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.

Until recently, most experienced political observers agreed that Democrats winning back a majority in the House of Representatives on November 8th would be a long shot, even considering Trump’s abysmal poll numbers. At Vox, however, political reporter Jeff Stein reports that some commentators now see a path that could give Dems majority control:

Geoffrey Skelley, who closely tracks congressional races at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, suggests there’s a crude shorthand for evaluating the battle for the House: Look to see if Clinton can beat Trump by 6 points or more in the presidential race. If that happens, Skelley projects 50 seats would be in play.

..By most projections, Democrats look more likely to get closer to 15 or 20 seats, not the 30 they’d need. Many states have gerrymandered safe Republican seats that would require an extraordinary landslide to do the trick. In 2012, for instance, Democratic House candidates won 1.7 million more votes than their Republican foes — and still ended up with 33 fewer members of the House. This is why even many Democrats believe taking the House is unlikely.

But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. Here’s the math behind how Democrats’ long-shot dream might just become a reality.

Get a district to vote for your party’s presidential nominee and your party will also probably win its House seat.

That’s not an ironclad rule, but it’s a pretty good indicator — in 2012, only 6 percent of districts that voted for Barack Obama voted a Republican into the House.

This is the key to understanding why Skelley thinks a 6-point Clinton win could put the House in play. That kind of national victory would likely mean 50 House districts currently controlled by Republicans would vote for Clinton — therefore suggesting they have a good shot of also going blue at the House level.

Of course, a Clinton win in these 50 districts wouldn’t guarantee House Democrats will pick up all of those seats. (Many are held by powerful or longstanding Republican incumbents who are well-funded and enjoy good reputations at home.) But it does mean that Democrats could lose 40 percent of the House races in districts won by Clinton and still take back control of the House.

And here’s the interesting thing: The polling suggests this is not only a possibility but exactly what’s projected to happen. Averages of all the major polling firms compiled by both RealClearPolitics and the Huffington Post currently put Clinton’s lead right around the 6-point mark.

Stein argues that a 4-point Clinton victory probably wouldn’t do it. That would replicate Obama’s last margin of victory, which only netted 28 seats, two short of what Dems would need to reclaim the Speaker’s gavel this year. A 5-point margin favoring Clinton might do it, according to Skelley’s calculations, but a 6-point lead should give Dems realistic reason to hope for a House majority.

Stein also cites Sam Wang’s calculation that, with just two exceptions since 1946, Democrats have always won back the House when they’ve won the “two-party vote” (voting that excludes third parties). “If the election were held today,” says Wang, “House Democratic candidates would win the popular vote by 5 to 8 percent..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.”

Before Dems get too optimistic, Stein notes that the Cook Political Report projects that “the party is only on track to nab an additional 16 seats and argues that only 33 seats are vulnerable at this time. Further, adds Stein, Alan Abramowitz’s calculations indicate Dems have about a 15 percent chance of retaking the House majority.

So we have a fairly wide range of informed opinions based on data among some of the smartest political observers about the possibilities for winning back a Democratic majority of the House this year. That’s a lot better than what we were looking at a year ago.

If half of the warnings in Dana Milbank’s WaPo column “A Putin-sponsored October surprise?” pan out,  the closing weeks of the 2016 election could make the ‘Brook Brothers Riot,’ hanging chads and  voter suppression scams of the 2000 election seem like a day at the beach.

The really scary thing is, Milbank’s warnings seem plausible, considering what we know of Putin’s character, track record and priorities. Milbank elaborates:

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Yes, that’s right. Forgeries crafted to obliterate the integrity of U.S. elections and create an outcome that serves Putin’s agenda, specifically the election of Donald Trump. Milbank continues:

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

At this point, maybe the smart answer is another question: Why wouldn’t they? If they can hack the Soros Foundation, perhaps they wouldn’t have too much trouble hacking into the offices of Secretaries of State, particularly “red” states where Republicans run election day operations.

And what sort of b.s. memes might the Russians try to implant? Milbank offers a few possibilities, including “Perhaps they’ll show that the Clinton Foundation has been funding the Islamic State, or they’ll have Hillary Clinton admitting that she didn’t care about those Americans who died in Benghazi after all.”

If this sounds a little too ‘out there,’ consider Milbnk’s reminder that “Russian “dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case.” Milbank conceders that “this type of cyberwar — email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a novel escalation.” Further, adds Milbank:

…On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in 2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

…Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

Could Putin make Trump his puppet? Trump is still hiding his taxes from public scrutiny, but it appears that they have some economic interests in common. As Milbank observes, “Trump and Putin have expressed their mutual admiration, and even after the departure of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump and several top advisers have close ties to Moscow.” It’s even been reported that Trump’s daughter is hanging out with Putin’s wheeler-dealer girlfriend.

