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.

‘To walk, or to walk back’ Trump support seems to be the question of the day for Republican Senators and House members conflcited about Trump’s mess and what it does to their ‘base.’ In his NYT report, “Some in G.O.P. Who Deserted Donald Trump Over Lewd Tape Are Returning,” Jonathan Martin elaborates: “While Mr. Trump had already lashed out at Mr. Ryan on Twitter and in a Fox News interview, his decision to use his own campaign event to hurl attacks at the speaker caused a new wave of fear among Republicans that their now “unshackled” candidate, as he described himself earlier in the week, might use his rallies to similarly attack local Republican lawmakers who have refused to support his candidacy. (They also had to deal with new revelations about Mr. Trump’s behavior, like a report that he had walked into a Miss Teen USA dressing room as contestants were changing, and another report that two women had accused him of groping them.).”

For an update on specific GOP politicians, The Times is also offering “More Than 160 Republican Leaders Don’t Support Donald Trump. Here’s When They Reached Their Breaking Point.”

At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky clarifies the tally in percentage terms, which clearly indicate that the GOP is still Trump’s party, despite his declarations to the contrary: “Monday, McCain joined what in panting media shorthand is usually called something like the “long and fast-growing list” of Republicans who’ve withdrawn their support from Trump. Looked at one way, the list is indeed long. It includes about 15 GOP senators. But another way of saying it is that the list does not include nearly 40 of them. It includes around 25 GOP House members, which means it does not include about 215. It includes a half-dozen governors, but does not include more than 25. Adding it all up, among senators, House members, and governors, a hefty 85 percent still officially back this man who is obviously unqualified and hasn’t a small-d democratic cell in his body”

From Nate Cohn’s “The Savvy Person’s Guide to Reading the Latest Polls” at The Upshot: “Until a candidate approaches 50 percent, it’s hard to know whether the lead is because of party unity or because the candidate has won over the key voters needed for victory. This is especially true in a reliably red or blue state: A Democrat who has 40 percent of the vote in Arizona still has a lot to prove, even with a lead. He or she hasn’t yet won the Republican-leaning voters who decide the state’s elections…Usually, anything at 46 percent or above is a good indicator of real strength. Less than that, and you have to wonder about undecided voters.”

WaPo’s Kelsey Snell and Karoun Demirjian explain why “House Democrats believe Trump troubles give them real shot at retaking majority.” As they note, “Democrats think that Republicans are now stuck in the impossible position of either embracing their party’s presidential nominee and alienating swing voters critical to maintaining their hold on Congress or rejecting him and angering their base…While a generic ballot tests shows a Democrat up by 7 points over any Republican lawmaker, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s poll — conducted nationwide by the Global Strategy Group — shows the Democratic candidate has a 12-point edge if the Republican recently withdrew their support from Trump. If a Republican lawmaker continues to support Trump, the private polling shows they are at a similar 12-point deficit.”

Jim Galloway reports at The Atlanta Constitution-Journal that Margaret Hoover, Republican founder of a Super PAC dedicated to putting gay rights on the conservative agenda and great grand-daughter of President Hoover, articulates a point of view shared by a growing community of worried GOPers: “I really hope that Donald Trump loses spectacularly. For my version of the Republican party to be ascendant, I need a definitive loss,” said Hoover at a Georgia State University panel on the presidential race. “I need for that idea of what the Republican party is to really be disproved as viable, politically. If it’s very, very close you’ll embolden hold-outs who say, ‘Let’s wait four more years and do this again.’”

Social pressure matters a lot in increasing voter turnout, reports Simon Greenhill at The Daily Californian: “A study by UC Berkeley economics and business administration professors, in collaboration with professors from the University of Chicago and Harvard quantifies how much social pressure influences would-be voters…The researchers found that people’s concern about being asked whether they voted in the 2010 congressional election increased turnout by two percentage points and argue that doubling how often people are asked if they voted could increase turnout by two percentage points more…Previous studies have found that mailed get-out-the-vote campaigns increase voter turnout by an average of just 0.2 percentage points…“Two percentage points will open the margin where an election is decided,” said Stefano DellaVigna, the study’s lead author. “If the campaigns encourage people to ask others more, this could have a really sizable impact on turnout.””

Campaigns can administer social pressure, but facebook may be the most efficient instrument for administering peer-group pressure to go to the polls and vote on election day. It is certainly growing in influence as a news source, reports  Kanyakrit Vongkayitkajorn at Mother Jones. “About 60 percent of Americans now get news through social media, according to the Pew Research Center, up from nearly 50 percent in 2012. Facebook is the most widely used platform, and it also leads the pack in terms of getting news to its users: two-thirds of Facebook users said they sought news on the site, Pew found.” Facebook has its limits as a vehicle for influencing swing voters, since “friends” share political perspectives more often than not. But that very weakness is a source of srength, when it comes to guilt-tripping friends who are pondering whether to vote at all. Jennifer Moire noted at Adweek, “A study in Nature released last month reveals that a single Facebook message increased turnout by 340,000 votes in the 2010 midterms.” For more on this topic, read “3 Ways to Harness Facebook for GOTV” by Brian Ross Adama, digital consultant to Democratic campaigns and advocacy groups at Campaigns & Elections.

