For those who couldn’t bear to watch another day of the GOP convention after the opening night mess, The New York Times offers “Republican Convention Day 2: Analysis,” a roundtable featuring real time commentary by their team of political reporters, including Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Adam Nagourney and Alan Rappeport.

Their overall consensus is that Day 2 was a comparatively tame affair, with the exception of Chris “Bridgegate” Christie’s Hillary-bashing, even though Christie himself still faces a federal investigation. Ed Kilgore probes the weird and poorly stage-managed strategy behind the formal nomination of Trump on Day 2. Other than that, there were a couple of yawners by McConnell and Ryan, an endless parade of no-namers, along with “my dad is a nice guy” speeches by Trump’s children, who the NYT panel says did well enough.

The ‘Trump is a nice guy’ meme, which was painstakingly inserted into Monday night speeches as well, seems to be an ongoing concern of his image gurus, probably because Democrats have banked plenty of videos indicating otherwise (This one will do for exhibit “A”). No presidential candidate in history has been more thoroughly exposed on video as mean-spirited at the core, and projecting him as a ‘nice guy’ is going to be a very tough sell.

That’s the short explanation why so many Republican Senate candidates are keeping their distance. Not that they care all that much about Trump’s lack of compassion and decency; they just don’t want to be his  collateral damage on election day. In his post, “Is distance from Trump a good reelection strategy for GOP senators?” at The Monitor, Aidan Quigley explains:

As Republicans from across the country gather in Cleveland for the party’s convention, several vulnerable Republican senate incumbents have decided to sit out the convention in an effort to distance themselves from presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.

As Democrats try to tie these incumbents to their party’s standard-bearer, Republican senators are staying in their home states to campaign instead of making the trip to Cleveland. Four of the seven Republican senators running for reelection in states that President Obama won twice are staying home..

“For the ones who are running in swing states or Democratic leaning states, it’s a necessary strategy to survive,” Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, tells The Christian Science Monitor.

Increases in polarization, partisanship and straight-ticket voting make it difficult for Senate incumbents to escape the “downdraft” from Trump at the top of the ticket, he says. He expects Trump to lose in most of the Senate battleground “swing states”, which will force the incumbents to try to gain votes from voters who vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. This is a very difficult challenge, he says.

“Pretty much all of them, to varying degrees, are trying to distance themselves from Trump to run on their own record and separate themselves as much as possible, to try to localize the election,” he says. “The problem is that voters increasingly see these choices they’re making in Senate and House elections as not just choices about who they want to represent them in their own state, or their own district, but as which party do they want to control the House or Senate.”

Quigley explains the art of Trump avoidance, as practiced by Republican Sens. McCain, Toomey, Portman, Rubio and Ayotte. Quigley closes with a salient observation by Abramowitz: “Republican candidates will try to separate themselves from Trump as much as possible, and try to localize the races. Democrats are going to try to nationalize the races,” he says. “In recent elections, the side that tries to nationalize the race has generally been more successful.”

For Democratic strategists, the hope is that Republicans will over-invest in doomed Senate candidates, while under-investing in endangered House seats. If that scenario unfolds in a blue wave election, the Republican legislative blockade will crumble into memory.

If the Republican Convention’s opening day is an indication of the acrid tone Trump’s campaign will pursue leading up to the election, Hillary Clinton will have no trouble projecting herself as the only presidential candidate with a positive vision for America’s future.

Speaker after splenetic speaker at the convention attacked the Democratic nominee-apparent, and several of them called for her imprisonment to the cheers of delegates on the floor, some of whom could fairly be likened to near-rabid Salem witch-hunters. Some speakers vented their outrage against African Americans protesting against police brutality and illegal immigrants, blaming Hillary Clinton/President Obama even for tragic accidents that occurred during the Obama Administration.

Paul Begala observed at cnn,.com, “The first night of Donald Trump’s convention was as messy, undisciplined and undignified as Trump himself. If Donald Trump’s hairdo held a convention it would look like this.” Begala credits Melania Trump with the only grace notes of the evening, but adds that some of her best lines were plagiarized directly from Michelle Obama. “I do not blame Mrs. Trump for this,” said Begala. “She is a political neophyte. But her husband and his team should have been especially sensitive after The New York Times reported on Trump Institute’s plagiarism a few weeks ago.

