“With her campaign expanding to compete in traditionally Republican-leaning states and her advantage growing in most of the battlegrounds, Mrs. Clinton is well positioned as the race enters its final days. Because Mrs. Clinton is now so heavily favored to win, the debate offers an opportunity for her to start looking beyond the election and toward unifying a country that has been divided by an ugly campaign…After praising Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” credo, Mrs. Clinton now has a chance to turn that advice into action. And doing so would not simply be an exercise in high-mindedness to win plaudits from centrist commentators. By vowing to represent all Americans after the election, including Mr. Trump’s supporters, she can also disarm an opponent who relishes confrontation but has little aptitude for conciliation.” — from “Presidential Debate: How Will Trump and Clinton Handle Sexual Assault Allegations?” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Alan Rappeport.

“One certain question Clinton will be asked is whether she would renominate Garland to the Scalia vacancy or preserve her right to come up with her own candidate for the Court. And that question could come with a twist: John McCain’s blunt statement this week that Senate Republicans will fight absolutely any nomination Clinton could make for the entire course of her presidency means there is not much point in going with a perceived judicial “moderate” like Garland when a younger, more progressive nominee would attract the same support and arouse the same opposition. But if Clinton does anything tonight other than promise to renominate Garland there will be spin-room shrieking about her constitutional radicalism.” — from Ed Kilgore’s New York Magazine post “Clinton and Trump to Debate SCOTUS.”

“While it’s hard to argue with Clinton that the U.S. should be doing more to help those deeply suffering inside Syria, she should explain to the American people how her plan would work in practice. She should also explain the scale and scope of the no-fly zone she’s presenting. Will these safe zones encroach on territory held or coveted by Assad’s regime forces and their allies? If so, how will the U.S. military confront Syrian government and Russian forces that are seeking to protect or take them? Which country’s ground troops will protect the safe zones?”  — from “Clinton Should Say More About Syria: The Democratic nominee should fully lay out her Syria strategy” by Stephen Miles and Michelle Dixon in U.S. News.

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has banked a lot on the old saw that “any publicity is good publicity.” That may be true when selling widgets to suggestable consumers. But Geoffrey Skelley has put the notion to the test in his Crystal Ball post “The Danger of the Political Limelight,” and the results suggest otherwise, at least when one of the candidates is named Donald Trump. Skelley explains:

…Using Gallup data for the question “Did you read, hear, or see anything about Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump in the last day or two?” and comparative Google Trend data for the search terms “Hillary Clinton” and “Donald Trump” in the United States, it really does appear that the candidate receiving more attention tends to struggle more.

Probing “the correlation between the polls and the Gallup data as well as the correlation between the polls and the Google Trends data,” Skelley explains that “First, we compared the Gallup data to the polling averages from HuffPost Pollster and RealClearPolitics, taking the percentage of respondents each day for Gallup who said they read, heard, or saw something about Trump and subtracting the percentage who said the same about Clinton. Then we compared the Trump margin in Gallup’s data to Trump’s margin in the polling averages. It should be noted that, on average, Trump has had slightly more net attention than Clinton by a five percentage point margin in Gallup’s measure…” In addition,

…Each candidate received gobs of attention during their party conventions, which complicates any analysis. So if we look at time periods after the convention, it’s easier to sort out who is going through spells of greater or lesser attention from the public. For the period from Aug. 1 (the Democratic convention ended on July 28) to now, the correlation is moderately strong — just above .5 — for all four polling averages. During this time, when one of the nominees has garnered notably more attention, always for negative revelations, that candidate has suffered…

Also, “Clinton and Trump have the highest unfavorable ratings of any major party nominees in modern history, notes Skelley. “Thus, when one has been in the news a good deal more than the other, it has usually been because of negative stories (outside of some convention coverage).”

Noting that “modern media coverage, especially in the Trump-Clinton contest, tends to be fairly negative,” Skelley concludes that “there is sufficient evidence to say that the 2016 presidential election has two highly disliked major party nominees who seem to perform worse the more attention they attract.”

