Reuters:
Donald Trump has fallen further behind Hillary Clinton and now trails her by 8 points among likely voters, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, with 1 in 5 Republicans saying his vulgar comments about groping women disqualify him from the presidency.
The national tracking poll was launched after Sunday night's second presidential debate, where Trump was pressed to explain his comments in a 2005 videotape about grabbing women's genitalia. He described the remarks, which first surfaced on Friday, as "locker room" banter and apologized to Americans.
The poll released on Tuesday showed Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had increased her lead over Trump, the Republican nominee, to 8 percentage points on Monday from 5 points last week…
Trump, however, appears to be shedding support among evangelicals, who are usually a wellspring of support for Republican presidential candidates. Monday's poll showed that Trump had only a 1-point edge over Clinton among people who identified as evangelicals. That’s down from a 12-point advantage for Trump in July.
Cleveland.com:
New Ohio poll puts Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 9 points after news of Trump's vulgar talk
Democrat Hillary Clinton has a 9-point lead over Republican Donald Trump in Ohio following the news of Trump's vulgar talk about women and after the second debate between the candidates, according to a statewide poll released today by Baldwin Wallace University in Berea.
Clinton leads Trump, 48 percent to 38 percent, with 14 percent unsure, in a direct match-up, the poll found. When the two minority party candidates are added to the mix – as they are on state ballots -- Clinton leads by 9 percent, 43 percent to 34 percent.
ICYMI Drew Linzer (who does the DK prediction model, above banner) explains:
What this demonstrates, though, is that at this point in the campaign, the disagreements between the presidential models’ forecasts are primarily due to differences in the way uncertainty is carried through from the state forecasts to the national forecast. It is not that any of the forecasting models have a fundamentally more pro-Trump interpretation of the data. The models are essentially in agreement. Donald Trump is extremely unlikely to win the presidential election.
A reminder that as the Donald implodes and spends his time playing fantasy election back at Trump Tower, his prospects might be worse than it seems
And the Reuters 53-32 makes five.
Atlantic:
Clinton holds a 49-38 lead over the Republican. Two weeks ago, a previous PRRI/Atlantic poll found Trump and Clinton tied at 43-43. Following the first presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, the Democrat broke out to a 47-41 lead. She has now built on that lead.
That’s the bad news for Trump. The worse news is that this poll likely does not include the full impact of a video, published Friday afternoon by The Washington Post, in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women. The poll was conducted Wednesday through Sunday, meaning some respondents were interviewed before the video’s release and some afterward. It also does not take into account the second presidential debate, in which Trump’s performance drewwidely varying reviews.
John Stoehr/US News:
Why are congressional Republicans abandoning their nominee Donald Trump long after it was clear that he's manifestly unfit to hold any elected office, much less the presidency of the United States?
The simplest answer is usually the best. Here's my guess: Bigotry can be useful as long as it does not impact your core constituents. With video showing Trump admitting to the crime of sexual assault, and doing so in the foulest language possible, bigotry has come full circle for congressional Republicans. The bigotry that the GOP courted for decades to create a coalition large enough to capture the White House is now alienating a reliable voting bloc: middle-class white women.
WSJ:
Donald Trump’s New Attack Strategy: Suppress Clinton Vote
Mr. Trump, in fact, is trying to use his break with many party leaders as a lever to ramp up support among his base, which includes many voters who feel equally estranged from the party establishment.
The decision means that a campaign already marked by intensely personal attacks is primed to grow even uglier in the remaining four weeks. Mr. Trump plans to keep up a relentless assault on Mrs. Clinton, including her use of a private email server and allegations about her husband, former President Bill Clinton, with the intention of keeping some of her supporters home on Election Day, his advisers said.
“As more and more Republicans defect, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump is getting more and more desperate,” said Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon. “In the closing weeks, he can run his campaign however he chooses, but Hillary Clinton is going to continue talking about her positive vision for improving the lives for everyday Americans.”
Daniel Drezner/WaPo:
It matters how Trump falls, because in our electoral system it matters how the loser concedes to the winner. By this point in the 2008 election, John McCain kinda sorta knew he was losing, and exactly eight years ago today, started doing things like tamping down the extremist elements of his base at his rallies.
That’s not how Trump has acted over the last 48 hours:
BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray does a nice job of describing Trump’s current strategy:
On Sunday night, Trump signaled that his objective now is to fight to the end as the champion of the populist nationalist movement he has spearheaded and which propelled him to the Republican nomination. Trump’s revanchist positioning is a sign he’s retreated to pleasing the hard core of his base, despite the fact that they cannot deliver him the White House; a performance like this won’t bring on board the voters Trump must persuade in order to win.
Trump began the night by holding a livestreamed meeting with several of Bill Clinton’s accusers, signaling that he would bring up a subject that many Republicans have urged him not to. He accused Clinton’s campaign of starting birtherism, bringing up Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal twice — a reference unlikely to resonate with many people beyond loyal readers of Breitbart and viewers of Fox News. Trump told Clinton she had “hate in her heart.” He threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and even jail her after the election.
Or, as CNN’s M.J. Lee put it: “Donald Trump issued an unmistakable threat to Hillary Clinton Sunday night: I am willing to cross any line to make the next 30 days of your life hell.”