Tonight, it would be hard for the Republicans to match the orgy of sulphurous contempt that defined their opening night. But some will surely try. Tonight’s speakers include Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie and Dana White. Trump will officially become the nominee tonight, and “each state will ceremoniously announce how their delegation will vote, and since Trump has secured enough delegates through the primaries and caucuses…He’ll be the man in the general election starting Tuesday night,” reports Eliza Collins at USA Today.

When the GOP presidential campaign kicked off last year, no one could have imagined that the 2016 Republican convention would be boycotted by both Bush presidents, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Kasich and that the GOP nominee would be disparaged by nearly every conservative pundit. These politicians and pundits now look wise in comparison to the Trump puppets who have now  seized control of the Republican Party.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore previews the GOP convention in his Daily Intelligencer post at New York Magazine: “The general feeling here in Cleveland a day before the formal opening of the 2016 Republican National Convention is that any drama is most likely to occur outside the arena, in some configuration of a three-cornered battle involving pro- and anti-Trump protesters and the Cleveland police…It’s the general disorder in the planning of this convention that sustains some speculation about the possibility of the unexpected occurring inside the arena…But in terms of efforts to loosen the grip of Trump and the RNC over the convention’s rules and platform, it’s probably all over but the shouting…”

In his syndicated column “GOP, RIP?” E. J. Dionne, Jr. has an eloquent take on the coarsening of the Republican Party as they begin the Trump convention. “…Republicans who are not in the least progressive have reason to mourn what is likely to come to pass this week: the transformation of the Party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower into the Party of Trump. Some are bravely resisting this outcome to the end — and good luck to them. A fair number of leading Republicans have stated flatly that they will never vote for Trump. Their devotion to principle and integrity will be remembered.” Citing Trump’s “politics of flippant brutality,” Dionne adds, “hypocrisy really is the tribute vice pays to virtue and so it does mark a decline in simple decency that Trump has shouted out his prejudices openly…He substitutes bullying for choosing, bluster for strength…”

In terms of issues and themes, expect increasingly shrill calls for “law and order” to dominate the GOP quadrennial convention, in the wake of the shootings of police in Louisiana and Dallas. As Alexander Burns reports at The New York Times, “Mr. Trump has campaigned on the theme of “law and order” since the assassination this month of five police officers in Dallas, and he is likely to amplify that message in the coming days…While Republicans often run on law-and-order themes, an indelicate approach could carry considerable danger at a moment of such unusual political instability…But some local officials have expressed concern about the possibility of violence owing to Ohio’s open-carry gun laws. Though demonstrators and others in the convention district have been barred from possessing a range of items, including gas masks, there was no prohibition on the brandishing of firearms…On Sunday, the president of Cleveland’s police union called for additional measures to protect the security of the event, and urged Mr. Kasich to suspend open-carry gun rights.” Kasich, thus far, has refused to do so.

At Post Politics John Wagner’s, “As GOP convenes, Clinton plans to launch major voter mobilization drive” observes “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton plans to announce a major voter mobilization effort on Monday that will aim to add more than 3 million people to rolls by November to bolster her odds against Republican Donald Trump…Aides to Clinton said they intend to make voter registration a major focus at every level of the campaign, including among coordinated Democratic drives in key states. This week alone, they said, more than 500 registration-themed events will take place across the country.”

Meanwhile, from The Brennan Center for Justice: “Today, senior congressional lawmakers introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2016, a transformative bill that would add up to 50 million new voters by automatically registering eligible citizens to vote…In the past 16 months, five states, several with bipartisan support, have adopted automatic registration, through the department of motor vehicles. Oregon, the first state to fully implement the plan, is now a national leader in voter registration rates, and has quadrupled its rate of new registrations at the DMV compared to previous years.”

“Democratic strategists are now talking up not only Illinois and Wisconsin but also Indiana as easy wins, a scenario which leaves Democrats just one seat short of Senate control if Clinton beats Trump. Republicans fear their party could be letting one go if it doesn’t respond to Bayh and the $10 million he already had sitting in his old campaign account when he announced his new run last week. — from “Vulnerable Senate Republicans outpolling Trump” by Burgess Everett and Kevin Robillard at Politico.

In her Los Angeles Times op-ed “The Democrats’ demographic firewall is under attack,” Emory University professor Carol Anderson writes: “A recent study by political scientists at UC San Diego found that in elections held between 2008 to 2012 in states with strict voter ID laws “turnout among Democrats in general elections dropped an estimated 7.7 percentage points, while Republican turnout dropped 4.6 percentage points.” Even more telling, strong liberals’ voter turnout rates plummeted 10.7 percentage points, whereas the decline for strong conservatives was only 2.8%…Four of seven key swing states in the upcoming election, as well as North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin, which were crucial in either 2008 or 2012, have Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement statutes in place. We’ve already seen a dress rehearsal for what might happen in November. The midterm 2014 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections in Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama were all decided in favor of Republicans by a margin smaller than the number of disenfranchised voters in each state.”

