At The Fix, Philip Bump has an overview of early voting windows in the 50 states and how these windows  affect presidential campaign strategy. Bump unveils a new WaPo graph which depicts the early voting window in each state, along with polling averages in each state, to provide a sense of how Clinton and Trump are doing. Bump writes:

…”Election Day” is a misnomer, suggesting a set time at which America will head to the polls. Our description of Election Day being 82 days away is correct in that Nov. 8 is the day most people will vote in the election — but millions will vote well in advance of that, some by absentee ballot and some at early voting stations. What that means is that the presidential campaigns (and every other candidate) needs to have its turnout operation up and ready within a month, not within two. And it means that Trump’s consistent pokiness about setting up his field effort will be a problem sooner rather than later.

At Bloomberg, Sasha Issenberg (who knows this world well) reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has oriented its operation in an unusual way, dividing its focus between states that vote early and those that don’t, recognizing the very different ways in which the campaigns in those places differ. In 2012, a quarter of the votes cast were cast by early ballot, he notes. Michael McDonald, who tabulated that number, figures this year could top one-third.

Bump points out that the rules for early voting vary significantly from state to state, so the value of any comparisons is limited accordingly. One of the consequential takeaways from the graph is that people will start voting toward the end of September in six states, including potential swing states Michigan and Minnesota. All of the other early voting windows open up in October, with the exception of Oklahoma, which has a tiny early voting window in November.

Some, but not all of the potential swing states that will decide the election, have early voting windows opening in October, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. Of this list, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia have the most electoral votes, and all of them have Republican Governors and Secretaries of State.

Recent history suggests voter suppression activities on election day, including “caging,” poll site and hours disinformation, phony “security” guards, no parking signs near polls, purge lists, voting machine malfunctions, poll understaffing to create long lines and other scams, will be in full throttle in the first three of these states.  So early voting can make a pivotal difference in these four states, especially NC, where close races for Governor and U.S. Senator, as well as President are heating up. Ohio and Florida also have see-saw senate races, according to recent polls.

It makes good sense for Democratic candidates to try and bank as many votes as possible in the early voting windows in these four potential swing states. Florida (Oct. 29) and North Carolina (Oct. 27) have short early voting windows, while Ohio (Oct. 12) and Georgia (Oct. 17) open their early voting windows earlier.

Democrats should take no comfort from the fact that many Republicans, including Governor Kasich of Ohio, have given up on Trump. Dems should still expect fierce voter suppression in Ohio, where Republicans desperately want to hold Rob Portman’s senate seat and in NC, where even more is at stake.

It is encouraging that the Clinton campaign has a much better ground game already gearing up to help bank early votes. They are going to need it in a big way in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, and perhaps Georgia.

The news that Donald Trump hired Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon to serve as his new campaign chairman, even as his fellow Republicans were begging him to “normalize” his campaign, shocked people all over the political spectrum (at least outside Breitbart’s own fever swamp!). But the most savage condemnations came not from the Left but from the Right, as I noted at New York.

Here’s conservative activist and TV commentator Erick Erickson:

Bannon coming onto the Trump campaign is just a doubling down on crazy. It means the Trump campaign has not really learned any lessons, does not really recognize its message is not a winning message, and it’s just going to go out in a blaze of conspiracy theory and bitterness.

We are now moving beyond a dumpster fire. We’re more at Chernobyl. The only thing that’ll be coming out of the Trump campaign by November are three headed rats, which is kind of fitting.

Here’s Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard:

“The campaign overhaul means that Trump is choosing to end his campaign living in the alternate reality that Breitbart creates for him on a daily basis — where everything he does is the best, where everyone who questions him is an idiot or a traitor, where big rallies portend electoral victories, where House speaker Paul Ryan is the problem with modern conservatism, where polls that find him down are fixed, where elections he loses are rigged, where immigration and trade are the nation’s most pressing issues, and where, truly, Trump alone can fix it all.

