So that was one annoying debate with a moderator that lost control early. More from the pundits tomorrow, but Tim Kaine did one important thing: he showed beyond doubt that Mike Pence cannot defend Donald Trump (no one can). Pence did better on style, Kaine on substance, it won’t change minds and it’s a day later. Pence might have looked ok on air (and pundits love style over substance), but his statements and head shaking will be fact checked to death today.
Harry Enten/FiveThirtyEight:
For politics fans, it’s easy to get caught up in fun Electoral College scenarios — ones in which small states make a big difference or in which the House of Representatives has to decide the election. The alternative — endlessly repeating that “Florida is important; Ohio is important” — can get tiresome. That said, Ohio is important, and Florida is super important.
Florida has a 19 percent chance of providing the decisive vote in the Electoral College according to our polls-only forecast. It’s the most likely “tipping-point state,” in FiveThirtyEight parlance. That’s up from 16 percentjust two weeks ago. There’s only one other state with a better than 10 percent chance of casting the decisive electoral vote: Pennsylvania, at 12 percent.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
Here’s what we know: Hillary Clinton is leading in the race for president, and she’s made meaningful gains since last week’s presidential debate. Clinton is currently a 72 percent favorite in our polls-only forecast, up from 55 percent just before the debate. That corresponds to a roughly 4-percentage-point national lead for Clinton, about where the race was as of Labor Day — before a series of mishaps for her in mid-September. Our polls-plus model, which blends polls with an economic index and generally produces a more conservative forecast, has Clinton with a 69 percent chanceinstead.
But don’t take our model’s word for it: Take a look at the polls for yourself.
It’s actually been a pretty stable race. See aggregate from Huffington Post Pollster, above.
Isaac Bailey/CNN:
Scott, a low-wage housekeeper, was born poor, made a real estate mistake during a period that even manufactured housing executives were being fooled by a market overheated by relaxed lending standards and a glut of repossessed homes. And she was ruined. Trump, born into enormous wealth, made one mistake after another -- stiffing everyday small businessmen,
helping to sink the USFL, mismanaging his businesses so much that he needed bankruptcy court multiple times. And he, instead, grew richer because of the system he bragged during the primaries that he had helped shape by influencing politicians with donations.
That would be bad enough. But it's worse, because Trump has fashioned himself as some kind of blue-collar billionaire ready to fight for the common man while pushing for a tax policy whose primary benefits would go directly to wealthy men such as himself. Hypocrisy is too kind a word.
The reality is that Trump is the embodiment of why inequality has remained such a pressing matter for the past few decades. There's no shame in being born into wealth, but there should be shame when your life's goal seems to be only enriching yourself further, no matter how your actions affect those who are less fortunate.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The Morning Joe set appears persuaded that the New York Times revelations about Donald Trump’s taxes are no biggie. In a segment today, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski all but sneered at the idea that the revelations might damage Trump or are even all that newsworthy at all.
“Hillary Clinton is more in the pocket of Wall Street than anybody else that has run for president in years,” Scarborough chortled, scoffing at the idea that she would “fix the system” and ridiculing criticism of Trump as corrupt. Brzezinski opined that “the people feel they’re hearing the truth” from Trump, praised Trump’s ludicrous response that the Times revelations prove his business genius, and admonished Clinton: “Get off your high horse about this tax thing. Unless laws were broken, it’s not an issue.”
We’ve heard various versions of this argument for the past few days. But it badly misses the much deeper context — both political and substantive — in which the battle over Trump’s taxes is now unfolding, context that make the story very newsworthy and potentially very damaging politically. That context has several layers.
Vanity Fair (read the whole thing about the WHCD):
I don’t think he will get to the White House, but just the fact that his carny act has gotten so far along the road will leave the path with a permanent orange stain. Trump, more than even the most craven politicians or entertainers, is a bottomless reservoir of need and desire for attention. He lives off crowd approval. And at a certain point that will dim, as it always does to people like him, and the cameras will turn to some other American novelty. When that attention wanes, he will be left with his press clippings, his dyed hair, his fake tan, and those tiny, tiny fingers.
Binyamin Appelbaum/NY Times (read these next two together):
Why Are Politicians So Obsessed With Manufacturing?
