Jim Tankersley/WaPo:
Hillary Clinton is running arguably the most digital presidential campaign in U.S. history. Donald Trump is running one of the most analog campaigns in recent memory. The Clinton team is bent on finding more effective ways to identify supporters and ensure they cast ballots; Trump is, famously and unapologetically, sticking to an 1980s-era focus on courting attention and voters via television.
It is a deep contrast in how the Democratic and Republican nominees allocate their time, staff and campaign funds, and one that the entire political world would be buzzing about in almost any other election year.
But this is not an ordinary year, and so the candidates' strategies have received less attention than, for example, the Obama campaign's vaunted data-mining operations in 2008 and 2012. That's why we're lucky to have Sasha Issenberg — a Bloomberg reporter and the author of (the recently updated and reissued) "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns" — on the beat.
This week, Issenberg pulled back the curtain on Clinton's voter-targeting operation and how it is rethinking the age-old practice of grouping states geographically, for campaign purposes. In a follow-up online chat with me, he explained that report, and Clinton's approach, and he contrasted it with Trump — who Issenberg says is running an old-school, on-brand, but probably unsuccessful, style of campaign.
An epic tweet storm from John Stoehr (Storified) on the double standard used to judge Hillary Clinton:
Jared Yates Sexton (in a tweet he says: it's not about Trump. It's about a group who's been looking for permission):
Perhaps the appeal lies elsewhere. Maybe all this electoral chaos has been sown as an excuse to gather in public, under the guise of civil engagement, to say the vile, hateful things that the majority of the country has long shunned. It’s not about Mr. Trump; he’s just the cover, the cheerleader, not the quarterback.
In a perverse way, many Trump supporters want what they criticize: the sense of winning that seems to be the sole preserve of the cultural elite, the ability to set the terms of discussion, the freedom to speak their minds and not face criticism. Whether it’s same-sex marriage, the last two presidential elections or the Confederate battle flag (several of which I saw at the rally), they have not won in such a long time.
Commentators have tried to cast Mr. Trump as a master manipulator, using his supporters to carry him to the White House but having no real interest in improving their lives. That may be his intention. But the reality is the other way around: His supporters are using him. Indeed, as I got in my car to drive home, I realized that since leaving the coliseum, of all the things I had heard people say, there was one phrase I hadn’t heard his supporters utter even once: Donald Trump’s name.
This was the same reporter.
The “toss-ups”, Pollster averages: NH (+7) NC (+4) FL (+4) IA (+2) OH (+2) for Hillary.
Which analyst thinks Trump can win w/o Ohio?
Dave Weigel/WaPo:
When Trump made Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon his campaign’s chief executive last week, Taylor found reasons to celebrate. It was the latest sign for white nationalists, once dismissed as fringe, that their worldview was gaining popularity and that the old Republican Party was coming to an end…
Trump’s newest speeches, read from a teleprompter, hit all of their favorite notes. “I don’t think Trump had mentioned ‘sanctuary cities’ previously,” Spencer said in an interview. “There’s reason to believe that Bannon is returning him to his powerful, populist message — indeed, honing it. [Former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort was turning Trump into a standard Republican, with the [Mike] Pence [vice-presidential] choice, the economic policy, talk of how ‘Hillary is the real racist,’ if not quite in those words. Bannon is making me hope again, making Trump Trump again.”
Mediaite:
David Duke Show Celebrates Trump’s Breitbart Hire: We’ve ‘Taken Over the Republican Part
Guardian on Breidbart:
Bannon has been described variously as “the most dangerous political operative in America” and the “Leni Riefenstahl [a Nazi propagandist] of the Tea Party movement”.
To gain clarity following yet another Trump campaign shakeup, I read Breitbart exclusively for two days, eschewing all other news sources. (The Guardian included. Apart from its soccer coverage.)
It offered an insight into not just the popularity of Breitbart – the site boasted 31 million unique visitors in July – but also how it appeals to its readers. And it’s not as straightforward as you might imagine.
The first thing you notice when visiting Breitbart is its idiosyncratic presentation. Every headline is in capitals. It implies a sense of significance and dire urgency.
It screams at you. “THIS IS IMPORTANT,” is the effect. “THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.” “THIS IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THIS COUNTRY GOING TO HELL IN A HANDCART.”
The last of those points is an example of how well Breitbart knows its audience.
This doomsday approach makes it seem like Breitbart readers want to feel that everything is rotten. They want to feel irate. They want to feel that disaster is impending – unless their guys can fix it.
Ed O’Keefe/WaPo:
With Latinos making up just 2 percent of its voters, Georgia isn’t usually a place where presidential campaigns go looking for Hispanic support.
But as she pulls away from Donald Trump in traditional battlegrounds, Hillary Clinton is aggressively wooing Latino voters here and in other states with smaller Hispanic populations in hopes of expanding her margins in November.
The efforts in states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania illustrate the extent to which Latinos are transforming electoral politics beyond competitive states that they have long dominated, including Colorado, Florida and Nevada.
Even though the LA Times USC tracking poll is relatively close and one of Trump’s best, there’s this:
The last six weeks have been a time of tumult in the presidential campaign — two conventions and a fistful of controversies, many of them created by Republican nominee Donald Trump himself.
