Let's return to a theme that I raised on Election Night. Two of the last five presidential elections were lost by the national popular vote winner, thus many people will probably be taking another look at abolishing the Electoral College. Since obtaining a constitutional amendment to do that is impossible, the only alternative is to get states with a total of 270 electoral votes to agree amongst themselves that their electoral votes would go to the national popular vote winner. Thus far, though, only states with 165 electoral votes have done so. (You'll not be shocked to learn that these are all states that typically vote for Democrats.) Why would many more join? Surely their legislatures would block that effort, either because they want to preserve their state's outsized power in a general election or because they think the current system benefits Republicans.
There is, though, another route worth exploring. Ballot propositions could be put forward in some states to amend their constitutions in favor of the national popular vote method of awarded electoral votes. Wait a minute, you might think. The Constitution says that state legislatures get to decide how electoral votes are allocated. A ballot proposition is not an act of a state legislature.
Under the Supreme Court's 2015 analysis in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, though, the Constitution's use of state "legislature" can be read to mean state "lawmaking power." The Court held that a state constitutional amendment could be used to set up an alternative mechanism for drawing congressional district boundaries even though Article One talks about that power being lodged in the state legislature. Why would the same not be true for the allocation of electoral votes? (Yes, McPherson v. Blacker and Bush v. Gore have dicta to the contrary, but that probably cannot overcome the most recent decision on that question.)
There are enough states that make constitutional amendments possible through a ballot proposition to get the total to over 270 electoral votes. Examples include Arizona, Colorado, Florida (obviously a big state), Michigan and Ohio. There are also others that could take legislative action and might be inclined to do so (Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia). If all of these states joined, you would have more than 270. You probably cannot get to more than 270 without one of the big 3 (FL, MI, and OH), though after the next census that may change.
To pick up on Sandy's theme, issues of constitutional structure count for more than issues like Citizens United or the usual liberal hobbyhorses. I also think that (as a person who votes for Republicans and Democrats depending on the situation) that there is a principled argument for using federalism to short-circuit the Electoral College.
i don’t know that this accounts for any turnout increase among whites (or anyone else). i don’t know whether that’s a factor or not, but this wouldn’t reveal it.
Among liberals, one of the most popular explanations for Donald Trump's victory is that it was a "whitelash," a primal scream of lost influence and latent racism among white voters. I myself certainly talked about racial animus quite a bit during the runup to the election. However, in the spirit of figuring out where we were wrong, the actual voting patterns suggest this is flat wrong. Using exit poll data from 2012 and 2016, here is Trump's share of the vote compared to Romney in 2012:
Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump.1 There's nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite. But now let's add a column to the table:
Among whites, Trump lost 1 percent of white votes, but third-party candidates gained 3 percent. Among Latinos, third-parties gained 4 percent, and among blacks they gained 3 percent.
This is the big difference. Who did third-party candidates hurt the most, Trump or Clinton? And why? Or was the damage equal? You need to answer this question before you can say anything sensible about race.
It's worth nothing that this doesn't mean that race played no role in this election. But it does mean two things. First, white racial animus seem to have played no more of a role than it did four years ago. Second, although Trump's blatant appeal to white ethnocentrism did him little good, it also did him no harm—and that was true among all racial groups. That's disheartening all on its own.2
When more detailed data is available, it might turn out there are specific subsets of the white vote that moved very strongly toward Trump. But what we have so far doesn't suggest anything of the sort. If you still want to claim that whitelash played a big role in this election, you need to contend with this.
1You can break this down by age or gender, but it doesn't really change anything. For example, white men moved slightly toward Trump while white women moved slightly away from him. Likewise, middle-aged whites moved slightly toward Trump while young and old whites moved slightly away. But the differences are small enough that they don't change the picture much.
2Since I first put up this post, several people have suggested that national data isn't the right way to look at voter demographics. Instead, we should look at the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But that doesn't change things. If you look at the exit poll data, Trump did slightly worse than Romney in Pennsylvania and slightly better in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the operative word is "slightly."
Still, maybe turnout was up among white voters? That's possible. But we don't have that information yet, and I'm not sure when we'll get it.
Neighbors get into political dispute. On Oct. 20, Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a dispute between neighbors in the 2000 block of South Newcombe Street, Lakewood. One neighbor said he was working at home when he heard something hit his front door. When he went to investigate he saw a neighbor carrying away a Hillary Clinton sign from his yard and there were egg yolks on his door. He confronted his neighbor, grabbed the sign back and a shoving match ensued in which the resident’s glasses were broken. The neighbor admitted to throwing the eggs and insinuated that someone would burn his house down. The suspect agreed to pay for the glasses and the man did not want to press charges.
Woman hears noise in basement. A woman called deputies Oct. 20 after she heard a noise in her basement in the 5000 block of South Zang Street, Morrison. The woman said she thought someone had broken in. The deputy cleared the house and did not find anyone inside or signs of forced entry.
Rear windshield smashed. On Oct. 19, a man called deputies to report that someone had broken the rear windshield of his car in the 2000 block of Pebble Beach Drive, Evergreen. The man told deputies that he heard his dog “go crazy,” but did not investigate anything outside.
Neighbor shouts at family. A man called deputies Oct. 21 after he heard his neighbor swearing as soon as he and his sons walked into their yard in the 10000 block of West Alamo Place, Littleton. It was unclear if the neighbor was shouting at the family or just in general, but the man wanted the incident documented. The woman refused to answer her door when police arrived.
At some point, the producers of baseball broadcasts for television decided that the managers were the most important people in the ballpark. During this World Series, between what seems to be nearly every important pitch, the camera cuts to Terry Francona, of the Cleveland Indians, or Joe Maddon, of the Chicago Cubs, standing on the top steps of their respective dugouts, surveying the field, looking hopeful, or worried, or a bit bored—much like the rest of us. Unlike their peers in other sports, during games, baseball managers don’t seem very busy. Sometimes they signal to a coach on the field; occasionally a microphone catches a stray shout of encouragement to one of their players. When things get really exciting, they pick up a phone to call the bullpen or walk out onto the field to make a pitching change. Still, the TV tells us that it’s mostly in this stillness of a middle-aged man bearing witness that much of the drama resides. Watching baseball is, to some degree, about watching a manager watch the game.
this all makes sense. but we won't know until afterward what the baseline was.
This chart is a follow-up to my post last night about response rates in polls. It's from the paper that started the whole thing, published earlier this year by Andrew Gelman and three other researchers. They analyzed the 2012 campaign, and what they found was that polls were far more variable than actual voting intentions. The red line is what the polls looked like in real time. The black line is what they look like when you control for different response rates:
The first dotted line is the first debate. Remember how Obama did so poorly and plummeted in the polls? It turns out he didn't, really. Obama fans just stopped responding to polls, producing the illusion of a 10-point collapse. In reality, he only dropped about 4 points. In fact, during the last six weeks of the campaign, Obama's support was never more than a couple of points away from 52 percent.