“Breitbart is the only place that is more Trumpian than Trump.”

And more succinctly, here’s conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes:

“Trump’s campaign has now entered the hospice phase. He knows it’s dying and he wants to surround himself with his loved ones.”

Last but not least, there is the bitter jeremiad from Ben Shapiro, a former colleague of Bannon who left Breitbart because it was becoming a “Trump Pravda”:

“Many former employees of Breitbart News are afraid of Steve Bannon. He is a vindictive, nasty figure, infamous for verbally abusing supposed friends and threatening enemies. Bannon is a smarter version of Trump: he’s an aggressive self-promoter who name-drops to heighten his profile and woo bigger names, and then uses those bigger names as stepping stools to his next destination. Trump may be his final destination. Or it may not. He will attempt to ruin anyone who impedes his unending ambition, and he will use anyone bigger than he is — for example, Donald Trump — to get where he wants to go. Bannon knows that in the game of thrones, you win or die. And he certainly doesn’t intend to die. He’ll kill everyone else before he goes.”

Now, it is true that all of the above detractors of Trump and Bannon are prominent Never Trump activists who look forward to regaining power in the GOP after a Trump defeat. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable cascade of venom involving people who once served the same political gods. And, if they are right about the hiring’s significance, they won’t have to wait long to get the old band back together with the Trumpites in full disgrace.

If they’re wrong, of course, big plates of crow will be in order. But the country as a whole will have much bigger problems.

In his Washington Post column on the Trump campaign leadership re-do, E. J. Dionne, Jr. observes, “There is much good news but one piece of bad news for Clinton in the Trump shake-up. The bad news is that she is likely to have to play more defense, especially if Bannon builds on his success in enticing reporters at non-conservative media outlets to work on stories damaging to her…The good news is that Trump seems determined to fight through the campaign on his own terms. This reduces the chances that he will drop out of the presidential race, which, in turn, means that Clinton is more likely to avoid what would be the biggest blow to her chances: a Trump withdrawal and the naming of a new GOP candidate.”

Sam Wang writes in his post “What would it take for the House to flip?” at the Princeton Election Consortium: “…I used the generic Congressional preference poll and national Presidential polls to estimate that if the election were held today, House Democratic candidates would win the popular vote by 5-8%…. Judging from the last few cycles, that level of public opinion appears to be right on the edge of being enough to give Democrats control of the House…Kyle Kondik takes a more extreme view, and estimates that Democrats need a +10% win. If true, that would be a serious deviation from 1946-2012 trends. There is a research finding from the 1990s asserting that the effects of gerrymandering can fade after a few cycles…”

At FiveThirtyEight,com Seth Masket explains “How A Trump Debacle Could Affect The House And State Legislatures.” Masket looks at historical data, crunches the numbers and observes “There’s a pretty clear relationship — for each additional percent of the vote a presidential candidate receives, his or her party will gain several House seats and about two dozen state legislative seats, according to my analysis. But there’s quite a bit of leniency in that relationship. While having an unpopular candidate at the top of the ticket is certainly a challenge, it’s not necessarily a death sentence. Candidates can sometimes successfully distance themselves from their presidential candidate.”

“Presidential Debates Will Almost Definitely Exclude Third Parties,” writes Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress, because none of them are getting close enoiugh to the 15 percent average in five major polls that is required to be in the debates.

At The New Republic Kevin Baker makes the case for Democrats returning to a form of “machine politics” — using some of the organizing structures that empowered strong Democratic state and local parties in the past, while avoiding the corruption that often came with it.

“Trump plans to devote himself primarily to five crucial states — Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania — where he hopes that raucous rallies and a relentless presence on television will electrify his working-class base and thousands of other people who have grown disengaged and frustrated with the political class,” report Robert Costa, Jose A. DelReal and Jenna Johnson at The Washington Post.

