NYT’s Robert Pear reports on the latest GOP schemes to repeal Obamacare, or at least the latest timetable, beginning this week: “Within hours of the new Congress convening on Tuesday, the House plans to adopt a package of rules to clear the way for repealing the health care law and replacing it with as-yet-unspecified measures meant to help people obtain insurance coverage…Then, in the week of Jan. 9, according to a likely timetable sketched out by Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, the House will vote on a budget blueprint, which is expected to call for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act…Later, in the week starting Jan. 30, said Mr. Walden, incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the panel will act on legislation to carry out what is in the blueprint. That bill would be the vehicle for repealing major provisions of the health care law, including the expansion of Medicaid.” No one seems to know just what the particulars will be, but Pear also notes, “The law also saves hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing the growth of Medicare payments to hospitals, nursing homes, health maintenance organizations and other health care providers. Repealing the law would eliminate those savings and thus increase federal spending, the Congressional Budget Office says.”

The Guardian explains various Obamacare repeal scenarios with “How Obamacare could be dismantled by Republicans” by Jessica Glenza and Nadja Popovich. The authors provide a “how it works/how it could go” analysis (with some polling data) concerning 11 key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including: the individual and employer mandates; pre-existing conditions; the Medicare payroll tax; insurance exchanges; health plan subsidies; Medicaid Expansion; Donut Hole and 39 rule; free preventative seervices; converage for young adults; and the ban on coverage limits. There is not much here that supporters of strengthening Obamacare will find encouraging.

What seems likely as not when all of the dust settles, is that the Republicans will make a big flashy show of repealing Obamacare, keep much of it, but call it something else, screw around with funding mechanisms and leave a hideous mess for government accountants, the health care industry and millions of Americans with weakened health security to sort out, and then loudly proclaim a great victory. In her preview of the upcoming week’s repealapalooza festivities, HuffPo’s congressional reporter Laura Barron-Lopez writes “The GOP’s current plan is to move swiftly on repeal legislation and then spend up to four years developing a consensus on a new set of health care reforms ― an achievement that has otherwise eluded the party for years. But Republicans are already split over how long they’ll spend creating that replacement. Party leaders expect it to take years, but some conservatives are pushing for a replacement to be finished within one year…Democratic leaders have been defiant about Republicans’ chances of pulling off this effort. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predicted that Republicans would not repeal Obamacare once they realized how difficult it would be to replace…“They’re not going to repeal it,” Pelosi said earlier this month. “I don’t think they’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act.”

At New York Magazine Ed Kilgore explains “The Latest ‘Repeal and Delay’ Idea for Obamacare: Grandfathering!,” noting that “Now comes the American Enterprise Institute’s conservative health wonk James Capretta with an idea that cuts to the chase: Why not just “grandfather” all the people currently receiving benefits via the ACA and make whatever the new “replacement” system turns out to be prospective for new people seeking assistance?” Kilgore acknowledges that “the idea has the advantage of being relatively simple and predictable,” but adds “Until the GOP can pass something that garners bipartisan support and solves the Obamacare problems it has identified, it should do nothing. That’s the ultimate “grandfathering” — leave the system in place. That is the only real solution politically or policy-wise that doesn’t create a raft of victims. The sooner the GOP figures this out, the better.”

Sean Williams reports at Fox Business, no less, that “In an Ironic Twist, Obamacare Enrollment Hits an All-Time High.” Williams writes, “Yet in spite of its perceived demise, Obamacare enrollment is currently proceeding at a record pace, at least according to the Department of Health and Human Services. According to the HHS, roughly 6.4 million people had enrolled via HealthCare.gov, the federally run website that runs the online marketplace exchange for more than three dozen states, between Nov. 1 and Dec. 19. This represents an increase of nearly 7% year over year, or about 400,000 enrollees…The data midway through 2016 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the uninsured rate had fallen to 8.9% from 16% in the quarter immediately preceding Obamacare’s implementation on the individual market. If the early enrollment data is any indication, the uninsured rate could fall even further in 2017.”

Vox will be running an live-streamed interview with President Obama on Friday, January 6th on the topic of Obamacare repeal prospects, with an audience of Obamacare enrollees who are also members of the Vox Facebook community. Meanwhile Sarah Kliff and Ezra Klein write at Vox that “the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces have struggled to attract health insurers who want to sell coverage” and “about half of Obamacare enrollees say that they’re unsatisfied with the high costs of premiums and deductibles… That’s what we want to talk to the president about: the lessons he has learned from six years of implementing the biggest health coverage expansion in decades, his thoughts on its political vulnerability now, and the challenges Republicans may confront as they embark on a similar task.” Kliff and Klein note that “Economists, however, are skeptical that Republican plans will cover as many people as Obamacare currently does. Estimates predict that the plans the GOP has offered so far will lead to anywhere from 3 to 21 million Americans losing health coverage, depending on which plan Republicans pick.”

At Forbes, Duke University/American Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Conover mulls over “How The Patient CARE Act Would Repeal And Replace Obamacare” and observes that “this plan would result in very modest reductions in coverage, accompanied by massive federal tax savings (to the tune of more than one half trillion over ten years!).” I’m guessing that Conover’s health security will not be adversely affected by the “modest reductions in coverage” he envisions for others.

