There’s a long list of lies and lying that doesn’t even include the Pulitzer worthy work of David Fahrenthold. But be aware that the Trump Foundation story is very much a part of the conversation.
Meanwhile the chances of a Clinton win ranges from 56% on 538 to 81% on Sam Wang's site.
The neutral guys, Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook also still see a Clinton win (no guarantees, but that’s how they see it even with tightening).
Amy Davidson/New Yorker:
Trump is still lying about birtherism
Trump spreads lies the way terrorists plant bombs: one goes off, and when the first responders rush in, there’s a second, or even a third. The main collateral blast when he spoke about birtherism last Friday, at his new hotel in Washington, D.C., was that “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.” They did not, as my colleague John Cassidy and others documented over the weekend. Trump continued, “I finished it. I finished it—you know what I mean.” Many reports indicated that they did know what he meant, or was mendaciously referring to: “his public pressure campaign in 2011 that resulted in Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii,” as Politico put it—as if that act added information about anything but Trump’s ambitions. The Times noted that “Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Jason Miller, asserted—also falsely—that Mr. Trump had ‘obtained’ Mr. Obama’s birth certificate. The president actually released the long-form version in 2011.” A Times editorial left out the long-form qualification, saying that “Mr. Trump continued to heap doubt on President Obama’s birth certificate even after it was released,” linking to a story about the 2011 release. It is, again, important to say that Trump is lying even on his own terms. But those terms are a lie, too. This is a rhetorical trap, one that even Tim Kaine, the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, stumbled into when he was asked to address an allegation that Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton associate, raised birtherist questions during the 2008 primary. (Blumenthal has denied it.) “Whatever Sidney Blumenthal thought in 2008, by 2011, it was absolutely crystal clear that President Obama was a citizen, because his birth certificate had been released,” Kaine said. It is, again, necessary to address the bald lie in Trump’s claim that he “finished” anything in 2011. But one can’t forget the bigotry built into the way he got started.
Michael Barbaro/NY Times podcast:
Is Lying Trump’s Strategy?
We hear from Pamela Meyer, an expert on lying and the author of “Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception.”
“I think he’s a great liar,” Ms. Meyer told us of Mr. Trump. “A good liar intuitively knows what it is you want to hear, dangles it out in front of you just when you need it, expresses confidence enough so that you allow them a path if you think they’re lying or might trust them a little bit more than you normally would.”
In the episode, I’m also joined by my colleague Maggie Haberman, who has covered Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton and who questions whether Mr. Trump’s lies or inconsistencies are the result of a careful strategy.
“I think Trump will say whatever he has to say to get through a 5- or 10-minute moment in time,” she said on the show. “Those are the chunks in which he operates and thinks.”
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Trump’s Racist Birther Gaslighting Strategy Has Taken Over the GOP
Trump used birtherism and other forms of racist agitation to build a political base for himself, and now that these defining crusades are impeding his pursuit of political power, he is trying to discard them in the most contemptuous and brazen possible way. Rather than disavow and apologize for his birtherism, he fabricated a new history in which Clinton had given life to the birther movement and he had merely settled the issue by forcing Obama to produce his birth certificate.
Take time to read this excellent piece on polling from Nate Cohn on their recent Upshot/Siena FL poll:
We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.
Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come up with two very different results.
How so? Because pollsters make a series of decisions when designing their survey, from determining likely voters to adjusting their respondents to match the demographics of the electorate. These decisions are hard. They usually take place behind the scenes, and they can make a huge difference.
To illustrate this, we decided to conduct a little experiment. On Monday, in partnership with Siena College, the Upshot published a pollof 867 likely Florida voters. Our poll showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald J. Trump by one percentage point.
We decided to share our raw data with four well-respected pollsters and asked them to estimate the result of the poll themselves.
This was a really innovative thing to do and kudos to them.
Greg Sargent/WaPo on Clinton, Trump, the election and Millennials:
I don’t really see how this debate can be settled in any definitive way, because if Trump wins, there will be a whole lot of blame to go around. If millennials do end up helping cost Clinton the election, surely it’ll be reasonable to argue all of these things simultaneously:
1) First and foremost, Clinton and Democrats deserve the blame for failing to give millennials a compelling enough reason to vote for her; but…
(2) despite this, millennials who do vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein will indeed have wasted their votes, with potentially disastrous consequences for themselves and everyone else; and yet, even if that is so…
(3) this won’t necessarily make millennials any more responsible for the outcome than anyone else, and we’ll all have hell to pay for it.
But I do want to make a separate point, which is that the struggle to get it right with millennials could end up being a much bigger long-term story than the one reflected in the current arguments over whether they are or aren’t obliged to support Clinton in this election.
Peter Beinart/Atlantic:
But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the “he said, she said” campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump’s press conference by running a “News Analysis,” a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story’s significance. But “News Analysis” pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its “News Analysis” atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump’s press conference to page A10. Moreover, “News Analysis” stories generally offer context. They don’t offer thundering condemnation.
Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” Not “falsehood,” which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but “lie,” which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama’s citizenship was false.
The article’s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump’s campaign to discredit Obama’s citizenship. “It was not true in 2011,” began the first paragraph. “It was not true in 2012,” began the second paragraph. “It was not true in 2014,” began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: “It was not true, any of it.”
Steve Schale/Blog:
MEMO
Dear: Reporters covering Florida, Other Observers, and the Nation of Twitter.
From: Steve, #FloridaMan and Disgruntled Jags Fan.
Re: BREAKING, 2016 version: Florida is gonna be close
For much of the window between 2000 and 2012, the conversation about Florida, driven at times by Nate Silver himself was “is it really a swing state?” This year, the new narrative is “why isn’t Clinton crushing it in Florida.” Both then, and now, those statements were and are absurd.
Let’s settle one thing, for good. Until further notice, Florida is an exceptionally competitive swing state. In fact, it is the most competitive.
When you look at the last four Presidential elections in Florida, Republicans won two, and the Democrats won two.
Over those four elections, roughly 30.5 million voters have had a Presidential vote counted, and the difference between Republicans and Democrats? Try 71,000 votes. That is a margin of 0.24%.
No other state in the country was closer.
To take it further, the last three major statewides: the 2010 Governor’s race, the 2012 Presidential, and the 2014 Governor’s race, the margin of victory respectably was 1.1, 0.9, and 1.
Just look at today’s NYT poll, the first poll using the actual file of registered voters. What was the margin? One point.
Florida is just wired to be close. And 2016 will be no different. Here are a few reasons why.
John Tures/Observer:
Can Terrorists Really Influence an Election?
The ability of incumbents and challengers to run on a credible antiterrorism strategy seems to be the key when terror attacks occur
Julia Azari/FiveThirtyEight:
Voters Turn To Trusted Authorities After Terrorist Attacks
But in this election, it’s not clear who they think that is
