Joan Walsh’s article, “Can the Democrats Win Back White Working-Class Voters? Maybe—but first we need to understand why they left the party,” at The Nation sheds light on a leading concern of Democratic strategists.

Noting that the white working-class vote “was nearly 50 percent of the total electorate in 2012,” Walsh addresses four key questions of concern to Dems in 2016:

Did the white working class flee the Democrats because the party abandoned them economically? Is Clinton, as the establishment favorite, uniquely unqualified to lure them back? Is their economic suffering really driving the Trump campaign? And can it be enough to carry the racist bully to the White House?

Walsh provides a strong “No” answer to all of these questions. She acknowledges the pessimism of this large constituency, but adds, “the conviction that’s common on both right and left—that the Democrats deserted the white working class by chasing “identity politics” and Wall Street donors and now show little interest in winning it back—is undone by the evidence. To bring these voters back, we have to understand what made them turn away in the first place.”

Walsh takes particular issue with Thomas Frank’s contention that “the Democrats betrayed their own base” by supporting NAFTA , coddling Wall St. and other ‘neo-liberal’ ideas. She acknowledges a significant decline in Democratic share of white working-class voters since the early 1960s, when the Democratic presidential candidates recieved about 55 percent of their votes, on town to 2012, when “Barack Obama dropped to 36 percent of that vote in 2012, 25 points behind Republican Mitt Romney.”

But Walsh argues that “a deeper dive” indicates very significant regional differences have emerged in surveys of the Democratic presidential candidates’ share of their votes, particularly in the last preesidential election:

In 2012, Obama convincingly won the white working-class vote in New England, essentially tied with Romney in the Midwest, and ran competitively in the coastal West and Mid-Atlantic states, according to the polling group Democracy Corps. Only in the Deep South (where he won 25 percent) and the Mountain West (where he won a third) did Obama crater.

Jimmy Carter (in his first campaign) and Bill Clinton were able to slow the southern regional exodus of the white working-class to the GOP presidential candidates. But now New Yorker Trump, taking a lesson from Reagan, has shown that regional identity is no longer much of a force. “Donald Trump didn’t invent this nativist, racist, paranoid  appeal,” says Wash. “He just dialed into it.”

Walsh shares concerns exprressed by white working-class voters gleaned from interviews and insights from the AFL-CIO’s Working America project headed by Karen Nussbaum, who conducted “front-porch focus groups” in rust belt cities, which found significant suppport for Trump. But their support was not so much based on Trump’s issue positions. Walsh notes,

But the project learned that although these voters’ No. 1 issue was the economy, Trump’s economic solutions (such as they are) weren’t driving his popularity. Despite Frank’s insistence that Trump’s opposition to trade deals is the core of his appeal, only 8 percent of those who favored Trump said it was because of his “policies.” Nearly half said they liked him because he “speaks his mind,” Nussbaum noted. “They have a strong feeling that government isn’t working for them, and they want political leadership that helps them. If we move them to clarify who’s really to blame and who really will help, we can help make sense of a frightening situation.”

Walsh cites polls indicating that Trump’s white working-class support has been somewhat overstated, and adds,

I asked Ruy Teixeira what the Democrats could do to attract more of these voters. In their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, Teixeira and John Judis identified the rising “Obama coalition.” But now, both writers warn the party against forsaking struggling white voters entirely. Judis makes a persuasive case in his forthcoming book, The Populist Explosion, that the remarkable candidacies of Sanders and Trump, along with the right-and left-wing insurgencies in Europe, have their roots in the white working class’s economic dislocation—something that the left must address. “Maybe you don’t need the white working class in order to win the presidency,” Teixeira says, “but you need them to accomplish anything else you want to do.” He’s right: Democrats can’t win majorities in the Senate or House, or prevail in state legislatures, without a stronger showing among this cohort.

But when it comes to what the party can do to win more of them back, Teixeira is less certain. Though many of these struggling voters believe that Democrats, especially Obama, have turned their backs on them, in fact “people fail to realize how much [Obama] has accomplished,” he argues, citing the 2009 stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and the auto-industry restructuring, all of which helped white workers. For the last few years, Teixeira and I have participated in a roundtable (along with other scholars, labor activists, and writers, including Judis and Nussbaum) on the white working class, organized by Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore. Virtually every position the group recommended to appeal to white working-class voters has been incorporated into the Democratic platform. What more can Hillary Clinton and the party do?