Lest Democrats drift into an unseemly October gloat, David Leonhardt has a sobering reminder of glaring weaknesses that must be addressed to prevent 2018 reversing gains won in 2016: “For one thing, Democrats haven’t yet hit on a successful strategy for turning out voters in midterm elections. That hurts them in congressional and governor races, as well as in state legislatures, which in turn allows Republicans to control the gerrymandering process…Democrats have also failed to build a strong bench of candidates. This year, Democrats did not even field a candidate in some districts. In others, the Democratic candidate seems too weak to create a competitive race. The Republican group that oversees its House campaigns recently chortled about the Democrats’ “embarrassing recruiting failures and primary losses for their chosen candidates.”

If you have been wondering where conservative evangelical Republicans draw the line regarding their support of Trump, the moment of truth may have arrived, as evidenced by couple of recent statements from religious leaders.

In his Washington Post opinion page article, “Donald Trump has created an excruciating moment for evangelicals,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, writes:

This past weekend, political analysts described the situation inside the Trump campaign as “DEFCON 5,” an acknowledgment that the revelations of a sexually explicit taped conversation with Trump posed the prospect of immediate defections from key Trump constituencies, and evangelicals are at the top of that list.

..How could “family values voters” support a man who had, among other things, stated openly that no man’s wife was safe with him in the room? A casino titan who posed for the cover of Playboy magazine? A man who boasted that he did not repent of his (well-documented) sins and would not?

Citing “a marriage of convenience between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party” which  resulted from “the divide over issues like abortion and the definition of the family,” Mohler explains that conservative evangelical tolerance of Trump’s excesses thus far were largely due to their opposition to Hillary Clinton, who became their lightening rod for liberal values.

However, adds Mohler,

…This year, the Republican nominee is, in terms of character, the personification of what evangelicals have preached (and voted) against. Married three times, flaunting Christian sexual mores, building his fortune and his persona on the Playboy lifestyle, under any normal circumstances Trump would be the realization of evangelical nightmares, not the carrier of evangelical hopes.

…The release of the sexually explicit tape revealed Trump in a light that must be the worst nightmare for the candidate’s campaign. It revealed a sexual predator, not merely a playboy.

Further, says Mohler, “Trump’s horrifying statements, heard in his own proud voice, revealed an objectification of women and a sexual predation that must make continued support for Trump impossible for any evangelical leader.”

Mohler is just one voice. But consider Joshua Dubois’s post “Powerful Evangelical Women Split From Male Church Leaders to Slam Trump” at The Daily Beast. A Dubois writes about Beth Moore,  who preaches in arenas and writes perennial best-sellers on religious lists:

Moore’s broken silence about the 2016 race—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—signals a widening gender divide between evangelicals. Increasingly, moderate and conservative Christian women are speaking out about Trump’s brand of misogyny and divisiveness, and condemning support for the nominee or silence about him from male evangelicals.

At New York Magazine Ed Kilgore writes that “since Trump’s grand objective was surviving this debate, he did win. He’s not going to be forced to cough up the Republican presidential nomination just under a month before the election. That has to be the lowest debate threshold any presidential candidate has ever faced.” However, that may well prove to be a strategic winner for Clinton. As Kilgore adds, “What Democrats may realistically hope is that, by remaining on the ticket, Trump has now put a Democratic House as well as a Senate back on the table. Since a Democratic Congress may be the only thing that could enable a President Hillary Clinton to achieve much as president, that’s a very big deal.”

At The Daily 202, James Hohman explains why “More than Trump, the Republican Party was the biggest loser in last night’s debate,” noting “Trump’s collapse has already ruined many political careers, and it will probably ruin more… The ambitious Republicans who submitted and capitulated to Trump after he personally insulted them and their families continue to be personally humiliated…“Everything Trump touches dies,” said Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who is advising independent candidate Evan McMullin…“The Republican Party will look like Berlin circa 1945,” added GOP operative Steve Schmidt…Schmidt, one of John McCain’s top advisers in 2008, said this weekend’s donnybrook “has exposed the intellectual rot in the Republican Party.” “This candidacy – the magnitude of its disgrace to the country is almost impossible to articulate,” he said during an appearance on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “It has exposed, at a massive level, the hypocrisy, the modern-day money changers in the temple like Jerry Falwell Jr. … What we have seen – and the danger for all of the candidates – is that over the course of the last year these candidates have repeatedly put their party ahead of their country.”

The low bar Trump set in the St. Louis debate has hustled some commentators to declare Trump the winner of last night’s debate. But Amy Davidson isn’t having any of it in her New Yorker article, “Trump Shows His Inner Dictator,” she writes: “Clinton won this debate; she was consistently more informed, she fought calmly and effectively under enormous pressure, and she spoke to American ideals…Trump did nothing to dispel any of the concerns about him—not about his temperament, or his commitment to civil liberties, or his tax returns, or his fundamental bigotry. His discussion of Syria was incoherent: he wrote off Aleppo, the besieged city, and started complaining about the planned campaign in Mosul, which is in Iraq…The only worries he may have addressed are those of the faction of his party that worries that he will not do everything possible to win, including to go as low and dirty as he can. In that capacity, Trump may have done enough in St. Louis to hang on.”

A CNN/ORC poll of debate-watchers found that 57 percent of respondents believed Clinton won, while only 37 percent said Trump was the victor. But it was a small sample (537 RVs) and Republicans may have been undersampled (27 percent self-described).