With the campaign moving toward a final general election sprint, Trump finds himself in a dangerous place. He has narrowed his support to a segment of the electorate, and curbed his own momentum, according to an analysis of six weeks of findings in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak presidential tracking poll.
Over the same period, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has built support — even among groups previously arrayed against her — into demonstrable advantages.
Remember, it’s an odd poll:
More from David M Rothschild:
USC/LA Times: interesting and exciting, but not too believable
Harry Enten/Fivethirtyeight:
Donald Trump received one of his better polling results on Thursday — at least since the conventions. The highly regarded Pew Research Centerreleased a survey showing Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 41 percent to 37 percent, with Gary Johnson at 10 percent and Jill Stein at 4. Consequently, Clinton’s chances of winning the election dropped 2 points in both our forecasts, to 86 percent in polls-only and to 76 percent in polls-plus.
The fact that a 4-point deficit is a “good” result for Trump should give you a sense for how poorly he’s doing. Clinton remains a clear favorite to win the White House. There was, however, another interesting bit of info in the Pew poll: The youngest voters in the electorate don’t seem very enamored with the major-party candidates.
Andrew McGill/Atlantic:
But here’s the weird thing: Folks in hard-hit industrial towns aren’t voting for Trump. When Michigan Republicans went to the polls in March, economists expected to see huge Trump turnout in areas with the most shuttered factories. Instead, they got the opposite: Trump’s support was strongest in towns that hadgained manufacturing jobs. He did about 20 percentage points worse in areas where layoffs were most intense. It was completely the opposite of what everyone expected.
Earlier this month, Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell published a working paper expanding the Michigan analysis to the entire country. This time, he used opinion poll results instead of vote totals, making the data more current. Rothwell found the same trend: Trump did worse in towns that lost manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, and better in areas that gained them. Indeed, Trump is most popular in prosperous areas. Apparently, economic pain doesn’t guarantee votes for the Republican nominee, and economic success is no guard against him.
I’d argue the real dividing line is optimism. Consider this: Two-thirds of Hillary Clinton’s supporters think the next generation will be in better shape than we are today, or least the same, according to Pew Research. The reverse is true for Trump’s camp. Sixty-eight percent of his supporters think the next generation will be worse off. What’s more, the vast majority of Trump voters say life is worse today for people like them than it was 50 years ago. Only two percent —two!— think life is better now and that their children will also see improvement.
Natalie Jackson/HuffPost pollster:
The biggest electoral question of the year is undoubtedly who becomes the next president. But just after that follows the issue of whether the Senate majority will flip again. Republicans took the chamber with a 54-46 seat majority in the 2014 midterm elections. Keeping that lead in 2016, however, will prove a more difficult task.
According to The Huffington Post’s Senate model, which relies on the polls aggregated in HuffPost Pollster charts, there’s a 55 percent chance that the Senate will swing completely over ― and a 23 percent chance that it’s tied at 50 seats for each party. That means there’s a 78 percent chance that the Democratic Party could get 50 or more seats.
Jelani Cobb/NewYorker:
THE APPALLING LAST ACT OF RUDY GIULIANI
The parade of G.O.P. elected officials huddling around Trump’s lamp in Cleveland made political sense, even if it required a kind of craven, selfish logic to understand. Trump was more popular than many of those figures in their home states or congressional districts. Few were eager to suffer self-inflicted wounds, no matter how egregious, unqualified, and dangerous the nominee. Giuliani’s route to Trumpism is not as transparent. He has no constituency to please, no real concern with backlash or access to reëlection funds should he buck the Republican National Committee hierarchy. But like Newt Gingrich, another sunsetting Republican stalwart, Giuliani sees Trump as his route back to relevance. Before Trumpism became a political force, Giuliani was most commonly seen as a Fox News crank summoned to remind the network’s viewers why Black Lives Matter is wrong.
Thus you found Giuliani sitting across from Cuomo, giving a memorable portrayal of a man who almost believes the words coming out of his own mouth. On Monday, he went even further, apparently forgetting the timing of 9/11, and declared that, during the eight years of the Bush Administration, “We didn’t have any successful radical-Islamic terrorist attack in the United States.” They had, he argued, started under Obama. No matter what happens in November, we’re all but assured a raft of studies on the cultural dynamics that produced Trumpism. Almost certainly a part of its appeal—as with most mass movements, but particularly fascistic ones—is its ability to add meaning to the lives of its adherents. And improbably, pathetically, one of those lives belongs to the former mayor of New York City.
The Advocate (Baton Rouge):
Planned, forgotten: Unfinished projects could've spared thousands from Louisiana flood
Officials spread the blame for the lack of progress, from the general — like lack of funding from the state or the federal government and sluggishness from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — to the excruciatingly specific — such as bickering over which specific areas can be set aside as wetlands mitigation to counteract the ecological damage to swamps caused by building the canal.
White, the state senator, pointed out that residents in Ascension, Livingston and East Baton Rouge have been paying a 3-mill property tax for over a decade and haven't seen any significant progress.
"They were hot about paying that tax for 13 years and not seeing anything. ... It's like beating your head against the wall," he said.
Not an argument against helping, not finger pointing, but an argument to think through what’s happening.