This is the week when pundits stopped pretending Donald Trump might win. You can’t win when you are at 40. Discuss, excuse, spin, whatever you want. These are awful numbers for Trump, and it doesn’t get any better for him in the battlegrounds.
It turns out that he is not just an awful person, unfit for office. He’s also an awful candidate.
It also turns out that the GOP primary electorate and the general electorate are two different animals. Who knew?
NBC:
Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump in some of the most diverse battleground states - including by double digits in two of them - according to four brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Presidential campaigns can run into trouble for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there are external events over which they have no control that put them at a disadvantage, such as an economic downturn that makes it hard for the party in power to resist calls for change. Sometimes there’s a scandal that engulfs the candidate, or a string of campaign-trail mistakes. There may be fundamental demographic patterns working against the candidates that are hard to overcome. Or one campaign might just be doing its job better than the other, building a better organization to turn out voters, managing the media better and raising more money.
And sometimes, everything goes south at once. That’s what’s happening to Donald Trump right now...
There are still some undecided voters out there, but the most troubling question for Republicans may be whether the public’s image of Trump is beyond repair. At this point, is there anything he could say or do that would persuade Latinos to forget what he said about Mexican immigrants or about the judge in the Trump University case? Can he make moderate Republicans forget that he mocked a disabled reporter and got in a fight with the parents of a fallen soldier?
Politico:
GOP insiders: Trump can't win
'Trump is underperforming so comprehensively...it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America,’' said an Iowa Republican.
Even the Trump-friendly LAT-USC tracker is having second thoughts. A 3 point swing in a day (HRC +4) is unusual for this poll:
The biggest change was in voters 18-34, once tied and now HRC +12 in just a few days:
Andrew Prokop/Vox:
Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won
Wonkblog/WaPo:
A massive new study debunks a widespread theory for Donald Trump’s success
Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump's most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.
Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump's appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.
According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
The GOP’s New Delusion: Hillary Would Be Losing Badly to Any Other Republican
After all, part of the reason other Republicans polled better than Trump against Clinton is that they themselves were losing, and as such were spared the scrutiny and negative attention that Clinton has endured for 25 years. Moreover, just four years ago, a competent candidate advanced the generic conservative agenda that Kasich and most non-Trump Republicans ran on this year; but the voters rejected Mitt Romney. These vulnerabilities (whether they belonged to Kasich or Rubio or anyone else) would’ve been held up against Clinton’s just as Trump’s have, and any gap that existed at the end of the primary would have narrowed.
John Cassidy/NewYorker:
WHY TRUMP’S CRAZY TALK ABOUT OBAMA AND ISIS MATTERS
When he’s not tied to a teleprompter, Trump often seems to say the most provocative thing that comes into his head, with little thought for the consequences for his campaign, or for the campaigns of other Republicans. He’s like a small child, trying to be the center of attention, even if that means he has turned himself into an object of outrage and ridicule.
If you take this view of Trump, there isn’t much more to be said. He’s the melting figure on the cover of this week’s Time magazine: a reality-television shyster who somehow captured the nomination of a major political party and is now dissolving in front of us. The only remaining questions for you are how big a majority Clinton will rack up, and whether the Republicans can limit the damage in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
I’ve got a lot of sympathy for this interpretation. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump is smarter and less myopic than he seems. Let’s assume that what he’s really focussed on isn’t winning this year’s election, a task he now realizes is beyond him, but creating a long-term Trumpian movement. A nationalistic, nativist, protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him. A movement that in some ways would resemble other right-wing political parties around the world, such as France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom Party, and the U.K. Independence Party, but which would also harken back to earlier moments in American history, such as the rise of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing movement of the eighteen-forties, and the formation, a century later, of the isolationist America First Committee, which sought a negotiated peace with Hitler.
Vox with a useful voxsplainer:
Rio 2016: Simone Manuel’s Olympic gold is also a victory over swimming’s racist history
People worked so hard to keep African Americans out of pools. They lost.
As Vox’s Victoria Massie wrote in June, swimming pools have always been spaces where social inequalities have played out. And as University of Montana history professor Jeff Wiltse wrote for the Washington Post last year, the nation’s swimming pool history is intimately tied to racism.
When the first public pools were established in America’s Northern cities at the turn of the 20th century, class prejudices fueled decisions of where municipal pools were built to keep out poor and working-class people, regardless of race. In the 1920s and ’30s, when pools were larger and men and women began swimming together, some major Northern cities used racial segregation tactics to prevent interactions between black men and white women.
SB Nation:
Black women, whether relaxed or natural, are so often shamed for their "nappy" hair that something as vital and enjoyable as swimming becomes an undue burden out of fear that broken or damaged hair will be further criticized. The chemicals used to maintain swimming pools are remarkably damaging to black women’s hair--which is ironic, due to the fact that, historically, pool access in the U.S. has been steeped in racism.
As recreational swimming became more popular in the 1920s and '30s, black children were routinely denied entrance to the pools, sometimes violently. But "Whites Only" pools didn’t end when Jim Crow did; some pools were effectively privatized just to avoid being integrated, and last June in McKinney, Texas, we were reminded that public pools continue to be just one more space for the brutalization of black women.
But when I saw Manuel, a fellow Texan, unleash plentiful inches of healthy hair after tying for gold, I shrieked. It was the cherry on top of a historic moment. She did it and kept her hair, too.
Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC:
While Wooing Republicans, Clinton Sticks to Progressive Politics
What economic policy concessions might Hillary Clinton offer up to woo Republicans? If her speech Thursday in Warren, Michigan is any indication, the answer is: Nothing.
In her first major economic address since her campaign began actively courting the Republicans turned off by Donald Trump, Clinton made no major pivot to the ideological center.
Instead, Clinton reiterated several of the policy positions she adopted during her primary fight against Bernie Sanders, even while making a direct appeal to Independent voters and Republicans.
GOP pollster Robert Blizzard on the Trump “hidden vote”:
Politico:
Obamacare loses its fire on campaign trail
A handful of moderate House Republicans in tight reelection contests have done something that most Republicans would consider unthinkable — renounce the GOP catechism on repealing Obamacare as they fight for their political lives. They say they oppose the health law but are reluctant to tear it up completely.
"Unless there is a bipartisan solution to fix the law, I don't think we should be taking symbolic votes," to repeal it, said Rep. Bob Dold of Illinois, who is casting himself as a bipartisan voice in Congress as he fights to hang on to one of the most competitive districts in the country.
Politico:
Dem senators to Clinton: Stick with Garland
Renominating the judge could help Clinton preserve valuable political capital if she wins the presidency.
By sticking with Garland, the thinking goes, Clinton would save herself some of the political capital inherent in making a court nomination, as well as the stress on what would be a brand new White House staff to vet nominee and promote them on the Hill and in the media.
“He’s somebody who the voters clearly think should be confirmed and has the kind of resonating background that would be broadly appealing to voters,” said Geoff Garin, a prominent Democratic pollster. “There are obvious advantages but presidents also like to have the opportunity to make their own choices as well.”