We need context before we get to the bombshells. Trump was already losing. Let’s start with yesterday’s polling round-up, not good news for the Donald:
National
State
He’s losing bigly. I feel bad for him and for Paul Ryan. OK, I’m over it. And by the way the actual genuine original RAND panel (not the LAT, which resembles it) had Clinton +10 for September.
So as we pivot (it’s politics, you have to use that word) from whether he’ll lose to how he’ll lose, keep in mind his crew of deplorables doesn’t care about you, me, the Republican party or America. That’s one of the two main reasons to keep them as far from the White House as possible (the other is Trump is temperamentally and experientially unfit for the job, as well as a terrible person).
Philip Bump/WaPo on the Friday tape:
Donald Trump’s poll numbers collapsed in Wisconsin after the hot-mic tape came out
The pollsters noticed an immediate effect.
The way live-caller polls work is that a bank of interviewers calls landlines and cellphones to reach a certain number of people. This is a slow process, and a poll is usually in the field for several days. So Marquette called from Thursday through Sunday, ending before the second debate. In a series of tweets, they revealed what they found.
On Thursday, likely voters backed Trump by a one-percentage-point margin. This is well within the margin of error; since each day's calls is only a part of the overall sample, the margins of error are necessarily larger.
On Friday, the day the tape came out late in the afternoon, Clinton led by six points.
On Saturday and Sunday, she led by 19.
That's a 20-point shift over the course of the survey, and why Clinton now leads Trump by seven points in a four-way contest.
The NYC tabloids play hardball. Predatory behavior? The press is looking.
WaPo:
The hunt for the tapes is on.
In the wake of a leak last week of a tape in which Donald Trump is heard making crude and predatory comments about women in 2005, the question is: Are there more?
Because Trump has lived much of his adult life in front of cameras and microphones, the answer is undoubtedly yes. Whether there are more that are as shocking and potentially campaign-altering as the outtakes from the “Access Hollywood” hot-mic video of 11 years ago, however, remains to be seen.
WaPo:
Former Miss Arizona: Trump ‘just came strolling right in’ on naked contestants
Politico:
Just minutes after news broke of women alleging that Donald Trump had touched them inappropriately, Kelly Ayotte realized the benefit of withdrawing her endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate.
She no longer has to defend the guy.
Rolling Stone:
A Timeline of Donald Trump's Creepiness While He Owned Miss Universe
From walking into a teen dressing room to joking about his obligation to sleep with contestants, Trump's a storied pageant creep
NY Times:
In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.
“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at The Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.
“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.
Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”
But for the women who shared their stories with The Times, the recording was more than that: As upsetting as it was, it offered them a kind of affirmation, they said.
As they say...developing...
Meanwhile, back to traditional elections stuff. From RAND on who will win (September):
Sahil Kapur/Bloomberg:
For or Against Trump, GOP Fears Intensifying Civil War If He Loses
The battle between the Republican presidential nominee and House Speaker Paul Ryan raises questions about the party’s future.
If Trump goes down in defeat to Hillary Clinton, as current polling indicates is likely, several questions will arise concerning the Ryan feud. Will cracks emerge in Trump’s loyal following? Will a majority of Republicans, faced with a third consecutive presidential defeat, reassess the wisdom of his candidacy, or will they lay blame at Ryan’s feet? Perhaps most importantly, can the party be healed?
One number may help answer those questions: the percentage of Republicans who vote for Trump on Election Day. Mitt Romney won 93 percent of Republican voters in 2012. John McCain received 90 percent in 2008. Trump is in the ballpark, consolidating the support of 89 percent of Republican voters since the debate Sunday, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
A top Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the “key is to hold that number” so that Trump’s vision continues to hold sway over the party after the election. His debate strategy to hammer Clinton in intensely personal ways seems to have helped shore up GOP support that sank to just 74 percent in the prior NBC/Journal survey…
The more painful question for the party is whether it is even possible to forge a pluralist conservative majority out of its supporters.
“The conservative consensus that a lot of leaders thought we had: was it completely illusory?” [Charlie] Sykes wondered. “A lot of conservatives had deluded themselves that we were a more coherent cohesive movement than we really were. And that's not going to suddenly going to go away.”
Nate Cohn with a ‘how to read polls’ primer:
The Savvy Person’s Guide to Reading the Latest Polls
You’ve probably heard that it’s always best to focus on the average of polls. The poll results that often get the most attention are outliers — they get attention because they’re shocking, not because they’re representative.
But we also know that people often ignore that advice. They want to know the details of the newest poll, and how and why it might be different from the last. And to tell you the truth, I do, too. I read the details and methodology of almost every survey that is released.
The problem is that it’s a lot harder than it looks. After a splashy poll is released, Twitter is often overflowing with well-intentioned but misguided analysis.
It’s true: You really are better off looking at the averages. But if you’re going to assess individual polls this election, here’s a guide on how to do it well.