Moral of the story: even poll averages bounce up and down misleadingly. In reality, there's probably no more than two or three points of change in actual voting intentions during the last month of the campaign. And in the last week? Practically none at all.
i see stuff like this and i'm like, "um, let's just get through this election and then we can worry about the feral cats?"
I love my cat Torvald more than anything. He looks a lot like the cat pictured above. But let’s not beat around the bush–cats are incredibly destructive creatures. Feral cats are not our lost potential pets. They are a wildlife management problem. And the best way to deal with them is to kill them. Not in some torturous horrible way. But they must be eliminated for the sake of ecosystems. Take Kauai for example, where areas overrun by excess cats defecating on the beach are seeing seal deaths.
Barbieri and Littnan had no evidence that toxo was zombifying monk seal brains. Rather, the seals seemed to be collateral damage in an evolutionary death match among cats, rats, and T. gondii. But that was another mysterious thing about toxo—plenty of insect, bird, fish, and mammal species could acquire and carry toxo oocysts without manifesting any symptoms whatsoever. Why toxo killed monk seals nobody really knew. Nor did they know why, beyond Hawaii, toxo killed sea otters, spinner dolphins, kangaroos, and even humans. An estimated 23 percent of Americans have had toxo, and in some countries that figure reaches 95 percent. Occasionally, it produces muscle aches and other flu-like symptoms, and even more occasionally it can cause blindness and epilepsy in newborns, behavioral changes in adults, and increased miscarriages in pregnant women. For people with compromised immune systems, toxo can be fatal.
When I meet Barbieri and Littnan in Honolulu after Uilani’s death, we discuss the fact that Hawaii has no native felids. What Hawaii does have is feral house cats, lots of them. By some calculations, Oahu alone has 350,000, but Littnan calls that a “gross underestimate.” His program struggles to accurately count 400-pound seals on the beach. “Cats are small, elusive predators living in the forest,” he says. “And there’s been no systematic effort to count them.” Whatever their number, they produce billions of oocysts, and these wash down watersheds and into the ocean, where seals consume them through the food chain. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” says Littnan. “What we do know is that cats poop and monk seals die. You’re only going to reduce toxo by reducing the definitive hosts—cats.”
Of course people are totally irrational when it comes to cats. And it’s not just the seals, it’s every species on Kauai, many of whom, especially the birds, are endangered. This is not an acceptable situation. But cat people just don’t care. They would rather see every other animal die than hurt little fluffy. And I get that to some point. But there are far larger issues at stake. Kill the cats.
gabe (c's bro) worked on this. he said it was a blast.
Joss Whedon got together with his friends again and the results are…hilariously scary.
And here is the Obamas celebrating their last Halloween at the Whitehouse in case you missed it. My two favorites were Pres. Obama singing Purple Rain and of course the Lame Duck – probably the best and ballsiest costume of the day.
fuck you asshole. i work with those county election officials. you can’t just roam the country slandering people for fun.
GOLDEN — Donald Trump cast doubt on the integrity of Colorado’s mail-ballot election Saturday at a rally in a key swing county where he implored his supporters to vote.
“I have real problems with ballots being sent,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd that numbered in the thousands. “Like people say, ‘Oh here’s a ballot. Here’s another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here’s one I like. We’ll keep that one.’ I have real problems.”
Trump even added a warning to county election officials: “We have a lot of people watching you people that collect the ballots.”
This is Colorado’s first mail-in presidential election. The first statewide mail-in election was in 2014.
The emphasis on voter fraud — part of what Trump suggests is a “rigged system” — enlivened his supporters but diverted focus from the renewed FBI investigation into e-mails connected with Hillary Clinton.
Republicans are looking to capitalize on the latest shroud surrounding the Democratic nominee as the party looks to close an early vote gap that shows Democrats with a 27,000 ballot advantage in Colorado through the end of the day Thursday, the latest numbers available.
Trump suggested Clinton’s handling of her e-mail as secretary of state “put our national security at risk” and he speculated that the new investigation may reveal some of the 30,000 missing records.
“This is the biggest political scandal since Watergate and it’s everybody’s deepest hope that justice at last can be properly delivered,” Trump said to raucous applause. “Hillary has nobody to blame but herself for her mounting legal troubles.”
The initial investigation into Clinton’s private e-mail server drew significant attention in Colorado, as the company hired to manage the data, Platte River Networks, is based in Denver.
“On Nov. 8, we are going to change things,” the New York businessman told the crowd. “A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft and cronyism, that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system.”
Trump’s campaign event at the Jefferson County fairgrounds in Golden was the first of back-to-back visits to Colorado — and fourth to the state this month. The New York businessman will attend events in Phoenix and Las Vegas before returning Sunday for a 4 p.m. rally in Greeley.
Clinton visited Pueblo earlier this month in her second visit since the Democratic National Convention. Her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, is attending events next week in Aurora and Boulder.
Clinton’s campaign is feeling confident in Colorado, as polls show her leading by an average seven percentage points. To win the White House, a number of projections show Trump must win Colorado.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a top Clinton supporter, said the latest questions about the candidate’s e-mails will not shift the momentum.
“I don’t think it’s going to have much effect,” he said in an interview between canvassing events. “Republicans are trying to make a lot of noise with it because they are in kind of a desperate place.”
Perlmutter emphasized that e-mails at the center of the FBI investigation do not involve any sent to or from Clinton, but rather involve a laptop shared by former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top campaign adviser.
On the campaign trail Saturday, Perlmutter emphasized the enthusiasm among Democrats and asserted that Trump’s message of “doom and gloom pessimism really doesn’t play well in Colorado.”
In Jefferson County, the Democratic early vote advantage is 4,700 ballots, according to the latest state figures, and Trump told the crowd at his rally to “get the ballots in” or vote in-person at the polling center next door.
Most of the crowd raised their hands when Trump asked if they had voted before the rally. But Dustin McClure, a 34-year-old recent transplant from Tennessee, took Trump’s advice and voted in person.
“I don’t really trust the whole mailing in your ballot thing,” he said.
Cristal Lubbers, a 37-year-old from Golden, felt the same and voted after the rally. She expects more Colorado voters to support Trump after the latest questions about Clinton’s e-mails.
“It’s going to help the people who are kind of wavering on that fence to finally decide what a crook she is,” she said, adding: “This election year is a little bit violent and it’s one of the most exciting I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
fuck me. this is like walking distance from our house. so not interested in having thousands of trumpkins in the neighborhood.
Donald Trump is returning to Colorado for a campaign rally Saturday that is designed to help add a jolt of energy to the Republican Party’s lackluster early voting numbers.
