GOP’s bubble is going to be punctured by reality, real soon!
9.
Kylroy
Crappiest thing about Rasmussen? They always adjust their model to reflect reality in the last week or two of the race, so that their final result actually approximates reality. The transparent manipulation at work here is really stunning.
On-line polls tend to favor the activist demographic – even if a minority; yes, that poll is likely accurate for the demographic it is profiling and Rasmussen knows their paying clientele very well.
12.
scav
“Any reasonable poll would have shown Trump winning for decades now,”
I’m sure this is just a show of their strength in the Old Dominion. Am I right?
14.
FlipYrWhig
Not gonna click. Does the mention of the debate mean that this was a “who won the debate?” poll, or is it supposed to be a national presidential preference poll?
15.
eric
@hovercraft: given the allegations against trump, how bout we retire the phrase “pulling out of” for the rest of this cycle.
16.
eric
@hovercraft: lets be honest, shouldnt that have been where his money was going all along, with nevada and iowa (to be safe)
I agree that those polls are useful for keeping tabs on what your base is thinking*, but as a measurement of how one is doing with the entire electorate, they’re pretty much useless.
*I have no doubt HRC has polls that focus on committed Hillary voters as well as the electorate at large.
@schrodinger’s cat: And it’s going to be ugly. They are so delusional.
20.
C.S.Strowbridge
After Hillary Clinton wins, she should have some of her surrogates mock Rasmussen in the media. Make Rasmussen a joke among the general public and destroy their credibility.
Oh my dog. Wow, it’s like we are playing the insult game rubber and glue.
24.
Patricia Kayden
@C.S.Strowbridge: Rasmussen is doing a great job of destroying its credibility via its shady polling. All Secretary Clinton has to do to mock them is win.
Make Rasmussen a joke among the general public and destroy their credibility.
Meh – general public doesn’t know who does these polls. They generally see the top lines.
People minimally involved in politics might recognize some of the names of the pollsters, but that’s about it.
The poll aggregators who weight these polls into their averages – now those are the guys who need to understand that Rassumussen’s credibility is in the toilet. Except that all of them except for Sam Wang do it for the clicks, and showing a horserace is better than showing a blowout until the last few weeks of the campaign. So having some biased polls in the averages helps to keep the narrative moving.
I’m actually happy that Rassmussen keeps the thumb on the scale. Between them and that highly skewed LATimes/USC tracking poll they’re keeping Trump’s head above water and making it impossible for downticket Republicans to write him off as a loser. That’s a good thing – if the polls all show Trump losing with nothing for them to hang their delusions on they might actually be able to strategize to save the downticket races a bit more.
(That said – only a delusional winger thinks Clinton is getting only 41% of the vote. Rassmussen can’t even tweak their samples to give Trump a McCain level share of the electorate! That’s how weak it is – even if they downweight all of the minority votes, and women voters, they still apparently can’t upweight white male voters to get Trump over 45%. Impressive!)
30.
hovercraft
@schrodinger’s cat:
Since “facts” have a liberal bias, I doubt it. Besides I was told that there are no facts.
“I think, personally, if you are starting to get into the fact-check, I’m not sure what is the big fact, and what is a little fact? And if you and I [have] information, does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?”
Janet Brown, the Commission on Presidential Debates’ executive director.
Reality like facts is whatever they say it is, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to wake up to the fact that while they were busy creating their own reality, the country changed. No amount of denial or wishful thinking is going to change it back.
31.
Woodrowfan
I am waiting to hear what the “unskewed” polls guy says..
@Patricia Kayden: And it’s going to be ugly. They are so delusional.
They see it delusional as one of their strengths! Belief is intrinsic to everything they do!
The classic work, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, a group got ready for an alien ship to pick them up before the planet Earth is destroyed. And the ship did not come.
The more fervent the believer, the less they were deterred. They just went through mental gyrations to keep on believing. According to Wikipedia, the group is still going on now, since 1954.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have not been deterred by decades of failed prophesy.