However, at Vox Sarah Kliff explains some of the effects of The Patient CARE Act in less than glowing terms: “There are two economic analyses of CARE Act available at this point. One, from the RAND Corporation, estimates that it would cause 9 million Americans to lose coverage by 2026. Another, from Parente’s Center for Health Economy, estimates that 4 million would lose insurance the same year… In addition, the Patient Care Act suffers from the same major flaw as all of the republican proposals,” making insurance cheaper for young people and more expensive for old people.” Further, “Eibner has done economic modeling of the CARE Act (although not Better Way yet) and is able to show who benefits and who loses under the proposal…She finds that under the CARE Act, only 85 percent of 21-year-olds would see their premiums either stay the same or decline compared with Obamacare. But 100 percent of 50- and 60-year-old enrollees would see their premiums increase under CARE Act.” Thus many seniors who are surviving on Social Security can expect a health care premium hike under this plan.

What is so frustratingly childish about all of the Republican Obamacare repeal talk, is that they all know that none of the health care reforms they now claim to support would ever have gotten a fair hearing, much less enacted, without Obamacare. The GOP has always been content to let health insurers and ritzy physician groups gouge and impoverish consumers who face major illnesses. With the exception the Medicare prescription drug benefit Bush II signed, the Republican Party has never provided leadership for broadening health care security for Americans. Instead they have resisted significant reforms, from Medicare and Medicaid on down to the Affordable Care Act. When you take a look at the most recent polling on Obamacare, you find more respondents saying they “disapprove” than “approve” of the ACA. But when the question is framed in terms of should it be repealed or expanded, the most recent Pew Research poll, conducted Oct. 20-25, found that 53 percent of respondents say “expand it” or “leave it as it is.” No matter what happens to Obamacare, President Obama can always be proud that his leadership has saved countless lives and improved the health securitry of millions of Americans. Thanks to him, the Republicans can no longer hide from public demand for affordable health care.

At NPR Linda Wertheimer interviews Nick Rathod, executive director of the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), which fights for progressive causes and candidates in state houses across America. Rathod notes that”one of the things that progressives have done…is that we try to pass big pieces of legislation here in D.C. and then educate everyone on the back end where conservatives have developed policies that are tailored to local communities and then have the conversation and build narratives around what that means for people. I mean, I grew up in Nebraska, and when I talk with my conservative friends there, we’re pretty close on a lot of the issues. But the thing is that we just haven’t ever really sat down and talked to people about what it – what equal pay actually means. You know, do you care whether your daughter gets paid the same as your son? I think most people would say yeah. Do you care that people have a living wage, that people who are playing by the rules, working hard, I think people would say yes to that. Let’s have those conversations locally, and let’s shake out who is actually fighting for those things.”

Here is some good post-election news for progressives, as reported by Joanna Walters at The Guardian:  “From smaller local organizations to household names such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, nonprofit organizations across the US reported fundraising tallies many magnitudes higher than in previous years as they approached their end-of-year donation drives…Progressive causes in the US saw a spike in donations immediately after the election on 8 November from voters dismayed, outraged or even frightened by the outcome. In the weeks since, this wave of strategic giving has compounded. Planned Parenthood has received more than 300,000 donations in the six weeks since the election, 40 times its normal rate. Around half the donors were millennials and 70% had never given to the family planning organization before, a spokesman told the Guardian.”

Gene B. Sperling, director of the National Economic Council from 1996 to 2001 and from 2011 until 2014, has a New York Times op-ed, “The Quiet War on Medicaid,” focusing on a looming crisis Ed Kilgore flagged at New York Magazone back on December 1st. As Sperling writes, “if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid — one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families and people with disabilities…Of the two battles, the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain. Neither Mr. Trump nor Senate Republicans may have the stomach to fully own the political risks of Medicare privatization. But not only have Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid through arbitrary block grants or “per capita caps,” during the campaign, Mr. Trump has also proposed block grants.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich discusses Donad Trump’s “7 Techniques to Control the Media” in a ‘Democracy Now’ interview with Amy Goodman. Discussing one of the points, Reich observes, “Donald Trump has, almost from the beginning of his campaign, and certainly in the—and he’s continued it—in the post-election period, to denigrate and berate the media. He holds rallies, and he talks about the dishonest media. He uses adjectives like “scum” and “scoundrel” to describe the media. He picks out individual members of the press who have criticized him, and talks about them in very critical terms or mocks them. This is not the habit of a democratic—democratically elected president…We’ve never before had a president or president-elect who has taken the media on so directly and so negatively and tried to plant in the public’s mind—and I think this is the real danger, Amy—trying to plant in the public’s mind the notion that the press is the enemy itself.” Video of entire interview here.

The debate about the substance of the best Democratic message will continue on through the next few elections. As for the best message vehicle, here’s a clue: “So what medium really is a primary news source for the largest number of Americans? We can find an answer to that in a different Pew Research report, this one from June, titled, “The Modern News Consumer.” It compares the percentage of U.S. adults who “often” get news from various platforms. By this metric, television remains the dominant medium by a significant margin, at 57 percent. A distant second is “online,” at 38 percent. This combines the 18 percent who get news often from social media with an overlapping 28 percent who get it often from “news websites/apps.” Third on the list is radio at 25 percent, followed by print newspapers at 20 percent.” from “How Many People Really Get Their News From Facebook?” by Will Oremus at slate.com.