“The hyper-competitive American media environment,” concludes Milbank, “is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents, altering them, then releasing them as the original.” Given all of the above, the biggest surprise would be if Putin decides not to meddle in our presidential election to help elect Trump.

It may seem counter-intuitive that Putin would prefer Trump to Clinton, since Democrats are far more of a pro-worker party than Republicans. Russia as a whole has prospered in recent years under Putin, but is now mired in a deep recession. The World Bank projects Russia’s poverty rate to increase to over 14 percent this year. Never much of a socialist, Putin has not been an enthusiastic champion of Russia’s workers. He has put his KGB cronies on industrial boards, not workers, and he has restricted human rights in general.

The labor movement is still weak in Russia, but there have been wildcat strikes and protests in recent years. Putin has been able to deflect much worker discontent with nationalist distractions, like the invasion of Crimea. It’s not hard to see why he would like Trump better than Clinton, with whom Putin clashed during her tenure as Secretary of State. Don’t be surprised if Russian-doctored emails and other forged documents designed to discredit Clinton suddenly appear in the weeks ahead.

The Washington Post editorial “Republicans can’t pretend not to know what fuels the Trump campaign” offers some salient observations about Clinton’s speech to a community college in Reno, NV calling out the “alt-right,” especially: “In a major speech Thursday, Hillary Clinton linked Donald Trump to bigoted elements on the fringe of American politics. But she got it wrong when she said, “Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.”…It’s not a “dog whistle” if everyone can hear the bigotry.” The only ‘pivot’ emerging in the Trump campaign is a stronger tilt toward neo-fascism.

Regarding the buzz about the pros and cons of  Clinton’s “alt-right” speech, my take is that it had to be done — at  least the part calling out the Trump campaign for advocating unprecedented bigotry for a major political party (the second video here defines ‘alt-right’). Once was OK for Clinton, but I think it’s a mistake keep on using the ‘alt-right’ term, which suggests something shiny and new, instead of the same old bullying racism, sexism, religious bigotry, homophobia that was more recently attributed to the tea party. What’s new is that they have taken over the GOP, and perhaps the escalated intensity with which they sneer at Republican conservatives who still believe in civility. Remember, the ‘tea party’ term got a long ride – a few years – before it was rendered counter-productive to their cause. This election is 9 weeks away. The media will continue to use ‘alt-right’ as their new rhetorical toy, but Dems need not help bigotry get all gussied up in fancy new clothes. Somewhere Frank Luntz is smiling, but George Lakoff is not.

At The Fix David Weigel explains, contrary to a recent New York Times article by Jennifer Steinhauer, that Democrats are in pretty good shape in terms of this year’s U.S. Senate races. Weigel notes, “Had the party failed at recruiting, it might be leaving races uncontested. It didn’t. There’s a credible Democratic candidate in every presidential swing state. The party is staring at a brutal 2018 midterm map, and it has no short-term solution to the gerrymandering-enabled wipeout of its suburban legislative bench. This year, remarkably, they’ve held off the crisis.” Check out all of the Democratic Senate candidates right here.

From Jessica Wehrman’s Dayton Daily News post “GOP worried Trump could bring down others on ballot: Since 1948, Ohio has split the president, Senate votes just three times“: “In 1984, for example, roughly half of the states holding U.S. Senate races chose a Senate candidate from one party and a president from another…But by 2012, only one in five states holding Senate races split tickets, said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College…The last time Ohio voters backed a Senate candidate from one party and a presidential candidate from another was 1988, when Democrat Howard Metzenbaum won the Senate race while George H.W. Bush took Ohio on his romp to the presidency.” However, adds Wehrman, “As of June 30, the last reporting period, Portman had $13.2 million to Strickland’s $3.7 million. Portman has been airing ads since June, while Strickland began airing his first TV ad in August.” To help level the campaign finances playing field, check out Ted Strickland’s ActBlue contributions page.