The Republican presidential nominee will speak at noon at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds event center in Golden. (Tickets required — click here for details.) The visit to the vital swing county is Trump’s third to Colorado this month — and the third campaign event in the state this week.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the vice presidential nominee, and the candidate’s son Eric Trump attended events in Colorado Wednesday and Thursday.
The Trump campaign’s attention on Colorado comes as Republicans look to close the gap with Democrats, who are leading early mail ballot returns — a stark reversal from 2014 when the GOP scored big wins.
Dick Yuengling welcomed Trump, thanking him for taking the time to visit the brewery."Our guys are behind your father," Yuengling said. "We need him in there."
At a recent concert in Chicago, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong noticed a kid in the audience holding a sign saying “I can play every song on Dookie” and pulled him up on stage to prove it. Aside from a slightly slow tempo, he did pretty well on When I Come Around.
P.S. Was thinking about this the other day: I don’t know that I would have picked Green Day as one of the 90s bands that has stuck around, still touring, still recording, still attracting new fans.
Actor Ed Asner will moderate the third-party presidential debate being held on the University of Colorado campus this week, organizers announced today.
Asner, the seven-time Emmy Award-winner best known for his performances in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Lou Grant” and the animated film “Up,” will lead a discussion between presidential candidates Darrell Castle, of the Constitution Party; Gloria La Riva, of the Socialist Party, and Rocky De La Fuente, an independent candidate.
The debate is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Tuesday and will be held at Macky Auditorium on the Boulder campus. The United We Stand Festival, which is being held in conjunction with the debate, begins at 4 p.m. in Macky.
The event, which will be streamed online, is being organized by the Free and Equal Election Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to broaden electoral choices.
The event is free and open to the public.
Kweku Mandela, grandson of the late Nelson Mandela, will deliver the keynote address at the debate.
Ramsey Clark, who served as U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, is also expected to attend the festival, according to organizers.
Musicians Ky-Mani Marley and Flobots are also scheduled to perform.
I’ll take “people you are surprised to learn are still alive” for $500 Alex.
This folding measuring spoon on Kickstarter is clever as hell. Polygons lays flat in a drawer and, depending on how you pick it up, folds into four different volumes.
Premarked areas on both spoon sizes (tablespoon and teaspoon) let you know where to pick up from to measure the volume required for your recipe. Practicality and simplicity at its finest.
The spoons come in two sizes (the smaller measures teaspoons and the larger one tablespoons), they’re marked with US and metric measurements, you can flatten it to easily scrape every last bit of stuff into the bowl, and it doubles as a knife when flat as well. (via colossal)
Update: Hmm, it looks like Polygons needs a little more work to be a fully functional product. (thx, mac)
super helpful summary. (snark.) woods is a republican, zenzinger is a democrat. this can't really be helpful for anyone can it?
In a welcome Denver Post piece Sunday about the most important election contests in Colorado—the under-the-radar races that will likely determine if Democrats take control of the state senate—State Sen. Laura Woods (R-Arvada/Westminster) is referred to as “one of the most conservative lawmakers in the chamber.”
The Post article links to Post reporter John Frank’s detailed analysis of legislative votes showing how Woods, during her first year in office, voted with seven other GOP state senators on the far right fringe of the GOP, mirroring the marginalized votes of extreme Republicans in the U.S. Congress.
The linked article matters a lot, because Woods faces Democrat Rachel Zenzinger in an Arvada/Westminster race that’s a tossup going into the final two weeks, so voters should know what’s what with these two candidates.
Here’s a few more details on the candidates stands, retrieved from various sources.
Abortion
Woods wants to pass a personhood abortion ban, making all abortion illegal, even after rape or incest.
Zenzinger is pro-choice, favoring the option of abortion for women.
Guns
Woods opposes criminal background checks for gun purchases at gun shows and elsewhere, and she wants citizens to be allowed to openly carry a gun in public.
Zenzinger backs laws requiring criminal background checks prior to gun purchases, and she opposes open carry.
Education
Woods backs vouchers, allowing parents to use public tax dollars to pay for private schools for their kids. (And Woods has been endorsed backed by ousted Jeffco school board member Julie Williams.)
if you had told me that herzog had already done a documentary on volcanos that i just hadn't heard about, i would have totally believed you. seems sort of obvious.
Werner Herzog has directed a documentary film for Netflix on volcanoes.
Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Into the Inferno, heads just where its title suggests: into the red-hot magma-filled craters of some of the world’s most active and astonishing volcanoes-taking the filmmaker on one of the most extreme tours of his long career. From North Korea to Ethiopia to Iceland to the Vanuatu Archipelago, humans have created narratives to make sense of volcanoes; as stated by Herzog, “volcanoes could not care less what we are doing up here.” Into the Inferno teams Herzog with esteemed volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer to offer not only an in-depth exploration of volcanoes across the globe but also an examination of the belief systems that human beings have created around the fiery phenomena.
This is all true. But there were still a few moments that I was wishing she would expose that ignorance. Like the ridiculous stuff about India and China's growth rates. Like saying "Obama regime." Like talking about immigrants pouring over our borders. Also, the numbers he uses about Syrian refugees -- IIRC, he actually toned those numbers down a bit from the last debate. I think he said hundreds of thousands at the last debate.
She was clearly prepared to talk about her policies a lot, talk a little about his and talk a lot about his character. And she did that effectively, but I feel like the "someone on the internet was wrong" guy about all of the totally misleading things Trump gets away with saying. Not the whoppers so much as the things that might sound plausible to a cultural-change-fearing uninformed listener.
A presidential campaign is not a résumé competition, but there’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton has some of the most impressive credentials for high office of any candidate in generations — senator, secretary of state, public advocate, and lawyer.
Not everyone likes her, but everyone with an ounce of sense can admit that she knows a lot about an awful lot of things. And over the course of the three presidential debates, culminating in the final matchup Wednesday night, it showed.
Clinton said she supports Roe v. Wade but also noted that “many states are putting very stringent regulations on women that block them from exercising that choice.” She referred to the difficulty of splitting up families that contain both US citizens and undocumented immigrants. She talked about the US intelligence community’s assessment of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. She talked about her job plan and her tax plan and about independent assessments of their impact. She offered a detailed discussion of the tactical situation surrounding Mosul.
It wasn’t earth-shattering stuff, exactly, and she didn’t have amazing zingers. But she knows what she’s talking about, she’s studied Trump’s policy plans and her own, and she’s prepared to discuss the whole range of issues under consideration. She’s a well-qualified candidate who showed up well-prepared for an important job interview.
