Nate Silver/FiveThirtyeight answers 10 questions about the election:
9. What would keep me up late at night if I were Clinton?
My first question would be whether the race has settled into a 4-point Clinton lead, as the polls have it now, or is continuing to trend toward Trump. If I’m still ahead by 4 points or more at the time of the first debate on Sept. 26, I’ll feel reasonably good about my position: A Trump comeback would be toward the outer edges of how much trailing candidates have historically been able to move the polls with the debates. If the race gets much closer, though, my list of concerns gets a lot longer. It would include geopolitical events that could work in Trump’s favor, third-party candidates who seem to be taking more votes from me than from Trump, and the tendency for incumbent candidates (since Clinton is a quasi-incumbent) to lose ground in the polls after the first debate.
10. What would keep me up late at night if I were Trump?
As the polls have ebbed and flowed, I’ve been 8 or 10 points behind Clinton at my worst moments, but only tied with her at my best moments. I’ve also never gotten much above 40 percent in national polls, at least not on a consistent basis, and I’ve alienated a lot of voters who would allow me to climb higher than that. In other words, maybe that dreaded Trump ceiling is there after all, in which case I’ll have to get awfully lucky to win the election, probably needing both a favorable flow of news in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8 and a large third-party vote that works against Clinton.
Natalie Jackson/HuffPost:
The polling averages are your best friend for the next 9 weeks. HuffPost Pollster combines publicly-available polls that meet our criteria (which are mostly based on disclosing methodological information) into a single estimate of the polling trends. We do this for every major election contest in which there are five or more polls that meet our criteria. That includes the presidential race in each state where polling is available, Senate races, gubernatorial races and even an overall look at House of Representatives vote shares. Our charts show you in one glance where the race stands, where it’s been over the time that it’s been polled and how much variation there is in the polling. In the main chart for the presidential race, you can easily see when Donald Trump has come up in the polls and the race currently tightening, but also that Hillary Clinton has never trailed in the averages.
The latest CNN poll had RVs favoring Clinton by 3, and/but LVs had Trump by 2. So what’s with the likely voter vs registered voter thing? Here are some primers:
Charles Franklin/Medium:
About Likely Voter Samples
Identifying likely voters matters because only those who show up affect the election. Opinions of nonvoters matter not at all for outcome4/
But likelihood of voting is not a fixed attribute. It responds to circumstances, enthusiasm, closeness of state. 5/
In fact, shifts in who is LV can drive changes in polls at least as much as changes in candidate preference. 6/
For this reason, I prefer the much more stable RV population as the basis of assessing change during campaign. 7/
But as election approaches, LVs begin to be more certain of voting (or not) and it makes sense to use LV late in campaign. 8/
Scott Clement/WaPo:
Why the ‘likely voter’ is the holy grail of polling
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, here is a brief primer on likely voter models:
Most election polls start with a sample of the overall adult population or registered voters. But not everyone actually votes in a given election, and voters and non-voters can differ quite a bit; typically, actual voters are more Republican. Nobody "knows" who will vote, but pollsters try to identify who is likely to vote by asking questions that have been correlated with voting in the past — like those above — and filtering out respondents who are less engaged in the election.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
The Post's new 50-state poll, conducted with SurveyMonkey, gives us an opportunity to see how those other candidates can affect the results. We have two sets of numbers for each and every state, a 1-on-1 match-up between Clinton and Trump and a four-way match-up including Johnson and Stein. As it stands, the latter two candidates aren't on the ballot in every state, and Stein will likely be excluded in a number of them. If we compare where each will appear on the ballot (via Johnson's and Stein's websites) with the results of our poll in each state, we can get a good sense of how these candidates might affect the outcome.
Bottom line: Hillary Clinton wins either way, but third parties take more from Clinton than Donald Trump.
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
The president is in Laos, which is one of the first obscure foreign nations that penetrated the fog of childhood from newscasts half-heard while I was eating dinner with my parents. One of the fragments that fascinated me was some place called the Plain of Jars.
(That fired up the childhood imagination. Did they all have lids? Labels? Were they like the jars out of which I just made a Fluffernutter? One of the great satisfactions of my adult life was discovering that the Plain of Jars was named after actual jars, neolithic structures going back before recorded history. Nobody's really sure what they were for, but there are theories. Clearly a job for...The Most Awesome Man On Television.)
They were always fighting on the Plain of Jars. What I did not know until much later is that, between 1964 and 1973, while most of the country's attention was drawn to the war we were making on Vietnam, the U.S. Air Force dropped more ordinance on Laos than it dropped in all of World War II, and the Plain of Jars was one of the principal targets. This included 262 millioncluster bombs, which are anti-personnel weapons that do not discriminate as to which personnel they are anti-, or as to whether they exploded in 1965 or last Tuesday. An estimated 100 Laotians die from unexploded ordinance ever year, many of them killed by weapons launched before they were born. The landscape of Laos is a fully functioning Doomsday Weapon…
If you give this president nothing else, give him this. He has looked at this country's moral balance sheet and he has tried to settle at least some of its debts, even as we accrue more of them in distant places from which not even he has been able to disentangle us.