Also at TNR David Dayen writes about Zephyr Teachout’s challenge to debate her opponent’s PAC funders (which I noted in Monday’s Strategy Notes) and comments: “Attack ads usually stream across local television screens without any context. By calling out the funders directly, Teachout has tainted those forthcoming ads by associating them with corruption. And that’s a lesson other Democrats might want to heed.”

From Dara Lind’s “Democrats have a secret plan to win red states without moving to the center” at Vox: “…What if Democrats stopped thinking about winning as many of the available, likely voters as possible, and started thinking about changing the pool of who was a likely voter? What if they focused less on persuasion and more on voter mobilization?…If Democrats stop pivoting to the center and spending money on ads, and start focusing on getting their natural allies to the polls, they can win more durable victories; America, after all, is only getting more diverse…Instead of spending money on ads…spend it on turnout. [Democratic strategist Steve] Phillips estimates that for the amount of money spent on attack ads in the 2014 North Carolina Senate race, for example, Democrats could have paid for “400 full-time staff members to go door to door in communities of color for an entire year, talking to and mobilizing the voters who had turned out for [Democratic Sen. Kay] Hagan when she won in 2008.”

Roll Call columnist Jonathan Allen explains why “We’re Underestimating the Donald Trump Debacle,” noting that “Trump’s failure to put together even a bush league campaign organization has Republican insiders rightly worried about the long-term implications of the impending November debacle. He’s refused to do the presidential-year work that parties rely on to build their donor, volunteer and voter lists for future elections at the local, state and national levels…“Presidential races are where you can invest in data infrastructure, organizing talent, technology, etc. He is not doing that. She is,” Jeremy Bird, the national field director for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign said on Sidewire…Democratic and Republican strategists say he could do truly lasting damage to the size and strength of the party and its ability to find and mobilize like-minded voters.”

When Donald Trump came out with his proposal to administer an “ideological test” for immigrants and even visitors to the United States from certain countries, he talked as though he would insist these outsiders embrace U.S. values of acceptance of LGBT people and of gender equality. I discussed the broader implications of the proposal at New York.

The strangest of many strange aspects of Donald Trump’s new, improved position on how to keep “bad” Muslims out of the United States is that this favorite of homophobes and misogynists is promising to protect LGBT folk and women from terrorists. One of his louder supporters, the anomalous gay voice of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, wrote about this at his perch at Breitbart.com, arguing that Trump is offering LGBT Americans the only thing that matters.

“[D]ecline to bake a cake for some lesbians and you are a heinous bigot. Murder 50 fags and injure 50 more and you’re a tragic victim, probably reacting to islamophobia, whose dad will be invited to stand behind Hillary Clinton at a rally.

“There’s no diplomatic way to put it. In this historic announcement, Donald Trump has dramatically overtaken the chronically Muslim-friendly Democratic Party on gay rights…. The right is quickly realising that, thanks to the silence on Islam, it is they and not the left who are destined to safeguard women, gays, and minorities from the barbarians of the East.”

As you contemplate this argument, recall that the recently adopted platform of Donald Trump’s party denied LGBT folk any right to marry or adopt children, be guaranteed access to public accommodations and services available to everyone else, or even (in the case of minors) to resist being subjected to the inhumane hoax of “gay conversion therapy.” The GOP depends heavily on a Christian-right constituency group that more or less officially considers LGBT people an abomination to the Lord, and their claims to equality a hated “homosexual agenda.” That’s the party that would control the entire federal government and soon the Supreme Court if the 2016 general election went the way Team Trump wanted it to go. But hey, there’s a silver lining: A President Trump wouldn’t let any of that “equal rights” nonsense get in the way of keeping gay-hating Muslims — apparently, as a matter of probability, more likely than gay-hating Christians to actually kill people — out of the country. That’s the bargain Trump is asking LGBT Americans to accept: Throw away your claims to freedom and equality and I’ll protect you from being murdered, at least by Muslims.

