A raft of new polling data documents Trump's continuing slide among white women with some college, but no degree, who are or were married to a Sugar Daddy and reside in a state with a high consonant-to-vowel ratio. The preponderance of expert opinion has therefore concluded that Wisconsin is out of his reach and that he should concentrate on Ohio and Iowa.
Seriously, though: it's beginning to look like a lot of states, not just Wisconsin, are out of his reach, and that, somewhat oddly, Ohio and Iowa are not among them. According to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, Clinton now has a double-digit lead in states (and the D of C) possessing 273 electoral votes, which of course is enough to win. States in which Clinton is tied or leading by less than ten points include Florida, Nevada, and the aforementioned Ohio and Iowa. Things can change, but it's a terrible sign for Trump that right now it appears he could go 4-for-4 in these traditional "battlegrounds" and still lose. This is so because he has no path to victory if he goes 0-for-4 in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Colorado--and he is behind by ten or more points in all of them.
Yesterday Trump was in Altoona, Pennsylvania, urging the crowd to vote and then cruise around "certain areas" of the state looking for people voting five times, "because the only way we can lose, in my opinion--I really mean this, Pennsylvania--is if cheating goes on." Since polls of Pennsylvania voters show Clinton with a double-digit lead, this like so much of what he says is reckless and incoherent. Are the polling organizations calling the same African-Americans in Philadelphia five times? I'd say he appears desperate except that it's really not any stupider than all the crazy shit he said during the primary that Republican voters endorsed with their ballots.
In the category of fossilized Trumpean stupid shit, I'd like to highlight, just because it's something I'm interested in, a forgotten tidbit from one of the very first Republican debates. The topic of mandatory immunizations for schoolchildren came up. Trump announced his opposition, and argued that they cause autism. This is a notion thoroughly debunked by science. Trump, however, knows better, because he has a friend who has a beautiful child who became autistic after a vaccination. "A beautiful child!" he said. Life destroyed by a vaccination! Back in those days, the Republican field included two physicians, Dr Carson and Dr Paul, and the moderator had the presence of mind to ask them to weigh in. Instead of contradicting Trump on this question of medical science, they both used the opportunity to add another dollop of stupid shit.
One of the interesting things about President Obama's speech at the DNC concerned his view of the Republican convention. He said that to him it hadn't seemed very Republican and certainly wasn't conservative. I took this to be part of a deliberate campaign strategy. By suggesting that Trump is an aberration rather than the standard-bearer of the Republican party, he hoped to win votes for Clinton among more moderate Republicans. Clinton for president, because Trump is nuts, and then do what you want on the rest of the ballot. That was the president's (barely) subliminal message.
I guess I have a different view. I don't think Trump qualifies as an aberration. He is a fair representative of the modern Republican party. Their voters selected him in one fair democratic process after another. No doubt there are some among us who consider themselves to be twenty-first century American reproductions of Edmund Burke. They're disgusted, but they're also not the reason the Republican party is a force in American life. The people who cheer when Trump says stupid stuff have been the ones supplying the votes for a long while now. The basic problem is that there's too big a market for stupid stuff and the Republican party has been too eager to meet the demand. The remedy is to punish them for that, up and down the ballot.
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