Greg Allen explains why “Which Way Florida Goes Hinges On Puerto Rican Voters.” Allen notes, “According to the Pew Research Center, Puerto Ricans make up 27 percent of eligible Hispanic voters in the state, rivaling the 31 percent of eligible Hispanics who are Cuban-Americans…”This year is one of the tests of how strong the Puerto Rican vote has gotten,” says Esteban Garces, with the voter education group Mi Familia Vota. “Eventually, Puerto Ricans, if this trend continues, may outnumber the number of Cubans we have in this state.”…State Sen. Darren Soto represents the area in the legislature. He says Puerto Ricans have been a key swing vote in the state’s most important swing region — central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor — since at least 2008. “We helped put President Barack Obama on top and helped him win his re-election,” Soto says. “At the end of the day, it’s no secret that the candidate that wins the I-4 corridor, so goes Florida.

For those who were wondering about the cultural/entertainment offerings of the GOP convention, read “Scrambling, Planners of the Republican Convention Put ‘Showbiz’ Off to the Wings” by NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters. The authors report that Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson is the headliner, and “actors from “The Young and the Restless,” “General Hospital” and “Charles in Charge” will also participate. Martin and Peters also quote Tommy Valentine, a delegate from Virginia, who dryly observes “This is not what I’d call A-list.” Trump has reportedly caved on his insistance that boxing promoter Don King address the convention, after “Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, firmly explained to Mr. Trump why Mr. King should not be invited: He once stomped a man to death and was convicted of manslaughter,” which might not go so well with the expected calls for “law and order.” At The Daily Beast Betsy Woodruff profiles this charmer, who has reportedly been given a speaking slot at the convention. But whatever levity can be, ahem, goosed out of the looming potential for disaster the GOP convention provides will likely be found at The Late Show, where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will riff on the proceedings. As Frank Zappa once observed, “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”

From Erik Wemple’s “Top Beltway journalists cling to heinous assertion of Trump-Clinton false equivalence” at The Washington Post:

When top Beltway journalists Carol Lee of the Wall Street Journal and Jeff Mason of Reuters made the case in a USA Today op-ed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump posed similar threats to a free and independent press, they weren’t suffering a momentary lapse of judgment. Or writing imprecisely in a rush to meet a deadline. Or some other such innocent explanation.

They meant it.

In a statement to the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone, Lee and Mason — the outgoing and incoming presidents, respectively, of the White House Correspondents’ Association — explain what they were explaining:

“The White House Correspondents’ Association defends the First Amendment in the context of the presidency, and, as such, speaks up when a presumptive nominee from either party falls short. Our op-ed laid out legitimate and different concerns that we have about each candidate with regard to the press. We did not render a verdict on which candidate poses more of a problem; people can draw their own conclusions about that. To suggest that we were somehow presenting a “false equivalency” misses our point.

This is not about comparing one candidate with the other; it is about scrutinizing how the candidates would conduct themselves in the White House in relation to the press. We were clear in our op-ed about what concerns we have with Hillary Clinton and with Donald Trump on that specific point. We will advocate strongly for the winner in November to respect a free press based on the principles of the First Amendment, not on a scale shaped by his or her rival.”

That statement lacks one thing, which is the ring of truth.

The offending USA Today op-ed by Lee and Mason actually compared “one candidate with the other”; it actually presented “false equivalency”; it actually blurred and steamrolled the significant differences between the candidates. It’s all in these two paragraphs:

The public’s right to know is infringed if certain reporters are banned from a candidate’s events because the candidate doesn’t like a story they have written or broadcast, as Donald Trump has done.

Similarly, refusing to regularly answer questions from reporters in a press conference, as Hillary Clinton has, deprives the American people of hearing from their potential commander-in-chief in a format that is critical to ensuring he or she is accountable for policy positions and official acts.

Bolding added to highlight the smoking gun of false equivalency: that the anti-media policies of these two candidates are similar. The headline helps level the playing field, too: “Trump, Clinton both threaten free press.” As does the piece’s kicker: “Both Clinton and Trump can do better.”