Trump, by contrast, lacks any kind of conventional qualification for office. And rather than make up for it by showing that he has a surprising grasp of policy and public affairs given his lack of relevant background, he yet again delivered a clueless, rambling performance that was long on bluster and short on real information. Over the course of the series of presidential debates, he’s shown that he’s tall, he’s pretty good on television, and he carries himself with the distinctive confidence of a mediocre white man.
Beyond that, he’s got nothing.
Trump is weirdly ill-informed on his signature issues
Chris Wallace did the debate-watching audience a great favor by asking Trump an enormous softball question to kick off the debate’s second segment, turning to the GOP nominee and asking him to explain his position on immigration.
Trump’s answer is worth quoting in full. Keep in mind that this is his signature issue — the topic on which he has centered his campaign from its first day more than a year ago. Pay attention and you’ll note that it has no content whatsoever:
First of all, she wants to give amnesty, which is a disaster and very unfair to all the people who are waiting in line for many years. We need strong borders. In the audience tonight we have four mothers of — I mean, these are unbelievable people that I've gotten to know over a period of years whose children have been killed, brutally killed by people who came into the country illegally. You have mothers, fathers, relatives all over the county. They're coming in illegally.
Drugs are pouring in through the border. We have no country if we have no border. Hillary wants to give amnesty, she wants to have open borders.
As you know, the border patrol agency, 16,500-plus ICE last week endorsed me. First time they've ever endorsed a candidate. It means their job is tougher, but they know what's going on. They know it better than anybody. They want strong borders. They feel we have to have strong borders. I was up in New Hampshire, the biggest complaint they have with all the problems going on in the world, many of the problems caused by Hillary Clinton and by Barack Obama, all of the problems, their single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring and destroying their youth. It's poisoning the blood of their youth and plenty of other people.
We have to have strong borders. We have to keep the drugs out of our country. Right now we're getting the drugs, they're getting the cash. We need strong borders. We absolute -- we cannot give amnesty.
Now I want to build a wall. We need the wall. The Border Patrol, ICE, they all want the wall. We stop the drugs, shore up the border.
One of my first acts will be to get all of the drug lords, we have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out. We'll get them out, secure the border, and once the border is secured, at a later date we'll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here and we're going to get them out.
Trump’s campaign, seemingly working in partnership with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and the unions representing ICE and Border Patrol officers, has in fact written up a fairly detailed immigration plan. Vox’s Dara Lind has read the plan, understands the plan, and can tell you what the plan says. Donald Trump, by contrast, appears to have no idea. He’s repeating empty slogans, absurdly asserting that a massive construction project on the Mexican border will cure opiate addiction in New England, and saying offensive things about Latinos.
Trump, to be clear, wants to be president of the United States. He’s not qualified in a conventional sense. He needs to convince us with his surprising command of the issues. Immigration is his signature issue. And he can’t make any sense discussing it.
Trump keeps tossing off random nonsense
At one point in the debate, after Hillary Clinton offered an explanation of the benefits of the college tuition plan she’s put forward, Trump cut in to remark, “We’re going to do a lot of things for college tuition.” Which things? He didn’t explain. His website offers no plans on college tuition, and it’s not something I can recall him ever having talked about.
On the economy, he said “we’ve lost our jobs,” when in fact total employment is at an all-time high. He said “we don’t make things anymore,” when in fact manufacturing output is at an all-time high. He said NAFTA “didn’t kick in” until Bill Clinton left office, which isn’t true. Nobody knows what he said about Aleppo.
When Wallace asked him why even conservative economists say his economic growth projections are unrealistic, Trump replied that we recently had “a terrible jobs report” — a total non sequitur that also (surprise!) happens to be untrue. He expressed bafflement that the US government hasn’t been forcing NATO members to “pay up,” as if it were a protection racket, and he reversed months of anti-trade rhetoric with a hazy, tossed-off promise that after he renegotiates existing trade agreements “we'll have more free trade than we have right now.”
Given trade’s centrality to Trump’s view of economic policy, you might think he would have some clear ideas here. He’s a businessman, so maybe trade is the time when he’s going to impress us.
Here, in his own words, is his plan: “We will be doing very much better with Mexico on trade deals, believe me, than the NAFTA deal by her husband, one of the worst deals of any kind signed by anybody.”
What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine.
Don’t lower the bar for Trump
A presidential debate, by its nature, has a leveling effect. You have two candidates, side by side, up on a stage. They both have podiums; they both get roughly equal amounts of time to talk. They both offer charges and counter-charges, and the moderator probes both of their weakness.
But make no mistake: Trump is no Hillary Clinton. He’s no Gary Johnson, either, for that matter. He’s no Mike Pence or Tim Kaine or Barack Obama. He wants a government job, but he has no background in government and no circle of associates with public sector experience he can draw on as his key subordinates.
If Vox were looking to hire an experienced digital editor and a candidate showed up with no journalism experience whatsoever, we’d be skeptical.
We might be willing to take a shot on a sufficiently interesting outside candidate, but we’d have our eyebrows raised. We’d want to see she could really impress us with a level of knowledge and understanding of the work that exceeds what you could find on her résumé.
Trump is the opposite of that. Over the course of a campaign that’s lasted for more than a year, he appears to have learned nothing. He often seems unfamiliar with the content of his own policy proposals. He displays ignorance of the basic norms and principles of constitutional government — up to and including refusing to admit the legitimacy of the election itself.
In debate after debate, he shows himself to be a decent television improviser — not coincidentally, a field in which he has actual experience — but offers no evidence that he has the skills or knowledge required to be an effective president of the United States. We’ve all been in meetings and social situations in which a loud, blustery man gets his way over a quieter woman who actually knows what she’s talking about.
And to the extent that there’s any method at all to the Trump campaign at this point, that’s the plan. Just kind of show up and talk. Be loud and forceful and hope for the best. At this point, he seems overwhelmingly likely to lose the election, so we won’t get to see the consequences of trying to actually run the country the way Trump runs his debate strategy.
Watch: Clinton compares her experience to Trump's
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The editors of the Yale Law Journal asked me to contribute to a series reflecting on Justice Alito's first ten years on the Court. In lieu of praising or criticizing the Justice, I elected to ask into what distinguishes him from his colleagues.
I have concluded that, especially in light of Justice Scalia's passing, Justice Alito has become the primary judicial voice of the many millions of Americans who appear to be losing the culture wars, including in conflicts over gay rights, women's access to reproductive healthcare, religious exemptions, and affirmative action. As evidenced, for example, by his opinions in Hobby Lobby and Obergefell, Justice Alito empathizes with the plight of traditionalist conservatives as the world changes profoundly around them, and he seeks to preserve their ability to refuse to accept the new normal.
Given the "hinge" point in American constitutional history that appears to be fast arriving, I also predict that Justice Alito's dissents on behalf of traditionalist dissenters will become more frequent and more strident in the years ahead.