Television still rules in terms of political ad revenues, but the picture looks a little different in terms of influence on voters. “Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.,” notes John Herrman’s New York Times Magazine article, “Inside Facebook’s(Totally Insane,Unintentionally Gigantic,Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine: How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds,”

Andy Schmookler, a former Democratic candidate for congress (VA-6) in 2012, has an interesting column, “Should Democrats use Trump as wedge or millstone against Republicans?” in the Augusta Free Press. Schmookler urges both, but with a strategic distinction: “Let the Democratic candidates for President and Vice-President use Trump as a wedge, differentiating Trump from the Republican Party whose face he’s become. And let other Democrats use him as a millstone, to sink the Republican Party in its current form. And perhaps together, these two approaches can loosen the stranglehold that today’s Republican Party has had over America’s ability to make progress as a nation.”

With respect to the Clinton campaign’s ‘wedge strategy,’ Rick Perlstein raises some perceptive concerns at The Washington Spectator about overdoing it, particularly if it throws Paul Ryan a life raft — instead of an anvil.

At The Hill, Niall Stanage discusses another strategic dilemma facing the Clinton campaign: how much to emphasize Trump’s flip-flopping on immigration, vs. focusing more strongly on his lack of qualifications and gravitas. Stanage quotes Joe Trippi, who was the campaign manager of Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the White House: “Sixty percent of the population thinks he is not fit to be president…I would reinforce that and not do anything to take people off it. If the race is about who is fit to be president, Donald Trump is not likely to win.” Stanage reinforces Trippi’s argument: “In a Bloomberg poll released earlier this month, only 38 percent of likely voters said that Trump was ready to lead the nation “on day one in office.” Clinton’s rating on the same question was almost 20 points better, at 56 percent…A Quinnipiac poll released Thursday found 66 percent of likely voters saying that, whether they planned to vote for her or not, Clinton was “qualified” to be president. Only 40 percent said the same about Trump.”

This should be the front-runner for “most unwanted endorsement of 2016.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

• Grievance-Driven Nationalism.
• The narrative that the majority of people have been victimized by enemies – foreign and domestic.
• The legitimation of conspiratorial thinking.
• The argument that only the one strong man can come to the people’s rescue.

These things are true whether they describe the authoritarian regimes of history like Mussolini and Stalin, or those of the current period, like Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or Putin in Russia – both of which Donald Trump apparently admires.

Read more…

As the two major political parties struggle once again for the presidency, it’s being largely missed that Democrats are likely about to break a record of presidential election success that dates all the way back to 1828. I discussed this development and its significance at New York:

When you think of the great political coalitions of the past that were dominant for long stretches of time, you’d probably include the Democratic “New Deal” coalition, the Republican “Gilded Age” majority, and maybe the antebellum Democratic and post–Civil War Republican winning streaks. More recently, you might consider the Republican-dominated period from Nixon to Poppy Bush with its suggestion of a GOP “electoral college lock” pretty notable.

But as Ron Brownstein notes today, the contemporary Democratic Party is on the brink of exceeding them all by one key measurement. If Hillary Clinton wins this year, the Donkey Party will have won the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections.

There are some qualifications that must be attached to this accomplishment, of course. Most obvious, the Democratic popular-vote victory in 2000 did not lead to a Gore administration; Democrats suffered the same fate after winning the popular vote in 1876 and 1888. In three of the five most recent victories, the Democratic candidate did not win more than 50 percent of the popular vote (and the odds are pretty good that even with a comfortable decision Hillary Clinton will be a plurality winner as well). And most significant, Democratic success at the presidential level has not been accompanied by consistently strong performances down ballot, especially in midterms, where Republican landslides during Democratic presidencies (1994, 2010, 2014) are becoming pretty common.

Still, something is going on that makes the presidential-popular-vote winning streak possible, particularly when you add in the Democratic near-miss in 2004 and contrast this era with the 1980s and its three straight Republican wins by large margins. Brownstein points to a common feature of all dominant presidential coalitions: the close alignment of a party with “growing groups in the electorate.” For today’s Democrats, that means “minorities, Millennials, and whites who are college-educated, secular, or single (especially women).”

Today’s Republicans, of course, by nominating Donald Trump, have gambled everything on winning a supersize and super-energized share of the declining groups in the electorate: white folks, old folks, non-college-educated folks, self-consciously religious folks, and married folks (especially men). If that strategy fails, as appears likely at the moment, then the GOP will have the dual problem of a continuing and intensified misalignment with prevailing demographic trends, and a disappointed and angry old-white-male “base” that may be even more radicalized by the election of the first woman president following the first African-American president. It’s not a scenario that will lend itself to a quick recovery, which means the Democratic winning streak could grow even longer.

Or so Democrats hope. Karl Rove had similar visions of a permanent Republican majority in the early 2000s, but objective reality rudely interfered. That can always happen.