They are not going to convert to a new way of thinking. But it is likely they will withdraw from the world which is treating them so cruelly. That was their pattern after the Scopes Trial exposed them to some heavy ridicule. Even though they “won” in court, the world was not kind.
33.
Shana
@Patricia Kayden: My congressman in Northern Virginia did a poll that showed Trump has about 23% support. This was from about a month ago.
34.
The Moar You Know
If you want to see reich-wing delusion in action, read this.
John Roberts signs off on Obama’s Removal for Treason
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Yes. Obama will be removed from office. Pretty soon in fact. Somewhere around January 20th or so if I recall correctly. And I’m sure John Roberts will “sign off” on it, just as every other Justice will.
These fucking morons. But they gotta keep the grift machine rolling at full blast.
They’ll get another four years worth of butthurt in the bank when that same John Roberts gives Hillary Clinton the oath of office and fails to have her arrested on the spot.
35.
Calouste
@hovercraft: Good, that gives Clinton the opportunity to sweep up Arizona and Georgia. And if Clinton wins either of those, even in the highly unlikely event that the orange pedophile wins NC, FL, OH, PA, and IA, she still wins.
36.
RK
@WereBear: That gave birth to cognitive dissonance in social psychology I think.
What does Rasmussen have to gain by putting out outliers? Is skewed polls lucrative business?
37.
Barbara
OT, and maybe Adam will post on it, but apparently, Trump has issued an apology to Serbia for Clinton’s decision to bomb it in 1996. Other than being anti-Clinton, being pro-Serb is also pro-Russia (Russia is avidly pro-Serbia) and also apparently, a distinguishing feature of alt-right foreign policy views. Some are speculating that it might also be a kind of outreach to Ohio and Pennsylvania, to which I say, “you’ve got to be kidding.” As the granddaughter of a bona fide Serb, maybe 1 out of 10 Serbian-Americans has current allegiance to Serbia, and for every Serb who is excited by the idea, there is at least one Croat or Slovenian who is violently opposed. What is going on here?
38.
hovercraft
Sometimes there are reasons for traditions when running for office.
Trump’s rejection of opposition research comes back to haunt him
10/13/16 08:40 AM—UPDATED 10/13/16 09:24 AM
By Steve Benen
And if it seems as if Team Trump has been caught unprepared for some of its recent scandals, it may have something to do with the fact that the Republican campaign never scrutinized the candidate’s past.
Remember this report from Mother Jones’ David Corn? For most major presidential campaigns, it is a routine act: You conduct opposition research on your own candidate. The reason is obvious; campaign officials and candidates want to know what they might have to contend with once the you-know-what starts flying. But not Donald Trump.
At least not at the start of the campaign that would lead to him becoming the presumptive GOP nominee. According to a source with direct knowledge, when Trump was considering entering the presidential race early last year, his political advisers, including Corey Lewandowski, who would become his campaign manager, suggested that he hire a professional to investigate his past. But the celebrity mogul said no and refused to pay for it.
In other words, when any of the various damaging revelations – about Trump’s finances, his boasts about his romances, women who allege he groped them – the Republican candidate’s staff has no prepared response because they don’t know what’s coming.
That last sentence is ridiculous, anyone with google could have foreseen what was coming. Incompetent campaign is incompetent.
39.
Corner Stone
I can barely even these days. I went from having to order and re-order new bags of “can’t evens” to just blowing right through them to the “can barely even” stage.
U.S. and NATO allies launched aerial campaigns against the faltering Yugoslav regime, targeting ethnic Serb troops, in 1995 and 1999. The first attack was carried out in support of groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, seeking independence from Belgrade, while the second was in support of similar forces in Kosovo.
“The bombing of Serbs, who were our allies in both world wars, was a big mistake,” Trump told the Serbian weekly magazine Nedeljnik for an article published on its website Thursday. “Serbians are very good people. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration caused them a lot of harm, but also throughout the Balkans, which they made a mess out of.”
