From Valerie Bauerlein’s “Mark Robinson Scandal in North Carolina Injects Chaos Into Presidential Race” at The Wall St. Journal: “North Carolina is the swing state that former President Donald Trump won the most narrowly in 2020. Now Trump sees his fate tied to Robinson, the starkest example yet of the standard-bearers the MAGA takeover has brought to the Republican Party, and how hard it is to contain them….The state has become a place where all of the forces of a polarized nation intersect, from the divide between rural and urban interests, to hardened opinions about abortion…. North Carolina’s direction, potentially decisive in the presidential race, could hinge on another deeply flawed Trump protégé burdening the party with extreme views….Several top Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, have withdrawn support for Robinson. And Robinson, previously lauded by Trump as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” was neither seen nor mentioned at Trump’s Wilmington, N.C., rally on Saturday….In an unusual situation, the reverse coattails of a statewide candidate, Robinson, threaten to drag down the top of the ticket. An Elon University poll released Tuesday, taken Sept. 4-13, before the CNN report, showed that Robinson was trailing the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Josh Stein, by 14 points, with Trump neck and neck against Vice President Kamala Harris. In recent months, Trump consistently polled ahead of her….Robinson exemplifies, more so than Georgia’s failed Senate candidate Herschel Walker or Arizona’s current Senate candidate Kari Lake, the no-apologies, right-wing purists who sail through primaries but stumble in general elections….Democrats are seizing the moment. The Harris campaign ran its first TV ad linking Trump and Robinson after CNN’s report….Rep. Jeff Jackson, North Carolina’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, said he is running ads reminding voters that his opponent, Rep. Dan Bishop, previously called himself Robinson’s “sidekick.”…. “Mark Robinson has been the most popular person for his party in our state for several years, so lots of major candidates have fallen over themselves to be pictured with him,” Jackson told supporters by email. “The blast radius is going to envelop lots of other candidates.” Democrats certainly hope so. The whole mess provides as good a test of the negative power of ‘reverse coattails’ in political campaigns as anyone could hope for. It also provides a fertile field for testing ads that emphasize the moral bankruptcy of the NC GOP.

Some nuggets from “Harris’ Georgia challenge: reassembling Biden’s diverse 2020 coalition” by John King at CNN Politics: “In 2020, voters of color made up 39% of the Georgia presidential electorate, and Biden won 81% support of that vote. That lopsided margin helped Biden win the state, by fewer than 12,000 votes, even though Trump won 69% among White voters….In a CNN poll released Tuesday, Harris was well ahead of Trump among Black (79% support) and Latino (59%) likely voters, but still trailed Biden’s winning percentages with those groups in 2020 – 87% and 65%, respectively….Statewide, Asians constitute about 4.5% of Georgia’s population. In the metro Atlanta area, the number of residents of Asian descent has more than doubled in the past two decades….Trump’s often toxic tone hurts him in the suburbs, but that is just part of the shift. Cobb and the other Atlanta suburbs are growing more diverse, and many big employers in metro Atlanta require at least four years of college – now the clearest dividing line in voting preference.” Unique factors that many pundits missed about the Georgia 2020-21 political upsets include that the state not only has Black voters comprising a third of the electorate; it probably has the most well-trained and most dedicated Black voter activists anywhere in the U.S., along with Atlanta’s heavy concentration of HBCUs, predominantly-Black in-migration and expanding Black middle class. Persuasion of uncommitted voters (especially white working-class) is a paramount strategic consideration for all states. And yes, it helped in 2020-21 that the Georgia GOP was engulfed in internal infighting. But Georgia’s unique demographic profile still makes it the best state lab for testing the power of investments in Black voter turnout.

NYT opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall addresses a question that seems to be on the minds of millions: “How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him?” He adds, “The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters….Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts….Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake “fights” they know in their hearts were fixed.” Edsall notes further that “Based on eight surveys in the United States with a total of 10,921 respondents from February 2018 to February 2022, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that white men, a core Trump constituency, were unique in many respects: “White men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges. While white men do not feel highly status-challenged on average, they are more likely to seek chaos when they do.” Any demographic group will respond strongly and negatively to economic status reduction. it provokes more anger because the group has experienced a taste of the good life, followed by a take-away. That’s different from striving for status that has never been experienced. “The threat of marginalization,’ as Edsall terms it, is a time bomb that explodes in many elections. But it never seems to harm the beneficiaries of marginalization – the corrupt profiteers of anti-union policies and other divide-and-conquer strategies. Thus far, some, not all, Republicans have successfully redirected much of the rage of status anxiety toward low-income people of other races. Challenging this cynical strategy is a long-term project that will span several more elections.

It’s only one poll, so all the usual caveats apply. But one of our commenters has shared a report on a recent poll, which ought to encourage the Harris campaign to recalibrate its foreign policy image in the swing states. As Dave Lawler reports at Axios: ‘Voters in six key swing states think former President Trump is more likely than Vice President Harris to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, respond effectively to a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan, and advance U.S. interests internationally, according to new polling from the Institute for Global Affairs….By the numbers: Voters nationwide narrowly see Harris (52% to 48%) as better able to strongly defend U.S. interests, according to the poll. But Trump leads 56% to 44% in that category among voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin….

• The gap is wider in favor of Trump (58% to 42%) in the swing states on the question of who is more likely to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. By the same 58% to 42% margin, swing state voters see Trump as more likely to respond effectively if China makes a move on Taiwan.
• Trump also leads Harris (56% to 44%) in the swing states on his signature issue: immigration policy.
• Harris narrowly leads Trump nationally on the questions of who would respond more effectively to a major global crisis (52% to 48%) or improve America’s reputation (53% to 47%). But once again those gaps are wiped out when you zoom in on the swing states.

Between the lines: Harris’ foreign policy vision is less well-defined for voters than Trump’s, particularly in the swing states Trump’s campaign has been bombarding with messaging for months, says Mark Hannah, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs.”….

• “We’ve seen that independents in battleground states tend to prefer a less interventionist foreign policy. So the fact that voters see Trump as more likely to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza might strengthen his popularity,” Hannah notes.

Reality check: While foreign policy is arguably the area on which presidents have the most direct influence, it has not been a major issue for voters this cycle, with the exception of immigration.” Even though the notion that Trump’s foreign policy toward Gaza, Ukraine, Russia and China serves U.S. interests better is laughable to serious international affairs experts, the margins in this poll are large enough to indicate a problem as regards the opinions of swing state voters. The Harris campaign’s ad strategy should be tweaked accordingly, and soon, since people are voting already.