When you think about it, that’s sort of the same bargain Trump is offering women and minorities, too: Throw away “the left’s” paltry support for mere rights and privileges in everyday life in exchange for security against Muslims.

Donald Trump is the nominee of a party that adamantly denies women reproductive rights, legislative mandates for equal pay, or anything like an Equal Rights Amendment; that won’t lift a finger to restore key elements of the Voting Rights Act; and that is fighting a scorched-earth battle to restrict voting opportunities for minorities in the name of the phantom menace of voter fraud. Trump himself has promised to create a Supreme Court that will make the spirit of Antonin Scalia the supreme law of the land. He inflames racial fears at every opportunity, and rejects any accountability for police who murder the people they are supposed to protect just as he rejects any limitations on the use of torture by military or CIA interrogators. And most of all, Donald Trump rejects small tokens of respect for women and minorities as “political correctness.”

In a broader sense, it’s the bargain Donald Trump is offering all of us: more of one thing you want in exchange for giving up freedoms you can probably do without. As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently noted, Trump provides all sorts of Americans with the age-old temptation of authoritarianism: It can protect you from certain threats quite effectively — for instance, in the case of rich people, the threat of redistribution — so long as you don’t mind giving up, or forcing other people to give up, certain rights and democratic norms.

The most maddening thing in Trump’s case is that what he offers most insistently, absolute security against terrorism, is a chimera. No one can with 100 percent assurance promise to “stop” a lone-wolf terrorist with access to high-powered weaponry and a suicide wish from taking innocent people along with him to the afterlife. As Steven Brill put it in an exhaustive analysis of post-9/11 security:

“We can’t be right 100 percent of the time. The FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces have stopped between three and five dozen plots since 9/11, depending on one’s definition of a plot. [FBI Director James] Comey’s ‘well-oiled anti-terror machine’ has indeed improved our defenses. And the TSA, Customs, the air marshals, and other DHS units have undoubtedly deterred attacks. But we can’t catch everything.”

But, in a grand irony, that observation, which any homeland-security expert would quickly echo, is the most “politically incorrect” statement of them all, in the sense that politicians just cannot say it. It is the illusion that absolute security is possible that Donald Trump is exploiting — the hope that enough violence and discrimination against other people will keep Americans absolutely free of the fear of more “breaking news” of a terrorist attack.

Sadly, Donald Trump has come within site of the White House while offering this false and corrupt bargain.

At Brookings William Frey has an analysis that will should add to the RNC’s woes quite considerably. Frey writes,

Much has been written about white working-class men this political cycle because they represent the voting base on which Republican candidate Donald Trump largely depends. Yet recent polling suggests that another demographic segment – white college-educated women – could be his Achilles heel. I have calculated just how many votes it would cost him if white college-educated women vote the way they have stated they will in recent polls. If the polls are accurate, even a supersized turnout of working-class white men would not be nearly enough for Trump to win the election.

…This year’s election could be historic by making white college-educated women a lynchpin of a decisive Democratic win – an unintended consequence of Trump’s full-throated old-style male bravado, as a contrast to Clinton’s more inclusive messages. These women not only favor the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, but do so decisively – a shift that occurred just after both parties’ conventions took place. The difference is tallied in ABC/Washington Post polls of registered voters for mid-July and early August, as shown in Figure 1. Before the conventions, Clinton held a slight edge over Trump, 45 percent versus 42 percent among white college-graduate women, but her advantage widened sharply to 57 percent versus 38 percent after the conventions.

Frey presents charts that provide a striking visual demonstration of Clinton’s post-convention gains with the white women college graduate constituency, with little variation among other constituencies between pre and post-convention polls. Frey uses a simulation exercize “show how many votes Clinton and Trump would receive from these different groups,” using 2012 turnout rates with Current Population Survey reports and the polling data in the charts and calculates that Clinton would pick up an additional 5 million votes for her election tally, securing a 10 million vote margin in the popular vote. Frey explains,

The main reason for this difference is the outsized contribution to Clinton of 4 million net votes from white college-graduate women. This is a rise from the 659,000 net gain for Clinton that this group contributed under the pre-convention polling scenario. It makes the difference between a solid Democratic win and a near landslide win. Throughout the nation’s history only four previous presidential candidates (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt) showed winning margins that exceeded 10 million votes.