So, over the weekend I was trolling FB. Turns out that one of my friends from home also knows someone who works for a Fox TV station in FL. When I started poking fun at the nice Fox lady for thinking Trump was winning, she informed me that SHE WORKS FOR FOX and I didn’t know what I was talking about. Then she told me about ALL OF THE YARD SIGNS she has seen in Florida. I told her to learn to read polls and, well, that was when the thread was deleted.
Also, one of my hometown newspapers actually endorsed Clinton. I was stunned, but it was great to stop by the BDT’s FB page to drink the sweet wingnut tears.
44.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
Couple of local notes from Kentucky.
I do appreciate local congressman Brett Guthrie (R)
for his honesty and candor, the shorter of: Trump is despicable, but he would sign our legislation.
Also, an interesting ad from Democratic Senate candidate Jim Gray with video of Christie and McCain trashing Rand Paul. Not sure how well those two will play here. Maybe pickup a few middle of the roaders.
45.
Russ
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Interpole? After reading the article, it sounds VERY serious. I wonder if they’ll go after Hillary.
PA, FL, NC and OH? Wouldn’t Trump have to win ALL the EVs from these states to even make the race close?
Maybe not PA, but if he loses any of the other three it is over.
47.
MattF
Rather OT, but interesting and important. The NY Review of Books has an article (yes, a long article) about the Panama Papers. You think you know the magnitude of what the Panama Papers revealed? Guess again.
48.
hovercraft
@Barbara:
Apparently he’s never heard of the Srebrenica Massacre.
How long before his campaign walks this back and says he didn’t say what we heard him say?
49.
Patricia Kayden
@WereBear: If by withdrawing you mean that Deplorables stop voting, that would be great in my opinion. They can continue living in their own alternate reality cocoon and leave the rest of us alone.
50.
Eric NNY
What the everloving hell happened last night? I left work, went to a firefighter class, went to bed, got up and checked this here blog and the already ugly mess of an election took several more rolls into the muck. I’ve got to quit everything just to keep up.
51.
Aleta
@hovercraft: And if the wanna be candidate refuses to be researched … why, there’s a research result right there!
In Trump’s mind, or what passes for it, Donald Trump does not lose – period. Therefore if he appears to lose, by definition it’s because whatever contest is involved was rigged, whether it be an election, civil legal proceedings, or criminal charges for which he is summoned to appear. Unfortunately, his followers will go right along with him because they are no more attached to objective realities than he is and will believe whatever he says.
53.
hovercraft
@The Moar You Know:
My crystal ball is telling me right around noon.
54.
MattF
@Corner Stone: According to the NYT Upshot decision tree, if Trump wins those four states (in addition to the usual red states), he wins the election.
55.
Gin & Tonic
@skerry: I’ll bet real money that if you put a map of Europe in front of Donald and gave him three tries he wouldn’t be able to point to Serbia.
@schrodinger’s cat: And it’s going to be ugly. They are so delusional.
GOING to be ugly…as if Trump and his hard-core supporters haven’t already gone light-years past any modern (past 100 years) threshold of ugliness in a Presidential campaign. You’re correct that in the immediate aftermath of the election and also inauguration, there’s a real possibility some of Trump’s most extreme supporters might attempt to militia up and declare “free enclaves” of armed resistance to any assertion of federal authority, abetted by “constitutional sheriffs”.
Wingnuts reject reality. They view the world as it actually is as unacceptable because this is not how it is supposed to be.
I wonder if Karl Rove (we create our own reality, we’ll create other new realities and you people can just study what we do) approves of the new Trump reality show.
61.
MattF
@Botsplainer: Well, Noot is, after all, the world’s expert on guys with sensitive egos– so he’s qualified to diagnose Trump’s difficulties.
62.
scav
Here’s a little tidbit
Digit of the day: 12
That’s how many out of 22,450 people employed at Donald Trump’s companies have donated more than $200 to his presidential campaign through August. His employees may vote for Trump on Nov. 8, and could be supporting his candidacy with smaller-dollar contributions that do not appear on filings. But when it comes to putting more significant money toward Trump’s candidacy, his workers have shown little inclination to support their boss.
