Stu Rothenberg/WaPo:
Trump’s path to an electoral college victory isn’t narrow. It’s non-existent
Trump is and has been a disaster as a presidential nominee, and that will not change in the campaign’s final days. Nor is there any reason to believe that voters from important demographic groups will warm to him. He continues to play only to his core supporters.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The New York Times reports today that elections officials in both parties are rushing to reassure voters that the election won’t be “rigged,” and some fear violence. Anecdotal reporting and polling suggest many Trump voters believe his claims.
[I read Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs. Here’s what surprised me.]
If Trump loses, he’ll likely continue to tell millions of supporters that the election was stolen from them, perhaps to maintain or monetize his following. Imagine Trump as a conspiracy merchant in the mold of Glenn Beck, who famously sketched out hallucinatory conspiratorial charts only he could understand.
NPR on the evidence of a rigged election (ie none):
Claims by one side — so far without evidence — that the coming presidential election will somehow be "rigged" are being echoed at campaign rallies and in one new poll of voters.
Donald Trump has questioned the integrity of the election, and there's been talk of the race for the Democratic nomination having been rigged at the expense of candidate Bernie Sanders.
Historically, says Edward Foley, an election law expert from Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, a rigged election has meant tampering with or stuffing ballot boxes or buying votes. And he's not convinced that could happen on Nov. 8.
"I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that we're going to have a rigged election because of the fact that our system is so decentralized," he tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne.
Ryan Lizza/ New Yorker:
STEVE BANNON’S VISION FOR THE TRUMP COALITION AFTER ELECTION DAY
The rhetoric that Bannon is feeding Trump makes it increasingly likely that Trump will lose in a landslide. Polling averages show Trump trailing Clinton byeight points, the largest gap since August, when Clinton received a significant boost after her Convention. Most election forecasts put Clinton’s chance of victory at about eighty per cent.
Trump’s response to these numbers has been to tell his supporters, repeatedly in recent days, that the election is “rigged,” creating a sense of grievance about the likely results that can be exploited after November 8th. Trump and Bannon have given up on trying to defeat Clinton. They seem more interested in creating a platform for a new ethno-nationalist politics that may bedevil the Republican Party—and the country—for a long time to come.
On Sunday morning, I asked a top Trump official, “Do you think there’s any chance that Trump would refuse to concede if he loses?” The official responded, “He is not going to lose.”
Great poll, reflects what the family will do:
Charles Stewart/blog:
“Rigged election” rhetoric is having an effect on voters — just not in the way you think.
Donald Trump’s relentless messaging about a “rigged election” is having an effect on the confidence voters have that their votes will be counted accurately. But, it’s not the effect you think.
I came to this conclusion as I was considering yesterday’s Morning Consult poll results about confidence in the vote count. It so happens that I asked almost exactly the same question on a national poll during the pre-election period in 2012. (I can’t take all the credit. My colleague at Reed College, Paul Gronke, joined me in sponsoring a “double-wide” module on the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.) I decided to compare what Morning Consult found today with what we found almost exactly four years ago.
The results were surprising. The percentage of respondents who say that they are “very confident” that their own votes will be counted accurately is virtually unchanged from 2012. Confidence that votes nationwide will be counted accurately has, if anything, increased since 2012. Trump’s rhetoric appears not to have reduced Republican confidence in the accuracy of the vote count over the past four years. Rather, it has increased the confidence of Democrats. The degree of party polarization over the quality of the vote count has increased since 2012, but it is Democratic shifts in opinion, not Republican, that are leading to this greater polarization….
Much more work needs to be done on this issue, but a couple of tentative conclusions seem in order. The first is that Donald Trump’s complaints about a “rigged” electoral system most clearly reminded his strongest supporters of what they already believed. It is much less clear that Republicans who were not already convinced of the corruption of the election system have now had a change of heart.
The second conclusion is that Trump’s charges appear to have counter-mobilized Democratic opinion in novel ways. Democrats have come to the defense of vote counting, not only in their own back yards, but even in other people’s back yards.
