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).
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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.
It’s going to be a very busy day. Usually the new president goes to the inaugural brunch, takes a nap and then goes to the inaugural ball on day one. Trump says he’s going to take 200 actions and counting. “A lot but not all of what Trump says he wants to do on day one is going to be illegal or impractical,” said Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown University Law Center and a critic of how Trump has wielded executive power. “But even the illegal stuff might go into effect for some time, and he might actually succeed in pushing the law in his direction.” Here’s a little taste of what he’s promising on immigration on day one: Ity sounds like it’s going to be quite a day. Obviously, he can’t do all or really, any of that, on the first day. But recall that in 2017 it didn’t take him very long to enact his Muslim ban and even though the courts eventually pared it back, it created chaos and ended up being fairly draconian in the end anyway. I think we can expect the Mass Deportation promise to be the same.
Something’s happening with the youngs: Voter registration is breaking records as Election Day approaches, particularly among young people, many of whom are first-time voters. On Tuesday’s National Voter Registration Day more than 150,000 people registered through Vote.org, the most the organization has ever seen on that day. The organization registered 279,400 voters in all of last year. Last week, 337,826 people visited a link posted on Instagram by pop star Taylor Swift that directed them to their state’s voter registration site. Although Swift noted that she would be voting for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, people don’t have to declare a party affiliation when they register and neither vote.org nor Swift tracked registrations by party. Vote.org has previously told USA TODAY that about 80% of people they register turn out in the next election. A huge percentage of the newly registered voters are young people, many voting for the first time. According to Vote.org, voters under 35 made up 81% of Tuesday’s registrations, with the biggest spike among 18-year-olds.
Battleground state doesn’t just refer to the election Marc Elias of Democracy Docket previews his newsletter today (sorry, no link). He’s focused on efforts in the courts to preserve voting rights vs. those who challenge them. Two graphics are particularly handy. First the trend in voting lawsuits since 2020: The second graphic displays the number of active voting rights lawsuits by state. Texas and California may be outliers because they are each so big, population-wise as well as Latino population-wise. The other 7+ states are six swing states in hot contention this fall. Republicans would convince their base that it is “Democrats and progressive groups are actively using the courts to bring last minute litigation to change the rules of voting.” The data says otherwise, Elias contends. He writes: The state of our democracy has revealed itself. Democrats will go into the election supporting free and fair elections while Republicans will continue to attack them. I wish it were otherwise. Perhaps if they suffer big enough losses, in two years it will be. But for now, election denialism remains firmly in control of the once grand old party.