Michael Moore’s assertion that Trump was going to “get us all killed” seems a little less of an overstatement in the wake of Trump’s tweet last week that that the U.S. should “greatly strengthen and expand” its nuclear capability.” In their syndicated column on “The chaos theory of Donald Trump: Washington Post analysis,” John Wagnern and Abby Phillip share a chilling quote about it by a foreign policy expert: “We’re just operating in this world where you cannot believe the things he says,” said Eliot Cohen, a foreign policy expert and former George W. Bush administration official at the State Department. “It will have large consequences for our allies and our adversaries, and it’s going to greatly magnify the danger of miscalculation by all kinds of people.” It’s one thing for Trump to be a ‘bomb-thrower’ in his domestic policy tweets, without regard for the consequences. But loose talk about escalating the nuclear arms race is a much more dangerous kind of foolishness. The top foreign policy pros should ask for a meeting with Trump at the earliest opportunity, to at least try to get him to stop tweeting about the arms race.

Greg Sargent adds to this concern in his Plum Line post, “Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single tweet?,” noting “Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, points out that in peacetime, any belligerent Trump Tweet about nuclear weapons might not appear as alarming, simply because “confirmation bias” might lead key actors not to interpret it in its most frightening light at that moment. Amid rising international tensions, though, that confirmation bias might work in the other direction, he says…“Imagine we’re in a crisis — if he recklessly Tweets, people could read these things in the worst possible light,” Lewis tells me. “The North Koreans have a plan to use nuclear weapons very early in a conflict. They’re not going to wait around. If they think we are going, they’re going to use nuclear weapons against South Korea and Japan.””

Nate Cohn shares some revealing data at The Upshot: “The exit polls also show all of the signs that Mr. Trump was winning over Obama voters. Perhaps most strikingly, Mr. Trump won 19 percent of white voters without a degree who approved of Mr. Obama’s performance, including 8 percent of those who “strongly” approved of Mr. Obama’s performance and 10 percent of white working-class voters who wanted to continue Mr. Obama’s policies…Mr. Trump won 20 percent of self-identified liberal white working-class voters, according to the exit polls, and 38 percent of those who wanted policies that were more liberal than Mr. Obama’s…Taken together, Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, trade, China, crime, guns and Islam all had considerable appeal to white working-class Democratic voters, according to Pew Research data. It was a far more appealing message than old Republican messages about abortion, same-sex marriage and the social safety net.”

At The Jacobin Seth Ackerman’s “A Blueprint for a New Party” includes a critique of the Democratic Party, arguing in essence that it is neither Democratic, nor a Party. Ackerman is not interested in improving the Democratic Party. But he offers several interesting observations, among them: “It’s true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we’re better off with such politicians in office than without them…But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class interests. “Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including progressives, must respond…In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone…Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no members…fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand] democracies, where members join a political party through a process of application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.”

On the the treasured myths entertained by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign was the belief that the Trump campaign lagged badly in digital media operations. Media reports were full of disparaging comments about Trump’s poor or nearly nonexistant ‘ground game,’ coupled with references to the Clinton campaign’s whiz bang digital media edge. Both views appear to have been grossly overstated.

In Joel Winston’s Medium post, “How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election,” he explains:

…The Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.

..Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

When the ballots were counted, African American turnout was substantially lower than for 2008 and 2012, and Clinton lagged significantly with young women behind projections based on polls. At salon.com, for example, Nico Lang notes, “While black voters accounted for 25 percent of all early ballots cast in the Sunshine State in 2012, that number dropped to just 16 percent on the eve of the 2016 election, as Politico reported…Amid data showing an 8.5 percent drop in blacks’ early voting in North Carolina, the state’s GOP sent out a press release arguing that this showed a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton’s campaign among people of color.”

It has been argued that the attrition of African American voters in 2016 was understandable, without Obama on the ballot, and Republican-driven voter suppression measures were also far more prevalent in 2016. However, Winston notes that the Trump campaign also created an animation of Clinton’s controversial “super predator” comment, and targeted large numbes of African Americans on Facebook.

As for the scope of the Trump campaign’s digital operations, Winston reports that “the Trump digital team consisted of 100 staffers, including a mix of programmers, web developers, network engineers, data scientists, graphic artists, ad copywriters, and media buyers” headed by Brad Parscale in the campaign’s San Antonio HQ (hence ‘Project Alamo’).

In addition, “Parscale worked closely with President-Elect Trump and was one of select few members of Trump’s inner-circle entrusted to tweet from his personal Twitter account, @ realDonaldTrump…On the strength of Parscale’s ability to generate campaign donations using Facebook and e-mail, the digital operations division was the Trump campaign’s largest source of cash.”

Winston quotes Sasha Issenberg and Joshua Green, who wrote in Business Week that “Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers.” In terms of Parscale’s methods, Winston notes:

Parscale uploaded the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of known Trump supporters into the Facebook advertising platform. Next, Parscale used Facebook’s “Custom Audiences from Customer Lists” to match these real people with their virtual Facebook profiles. With Facebook’s “Audience Targeting Options” feature, ads can be targeted to people based on their Facebook activity, ethic affinity, or “location and demographics like age, gender and interests. You can even target your ad to people based on what they do off of Facebook.”