Des Moines Register:
Head of Iowa women's GOP group quits over Trump
Melissa Gesing, the president of the Iowa Federation of Republican Women, says she is resigning her post because she cannot support Donald Trump for president.
In a letter dated Tuesday to the group's executive committee, Gesing, a veteran political operative from Brooklyn, wrote that she was submitting her resignation with a heavy heart because she could not adequately fulfill the duties of her position.
"While I am still a Republican and plan to work hard for our down ballot GOP candidates, I cannot fulfill our mission 'To elect Republicans at all level of government' with Trump as our party's nominee," Gesing wrote.
Politico:
‘I Think He’s a Very Dangerous Man for the Next Three or Four Weeks’
At one of the most explosive moments of the campaign — and with a month to go — Politico Magazine reconvened the top Trumpologists to dissect The Donald’s final days as a candidate and what comes next.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Is the 2016 presidential race over?
There are 27 days between now and election day, and Donald Trump’s campaign is in crisis. Can he turn things around? Is it even possible at this point? And what would it take?
To answer that question, let’s start by looking at where the race is right now. To put it simply, from Trump’s perspective it’s an outright disaster.
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Hillary Clinton to Panicked Republicans: You’re on Your Own
Clinton was once willing to draw a distinction between "normal" Republicans and Donald Trump. Not anymore.
Trump has shed support among college-educated whites, but in the weeks after the convention the race tightened much more than Clinton expected, and the mass GOP defections she hoped for didn’t materialize. Until, of course, the emergence on Friday of a horrifying videotape in which Trump brags about committing sexual assault with impunity. Suddenly, dozens of Republicans understand the value of creating distance between themselves and Trump. The problem for them is that just as they’ve decided they want as little to do with Trump as possible, Clinton and her allies have decided to pull up the ladder and leave them stranded.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
The way live-caller polls work is that a bank of interviewers calls landlines and cellphones to reach a certain number of people. This is a slow process, and a poll is usually in the field for several days. So Marquette called from Thursday through Sunday, ending before the second debate. In a series of tweets, they revealed what they found.
On Thursday, likely voters backed Trump by a 1-point margin. This is well within the margin of error; since each day's calls is only a part of the overall sample, the margins of error are necessarily larger.
On Friday, the day the tape came out late in the afternoon, Clinton led by 6 points.
On Saturday and Sunday, she led by 19.
That's a 20-point shift over the course of the survey, and why Clinton now leads Trump by 7 points in a four-way contest.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
After the second debate, there was a lot of chatter about how Trump had “stopped the bleeding.” It’s now clear, though, what the Trump campaign was really up to here: The most important “bleeding” that had to be staunched was the hemorrhaging of support from Republican elected officials who were terrified of the politics of the sex tape. By putting on a thumping good show of attacking Bill’s affairs and fantasizing about jailing Hillary, Trump showed GOP base voters that he is a fighter, making them more enraged at those feckless GOP elites who are abandoning him just because things are getting a bit rough. That backlash may be making it harder for GOP lawmakers to keep running away from him. Indeed, multiple GOP elected officials who had called on Trump to withdraw from the race are now publicly rethinking that stance and are confirming they’ll still support him. Thus, Trump’s debate performance really did stop this bleeding.
But Trump is also bleeding in another way. Before the sex tape broke, large majorities of college-educated whites — voters Trump simply must improve among — were already convinced that Trump is sexist, bigoted, and temperamentally unfit for the presidency. The sex tape probably made that worse, and it’s unlikely that Trump’s most recent debate performance did anything to mitigate that. Indeed, the real message in the Journal reporting is that the Trump campaign has basically given up on stopping that particular bleeding.
Ryan Lizza/New Yorker:
TRUMP GETS READY TO BE A BAD LOSER
The wheels of this strategy came flying off in three dramatic episodes: Trump’s meltdown in the first debate, when he was unable to mount a sustained argument either for his candidacy or against Clinton’s; the release of the audio and video of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women; and the subsequent effective abandonment of Trump by Party leaders. (A quarter of Republican governors, senators, and Congress members have now said that they will not support Trump.)
“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, declaring an official end to the Conway experiment—and to any discernible plan to win the election. Trump is now attacking Republican leaders who allegedly betrayed him as much as he’s attacking Clinton. Perhaps the temper tantrum will pass and Trump will refocus his campaign in the final days on issues that have some strategic value to him. But it’s more likely that Trump knows he can’t win and that he has decided that the last stretch of his campaign should be used to set the stage for the aftermath of his loss. In this scenario, what’s crucial for Trump is to be able to convince his hardcore supporters that he—and they—didn’t lose, but that the dreaded Republican establishment sabotaged the Trump campaign in the final weeks. This strategy is in keeping with the way Trump has always spun his greatest defeats, from his failures in Atlantic City to his loss in the Iowa caucuses. He either denies that he failed or he argues that he was cheated.
Trump is either victorious or victimized, but never a loser. This week marked the end of Trump trying to actually win, and the beginning of him plotting to explain why the election was stolen.