The beauty of journalism is that once you’ve written a piece, you may retain the byline or even the copyright, but you don’t own the interpretations. That’s the prerogative of readers. Here, the message is clear — Clinton and Trump are co-threats to a free press in the United States. There was no effort to contextualize this message, no qualifiers, no reality check. That Lee and Mason chose to recommit themselves to a deeply flawed piece says a great deal about the catechism of “fairness” in old-line media organizations. They’re all bad, equally bad, goes the apparent thinking.

And let’s directly attack the common and facile fallback line that “people can draw their own conclusions.” Oh, no they cannot, Lee and Mason, because you two didn’t provide a comprehensive list of Trump’s and Clinton’s transgressions. You abridged the list to facilitate false equivalency. This is awful.

To recap the imbalance between Trump’s and Clinton’s approaches to the media, we’ll re-run the list of offenses cataloged in this blog’s initial post on this absurdity:

Trump campaign:

• Bashing outlet after outlet after outlet in his speeches, often using descriptors like “disgusting” and even calling one reporter a “sleaze” on national television;

• Singling out camera operators at his rallies for failing to pan the crowd. “Look at the guy in the middle. Why aren’t you turning the camera? Terrible. So terrible. Look at him, he doesn’t turn the camera. He doesn’t turn the camera,” said Trump;

• Promising to “open up” the country’s libel laws to make it easier to sue media organizations;

• Denying press credentials to various news organizations based on unfavorable coverage. They include the The Post, Politico, the Daily Beast, Univision, Fusion, the Des Moines Register and the Huffington Post;

• Expressing frustration with the media for investigating his record of charitable donations;

• Suing a former campaign aide for violating a confidentiality agreement by speaking with the media;

• Hassling reporters for not staying in their designated pen at rallies;

• Boycotting a Fox News debate over vague concerns about one of its hosts;

• Grabbing and pushing reporters;

• Hyping a bogus National Enquirer story that spun conspiracy theories about the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.);

• Failing to condemn the anti-Semitic backlash against a reporter who’d written about Trump’s wife, Melania Trump.

Clinton campaign:

• Herding media reps into a roped-off area at a New Hampshire event in 2015;

• Failing to make herself available to reporters on the campaign trail and in news-conference settings.

An alert Twitter user added to the lopsidedness:

 Very good point.

Some insightful comments from readers follow at the end of Wemple’s post.

I’ve been watching Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for a while, and so was prepared when his name finally emerged as Donald Trump’s running-mate. Here are some observations I made at New York:

The more you look at Pence’s recent career…the more he looks like a running mate who checks all the boxes for Trump, but very faintly.

Most notably, this supposed Republican-unity figure has been struggling in his gubernatorial reelection campaign. You get the distinct sense Hoosier Republicans are pleased to hand him off to Trump so that they can put a better candidate into the race to succeed him. That’s not a very good sign.

From the beginning of his tenure in Indianapolis, Pence has looked diminished by the long shadow of his Republican predecessor, Mitch Daniels, generally rated as a successful chief executive even by Democrats. His meh reputation turned toxic in 2015 when by virtually all accounts he bungled an effort to enact a “religious liberty” law, only to backtrack when his state became the target for high-profile boycott threats from businesses, the NCAA, and even churches. His “fix” of the law to make it less egregiously hostile to the basic rights of LGBT folk left no one satisfied.

The fallout hasn’t really dissipated. Pence’s reputation as an unshakable social conservative is supposedly one of the qualities he brings to Trump, whose own standing with Christian conservatives is as fragile as that “little cracker” (as he calls it) he consumes on occasion at church communion celebrations. So it must be unsettling to Team Trump to hear Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins pause during his largely successful efforts to ride herd on the Republican platform committee to diss the Indiana governor:

“Family Research Council head Tony Perkins told NBC News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell at the RNC’s Platform Committee meeting today that he believes Trump ‘can do better,’ citing Pence’s wavering support for the religious freedom bill he signed into law. ‘I think he can do better with someone who has not capitulated on something as fundamental as religious freedom,’ Perkins said.”

Pence also has a reputation as a rock-ribbed economic conservative. But it’s not clear it would survive the upcoming flip-flops over trade and other economic issues he’d have to execute as Trump’s running mate. A video of him praising NAFTA and other past and future trade agreements on the House floor is already circulating.