Teixeira believes that Clinton’s domestic program—from expanded infrastructure spending and paid family leave to debt-free college and subsidized child-care programs—“will make it easier for [white working-class voters] to get ahead.” But he thinks winning back a majority will require “a full-employment economy with rising wages”—the kind of economy fostered by the Keynesianism of the mid-20th century. Yet policies to re-create that kind of economy would need at least some support from Republicans, Teixeira points out. And right now, Republicans rely on white working-class voters to support their filibuster against any Democratic agenda.

Wash concludes on an optimistic note: “The resurgent populist, pro-opportunity, and anti-oligarchy left wing of the Democratic Party has pushed politicians, including Clinton, to embrace many policies—on trade, union rights, Social Security, and education—that many hope will win back this cohort…If Clinton and the Democrats can find a way to fuse the Obama coalition with the remains of the mainly white New Deal coalition, they will be unbeatable.”

Hillary Clinton has run an impressive campaign so far, and there is good reason to hope that she she is on track to meet the challenge posed by Walsh. The dream of an enduring Democratic coalition that can secure a stable, working majority is closer to becoming a reality than it has been for many years. If progressive activists, particularly in the swing states, will pour their energies and resources into making it happen in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, the Republican road-block will be ended and a new era of forward progress can finally begin.

At last night’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum” sponsored by veterans’ groups and featuring consecutive appearances by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, moderator Matt Lauer got a lot of well-justified criticism for focusing on Clinton’s email practices and letting Trump get away with–well, not murder, but some bold-face lies. I wrote an immediate reaction for New York that took a serious look at what Trump actually said about foreign policy and national security.

Hillary Clinton spent most of her time answering hostile questions about her use of emails as secretary of state and her vote to authorize the Iraq War. She really did not need to present a national security philosophy, because she has been doing that regularly ever since her first race for the Senate in 2000. When finally allowed to escape her defensive crouch via a question about her process for deciding when to use military force to defeat ISIS, she gave a classic Democratic Goldilocks answer, eschewing too hot (ground troops) and too cold (disengagement) responses.

Donald Trump, however, is another matter. He has typically offered impulsive answers to sporadic questions about national security policy, and has occasionally — viz., his cluelessness in a primary debate about the strategic triad of air, land, and sea delivery systems for nuclear weapons — looked like someone who should be kept far from the levers of power.

In this forum, he did not sound clueless, which was a small triumph. But two strange aspects of his approach to national security became clear.

First, when challenged by moderator Matt Lauer to reconcile his talk of a “plan” for defeating ISIS with his boast that he would be “unpredictable” to confuse America’s enemies, Trump came down squarely on the side of unpredictability, criticizing Barack Obama for telling the world what he would do. The idea of a president deliberately pursuing an erratic course of action and refusing to articulate policies is certainly new.

Second, when asked about his expressions of admiration of Vladimir Putin, Trump doubled down, calling Putin a better leader than Obama and touting Putin’s domestic poll ratings as a validator of Vlad’s sterling qualities. This was cold comfort to Americans concerned that Trump might emulate his Russian friend in “uniting” his country and Making It Great Again via radical curbs on dissent and diversity.

More generally, Trump is drifting toward a truly Jacksonian national security posture, which can be described as a philosophy of peace through strength — and craziness! He has taken to calling Hillary Clinton “trigger happy” (as he did tonight), even as he calls for much higher defense spending, a larger military, and the elimination of any restraints of use of military force against civilians. The idea seems to be to maintain a credible threat of insane, massively destructive overreaction to any friend or foe who messes with Uncle Sam. This “winning through intimidation” approach helps explain why Putin is a role model for the candidate.

Even though this global, nuclear-armed version of the motto “Don’t tread on me” has been a subcurrent of American popular culture for decades, we have never had a commander-in-chief so irresponsible as to make it the touchstone of actual U.S. policy. Hillary Clinton can be accused of a lot of mistakes and misjudgments over the years, but she has never entertained the idea that America should protect its interests by inspiring sheer terror and emulating despots.

And she doesn’t lie about her support for the Iraq War, either.

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.”