Not so amazing, really. Some of us have been saying it’s a stable race for months. Donald Trump has never led. It’s been like an airline trip: some turbulence, much of it unexpected, but where you start and where you finish is pretty well known. That’s because Hillary and The Donald are two of the best known candidates ever. Everyone knew what they needed to know in January.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Arsonist Donald Trump wants to torch our democracy. He will fail.
But Democrats think Trump’s whole scheme goes further still: They think Trump is making an explicit effort to encourage disruptions on Election Day, because the specter of such disruptions could itself depress turnout. As one Democratic lawyer put it: “If you wind up spending a lot of time talking about election fraud and law enforcement, you’re generating a message that can have a very discouraging effect on the electorate.”
Disruptions on Election Day, should they happen, could also serve another obvious objective harbored by Trump. As many have already observed, Trump has spent months preparing to tell his millions of followers that the election was stolen from them, should Clinton win, and will also likely tell them that Clinton is an illegitimate president. Disruptions and possibly violence would further the impression of a messy Election Day that could help him make that case.
No one really knows what Trump is thinking. But it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Trump is ultimately trying to cast our entire democratic process as illegitimate, laying the groundwork to press this argument long after Election Day.
David Byler/RCP:
Trump Misses Benchmarks, Is Running Out of Time
This graphic summarizes how much polls typically move between Election Day and a given number of days beforehand. The green points show the difference between polls on a given day and the final polling average heading into the election for all presidential races from 1972 to 2012. The black line is the trend line -- it provides an upper limit for how much polls typically move between a given day in the fall and Election Day. (Details on the math and data can be found here.)
Two specific features of this data jump out: Trump is missing his benchmarks and his ability to shift the polls may quickly start to wane.
Daniel Dale/Toronto Star:
Donald Trump may be a threat to global democracy, experts warn
Dictatorship experts see signs of Benito Mussolini or Hugo Chavez in the Republican candidate’s outlandish claims and allegations.
Donald Trump’s ugly, deceitful and intensifying attacks on the integrity of America’s democratic system have alarmed experts on dictatorships, who say his words resemble those of foreign fascists and authoritarians.
As voting day approaches, Trump has descended into a conspiratorial darkness he had not previously approached during a presidential campaign always marked by dishonesty and demonization.
His false and outlandish claims have reminded scholars of those of illiberal leaders from Italy’s Benito Mussolini to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. And they “can potentially lead to violence, in particular if the followers take this seriously,” said Pippa Norris, an elections authority at Harvard University who is director of the Election Integrity Project.
“I actually can’t believe all of the parallels,” said Erica Frantz, a political-science professor at Michigan State University who studies dictatorships. “I actually can’t believe that it’s happening here.
Erik Wemple/WaPo:
The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim yesterday profiled afternoon Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was a revealing bit of portraiture, minus the fantasy part: “Shep’s approach represents one potential path forward for Fox News ― undeniably conservative, but grounded in reality, observant of American traditions and democratic norms, and partisan only when a standpoint fully aligns with conservative and American values.”
We’ll believe such a scenario when Smith and his proteges take over “Fox & Friends,” the ratings-killing morning show that produces idiocy so exotic and thorough that there has to be a special recipe somewhere behind the set. A case in point arose this morning, as co-host Steve Doocy introduced an interview by colleague Ainsley Earhardt with Melania Trump, a timely sit-down in light of the leak of a 2005 tape in which Donald Trump and then-“Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush engaged in misogynistic banter. Bush was just fired from his “Today” show slot because of the outrage over the tape.
Doocy teed up the interview with these words: “It is official: Billy Bush, reportedly fired from the ‘Today’ show after NBC executives threw him under the bus in a covert attempt to derail the Trump train.”
McClatchy:
A group of conservative writers is asking voters to reject Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, calling him a candidate “most dangerous to our nation’s founding ideals.”
The more than 140 scholars and writers who signed a letter are encouraging people to vote “as we will, for someone else.”
Some of the signers have served in past Republican administrations and all have voted for past Republican presidents and candidates.
Medium with the letter and signatures:
Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most dangerous to our nation’s founding ideals. He is a unique and dire threat to the political principles, liberties, and cultural values of justice, fairness, honesty, and decency we have long defended. We urge you to vote, as we will, for someone else.