John McNeill/WaPo:
“Donald Trump is a fascist” sounds more like a campaign slogan than an analysis of his political program. But it’s true that the GOP nominee doesn’t fit into America’s conventional party categories, and thoughtful people — Robert Kagan and Jeffrey Tucker, among others — have hurled the f-word at him.
Fascism was born in Italy during World War I and came to power with the ex-journalist and war veteran Benito Mussolini in 1922. Since the 1950s, dozens of top historians and political scientists have put fascism, especially the Italian and German versions, under the microscope. They’ve come up with a pretty solid agreement on what it is, both as a political ideology and as a political movement, factoring in all the (sometimes contradictory) things its progenitors said as they ascended to power. As a political ideology, fascism has eight main traits. As a political movement, it has three more. So: Just how fascist is Trump? On the fascist meter, we can award him from zero to four “Benitos.”…
Add all this up, and you get 26 out of a possible 44 Benitos. In the fascist derby, Trump is a loser.
Melissa Batchelor Warnke/LA Times:
We saw a new Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night, the Shade Queen that America deserves
I watched because this dumpster fire is our political system, and it matters.
When it was over, I asked my friends what the heck they had just gotten out of the last 90 minutes.
Clinton demonstrated the unlearning process that guides many American women’s experiences: performing for men, leading for others, living true-to-self.
One said she’d never heard a presidential candidate come out so strongly for abortion rights.
Another said that Clinton nailed Trump by getting him to disagree with Reagan, Republicans’ forever hero.
Another said it was insane when Trump said he should have won the Emmy for ”Celebrity Apprentice.”
One had bipartisan praise for fashion flourishes, enjoying both the mandarin collar on Clinton’s pantsuit and Melania Trump’s mysterious dedication to the unfortunately-named “pussy bow.”
Chris Cillizza/WaPo:
And so, it's no surprise that Trump (a) didn't feel comfortable in the room last night and (b) didn't get a very warm reception from the crowd. It was, quite literally, not his people. For all of the ostentatious wealth and the braggadocio, Trump knows that these people don't like him and have never accepted him.
My guess is that Trump's reaction on the campaign trail in the wake of the Al Smith dinner will be even more aggressive and anti-elite than it was going into last night. Trump is an able reader of crowds; he will know that they were laughing/booing at him. And, if it's anything like what happened in the wake of the 2011 White House correspondents' dinner, he will use his own resentment to drive him in the final 18 days of this race.
In short: Last night was ugly. On the trail, it's likely to get even uglier.
Catherine Rampell/WaPo:
Such charges will rile up some of his base, including those who want to “monitor” the polls so they can intimidate anyone resembling, as one acolyte put it, “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American.” These hardly seem like idle threats; data from the World Values Survey show a correlation between belief that election officials are unfair and violence at the polls.
But however motivating this rhetoric may be for a handful of die-hard Trump thugs, the larger effect will probably be to depress turnout among more marginal voters — whodisproportionately comprise Trump’s base.
Several recent social science studies find that belief in government corruption seems to discourage voting. An Innovations for Poverty Action field experiment in Mexico found that telling residents about the incumbent party’s record of corruption depressed their turnout rates.
“They stayed home because they were fed up with the system,” said Alberto Chong, a Georgia State University professor who co-wrote the paper.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Donald Trump's effort to cushion the landing of what increasingly looks like a large electoral loss goes something like this.
1. Reject polling as inaccurate
2. Imply that voter fraud is rampant and substantial.
Trump's goal? Make a Clinton victory seem suspect.
But what happens when, on Election Day, there isn't obvious evidence of fraud? When exit polls conducted with voters show an overwhelming preference for Clinton (if that should happen)? Well, you're just going to need to have your own folks out there digging up fraud. And you're going to need your own exit polls.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
In several key states, the early vote has shifted heavily to the Democrats since 2012
More details in article
Ari Berman/The Nation:
Voter Suppression Is a Much Bigger Problem Than Voter Fraud
Trump’s rigged election lies distract from the real threat to American democracy.
Other commentators, like CNN’s Jake Tapper, said fraud was a small problem, but so was voter suppression. “CNN equating voter fraud and suppression as things that sometimes happen, but very rarely. That’s very flawed,” tweeted Daniel Nichanian of Daily Kos Elections.
This is a dangerous false equivalence. Voter fraud is a very small problem in American politics and voter impersonation, which GOP-backed voter-ID laws are meant to address, is exceedingly rare. As I’ve written over and over, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than impersonate another voter at the polls.
CJR:
How the media covers the ‘deplorables’
The word “deplorable” has, along with so much else in this political season, crystallized the disruptions rippling through American life. The term also encapsulates a dilemma confronting journalists who have come to report on the class of people that Hillary Clinton designated, with the power of a formal indictment, as a “basket of deplorables.”
Journalists have had to grapple with the most consequential questions surrounding the issue: Once you have established what class of people Clinton was referring to, how do you write about them? How do you cover their lives, their opinions, their judgments, their values, especially when their values fall outside the pale of what is socially and morally acceptable?
The media response to the revelation of Trump’s America fell into two approaches. The first was to send reporters out to the hard-pressed hinterlands with the intention of trying to find out how, literally, the other half lived. Many of these stories were sensitive, subtle investigations and explorations of the lives of the working class and the working poor. They fell into that traditional journalistic category of the “human interest” story. Ordeal was emphasized and, as is so often the case in journalism, so was triumph over adversity. The subjects of these stories may well have been in Clinton’s “basket” of people who held abominable social attitudes but that fact was scarcely mentioned or alluded to, if at all.
The second approach, on the other hand, made no bones about trying to find out what made Trump’s followers tick. Though they also included details of economic struggle and dislocation, they were more focused on the personalities and motives of the people who want to see Trump in the White House. The moral indictment that lay behind Clinton’s use of the term “deplorables” was strongly present in these stories, but it was never explicitly referred to. Yet the term lurked in every one of these reports and articles.
Adam Feldman/Empirical SCOTUS:
President Roosevelt made the most appointments with eight Justices over the course of his 12 years in office. Even in more recent times, Dwight Eisenhower made five nominations to the Supreme Court. To be fair, one of these, Justice Warren did not turn out as President Eisenhower expected. Still, even if the next President appoints four new Justices, this may not be as cataclysmic a shift as some experts convey.
Here are a few points worth reiterating:
- The candidates are both making hyperbolic statements about their expectations for the next Supreme Court Justice(s).
- These statements combined with the active vacancy on the Court have led to rhetoric that describes the Court and its potential political power as likely beyond bounds the Court is willing to transcend.
- The current Court now is no more activist than it has been in the past and if anything is less so than it has been in recent years.
- Even if the next President makes several appointments to the Supreme Court this would not be historically unprecedented and is part of the normal ebb and flow process of reshaping the Court.