In his Vox post, “Confessions of a Clinton reporter: The media’s 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary,” Jonathan Allen rolls it out raw and ugly: “1) Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and mainstream media outlets; 2) Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world; 3) The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there’s hard evidence otherwise; 4) Everything is newsworthy because the Clintons are the equivalent of America’s royal family; 5) Everything she does is fake and calculated for maximum political benefit.” Given all that, how large would Clinton’s lead be if the media covered her fairly?

At FiveThirtyEight.com Harry Enten has “13 Tips For Reading General Election Polls Like A Pro,” an excellent checklist for analyzing opinion surveys.

It’s just one poll, but boy, it’s a big one, “the largest sample ever undertaken by The Post.”  As Dan Balz and Scott Clement report at The Washington Post, “…The state-by-state numbers are based on responses from more than 74,000 registered voters during the period of Aug. 9 to Sept. 1. The individual state samples vary in size from about 550 to more than 5,000, allowing greater opportunities than typical surveys to look at different groups within the population and compare them from state to state.” The overall take: “With nine weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump is within striking distance in the Upper Midwest, but Hillary Clinton’s strength in many battlegrounds and some traditional Republican strongholds gives her a big electoral college advantage, according to a 50-state Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll.” Also, Trump is way behind former GOP presidential nominees with white, college-educated voters, as well as women and voters in AZ, GA and TX.

As the post-Labor Day campaign begins, Ed Kilgore notes at New York Magazine “Polls-only forecasters unsurprisingly project Clinton as the favorite. FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only projection has Clinton’s win probability at 69%; The Upshot’s has it at an overwhelming 84%…If the elections were to wind up precisely as indicated by today’s state polling averages (giving Trump the tied state of NC), Clinton would win with 326 electoral votes to Trump’s 212…The difficulty of getting to 270 for Trump is illustrated by Daily Kos’ state-by-state projections, which award not only Iowa and North Carolina but also Florida, Nevada, and Ohio to the Republican. Clinton still wins 290/248.”

From Rowena Lindsay at The Monitor, why early voting ought to be a bigger concern for Dems: “..Early voting has favored the Democrats in some key states, and in 2008 35 percent of votes are cast before the election according to the Associated Press…In 2008, for example, Barack Obama won 58 percent of the pre-election day votes to Sen. John McCain’s 40 percent and managed to win Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina even though on election day more people in those states voted for Senator McCain – which speaks to the overall enthusiasm young and minority American Democrats felt for Obama.”

Some numbers to keep in mind when politicians blither about “family values”: “This election year has both parties still talking about families, but the family structure itself has changed dramatically over time. There are now more unmarried women of voting age than married women. The loving couple down the street may be unmarried (8.3 million such households existed in 2015, compared to 523,000 in 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). They may not be heterosexual, either (nearly 450,000 U.S. households were same-sex couples in 2014, the bureau reports). Young adults may be living with parents as they pay off college loans, while middle-aged adults might have elderly, ailing parents living with them so they can provide round-the-clock care. And some may not be coupled or caring for children at all: a full 28 percent of American households are people living alone, up from 17 percent in 1970, Census says. As for the man of the house bringing home the bacon, that pattern has been upended. Women are now the sole or primary breadwinners in 40 percent of homes with children, up from less than 11 percent in 1960, the Pew Research Center reports.” – from Susan Milligan’s U.S. News report “Yearning for the Past Politicians aren’t addressing the needs of the new American family.”

Facebook may be fine for choir-preaching, but here’s a good clip and share NYT op-ed for your conservative uncle, from a former Bush Administration official, James K. Glasman: “Save the Republican Party: Vote for Clinton.”

Despite the protests of recent years, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which provides “template” state and local legislation to suppress voting (among many other anti-consumer and anti-worker bills) by people of color and other pro-Democratic constituencies, still bosts dozens of major corportions among it’s members. Some of the largest companies that are not only members, but are also active on ALEC’s corporate board include: AT&T; Diageo (brands include Crown Royal, Johnnie Walker, J&B, Bushmills, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Jose Cuervo, Tanqueray, and Guinness); ExxonMobil; Koch Companies (brands include Angelsoft, Brawny, Quilted Northern, Sparkle, Dixie products), Pfizer; State Farm; United Parcel Service; and others. What would happen if millions of progressives took this list into consideration when they do their shopping?