Speaking of the House, Pence did not sponsor a single enacted law in 12 years as a congressman. He used to get credit from conservative activists for a two-year chairmanship of the House Republican Study Committee, for decades the conservative group that acted as an ideological commissar monitoring the eternally suspect House Republican leadership. Shortly after Pence’s departure, though, the RSC was impatiently pushed aside by what became the House Freedom Caucus, whose members denounced the RSC as false-flag RINO defenders of the leadership. Another line on Pence’s résumé began to fade.

More generally, this man once considered presidential timber has shown himself to be a tad slow on his feet. You have to wonder how he would fare in a debate against a sharp-witted Democrat like Elizabeth Warren or really any of the figures on Clinton’s short list for veep.

So sure, he’s less perilous than Gingrich or Christie, and not in any danger of upstaging the Boss (unless it’s with a gaffe). He ostensibly helps to mend fences with anti-Trump conservatives, but it’s worth keeping in mind #NeverTrump conservative leader Erick Erickson’s sardonic reaction to reports of Pence’s selection:

“This will be both fun to watch and vicariously humiliating for so many who for so long backed Pence.”

If I had to guess, I’d figure that Pence will soon fade into the background and give Trump what he probably wanted all along: a ticket of Trump looking into a mirror.

So yeah, this is an underwhelming decision.

Christopher Ingraham’s Wonkblog post, “The non-religious are now the country’s largest religious voting bloc” provides a number of interesting observations about the role of religion in U.S. politics. It’s an evolving role, made more complicated by demographic transformations underway in particular states. But there are a couple of overriding points of interest, including:

More American voters than ever say they are not religious, making the religiously unaffiliated the nation’s biggest voting bloc by faith for the first time in a presidential election year. This marks a dramatic shift from just eight years ago, when the non-religious were roundly outnumbered by Catholics, white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants.

These numbers come from a new Pew Research Center survey, which finds that “religious ‘nones,’ who have been growing rapidly as a share of the U.S. population, now constitute one-fifth of all registered voters and more than a quarter of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters.” That represents a 50 percent increase in the proportion of non-religious voters compared with eight years ago, when they made up just 14 percent of the overall electorate.

My hunch is that it is a mistake to call the religiously unaffiliated a “voting bloc,” at least in the sense that they are not monolithic supporters of Democrats, Republicans or any other party. Indeed, as the above quote notes, only about one out of seven of them actually vote. It’s also a mistake to think of them as heathens, in that many will tell you they are believers, but they distrust “organized religion.” So it’s not like all of those who bother to vote are casting ballots that reflect atheistic convictions.

Nor are the religiously-affiliated paragons of high voter turnout. (I kid you not, in an interesting coincidence a few mintues ago, I was interrupted by the knock on the door by a member of  Jehova’s Witnesses, who do not vote at all as a matter of principle.) Ingraham shares the following Pew Research Center chart indicating the voter registration trends of the religiously affiliated subgroups and unaffiliated since 2008:

So the misnamed non-religious Americans are now 21 percent of registered voters, a 50 percent uptick from 2008, while “other religions” have increased their share of RVs from 9 to 11 percent and Catholics, white evangelical protestants and white mainline protestants have seen a decline in their share of the nation’s RVs.

Ingraham adds further,

The growth of the non-religious — about 54 percent of whom are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 23 percent at least leaning Republican — could provide a political counterweight to white evangelical Protestants, a historically powerful voting bloc for Republicans. In 2016, 35 percent of Republican voters identify as white evangelicals, while 28 percent of Democratic voters say they have no religion at all.

It doesn’t seem like this alone will force much change at the ballot box, especially in the context of 2016 politics. Trump, for example, is doing well with white evangelicals at the moment. But it’s not hard to imagine a significant decline in their support for him once the ad campaigns hit high gear and media coverage makes voters more aware of the Trump’s lifestyle and their minimal religious involvement.

Ingraham cites the “underperformance of the non-religious” at the ballot box as a key factor. But that should be a washout for the two parties, neither one reaping much advantage because of it. There is not much that can be done to target them as a group, outside of crafting political ads, even if their politics were monolithic, which is not the case.

But Dems should keep an eye on Latino Christian voters, many of whom may be inspired by Pope Francis’s commitment to social activism, coupled with Trump’s animosity towards their aspirations. Latino organizations are important, but it would be a mistake to assume they alone can increase voter turnout and ignore the Hispanic churches.

Even more consequential, however, are the votes of African American Christians, who tend to cast their ballots favoring Democrats by as much as a 9 to 1 ratio. The ‘Souls to the Polls’ movement could be influential this year, particularly in states that have not enacted voter supression measures to squeeze early voting opportunities and registration deadlines. The Republicans fear the ‘Souls to the Polls’ movement as much as any religious trend in America, and there is not much they won’t do to obstruct it, legal and otherwise.

