From “Ground Game: Democrats Started Fall with 5-to-1 Paid Staff Advantage” by Alex Seitz-Wald, Didi Martinez and Carrie Dann at NBC News:

Democrats entered the fall campaign with an army of paid staffers close to five times the size of Republicans’ according to an NBC News analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.

At the end of August, the most recent date for which data is available, Democrats employed at least 4,200 people working to elect Hillary Clinton, with about 800 at the Clinton campaign, 400 at the Democratic National Committee, and nearly 3,000 on the payrolls of state parties in 13 battleground states, which typically employ a majority of field organizers.

Republicans, meanwhile, employed about 880 people during the same period, with about 130 at the Donald Trump campaign, another 270 at the Republican National Committee, and roughly 480 at the 13 state parties.

The authors point out that “the disparity is not dissimilar to 2012” and Republicans claim to have “a head start in deploying national field staffers back in 2013, long before Democrats.” However, in 13 battlegound states analyzed  “The tally also does not reflect the activities of allied outside organizations, such as labor unions, political action committees and interest groups,” nor does it specifiy what the staffers and volunteers of both parties actually do.

Democrats have a clear edge in what is quantifiable about their ‘ground game,’ but data on the quality of the field operations is lacking. Further,

“The RNC’s ground game is far ahead of a Clinton ground game that amounts to a cubicle factory,” chief strategist Sean Spicer said in a memo to reporters last month, adding that “the media has fallen for the Clinton camp’s false narrative that equates having a lot of campaign offices with having a superior field organization.”

However,

Mitch Stewart, who ran the battleground states program for Obama in 2012, argues that volunteers are not replacements for staff, saying the roughly 10,000 top-tier volunteers Obama’s campaign recruited four years ago depended on paid organizers to function. And he said the RNC’s recent hires come too late.

“It’s just too late to build a massive volunteer effort,” he said. “The later you hire staff, the less impact you’re going to see on the number of votes they can get.”

…As of the end of August, Democrats had more than five times the number of staffers than Republicans did on the payrolls of their respective state parties in Florida (about 520 to around 100), more than three times as many in Ohio (about 360 to roughly 90), and roughly ten times as many in Virginia (approximately 270 to 30), Pennsylvania (roughly 450 to 40) and North Carolina (300 to 20).

With the GOP’s new infusion of staff, they’ve cut that disparity to roughly 2-to-1 in Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, though the gap remains wider in Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, and Virginia.

It certainly looks like the Trump campaign is betting everything on his ability to mobilize and excite  voters independent of minimal Republican GOTV operations. Put that together with the campaign’s relatively small expenditure on ads thus far, and it appears that Trump ’16 will surely be the most minimalist presidential campaign of the modern era.

That’s an awfully big bet on the power of charisma alone, especially for a candidate who may end up mobilizing more votes against him than for him with his every utterance. It looks like Trump’s best hope would be a combination of Democratic defections to the Libertarians and Greens, coupled with complaisancy about voting on the part of regular Democratic voters. The trend at this political moment is in the opposite direction.

If anyone out there is looking for a good motivational device to convince meh Democrats or progressive independents there’s a good reason to get out there and vote, House Speaker Paul Ryan just supplied one, as I discussed at New York.

Combined with the illusion that the filibuster would give Senate Democrats a veto over anything egregious, the Republicans-in-disarray meme has lulled a lot of Democrats, and the media, into a drowsy inability to understand how close we are to a right-wing legislative revolution if Donald Trump becomes president and Republicans hang on to Congress.

Now Paul Ryan has given Washington a wake-up call. Reportedly angry that Beltway types were yawning at his plans for 2017 on the grounds that the usual gridlock would stop anything major from happening, the House Speaker held a presser to explain how he could cram a generation’s worth of legislation into a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered, as Politico’s Ben Weyl reports:

“Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters.

“’This is our plan for 2017,’ Ryan said, waving a copy of his ‘Better Way’ policy agenda. “Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.” He explained that key pieces are “fiscal in nature,” meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. “This is our game plan for 2017,” Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.”

It’s unclear why the press is “seemingly unconvinced” that the budget reconciliation process is indeed a “bazooka in his pocket.” It’s been around as a device to package and speed through Congress vast policy changes since Ronald Reagan and his allies used it in 1981 to rewrite the tax code and enact far-reaching budget cuts and program changes. Republicans had the same revolutionary plans for its use four years ago if Mitt Romney had won and the GOP held on to the Senate. And they conducted a dry run at the very beginning of this year by enacting a sweeping reconciliation bill that nobody paid much attention to because they knew Obama would veto it. President Trump would not.