Frey performs another simulation exercize in which white non-college men turn out to vote in percentages  matching that of white college-educated men, a generous 79 percent turnout rate, translating into an 16 million increase in this constituency over 2012.

“Yet even with the assumption of extreme white working-class male turnout,” writes Frey, “the election results in a 5 million vote win for Clinton. This indicates that if Clinton can sustain the support of white educated women shown in recent polls, she can overcome supersized turnout of white working-class men.” Frey acknowledges that a lot could change in the months ahead. He concludes, however, that

…The division between the voting patterns of white-working-class and racial-minority voters will probably be larger than in the past. But recent polls suggest that there could be a new demographic divide within the white population with white college-educated women turning into a meaningful Democratic bloc. If this split within the white population persists until Election Day, it could result in a landslide win for Clinton over Trump.

Despite all of the complications that could arise over the next 90 days, Frey’s scenarios are not so  implausible if Clinton can hold steady her electoral popular vote coalition. And while many pundits are predicting a Clinton victory in November, the word “landslide” in Frey’s analysis should have GOP down-ballot candidiates in swing states and districts more than a little worried.

At Politico Daniel Strauss reports on plans for a heightened role for Sanders in support of Democratic presidential nominee Clinton and other party candidates for congress, state and local offices. Strauss notes that the effort is being coordinated by Interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile, former Sanders campaign head Jeff Weaver and state Democratic Party leaders, along with other DNC officials and Sanders aides.

Strauss reports that Brazile met with Weaver and Sanders’ top campaign adviser Mark Longabaugh, followed up by Brazile’s conference call with top Democratic National Committee officials including chief of staff Brandon Davis and state party leaders. The topics discussed “Sanders’ schedule as well as voter mobilization among former Sanders supporters,” notes Strauss, who adds,

Brazile told those on the conference call that Weaver had agreed to help her “through this election process and beyond.”

The call focused on a 50-state strategy for the November election to be implemented soon by members of Clinton’s campaign and Sanders’ former presidential team.

The close interactions between the interim DNC chairwoman and the Sanders campaign is in stark contrast to earlier in the presidential cycle when the campaign criticized now-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as unfairly partial to Clinton.

“I know that sometimes in primaries there can be sharp elbows, and I hope I haven’t bumped into too many of you,” Weaver said on the call. “But as we go forward into the general election, I’m very happy to be working with members of the Clinton team in trying to get the secretary elected.”

Brazile affirmed her determination to strengthen the 50 Democratic state parties and support down-ballot Democratic candidates, and a fund-raising campaign in support of that effort is underway. “Marlon Marshall, the Clinton campaign’s director of states, and Brazile highlighted red states around the country where they thought Democrats could make immediate inroads, including Georgia and North Carolina,” notes Strauss.

“We’re continuing to look at places where we can expand opportunities to vote,” Marshall said. “We’re working to expand early vote sites in some of these places like Florida and North Carolina. And we’re starting our heavy push of recruitment of lawyers” to be at polling locations in battleground states.”

Looking beyond 2016, Brazile reiterated her strong commitment to the 50-state strategy. “We know what’s coming up in 2020. We know what’s coming up in 2018,” she explains. With the DNC, the Sanders and Clinton campaigns working together so well, improved Democratic voter mobilization and turnout should Give Dems an additional edge in 2016 and beyond.

Zach Carter, senior political economy reporter at HuffPo, has an interesting post about a promising new strategy being deployed by Zephyr Teachout, a progressive Democratic candidate for New York’s 19th congressional district in the Hudson Valley.