Parscale then expanded Trump’s pool of targeted Facebook users using “Lookalike Audiences”, a powerful data tool that automatically found other people on Facebook with “common qualities” that “look like” known Trump supporters. Finally, Parscale used Facebook’s “Brand Lift” survey capabilities to measure the success of the ads…Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads.

Winston also reports that “RNC Chairman Reince Preibus famously invested more than $100 million dollars into the party’s data and infrastructure capabilities since Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss…The RNC granted Trump access to its list of 6 million Republicans, but Trump could only keep 20% of any cash he raised from the list. The other 80% of campaign donations belonged to the RNC.” Further,

Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)…Another critical supplier of data for the Trump campaign and Project Alamo was Cambridge Analytica, LLC, a data-science firm known for its psychological profiles of voters…The locations of Trump’s campaign rallies, the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, were chosen by a Cambridge Analytica algorithm that ranked places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters.

“I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says the Trump campaign Chairman Steve Bannon. (Bannon is also a Board Member of Cambridge Analytica.) “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”

Winston clearly believes that Trump’s digital media operations were the pivotal factor leading to his Electoral College victory. We’ll leave it to historians to argue about whether that’s an overstatement, in light of all of the other factors, which together add up to a giant clusterf*ck. But Dems surely now have enough evidence, thanks to Winston, to bury forever the quadrennial myth of Democratic digital dominance in presidential elections.

At Politico Gabriel Debenedetti’s “Democrats wrestle with Rust Belt dilemma: Party leaders in fast-growing states warn against obsessing over Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin” cautions against overreacting to Trump’s electoral college win and notes a couple of bright spots for the future. “The Arizona and Georgia margins turned out to be closer than in Ohio and Iowa — two swing states Obama won twice,” notes Debenedetti. “…Reed, the Atlanta mayor, makes the point that Clinton lost North Carolina and its 15 electoral votes — where her team spent tens of millions of dollars — by just roughly one point less than she lost Georgia and its 16 votes…“It would be a mistake to not look at the gains that were made in Georgia,” said Rebecca DeHart, executive director of that state’s Democratic Party, nodding to the looming uncertainty about resources.”

Lynn Vavreck reported in the New York Times that “Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.”

In his Daily Beast post, “Dems Can’t Afford to Say Yes to Trump: The few last times Democrats were in the oppositional spotlight, they were excessively accommodating to Republican presidents. The party can’t risk that now,” Michael Tomasky makes a strong case against Dems taking an accommodationist tilt toward Trump. In one graph Tomasky shreds the myth that Dems outspent Republicans leading up to 2016, particularly at the state level: “…It’s the right that spends more. Rob Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance, the group of wealthy liberal donors that tries to coordinate investment in a progressive infrastructure, has studied this question for years. He told me: “The right has been building its infrastructure for more than 40 years. Whereas 10 years ago the right’s independent political apparatus was outspending progressives in electorally relevant state-based political mobilization by over two to one, in this cycle that margin appears to have been in excess of four to one.”

You’ve probably seen a fair number of posts disparaging “identity politics” in recent weeks. Most of these articles are talking about pro-liberal demographic groups. But Trump played the identity card with a much heavier hand than did Clinton, and more pundits than you can count attribute his electoral college victory and state upsets to his leveraging white working-class resentments. Laila Lalami’s “The Identity Politics of Whiteness” explores the phenomenon at The New York Times Magazine.

From “Vilsack’s tough message for fellow Democrats: Stop writing off rural America,” by Greg Jaffe at The Washington Post: “Democrats need to talk to rural voters,” Vilsack warned this summer. “They can’t write them off. They can’t ignore them. They actually have to spend a little time talking to them.” There is no question that Democrats do better in towns and counties where they put in the time, as Obama proved in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. For a strongly-stated opposing view, however, read this post.  A possible copromise might be for Dems to campaign more in rural areas in state and local races and during the presidential primary elections and caucuses, but for Democratic presidential candidates hold off on spending much time and resources in rural areas in the 2020 general election presidential race.

Although the 2018 election offers a scary landscape for Democrats campaigning for senate seats, at The Plum Line Greg Sargent points out that Democrats face more encouraging terrain in upcoming races for governorships. Sargent writes that “in 2017 and 2018, there will be a total of 38 gubernatorial contests…Of these races, those that will feature Republicans defending GOP-held seats…will vastly outnumber those that will feature Democrats defending Dem-held seats…The vast majority of these races take place in 2018 (only two, Virginia and New Jersey, take place next year), so we’re really talking about the 2018 map here. It has big transformative potential for Democrats, since many of the states in which Republicans are defending seats are ones Barack Obama (and to a lesser extent Hillary Clinton) won…There has been a great deal of chatter about how Democrats should retool their economic message to win back the working class and middle class whites that Trump overperformed among, but these races provide a chance to actually try to do this in the immediate future.”