There has been speculation recently that even Georgia could be in play in 2016 in terms of electoral votes, owing to the accelerating demographic transformation favoring Democrats in recent years. I will be surprised if that happens. But if it does, credit ‘Souls to the Polls’ and Black church activism in Georgia.

The late Rev. James Orange, one of the AFL-CIO’s star union organizers, once told me that the first thing he does when he begins a labor campaign anywhere in the south is visit the most influential preachers in town and make an appointment to meet with their congregations. No doubt the same should be true for Democratic political candidates. Clinton should work every major African American church in NC, FL and GA, and really in all of the swing states.

The Clintons have thus far done an excellent job of leveraging the power of the African American electorate in this campaign. For the remainder of the campaign, however, an even more energetic outreach to Black and Latino congregations can lead the way to victory in November.

After a stretch of very positive polling numbers, the Clinton campaign hit a rough patch this week, freaking out some Dems who thought the Clinton-Trump race was headed towards a blowout. I tried to offer some perspective at New York.

Yesterday, a lot of Democrats were upset about Quinnipiac battleground-state polls that showed Trump even with or leading Hillary Clinton in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. But there were mitigating factors: The Q-polls had been giving bad news to Hillary Clinton all year, and there were other recent polls showing her still holding a robust lead.  Still, those thinking she was in the process of building a landslide were disabused of the idea. Moreover, the polls have been showing that the FBI’s announcement of its findings in the email case were hurting rather than helping her.

Today you can expect an even stronger reaction to a CBS/New York Timesnational poll showing a 40/40 dead heat between Clinton and Trump.  The tie isn’t broken when Gary Johnson is added to the mix; it’s then 36/36 with 12 for the Libertarian. The last couple of polls from this outlet showed Clinton with a comfortable if not overwhelming lead.

The timing of this poll probably had a lot to do with the results: It was taken beginning the very day the FBI findings on Clinton’s email usage were revealed, subsequently dominating the news the whole time these pollsters were in the field. So it probably represents a peak reaction to that event. Unsurprisingly, Clinton’s ratings for being “honest and trustworthy” took a dive, to a dismal 28/67, as did her favorability ratio (28/54), shown as basically equal to Trump’s (30/54).

If there’s any silver lining for Democrats in these numbers, it’s that a poll taken at the worst possible time still showed her even with Trump. He’s not rising in the polls, either; she’s dropping. The subsequent endorsement she received from Bernie Sanders has probably improved her standing among both Democrats (where this poll gave her a 58/19 favorability ratio) and independents (19/62). And at present, it’s a fair guess her convention will be better managed and more positive than Trump’s. Even with this latest poll, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver’s polls-only projection gives Clinton a 66 percent probability of winning, though Trump’s odds have risen from 20 percent to 34 percent in pretty short order. And she got some good news, ironically, from Fox’s state polling, which showed her up ten points in Colorado and seven in Virginia, reinforcing the theory that she’ll do well in battleground states with a concentration of college-educated white voters and Latinos.

But as I observed yesterday, it’s really time for people expecting a runaway Clinton landslide to get a grip. It could still happen, particularly if the focus on the emails fades and Trump’s divisive character and dubious “ideas” get more attention, but a close race remains likely.

House Democrats will work a new theme to win seats in November, reports Carl Hulse at the New York Times: “After months of polling, focus groups and consultation with experts, Democrats have settled on “Stronger America: A New American Security Agenda,” unveiling it just in time to give lawmakers a chance to test it out over the coming seven-week break…All of that research comes down to one thing,” said Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, who is in charge of the party’s communications and messaging. “We are in an intense security environment. People are concerned about their security.”

“A massive new poll by Morning Consult finds Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would collect 320 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 212, far more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House,” reports Gabrielle Levy at U.S. News. What makes this poll with results for all 50 states a little more credible than other recent Trump-favorable polls trumpeted by conservatives is the sample size: 60,000.

“…The Sanders campaign will not further contest the makeup of the Democratic platform at the convention, even though Sanders did not get all the changes to the platform he had hoped for,” notes Greg Sargent at The Plum Line. “Previously, the Sanders campaign had intimated that — even after he endorsed Clinton — it would file minority reports indicating his disagreement with various aspects of the Dem platform, which could have perhaps led to continuing disillusionment among his 13 million voters, whom Clinton very much wants to win over starting now…This matters for two reasons: First, it shows that Sanders actually did get a great deal of what he had hoped for into the platform. And second, it suggests that, while there may still be some lingering conflicts over various matters involving rules, the convention will go a lot more smoothly than many had expected — and so will the process of Democratic unity.”