Three weeks out, Clinton seems to be holding a lead in the polling average of about 5 points. And, while the horserace polls have shifted subtly with the media’s focus on the troubles of one presidential candidate over the other, it appears that Trump’s media coverage has been significantly more damaging overall. This may not apply quite as well to future presidential campaigns. But it looks like Trump is proving that the “any publicity is good publicity” notion is a bad premise for media strategy in politics.

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.

Towards the end of this remarkable week in the presidential contest, I found myself wondering aloud at New York: Is it actually over? Could Trump still win?

[P]artly because of the impact of the recently released Access Hollywood video and the subsequent sexual-assault allegations against Trump, the trajectory of the race for the Republican nominee is terrible at exactly the moment he is running out of time to do much about it. And so it’s probably time to ask quite soberly: Is the presidential election over?

At FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten approaches this question from the point of view of historical precedent. Has anyone (at least in the modern era when polls were available) come from as far behind as Trump is at present to win? The answer is no. Going back to 1952, no one has trailed at this point in the cycle by the 6 points and change by which Trump currently trails Clinton and gone on to win. There are three elections with large late shifts (or perhaps polling errors, if you prefer to look at it that way), but (a) none of them reversed the outcome and (b) none of them especially resembled 2016. To be specific, in 1992, Bill Clinton lost half of his lead over Poppy Bush down the stretch, but still won in a walk; really sure winners often lose late votes to complacency, boredom, or (as definitely occurred in 1992) third-party candidates. In 1980, Reagan had a late surge against Carter, but that involved a challenger who had yet (at this point) to post his impressive performance in that year’s one debate, beating an incumbent at a time when economic conditions in the country were by anyone’s judgment terrible and America was suffering a high-profile international humiliation at the hands of Iran. Trump may claim the U.S. is in similar straits now, but the economic indicators and public perceptions say otherwise.

As Enten notes, 1968 is the closest example we have of the kind of comeback Trump needs:

“[T]he most encouraging precedent for Trump is probably 1968. In that year, Democrat Hubert Humphrey was down by 5 percentage points and ended up losing by 1 point. Humphrey consolidated a divided Democratic base — just as Trump needs to do now with Republicans. Humphrey was also likely aided by a major October surprise — the halting of bombing in Vietnam by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. That’s not a bad template for Trump — it would be difficult and he would need some outside help, but you can imagine it happening. Still, Trump is losing by a wider margin than Humphrey was, and the October surprises so far in 2016 seem to be working against Trump rather than in his favor.”

That’s the big picture. How about the little picture? There’s always been a nontrivial chance Trump could win the electoral vote without ever catching Clinton in the national popular vote. How’s he looking there?

The signs are not great for Republicans (at least those who want to see Trump win). The states that were earlier putting Trump within shouting distance of 270 electoral votes seem to be turning away from him. The first post-Trump video survey from Ohio (from Baldwin Wallace) had Clinton up by 9 points among likely voters; a more recent poll from Marist showed Trump back up by 1, but in a state he really must win, Clinton’s now pulled ahead in the polling averages. Even before the tape emerged, Clinton was beginning to build leads in the key swing states of Florida, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. In Pennsylvania, the keystone to one Trump path to the presidency, Clinton’s leading by more than her national average. If that state is truly gone for Trump, he cannot lose much anywhere else in the states (Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada) where he once led narrowly before his sexual behavior became central to the campaign. And there are reports that internal GOP polls taken after the video hit show big problems for Trump in Georgia. If that state, which no Democrat has won since 1992, is even close, Trump’s not going to win the states he must have.