From Jonathan Easley’s “Five takeaways from second presidential debate” at The Hill: “The reaction to the second debate was mixed, with pundits cast into despair over the ugliness and declaring that both candidates had scored points and absorbed damaging blows…”An instant poll from CNN/YouGov found 47 percent viewed Clinton as the winner, with 42 percent saying Trump had won it…A draw is a win for Clinton, who leads in nearly every battleground state and is the overwhelming favorite among election handicappers to be the next president…Trump entered the night in free fall. He may have stopped the bleeding, but he didn’t alter the dynamics of the race, which are very much against him.”

Greg Sargent writes at The Plum Line that “Trump’s real debate goal was to publicly humiliate Clinton. He failed miserably.” As Sargent writes, “Trump had two choices: he could focus his second debate performance largely on showing contrition and trying to reassure voters alienated by his character and temperament, in order to slow or reverse his slide. Or he could try to wrestle Hillary Clinton down into the mud with him and hope for the best. He mostly chose the latter. Virtually everything Trump said and did appeared geared towards that one goal. And, while Clinton’s performance had its flaws, Trump’s effort was a miserable flop.”

Many political observers are today expressing disgust with Trump’s threat to jail his opponent as a clear signal that he is capable of unprecedented fascism. E. J. Dionne, Jr. summed up the cumulative effect of Trumps comments, thusly: “It’s not an American habit for a presidential candidate to declare that he would imprison his opponent. Donald Trump, reeling from the release of an 11-year-old video recording his lewd and repulsive comments about women, went there anyway.”

The Washington Post article, “Donald Trump has created an excruciating moment for evangelicals,” by R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, focuses on another of the GOP nominee’s base constituencies which is having buyer’s remorse about their support of his candidacy.

To those who are contemplating split-ticket voting next month, NYT columnist Paul Krugman has a sage observation that ought to be taken into consideration: “Assuming that Mr. Trump loses, many Republicans will try to pretend that he was a complete outlier, unrepresentative of the party. But he isn’t. He won the nomination fair and square, chosen by voters who had a pretty good idea of who he was. He had solid establishment support until very late in the game. And his vices are, dare we say, very much in line with his party’s recent tradition..Mr. Trump, in other words, isn’t so much an anomaly as he is a pure distillation of his party’s modern essence.”

Crystal Ball wizards Sabato, Skelley and Kondik crunch post-debate data and see Clinton trending toward 300+ electoral votes.

In his New York Times op-ed, “How to Build a Democratic Majority That Lasts,” Steve Phillips, author of “Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority” and the founder of Democracy in Color, writes, “In November, Democrats have the chance to secure a decades-long electoral majority for decades, but they are at risk of missing this moment because too many consultants still stick to an outdated and ineffective campaign script that was written for a different, whiter era. Democratic spending is significantly misaligned with the pillars of the party’s electoral advantage, and campaigns throw away millions of dollars on ineffective ads while neglecting efforts to mobilize the rapidly growing ranks of minorities…The evidence about the formula for Democratic victory at the national level is overwhelming. When large numbers of voters — particularly minorities — turn out, Democrats win. When turnout plummets — as it did in midterm elections in 2010 and 2014 — Democrats lose…The most critical decision campaigns have to make is how to allocate limited time and money between persuasion and mobilization. Persuasion is aimed at those people who have a history of voting regularly, and it generally takes the form of paid advertising, mainly on television. Mobilization involves the more labor-intensive work of turning out infrequent voters by making phone calls, knocking on doors and driving people to the polls…The gross imbalance between investing in persuasion over mobilization could potentially be justified if there were evidence showing the efficacy of paid advertising, but there isn’t. Studies looking at decades of election data offer the same conclusion: Paid ads do little to change voter behavior. A recent study by the political scientists Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler looked at the impact of identical ads when broadcast into neighboring areas. One area received, according to the authors, “traditional ground campaigning such as door-to-door canvassing, phone calls and direct mail,” and the other didn’t. The study found that voters in the region that received direct contact had turnout rates 7 percentage points higher than the neighboring region. (President Obama’s average margin of victory in 2012 in the seven battleground states was 4 percent)…In 2016, there’s still time to redirect resources to what we know works: mobilizing voters of color.”

Also at The Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik takes a stab at explaining something I’ve been wondering about, “Why Trump Will Do Better in Ohio Than He Does Nationally: And why that doesn’t guarantee he’ll win the state.” A key graph: “According to the Upshot at the New York Times, the national electorate should be nearly 45% non-college educated white and nearly 30% college-educated white (that site generally believes that exit polls overstate the percentage of nonwhites and college graduates in the electorate). In Ohio, based on the New York Times’ analysis and our own research, the Ohio electorate should be about half non-college white in 2016 and about a third college-educated white. In other words, the gap between non-college and college-educated whites in Ohio is a little bit larger than the national gap, so a growing educational difference in white voter preference — with Trump overperforming with non-college graduates and underperforming with college graduates — probably works more to Trump’s advantage in Ohio than it might in some other states.”

At The Upshot David Rothschild and Sharad Goel cast some more doubt on the polls in their post, “When You Hear the Margin of Error Is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead.” As the authors conclude, “This November, we would not be at all surprised to see Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump beat the state-by-state polling averages by about two percentage points. We just don’t know which one would do it.”