Part of my argument differs in a subtle but important way from Mark Tushnet's recent declarations that the ideological left has already won the culture wars. In my view, a series of recent developments now renders it possible to imagine that the left will win the culture wars. Actually winning, however, will require more than a new Democratic president and a relatively liberal Court for the time being. Actually winning will also require continued changes in popular understandings of the moral and constitutional status of groups who traditionally did not count--or count for much--in constituting the People in whose name the Constitution purports to govern.
These scammers had called me so many times that I knew their script.
They always introduced themselves as IRS officers with inconspicuous American names, like "Paul Thomas." They called to collect the $6,000 I owed the IRS. And if I didn't pay, they threatened to send the local police to arrest me.
They were unconvincing. I didn't understand how this scam could work on anyone. But a quick search led me to a couple in Tennessee, a student in Virginia, and thousands of others who'd been taken in. There was something about this scam that worked — and I had to find out what it was.
So I got further and further into the scam. At first, I played along for a few minutes and then hung up. After a few days, I trolled them with the vast amount I learned about their operation. Then, on a hot mid-September day, I decided enough was enough.
I was going to get to the end of this scam.
That's how I ended up talking to "Steve Smith" for 30 minutes. He was a senior investigations officer — the actual person who walks you through how to send them money. I learned that his secret is maintaining an aura of authority. That's how he optimizes fear. That's how he gets people to suspend logic, drive to Walgreens, and buy iTunes gift cards to pay the IRS. The scam takes advantage of the most vulnerable people.
But then I got this link from a friend, which was mesmerizing because of the pictures. I couldn't stop staring. They were mostly young men, about my age, being led away by authorities. I couldn't help but wonder how many of them I had talked to. I couldn't help but wonder which one was Steve Smith. And for the first time, I wondered if most of them were just desperate people reading scripts.
Stage 1: Trying to gain back power by trolling the scammers
The hardest thing about phone scams is that there is little recourse you can take. Even if you don't fall for the scam, they waste your time, over and over again. It got so bad that I started live-tweeting these calls:
2) Man on the other end, Joy Smith, says I owe $5,188 because of miscalculations on my taxes.
The only way I knew to gain back power was by trolling them. One time, an agent named "Paul Thomas" called and began to read the script. But I had heard the script dozens of times, so I started to say it in unison with him. Then I asked for his ID number. He got angry. He claimed the IRS didn't have employee ID numbers, so I told him my ID number — D4598.
From that point forward, every employee at this call center seemed to have an ID number.
Fake IRS dude called again. I took notes from last time, so before he could read his script, I read it first.
At some point, I had wasted so much of their time that I thought they would take me off their call list. But they called again and again.
Stage 2: Learning how they create and leverage authority
There were many flaws to this scam.
One was that it was almost always an Indian man in a call center, which made it hard to believe their names were "Steve Smith" and "Joy Smith." The other was that they clearly read off a script, and were trying to get through their lines as fast as possible. You could hear the steady hum of their colleagues doing the same.
But over the next few months, they refined their technique. The scammers started introducing themselves by name. They assigned themselves ID numbers. They had a system that kept track of how much money you owed; that way, if you called them back, they were able to repeat back your balance. And they cited Section 7201 of the federal tax code, which is the actual section about tax evasion.
In short, they professionalized the scam. They found ways to implicitly suggest they were authority figures.
I knew how this worked. The summer after my freshman year of college, I was back home in Kansas, trying to make some money. I found an ad in the classifieds section of a company looking for sales representatives. I showed up to a storefront and interviewed with a tall white man in a tie. I gave him my résumé. He gave me a job.
Then he guided me to the back of the store where I met my dozen colleagues, mostly in their 40s and 50s. Everyone was sitting at desks separated by dividers. The only things on the desks were phones and call sheets.
The manager took me into a side office, and we practiced sales calls. He gave me a script. "Hello, my name is [say your name], and I'm calling to ask about where you get your drinking water." The script went on to describe how important it was to drink filtered water, which we could deliver to their home.
Then the manager said something I'll never forget: "The most important thing about this job is sounding professional."
I made a few dozen calls. They all hung up on me.
At lunch, I sat in the break room with my colleagues. Some of them had been there for years. One man in a yellow tie gave me a tip: Tell your customers the water is filtered through reverse osmosis.
Stage 3: Finding out how they scare you — and make you suspend logic
On September 14, the scammers called again.
The scammer this time was "Jeff Demer," and he had the unfortunate luck of calling me after I had eaten at Chipotle, which tends to make me moody. He read the script. I played along. Before he finished reading, I told him I wanted to pay immediately.
"Do not interrupt me!" he said.
I let him finish reading. Then he asked me if my tax fraud was intentional or by mistake.
"It was intentional," I said.
"Uhh, great. Since it was a mistake…"
I imagine their script looked some like this.
He said I could either fight this in a federal courthouse or I could resolve the case right now. I said I would pay now.
Jeff said, "Great. I will transfer you to my senior officer."
OMG, they called again. I'm getting transferred to a "senior officer" who will help me arrange monthly payments to the IRS.
That's how I met "Steve Smith." From what I could gather, Steve really was higher on the totem pole than Jeff. It seemed like there were dozens of low-level scammers calling people, and the people who agreed to pay were forwarded to these senior employees.
Steve said I should go to an authorized government payment center. I said I didn't know what those were, so he said a Walgreens would do fine. So I pretended to get in a cab. I pretended to tell the cab driver to go to the local Walgreens. I mimicked the sound of the car door closing by hitting my desk.
I am now pretending to be in the taxi, going to Walgreens to wire him money.
But something must've tickled Steve, because he called back. He apologized for hanging up. And then he said I should go to the gift cards section at Walgreens. Okay, I said.
"What do you see?"
I quickly Googled images of different gift cards — Home Depot, Lowe's, Amazon, iTunes.
"Yes, that one — iTunes gift card," he said. "What is the biggest one you see?"
Again, I searched Google Images and found a card that let me put up to $500 on it. I told him there were four of these. Steve told me to grab all of them and put $450 on each one, for a total of $1,800.
I pretended that I was at a register paying for the cards.
"Mr. Smith," I said, "I'm in the parking lot now. What do I do?"
He asked me to scratch off the numbers and read them to him. I knew the format had to be correct, because he would check it.
I am now providing iTunes gift card number, from a Google Image.
I got a rush out of realizing that this was the end of the scam — that it works through this absolutely absurd tactic of getting people to transfer money through iTunes gift cards.
But let's stop and think about this: This actually works on a lot of Americans. It's tempting to want to mock those people, but even after weeks of trolling them, the tenor of Steve's voice reminded me of being chided by people with authority — teachers, police officers, and even my parents. I understood the feeling of wanting it to just go away.
I gave him two more numbers.