The throw-down in NC, where polls show stat-tie races for President, U.S. Senator and Governor is intensifying. For some inside skinny, check out Chris Kromm’s Facing South report, “Why North Carolina is the biggest battleground of 2016.” Kromm reports one troubling gap in the U.S. Senate race: “[Republican incumbent] Burr is sitting on a war chest of $8.7 million compared to Ross’ $3.9 million. That doesn’t include super PACs and outside groups like Karl Rove’s One Nation, which recently announced it was pulling money out of Ohio’s U.S. Senate race to focus on Missouri and North Carolina, where it will spend $1.5 million to help Burr, and the Senate Leadership Fund, which has reserved $8.1 million in ads for Burr. But Democratic groups haven’t responded in kind, a move which the progressive website DailyKos called “baffling.”

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is trying to anchor his candidacy with appeals to two constituencies in particular: anti-Trump Republicans and young voters, who are attracted to Libertarian advocacy of personal freedoms like gay mnarriage and legalization of marijuana.

There is not much that can be done to dissuade Republicans who prefer Johnson to Clinton. But Democrats should try to better educate young voters, who may not be aware of Johnson’s often extreme “free market” views, and his opposition to environmental regulations, as well as his unbridled advocacy of corporate exemption from taxes and regulations.

In a normal political year, Libertarian candidates provide an inconsequential footnote and draw a little more from Republican candidates’ support than from Democrats. This year, however, the situation is a little different, mostly because of the GOP’s relentless hammering of Hillary Clinton, which has reduced her “trustworthy” numbers in polls. Never mind that their case for “distrust” of Clinton is extremeely thin; it’s the repetition that counts, and that’s their only hope.

Gary Johnson will likely be on the ballot in all 50 states, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein’s name will appear on ballots in less than half of the states. You would expect that Stein would draw more support from Democrats, but it’s unclear how much, since many of her supporters would probably not vote for the Democratic nominee in any circumstances.

At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver writes that “The majority of pollsters (12) have Clinton’s margin over Trump shrinking when at least one third-party candidate is included. The difference in margins, however, varies among pollsters, and a few, such as Ipsos, have Clinton’s lead rising by the tiniest of bits when at least Johnson is included. Overall, including third-party candidates takes about 1 percentage point away from Clinton’s margin, on average.”

Johnson’s average support in polls must be 15 percent in order for him to be admitted into the upcomming televised presidential debates, where he could conceivably increase his support figures.

But Tessa Stuart’s “Why You Shouldn’t Vote for Gary Johnson” at Rolling Stone unmasks the former Repubican’s economic and environmental agendas, and surprise, surprise, Johnson pretty much backs the same policies as the likes of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump on core bread & butter and environmental issues. Some examples from Stuart’s post:

Johnson has a poor fiscal track record, only the faintest fidelity to Libertarian ideals and a facile grip on issues both foreign and domestic – helping explain why 99.1 percent of the electorate decided he shouldn’t be president four years ago…

“I would not believe that colleges or universities should be free,” he [Johnson] told  ProCon.org in June. “They would be too expensive from a federal standpoint. If states want to do that of course, that’s their prerogative. But should they be free? No, they shouldn’t be free.”

Johnson says corporations should give as much money as they want, as often as they choose, to whomever they please. “I think it [Citizens United] comes under the First Amendment, that they should be able to contribute as much money as they want,” he told The New American in 2012. (He reiterated that sentiment this year.)

While Johnson admits fracking is an incredibly inefficient and environmentally destructive form of energy extraction, he thinks we ought to be doing more of it. “I have spoken to my former environmental secretary,” he tells ProCon.org, “and what he says regarding fracking is that it’s only 10% effective, that there are environmental concerns, and that he believes that more research needs to be done on fracking. Number one, it could become much more effective, meaning it could have a much higher yield. So it sounds very pragmatic to me, but that would be where I’m at.”

“My understanding is that it is more free trade than not…But I could not tell you what the specifics are…So I would be in support of TPP.” (All three of his rivals – Clinton, Trump and Jill Stein – are against the deal.)

Speaking of details, when Johnson last publicly discussed the Keystone XL, in 2012, he also didn’t have a firm grasp on those pertaining to the pipeline – a project later spiked by the Obama administration, and which Trump has vowed to revive. Nevertheless, he said he would support it. “I completely support the Keystone Pipeline if it’s not an issue of the government implementing eminent domain to procure right of ways… I really don’t understand where the regulatory hurdles are… I would certainly remove the regulatory hurdles,” he said.