Teachout is “cutting out the middleman” with a new ad that targets “vulture fund” billionaire Paul Singer, who wrote a check for a cool half-million dollars to a super PAC supporting John Faso, her Republican opponent. Teachout points out that contributions to her campaign average about $15. Go to this link to see the ad.

Carter explains Teachout’s strategy:

…When Singer signed on in May, Faso had the firepower to challenge Teachout in the general election.

On Monday, Teachout decided to bypass Faso himself and go after his donor. In a video posted to her Facebook account, she criticized Singer and challenged him to a debate.

“This is very serious,” Teachout says in the ad. “Paul Singer, I challenge you to come here and have a debate with me … I think the people of the 19th District deserve to hear your actual voice when you’re putting so much money into trying to buy up representation.”

Teachout is an academic corruption expert who is building her campaign message around curbing the influence of large corporations and money in politics. So highlighting Singer isn’t just an attempt to dismiss Faso as a tool of big money interests ― it also draws attention to Teachout’s strongest issue.

It’s an interesting strategy. For too long, Republican PAC sugar-daddies have escaped scrutiny and paid no penalty for lavishing big money on their candidates. By calling a lot of extra attention to Singer’s outsize contribution, Teachout is forcing him to pay a price in his diminished image, making his candidate, John Faso, look like a hedge-fund puppet and, if she wins, providing an impressive example that can help other progressive candidates who are willing to go after those who try to buy elections with large donations.

Opinion polls show overwhelming public support for curbing the influence of big money on American politics. Teachout’s strategy may provide a powerful new way to check the corruption of our democracy by fat cat money.

Here’s the Clinton campaign’s first ad on the subject of Trump’s unavailble tax froms: 

The Associated Press report “Clinton Releases 2015 Tax Returns, Pushing Trump for His,” notes, “…The Clintons paid a federal tax rate of 34.2 percent in 2015 and made about $10.6 million combined that year. Pulitzer Prize wining financial and tax expert David Cay Johnston writes at The Daily Beast that “The average American pays 13.6 cents out of each dollar in federal income taxes, with those just below the 1 percent paying 18.4 percent and the top 1 percent paying 27 percent, IRS data show.” Further, according to the AP story, they gave more than $1,042,000 to charity, with $1 million going to the Clinton family foundation. That is the financial vehicle the family uses to give money to museums, schools, churches and other charitable causes…The Clintons have disclosed tax returns for every year since 1977…Trump has refused to make his filings public, saying they’re under audit by the Internal Revenue Service…”

Jenna Johnson notes at The Washington Post: “In January, Trump said he was almost ready to disclose his “very big . . . very beautiful” returns. But a month later, Trump reversed course, citing ongoing Internal Revenue Service audits of several years of his taxes…An IRS spokesman said that nothing, including an audit, “prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information.” And President Richard Nixon released his tax records while under audit.”

David Cay Johnston also explains in his thorough analysis, “Is a Crook Hiding in Donald Trump’s Taxes?” at The Daily Beast, that “Trump’s excuse—that he is being audited by the IRS—is as phony as the three-dollar bills Trump refers to in speeches. Besides which, Trump’s tax lawyers issued a letter saying audits of his returns for 2002 to 2008 were closed with no changes. So even by Trump’s own standard, no excuse exists for holding back those years or earlier ones, which would also be closed…” Johnston also cites numerous  Trump business interests and dealings in Russia, and believes hiding the damaging details may be a leading reason why Trump has not kept his promise about releasing his tax forms.

At NPR Politics Domenico Montanaro puts into perspective why we should care about Clinton and Trump’s tax history, and cites three important things we can learn from candidates tax filings, including: Are there conflicts of interest?; “Do they have heart?” (charitable contributions) and; “Are they like us?” (how much they earn, their net worth, tax rates and lifestyle).