The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson probes “What’s Millennials’ Support for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson All About?” and answers “White skin privilege, that’s what.” Meyerson explains, “A late-September survey of more than 1,750 millennials, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs and Research for the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago, found that most national polls overstate young people’s support for Johnson and Stein because they under-sampled black, Latino, and Asian American millennials. The AP-NORC poll found just 11 percent of millennials backed Johnson, and just 4 percent Stein. Johnson had the backing of 15 percent of whites aged 18 to 30—but just 8 percent of Latinos, 6 percent of Asian Americans, and 4 percent of African Americans. Stein was getting 4 percent of white millennials, but just 2 percent of their black counterparts.Similarly, a second late-September survey by Latino Decisions found that 77 percent of Latino millennials were backing Clinton—exceeding by a full 10 points the 67 percent of older Latinos who said they’d vote for her.”

Jeremy W. Peters reports at the new York Times that “More Asian-Americans Are Identifying as Democrats, Survey Finds.” From his lede: “More than twice as many Asian-Americans now identify as Democrats than as Republicans, and they hold strongly unfavorable views of Donald J. Trump, a new national survey found, emphasizing the Republican Party’s continued struggle to appeal to minority groups…The figures, published on Wednesday by the nonpartisan National Asian-American Survey, suggested that the political allegiances of Asians might be hardening in a way that could harm Republicans with the fastest-growing minority group well beyond 2016.”

I had my doubts about the merits of sending Al Gore out to serve as Clinton’s “Millennial Whisperer,” but Ed Kilgore makes a good point that “there truly is no better witness to the real-life consequences of the not-a-dime’s-worth-of-difference view of the major parties that remains so prevalent among the current batch of youngsters.”

In his Esquire post, “People in Power Don’t Want You to Vote,” Charles Pierce has some choice words for  the voter suppression scams of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans: “This is the kind of penny-ante corruption that has marked the entire political career of Governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary once called the state of Wisconsin. This is the kind of cheap trickeration that has landed so many of his campaign aides in the hoosegow. This is what passes for cleverness in what has become a Republican banana republic…”

The Veep candidate debates are always an odd event, in that the candidates aren’t really running against each other, despite all of the media hoo ha suggesting otherwise. They know that very few voters cast their ballots because of the top of the ticket’s Veep pick, despite the importance of that decision.

History will affirm that, in 2016 more than most years, the Veep nominees were there mostly to bash away at the top of their adversary’s ticket, while exalting their respective running mates. That’s understandable, given the comparatively strong negative opinions many voters have toward the presidential nominees.

There will be lots of discussion for a minute about who “won” the Veep debate, and maybe an inconsequential poll or two. It’s all mostly fodder for lazy journalism. Any revelations about the character and readiness of the Veep candidates (both are smart politicians, but Pence is morally-challenged) will be subordinated in the media to the quality of their zingers.

We’ll let the Republicans trumpet Pence’s best moments, such as they were. Hell, they put out a statement declaring him the winner even before the debate! But we’re not here to stock the false equivalency larder, so here’s some commentary Dems should find useful:

Ezra Klein tweeted “It sort of works in the debate, but Pence shaking head, saying “no he hasn’t” is going to look bad in ads next to Trump saying those things.”

Jonathan Chait observed dryly at New York Magazine, “Pence provided an evening of escapist fantasy for conservative intellectuals who like to close their eyes and imagine their party has nominated a qualified, normal person for president. It is hard to see how he helped the cause of electing the actual nominee…Pence did call for “broad-shouldered American leadership,” which could count as implicit praise of Trump, whose shoulder width Pence has lavished with repeated and almost erotic praise. It is a deflating commendation, similar to the Simpsons episode where Homer asks his father to compliment him, and his father replies, “I was always proud you’re not a short man.”

Jamelle Bouie nailed it at Slate.com with a two-sentence summation: “Whether Kaine or Pence was polished and polite matters less than whether they gave a fair and good-faith accounting of themselves and their politics to the public. And by that standard, Mike Pence was a clear and abysmal failure.”

Glenn Thrush notes at Politico that, “Their performances almost perfectly reflected the priorities of each candidate: Kaine was a hyper-briefed Trump-thumping machine…Pence, on the other hand, seemed less concerned with out-and-out defending his running mate than rope-a-doping away from uncomfortable questions: His standard response was to pucker his face and mock Kaine as “ridiculous” for pelting him with facts, statistics and actual Trump quotes.”

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, an Assistant Professor in the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, explained at an NBC News Latino panel: “A vice presidential candidate should be able to defend the person at the top of the ticket. Kaine not only defended Clinton, he made a thoughtful case for her. But, when Kaine asked Pence to defend the litany of offensive statements Trump has made about Mexicans, women, Senator John McCain, Indiana-born judge Gonzalo Curiel, President Barack Obama, and the African American community, Pence simply didn’t, and it is on this point where he most clearly ‘struck out.’

Many commentators gave Pence an edge for his calm ‘temperament’ in the debate, in comparison to Kaine’s perceived badgering, which was designed to remind voters of something important — that Donald Trump can only be defended with lies and changing the subject. I would have liked to see a little more of Kaine’s attack directed at Pence himself, who has an extremist track record, despite his thin veneer of civility. If you want to know who Mike Pence really is beyond his deceptive persona, read “A More Familiar Monster:It’s tempting to view Mike Pence as the moderate side-kick to Donald Trump. He’s not,” a compact, but devastating take-down by Emily Arrowood, assistant editor for opinion at U.S. News & World Report.