But after the third, Steve paused. "Uh, sir…"
He hung up :( I don't know what I did wrong. Next time, I need to go buy iTunes gift cards and then try this.
What I craved in this interaction was a glimpse into Steve's humanity. I wanted to hear some kind of emotion, some kind of indication that he was aware of what he was doing. I wanted to elicit remorse.
They were caught. I assumed Steve was among those arrested. I couldn’t stop reading news stories that had small details of how their operation worked, because it only confirmed everything I had learned.
In order to have nearly 800 employees, the ringleaders must've put out ads for "investigations officers," targeted at people desperate for jobs. I imagine these people were interviewed and taken into side rooms for practice calls. I imagined they spent entire days harassing and terrifying random Americans. And surely, some or all of them realized this wasn’t a legitimate operation — that they didn't actually work for the IRS.
But I imagine someone told them to stay professional, because that's the most important part of the job. Because that's what gives you power. That's what lets you manipulate people.
As for my call center career, it ended after six hours. I didn't sell a single unit. My boss came by my desk and asked how I was doing. I said this wasn't exactly the opportunity I was looking for. He said, "So what do you want to do?"
I looked around at my colleagues, leaning back in their chairs, making call after call, trying to convince people their tap water wasn't good enough. There were still two hours left in the day — for me, that was probably 20 more cold calls.
I burst out crying.
Go home," my boss said, disgusted. "Leave me your address and I'll send you a check."
I was just 19 years old. Walking out on a grown man seemed wrong, like I was ditching school. But I got in my car, drove away, and started thinking about what else I could do to pass the summer. Worst case, I thought, I could mow lawns for my neighbors.
i obviously have no idea and would never say so publicly but this sounds suspiciously like some kind of fraud setup.
Aurora Police Department
A photo of the suspects and their vehicle.
Police in Aurora are looking for two suspects who robbed a man of $80,000 in cash outside of a KeyBank branch.
The robbery happened 10:30 a.m. Sept. 28 at the branch on the 10500 block of East Arizona Place.
“The victim went to the bank to withdraw $80,000 for the business that he worked at,” police said in a news release. “As he left the bank he was assaulted by two black males who knocked him to the ground and took his cash.”
The suspects fled the area in a white Lincoln LX which had no license plates.
Further information on the suspects was not released.
Anyone with information on the heist is asked to call Agent Brian Schnicke with the District 1 Crimes Against Property Unit at 303-739-6931 or Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867.
Speaker Paul Ryan told House Republicans on a conference call Monday morning that he’s done defending Donald Trump and will focus on maintaining his party’s increasingly imperiled House majority, according to sources on the call....Ryan told his members that “you all need to do what’s best for you in your district," said a source on the call, giving rank-and-file lawmakers political cover to disavow Trump.
I’ve come to believe [Ryan's call] was a mistake. As Tim Alberta pointed out, he didn’t really say anything new....All the call did was create more headlines about Republican dissension, make Ryan a hate figure for the Trump right, set Ryan up for the blame if Trump loses, and provoke Trump into pointlessly spending days attacking the speaker. None of this is helpful to anyone, especially to Ryan.
I've spent countless hours writing posts about Ryan's fundamental dishonesty on policy. He plays the part of deficit scold, compassionate conservative, and policy intellectual, but every year he releases a budget roadmap that would cut taxes on the rich, slash services to the poor, and blow up the deficit. Then, despite having the policy chops to know perfectly well what his roadmap would do, he blandly pretends it doesn't. I have very little patience for this.
That said, I confess to sympathizing with him over Donald Trump. He's taken a lot of crap from liberals over his hypocrisy in refusing to defend Trump but continuing to endorse him. But what can he realistically do? As he made clear months ago, he's a leader of the Republican Party. He really has no choice but to endorse the party's presidential candidate.
So why did he make such a point of abandoning Trump on Monday even though—as Lowry points out—he didn't really say anything new? I think the reason Ryan spoke up is simple: He may not feel that his position allows him to officially unendorse Trump, but he wanted to make it clear that, in practice, he doesn't endorse Trump. Lowry believes this was not helpful to Ryan, and I think he's right about that. What's more, I'm quite sure Ryan is keenly aware of it. Martin Longman thinks it might cost Ryan the speakership.
In other words, at considerable risk to his own career, Ryan felt like he had to make it clear how disgusted he was by Trump. I have nothing but respect for that. He didn't have to do it. No one would ever have noticed if he hadn't. But Ryan has enough of a conscience that he couldn't stay silent. Kudos to him for that.
If you watch any of Steven Spielberg’s movies, you’ll notice a distinctive element: the Spielberg Face.
If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke.
You see the onscreen character watching along with you in wonder, awe, apprehension, fear, sadness. It’s the director’s way of hitting pause, to show the audience this is a critical scene, to reinforce how the audience should be feeling in that moment.
click through for some interesting maps. the upper midwest looks brutal.
A county has “potential upside” for Trump if the share of Obama voters in 2012 who were non-college-educated whites is greater than the share of Romney voters who were either college-educated whites or non-whites. For Clinton, it’s the reverse.
In November, Donald Trump could become the first Republican presidential nominee to lose Orange County, California, since 1936. He could also be the first to lose Virginia Beach, Virginia, since 1964. But he could simultaneously become the first Republican to win an electoral vote from Maine since 1988 and only the second Republican to carry Iowa since 1984.
Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency, perhaps by a lot. Republicans are still favored to hold the House. In other words, after all the madness, the balance of power in Washington post-2016 could look surprisingly similar to that after 2012. Yet beneath the surface, the tectonic plates of the American electorate are shifting.
By now, it's clear where the fault lines lie: The 2016 election is poised to be among the most polarized elections ever, not only along gender and generational lines, but especially along lines of race and educational attainment.
In August, Nate Cohn of The New York Times put it well when he wrote: “The simple way to think about Mr. Trump’s strength is in terms of education among white voters. He hopes to do much better than Mitt Romney did in 2012 among white voters without a degree so that he can make up the margin of Mr. Romney’s four-point defeat and overcome the additional losses he’s likely to absorb among well-educated voters and Hispanic voters.”
There’s evidence that Trump is underperforming Romney among Asians and African-Americans, not just Latinos and college-educated whites. Clinton, on the other hand, has been underperforming President Obama among non-college-educated whites.
To get a handle on how these shifts could affect the electoral landscape, we modeled how many of Romney’s votes came from college-educated whites and minorities and how many of Obama’s votes came from non-college-educated whites in each state, county and congressional district. The difference between these two vote totals, shown in the map above, can tell us where Clinton and Trump have the most potential to build on 2012.
Then we went a step further: How would the 2016 map look if one out of every five whites without a college degree who voted for Obama in 2012 defected to Trump and if one out of every five non-whites and college-educated whites who voted for Romney in 2012 switched to Clinton? (Why one out of five? It’s a somewhat arbitrary number but represents a realistic shift of these groups, according to polls released over the past few months.)