Daniel Drezner/WaPo:
Why Hillary Clinton’s perceived corruption seems to echo louder than Donald Trump’s actual corruption
We are living in an era in which trust in authority and institutions is at a low ebb. Trump being exposed as a corrupt hack is unsurprising because no one thought much of him in the first place, and he’s been weirdly candid about his corruption. The suspicion around Clinton, on the other hand, reflects the fact that Americans increasingly view previously-respected authorities as not what they seem to be.
...
We are in a moment when small hypocrisies seem worse than blatant corruption. And in that moment, Clinton pays a greater price for her perceived indiscretions than Donald Trump does for his actual indiscretions. It’s not fair; it’s just the way it is.
Dan Kennedy/WGBH talks about the same topic, unbalanced candidate coverage:
Five Reasons Why The Media Are Piling On Clinton And Giving Trump A Pass
2. Trump fatigue. Once a candidate has mocked a disabled reporter and viciously attacked Gold Star parents, where else is there go to? I think the peak moment of anti-Trump coverage occurred after he criticized the Khan family, who lost their son in the war in Iraq. The press and the public were repulsed; for all Trump had said up to that point, it represented a nauseating new low.
The media have been covering and overcovering Trump from the moment he announced his campaign in June 2015. And they’ve dwelled on every hateful moment, from his mocking of McCain’s heroism as a POW to his hiring of a notorious white nationalist as his CEO. The press is tired of Trump—just as the home stretch is getting under way.
3. A sense that it’s over. This is related to Reason No. 2. Although the race has been tightening a bit as the Khan outrage fades into our rearview mirror, Clinton still holds a substantial lead. As of Monday, the New York Times’s statistical model showed her with an 86 percent chance of winning, and FiveThirtyEight had her at 72 percent. Given that the electorate is highly polarized, there is very little chance that Trump can win.
As a result, the media may already be moving on, attempting to hold the likely next president to account while paying less attention to the shortcomings of the loser.
Eugene Robinson/WaPo:
The ugliest, most appalling spectacle in American politics
And the North Carolina example clearly puts to rest any notion that these [voting rights] restrictions are colorblind. The law began as a simple 16-page bill mandating voter IDs. But in June 2013, while the legislation was still being worked on, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which compelled Southern states with a history of voter discrimination to obtain Justice Department approval before making changes in election laws.
“Now we can go with the full bill,” the Republican chairman of the state Senate’s rules committee told reporters. The legislation grew to 57 pages, with new provisions that shortened early voting, eliminated same-day registration and took away counties’ ability to extend poll hours to accommodate long lines, among other curbs.
Republicans claim they want support from African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. They don’t deserve the time of day until they stop this appalling effort to keep us from voting at all.
This one’s for the worriers, from a campaign pro:
Goldie Taylor/Daily Beast:
The Fact That Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Are Even Close in Texas Is Amazing
Two decades after the last Democrat won statewide in Texas, Republicans might lose their grip on the Lone Star State—and their relevance as a national party.
Orlando Sentinel:
Donald Trump made headlines last week for paying a $2,500 IRS fine for improperly using money from a charity to fund a campaign committee for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.
But I'm here to tell you: The wrong person is receiving the brunt of the scrutiny here.
Listen, I understand the global interest in Trump. But when a prosecutor has been asked to investigate someone — and instead takes $25,000 in campaign cash from him — it's the prosecutor who most needs probing.
That's why I began digging into this way back in 2013 — long before Trump was even a candidate for the White House.
TPM:
Last night TPM Reader AL sent in a timeline for the Trump/Bondi story in the key months from August to October 2013. I've verified the details and the links. So I'm including the timeline here after the jump.
NY Times:
Campaigning in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton demanded details of the conversation in which Ms. Bondi solicited Mr. Trump’s donation. “The American people deserve to know what was said, because clearly the attorney general did not proceed with the investigation,” she told reporters.
And Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Mr. Trump’s donation to Ms. Bondi gave new meaning to his more recent boasts about the efficacy of his political giving. “It sure looks like that is what is going on here,” said Mr. Libowitz, whose group filed a complaint about the donation with the I.R.S.
Though Mr. Trump denies it in the case of Ms. Bondi, he has been brazen in asserting that he has used political donations to buy influence — and routinely asks voters to trust that, because he possesses that insider’s knowledge, he can reform a system that he calls “rigged.”
WaPo:
Clinton steps up attacks on Trump’s character, accusing him of concealing ‘scams’
This story has legs.