In the final month of the presidential campaign, the oveerriding challenge for Democrats is turnout. Yes, the remaining debates are important, but Democrats can be confident, at least, that Clinton has a strong debating edge and will prepare to win. The top priority in the remaining weeks for her campaign, local Democratic parties and her supporters in the battleground states is mobilizing a great ground game.

The threat of GOP suppression of pro-Democratic voters is real and immediate. It’s not only the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act enforcement provisions, which has unleashed a rash of state measures to tighten i.d. requirements, restrict early voting and other dodgy measures. We are now seeing some outrageous attempts to imtimidate citizens who are engaged in voter registration projects in the states.

At The New Republic Spencer Woodman writes in his post, “The GOP’s Next Target: Get-Out-the Vote Operations?,” about a particularly sleazy Republican-driven suppression effort in Indiana:

On September 15, elections officials across Indiana received an alarming note from Connie Lawson, the state’s Republican secretary of state. “Unfortunately, it has recently come to my attention that nefarious actors are operating here in Indiana,” warned Lawson’s letter, which was sent to election administrators in each of the state’s 92 counties. “A group by the name of the Indiana Voter Registration Project has forged voter registrations. … If you receive one of these applications, please contact the Indiana State Police Special Investigations.”

For weeks, the state had been quietly pursuing an investigation into the Indiana Voter Registration Project, a get-out-the-vote group backed by the liberal-leaning Patriot Majority. Its mission is to resuscitate voter participation in Indiana from a record low in 2014. In cooperation with Secretary Lawson’s office, state police placed six detectives on the case, interrogated members of the voting group, and performed forensics on registration documents…

…Although the IVRP has submitted tens of thousands of voter registration forms in the Hoosier state this year, the state had only identified ten applications that were allegedly forged. (A news report released Thursday said that state police removed 250 suspicious IVRP registrations this week from a county elections office in central Indiana.)

Woodman goes on to share the experience of a voter registration worker, Lydia Garrett, who had to deal with the investigators. “During the interrogation,” Woodman writes, “one of the detectives pointedly told Garrett that he had been a detective for years and could tell when someone was lying” and asked Garrett if she would be willing to take a polygraph test.

In Georgia, writes Woodman, “Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp launched an extensive investigation into the New Georgia Project, a high-profile, Democrat-connected voter registration drive in the state that national commentators suggested held the potential to turn the state purple.”

In Pennsylvania in 2004, writes Erick Trickey at Politico, Republican activists created bottlenecks at the check-in tables for hundreds of University of Pittsburgh students, who had waited for hours to vote in the presidential election. As Trcikey explains,

“The attorneys for the Republican Party were challenging the credentials of pretty much every young voter who showed up,” recalls Pat Clark, a Pittsburgh activist and registered Democrat who was working for an election-protection group that day.

The GOP attorneys were acting as poll watchers. A common practice in many states, partisan poll watching helps parties get out the vote and keep an eye out for irregularities. But in Pennsylvania, laws governing how observers can challenge voters are unusually broad, and that makes them susceptible to abuse.

On that day in 2004, students who were challenged by the GOP lawyers were told they needed to find a friend who could sign an affidavit proving their identity and residence. Other battleground states, concerned that their voter-challenge laws could be misused, have limited or even abolished them in the past decade. But Pennsylvania hasn’t modified its rules. That worries election experts, who fear Donald Trump’s persistent calls for supporters to monitor the polls to prevent cheating could create conflicts and chaos inside and outside of precincts across the state…

Tricky quotes Trump on his call to PA Republicans: ““We’re going to watch Pennsylvania—go down to certain areas and watch and study—[and] make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times. … The only way we can lose, in my opinion—and I really mean this, Pennsylvania—is if cheating goes on.”

PA Republicans are trying to make it even easier to imtimidate voters with poll challenges. As Trickey explains,

…Last week, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives advanced a bill that would allow residents to be certified as watchers anywhere in the state. Current law allows them to watch polls only in the county they live. Republicans, on a near-party-line vote, amended the bill to give it immediate effect—so it could allow Trump poll watchers to range freely across the state on Election Day. But the bill would have to get past Democratic Governor Tom Wolf, and House Democrats have charged that it would “allow outside agitators to intimidate your local poll workers and make it harder for you to vote.”

Yet, it could get worse in PA. As Trickey notes,

In 2004, some of the University of Pittsburgh students who were caught in the interminable line arrived at the front to discover they weren’t registered in the poll books. Some of them were victims of a dirty trickplayed on college campus in three states in that year: canvassers sent by GOP operatives had gotten students to sign petitions supporting medical marijuana or lower car insurance rates, then used their information to submit bogus changes to their voter registrations.

Despite the shameless Republican voter supression projects in Indiana, Penssylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and other states, Democrats are preparing to monitor and chalenge the GOP with increasing effectiveness. Sam Frizell notes at Time Magazine that Democrats have also secured some impressive gains in terms of expanding their constituency:

In North Carolina, a key swing state, teams of lawyers are going county-by-county to add early voting days, pressuring supervisors of elections to include additional days and polling sites. In predominantly Democratic Wake County, home to the state capital of Raleigh, early voting hours have been expanded by 50%. In the blue counties that are home to Charlotte and Fayetteville, the Clinton campaign has bargained for similarly increased hours.

