He had a natural disaster about 6 weeks ago and seems no worse for the wear. The problem for republicans is the same one that it is for the democrats: their candidate is not getting necessarily any more popular. There’s no way to fix that problem, and at this stage, it would seem that Trump has perhaps committed a fatal series of errors. Again, time and geography work against him.
The only thing I could truly see working against Clinton and Democrats is either a massive terrorist attack or a series of Orlando and San Bernardino type events – and/or multiple Ferguson, Charlotte, Dallas type riots and police shootings. This would all have to happen in the next 2-3 weeks as well, to allow enough time for a sea-change in the electorate. It could happen, but what are the odds?
I look forward to him, in the last days before the election, suddenly reversing himself and saying Trump blew it by not being a good enough persuader at the last minute or whatever.
For a while there, apparently, the tactic of claiming that someone who does dumb stuff is ‘Playing 4th Dimensional Chess’ seemed (to Adams) to be working just fine. But at some point the derisive laughter must become fairly deafening. The ego wound may make it impossible for him to adjust to reality.
Not a mastermind? Au contraire! Here is Scott Adams claiming Trump’s 3D chess move by purposely losing the debate:
“But the most interesting question has to do with what problem both of them were trying to solve with the debate. Clinton tried to look healthy, and as I mentioned, I don’t think she completely succeeded. But Trump needed to solve exactly one problem: Look less scary. Trump needed to counter Clinton’s successful branding of him as having a bad temperament to the point of being dangerous to the country. Trump accomplished exactly that…by…losing the debate.”
I think that Adam’s character of the pointy-haired boss in his comic strip is supposed to be the rational, intelligent character. The rest of us just are not getting it the way he intends…
Yet another update, it looks like Clinton’s gain is slowing down.
Polls only: 67%
Polls plus: 64.4%
Now cast: 73.3%
Polls only in NV and FL are firming up in the mid-50s while NC remains thin as a hair at 50.1%. Clinton appears to be topping out in the low to mid 60s unless Ohio flips and they don’t have a poll there any later than Sept 26 so the debate isn’t baked in there yet. I’d assume the slide is based on overall national trendlines.
Well, Trump is probably guaranteed to have another bad week now that NYT has released his tax records. As with all things Trump, there’s the initial bomb drop of the controversy and then there’s the shock wave of his post-controversy meltdown.
Even so, I don’t think Hillary is going to get that much more popular, so she’ll be lucky to cross 50 percent and probably even fortunate to get well above 45 percent. The good news is, Trump could dip well below that amount and it seems right now that’s where things are headed.
Exactly. I remember reading in an article about Hillary’s debate prep that one of Trump’s most effective triggers was to question his actual wealth/success. HRC went straight for the jugular with this at the debate with predictable results, and now the MSM is calling him out on a nearly billion dollar loss that is backed up by hard evidence.
According to the RCP average, it looks like Trump’s numbers did not actually drop after the debate. Hillary went up from 45% to 47.5%. Trump moved from 44% to 45%.
For contrast, after the DNC convention Trump fell to a low of 40% and Hillary moved to a high of 48%, which created a substantial 8 point lead for Clinton.
As good as Clinton’s debate performance was, it’s not causing Republicans to change their vote. My guess is that she just increased her likeability among Democrats and independents.
This raises the question of how horribly unqualified a candidate must be for voters to vote for the opposing political party. We haven’t reached that threshold yet.
The group of people who will switch from Trump to Clinton or vice versa is effectively zero. The group of people who are so fed up that they aren’t planning on voting at all or who plan to vote for Stein or Johnson are the target demographic. They need to be disgusted enough with one candidate that they will vote for the other one. This seems to be, correctly, the strategy that Clinton is taking in the debates. Trump is trying to fire up the base which is not going to be as effective.
In addition, I wonder to what extent the VP debate will have an impact. In normal election years it does little to move people, but given how far from a normal election year this is couldn’t it have some influence on undecideds looking for a reason to vote one way or the other? I’m not sure how Kaine will come across to a national audience but Pence strikes me as a moralistic prig. I also think Pence will have a hard time defending some of Trump’s more odious rhetoric.
I’ve not seen Kaine debate but every time I’ve seen him in front of a camera (save the Convention) he’s been pretty poised. He’s much better at dealing with reporters one on one than Clinton.
A bigger question is, who will be watching the debate. My guess is that partisans will be but perhaps some undecideds could be as well and they might be using this debate as their bullshit filter, so I agree that it’s not an unimportant appearance for either candidate.
I think the debate coaches are probably going to use Pence to be aggressive with Kaine, but if Kaine can turn some of Trump’s statements against him and not say anything that can be turned into a meme, then he wins. I also think that he, more than Hillary, can prosecute the case against the GOP’s racist campaign.
There haven’t really been any new polls to drive this – this is likely due to old polls dropping off. We’ll get a new batch of polls next week and it might stay the same or go up or down.
Or to go the other way: Convince some of your opponent’s supporters that they’re too odious to actually support, and to instead vote for a third party or stay home.
I always check the “updates” tab on 538 which tells you the polls that were just input into the model – sometimes they are old polls that are received late. This is the case for most of today’s updates, so it’s much too early to conclude that her post-debate surge is over.