Yes, the dynamics could turn around to some extent; you can find at least one new national poll (albeit one from the GOP-leaning Rasmussen) showing Trump bouncing back. But unlike some of the late-surge candidates in the past, Trump does not have the kind of resources normally associated with playing catch-up against a candidate like Clinton. The base-mobilization strategy he signaled he was pursuing with his abrasive comments during and after the second debate could be neutralized to some extent by the effect it will have in helping Clinton mobilize her base. He doesn’t have the infrastructure for a quieter and more targeted get-out-the-vote operation, and it’s far too late to acquire one. He’s also at a serious disadvantage in early voter operations, and early voting will soon on a daily basis reduce the voters available to sustain a comeback — in effect increasing Clinton’s lead by allowing her to “bank” votes. Team Trump is also trailing Team Clinton in paid ad spending. And beyond all that, there’s the fight Trump has engaged in against the congressional Republicans who are clearly inviting voters to split tickets. Maybe that will not hurt him as badly as some observers assume, but it’s unlikely to give him a boost, either.

It’s really hard to find any current indicator that looks good for Donald Trump, truth be told. It’s entirely possible his latest travails have simply and finally put a ceiling on his vote that no degree of wild base-energizing rhetoric can overcome. So about the best reason I can find to hold off declaring him dead in the water is the vague and almost superstitious feeling that it’s been an unpredictable cycle. If new polling data coming out over the next few days shows convincing signs of even deeper national and battleground-state damage from the various sexual allegations and from intra-GOP infighting, it will be time to say this race is over.

And for many of us with shattered nerves from watching this long and strange cycle unfold, it will be not a moment too soon.

In an update to last year’s groundbreaking report, new analysis from demographers Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, and Rob Griffin released today explores in detail the national and state-level demographic and voting trends as they exist following the first presidential debate. “The Path to 270, Revisited” takes into consideration the possible influence of factors such as a potentially large third-party vote, a widening gender gap, and differentials in campaign effort levels, as well as the basic strategies both parties need to deploy in order to achieve victory.

“Five weeks to go in the campaign and nearly all signs that analysts look at point to a victory for Democratic nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, while Republican nominee Donald Trump is behind nationally and is trailing on average in nearly all of the major battleground states,” said Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report. “Things currently favoring Clinton are national and state-level polling, President Barack Obama’s rising favorability, the decent if not great state of the economy, campaign fundraising, and on-the-ground infrastructure.”

Interesting trends observed in the analysis include:

• Demographics: Nationally, the two biggest demographic trends are: 1) the growth in the Hispanic and Asian/Other communities; and 2) the growth in the white, college-educated population. The specifics of each vary by state, but states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada are undergoing fast changes.
• Gender gap: While there have always been differences between the voting choices of men and women, some of the polling is showing historically large gender gaps. Based on current polling data, the gender gaps for voters—all voters, white college-educated voters, and white non-college-educated voters—will reach historic highs at 38 percent, 36 percent, and 47 percent, respectively.
• Third-parties’ influence: Though historically these numbers tend to decline before Election Day as partisan loyalties are activated in the electorate, the third-party vote has remained high in polling, and 2016 may buck this trend.

“The analysis of the national popular vote doesn’t bode well for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,” said John Halpin, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report. “The racial and ethnic minority vote is highly likely to increase in every swing state and highly likely to favor Clinton as it favored President Obama in 2012, and it appears highly likely that there will be a significant shift among white, college-educated voters in swing states toward Clinton relative to President Obama’s support among these voters in 2012.”

“The Path to 270, Revisited” considers the following questions, and elaborates on these findings:

• How much demographic change can we expect to see in the 2016 election? Combining observed change in the demographic structure of the eligible electorate with expected turnout rates, CAP experts anticipate that the total racial and ethnic minority share of voters will rise 2 percentage points above its 2012 level, while the white share of voters should decline by 2 percentage points.
• Will Clinton’s racial and ethnic minority support be as high in 2016 as Obama’s was in 2012? It seems likely that Clinton will match or exceed Obama’s support among minority voters. Clinton holds overwhelming backing from black voters, while Trump’s support from black voters is vanishingly small in many polls. This is in addition to his extreme unpopularity among Latino voters.
• Will Clinton’s support among college-educated whites hold up relative to Obama’s in 2012? Not only is Clinton holding her ground among white college-educated voters relative to Obama in 2012, she appears to be exceeding the level of support he was able to gain among this demographic. It is important to note that Democrats have not carried college-educated whites in a presidential election for 60 years.
• Will Trump’s advantage among white, working-class voters be large enough for him to win? To have a decent chance of winning, Trump needs to generate a huge margin among white, working-class voters, but he has only been running at or slightly above Romney’s performance among these voters in 2012.