In Florida, Miami-Dade, the biggest liberal base in the state, has expanded its early voting sites from around 20 in 2012 to 30 this year, due to the Clinton campaigns efforts. Broward, Orange and Hillsborough counties—home to Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa—have also expanded early voting hours. In the state where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by a mere 500 votes, a day of extra voting at one polling place could swing the election if it ends up similarly close.

In Minnesota, Democrats have won no-excuse early in-person and mail voting. In North Carolina and Wisconsin, Democratic lawyers have beaten back laws requiring voters to carry IDs, while they’ve sought to reinstitute a week when voters could register and vote early at the same time in Ohio.

A month out from the 2016 national election, it’s clear that the Republican voter suppression machine is unrelenting, and Dems have a lot of work to do to prevent it from prevailing in 2016. The good news is that Democrats are intensely engaged, both nationally and locally, in the fight for a fair election. Clinton and her campaign have done a good job in meeting this challenge. Now it’s up to Democratic rank and file to volunteer to serve in GOTV mobilization and poll watching. With that comitment, an historic Democratic landslide becomes a real possibility.

After a week peppered with self-inflicted disasters for Double-Down Donald, this Washington Post headline may spell out the meme that does the most damage to his grip on blue-collar voters: “Trump could have avoided paying taxes for 18 years, report on tax records says” by WaPo’s David A. Fahrenthold, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jose A. DelReal. You can almost picture the kitchen-table ads in which one spouse asks the other, “How can we vote for a guy who brags about what a rich businessman he is, when he paid no taxes for at least 18 years?”

Stephen R. Weisman, author of “The Great Tax Wars,” has a reminder about how potent tax-dodging by a wealthy presidential candidate can be: “Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, learned this the hard way. During the campaign, he was caught complaining to donors and supporters that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax…But in the same election cycle, it was revealed that the Romneys paid just under $2 million in income tax, an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent, lower than many Americans in the middle class. Obama’s re-election campaign exploited these facts, painting Romney as a person who attacked others for not paying taxes while exploiting the system. This image — of Romney as a cosseted and selfish plutocrat — stuck, and probably contributed to Romney’s defeat.” A Gallup poll conducted April 6-10, found that 61 percent of respondents believed that “upper-income people” paid “too little” in federal taxes. “…A Monmouth University poll last month for instance, 62% of those asked thought it was very important or somewhat important for candidates to show their tax record,” according to CNN Politics.

From David Corn’s Mother Jones post, “Watch Donald Trump Lecture Americans For Not Paying Taxes“: “On July 18, 2011, Trump appeared on Fox News and was asked about President Barack Obama’s comments that well-to-do Americans should make a sacrifice for the country by paying more in taxes. He replied: “Well, I don’t mind sacrificing for the country to be honest with you. But you know, you do have a problem because half of the people don’t pay any tax. And when he’s talking about that he’s talking about people that aren’t also working, that are not contributing to this society. And it’s a problem. But we have 50 percent. It just hit the 50 percent mark. Fifty percent of the people are paying no tax.” And later Trump said, “The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.” Corns got the videos, for those with a strong stomach.

Things are getting even more interesting in the largest swing state. Chris Weigant explains at HuffPo why Trump’s business forays into Cuba could cause him to lose Florida. “…Up until recently, Republicans’ strong anti-Communist and anti-Castro positions have won them the support of most Cuban-Americans in Florida (and elsewhere). Spending money in the Castro regime could blunt this support more than it already has been blunted by time. Younger Cuban-Americans just want to travel to Cuba to see relatives they’ve never met — they’re not as concerned about the Castro brothers. But if this new revelation weakens Trump support among the older [higher turnout] Cuban-American demographic, that could actually tip the state over to Clinton in November. So while this is a minor story for the rest of us, we’ll be closely watching the Florida polling to see if Trump getting caught spending money in Cuba has an effect…” And, as Marc Caputo notes at Politico, “If Trump loses Florida, he has almost no chance of getting to the White House.”

Ed Kilgore quotes David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, who notes “According to the Census, 40.2 million eligible whites weren’t registered to vote at all in 2012. That’s much larger than the 14.7 million whites who were registered who but didn’t turn out. Therefore, if Trump were truly inspiring an uprising of “missing” whites, we should expect a surge (or at least an uptick) in new registrations in blue-collar white and GOP-leaning places…” Kilgore adds, “Trump needs a field operation and voter-targeting analysis, all with the aim of getting his potential supporters registered right now. There’s no sign of that happening; such frills have been disdained by Team Garbage Fire, and the RNC has too much on its hands to make up for that lost opportunity.”

Rubio’s presidential campaign manager Terry Sullivan provides the most succinct description of Trump’s likely down-ballot effect: “He’s definitely hurting the party if for no other reason than these candidates keep getting asked about stupid Trump crap. At best, he is a distraction for these candidates — and at worst, he’s a huge drag on the ticket.” — from “Trump’s bad week is a ‘nightmare’ for the GOP” by WaPo’s  Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Sean Sullivan.

At HuffPo Walter Einenkel has an interesting post, “Texas food trucks move beyond tacos, now serving voter registrations and civic engagement” which offers a new way for Dems to engage a key constituency. As Einekel explains, “A few weeks ago the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, along with other voter registration groups, decided to use Donald Trump supporters’ bizarre racism against them by leveraging the concept that #aTacoTruckOnEveryCorner was a great thing. They began the Guac The Vote campaign. The idea was to get taco truck operators to add voter registration to their normally food-only service. The movement has been spreading. On Tuesday in Texas, Mi Familia Vota (MFV), in tandem with National Voter Registration Day, sent out eight taco trucks that could also serve as voter registration spots.” Dems cvould use some more such creative projects to engage their base voters.

