Here’s data from the new ABC tracker from Sunday, with a couple of key points:
- Clinton has doubled her lead to 32 points, 62-30 percent, among college-educated white women, a group that’s particularly critical of his response to questions about his sexual conduct. (Seventy-six percent disapprove, 67 percent strongly.)
- That said, Clinton's also ahead numerically (albeit not significantly) among men, 44-41 percent, a first in ABC News and ABC/Post polling.
- Trump is just +4 among whites overall, 47-43 percent, a group Mitt Romney won by 20 points in 2012. Broad success among whites is critical for any Republican candidate; nonwhites, a reliably Democratic group, favor Clinton by 54 points, 68-14 percent.
and this:
The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.
We don’t know if the lead is still growing.
Reuters, meanwhile, has their data points online, showing it’s not a fluke:
Alas, they do not post daily, and neither does NOLA, which does weekday only (what’s the point of a tracker of you don’t post daily?). NOLA had an 8 point Clinton lead on 10/20 (45-37), so this set of polls at least has Clinton with an 8-12 point lead. The Huffington Post Pollster average is 48-41.
This Pew research graphic is pretty good: the rightmost column represents what an 8 point lead would get you in the polls, i.e., anywhere between a 2 and a 14 point lead:
In that context, most of the polls fit right in, be it 6 like Quinnipiac, 9 like Bloomberg or 12 like ABC.
Who are the consistent Trump-favoriting polls? These polls simply use different likely voter assumptions: IBD/TIPP (tied today), Rasmussen (Trump +2, updates 8:30 am) and USC/LAT (Clinton +1). Not at all clear they are doing it right. We’ll see. Their major function is to allow the Trump train to claim they’re on track.
And for whatever reason, there’s not much difference between 2 and 4 way race polling at the moment. So, note them all, but don’t sweat the Trump campaign citing the small leads.
Note that the depressed R base may already be showing. Michael Bitzer looks at early voting in NC:
White Democrats are 10 percent ahead of their 2012 same-day numbers, while white unaffiliated voters are 30 percent ahead of their same-day numbers from four years ago; conversely, white Republicans are 15 percent behind their 2012 same-day numbers.
Since Republicans tend to be an exclusively white party in North Carolina in terms of registration (94 percent white in the 10-22-16 voter registration pool), the gap between 2012's performance by white Republicans and their current turnout indicates that something is not motivating them to turnout, at least through absentee voting. ...
- In 2012, urban Democrats were 17 percent of the overall absentee voting
- So far in 2016, urban Democrats are 18 percent of absentee voting
- In 2012, urban unaffiliated voters were 13 percent of the overall absentee voting
- So far in 2016, urban unaffiliated voters are 15 percent of absentee voting
- In 2012, urban Republicans were 23 percent of the overall absentee voting
- So far in 2016, urban Republicans are 19 percent of the absentee voting
While more urban Democrats and urban unaffiliated voters are showing up this year so far than in comparison to the overall 2012 performance, it appears that urban Republicans are not casting absentee ballots, at this point in 2016's absentee voting, at the same potential rate as their 2012 overall percentage.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
The problem for Trump is that taken as a whole, his polls aren’t very good — and, in fact, they may still be getting worse. An ABC News national poll released on Sunday morning — the first live-caller poll conducted fully after the final presidential debate — showed Clinton leading Trump 50 percent to 38 percent. Clinton’s 12-point lead in that poll is toward the high end of a broad range of results from recent national polls, with surveys showing everything from a 15-point Clinton lead to a 2-point Trump edge. But the ABC News poll is interesting given its recency and given why Clinton has pulled so far ahead in it — Republicans aren’t very happy with their candidate and may not turn out to vote:
The previous ABC/Post poll found a sharp 12-point decline in enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters, almost exclusively among those who’d preferred a different GOP nominee. Intended participation now has followed: The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.
I’d urge a little bit of caution here, given that swings in enthusiasm can be transient and can sometimes exaggerate the underlying change in voter sentiment. Our polls-only forecast has Clinton up by about 7 percentage points instead of by double digits — and our polls-plus forecast would still bet on the race tightening slightly.
But you can easily see how the worst-case scenario is firmly on the table for Trump and Republican down-ballot candidates, where the bottom falls out from GOP turnout.
WaPo:
Donald Trump’s campaign manager admits: ‘We are behind’
Donald Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Republican pollster, admitted Sunday that her candidate is currently losing to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"We are behind," Conway said on NBC's "Meet the Press." Clinton, she said, "has some advantages, like $66 million in ad buys just in the month of September, thereby doubling her ad buys from August. Now, most of those ads are negative against Donald Trump — classic politics of personal destruction, cesspool kind of ads. And she has tremendous advantages: She has a former president, who happens to be her husband, campaigning for her. The current president and first lady, vice president, all much more popular than she can hope to be."
But Conway is still hopeful that Trump can be victorious by winning over undecided voters who don't like Clinton. Instead of pointing to polls, which Trump has said are rigged against him, Conway pointed to the enthusiasm that she seen on the campaign trail.
"Let me tell you something: You go out on the road with Donald Trump, this election doesn't feel over," Conway said on CNN's "State of the Union."
This Boing Boing alt right automatic conspiracy generator is hysterical. Just reload and you’ll get three randomly generated pictures suitable for your latest conspiracy theory post.
BuzzFeed:
“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment
For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people who’ve been trying to figure this out for a decade.
I’m going to use this tweet to answer all trolls:
Alec MacGillis/NY Times:
The Republican Party may seem in historic disarray, but it will most likely be able to continue to stymie the Democrats’ legislative agenda, perpetuating Washington’s gridlock for years to come.
Liberals have a simple explanation for this state of affairs: Republican-led gerrymandering, which has put Democrats at a disadvantage in the House and in many state legislatures. But this overlooks an even bigger problem for their party. Democrats today are sorting themselves into geographic clusters where many of their votes have been rendered all but superfluous, especially in elections for the Senate, House and state government.
This has long been a problem for the party, but it has grown worse in recent years. The clustering has economic and demographic roots, but also a basic cultural element: Democrats just don’t want to live where they’d need to live to turn more of the map blue.
Today’s Storify piece:
David French/NRO:
Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
When we both publicized some of the racist attacks — I in National Review and Nancy in the Washington Post — things took a far more ominous turn. Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section.
Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.
The next Sunday, friends from church approached, expressing concern not just for our safety but for theirs as well. We live in a community where most of the streets have similar names, and it’s common for UPS drivers, FedEx deliveries, and friends to end up at the wrong house. They interpreted the images as threats, and they didn’t want anyone to drive into our neighborhood, looking for the Frenches, intent on turning image into reality.
It took days — and hundreds of IP blocks and Twitter reports — but things finally calmed down. The racist images slowed from a flood to a trickle, I relaxed a bit at night, and life returned, I thought, to normal. I was wrong. Our “normal” had changed. This wasn’t the beginning of the end of our troubles, but rather the end of the beginning.
James Ball/Buzzfeed on Julian Assange:
On 29 November 2010, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped out in front of reporters to condemn the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks and five major news organisations the previous day.
WikiLeaks’ release, she said, “puts people’s lives in danger”, “threatens our national security” and “undermines out efforts to work with other countries”.
“Releasing them poses real risks to real people,” she noted, adding “we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”
Julian Assange watched that message on a television in the corner of a living room in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in rural Norfolk, around 120 miles away from London.
I was sitting around 8ft away from him as he did, the room’s antique furniture and rugs strewn with laptops, cables, and the mess of a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story.