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“so-called sexual crimes…” This was out there. North Carolina Republicans made him their Lt. Governor because of it, not in spite of it. “Child-like Oppositional Disorder” describes so many people on the right. And yes, a fair number on the left as well, but fewer than there used to be.
I know you don’t want to watch a whole Trump speech. It’s very, very hard. But he’s escalating and you should probably hear a little bit of it: There’s more of the same. He was all amped up this morning, obviously drank a six pack of diet coke already or Dr. Ronny gave him a little pick-me-up. He’s getting worse. Politico reports: Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping. Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it. The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign.
Mark Robinson’s sinking campaign N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor, had a pretty lousy weekend. He’s looking at a blue Monday too (CNN): Several top operatives on Republican Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor have stepped down, just days after a CNN report uncovered inflammatory comments the candidate made on a porn website. Robinson’s campaign announced Sunday evening that general consultant and senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, finance director Heather Whillier and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk have stepped down from the campaign. Pogorzelski confirmed the news when reached by CNN. “The reports are true that I, along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord,” he told CNN in a statement. Republicans expect Robinson to lose. Reports suggest he is persona non grata at Trump-Vance rallies in the state. Trump frets that Robinson’s drag on the slate will cost him North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes and the presidency (and in due course, his freedom).
At least until Trump does JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.) He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes: Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days. Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling. Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on: Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory. His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.
You betcha In her newsletter today, Margaret Sullivan discusses the astonishing fact that media organizations are sitting on a trove of hacked emails from the Trump campaign and refusing to publish them, in stark contrast to their behavior in 2016 when they eagerly pounced on similarly hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. She asks herself, what if it these were hacked emails from the Biden or Harris campaign. Would they be similarly protected? A group of well-known journalists got together last week to kick this topic around at the behest of Steve Adler, the former top editor of Reuters who now runs an ethics initiative at NYU. Adler moderated a panel including Ben Smith of Semafor who — when he was the editor of BuzzFeed News — famously published the so-called Steele dossier. That dossier was full of unverified and in some cases salacious information about Trump, much of which has turned out to be untrue. The other panelists were Sewell Chan, the new editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Kathleen Carroll, the former executive editor of the Associated Press.
It’s good knowin’ she’s out there Sam Elliot has had lots of memorable film roles, but perhaps none more memorable than the The Stranger in The Big Lebowski (1998). The Lincoln Project recruited the voice of that icon of manliness to pitch Kamala Harris to the dudes out there who need to hear it. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again,” Elliot begins. “Are we really going back down that same fucking, broken road? Or are we moving forward? Towards hope? Towards freedom? Towards change?” “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman,” made me burst out laughing. That’s pretty damned unsubtle. Hope it has an impact with the target audience.
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans got a little bit of good news over the weekend with some highly respected polls coming in showing that Kamala Harris is continuing to grow a lead over Donald Trump. According to the NBC poll, Harris leads by 5 points nationally and has received a mind-boggling 16 point bump in favorability since July. NBC reports that it’s “the largest increase for any politician in NBC News polling since then-President George W. Bush’s standing surged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” It appears that the more people see of her, the more they like her. The CBS News Poll found Harris up 52-48 percent nationally and 51-49 percent in the battlegrounds. Importantly, the poll found that views of the economy have improved a bit and her numbers on that issue have improved with them. Those who are voting on personal qualities favor Harris 66-33% and those who are voting on “policy” are 50% for her and 50% for Trump. G Elliot Morris of 538, posted this on Sunday night: That does throw some cold water on any euphoria Harris supporters might be feeling.
The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker with a long overdue proper description of Trump’s campaign theme: In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery. The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration. It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack.
In case you were wondering how The Great Businessman is doing: It would appear that now that the lock out period is over, Trump or other big stock holders are dumping stock. Too bad about the suckers and losers.