It is highly doubtful that independent tax analysts would be able to say the same thing about Trump’s tax history, that this report by Rick Newman at Yahoo Finance says of the Clintons’ taxes: “…Almost nobody in that tax bracket pays the large portion of taxes the Clintons pay, because a slew of tax breaks sharply reduces the tax bite for most high earners…There are no tricks or gimmicks here,” says Stuart Gibson, editor of the weekly publication Tax Notes International. “These are white-bread returns.” The Clintons earn nearly all of their income from working rather than from investments, which leaves few options for exploiting the many tax loopholes that other wealthy taxpayers use.”

According to “How Much Does Donald Trump Pay in Taxes? It Could Be Zero” by James B. Stewart at The New York Times, “Mitt Romney was excoriated during the 2012 presidential campaign for paying $4.9 million in federal income tax, or an average of just 14 percent of his adjusted gross income, in the two years for which he released returns…No one should be surprised, though, if Donald J. Trump has paid far less — perhaps even zero federal income tax in some years. Indeed, that’s the expectation of numerous real estate and tax professionals I’ve interviewed in recent weeks…Even though his recent returns are confidential, the notion that Mr. Trump has paid little or no tax is not entirely speculative. It’s consistent with Mr. Trump’s returns from the late 1970s, which he filed with the New Jersey Casino Control Commission when applying for a casino license in 1981. Mr. Trump reported losses and paid no federal income tax in 1978 and 1979 and paid only modest sums — a total of less than $75,000 — for the prior three years.”

The Tax History Project at Tax Analysts has compiled an extraordinary archive of presidential tax returns going back to FDR, and includes links to presidential tax information from 1913 till today. Since the 1970s, notes the Project, most presidents have publicly released their tax returns.

And what does Mr. My taxes are “none of your business”‘ propose to do about tax reform for America?  From David Horsey’s L.A. Times post, “Trump’s tax scheme serves the rich, not working-class white guys“: Trump would get a nice payoff from his proposal to cut the top income tax rate. Then, he and his heirs would receive an enormous gift through the elimination of the federal tax on inherited wealth for couples who have assets of $10.9 million or more. As if that were not enough, Trump would receive enormous tax savings from the provision of his scheme that sharply reduces the tax rate for so-called “pass-through” entities, businesses that pay no corporate taxes but whose owners pay a personal rate based on the profits of their enterprises.” Columnist Clarence Page also notes “The “death tax” he promises to scrap actually is the estate tax, which effects only 0.2 percent of all estates. It doesn’t kick in until the estate exceeds $5.4 million for an individual or $10.9 million for a married couple…Call it what you want but it’s not a tax break for the poor, no matter how many upset waitresses or taxi drivers I run into who think it applies to them.”

At CNN Opinion Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, explains why “Democrats must resolve economic identity crisis.” Marshall defines the central choice Democrats face;

No doubt Democrats are enjoying the GOP’s agonizing moment of truth, but their party also faces a big strategic choice. Will Democrats wage the fall campaign as pro-growth progressives or as angry populists?

Marshall sees a “huge opening” for Democrats, if they “offer anxious voters a hopeful counterpoint to Trump’s fearful narrative — a positive plan for parlaying our country’s strengths in technological innovation and entrepreneurship into stronger economic growth that works for all Americans. Trump’s  “retro vision of what makes America great — namely, low-tech, middling skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing jobs that are highly vulnerable to automation — is a major political liability.”

“Yes, it taps into the gnawing sense of economic and cultural dispossession felt by many blue-collar workers,” adds Marshall. “But it doesn’t speak to the aspirations of middle-class voters who now mostly work in offices, use digital technology to boost their productivity, and understand that their jobs depend both on keeping their skills up to date and on their companies’ ability to succeed in global competition.”

