A day later, it dawned on people that Tim Kaine’s strategy was not to talk about Tim Kaine or go after Mike Pence:
1. be aggressive in going after Donald Trump, even if it’s annoying, and get your points in
2. go after Donald Trump, make Pence defend Trump (or prove he can’t, and Kaine delivered with 100% success in execution)
3. ignore Pence, ignore his IN record. Go after Trump. Say everything Trump said. Remind people. And, by the way, don’t forget to go after Donald Trump.
Here is how VP debates work: if your base is bigger than theirs, and you are ahead, and your base is more pumped by the debate than theirs, you won. And the thing I like about Team Clinton is when they stick the stiletto between your ribs, you don’t know you’re bleeding until the next day.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
During the debate, by my count, Tim Kaine reminded the national audience of Trump’s attacks on Mexican immigrants no less than five times. He revived Trump’s attacks on a Mexican-American judge twice. He criticized Trump’s misogynistic quotes twice and quoted Trump’s suggestion that women should be punished for abortions once. He blasted Trump’s birtherism three times, in one case flatly describing it as bigoted. And he aired Trump’s plans for mass deportations five times. All of that, of course, was designed to remind everyone of Trump’s sexism, bigotry, racist campaign, and cruel, pathologically abusive streak. Kaine also revived Trump’s displays of ignorance about international affairs and his quotes about nuclear weapons and Vladimir Putin to press the case that Trump is dangerously unhinged and unfit for the presidency.
It’s been widely observed that Pence either refused to defend many of Trump’s statements or simply pretended he hadn’t said them. This is being widely analyzed by Clinton supporters as proof that you can’t defend the indefensible and by neutral observers as a sign that Pence didn’t help Trump as much as he might have done.
But I think this gets at something else that’s important: it shows, in a roundabout way, how and why Trump may be currently on track to losing the election.
Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns/NY Times:
Donald J. Trump’s support has plunged across the swing-state map over the last 10 days, wiping out his political recovery from September and threatening to undo weeks of Republican gains in the battle for control of Congress.
For his party, Mr. Trump’s reversal in fortune comes at the worst possible moment: Having muted their criticism of Mr. Trump in hopes that he could at least run competitively through Election Day, Republicans must decide in the next few days, rather than weeks, whether to seek distance from his wobbly campaign.
Should Mr. Trump falter badly in his second debate with Hillary Clinton on Sunday in St. Louis, Republican congressional candidates may take it as a cue to flee openly from their nominee, said two senior Republicans involved at high levels of the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private party strategy.
Janie Valencia/HuffPost with sobering news for Trump:
Donald Trump dropped in the polls following the first presidential debate, allowing Hillary Clinton to open up a significant lead. History suggests that the Republican nominee will not be able to recover.
The first presidential debate usually benefits the candidate who is running against the incumbent president’s party. In the 10 elections from 1976 through 2012, the challenger has risen in the national polls eight times, according to data compiled by FiveThirtyEight and HuffPost Pollster.
That calculation is based on the straight average of polls conducted one week before the debate and one week after the debate.
By the way, CNN says the VP debate had poor viewing:
Tuesday night's vice presidential debate drew a much smaller audience than the VP debates in 2012 and 2008.
About 37.2 million people tuned in to the nine television channels that carried the debate live, according to Nielsen.
An open letter to Mike Pence from my friend Nelba Márquez-Greene:
On the value and integrity of life- a letter to Mike Pence.
Dear Governor Pence- Last night during the debate, I heard you talk about your faith. As a Christian woman for almost twenty years, it is a faith we share and has comforted me in my most trying times. And there have been many, many trying times. My husband and I were high school sweet hearts. After college, we made the decision to give our lives to Jesus Christ and get baptized. We worked really hard. Attended church regularly. Tithed. We suffered two miscarriages and then nearly five years later had our first child. A boy. His name is Isaiah. Twenty two months later, a girl. Her name was Ana Grace Márquez-Greene. Does her name sound familiar? It should. She was one of the 20 children murdered in Newtown. She should be ten years old now. Her brother should be helping a little sister get through fifth grade. But he can't. Because she is dead.
I invite you to consider that the "value of human life" should not exclude victims of gun violence.
You see, Governor Pence, when you talk about the "value of human life" and "your faith" and ignore victims of gun violence? You ignore twenty Americans a day. And everyone they're connected to. Ana's death alone has caused pain and suffering to hundreds and hundreds of people. I urge you to not ignore the dignity of Ana's life- and those who die like her. Isn't it our shared faith that teaches us that we must not sit idly by in the face of suffering?
Governor Pence, I leave you with one my favorite scripture: Hebrews 11:1 - "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."
It is this very definition of faith that has carried our family out of darkness and convicts us to be passionate about ending this pain for other families- regardless of zip code. There are so many ways to work together. But you must start by not ignoring us.
I hope your faith and belief in the value of life can include victims of gun violence. I know it would for Jesus.