“I accept the fact that there is global warming and I accept the fact that it’s man caused. That said, I am opposed to cap and trade. I’m a free market guy when it comes to the clean environment the number-one factor when it comes to the clean environment is a good economy.”

“Minimum wage, look, I think [everyone is] missing the boat. Why doesn’t he raise it to $75 an hour? Well, of course he can’t raise it to $75 an hour because then prices would go way up and nobody would be able to afford to hire anybody. ‘Oh, I see $75 is too high but $10.10 is just the right number?’ How do you arrive at that? Why not let the marketplace arrive at that? And I just think it’s much to do – minimum wage is much to do about nothing. I mean, nobody works for minimum wage [anyway]… [Just] showing up on time and wearing clean clothes gets you way above the minimum wage.”

“I would do everything I could to repeal President Obama’s health care plan. I think that very simply we can’t afford it,” Johnson said. “The long-term solution to health care is a free market approach to health care…Regarding paid medical and family leave, “I would be opposed to that,” Johnson told ProCon.org earlier this year.

Johnson says he’s a fiscal conservative, but, as the National Review points out, when he was elected governor of New Mexico, “Johnson inherited a debt of $1.8 billion and left a debt of $4.6 billion.”

In addition to his Republican views on economic and environmental policies, Johnson still supports zero gun safety measures, despite all of the horrific massacres of innocent people, including children, in recent years. “I don’t believe there should be any restrictions when it comes to firearms. None,” he said to Slate in 2011.

Libertarians have gotten pretty skilled in crafting their pitch to young voters with vague noises about “freedom” as a general social goal. But they try to avoid too much conversation about their economic and environmental views when selling their candidates to young voters because they know that their views on these issues are nearly identical to those of GOP candidates.

As one friend puts it, “A Libertarian is just a Republican who believes you should be able to kiss whoever you like and smoke whatever you want.”

The centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton is a couple of manufactured “scandals” being peddled by Judicial Watch and other Hillary-hate groups, writes Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast. Some of the more gullible media outlets have fallen for it, branding Clinton with a standard they have never applied to Republicans. It has had an effect, as Tomasky explains,

One of the more important debates emerging among Democrats is whether or not Hillary Clinton is banking too much on winning the support of GOP moderates. By appealing to them, is Clinton hurting the chances of Democratic candidates down-ballot and endangering potential Democratic majorities in the Senate and/or House? It’s a question which could decide whether the Supreme Court, as well as congress, will become a force for progressive change or deepening stagnation.

In his Salon.com post, “Hillary’s GOP outreach: Could it do more harm than good for Democrats?” Gary Legum asks whether  “Clinton’s outreach to some traditional Republican constituencies” could cost the Democrats the House and Senate. He cites a  USA Today/Suffolk University poll, which “suggests a bare majority of Hillary voters – 52 percent – are very or somewhat likely to split their ticket when they vote, punching their ballot for Clinton for president but a Republican for Congress. By contrast, a slight majority of Donald Trump supporters say they will vote straight Republican up and down the ballot”

However, “The biggest problem with Clinton’s outreach to Republicans,” explains Ed Kilgore in his New York Magazine article “Maybe Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Spend So Much Time Pursuing Republican Voters,” is that “it does not seem to be working, at least at the level of actual rank-and-file voters…There are relatively few signs in polling so far of significant crossover voting by either partisans or partisan-leaning independents.” Kilgore concludes that “Clinton’s outreach to them is risky and not really necessary.”

“In the heat of this year’s presidential battle,” Kilgore says, “taking the fight to the partisan enemy makes more sense than begging it to surrender.”

Ron Brownstein notes further, in The Atlantic: “In one respect, Democrats have helped Republican candidates to escape any Trump undertow. Although some individual Senate candidates have linked their opponents to the blustery nominee, Hillary Clinton has mostly chosen not to tie Trump to conservative thought but rather to define him as a fringe departure from it. Republicans are hopeful that will help conservative-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump revert to their usual party loyalties in Senate races.” Brownstein adds that Republicans hope for ticket-splitting to check Democratic Senate and House candidates had “some success late in Bill Clinton’s 1996 victory.”