Marshall challenges “the conventional view among party elites” that Clinton must keep blasting “populist bogeymen,” like free trade and Wall Street  to energize  “white, working-class voters in Midwestern swing states”  and to placate Sanders’ voters. But “such calculations” are bettter focused on “primary and caucus voters rather than the national electorate” Further,

Nor does it make much sense for Democrats to compete with Trump in pushing blue-collar America’s hot buttons. In the first place, non-college-educated whites have been voting predominantly Republican for a generation…Instead, Democrats should recalibrate their primary message to appeal to aspirational voters across the middle of the political spectrum — independents, college-educated suburban moderates and a substantial slice of Republicans who can’t abide Trump…A business-bashing populism, on the other hand, would put Democrats on a narrower path to the White House, with a slimmer margin of error…To win in red states and competitive House districts, however, the party’s candidates can’t sound like Sanders.

Donald Trump’s domination of the headlines with mounting outrages has served as a highly convenient distraction for the GOP; Much of the media and the public believes it is all about him, and he is dragging his poor party down into the fever swamps. Thus the Republicans escape accountability for their Frankenstein.

But Jeet Heer, a senior editor at The New Republic, isn’t having it. He brings a moment of clarity to the 2016 presidential campaign in his TNR post arguing that “The Republican Party, no less than its nominee, is incapable of accepting the Democratic Party’s right to rule.” As Heer explains:

As shocking as it was, Donald Trump’s suggestion that “Second Amendment people” would be able to deal with Hillary Clinton and the judges she appoints—a clear appeal to political violence—should not be seen as the nadir of his candidacy. Rather, it was part of his larger pre-emptive attack on the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency. The “Second Amendment” talk is of a piece with his claims that the election is being “rigged” against him. Trump is poisoning the well, so that even if Clinton wins, she’ll govern over a population in which a significant minority rejects the notion that she has the right to rule at all.

Yet the coming legitimacy crisis won’t be solely Trump’s fault, even if he’ll deserve the bulk of the blame. As in so many other areas, Trump is merely pressing to their logical conclusion ideas that have been advocated by the last generation of Republicans, albeit more subtly. In truth, the last time Republicans wholeheartedly accepted the legitimacy of a Democratic president was Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Since then, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have faced repeated attacks from an opposition that refused to fully accept their victory as final. Clinton had to fend off ginned-up scandals that suggested he and his wife were crooks and murderers, while Obama has had to contend with birthers who think he has no legal right to be president and conspiracy theorists who believe ACORN stole the election on his behalf.

Heer adds that “It wasn’t Trump who created the bogeyman of voter fraud, which resulted in laws making voting more difficult. That’s a mainstream Republican position, advocated in the respectable pages of The Wall Street Journal and enacted into laws by Republican governors across America, in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.”

Regretfully, it’s not only Republicans who are entertaining the bogeyman delusion, says Heer. “Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have gone out of their way to say that Trump is not a normal Republican, in the hopes that they can shake loose Republican votes. But after the election, this polite fiction has to end. We need to confront the fact that Trump, as extreme as he is, is all too representative of his party.”

And those who think that defeating Trump will end the GOP-driven “legitimacy” crisis are going to be disappointed. “If Trump isn’t the only cause of the legitimacy crisis, then his defeat in November won’t be the cure for it either. America has a political problem that goes deeper than Trump: The Republican Party refuses to accept the fundamental idea that when it loses an election, it has to accept the results.”

“The Republican Party has been recklessly playing with matches for more than two decades,” concludes Heer. “Now they’ve handed over a flamethrower to a pyromaniac. However scary Trump might be, the GOP desire to burn everything down long precedes him.”

It’s really about the modern Republican party’s core contempt for democracy. For them, it’s all about destruction of the adversary in the pursuit of absolute authority, even if their refusal to negotiate in good faith damages the health and well-being of millions of citizens. And when they lose, their strategy is to undermine the very legitimacy of the election and its consequences.

Today’s GOP would no longer be recognizable to Republicans who voted for Eisenhower, let alone Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln. We can do our best, however, to insure that they will be so badly beaten in November that a few of the GOP survivors will see the folly of their party’s flirtations with anarchy, and return to the more patriotic  conservatism that once empowered their best leaders.