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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Political Strategy Notes

Democrats, don’t skip The New York Times opinion pages forum on “How to energize demoralized Voters,” featuring four articles by leading academic researchers on the topics: Same-Day Registration and Increased Absentee Voting Would Help; Why Get-Out-the-Vote Drives Rarely Work; Teach Civic Responsibility to High School Students; and Direct Voter Contact Is Key to Boosting Turnout.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres, quoted in Bill Barrow’s AP article, “For Donald Trump, low-turnout strategy is unlikely to work,” puts it charitably “Any strategy of trying to drive down turnout in a democratic election is not the most noble of motivations to begin with…And there’s just no chance for it work.” Barrow adds, “Ayres, the Republican pollster, said elections that are “reasonably close” and involve “clear consequences” usually generate higher turnout. “I’d say this election meets both standards,” he said.”

Clinton leads by 6 points in batleground states, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll of more than 4,000 voters. Clinton leads by by 15 points with women and Trump is down 7 points from last month with Republican women.

At The Daily Beast Patricia Murphy explains why “Democrats Worry About Hillary Clinton’s Ground Game: Hillary Clinton has a better ground game than Donald Trump’s, but it still falls far short of the campaign network Democrats in some critical states consider the gold standard: President Obama’s.” Murphy notes, “The good news for Democrats is that the Clinton ground game is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s. A FiveThirtyEight analysis shows that in terms of field offices, the Clinton operation is far outpacing Trump’s. Clinton has 489 field offices nationwide, compared to 207 offices for Trump…Clinton’s numbers don’t come close to replicating the Obama operation, which had 789 field offices in 2012. The pattern holds for battleground states. In Florida, Clinton has 68 offices, compared to for 29 Trump, but 103 for Obama. In Virginia, Obama had 61 offices, compared to Clinton’s 27 and Trump’s 11. In Ohio, she has 75, while Trump has 22. Obama had 131 Ohio field office…“Barack Obama had an army of volunteers in 2012. You could flip a switch and knock on one million doors in Florida in a weekend,” said a Democratic operative involved in GOTV efforts for the party in 2008, 20012, and 2016. “There is no Hillary army. Not even close. In tight races, that matters.”

In other worrisome news, Philip Bump reports that “Early voter registration numbers don’t suggest big surges among Democrats or women.”

Marianna Sotomayor reports at nbcnews.com that more than a half million new immigrants may not be able to vote in November, owing to a backlog in processing their applications at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Julia Sonenshein’s Politico post, “Revenge of the White Working-Class Woman: The white blue-collar vote isn’t the GOP monolith everyone thinks: It’s splitting fast, and Donald Trump is just part of the reason” should provoke some hand-wrining inside the Trump campaign. “…over the past several months, that seemingly rock-solid core has started to fracture—and the fracture has widened dramatically this week for one key reason: Most of the white working class is actually female. And working-class white women now appear to be jumping off the Trump train…The first polls to emerge since the release of the “Access Hollwood” videotape now show a historic gender gap splitting what might be the GOP’s most important constituency. The fracture was already apparent back in August, when a four-way poll showed Trump’s lead over Clinton among white men without a college degree was 40 percent, but only 12 percent among women without a college degree. This week, after the 2005 videotape was released, that number stayed roughly the same for blue-collar men—Trump is still up in that group by 43 percentage points—but it tanked for women, to a low that hasn’t been seen since the 1960s, with the exception of Bill Clinton in 1996. According to the first post-videotape poll, among white women without a college degree, Hillary Clinton had pulled even.”

Millennials Are Now Moving Toward Clinton, But Will They Turn out and Vote?” At Alternet, Steven Rosenfeld explores the evidence in Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund/Democracy Corps polling.

Carlos Maza and Coleman Lowndes have a disturbing report at Media Matters: “VIDEO: CNN Has A Trump Surrogate Problem: The Network Is Paying Professional Trump Supporters To Derail Negative Segments About Trump.” Icky.

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