For Democrats, however, most of Trump’s policies are not so different from those of other Republican leaders. As Ed Kilgore explains, “While it is possible to argue, as Clinton regularly does, that Trump has “taken over” a Republican Party that was a different kind of elephant before he appeared, it is not so clear the takeover was hostile or accidental.”

At RealClear Politics, Caitlin Huey-Burns quotes Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who has argued, “You have Republicans up for re-election trying to run away from Trump as much as they can, so I think the smart move would be to lash them together to the extent possible to drag all of them down…The goal is to make the Republican Party as toxic as possible, to make it one big dumpster fire that they can’t run away from.”

Huey-Burns quotes former DNC official Luis Miranda: “We can’t give down ballot Republicans such an easy out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they’re just as bad on specific policies…” However, warns Huey-Burns, “Portraying all GOP candidates as racist or bigoted could turn off an electorate already exhausted by the tone and tenor of this campaign season and the divisive nature of the political system.”

Legum adds, “…Trump’s immigration speech on Wednesday should have removed any doubt about him for even the most clueless, disengaged voter. If that 70 minutes of bombast and flat-out fascism didn’t convince the last few remaining GOP holdouts that he would be far and away the most dangerous president in the history of the republic, then nothing will. If any Republicans are still going to support him out of some twisted sense of party loyalty, then there is nothing to be done.”

From a purely strategic point of view, Republicans who can’t stomach Trump’s brand of politics are either going to stay home, vote Libertarian  or vote for Clinton. There’s not much that Clinton can do, other than an excellent debate performance, to encourage them to vote for her.

In the wake of Trump’s blunder-riddled campaign leading up to Labor Day, most of his remaining Republican supporters are hard-core Hillary-haters, rigid ideologues or misguided ignoramuses, very few of whom can be considered persuadable.  To win the votes of whatever Republican moderates remain, Clinton should instead focus on the debates, which genuinely persuadable voters will be closely watching — along with everyone else.

It was an amazing Wednesday on the presidential campaign trail. After his strange trip to Mexico, Donald Trump gave a long-awaited definitive policy speech on immigration. And as I explained at New York, he pretty much kissed the Latino vote good-bye:

To get a proper grip on where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party after his latest spasm of speechifying and posturing on immigration, it’s helpful to go back to the RNC’s famous 2013 “autopsy report” explaining how the GOP could avoid the fate of Mitt Romney. Romney, you may recall, very accurately described his immigration policy as “self-deportation”: Through malign neglect (including random documentation checks by local law enforcement), make life as unpleasant as possible for the undocumented and many of them will go home and take with them the message that the Land of Opportunity was closing its doors.

Here’s how the “autopsy report” described the political consequences of that attitude:

“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.”

That did seem to be the case, as Romney lost the Hispanic vote — the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. electorate — in 2012 (according to exit polls) by an astonishing 71-27 margin.

And so the logical thing to do, concluded the report, was to go back to the support for comprehensive immigration reform that was originally devised by Karl Rove as one of the keys to an enduring Republican majority — before “the base” rejected efforts by its last two pre-Romney presidential nominees (George W. Bush and John McCain) to enact it into law.

As we all know, “the base” stopped that from happening once again, and the 2016 nominee turned out to be someone who had made hostility to immigration reform — and a variety of other white ethno-nationalist themes — signature motifs of an unprecedented challenge to Establishment Republicanism.

Now that Trump has (apparently, at least; one can never rule out countless additional reformulations and “pivots” with the wiggy dude) issued his most definitive statement ever on immigration policy, it seems he’s taken Romney’s “self-deportation” position and tried to add some teeth and a snarl.

You might not realize this right away, given his rhetoric, but Trump did not actually embrace a policy of immediate deportation of all 11 million undocumented immigrants, apparently realizing that would involve about a gazillion dollars and the establishment of a fascist police state. His proposal to prioritize the deportation of people convicted of crimes is actually the same as the Obama administration’s.

But if he’s serious about trying to immediately deport the roughly 4 million people who have overstayed visas, that’s a pretty big departure from current practice and would require a half-gazillion dollars and moderately vicious police-state enforcement strategies. That could be just a feint, though, designed (along with a new policy of deporting any undocumented immigrant arrested — not convicted, but arrested — for a crime) to put the word out that there’s a new sheriff in town who is determined to harass and immiserate the undocumented without the insane cost and bad impressions associated with setting up star chambers and massive relocation camps and then bringing out the cattle cars headed south.