Sam Frizell’s “How Hillary Clinton’s Allies Are Expanding the Vote Behind the Scenes” in Time Magazine provides some good news regarding early voting in battleground states: “In North Carolina, a key swing state, teams of lawyers are going county-by-county to add early voting days, pressuring supervisors of elections to include additional days and polling sites. In predominantly Democratic Wake County, home to the state capital of Raleigh, early voting hours have been expanded by 50%. In the blue counties that are home to Charlotte and Fayetteville, the Clinton campaign has bargained for similarly increased hours…In Florida, Miami-Dade, the biggest liberal base in the state, has expanded its early voting sites from around 20 in 2012 to 30 this year, due to the Clinton campaigns efforts. Broward, Orange and Hillsborough counties—home to Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa—have also expanded early voting hours. In the state where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by a mere 500 votes, a day of extra voting at one polling place could swing the election if it ends up similarly close.” Frizell credits Washington, D.C. attorney Marc Elias for doing a heroic job of coordinating the effort.

At PostPartisan James Downie ruminates on “How Clinton’s debate win could change the race” and notes, “The cringe-worthy moments piled up for Trump, such as saying that he rooted for the housing collapse because “that’s called business” and interrupting moderator Lester Holt’s question about “what do you say to . . . people of color . . .” with “I say nothing.” When Clinton suggested he might be hiding his tax returns because he doesn’t pay any federal income tax, Trump interjected, “That makes me smart,” seeming to imply that Clinton’s charge was correct. He also perpetuated the birther issue by repeating the debunked claim that Clinton’s campaign started it.  The tax returns and birther responses were easily some of Trump’s least popular answers with the dial group voters across the board. (Republican consultant Frank Luntz found similar results.)

My read of the polls and focus group comments following the first debate is that Trump’s strongest card is his ability to articulate the rage many working-class voters feel about jobs being exported to other countries. Clinton may be wasting her efforts defending her track record on the issue — too complicated  to explain for soundbite-focused media. Better she should hit Trump a lot harder on his outrageous hypocrisy on the topic — the way he has exploited cheap foreign labor in his business, his shady international operations, his hidden tax returns masking his offshore operations, to name a few. She should also remind white workers of Trump’s shameful record of stiffing subcontractors. Clinton did a  good job in calling out his two faces on the issue in the first debate. But she and her campaign should double-down on the topic and blast him on it at every opportunity.

Steven A. Holmes explores “The truth about the white working class: A mosaic of their own” at CNN Politics, and notes “While support for Trump is relatively strong across the board among working-class whites, there are significant differences among different groups…Men over the age of 50 are among the Republican nominee’s strongest backers with 68% of voters in this group saying they would consider voting for him, compared to 51% of women who are 50 years or older…Rural (68%), suburban (66%) and Southern (70%) working-class white voters voice support for Trump in larger numbers than urban dwellers (49%) and those living in the West (54%) and Midwest (53%). And 78% of working-class white voters surveyed who say immigrants are a burden on the country say they would consider voting for him, compared to 38% who of those who believe immigrants strengthen the country.”

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and FLOTUS Michelle Obama are campaigning hard for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in an effort to improve her share of young voters, reports Byron Tau at The Wall St. Journal. It would be hard to pick three better youth ambassadors for HRC. All three are highly-popular among younger voters. Some good ads featuring popular musicians, actors and athletes targeting media favored by college students and young blue collar workers might also  help. What value endorsements may have likely results from their influence on generating peer persuasion, which seems to be lacking in the Clinton campaign at the moment.

At PowerPost Stuart Rothenberg explains why “Media hype aside, Clinton still has the edge in this race.”

Democrats take note: Noam N. Levey reports at The L.A. Times that A new Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 78% of respondents want “new restrictions on how much pharmaceutical companies can charge for high-cost drugs for illnesses such as hepatitis or cancer…More than eight in 10 Americans favor allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug makers to get lower prices on medications for people on Medicare, a move that the pharmaceutical industry and its supporters in Congress have blocked for years….And 86% of Americans support new requirements on drug companies to release information on how they set prices.”

Google reports a “huge spike,” particularly in Florida, in searches for “registrarse para votar,” which translates into “how to vote,” reports Philip Bump at The Fix. There is no data, however, revealing whether the uptick was concentrated more in the Cuban-American or Puerto Rican communities.

Again at The Fix, in his post, “Democrats are coming into November in a familiar position: Urgently needing to push turnout,” Philip Bump probes the voting propensities of pro-Democratic constituencies, and finds that data from the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll shows African American and young voters a little behind the 2012 pace in their stated intentions to vote, while Latino voters are showing more interest in voting. Also “Those who support Clinton are more likely to say they plan to vote this year than those backing Obama said at this point in 2012.”

Another “Aleppo moment” for Gary Johnson adds to his “not ready for prime time” image.

In the first of the 2016 presidential debates following the conventions, Donald Trump was most effective with his initial volley of trade-bashing, but on most of the other topics, all he could provide was bluff and bluster. At several points during the debate Trump resembled a nervous high schol D student trying to distract attention from his failure to do any of his homework, while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton received numerous commentator plaudits for her preparedness for the debate.