The Monkey Cage’s Josh Putnam explains why the “Never Trump” grumblers in the GOP are not likely to get much traction at the Republican convention.

A list of speakers for the GOP convention released this morning includes: Pastor Mark Burns; Phil Ruffin; Congressman Ryan Zinke; Pat Smith; Mark Geist; John Tiegen; Congressman Michael McCaul; Sheriff David Clarke; Congressman Sean Duffy; Darryl Glenn; Senator Tom Cotton; Karen Vaughn; Governor Mike Huckabee; Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Melania Trump; Senator Joni Ernst; Kathryn Gates-Skipper; Marcus Luttrell; Dana White; Governor Asa Hutchinson; Attorney General Leslie Rutledge; Michael Mukasey; Andy Wist; Senator Jeff Sessions; Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; Alex Smith; Speaker Paul Ryan; Congressman Kevin McCarthy; Kerry Woolard; Senator Shelley Moore Capito; Dr. Ben Carson; RNC Co-Chair Sharon Day; Natalie Gulbis; Kimberlin Brown; Antonio Sabato, Jr.
; Peter Thiel; Eileen Collins; Senator Ted Cruz; Newt Gingrich; Michelle Van Etten; Lynne Patton; Eric Trump; Harold Hamm; Congressman Chris Collins; Brock Mealer; Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn; Governor Mary Fallin; Darrell Scott; Lisa Shin; Governor Rick Scott; Chairman Reince Priebus; Tom Barrack; Ivanka Trump; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Jerry Falwell Jr.
; Rabbi Haskel Lookstein; Chris Cox; Senator Mitch McConnell; Tiffany Trump; Governor Chris Christie; Donald J. Trump Jr.
; and Governor Scott Walker. Trump’s running mate will also get a slot and others will likely be added to the program. No Bushes, McCain, Kasich, Fiorina or Graham, and hey, where’s Palin? Don’t expect an empty chair, but there will be plenty of empty suits.

Not a shocker, but Alexander Bolton reports at The Hill that Gov. Mike Pence is the favorite running mate choice of the GOP estabs.

A tidbit from Laurie Goodstein’s NYT article on a Pew Research poll indicating that white evangelicals favor Trump by nearly 4-1 ratio: “The poll also found that Roman Catholics favored Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, over Mr. Trump by 17 percentage points — a significant shift from the 2012 presidential race, when Election Day exit polls showed Catholics split almost evenly between Mr. Romney and the Democratic incumbent, President Obama…The change is largely because of the support of Hispanic Catholics, who make up about one-third of Roman Catholics in the United States and favor Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Trump by an overwhelming 77 percent to 16 percent. White Catholics narrowly favor Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton, 50 to 46 percent, but Mrs. Clinton has a 19-point advantage among all Catholics who say they attend Mass weekly.”

Regarding recent horse-race polls, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his syndicated column: “There is also no doubt that Hillary Clinton has suffered some damage from FBI Director James Comey’s sharp criticisms of her use of a private email server…Still, there is reason to believe that Clinton, like Bush and her husband, has an opportunity to win over new sympathizers, especially since voters have revised their judgments in her favor before. Her favorable ratings in the Gallup poll reached as high as 67 percent in late December 1998, and 66 percent in May 2012…Clinton almost certainly has more room to grow than Trump does, given her past high marks and the fact that even at her lowest points this year, Clinton’s favorability still has outpaced Trump’s in most surveys.”

Turns out Justice Ginsburg does regret making “ill-advised” comments about Trump, including calling him “a faker” following a GOP-driven media storm. But she didn’t say her comments weren’t true.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has provoked the ire of Donald Trump by calling him out on not releasing his tax returns. In so doing she also took a well-deserved poke at the media:

How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.

Trump, Ryan and other Republicans are bent out of shape about her breaking with the “nonpartisan” tradition of not having anything to say about presidential candidates. But that’s a pretty archaic tradition, considering how politicized the court has been under Roberts and Rhenquist, both of whom served as highly-partisan GOP voter suppression errand boys before their appointments as Chief Justice and who continued to vote for the Republican agenda during their terms (Roberts slightly less so). And no one has accused Justices Thomas, Alito or the late Justice Scalia of being insufficiently supportive of Republican priorities.