Politically, Trump is making the opposite bet posed by the “autopsy report” — not just in the sense of moving violently and permanently away from comprehensive immigration reform, but in gambling that, along with the Wall, the most hateful attitude possible toward the 11 million will satisfy “the base” without the fateful step of going all the way to immediate mass deportations, the logical end of his rhetoric.

Some “pivot,” eh?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s botched meeting with the president of Mexico and its aftermath has led to an exodus of what remained of his Latino Republican support, damaged the GOP’s Latino outreach even further and generated global ridicule. As Javier Palomarez, president and c.e.o. of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce put it on the Morning Joe show, “He’s done for…He has laid it to waist, and there’s no going back. Remember this one word: “Payaso.” It means ‘clown.'”

For those who were wondering just how bad of a mess Trump could make of America’s international relations, these three headlines and the stories behind them provide an indication: (1.) “Mexican president disputes Trump over border wall payment discussion“; (2.) “Donald Trump Gambles on Immigration but Sends Conflicting Signals“; (3.) and the devastating “Pariahs for Trump: When ISIS Jihadists, North Korea and the K.K.K. Agree on a Candidate.”

From Nate Cohn’s post “Democrats’ Edge in Voter Registration Is Declining, but Looks Can Be Deceiving” at The Upshot: “Democrats are actually registering more new voters than Republicans. In addition, more new voters are registering as independents. These voters are far younger and more diverse than the electorate as a whole, and they appear to lean Democratic…These trends in voter registration aren’t being driven just by Mr. Trump. The changing tallies are a lagging indicator of what we already know: Many voters who used to consider themselves Democrats now vote Republican…Among the approximately one million voters who have registered this year in the seven traditional battleground states where voters can register with a party — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada — Democrats have an eight-point registration lead, 37 percent to 29 percent, according to data from L2…The Democrats hold this new-voter edge in every state — even the ones where their overall registration tallies have dwindled.” Read Cohn’s post for a more deatiled analysis.

At Politico Gabriel Debenedetti credits the Clinton campaign with some clever moves on the political chessboard, forcing Trump to spend time, money and energy in formerly solid red states, like Utah, Arizona and Georgia — draining valuable resources that Trump needs for battleground states.

In his New York Times column, Thomas B. Edsall sheds some interesting light on New Hampshire politics during his recent visit to a Trump rally in Manchester, including how Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s re-election prospects are being held hostage to her two-faced support for Trump: “Senator Kelly Ayotte, elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, was nowhere to be found in Manchester. She has distanced herself from the Trump campaign as her convoluted equivocation — “While he has my vote he doesn’t have my endorsement” — has drawn national attention, and, in some quarters, ridicule…Facing a tough challenge from Maggie Hassan, the Democratic Governor, Ayotte, who campaigned long and hard for Mitt Romney in 2012, has tried to describe what she calls a “big distinction.”…On one hand, she said “Everyone gets a vote, I do too.” On the other, “an endorsement is when you are campaigning with someone.”…While this is just the kind of distinction without a difference voters are suspicious of, Ayotte is very clearly not campaigning with Trump…Maggie Hassan repeatedly links Ayotte to Trump. In one recent week, Governor Hassan issued eight Ayotte/Trump press releases, starting with “In Just One Interview, Ayotte Praises Trump, Doubles Down on Raising Social Security Eligibility Age & More” and moving on to “In Two Interviews, Ayotte Refuses Multiple Times to Say Whether She Trusts Trump with Nuclear Arsenal” by the end of the week.”

The new Kaiser Health Tracking Poll reveals the major health care concerns shared by registered voters. Among the revelations: The future of Medicare is rated a “top priority” by 66 percent of poll respondents and an “important” priority by an additional 28 percent, while “the cost of prescription drugs” is considered a ‘top priority’ by 53 percent and an ‘important’ priority by another 33 percent. Such numbers suggest Democrats may be able to gain some leverage with senior citizens who have a lot to be concerned about in the Republicans’ refusal to address either of these issues with credible reforms.

For a sobering look at security of voting in the U.S., read “Here’s how Russian hackers could actually tip an American election” by Craig Timberg and Andrea Peterson in the New York Times.