It’s so short I just copied it all from Reuters which has some other Russian details for those that indulge.
I’ll bet Trump has no memory of groping any of these women because it sounds like he did it so often that they’re lost in the crowd. Chance are he never knew their names in the first place, even if they introduced themselves.
64.
hovercraft
@Jay C:
When even Steve Kornacki is saying at this point that the task is not to plot his path to 270, but instead to plot a plausible path to hold onto all of RMoney’s electoral vote count, he’s behind in NC, tied in UT, barely ahead in GA, AZ, AK yes that’s f**king Alaska. The orchestra is done warming up they are playing the opening bars.
OT, and maybe Adam will post on it, but apparently, Trump has issued an apology to Serbia for Clinton’s decision to bomb it in 1996. Other than being anti-Clinton, being pro-Serb is also pro-Russia (Russia is avidly pro-Serbia) and also apparently, a distinguishing feature of alt-right foreign policy views. Some are speculating that it might also be a kind of outreach to Ohio and Pennsylvania, to which I say, “you’ve got to be kidding.” As the granddaughter of a bona fide Serb, maybe 1 out of 10 Serbian-Americans has current allegiance to Serbia, and for every Serb who is excited by the idea, there is at least one Croat or Slovenian who is violently opposed. What is going on here?
Just a WAG here, but I’m guessing this (lame) attempt to shore up his foreign policy “chops” has several inter-related “aims’
1. Clinton-bashing (Bill, not Hillary, but he probably hopes for some splashback)
2. Russia-fluffing (But with an obscure-enough topic that it won’t be too obvious)
3. Muslim-bashing (“Fighting Islamist terrorism” was a major excuse for Serbian atrocities)
4. Generalized Democrat-bashing (supporting a “wrong” war)
Pretty weak stuff, IMO, but then, this IS Donald Trump we’re talking about: dragging up old issues from the ’90s to slag his opponents with to try to deflect attention from his own innumerable shortcomings. And hopefully, this will work about as well as the rest.
Polls can be used to drive donations. Every candidate wants a poll to show potential donors to make the pitch.
If Rasmussen isn’t paid by campaigns for a poll like this how do they profit?
71.
dww44
@Calouste: And, I aim to help HRC in this regard. Signed up for canvassing 5 days out of 7 between now and the election. It’s good here in my state that Trump is remaining viable to so many GOP’ers who are so focused on why they can cast a vote for him and not that evil corrupt HRC.
Plus Sen. Isakson has long ago endorsed him and the no-name mostly self-funding Democratic challenger stands a small chance of ousting him if the the HRC coattails are long enough. Now, that would be real sweet if Barksdale pulls off a miracle upset.
72.
hovercraft
@Botsplainer:
“Little Trump” is going to be really upset, he doesn’t like people talking about him, he so too not pathetic!!
Some are speculating that it might also be a kind of outreach to Ohio and Pennsylvania, to which I say, “you’ve got to be kidding.”
There are much larger Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian immigrant communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania that are fuming mad over the Trump campaign’s relentless Putin knob-polishing.
78.
Corner Stone
@MattF: Haven’t checked the reference but yeah, if he sweeps those four states we are all well and truly…um, fucked.
I’ll bet Trump has no memory of groping any of these women because it sounds like he did it so often that they’re lost in the crowd. Chance are he never knew their names in the first place, even if they introduced themselves.
It seems like it was pre-programmed behavior in any given situation, almost de rigueur for him. As to the women, I agree. He doesn’t ever seem to distinguish a woman as an individual person so no names needed. I was surprised he could actually recall Nancy O’Dell’s name. Maybe Billy Bush fed it to him during the conversation.