Maybe 2016 really was the “facebook election,” though not in a good way, as Jenna Wortham observes, also in the New York Times Magazine: “Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with. But if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet at all.” Despite all of the educational promise of social media, it may be feeding polarization, instead of reducing it. Not only are left and right mostly preaching to their respective choirs on social media, the medium seems to encourage name-calling, insults and ostracism. What might help would be social media forums that  stimulate civil dialogue and consensus-building.

In The NYT Sunday Review Steven Greenhouse previews the tough times ahead for unions under Trump:  “Unions are expecting a series of stinging blows. Even as Mr. Trump talks of spending $1 trillion to improve infrastructure, many Republicans are eager to repeal an 85-year-old law requiring that contractors pay union-level wages on federal projects. Congressional Republicans are likely to take up nationwide “right-to-work” legislation, which would sap union treasuries by barring any requirement that workers pay union dues or fees. And even if Senate Democrats manage to block such a law, Republican gains in Kentucky and Missouri mean those states are likely to enact their own right-to-work laws…Mr. Trump will most likely scrap most of Mr. Obama’s executive orders on labor, including ones requiring federal contractors to disclose labor law violations, provide paid sick leave and pay a $10.10 minimum wage. He may also erase a regulation that lets four million additional workers qualify for overtime pay. (Last Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas suspended that regulation.) And the National Labor Relations Board under Mr. Trump will no doubt overturn numerous union-friendly moves by the Obama board, among them ones speeding up unionization elections and giving graduate research and teaching assistants at private universities the right to unionize.”

At HuffPo Robert Kuttner has an article that puts many of the Democratic-friendly post-mortems in perspective. Kuttner argues, “While posing as a populist, he [Trump] seems inclined to let the Republican establishment have its way, not just with welfare for the poor but with federal programs that Middle America actually values, such as social security and medicare…At some point, even the devout Trump backers may notice that the man is a fraud. And Democrats need to be there with a brand of constructive economic nationalism that actually serves working people…But in the meantime a great deal is at risk — not just the programs going back to Franklin Roosevelt and the civil rights victories going back to LBJ and Martin Luther King but constitutional democracy itself…Now, can the Democrats please suspend their usual ritual of the circular firing squad — and get on with the business of defending what’s decent in America?”

The following article by Stan Greenberg and James Carville is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:

CLINTON IN 12-POINT LEAD, POTENTIAL FOR DOWNBALLOT GAINS

Tuesday, October 25 2016

Attachments: Report [ ] 259 Kb Toplines [ ] 292 Kb The final pre-election national survey for Democracy Corps shows Clinton moving into a commanding 12-point lead over Trump, getting to 50 percent of the vote as the third party vote is squeezed.[1] This lead is produced by some historic voting patterns and a breathtakingly unpopular Republican Party led by Donald Trump. It is also produced by a country where President Obama’s approval has reached 56 percent and wrong track numbers for the country’s direction have begun to fall. Critically, the association of GOP candidates with Trump and a closing Democratic economic message have the chance to translate to much larger Democratic margins down-ballot.  After voters hear the simulated campaign play out, Democrats take a 9-point lead in the House ballot, just at the edge of a majority. Clinton has consolidated 90 percent of Democrats and actually has room to grow. Trump is winning white working class men 57 to 31 percent, but that is not better than Mitt Romney (65 to 32 percent). He is only running even with independents, men, white college educated men and seniors. That allows Clinton to run up the score with women (56 to 33 percent), unmarried women (59 to 31 percent), white college educated women (56 to 30 percent), millennials (59 to 20 percent) and in the suburbs (54 to 36 percent). The third party vote has been squeezed and Gary Johnson is only getting 5 percent of the four-way ballot. Though it is a small sample size, the remaining Johnson voters are mostly anti-Trump Republicans and they may not vote in the end: just 39 percent report the highest interest in voting, half the level of all likely voters. Jill Stein is only getting 2 percent of the four-way vote and her voters are Democrats. No one is surprised that Trump emerges with a net favorability of -28 points and 60 percent hold unfavorable views of the GOP nominee. The House Republicans have an even worse image than Trump (-31 unfavorable) and the Republican Party has a -23 point unfavorable image with over half unfavorable (53 percent). With the Democratic Party at parity of positive and negative reactions, the Republicans have a brand problem. That is unlikely to change as only 26 percent of Republicans want their leaders in the next Congress to work with President Clinton to make progress. There is a chance to translate Clinton’s emerging landslide into a wave down-ballot. In a simulated contest where the Republican congressional candidate argues they are needed as an independent check on Clinton, the Democrats move into a 9-point lead in the congressional match-up after the Republican is attacked. Overall, the current strategy of linking Republican candidates to Donald Trump and not opposing him produces the biggest overall shift down-ballot. That is an effective message and moves Republicans and independents. But when Democrats echo the economic message that Clinton used in the debates – vowing to build an economy for everyone and raise taxes on the rich, in contrast with an opponent who wants more trickle-down economics – there is dramatically more consolidation with Democrats and the Rising American Electorate, particularly unmarried women and white unmarried women and millennials. There is room for more consolidation among Democrats down-ballot and at the top of the ticket and this economic message will help Democratic candidates get there.   [1] This national survey took place October 21-24, 2016.  Respondents who voted in the 2012 election or registered since were selected from the national voter file.  Likely voters were determined based on stated intention of voting next month.  Margin of error for the full sample is +/-3.27 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.  Of the 900 respondents, 65 percent were interviewed via cell phone in order to accurately sample the American electorate.