Let's call this scenario the “2016 Vote Swap.” In it, Clinton would win the election, and her share of the two-party vote would be 52.7 percent — 0.7 percentage points higher than Obama’s 2012 showing. However, we also estimate she would win 10 fewer electoral votes than Obama did in the Electoral College.
The shift for Clinton among college-educated whites and non-whites would allow her to pick up North Carolina (15 electoral votes). But the shift among non-college-educated whites would cost her Ohio (18), Iowa (6) and Maine’s 2nd District (1). That's not far off from what polls and FiveThirtyEight’s forecast models show.
This model — described in detail below — isn't perfect. The available polling tells us that, for example, whites with a college degree who voted for Romney in heavily Mormon Utah are much likelier than their peers in Texas or Alabama to defect to Clinton (or a third-party candidate). Conversely, non-college-educated whites who voted for Obama in eastern Ohio are probably much likelier than their peers in Washington state or Vermont to defect to Trump.
But it's a decent starting point for understanding how the electoral map is changing and explains why Trump could outperform Romney in states like Rhode Island and Oregon while Clinton could outperform Obama in states like Arizona, California and Georgia.
Just as fascinating as the Electoral College implications of these potential vote shifts is how they could alter the political maps within each state. If Clinton wins greater shares of college-educated whites and non-whites than Obama did but sheds some non-college-educated whites, the Democrats' coalition would continue to grow more urban and suburban, while the Republicans' coalition would continue to get more rural.
In 2012, Obama won 693 of America's 3,100-plus counties (22 percent) on his way to winning 62 percent of all Electoral College votes. Under the “Vote Swap" scenario described above, our model projects that Clinton would win the election with even fewer counties: just 631, or 20 percent, the lowest share for a presidential winner in modern history:
The model suggests that several traditionally Republican suburban locales with diversifying and highly educated electorates could be poised to flip and support the Democratic presidential candidate: Orange County, California; Gwinnett County, Georgia; Chester County, Pennsylvania; Fort Bend County, Texas; and Virginia Beach. The model also suggests that Clinton could make major gains — while still falling short — in Douglas County outside of Denver; Hamilton County outside of Indianapolis; and Delaware County outside Columbus, Ohio.
But Trump could be poised to flip the script in plenty of counties with large populations of non-college-educated white voters and Democratic heritages. These include Macomb County, Michigan; Stark County, Ohio; Aroostook County, Maine; Niagara County, New York; Luzerne County, Pennsylvania; Clark County, Washington; and Racine County, Wisconsin. Trump even has a decent chance to win tiny Elliott County in Kentucky — which hasn't voted Republican since its founding in 1869, according to Sabato's Crystal Ball contributor Robert Wheel.
For Democrats, the two most strategically crucial pro-Clinton shifts could come in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and Wake County, North Carolina. Both could play big roles in offsetting losses elsewhere in those states and effectively put Trump away.
In Miami-Dade alone, Clinton could pick up enough Cuban and other Latino defectors from the GOP to double Obama’s 74,346-vote statewide margin from 2012. And, Clinton could pick up enough Romney-supporting college-educated whites and Latinos in Wake County — the heart of North Carolina's Research Triangle — to cut Romney’s statewide margin of 92,000 votes in half.
Under the “Vote Swap” scenario, Clinton would carry 211 of 435 congressional districts, only two more than Obama carried — underscoring how short her coattails could be in House races. Traditionally Democratic seats in Minnesota's Iron Range and southern Illinois could fall to Trump. Conversely, three districts in California, two in northern New Jersey, one in Northern Virginia and one in southwestern Texas could flip to Clinton.
One casualty of 2016 vote shifts could be the bellwether status of Indiana’s Vigo County, the only county in America that has voted with the winner of every presidential election since 1956. Its knack for picking winners has attracted journalists and even a documentary filmmaker to Terre Haute. But in our “Vote Swap” scenario, Trump would be the favorite to carry Vigo, even as Clinton prevails nationally.
If the streak ends, our sincere condolences to Terre Haute.
To gauge Clinton’s and Trump’s upside potential, we began by reverse-engineering the 2012 electorate in each state, county and congressional district. To do this, we used population data from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey and voter turnout data from its 2012 voting and registration report to estimate the demographic breakdown of the electorate within each geographic area by five groups: college-educated whites, non-college-educated whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians/others.
Then, using using data from 2012 and 2008 exit polls, we estimated Obama’s and Romney’s levels of support from each group within each state. We applied those support levels within each geographic area and adjusted each subgroup’s vote totals proportionally to fit the actual reported votes for each state, county and district. For example, our best estimate is that 4,825 of the 47,416 major-party votes cast in Allen County, Ohio, came from African-Americans and that Obama carried them 4,371 to 454.
Finally, we used these estimates to calculate, in each state, county and district, the share of college-educated whites and minorities who voted for Romney and the share of non-college-educated whites who voted for Obama. Our “Vote Swap” scenario depicts what would happen if 20 percent of each of those groups switched parties in 2016.
Hillary Clinton rallies the faithful at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, North Carolina
Imagine a world where Donald Trump absolutely obliterates Republican voter turnout this November. Then take a look at North Carolina.
You can go read Bill Busa’s entire analysis of the North Carolina early vote, but that graph says everything you really need to know: only HALF as many Republican voters have voted early right now, compared to this point four years ago. Democrats and independents are slightly up, but as for Republicans, the bottom has fallen out.
Maybe it’s Donald Trump’s assholeness, or Donald Trump’s lack of a field operation, or maybe hating on the LGBTQ community isn’t the big base-mobilizer the GOP thought it would be. Or maybe it’s all of the above. Yeah, it’s probably that, all of the above.
Republicans are panicking as their numbers crater across the board. Hopefully, that chart above is a national harbinger, and not just a localized phenomenon.
we drive by this place a lot and conrad really hates it because we've successfully conditioned him to think guns are bad. but then we had to try to tell him that we'd rather people shoot their guns in there than elsewhere, but he was having none of it. anyway, i won't be telling him about this.
Lakewood police are investigating the possible suicide of a 23-year-old man Monday afternoon who died at a commercial indoor shooting range.
Officers responded about 4 p.m. after authorities were called to the facility on the 12100 block of West Cedar Avenue on reports that a customer had shot himself. The Bristlecone Shooting, Training & Retail center is the only such business listed on that block.
When investigators arrived, they found Eric Earl Blake with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Blake was pronounced dead on scene. Although originally from Texas, Lakewood police say Blake had been living in the Denver area.
“Our people are thinking it was a suicide,” Steve Davis, a Lakewood police spokesman, said Tuesday morning.
Davis said investigators found indications in Blake’s vehicle that the shooting was not accidental, but he did not elaborate.
Blake’s death was heard and seen by several patrons at the range, authorities say.
“Even though the investigation continues, detectives do not feel anything criminal in nature was involved in Blake’s death,” Lakewood police said in a Tuesday news release.
so fantastic that Glenn unendorsed and now is reconsidering unendorsing. what a buffoon.
WASHINGTON — Days after three top Colorado Republicans disavowed Donald Trump, one of them wavered Monday while another GOP official stood by the nominee, as pressure mounted for party leaders to hold ranks.
Denver Post file
Clockwise from top left are Darryl Glenn, Ken Buck, Cory Gardner and Mike Coffman.
U.S. Senate candidate Darryl Glenn said Monday he was reconsidering his decision to withdraw support for Trump, while U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Windsor, said he would continue to support the nominee despite reservations.
But the fact that key Republicans still were choosing sides a month before Election Day reaffirmed the divisiveness and the political peril that Trump has brought to the party in this election.
The repudiation by the three Colorado Republicans sparked an immediate backlash among some Trump supporters, however, and Glenn said Monday he was reconsidering his decision — the most outward sign of the ongoing fight inside the party.
“Donald Trump did what he absolutely had to do,” Glenn told Fox News, referencing the candidate’s performance in Sunday’s debate in St. Louis. “I think he reset this campaign. People were wanting him to come out and show contrition, and he did that. He accepted responsibility.”
Now Glenn says he wants to meet with Trump at an out-of-state campaign event Thursday before deciding whether he will back him.
Before his appearance on Fox News, Glenn had taken criticism from his base for withdrawing his support. Kanda Calef, a prominent El Paso County conservative activist, criticized Glenn’s move and endorsed Libertarian candidate Lily Tang Williams.
“When the Republican Party elites were backing Trump, Glenn was more than willing to associate with him at events,” Calef said in a statement released by Williams’ campaign. “Now that McCain and his ilk are against the nominee, Glenn jumps on board the hypocrisy wagon.”
The latest back-and-forth over Trump follows months of fighting in Colorado over the GOP presidential nominee — and amid new polls that show Trump and Glenn both losing the state to Democrats.
Trump’s comments on the 2005 tape, in which he described how his stardom allowed him to grope women, also reinvigorated the Colorado-based “Free the Delegates” movement that led the uprising against the New York businessman at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“The tape release is the realization for many of what we have been warning everyone about. Donald Trump’s campaign — and the Party — is destined for monumental disaster,” wrote Regina Thomson, one of the group’s leaders, in an e-mail to supporters a day after the tape’s release.
The anti-Trump forces are now calling on the Republican National Committee to invoke party rules to forcibly remove him as the nominee. But Thomson, a conservative political operative from Aurora, acknowledges it’s a longshot.
“We know that the RNC is not going to do anything. We know that,” she said in an interview Monday. “The election is lost. Even if they replaced him, it’s lost.”
A new poll released by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal highlighted the difficult position many Republicans face when dealing with Trump.
The survey, taken over the weekend, asked how GOP congressional candidates should respond to Trump and the tape. Two-thirds of Republican respondents said they should continue to support Trump while another 23 percent argued that GOP officials should either revoke their backing or urge Trump to step aside.
It’s unclear how the current fight could affect the future fortunes of Republican candidates. Coffman is battling this election to keep a swing seat in GOP hands and Gardner is considered a rising star in the Republican party — and someone with ambitions that could extend beyond the Senate.
Dan Caplis, a talk show host with 710 KNUS, said Republicans such as Coffman and Gardner were hurting Trump’s chances in Colorado — and that’s a bad thing.
“I think it’s unfortunate that they did that because I do feel that it is vital for our state and country that Hillary Clinton be defeated,” he said. “The Republicans who are digging in and supporting Trump are showing a lot of courage and are willing to risk their own political futures for the greater good of defeating Hillary.”
Buck on Monday joined Republican congressmen Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs and Scott Tipton of Cortez in voicing continued support for Trump.
George Athanasopoulos, a Trump supporter and Republican running against U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Arvada, said grassroots activists in the party will remember the actions of GOP officials this election.
“Pop culture has a very short attention span,” he said. “But in political circles, people remember and they hold grudges and this is not going to be water under the bridge.”
William Adams, a Republican from Castle Rock, echoed that sentiment and said he had issues with GOP politicians such as Coffman and Gardner. “They’ve turned their back on Trump, which means they have no spine and I won’t vote for them,” said Adams, 80.
A Gardner aide said in a statement that the Republican senator has received praise since disavowing Trump. “Emotions are running high this election season, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Alex Siciliano, a Gardner spokesman.
Even before the tape’s release, polls showed Trump had a tougher path to the White House than Clinton. But pollster David Flaherty, who runs Colorado-based Magellan Strategies, said his latest research had shown that voters were able to draw a distinction between Trump and other GOP candidates.
However, he said the tape has given Republicans another reason to worry.
“If you were looking for a convenient way to separate yourself, this is probably more than you wanted,” said Flaherty, who previously worked at the Republican National Committee. “It was so shocking we are concerned about Republicans voting at all.”
Flaherty said his team planned to talk to voters this week to try to understand two different trends. One will examine voters’ approach to the presidential election overall: will they vote, will they skip that race or will they abstain from voting altogether? The other will try to decipher what Republicans think of GOP leaders who have forsaken Trump.
“We are going into the field to measure the damage,” Flaherty said.
as i'm sure will be cleared up soon, this is the "who do you think will win" question. not the candidate support. an 18 point lead is something i think i would have heard about.
[See update below.]
The overnight polls all say Hillary Clinton won Monday's debate by a wide margin. Common sense confirms this. But how will this affect the race? Ipsos/Reuters released its first post-debate polling today, and the results are on the right.
Clinton gained ground, which is no surprise. But the truly remarkable thing is that the Undecided vote skyrocketed to 20 percent. After the debate, Trump, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein all lost huge amounts of support, and only a fraction of it went to Clinton. Most of them are simply no longer sure who to vote for. Apparently a lot of Trump supporters saw his performance and had second thoughts, and lots of Johnson/Stein supporters saw Clinton's performance and had second thoughts.
Oddly enough, none of this strangeness showed up in the polling on a two-way race. Nor does Clinton gain any ground in today's PPP poll. So I'm not sure what's really going on.
UPDATE: I'm an idiot. The poll on the right asks people who they think will win, not who they plan to vote for. Sorry about that.
In the actual preference poll, Ipsos/Reuters only did a two-way question, and Clinton lost ground. This is odd considering that in the very same poll voters gave Clinton a big win in the debate and said they were now more favorably disposed toward her. Life is strange.
call, giving rank-and-file lawmakers political cover to disavow Trump.
[See update below.]