Read the full analysis here.

With Donald Trump melting down and continuing to slip in the polls, political opportunities for down-ballot Democrats could significantly improve. At New York I discussed why building on that trend should be an urgent priority for Hillary Clinton.

Now there’s a glimmer of hope for at least two years of frenetic legislative activity for Clinton if Democrats win the four net Senate seats and 30 net House seats they need for control of Congress. Democrats have long had even or better-than-even odds for winning the net four Senate seats needed to take over the upper chamber, assuming Tim Kaine has the tie-breaking vote as vice-president. What’s changed during the last two weeks of trouble for Trump and Republicans is that control of the House is once again in play. In 2006, Democrats gained 31 House seats by winning the national popular vote by 8 points. They need to gain 30 to win control this year. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Democrats leading by 10 points in the congressional generic ballot measuring which party voters support in House races. If that’s a solid trend rather than a blip, and Clinton’s own polling surge holds, a Democratic House is no longer a fantasy, though Republican gerrymandering and efforts to encourage ticket-splitting mean it’s still a bit of a long shot.

The payoff for a Democratic sweep makes going for it well worth the effort.

The old reality was nicely represented by the remark she made to New York Times Magazine columnist Mark Leibovich, which he used as the headline for his long thumb-sucker on her campaign: “I’m the Last Thing Standing Between You and the Apocalypse.”

While that idea is a pretty good motivator for those who hate or fear Trump, in the end it’s not very inspiring. I used to have a boss who had a framed motto on his wall that I have never forgotten: “Avoiding disaster is an insufficient agenda.” For Clinton, it’s also unnecessary for the moment. Her long litany of policy proposals sometimes had the appearance on the campaign trail of being props: answers to the argument that she didn’t really have any new ideas. Now there’s a chance, if not an overwhelming one, that she can actually get some of them enacted, and without pretending she can talk more than a handful of congressional Republicans into helping her.

At a time when her main remaining challenge is energizing Democrats and left-bent independents, aggressively and explicitly campaigning for a Democratic Congress that can actually accomplish big things makes abundant sense. And besides, she might as well strike back at congressional Republicans who are pretty clearly pivoting to a “checks and balances” message that they’ll thwart anything Clinton tries to do. She can point to the choice down-ballot voters face of more gridlock or the pragmatic and generally popular agenda she’s outlined during the campaign.

In weighing this option, Clinton and her campaign team should realize they have nothing to lose other than the near-certainty of a presidency that is tragically limited by Republican obstruction in Congress. It would be difficult for her to lose to Trump at this point no matter what she does. And she might as well give herself a fighting chance to be successful in office.

There are already signs the Clinton campaign is moving in that direction. It’s not a moment too soon.

‘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.”

Millennials are poised to give Hillary Clinton and Democrats a big margin in November’s election if they are engaged to vote and if progressives are smart in dealing with the third party vote. Millennial voters are in a very different place than they were two weeks ago, according to a new web survey of likely millennial voters in the eleven most competitive battleground states…

Democratic millennials have started to consolidate for Clinton, but their Republican contemporaries have not done the same for Trump. Gary Johnson’s millennial vote is now a repository for most of those anti-Trump Republicans. The biggest, genuine problem is whether millennials will vote. The emerging battle over the economy – centered on taxes, trickle down and corporate responsibility – is getting their attention. Millennials are in an anti-corporate mood and desperate for change, and this new focus may move them to the polls on Election Day.

Clinton wants to end the reign of trickle-down economics and raise taxes on the wealthy that have seen all the new income gains so they pay their fair share and so we can invest in the middle class. Trump will enact the biggest tax cut for the one percent in history, including a $4 billion dollar tax break for his family, and make inequality even worse.

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.”