Michele Bachmann: Elect Donald Trump Or There Will Be ‘Even More Sexual Assaults’
Former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) cautioned this week that Christians needed to “wake up” and vote for Donald Trump because electing Hillary Clinton would “lead to even more sexual assaults against women.”……
“There’s no similarity between what Donald Trump said 11 years ago and what Bill Clinton did,” Bachmann opined. “Is sexual assault against women a big issue? You bet it is. And the best thing that Christian men can do is make sure that Hillary Clinton does not become president and the best thing that Christian women can do is make sure that Hillary Clinton does not become president.”
“Donald Trump has already released a list of only pro-life judges that he will support,” the former congresswoman promised. “Hillary Clinton will set a standard in this country that will lead to even more sexual assaults against women because she will be setting an anti-biblical agenda.”
Rohrer agreed that Clinton was engaging in a “strategy of the left, of the devil.”
I’d say that if the Trump businesses were healthy, they should start cobbling together resumes for a wave of pretext firings, the pretexts put to words by his asshole stereotype lawyers. Since the whole rotten edifice is on a collapsing clifftop, they’ll be eligible for unemployment due to the mass layoffs.
86.
Cermet
@Barbara: The Christian Serb I know – born, raised and educated in Serbia! – did NOT like the policies of that country then (why he left) and despises people who supported that Serbia or even the Serbia of today.
87.
DanF
@Kylroy: Exactly right. I expect them to start adjusting toward reality this weekend. Rasmussen exists solely to create narrative, and you can’t influence narrative if you’re a joke 100% of the time.
88.
MattF
@Corner Stone: Has to sweep all four, and that may assume he wins Utah. I’ll have to check on that.
People are very weird about this kind of thing. Like Trump supporters (or Sanders supporters) with their love of rally attendance figures. Even when a lot of people show up to stuff, there are MASSIVE numbers of people not showing up to stuff whose opinions also count.
@nonynony: It’s pretty well known that Rasmussen has been playing this polling charade for many election cycles. Well before the election, they will produce polling “data” showing that the Republican is ahead (which is meant to boost political donations and support for the Republicans, while discouraging Democrats). Then, about a week before the election, they’ll pivot back to reality and produce further “data” showing that the Democrat had gained ground. Their very last poll will usually be reasonably accurate. Accordingly, after the election results are in, they’ll say, “See? We were accurate after all. So, next time, you should believe our polling numbers.” A shameful game.
Don’t you love how the guy who got mad about being asked to leave the plane via the rear exit throws the guy under the bus who got mad about not getting a phone call.
93.
BR
I think it’s best for the nation if he doesn’t show up to the Third debate. He’s unhinged at this point, and could do more damage to our democracy by getting that big of a platform again. I’m hoping there’s enough bad news for him in the next few days that he drops out of the debate.
94.
Barbara
@PPCLI: No, not living in Pennsylvania and Ohio. There are a lot of people of Croatian and Serbian heritage in Ohio and Pennsylvania, along with Polish, Czech, and Baltic communities. Not so many from Bosnia or Kosovo. When I was a kid, I remember my dad talking about fraternal Croatian and Serbian clubs that perpetuated deep grudges against each other arising out of WWII. I vividly remember a news item in which someone’s house was bombed, and it turned out that the bomb had been met for his neighbor, an avowed Croat nationalist, probably planted by a Serbian counterpart. For us, it was utterly incomprehensible. We used to think, “why aren’t they just Americans now?”
95.
JMG
@FlipYrWhig: My son, who has worked on a lot of campaigns, from Obama ’08 to the LA and Boston mayor’s races in 2013, says that campaigns themselves hate yard signs as a total waste of energy and money, but that they all do them because the candidates themselves LOVE them, It’s reassurance for the insecurities generated by the risky proposition of running for office. So that’s what the yard sign arguers are doing, telling themselves somebody loves them/their side.
96.
Corner Stone
Any bets on if Ivanka says even one word about all the recent allegations?
What if he is complaining about rigged elections because he knows he is rigging this one? You know, projection and whatnot.
Of course, that would take competence and cunning, things I don’t see in his campaign. But perhaps his friends the Russians might be helpful there…
99.
catclub
@danielx: There are some bits in there that the GOP is not going to own either:
Proudly ignorant guy gets GOP nom.
