Charlie Cook/Cook Report:
Many Are Afraid To Say It, but This Is Not a Close Race
The king commissioned the faux-tailors to make him a suit of clothes, checking on their work, watching the pair at their looms as they pretended to weave, not letting on that he could not see the fabric, lest people think him a fool. Once presented with the “clothes,” he strutted through the streets wearing nothing, no one letting on that they, too, could not see the clothes. Finally, a young boy cries out, “But he has nothing on!”
I think about the story in the context of this election, but not in a way that compares Trump to the king. Rather, I think about it in terms of the political analysts, pollsters, and pundits who refuse to state publicly what the data plainly show: that it is very, very unlikely Trump will win 270 electoral votes and the election.
Blame the election of 2016. Virtually everyone but the most die-hard Trump backers that year felt he would lose. Few forecasters thought it was possible for a candidate to lose the national popular vote by over 2 percentage points (nearly 3 million votes) and still win enough states to reach 270 electoral votes.
Pro tip: Don’t freak out over Pennsylvania or Florida. They’re going as expected. More on the firestorm over Trump’s comment about the military below.
Don’t miss the story from last night from The Atlantic (and see Daily Kos coverage and army veteran Markos’ comments from last night):
Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’
The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.
Tweet heavy because of the late evening responses:
It’s been corroborated.
And Trump is frantically responding:
More to come on this one. WaPo has their own piece.
Meanwhile…
ABC on their new Ipsos poll this morning:
Trump's rhetoric on protests seen as detrimental by majority of Americans
Even Republicans are divided on his approach, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.
Trump's attempt to reframe the race against former Vice President Joe Biden around "law and order," does not appear to be breaking through.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
The Huge Snag in Trump’s Reelection Pitch
The president’s own volatility complicates his effort to convince Americans that he can stabilize their lives.
Donald Trump is betting his reelection on convincing most Americans that the “chaos president” can deliver order.
“Chaos president” is how former Florida Governor Jeb Bush described Trump in the final Republican presidential-primary debate of 2015. Bush’s argument against Trump’s erratic leadership style didn’t save his flagging campaign, but his coinage may have been the single most accurate forecast of Trump’s turbulent tenure. Trump’s presidency has been marked by constant turnover in personnel, hairpin turns in policy, angry feuds with politicians in both parties, perpetual Twitter wars, the disregard and disparaging of experts, a torrent of lies and misrepresentations, and the most open appeals to white racial resentment of any other national figure since George Wallace.
It’s also what I’ve been calling Trump since I can remember.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Can Joe Biden be ‘Swift boated’? Probably not.
Biden’s willingness to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and his insistence that effective leadership can bring all stakeholders to the table — messages he pushed during Monday’s speech — are themselves likely to be seen sympathetically by swing voters. This is especially so in contrast with President Trump, who is trying to make all the tensions and violence far worse pretty much daily.
Second, the idea that Biden supports defunding the police is just a weak attack. It has been completely debunked, and it has already been pursued by the Trump campaign for months, including in $20 million worth of ads, with no signs that it’s working. While Trump could get a bump in this effort from his convention and from potentially worsening violence, the full engagement of the Biden camp on this front will probably limit this attack’s effectiveness.
By the way ...
It is if you want to see how subtle racism affects Trump voters. In any case the next MULaw poll, the WI gold standard, is out Sept. 9.
Mike Madrid from Project Lincoln:
Lots of polls today. Quick thread on new Quinnipiac poll:
At the moment Trump is losing. On job approval, on coronavirus response, on making people feel safe in their communities, and most of all, head to head with Joe Biden.
15% of Republicans say the country is *worse* off than 4 years ago and among Independents that’s 60-36. Trump is losing 65+ and college ed white voters in approval on the economy, Covid, overall job approval.
The trends over the last 5 months have been that voter views on the pandemic & overall job approval are more strongly connected to who the voter will likely break for in the GE than their economic views - which is the only area that Trump still barely has an edge over Biden on
Is Trump having an effect with his law & order message?
Not the way he thinks he is. 59% of college ed white voters say that Trump makes them feel *less* safe. He may be running up the score with non college white voters in the Rust Belt, BUT…
He is pushing more and more suburban voters away in order to placate his base and drive a false chaos message. More importantly this issue is ‘flattening’ the race - pushing more sunbelt states in play. Sunbelt has higher shares of coll-educated whites turned off by dog whistles .
David Graeber, RIP. Here are two of his brilliant essays. First Gawker:
Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life
The Department of Justice's investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department's institutional racism, while shocking, isn't the report's most striking revelation.
More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city's population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's citizens had outstanding warrants.
Many will try to write off this pattern of economic exploitation as some kind of strange anomaly. In fact, it's anything but. What the racism of Ferguson's criminal justice system produced is simply a nightmarish caricature of something that is beginning to happen on every level of American life; something which is beginning to transform our most basic sense of who we are, and how we—or most of us, anyway—relate to the central institutions of our society, in ways that are genuinely disastrous.
Second, The Baffler:
The Bully’s Pulpit
On the elementary structure of domination
In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents—the “Highway of Death,” “Highway 8,” the “Battle of Rumaila”—in which U.S. air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis and engaged in what the military refers to as a “turkey shoot,” where trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became iconic symbols of the war.
I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn’t considered a war crime. It’s clear that, at the time, the U.S. command feared it might be. President George H.W. Bush quickly announced a temporary cessation of hostilities, and the military has deployed enormous efforts since then to minimize the casualty count, obscure the circumstances, defame the victims (“a bunch of rapists, murderers, and thugs,” General Norman Schwarzkopf later insisted), and prevent the most graphic images from appearing on U.S. television. It’s rumored that there are videos from cameras mounted on helicopter gunships of panicked Iraqis, which will never be released.