One major reason congressional Republicans conducted this dry run was to set a precedent that reconciliation could be used for seemingly non-budget items like repealing key elements of the Affordable Care Act (notably the individual mandate and purchasing subsidies). The GOP-appointed Senate parliamentarian, ostensibly the traffic cop whose job it is to stop non-germane riders, waved it on through. Democrats can whine about it, but if the GOP wins the trifecta in November, they will not be able to do a thing. So a future reconciliation bill would not only cripple Obamacare and strip millions of Americans of health coverage obtained via the exchanges, but also kill the Medicaid expansion and throw millions more out of coverage. Indeed, there is zero reason to think it would not include turning the original Medicaid program into a block grant to the states (probably along with the food-stamp program), as both Trump and congressional Republicans have proposed, while implementing Ryan’s own controversial plan to voucherize Medicare.

Those are just a few nasty features we can expect on the spending side of the budget. On the tax side, the only problem Republicans will face is cutting a deal with Trump on the relatively few differences between their tax schemes and his.

“Trump and House Republicans have proposed different tax plans, but they are largely in sync on major principles. Both would cut the top tax rate for individuals to 33 percent from the current 39.6 percent. The corporate rate would drop to 15 percent under Trump’s plan and 20 percent under the House GOP plan, from 35 percent today. Both plans also would drain federal coffers of several trillion dollars and give the biggest boost to the wealthy. By the end of the decade, the richest 1 percent would have accumulated 99.6 percent of the benefits of the House GOP plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.”

Think there’s some chance Trump won’t play ball? I don’t. One of the advantages of using reconciliation is that the entire toxic ball of reactionary legislation can be whipped through Congress and placed on Trump’s desk while he’s still looking for the washroom keys. He may still maintain big differences with congressional Republicans on matters like trade policy and immigration policy and NATO. But he’s given us no reason whatsoever to think he’d pause before rubber-stamping a bill that kills Obamacare and gets rid of all that “welfare” crap his supporters hate — while giving people like himself a historic tax cut billed as a job-generator.

Ryan may have conducted his explainer in order to get the word out to wavering Republican opinion-leaders that even though there are risks in placing Trump in the Oval Office, there’s a huge payoff as well that he can point to with considerable specificity. But it should be a warning to Democrats as well, and something that with imagination and persistence they can convey to those critical progressives who are meh about voting for Hillary Clinton and don’t think the identity of the president much matters. Even if you think Clinton is a centrist sellout or a Wall Street puppet, she’s not going to sign legislation throwing tens of millions of people out of their health coverage, abolishing inheritance taxes and giving top earners still more tax benefits, shredding the safety net, killing Planned Parenthood funding, and so on through Ryan’s whole abominable list of reactionary delights. If Democrats think a scenario so complicated that it’s lulled the press to sleep cannot be explained to regular voters, maybe they should break out the hand puppets. There is no more urgent and galvanizing message available to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following analysis by Stan Greenberg and James Carville is cross-posted from their article, “CLINTON DEFINES THE ELECTION AS CLEAR CUT ECONOMIC CHOICE AND THOSE ARE THE MARCHING ORDERS FOR A DOWN-BALLOT WAVE at Democracy Corps:

Over the past week, Hillary Clinton’s focus on the economy has given Democrats their marching orders for consolidating Democrats and her vote down-ballot. The powerful economic message she articulated in the debate and in Toledo should unify the Democratic offer in this campaign. Some have toyed with tying the Republican Party and its candidates to an unpopular Donald Trump, but our work for Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund already showed that strategy does not work. It is too indirect and political, and may actually help GOP candidates to show their independence from Trump.

Instead, listen to our potential Democratic voters. They are sending a very clear message about how to win their vote: make this a clear economic choice; show you are angry with corporate excess; and show how you want to make this economy work for everyone, not just those at the top. This is how Clinton put it in Toledo on October 3^rd:

It is a clear, powerful critique of how those at the top have used their influence to write the rules of the economy for their benefit – the heart of the economic narrative proposed by the Roosevelt Institute and WVWVAF and tested by Democracy Corps. Clinton’s battle with Trump on taxes puts that choice and “trickle down” economics at the heart of the election.