For your response, the next time some Trump defender charcterizes the Republican nominee as some sort of champion of working people: “…Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans…who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them…Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages…n addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.” — from USA TODAY exclusive: Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills.

It’s not enough to sell our candidates to the public. We must also work on improving the party’s image. If Dems won’t define the party, Republicans will. This is an OK start, but Democrats need a continuous series of ads that define what the party has accomplished and what it means to be a Democrat.

More required reading for Democrats: “Here’s how to fight Trump’s ballot bullies” by WaPo columnist Colbert King, who writes, “Trump has called for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in “certain areas,” a tactic that could be aimed at intimidating and suppressing the votes of African Americans and other minorities…“And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about,” Trump said at an Ohio rally in August. “Right? You know what I’m talking about.”…Expect Trump’s vigilantes to hover at the polling places of people who don’t look like them. They will be taking a page from their forebears, who used poll taxes, literacy tests and violence to challenge and suppress the black vote…Trump and his posse make GOTV all the more urgent…National civil rights groups, led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, intend to come out in force nationwide with volunteers trained to serve as a first line of defense against the intimidators…Pastors have to take to their pulpits and preach on exercising this basic right. Closer to home, the influential Metropolitan AME Church is spearheading “Ready, Set, Vote” to stir up voters, especially millennials, to go to the polls…National organizations such as the Links Inc., a group of nearly 14,000 professional women of color in 41 states and the District, are devoting the month to mobilizing voters.”

In their Washington Post article, “Buoyed by rising polls, Clinton shifts to a new target: the House and Senate,” Philip Rucker, Ed O’Keefe and Mike Debonis write “Hillary Clinton is pouring $1 million into Indiana and Missouri in the campaign’s final weeks — not because the Democratic presidential nominee thinks she can carry those reliably Republican states, but because she believes that, with an extra push, Democrats can win the Senate and governors’ races there…In Michigan, the Clinton campaign is propelling a late surge by Democratic state legislative candidates to regain their House majority. In parts of Maine, Nebraska, Virginia and other states, Clinton volunteers are touting Democratic congressional candidates in their phone calls and fliers to voters. And as Clinton rallied supporters across Pennsylvania on Saturday with running mate Tim Kaine, she touted Senate hopeful Katie McGinty and attacked her GOP opponent, Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, as beholden to presidential nominee Donald Trump…“As we’re traveling in these last 17 days, we’re going to be emphasizing the importance of electing Democrats down the ballot,” Clinton told reporters Saturday night.”

Politico’s Scott Bland illuminates Democratic funding strategy to win a House majority, and observes: “To date, more than a dozen Democratic challengers are benefiting from such “hybrid” advertising, getting extra hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The technique has been a small but consistent part of Democratic strategy in recent years, but new legal guidance has also allowed Democrats to share costs on ads linking their opponents to Trump on policy…“You have a historically unpopular Republican presidential nominee, which increases the appeal of doing this sort of thing,” said a Democratic operative. “If you can find a way now that you only have to pay 50 percent of an ad, and link your opponent to Trump, and that makes strategic sense in the district, that’s a no-brainer.”..The cost-sharing has turned into a critical tool for the DCCC, as it suddenly tries to compete in more districts and support little-known challengers made unexpectedly viable by Trump’s late slide.”

Less than three weeks from the election, there is a stat tie for the presidential race in GA, with Trump at 44, Clinton at 42 and Gary Johnson at 9, according the the Atlanta Journal Constitution poll released October 21st.

‘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.”

At The Daily Beast Democratic speechwriters/strategists Kenneth Baer and Jeffrey Nussbaum have a suggestion for the Democratic nominee in their post, “Here’s Hillary’s Debate Knockout Punch—Will She Use It?: When the topic is cultural politics, Trump bites back. But when it’s class politics, his answers are lame—or he’s just silent. Therein lies the key.” Among their insights: “A little over a week ago, that ex-pugilist, Senator Harry Reid, leveled a blistering attack on Donald Trump as a “scam artist” who “rips off working people” and is hiding his tax returns, playing footsy with Vladimir Putin, and running a fake charity all to enrich himself…Trump’s response? Silence. It’s amazing to think that there’s anything that will quiet Trump, but after examining the political campaign to date, it’s clear that Donald Trump is well aware of what attacks hurt him, and which ones don’t. Trump’s tell is simple: he ignores the attacks he can’t parry, the ones that could open a conversation that would hurt him with the voters who (currently) support him most strongly.”

USA Today’s Heidi M. Przybyla lists “5 things Hillary Clinton needs to do on debate night,” including: “play offense”; “Be more likeable”; “Outline a positive vision”; “go off script”; and “Have a compelling answer about Iraq and Syria.” At Roll Call, Jonathan Allen offers “Five Objectives for Hillary Clinton in the Debates,” including: 1. Tell us what you’ll do for the country; 2. Let baby Donald hide behind your skirt; 3. Destroy Trump’s economic message; 4. Talk tougher on national security; and 5. Stop talking in paragraphs and pauses. Greg Sargent explains at The Plum Line “Clinton can win the debate even if Trump doesn’t act unhinged. Here’s how,” and suggests, “Job One for Clinton is to project as much steadiness, sobriety of purpose, and mastery of complex issues as possible, on the theory that voters will reward the candidate who actually takes the debates seriously as a proving ground for the excruciating pressures and brutally tough choices required of a president.”