This myopic focus on factory jobs distracts from another, simpler way to help working Americans: Improve the conditions of the work they actually do. Fast-food servers scrape by on minimum wage; contract workers are denied benefits; child-care providers have no paid leave to spend with their own children.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides — more than double the population of Pittsburgh. Next year, there will be fewer steelworkers and still more home health aides, as baby boomers fade into old age. Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers. Many home health aides live close to the poverty line: Average annual wages were just $22,870 last year. If both parties are willing to meddle with the marketplace in order to help one sector, why not do the same for jobs that currently exist?
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Clinton and Trump Are Shuffling the Electoral Map
This reconfiguration largely leaves the same states at the center of the electoral deck, but shuffles which party looks to which state for a win. It’s a shift symbolized by Clinton’s clear decision to focus more effort on Florida and even North Carolina than on Ohio, the state traditionally considering the tipping point in presidential elections. (Clinton finally returned to Ohio Monday after nearly a month-long absence.)
“While the same ten states are in play by and large that we had in 2012 they have definitely been reordered,” said Mitch Stewart, President Obama’s 2012 field director and a founding partner of the Democratic consulting firm 270 Strategies…
That new geographic pattern is rooted in the race’s defining demographic trends. In the six major national polls released just before last week’s first presidential debate, Trump led among white voters without a college education by resounding margins of 20 to 32 percentage points. But he confronted deficits of 40-50 points among non-white voters, and was facing more resistance than any previous Republican nominee in the history of modern polling among college-educated whites: five of the six surveys showed him trailing among them by margins of two-to-eleven percentage points (while he managed only to run even in the sixth.) The race is on track to produce the widest gap ever between the preferences of college-and non-college whites, while Trump may reach record lows among voters of color.
From 1996, Henry Louis Gates:
HATING HILLARY
Hillary Clinton has been trashed right and left—but what’s really fuelling the furies?
Some of this glee relates to a discomfort with Hillary’s political identity. In the 1992 campaign, her husband presented himself as a different kind of Democrat. Many people who wanted a different kind of Democrat to be President fear that the President’s wife is not a different kind of Democrat. (In Ben J. Wattenberg’s “Values Matter Most” —the book that prompted Bill Clinton’s infamous midnight-of-the-soul telephone call to the author—Hillary is identified as “a lady of the left” and compared with Mikhail Suslov, who was for years the Kremlin’s chief ideologist.) Of course, if you ask why they fear she is not a different kind of Democrat, the answers are less than entirely satisfying. It’s true that she served on the board of a liberal advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, but then many C.D.F. members regard the First Lady with heartfelt disappointment. It’s also true that the Clinton health plan, which she spearheaded, involved significant government oversight, but then congressional conservatives routinely pass complicated bills in which government has a complicated role. (Consider, even, the tort-reform movement, which Vice-President Dan Quayle spearheaded, and which sought to vest the federal government with new powers to regulate product liability and other civil litigation.) But if you want to understand how conservatives perceive Mrs. Clinton these matters are ultimately a distraction. For they recognize her, almost on a gut level; in a phrase I’ve heard countless times, they “know the type.” In a word, they look at Hillary Clinton and they see Mrs. Jellyby.
Mrs. Jellyby, you may recall, is the Dickens character in “Bleak House” who is as intent on improving humanity as she is cavalier toward actual human beings; thus she heartlessly neglects her own family while high-mindedly pursuing charity abroad—“telescopic philanthropy,” in Dickens’ classic phrase.
Danny Vinik/Politico:
The bigger unfairness behind Trump’s tax break
The problem isn’t that he could write off his income for years. The problem is that everyone else can’t.
Best deep dive on OH, by Kyle Kondik, who literally wrote the book:
So what role does Ohio play in this election? Here are three possibilities:
If Donald Trump becomes president, Ohio will vote for him. If Hillary Clinton wins Ohio, she will be president. But if Hillary Clinton wins by just a small margin nationally, the state could easily back Trump in a loss.
That’s because both history and demographics suggest Trump will perform better in Ohio than he does nationally, just like Nixon did in 1960. If that’s what happens, the key questions then are: 1. By how much does Trump outperform his national average in Ohio; and 2. Are the changes that Trump may make to the electorate fleeting, or are they permanent?