Michael Wines reports in The New York Times how Republicans are manipulating rules of county election boards North Carolina, despite a recent Appeals Court decision invalidating the state’s 2013 voter law, which was designed to suppress African American votes. “In urban Mecklenburg County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one, the number of registered voters has risen 5 percent since 2012. But the majority Republican plan envisions a nearly 9 percent reduction from 2012 in early voting hours, and would limit balloting to six sites during the first week of the 17-day period, then to 22 sites for the remaining 10 days.”…In Lenoir County Republicans propose “106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election — less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.” NC has 100 counties.

David Brooks faults Hillary Clinton with a lack of “graciousness” in her refusal to cower and grovel in response to any phony “scandal” concocted by Republicans.

Before lurching off into a reformulation of his immigration policy and then jetting down to Mexico, Donald Trump had been focusing on an alleged outreach to African-Americans. It’s been a disaster, and I explained some of the reasons why at New York earlier this week.

There are a couple of reasons Trump’s “outreach” could be not only failing but backfiring. For one thing, he is rather conspicuously conducting it via nearly all-white campaign appearances in nearly all-white communities. Yes, he’s going to Detroit next weekend to attend services at a black church. But he’s not risking an actual speech to the congregants there; he will instead do a one-on-one interview with the church’s televangelist minister.

But just as damaging as the medium is Trump’s message itself. Its heart is familiar to those accustomed to conservative agitprop on race: Black folks are dupes for a Democratic Party that has enslaved them on a “plantation” where they give up their freedom and any chance at dignity or equality in exchange for the idle life of welfare beneficiaries. According to this revisionist theory, the modern welfare state is just a continuation of slavery and Jim Crow, with the Democratic Party serving as the continuous oppressor from antebellum days until now, and Republicans offering a continuous option of liberation via self-sufficiency and capitalism.

As Jamelle Bouie observes, the “plantation” theory may be comforting to Republicans who want to deny their party’s incorporation of white racists from 1964 on, but it’s deeply and inherently insulting to African-Americans:

“Beyond incoherent, the ideas underlying Trump’s narrative are racist, full stop. If ‘plantation’ theory is true, then black voters are the mindless drones of American politics. Nefarious Democrats gave them a taste of government, and they never abandoned the hand that fed them. White voters, by contrast, are active citizens—noble republicans in the best tradition of the founders. It’s ironic: For as much as they disdain Democrats as the real racists, it’s the proponents of plantation theory who echo the arguments and propaganda of the pro-Southern, anti-emancipation Democrats of the Civil War era. ‘The Freedman’s Bureau!’ sang one poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, advocating on behalf of Hiester Clymer and his white-supremacist platform. ‘An agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man.'”

To put it another way, it’s probably not a coincidence that Trump’s view of black people as lazy freedom-despising dependents living in a hellish prison built of their own pathologies happens to coincide with that of white racists everywhere, past and present. Black people do tend to notice that.

And then, of course, there is this question of the political leader who, according to the “plantation” theory, is the chief straw boss for the Man, the great betrayer of African-Americans: Barack Obama. Bouie puts it well:

“Tens of millions of black Americans hold the president and his family in high esteem as exemplars of the black community. For them, he deserves respect regardless of your politics. And if there’s anything that defines the GOP in the present age for black voters, it’s the outsized disrespect for Obama, from South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s ‘you lie’ to the birther crusade pursued so vigorously by Trump and others. Black Americans see this, and they remember.”

Observers who are mystified by Trump’s low standing among African-Americans do not seem to grasp the deeply racist subtext of birtherism: that the first African-American president must by definition be an “alien” and the product of a white-hating, “anti-colonialist” point of view, injected into the mainstream of U.S. politics by subterfuge. That first impression of Trump as a political figure was searing and enduring for voters who are intensely proud of Obama and what he represents.

So the failure of Trump’s “African-American outreach” so far is not very surprising; when you talk smack about people to their suspected despisers (conservative white voters) and then aggressively peddle a theory that reduces them to an easily duped collection of scary predators and helpless dependents, they do not respond well. The transparent nature of the whole exercise may even be apparent to its actual target: white voters who are made uneasy by the white identity politics Trump has so notably championed.

It’s unclear Trump’s support among African-Americans could have gotten much weaker. But ending his “outreach” to them is probably the best way to avoid finding out for sure.