Yoni Applebaum/Atlantic:
Trump's Promise to Jail Clinton Is a Threat to American Democracy
A candidate who accepted the nomination to chants of “Lock her up!” crosses a dangerous line.
This is not how the presidency works. When Richard Nixon tried to interfere in an ongoing investigation, Attorney General Elliott Richardson resigned. And even if Trump could find a more malleable attorney general, and discard precedent, he’d still lack the power to jail Clinton unilaterally. Presidents are not in charge of the law, but of its faithful execution.
This is also not how democracies work. Elected officials do not jail their foes. The Constitution specifically prohibits bills of attainder—legislation designed to punish individuals, thereby circumventing the judicial process—to bar despotic rulers from persecuting their opponents. The jailing of political opponents is a feature of repressive dictatorships, not vibrant democracies.
But it is fully in keeping with how Trump’s campaign has worked. He accepted the nomination in Cleveland in July. The defining chant of that convention was not, “Make America Great Again.” It was “Lock Her Up!”
And on Sunday, that’s exactly what Trump vowed to do.
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
There are two possible explanations for Donald Trump's debate performance Sunday night. The first is that it was one of Trump's regular releases of bile, albeit a high-volume one.
As Bloomberg Politics reported, after a weekend spent reeling from scandal and a flood of Republican defections, Trump unleashed "a spectacle of defiance with a hovering presence, as well as threats and interruptions that will likely do more to mobilize his devoted base than appeal to skeptical female voters he needs to win the White House."
It's true that the most unpopular presidential candidate in the history of polling did little in the debate to make himself more likable, and much to frighten voters who are not already in his camp. It was a greatest-hits compilation of every unhinged fantasy from Trump's damaged psyche.
But the second explanation for his performance is that his rage festival managed to be both cathartic and strategic. Because Trump's psyche looks remarkably like a psychographic map of the Republican base.
Rebecca Traister/NY Mag:
As for the video itself, Trump stuck with his talking point that there is nothing unusual in his language about women, emphasizing it as just “locker-room talk” — part of an ordinary, shared male view of women as sexual prey. After the debate, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tried to bolster this argument by telling Chris Matthews that when she was “younger and prettier,” some Republicans “on the list of people who won’t support Donald Trump because they all ride around on a high horse” were the same people “rubbing up against girls, sticking their tongues down women’s throats … uninvited.” This followed an apparent threat Trump had made earlier on Twitter, to the “many self-righteous hypocrites” abandoning his campaign. If Donald Trump is going down, he seems determined to do so in a blaze of revelation, in which he forever ties his own outsize loutishness to the everyday misogyny of members of the party that nominated him. That may be the one public service he performs in this election.
Ezra Klein/Vox:
Trump ally Alex Jones thinks Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are literally demons from hell
For the record, I have interviewed both Clinton and Obama, and I didn’t notice any unusual smells [brimstone, folks, brimstone].
All this would be hilarious if Jones wasn’t, in some way, an actual player in Donald Trump’s informational ecosystem. But among the scariest things about Donald Trump is the sources he chooses to trust. Polls are only legitimate if they show him ahead. Conspiracy theoriesare valid so long as they flatter his view of the world. Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Muslims in New Jersey cheered the fall of the Twin Towers. Climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. Vaccines cause autism. The FBI hasn’t jailed Hillary Clinton because the system is corrupt. The Clintons perhaps murdered Vince Foster. Obama is a secret Muslim. Antoni Scalia was assassinated. And on, and on, and on.
Jones is nuts, but he’s the kind of nuts Trump listens to, at least when convenient. And Trump takes these ideas and bases his approach off them. If this is the milieu you start from, merely throwing Clinton in jail is a compromise proposal.
Roger Cohen/NY Times:
This has been one long, strange trip for the Republican nominee. I don’t think that he can fool all Americans all of the time. Still he’s come a very long way with a single idea: I, and I alone, can channel your anger into an American renaissance. Policies have never really come into the Trump phenomenon. Saviors don’t have policies. They have energy.
It now behooves America, whatever the outcome next month, to address that anger mixed with fear. It is widespread. Trump understood this and went to work. He grasped that many people in a polarized America, whipped up by Fox News and ushered into a post-fact world by the antics of the Republican Party, were ready for a straight-talking outsider prepared to offer scapegoats for every frustration. Trump’s has been a single-note campaign; that note is rage. It has been particularly effective against the ultimate insider, Clinton.
I was talking the other day with a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who said to me with a kind of deadpan resignation: “You know we are designing a world that is not fit for people.” Perhaps that admission comes closest to capturing the disquiet and dread on which Trump has thrived, along with other demagogues in Europe.
Chris Cillizza/WaPo:
This is an absolute worst-case scenario for Republicans. Had Trump turned against them months ago — or had his poll numbers dipped then as they have now — extricating themselves from the dumpster fire might have been painful, but it was possible. Now it's almost certainly too late to do any real distancing from the nominee even as he is promising more unpredictability and more intraparty attacks.
It's unclear how badly Trump can hurt his chances or those of his party downballot. But, the disaster scenario — an electoral college wipeout, losing the Senate and the House — now has to be on the table.