There have been a number of Trump-Russian stories in the last few day, e.g. Franklin Foer/Slate, NBC and David Corn/Mother Jones, and a partial pushback on them from NY Times.
Noah Rothman/Commentary has more:
All these stories appeared in overtly liberal opinion magazines or center-left journalistic outlets. This cluster of revelations followed a conference call between members of the press and ranking Clinton campaign operatives hammering the theme of links between Trump and the Russian government. Doubtless in response to the cascade of stories linking Trump to Russia, sources within the FBI revealed to the Times they did not believe there were any operational links between the Kremlin and the GOP nominee. More important for Trump, the bank scandal involving DNS traffic between a Trump organization server and a Russian bank was almost certainly innocuous.
That revelation was a godsend for the GOP nominee. By invalidating the implications about the bank in Franklin Foer’s piece at Slate—suggesting basically that Trump was a paid Russian operative—the Times had provided the Republican candidate with a way to lacquer all of the revelations regarding his support for and from Moscow with a veneer of doubt. If one is dubious, so, too, must all of them be suspect.
Don’t believe it.
Donald Trump has spent the last 17 months ingratiating himself with Moscow and serving as Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman in the United States. This is not without purpose.
Keep all this in mind as part of the pushback against James Comey’s Friday interference with the election.
Francis Wilkinson/BV:
Race, Not Class, Dictates Republican Future
In the New York Times last week, political sage Thomas Edsall called this process the “Great Democratic Inversion.”
What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
A key word in Edsall’s analysis is "white." Stories about the disaffected working-class supporters of Donald Trump apply almost exclusively to white voters. Other working-class voters -- blacks and Hispanics -- are poised to provide lopsided support to Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic Party is departing from its working-class and populist past, and some liberals and leftists have been understandably troubled by the results. But as a simple voting matter, working-class nonwhites, having endured decades of veiled hostility from the Republican Party, now face overt antipathy from the Trumpified GOP. They show no great desire to abandon the Democratic coalition.
Fear of hostile Republicans isn’t the only part of the equation. Many see a better future in a diversifying nation.
Tim Weiner/NY Times:
Do the words “extremely careless” ring a bell?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s director, James B. Comey, threw that stinging criticism at Hillary Clinton in July, shortly after announcing that the bureau’s long investigation of her handling of classified information had turned up no crime. Now he faces the same judgment from her — and his superiors at the Justice Department.
In hurling barbs at Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey has at once revived his reputation for confronting commanders in chief and resurrected the spirit of the F.B.I.’s most infamous high priest. Somewhere, tearing wings off flies in a dark star chamber in the sky, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling. The use of secret information to wound public figures was one of his favorite sports.
James Fallows/Atlantic:
James Comey and the Destruction of Norms
The rules in politics haven’t changed that much in recent years. What has changed is adherence to norms, in an increasingly destructive way.
I made that case, using examples different from the ones I’m about to present here, nearly two years ago. The shift in norms is also a central part of Thomas Mann’s and Norman Ornstein’s prescient It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and Mike Lofgren’s The Party Is Over, plus of course Jonathan Rauch’s “How American Politics Went Insane,” our very widely read cover story (subscribe!) this summer.
James Fallows/Atlantic:
This [Comey decision to not discuss Russians/Trump] story is still in the “unnamed sources say...” category, though it’s by an experienced and reputable reporter, Eamon Javers. Like everything else in these chaotic final days of this unendurable campaign, its full implications are impossible to know while the news is still unfolding.
But at face value the report underscores the depth of the bad judgment that James Comey displayed last week. It suggests that the director of the FBI knew, reflected upon, and was deterred by the possible election-distorting effects of releasing information early this month about Russian attempts to tamper with the upcoming election. Better to err on the side of not putting the FBI’s stamp on politically sensitive allegations—even though, as Javers’s source contends, Comey believed the allegations of Russian interference to be true
WaPo:
Comey was concerned publicly blaming Russia for hacks of Democrats could appear too political in run-up to elections
Nonetheless, Comey’s concern about election timing has some officials scratching their heads in light of his decision last week to notify Congress — 11 days before the election — that the FBI was planning to review newly discovered emails in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server.
That notification set off an uproar in both parties, as lawmakers demanded to know what was in the emails and whether there was any indication of criminal wrongdoing.
“It’s really hard to square” the two, said one official, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal discussions.
And for your horse race fix, a possible outlier but a data analytics unit endorsed by NBC:
More here: she is winning 28% of early vote Republicans, says this analytics firm. Lots of crossover, ie Clinton-Rubio. Their full survey is out today.
Moody’s predicts a Clinton win using their economy model.
Jon Ralston/KTNV on early vote in NV:
It still looks a lot like 2012: At this time four years ago, the Democrats were up 14 points in Clark, about 48,000 votes and Republicans had a 2-point partisan turnout edge (it ended at 1.6 percent for the GOP). I wrote earlier that if Clinton holds 90 percent of her base, even if Trump makes progress with indies (and I think he is based on what I have seen), she could still lose them by 20 and win the state by 2 points. That still holds true.
Steve Schale on early vote in FL (and even more here):
Another interesting point that a very smart observer mentioned to me yesterday: more traditional Election Day Republicans are voting early than Election Day Democrats. According to the file I use, about 620,000 people who have voted early already are voters who in 2012 voted on Election Day. In other words, in the absurd terms of today’s politics – these are early voters that the parties are “cannibalizing” from their own Election Day turnout.
Republicans have been making the case that Democrats have closed the VBM gaps by cannibalizing their own vote, but here is an interesting finding: Republicans are actually doing it more to themselves. Right now, about 34,000 more 2012 Election Day Republicans have early than Democrats.
In other words, the GOP lead right now is based on cannibalizing their own supposed Election Day advantage.
On flip side, Democrats please don’t get all giddy. There are plenty of worrisome things in the data, not the least of which is the ridiculous number of vote-by-mail ballots are out there, and there are slightly more 2012 voting Republicans yet to vote than Democrats. In other words, to stay with the theme, take nothing for granted. And again, there are almost 80,000 more Democratic VBM ballots gathering dust in homes around the state – but a large chunk of those are low propensity voters – volunteer to go chase those. Whether or not Trump wins Florida is largely on you.
We will win FL if we show up.
Nate Cohn on early vote NC:
So far, here are our best estimates on early voters’ preferences, based on the most recent Upshot/Siena poll:
Already, about 1,873,000 people have voted in North Carolina, out of about 4,464,000 we think will eventually vote. Based on the voting history and demographic characteristics of those people, we think Hillary Clinton leads in North Carolina by about 6 percentage points. We think she has an even larger lead – 11 percentage points – among people who have already voted.
Greg Sargent with some red flags:
How worried should Democrats be about flagging African American enthusiasm?
One of the big unknowns about Campaign 2016 has always been whether core groups in the Obama coalition would turn out for Hillary Clinton at 2012-like levels. Recently there had been a lot of hand-wringing about Latino turnout, but that has since gone quiet, amid evidence that this demographic is energized in a big way, which is hardly surprising, given Donald Trump’s vow of mass deportations and relentless xenophobia towards undocumented immigrants.
But now a new smattering of articles and analyses suggest Democrats have cause for worry about another core demographic in the Obama coalition: African Americans. The main cause of this worry is a sign of potential declining enthusiasm in weak early voting numbers.
And just because it’s Florida: