Pity Skittles don’t go well with tacos.
Hillary’s going to have a little breathing room in time for the debates. 538 won’t show that just yet but probably will in a few days. Still, she needs to be strong in the debates for sure.
This might be the most important debate we’ve ever seen. Sadly, the media will only cover the performance aspect of it rather than the substance of what was said. If Trump manages to be coherent and say nothing stupid then they’ll spin it as a victory for him.
This is certainly the conventional wisdom, but I don’t think it will come to pass. One of the things about the media environment in 2016 is that it’s gone fully meta. We’ll see lots of media people acknowledging and challenging the CW about a coherent performance being a win. And that fact is likely to shape their coverage somewhat. I predict we’ll see more responsible coverage of the debate than we saw in the primaries or 2012.
It helps that the last month has really set the groundwork for a different kind of debate coverage. The Matt Lauer affair, the Mexico trip coverage, and all the rest, have set up an environment in which Lester Holt and the rest of the cable media are hyperaware of their role and the conventional wisdom. It also helps that Trump is far less of an underdog in the polling now, so they are less primed for the comeback narrative. If anything, Hillary is the one now set up for the comeback narrative.
Debates now have those thingies where you see how focus groups of ordinary schmoes react in real time. So if in fact Trump is coherent, people actually will respond positively, and the media will be telling the truth in saying he did well.
I have no doubt whatsoever that if Trump sounds coherent but says bullshit, he’ll be called out by any number of media sources, but most voters don’t care.
Literally days ago it came out that the “Trump Foundation” is a charity that isn’t a charity, and is, in fact, transparently a scam and probably merits criminal investigation. The effect on the polls has been negligible.
This would have absolutely torpedoed a Presidential candidate 30-40 years ago. If it had come out in September of 1980 that Ronald Reagan had created a charitable foundation and then used it for no charity, but was funneling money to himself, including purchasing, from himself, a giant portrait of himself, and then hanged it in a golf club he owned named after himself, Ronald Reagan would never have been the President of the United States. He would have had less of a chance than Ronald McDonald. It would have blown his campaign to smithereens. In 1980 such utterly brazen, shameless corruption would never even have allowed the man to be nominated. Now it barely registers. It’s not a secret, the media is reporting it, and to all appearances it doesn’t matter; Clinton voters repeat it to each other, Trump voters ignore it, and undecided and Gary Johnson voters don’t seem to think it matters.
Yes, I find that change in voter attitudes sickening as well. But it’s not a majority, at least. Here’s some good news from Pew, whose polls are highly respected, in part because they use an unusually large sample:
The key there is that 59% would be disappointed or angry if Trump wins. That’s pretty hard for a candidate to overcome, I think.
It would torpedo Clinton today. Look at how much she’s down based on purely manufactured gibberish about the Clinton Foundation and a misconfigured e-mail server. Can you imagine if there’d actually turned out to be something real there?
We don’t know that yet. The story isn’t getting as much play as it should but there’s only one national poll on Real Clear, by not particularly respected Rasmussen, that covers dates after WaPo published the article
I think at the very least, it’s going to make the media pause before they try to spin up breathless accounts of vague unseemliness regarding the Clinton Foundation.
538’s tracking of odds of winning seems to be updated frequently. It’s showing a slow climb for Clinton. Very slow.
No doubt the non-stop news coverage of the unrest in Charlotte is hurting Trump as he seemed to receive most of the news coverage prior to this event.
On the contrary, the Charlotte unrest is burying this Trump charity fraud story. And while apparently extra coverage helped Trump in the primaries, I’ve read that it hurts both candidates now that we’re in the general.
His town hall session on Hannity got bumped for Charlotte coverage last night. It was pre-recorded, and they released the transcripts. Honestly not sure if his lengthy call for stop and frisk laws would have helped him.
Donald Trump’s puzzling appeal to black voters on Sean Hannity’s show, annotated
At the moment there’s really no way to know what impact the Charlotte unrest is having on Trump since it just started a day or two ago. My guess is that it will polarize and already divided electorate in the state of North Carolina, but what damage is inflicted on the candidates generally remains to be seen. I agree with Carnal in that if there’s an upside it could be that it buries the Trump foundation scandal and slows the negative news cycle.
I don’t think we are agreeing - that isn’t an upside imho. The Trump Institute shenanigans are a big story that might turn into old news.
Didja ever read How The Good Guys Finally Won? Jimmy Bresliln, same guy who wrote The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. It was about Watergate. He addressed that question in an interesting way, he points that Nixon made repeated attempts to do just that, make the question “old news”. But Breslin says that effort was doomed once legal papers were filed, even the most minor. Because those papers initiate procedure, which continues at its own pace. But every step in that pace was news.
Which is to say, even if the subject has not been mentioned for some time, it gets re-upped whenever there is another development in the procedure. Now, Trump has battalions of skilled lawyers, so they will probably have no difficulty keeping this tied up in court until long after Election Day. Still, every development in that long and winding road is news. And up it pops.
That would make me feel better if the authorities actually bring forth an investigation (which I have a feeling they will at least drag their feet on for fear of looking political) and if there weren’t only a month and a half left til the election.
Good grief.
If the forces of Trump were to begin flogging this laughable video as a portent of Oval Office addresses to come, Hillary’d lose the election for sure.
I know!?? What was she thinking? Being old, and a lady, and showing emotion? Why’s she gotta be so emotional, while also being old and a lady? Awful!
She was speaking via video to a convention of a couple thousand people. What you can’t hear is the noise of a couple thousand people she’s speaking over. Just FYI.
ETA: Oh and I see SA is right on cue with Herman Cain’s talking points against Hillary.
The words ‘old’ and ‘lady’ never entered my mind while watching that. Neither did ‘emotional’ for that matter.
Words like shrill and stiff and phony and awkward and forced and painfully uncharismatic, however, did.
Day-um, SA, Bernie Bots don’t hate her as much as you do! We got blazing Trumpiviks here who don’t seethe like you do! You know that stuff about how she is the Whore of Babylon, that’s not literally true, right?