Sincerely,
Nelba Márquez-Greene
Ana and Isaiah's Mom
Founder and Director, @The Ana Grace Project
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Perhaps the most effective thing the major-party candidates could do for their chances in November would be to change their names from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to Generic Democrat and Ordinary Republican. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but probably not too much. A quarter of young voters told CNN they'd never heard of Tim Kaine, but in Fairleigh Dickinson's poll they preferred him to Trump by 22 points. Generic Democrat could win this in a walk.
Youngs always prefer third parties, olds know not to go there (memories of Ross Perot, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader).
Latinousa.org:
This is the first time since the summer that the weekly tracking poll, active since April, reported a number for Clinton greater than 80%. Before this week’s 83% result, Clinton’s highest number was 81% in July. Her lowest since July was 74%. In contrast, Trump’s 10.6% this week is his lowest number since April. His highest number was 17.2% in June.
Trump also saw a significant decrease with Florida’s Latino voters in this week’s poll, which was conducted days after the first presidential debate. The pre-debate NLV poll had Trump with 29.3% of Latino support in Florida. The post-debate poll now has Trump at 17.6%. Meanwhile, Clinton’s support jumped from 58.3% to 76.5%.
Sarah Kendzior/Globe and Mail:
Kaine vs. Pence: When Midwestern Nice meets Midwestern Lies
Americans are not used to a calm liar. We are used to lies being screamed, chanted, or told as a “joke” – lies wrapped in the bravado and bluster of Mr. Trump. We are not accustomed to lies uttered calmly by a purported man of faith, who appeared to reconcile his role in the vicious Trump campaign by pretending it never happened. Mr. Pence spoke favourably of a Mr. Trump that does not resemble Mr. Trump – a fantasy candidate who never said what Mr. Trump said, or did what Mr. Trump did.
In the end, when pressed on Mr. Trump’s proclaimed desire to punish women who have had abortions, Mr. Pence finally cracked, admitting that Mr.Trump had said this but chalking it up to him being “unpolished.” Mr. Pence is a pro-life extremist who once tried to get a law passed forcing women who miscarried to have funerals for fetuses. (The law was blocked by a federal judge.)
Mr. Pence likely had no objection to the content of Mr. Trump’s statement, but he knows how to cloak brutal policies in Midwestern Nice – a skill his running mate lacks. In that brief moment, Mr. Pence seemed resigned to Mr. Trump’s crudeness and cruelty.
It is hard to say who “won” the debate. Mr. Kaine stammered and interrupted, but remained essentially honest. Mr. Pence lied calmly and well.
Harry Enten/FiveThirtyEight:
Trump’s Doing Worse Than Romney Did Among White Voters
Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.
But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys.1 He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.
David Corn/Mother Jones:
By exploiting instead of addressing the anti-Obama fever within their party, Republicans leaders helped set the foundation for Trump's towering candidacy. And with his nomination came crunch time. The choice was this: keep trying to ride the tiger or denounce the beast within. Not prepared to confront a plurality, if not a majority, of the GOP base and trigger a bloody all-out civil war that could well put their own political careers at risk, Republican poobahs had only one course of action: to pretend that Trump is acceptable. They did not have the courage, spunk, or fortitude to take on the forces they had encouraged. So now many GOPers must make believe that Trump would be a fine president and offer a neverending series of excuses and rationales—that is, when they cannot avoid talking about him.
This is not ideological. Trump is no conservative hero for whom Republicans must fall in line. Michael Reagan this week said that neither Nancy Reagan nor his father Ronald Reagan would have supported Trump. But doing so is no problem for Pence, who proudly describes himself as a Reagan conservative. Pence also is self-proclaimed evangelical who is now crusading for a fellow who has not practiced family values. And he has had to put aside bedrock policy principles—free trade and support for the Iraq war—to saddle up with Trump.
Pence is the GOP's primary justifier for Trump—his only serious, brand-name surrogate. (Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie have become clownish Trumpbots.)
The Atlantic:
Against Donald Trump
For the third time since The Atlantic’s founding, the editors endorse a candidate for president. The case for Hillary Clinton.
Today, our position is similar to the one in which The Atlantic’s editors found themselves in 1964. We are impressed by many of the qualities of the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, even as we are exasperated by others, but we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency…
Our interest here is not to advance the prospects of the Democratic Party, nor to damage those of the Republican Party. If Hillary Clinton were facing Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, or, for that matter, any of the leading candidates Trump vanquished in the Republican primaries, we would not have contemplated making this endorsement. We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.
BBC on newspaper endorsements:
In fact, online research firm YouGov estimates about 8% of registered voters who plan to cast a ballot are still undecided.
"There are so many undecided voters in this race fishing around for some kind of guidance for what to do," he said.
These voters, he added, tend to be a mix of people who may not pay much attention to news but skim headlines, and others who are engaged but still uncertain of how they will vote.
"That surprise factor, when a newspaper deviates from its traditional posture, that sends a power signal to readers," he said. "I think it is going to make a lot of people sit up and pay attention."
Hey remember that Bill Clinton/ACA non-issue? Know the facts.