The dial research conducted for WVWVAF during the first presidential debate shows this is how you win on the economy, creating jobs and being for the middle class. And it is how you consolidate Democrats to vote for Clinton and to get Clinton voters to consolidate behind Democrats down ballot.

Winning on the economy and consolidating Democrats down-ballot

The world has changed with the first debate, the battle over taxes, and Clinton’s new definition of the choice in the election as one centered on the economy.

Trump led on the economy leading into the debate, and our research in the battleground states found even her supporters did not associate her with taking action on the economy or know about any of her policy goals or advocacy for the middle class. The big “change” voters – millennials and white working class voters – were becoming unmoored.

As a result, in our battleground polling for WVWVAF released on the eve of the first major presidential debate, Clinton and down-ballot Democrats were falling short of potential gains: only 87 percent of Democrats were supporting Clinton and only 66 percent of Clinton voters were voting Democrat for Senate.

But this survey also found that what consolidated those voters was a powerful economic message about rewriting the rules. This was confirmed during dial meter testing of the first presidential debate. Clinton’s current economic message will allow Clinton to defeat Trump on the economy and consolidate Democrats around her candidacy and down-ballot.

A populist economic choice: centered on taxes

The focus on taxes has allowed Clinton and Democrats to present a big economic choice about trickle-down economics, and this choice is also powerfully personalized by Trump. They should say what voters have long known and think as they learn about Donald Trump’s taxes – “It is wrong that corporations and the super wealthy play by a different set of rules” – declare “It’s time to rewrite the rules and make this economy work for everyone” and articulate an empowering, positive, and patriotic plan for a better future.

Our dial meter testing of the first debate on behalf of WVWVAF revealed the tremendous advantage Clinton earns when she is heard offering such a populist economic message. Most of Clinton’s strongest moments during the debate came during her new critique of Reaganomics (“Trumped up trickle down”) and when she laid out her specific plans to build “an economy that works for everyone.”

This really struck a chord with the voters in our online dial meters. Post-debate, she shifted voters’ perceptions of her on such key personal attributes as looking out for the middle class (+18) and having good plans for the economy (+14). She improved her margin over Trump on the economy (+9), creating more jobs (+8), standing up for America (+6) and being for the middle class (+6). There was also a huge shift in her overall favorability (+33 points) and as we have seen in public polls over the past few days, Clinton’s vote has risen post-debate.

Embracing Clinton’s economic message in all races

Democratic candidates would do well to follow Clinton’s lead and embrace her economic narrative, choice and agenda.

In their written comments after the debate, the participants in our groups said it felt like Hillary Clinton was speaking directly to them when they brought up “taxes and the economy,” “increasing and decreasing taxes,” “how taxes should be spent and that the millionaires should be paying more of their fair share.” They say that “Hillary was right about trickle-down economics not working and Donald helping himself, not the American middle class” and remember her calls for “equal pay for women and helping the middle class by creating good jobs.”

Such an economic message from the down-ballot Democrats reinforced gains at the top of the ticket and shifted votes in the Senate races in our September battleground survey.

Conclusion

When Hillary Clinton and Democrats offer a powerful economic critique and way forward, as she did at the debate and yesterday in Toledo, it puts them on the side of change and a better future. With Clinton doubling down on this message and if Democrats follow her lead, there is a chance for a reform mandate led from the White House, a Democratic Senate and more in 2017.

Stan Greenberg
James Carville

A lot of smart people have published a lot of smart takes on the vice presidential debate at Longwood University. But regardless of who “won” or “lost” that debate, Mike Pence showed himself to be one of the more unusual running-mates in living memory. He’s generally understood to be a human bridge between Trump and conventional conservatism. Is that what he served as last night? I tried to answer that question at New York:

[Pence] delivered a textbook conservative disquisition on deregulation and lower taxes being the key to reviving the economy. Because neither the moderator nor Tim Kaine so much as mentioned Trump’s promises to abrogate or renegotiate a long series of trade deals that Pence has supported, that area of conflict between Trumpism and conservatism was left unexamined.

Something similar happened on foreign policy, where Pence articulated an attitude toward Russia, Syria, and NATO that must have reassured neoconservatives that their claim to the GOP was not totally lost. (Both Kaine and the moderator brought up Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin and his hostility to NATO as currently constituted, but did not get into the mogul’s broader Jacksonian foreign-policy views.)

