Morning Consult with the first post-debate poll and a 4 point swing to Hillary (3 point lead):
Political analysts were quick to declare victory for Hillary Clinton after the Democratic nominee’s first debate with Donald Trump on Monday night, and a new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows roughly half of likely voters agree with that assessment.
According to the survey of likely voters conducted immediately after the debate at Hofstra University, 49 percent of respondents said Clinton won the first bout with her GOP foe. About one-fourth (26 percent) thought the New York businessman edged the former secretary of State, and about the same percentage (25 percent) were undecided…
But the impact of Monday’s debate is still small. Just 9 percent of voters said the debate changed their minds about who they will be voting for, while about eight out of 10 said it wouldn’t matter. Before the debate, Trump led Clinton by 1 point in the four-way race with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. But Clinton now leads Trump by 3 points (41 percent to 38 percent), and in a head-to-head scenario, she leads by 4 points (45 percent to 41 percent).
Ipsos/Reuters has a +4 HRC head to head (up from a tie last week, but no change immediately after the debate) with two sampled days post debate (unusual release for them). We also have Echalon +5, Times Picayune +5, PPP +4. Not bad numbers (winning by 5 is aka “winning”), but wait a few days to see whether there is a real change, then we can argue if it’s noise, the debates, or just reversion to the mean.
But wait! PPP will have five swing states out today (PA,CO, VA, NC, FL), all worth watching.
Nicholas Kristof/NY Times:
Yet if Trump’s Achilles’ heel proves to be not his oafish policies but rather his churlish manner, so be it. There are important policy reasons to reel at the thought of Trump in the White House, but voters perhaps flinch even more at his personal conduct: We already run into enough jerks in daily life, so why would we want one as our head of state?
Middle school is the wrenching, jungle stage of life that we all must struggle through. Why would we subject ourselves to a “leader” who is permanently in the seventh grade?
Capone went up the river for tax evasion, even if he got away with murder.
Walter Shapiro/Roll Call:
Donald Trump's a Real Trickle-Downer in Clinton's Eyes
Democratic nominee made use of a political epithet with a long history
I’m thinking the Clinton campaign figures this issue about Miss Universe went well for them after introducing it in the debate, and maybe the Trump campaign has figured out by now it did not go well for Trump:
You think this brilliant book review by Michiko Kakutani is about Hitler? Think again:
Mr. Ullrich, like other biographers, provides vivid insight into some factors that helped turn a “Munich rabble-rouser” — regarded by many as a self-obsessed “clown” with a strangely “scattershot, impulsive style” — into “the lord and master of the German Reich.”
• Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity. But Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”
• Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” that would later be magnified by a slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology (radio, gramophone records, film) to spread his message. A former finance minister wrote that Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”
TIME:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has declared a popular internet meme depicting a cartoon frog to be a hate symbol.
Pepe the Frog’s beginnings were unoffensive: he is the creation of comic book creator Matt Furie, who featured the frog as a character in the seriesBoy’s Club beginning in 2005. The character subsequently became a beloved meme, often called the “sad frog meme” and shared with a speech bubble reading “Feels good man” or “Feels bad man.” It was at times posted on social media by the likes of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj. But recently, as the Daily Beast reported in May, the character has been co-opted by a faction of Internet denizens who decided to reclaim it from the mainstream, and began sharing it in anti-Semitic contexts.
“Images of the frog, variously portrayed with a Hitler-like moustache, wearing a yarmulke or a Klan hood, have proliferated in recent weeks in hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter,” the ADL wrote in a statement. “Once again, racists and haters have taken a popular Internet meme and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading bigotry and harassing users,” wrote ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt.
This is brought to you by the nice folks that run Trump’s scampaign:
NY Times on Trump getting bored:
They blamed his overstuffed schedule, including a last-minute rally in Virginia that was added days before the debate. They blamed the large number of voluble people on his prep team, including two retired military figures with no political background. And they blamed the lack of time spent on preparing a game plan in the first place.
Mr. Trump, for his part, sought to blame everything but himself. During an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, he charged that the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, had become overly aggressive with him — although he inaccurately said that Mr. Holt had questioned him over a 1973 federal discrimination lawsuit against Mr. Trump’s company. (Mrs. Clinton had raised the lawsuit question.) He also suggested that his performance was related to a faulty mike — even though he was perfectly audible during the telecast — and that he may have been the victim of sabotage.And at a rally in Florida on Tuesday night, he ripped Mrs. Clinton in scathing terms that he declined to use when they were face to face.
Conor Friedersdorf/Atlantic:
Donald J. Trump has a cruel streak. He willfully causes pain and distress to others. And he repeats this public behavior so frequently that it’s fair to call it a character trait. Any single example would be off-putting but forgivable. Being shown many examples across many years should make any decent person recoil in disgust.
Judge for yourself if these examples qualify.
WaPo:
It's no secret that race and gender issues have been front-and-center in this year's presidential contest, and anew Washington Post-ABC News poll shines a new light on a central part of this dynamic: views of the power of whites and men.
White men fueled Trump's overall support in the poll, with likely voters in this demographic favoring him by a whopping 40-point margin, compared with a nearly tied contest among white women (46-44) and Clinton's 50-point lead among all non-white voters (69-19).
The Post-ABC poll also asked whether men, women, whites and racial and ethnic minorities have "too much," "too little" or "about the right amount" of influence in the country. Just more than four in 10 registered voters say each of women and minorities have too little influence, while far fewer say either has too much sway.
Looking at whites and men, nearly four in 10 voters say men have too much influence in the country, while one-third says the same about whites. Putting those questions together, voters split evenly, with 48 percent saying whites or men have too much influence, while 48 percent say neither group does.
John Stoehr/Washington Monthly:
As I noted in US News & World Report Tuesday, the Republican Party could have nominated a hamster, and the base of the party would have rallied around the rodent for the GOP’s sake. With that unity, opinion surveys would predictably reflect a very close race.
But let’s remember that Clinton lost to President Obama by a hair in 2008 (about 40,000 votes). This year, she bested Bernie Sanders by 4 million votes. She won about 2 million more votes than Trump did during the GOP primaries. She won more votes, in fact, than any Democrat since the 1960s, when the parties began taking primaries seriously. She did that even though 2016’s primary was not nearly as competitive as 2008’s. And she and Sanders won together as many votes as all 17 Republicans did.
Even before Monday night, when Clinton handed Trump his ass during the first presidential debate in front of 81 million Americans, the record was clear: She knows how to do this. Mind you, this isn’t the empty praise of a partisan. This is noting a record of accomplishment by a public figure in which we can have faith.