Then there was Alito’s mugging and head-shaking in disgust at President Obama’s comments on the court’s campaign finance ruling in the state of the Union speech back in 2010. You can go back a little earlier, to Bush v. Gore, if you need the emblematic partisan decision favoring the GOP.

Never a stickler for fussy notions about “decorum,” Ginsburg’s refreshing candor on Trump is no doubt driven by her concern that a “leader” of his calibre is a serious threat to our democracy. Her comments are well-protected by the first amendment, which for our Republican readers, is the one that comes before the half of the second amendment they so ardently embrace.

Republicans will surely continue blasting away at Ginsburg. But her point about Trump’s failure to release his tax returns is inarguable. As tax expert David Cay Johnston put it in his Daily Beast article, “New Evidence Donald Trump Didn’t Pay Taxes“:

The disclosure tradition dates to when Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973 and then plead guilty to a tax crime. President Richard Nixon was an unindicted conspirator in a felony for which his tax lawyer Edward L. Morgan went to prison for creating a fraudulent $576,000 tax deduction on his behalf—one of the specifications in the impeachment proceedings that never came to a vote because Nixon resigned in August 1974.

The way Trump plans to move past this is the same way he ducks every other controversial issue: he’ll restate his bogus excuse as often as is necessary until the press gives up. He’s going to wait it out or gin up some other controversial distraction to divert the press’s attention away from the issue. Past experience has given him every reason to believe that whatever questioning he’ll receive on the tax issue will be cursory, shallow, and easily ducked. Trump is, at this point, just taunting the press, and he has every confidence that they’ll react the way he wants them to.

It’s long past time to stop letting that happening, and Trump’s tax returns offer an excellent opportunity to reverse the easy press relationship he enjoys and start persistently challenging him on a matter that cuts to the core of his political identity.

As a master of the politics of distraction, as well as media manipulation, it is no surprise that Trump has tried to avoid complying with the growing demand for transparency on his tax returns. But it is disappointing and a little surprising that the major networks and newspapers have not badgered him until he does so.

At Brookings William A. Galston writes about a new Pew Research Center study which indicates that voter turnout may be significantly higher than in recent years. He argues that, despite relatively low enthusiasm for the presidential candidates, the three quarters of the “voters who care a lot about the outcome…will turn out in droves to vote against the candidate they despise.”

Galston explains that, while enthusiasm for tbhe two presidential candidates is low, interest is high, with 80 percent of the poll respondents saying they have thought “quite a lot” about the election. This is the highest share measured in the past quarter century. Another 85 percent are “following the news about the presidential candidates very or fairly closely, also a quarter-century high.” And, 74 percent believe “it “really matters” who wins the election,”up from 63 percent in 2012.

Galston cautions, however, that voters dislike “the tone and substance of this year’s campaign” and there ius a 15 percent increase from 2012 in the number of voters who say the campaign is “too negative.” Further, “A record 41 percent of voters say that neither major party candidate would make a good president. This negative evaluation is more widespread for Republicans (46 percent) than for Democrats (33 percent).”

Galston queries Pew researchers about the seeming contradiction between enthusiasm and interest, and they provided him with data indicating that:

It appears that turnout can be relatively high even when voter satisfaction with the candidates is low, and vice versa. On the other hand, turnout tends to rise and fall in tandem with measures of voter interest and involvement. We would need a serious statistical analysis over a longer period of time to confirm these generalizations. Still, it is plausible that the Pew findings are pointing toward a higher turnout in 2016 than in 2012, perhaps as high as in 2008, although it is hard to be confident of that.

“In this era of high polarization,” concludes Galston, “we have become accustomed to high levels of mutual disapproval between political partisans. This year, disapproval is high within as well as between partisan ranks, setting the stage for what promises to be one of the most negative campaigns that any of us has ever experienced.”

For Democrats, the case for optimism is that voters already feel they know Trump quite well, since he dominates the news nearly every day, while Clinton still has room to re-introduce herself to swing voters who will soon be paying more attention to her ads and the presidential debates. The notion is that many swing voters who have doubts about Clinton will modify their attitudes once they witness her performance in the debates, and her more thoughtful policies and mature temperament will stand in sharp contrast to Trump’s dubious qualifications and comments.

Yet, Trump is skilled at media manipulation, and all too many members of the press are willing to comply. Democrats are going to have to outwork Republicans to insure that Clinton gets a fair hearing and that her impressive qualifications shine through her adversary’s smoke screen.