Bigot who is unappealing to large numbers of people gets the nom.
Guy with skeletal campiagn and grifting campaign gets the nom.
100.
hueyplong
Falwell Jr now saying it doesn’t matter if allegations are true because Trump is a changed man.
1. Totally predicted here by too many people to list. All you have to do is claim to have just been saved.
2. Trump does in fact seem to have changed a little. He seems to be a little worse now. By the day. And there are several days to go.
3. Trump will need to get saved again on Nov 7.
101.
Barbara
@Corner Stone: When I think of Ivanka, I think of Tricia Nixon Cox, who apparently believed in her father’s innocence until it was literally impossible not to. She has shunned public life for a long time. These are the kinds of scars that do not heal easily. I don’t know what to make of the fact that Ivanka’s husband is in the thick of the poisonous strategizing.
Ominous part is they could have made its close run by putting up someone with every single one of his views, just without the rape-y and loathesome business practice part of his personality.
However, I don’t know if you get one without the other.
@RK: they are actually partisan. Their ‘accurate’ polling at the end gives them a veneer of respectability. That’s their product.
ETA: @JMG: I worked for Obama in 2008 and we DESPISED yard signs. They’re an anti-pattern, it makes people think they’ve done their part. We raffled them off to volunteers.
106.
Joel
@MattF: That’s his only way; and PA was +5 in the last election, currently polling at +7 for Clinton.
In order to win those four states, Trump essentially needs to win the popular vote outright.
107.
Lizzy L
I live in blue CA, in the very blue Bay Area, in an East Bay district which is so blue that the Republicans stopped funding a candidate to run against our previous congressperson because he routinely got 80% of the vote without any effort. I have not seen a single Clinton yard sign. I don’t have one. Yet, oddly enough, I am unworried as to whether the voters in my district, my neighborhood, will vote for the Democratic candidate for President.
Falwell is looking at an insurrection from the student body of his U. The students published a statement distancing themselves from Falwell besmirching the U by linking its name to Trump.
If Christie gets convicted for a full ten years in prison he could serve the 8 years of the Trump Administration as AG and still have two years left to write his memoirs.
111.
WaterGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: Trump: “That lady from Alaska Airlines is crazy! The only women I groped on a plane were on a different airline!” (Typing that made me wonder, wouldn’t there be records that could show the lady and Trump were on the same plane, perhaps even their seating?)
Also, as for Trump’s recent denial… when asked about the video from 2005, what kind of person responds with “I never said that” instead of “I would never do that!!!”?
@Lizzy L: I live in SF and I have a Hillary sticker on my laptop. People give me side-eye, I swear. Among my friends it’s not cool to be enthusiastic, you have to be voting for her reluctantly and make sure everybody knows it.
It’s pretty well known that Rasmussen has been playing this polling charade for many election cycles.
Oh yeah – Nate Silver has obliquely commented on it in the past. Also that Rassmussen’s samples tend to overweight Republicans.
It is interesting – I figured that that manipulation was mostly due to the influence of Scott Rassmussen himself – he’s a partisan figure and I think he understands the need for polling propaganda to the base of the party. But he got ousted from the company back in 2013 and I’m not sure who the new partners are. It will be interesting to see if their polls come back into line like they did in ’08 and ’12 or if they don’t this cycle. I personally would not be surprised to find out that Rassmussen was using his own “special sauce” on the numbers in the final two week stretch rather than letting someone else on staff do it. We’ll see if the current owners got the recipe before they kicked him to the curb.
114.
PPCLI
@Barbara: Yes — I knew several people on different sides of that divide. When I was an undergraduate in Toronto, I lived in a neighborhood where a lot of people from what was then Yugoslavia lived. There were even savage graffiti wars in Serbo-Croatian in the men’s rooms of restaurants. (I remember one astonishing one that went on for several cycles on the topic of whether Tito — who both sides agreed was a p—- [a vulgar Serbo-Croatian word meaning the thing that Trump likes to grab] — was a “Slovenski p—–” or a “Hrvaški p—–“
115.