In his slate.com post, “Clinton Victorious in First Two Debate Snap Polls,” Ben Mathis-Lilley reports on the findings of survey data:

• A PPP poll found that viewers thought Clinton had won the debate by a 51-40 margin. Among that group, 40 percent of viewers said the debate had made them more likely to vote for Clinton vs. 35 percent who said it’d made them more likely to vote for Trump.
• A CNN/ORC poll found that 62 percent of viewers thought Clinton won vs. 27 percent who thought Trump did so. That’s the most lopsided result in CNN’s data set, which goes back until 1984, except for Romney smoking Obama 67-25 at their first debate in 2012. Of CNN’s respondents, 34 percent said the debate had made them more likely to vote for Clinton while 18 percent said it had made them more likely to vote for Trump.

Wall St. Journal reporters Laura Meckler, Allison Kite and Colleen McCain Nelson report on the results of a focus group of undecided voters viewing thew debate in Cleveland conducted by Democratic consultant Chris Kofinis. “At the end of the debate, 11 people said Mrs. Clinton won, no one said Mr. Trump won, and 17 people said neither candidate won.”

At The Daily 202, James Hohman adds,

Republican pollster Frank Luntz conducted a focus group of undecided voters in Pennsylvania. Sixteen said Hillary Clinton won. Five picked Trump, per CBS News….

In a Florida focus group organized by CNN, 18 of 20 undecided voters picked Clinton as the winner.

…In a separate instant-poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, 51 percent said Clinton won and 40 percent picked Trump.

Eight in 10 insiders in the key battleground states thought Clinton performed better, including 57 percent of Republicans, according to the Politico Caucus survey.

Veteran Republican operative David Gergen, now a commentator, observed,

By all traditional standards of debate, Mrs. Clinton crushed. She carefully marshaled her arguments and facts and then sent them into battle with a smile. She rolled out a long list of indictments against Donald Trump, often damaging. By contrast, he came in unprepared, had nothing fresh to say, and increasingly gave way to rants. As the evening ended, the media buried him in criticisms.

“In the end, the lawyerly preparations paid off for Mrs Clinton, as she controlled the evening with forensic precision,” said BBC’s Anthony Zurcher. “While Trump had a strategy – and pursued it on occasion – he was often blown off course by the former secretary of state and torpedoed by his own sometimes badgering performance.”

Crediting Trump with “advantage in some of the debate’s early exchanges, John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker that, “As the night wore on, and as the discussions got more detailed, his lack of respect for the format got him into all sorts of trouble.”

Among Clinton’s more effective responses, her comment on Trump’s hidden tax forms resonates: “I think probably he’s not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he’s trying to hide…So you’ve got to ask yourself: Why won’t he release his tax returns? Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is … maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes.”

Cassidy notes further,

Here, you’d expect the target of the attack to sense the danger. Evidently, Trump didn’t. Having interrupted Clinton during most of her previous answers, he did so again. “That makes me smart,” he said.

Even on Twitter, where people were pulling apart Trump’s words with the relish of a class of third graders dissecting a worm, it took a few seconds for this statement to sink in. Had he really just boasted that he didn’t pay any federal taxes? Indeed, he had.

And that wasn’t the end of it. After Clinton pointed out the implications of Trump’s boast—“So if he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health”—Holt changed the subject and asked about her e-mails. She said what she has said before: that setting up a private e-mail server while serving as Secretary of State was a mistake, for which she accepted responsibility.

Clinton scored another zinger on the topic later on, after Trump said America was broke because of big spending by liberals like Clinton. She who responded with “And maybe because you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.”

Clinton also wounded Trump with his largest constituency: As Cassidy recounts,

I have met a lot of the people who were stiffed by you and your businesses, Donald,” Clinton said, baldly but calmly. “I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects, glass installers, marble installers, drapery installers—like my dad was—who you refused to pay when they finished the work that you asked them to do. We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your club houses at one of your golf courses. It’s a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn’t pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do.

Addressing Trump’s six bankruptcies, Clinton responded “There are a lot of great businesspeople that have never taken bankruptcy once.” Cassidy adds,

Trump simply couldn’t zip it and move on. “I built an unbelievable company, some of the greatest assets anywhere in the world,” he said. Then, referring to the bankruptcies, he added, “Four times … we used certain laws that are there. And when Secretary Clinton talks about people that didn’t get paid, first of all, they did get paid a lot, but [I’ve] taken advantage of the laws of the nation.”

It will be interesting to see how Trump’s defense of screwing his blue collar subcontractors plays with   working-class voters.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore summed up Clinton’s win at New York Magazine:

Hillary Clinton exceeded the very high bar the news media set for her and won on style (smooth versus incoherent), on substance (on stop-and-frisk, on ISIS, on birtherism, on tax returns, on tax policy, on NATO, on Trump’s business record), on endurance, and on visuals. It’s hard to find a topic on which Trump scored a clean point.

Trump was especially ridiculous when he bragged about his temperament, and one of  the best zingers of the evening, came towards the end of the debate, when Clinton responded to Trump’s put-down about Clinton’s “stamina”:

As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee he can talk to me about stamina.

Through it all, Clinton appeared calm and focused, while Trump seemed agitated, as he struggled with a case of the sniffles. Many commentators noted his stark lack of preparation for the debate in comparison to his adversary, and not a few saw it as an indication that he was poorly-prepared to serve as president.