“With by far the largest debate audience in history expected, working the refs could have an unusually rich payoff for the perceived “winner.” But the race is going to have to wind up being very close for a single debate to really matter. In the end, it did not in 2012.” — from Ed Kilgore’s New York Magazine post, “These Are the Lessons To Take — and Not To Take — From the First Debate in 2012”

New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg sees the first presidential debate, conducted by Lester Holt, a registered Republican, as “A Moment of Truth for Presidential Debate Moderators.” Rutenberg writes, “Can the moderators this fall turn their debate stages into falsehood-free zones? What does that look like in this election? Debate organizers say they want to avoid a situation in which the debate becomes one big fact-checking or hectoring exercise and never gets to important policy differences…Nobody wants a repeat of Matt Lauer’s performance a couple of weeks ago when he let Mr. Trump’s claim that he always opposed the Iraq war go unchallenged …Actually, scratch that. One person does — Mr. Trump, who portrayed critics of Mr. Lauer as liberals seeking to push debate moderators to be tougher on him than on Mrs. Clinton.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “Debate Monitors Shouldn’t Duck“: “Holt and his colleagues Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace need to keep in mind that they are far more affluent than most of the people watching the debates. They should think hard about what life is like for those — from Appalachia to Compton, Calif., from the working class in Youngstown, Ohio, to the farm workers in Immokalee, Fla. — who find themselves in less comfortable circumstances than those at the media’s commanding heights…I want Trump pressed about whether foreign interests have helped prop up his business empire and then asked how voters can possibly judge the truthfulness of his answer if he refuses to release any tax returns…In the short term, I’d be worried that the talk of Trump’s “low expectations”at the first debate is a tip-off that the media hivemind might frame a debate tie as a Trump win.”

In “Election Update: Where The Race Stands Heading Into The First Debate,” Nate Silver sets the statistical stage for tonight’s debate. “…Clinton is a pretty good bet at even-money. As of Sunday morning, she’s a 58 percent favorite according to both our polls-only and polls-plus models…FiveThirtyEight shows somewhat better odds for Trump than most other forecast models. Not all 2-point leads are created equal, and Clinton’s is on the less-safe side, certainly as compared with the roughly 2-point lead that President Obama had over Mitt Romney on the eve of the 2012 election…about 18 percent of the electorate isn’t yet committed to one of the major-party candidates, as compared with 6 percent late in 2012.¹ The number of undecided and third-party voters has a strong historical correlation with both polling volatility and polling error — and in fact, the polls have been considerably more volatile this year than in 2012.”

Meanwhile, “Trump is trying to rig the debate by kneecapping Lester Holt,” argues Colbert I. King at Post Politics. “Holding them both to the same standard should do the trick. Anticipating tricks from Trump, a master trickster, is Holt’s challenge. Good refs know the game, and the characters out to game the system…Trump’s public argument being that Holt will throw off the debate if he tries to correct Trump. Trump’s objective: reduce Holt to a potted plant in the moderator’s chair.”

At Vox, Dara Lind explores “The real reason debate moderators don’t want to fact-check Donald Trump” and notes, “…On the eve of the first debate, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates, Janet Brown, crushed those daydreams into finely ground dust…”I don’t think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica,” she told CNN. In her view, it’s the candidates’ job to fact-check each other — not the moderator’s job to fact check them.” However, the monitors absolutely should badger the candidates to answer the question at hand. No free passes.

CNN reports that the first debate will “likely be the most-watched political event in history.” A cord-cutter alert from Daily Beast’s Amelia Warshaw: “All the major news networks will also be offering free live streams in addition to those provided by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Viewers without a cable subscription can view the debate live on CNN.com, for free and without a cable provider login.”

At New York Magazine Jonathan Chait blisters NBC moderator Matt Lauer for his weak interviews of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the “Commander-in-Chief Forum” sponsored by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. “Lauer’s performance was not merely a failure, it was horrifying and shocking…Most voters, and all the more so undecided voters, subsist on a news diet supplied by the likes of Matt Lauer. And the reality transmitted to them…is a world in which Clinton and Trump are equivalently flawed.” Chait adds that “a third of Lauer’s questioning time” focused on Clinton’s private email server. As for Lauer’s softball interview with Trump, Chait cites Lauer’s “completely ineffectual technique of asking repeatedly if he is ready to serve as commander-in-chief,” while giving Trump a fairly easy ride on his relations with Putin. Chait’s summation: “The average undecided voter is getting snippets of news from television personalities like Lauer, who are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian.”

Also at New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore faults Lauer for weak follow-up: “Worse yet, the fast pace seemed to have emptied moderator Matt Lauer’s brain of any goal other than asking hard-hitting questions and moving on, providing the impression that the two candidates’ answers were equivalent expressions of reasonable approaches to U.S. security challenges.” Regarding Lauer’s Trump interview, Kilgore notes the Republican nominee’s “calls for much higher defense spending, a larger military, and the elimination of any restraints of use of military force against civilians.” Kilgore cites Trump’s “expressions of admiration of Vladimir Putin,” which did nothing to alleviate concerns that “Trump might emulate his Russian friend in “uniting” his country and Making It Great Again via radical curbs on dissent and diversity.”