But as much as he tried to keep the debate away from his running mate, it’s not true that Pence ignored Trump’s distinctive messaging entirely. As Dara Lind argued at Vox today, you can make a pretty good case that the Hoosier governor embraced Trumpism even as he detached its themes from the Big Man’s personal flourishes.

“When Pence talked about the issues that Trump has made his bread and butter — immigration, terrorism, race — he talked about them through Trump’s lens and in Trump’s terms. If you don’t have borders you don’t have a country. Islamic radicalization in Europe is proof that we shouldn’t allow Syrian refugees into the US. The real problem with race relations in America is bias against police officers.”

In other words, the absence of Trump’s often brutal language and crude dog whistles to racists does not necessarily mean Pence represents pre-Trump conservatism, much less some post-Trump, post-racial moderation. It’s more like Trumpism with a human face, to borrow the late Cold War term for Eurocommunism.

“[Pence] didn’t articulate an “alt-right” conservatism. But he didn’t articulate a pre-Trump conservatism — the conservatism of Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, a ‘post-racial’ conservatism that dismisses any discussion of racial difference — either. He was identifying the same problems as Trump — threats from abroad and within — and the same priorities in fixing them. That’s a big shift from the doctrinaire conservatism of the last decade or two, with its focus on fiscal issues and sexual morality.”

If Trump and Pence lose by a respectably narrow margin, which is the most likely outcome at the moment, the hope of #NeverTrumpers that the whole Trump phenomenon will go away like a bad dream is probably naïve. Maybe a kinder, gentler Trumpism, with its appeal to white-identity concerns and fears — a “law and order” conservatism that encourages profiling of suspect populations in immigration, anti-terrorism, and policing strategies — has a serious future within the GOP. That could be in the form of Mike Pence, or it could be through appropriation of Trump’s themes by other ambitious pols.

Should Trump win, of course, Trump himself will be large and in charge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some polls show that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson may be losing some support in the wake of his “Where is Aleppo?” and other gaffes. But what matters most for Democrats is how much support he and Green Party nominee Jill Stein draw from potential Clinton supporters in key swing states, like FL or NC. There have been some good articles revealing Johnson’s right-wing positions on environmental and economic issues recently (see here, here and here, for example).

Michael Tomasky adds to the critique of third party candidacies in his recent Dail Beast post, “Why No One Should Vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein,” in which he observes:

In what was universally described as a bid for millennial support, Hillary Clinton went to Florida today and unveiled a full-fledged national service proposal. For us old-timers, it was a nostalgic moment, as I explained at New York:

Millennials themselves won’t remember this, but Bill Clinton made national service a major theme in his 1992 presidential campaign, and managed to create a full-time national-service program, known as AmeriCorps, before Republicans took over Congress and began a guerrilla campaign to kill or at least starve the initiative.

What’s interesting about Hillary Clinton’s current proposal is that she seeks to significantly expand AmeriCorps — tripling its size and doubling the post-service education benefit — while directly connecting it to the kind of part-time, uncompensated voluntarism Republicans tend to prefer as an alternative to national service. Her proposed National Service Reserve would mobilize for emergencies or other urgent public priorities up to 5 million Americans, with the expanded AmeriCorps membership deployed to “recruit, train and lead” them. This hybrid approach of full-time and occasional service was endorsed by George W. Bush, who made it the centerpiece of one of his State of the Union addresses, and has won over several other prominent Republicans, notably Colin Powell and John McCain.

This proposal and the themes it allows Clinton to invoke are clearly a twofer in her efforts to drive up her support levels among millennials. The ethic of service is valued highly by young Americans, and a robust post-service educational grant nicely complements Clinton’s other proposals to make college more affordable.

Lord only knows if or how Trump may respond. He has a generation’s worth of conservative smears against AmeriCorps to draw upon, up to and including comparisons to the Hitler Youth (a particularly common if psychotic characterization made when Obama proposed an AmeriCorps expansion). If her proposal becomes a significant moment in the campaign, and she wins, it could either be the basis of a rare bipartisan opportunity in 2017, or another idea for Republicans to demonize because of its doubled-down connection to the Clintons. Any way you look at it, fighting for national service has become something of a family tradition.

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