Michael M. Grynbaum’s New York Times report on the interviews, “Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism Over Clinton-Trump Forum,” noted the complaint that Lauer allowed Trump room to ramble, while clipping Clinton’s remarks at several points: “Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump,” Norman Ornstein, the political commentator, wrote in a Twitter message, adding: “Tough to be a woman running for president.”

The headline for Aaron David Miller’s CNN report on the interviews, “A good night for Putin and those damn emails” puts it well. Miller elaborates, “it’s striking how many serious foreign policy issues weren’t covered. Indeed, instead of asking tough questions on China, nuclear weapons, under what conditions would a candidate use force, NBC chose to play off the same thoroughly politicized and well-worn themes: support for the Iraq war and Clinton’s emails. There was very little that was productive or new…What the night demonstrated clearly, though, is that Trump is not comfortable with the substance of foreign policy issues, nor is he able to engage in detailed or even general conceptions of how to formulate policies…On balance, Clinton acted and sounded more serious and more presidential.”

Shane Goldmacher has a revealing Politico story explaining the central role of the largely unknown Elan Kriegel, the Clinton campaign’s director of analytics. Goldmacher writes, “What cities Clinton campaigns in and what states she competes in, when she emails supporters and how those emails are crafted, what doors volunteers knock on and what phone numbers they dial, who gets Facebook ads and who gets printed mailers — all those and more have Kriegel’s coding fingerprints on them….When Clinton operatives talk about their “data-based” campaign, it’s invariably Kriegel’s data, and perhaps more importantly his models interpreting that data, they are talking about. It was an algorithm from Kriegel’s shop — unreported until now — that determined, after the opening states, where almost every dollar of Clinton’s more than $60 million in television ads was spent during the primary…To understand Kriegel’s role is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign — precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational. Top Clinton advisers say almost no major decision is made in Brooklyn without first consulting Kriegel.”

A widely-cited CNN/ORC national poll that showed Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by two points failed to re-weight the survey sample to match the 2012 electorate. Correcting the sample to reflect demographic reality shows a four-point lead for her. As Louis Nelson explains at Politico, quoting NBC’s Chuck Todd, “Whites without a college degree appear to make up nearly half of their sample. In 2012, by the way, whites without a college degree was slightly more than a third of all voters,” Todd said. “The point is, your numbers may not be wrong but your weighting may be, your assumptions. So the CNN folks assumed an electorate that is not an impossible scenario for Trump, but it would be an historic shift if it occurred….With the numbers adjusted to reflect how the electorate shook out four years ago, Clinton’s two-point deficit shifted to a four-point lead, 46 percent to 42 percent.”

The New York Times editorial on “Voter Suppression in North Carolina” reveals the GOP’s strategy “one month after a federal appeals court struck down the state’s anti-voter law for suppressing African-American voter turnout “with almost surgical precision…Election boards in 23 of the state’s 100 counties have now reduced early voting hours, in some cases to a small fraction of what they were in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis by The Raleigh News & Observer. Boards in nine counties voted to eliminate Sunday voting. Both early voting and Sunday voting are used disproportionately by black voters…While boards in 70 counties voted to expand the number of early-voting hours, the counties that moved to cut hours back account for half of the state’s registered voters. In heavily Democratic Mecklenburg County — the state’s largest, with about one million residents — Republican board members voted to eliminate 238 early-voting hours despite near-unanimous appeals from the public to add more. In 2012, African-Americans in Mecklenburg used early voting at a far higher rate than whites.”

Matt Zapotosky’s Washington Post report “Former secretary of state Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton he used personal computer for business” includes the following: “Former secretary of state Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton in 2009 that he used a personal computer attached to a private phone line to do business with foreign leaders and State Department officials and was generally scornful of the notion that his mobile devices might be accessed by spies, according to an email exchange released by U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) on Wednesday…In a statement, Cummings suggested the exchange showed that Republicans were unfairly singling out Clinton and alleged that Powell “advised Secretary Clinton with a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records…If Republicans were truly concerned with transparency, strengthening FOIA, and preserving federal records, they would be attempting to recover Secretary Powell’s emails from AOL, but they have taken no steps to do so despite the fact that this period — including the run-up to the Iraq War — was critical to our nation’s history,” Cummings said.”

Paul Waldman’s Plum Line post, “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” should be distributed to every swing voter in America. Waldman cites a dozen major Trump scandals glossed over by the same media who badger Clinton relentlessly email mistakes and paranoid conspiracies promoted by sleazy tabloids. “If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton,” adds Waldman, “news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them. In his column, “Trump’s best example of political corruption is himself,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. also notes, “Trump would have us believe that it is pure coincidence that the Trump Foundation’s $25,000 contribution to Bondi on Sept. 17, 2013, was made four days after the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was considering joining a class-action lawsuit against Trump University. It was brought by customers who felt victimized by what sure looks in retrospect like a shameless rip-off operation. Weeks later, Bondi announced that Florida would not join the lawsuit after all.”