Aleta
Wild late night thoughts. Have donations flatlined ? Do the history-making hats need to go on sale soon? Contractors must be very nervous about their unpaid billings. And they were so proud back when they got the first button order. (Are they just now reading the fine print that contradicts the We Want You to Be Rich handshake?)
Staff in campaign arteries must feel troubled as they drive out to get more bulk sacks of coffee and cheap pens, suspecting it’s all coming out of their pocket now, and that the lugs back in the office who plan to be billionaires will keep ignoring the cute urgent “Chip in for your cup and please wipe up!!” picture sign.
If even Romney tried to stiff Midwesterners for downtown office rents after he folded, imagine the concern over Trump’s unpaid bills rippling through this great nation today.
116.
OGLiberal
@Corner Stone: Hillary actually has a path even if she loses FL, NC, and OH.
117.
Punchy
Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio
Not a cupcake’s chance at a 5-year old’s birthday party that Trump can win PA. That ship sailed 3 weeks ago and is already docked somewhere in Malmo.
I worked for Obama in 2008 and we DESPISED yard signs.
Trump yard signs this cycle are serving a valuable purpose. They’re letting me know which of my neighbors I can’t trust to act like human beings in a pinch. I’m disgusted by people who are going to vote Republican, but the people who are not only voting Republican but also putting signs up in their yards? They might as well put on some white sheets and start up some cross burnings. I know a few Jewish families in the neighborhood who are not amused, and a few Hispanic families in the neighborhood who will open up to being somewhat afraid (if you can convince them that you’re not a Trump voter – there seems to be an assumption that if you’re a white guy in my neighborhood you’re probably a Trump voter, and that pisses me off too because it’s probably true).
121.
hovercraft
@Punchy:
Even on morning Joe they said his goose was cooked, Willie Geist pointed out he is polling at 23% in the Philly suburbs.
122.
scav
@WaterGirl: Let alone the He didn’t grope the lady, the armrests in first class are fixed line of defense.
I’m also wondering why the Big bossman had to Inspect his Beauty Employees (or products might be closer to his mindset) normalization seemingly entitles the big alpha bossman to browse the dressing rooms. Inspections outside the door as the women choose to exit fundamentally don’t work? Snap QC a must-have?
@WaterGirl: Also, as for Trump’s recent denial… when asked about the video from 2005, what kind of person responds with “I never said that” instead of “I would never do that!!!”?
Good point. It’s like when people are accused of a crime, and instead of protesting, they say, “You can’t prove it.”
Dude, that’s a tell.
125.
OGLiberal
@nonynony: Yup, it always swings back to normal numbers the last week or so of the race, allowing them to claim that they are among the most accurate pollsters. But they are clearly GOP hacks. A 9-point swing since the pussy comments based on a debate he didn’t even win followed up by no bad news for Hillary and continued bad news – but not as bad as the pussy stuff – for Trump? How can anybody even believe that? But then again, Trump tweeted that he won ever post second debate poll, although I’ve never seen a poll that says he won the debate.
126.
hovercraft
New video of New York Times preparing for Trump lawsuit ( bring it GIF)
— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) October 13, 2016
PS: according to an account I saw at LGF, Trump has supposedly already walked back his “Serbian apology” comments, claiming they were tweeted by a staffer, not him personally.
Right.
128.
OGLiberal
Regarding PA, RCP poll average, which tends to lean a bit to the right but does, to their credit, exclude Rasmussen – has Hillary up 8.7 in PA. There is no way Trump has even the slightest chance of winning PA. My guess is that he’s keeping a focus there because a) it’s easy to get to from NYC and b) he can speak to Northeastern cons a lot easier than cons outside of his region and c) most of the white folks in PA outside of the Philly and Pittsburgh area are bat shit crazy wing nuts who will show up in large numbers to wildly cheer on his racism and sexism, which is what pleases him more than anything….and, again, easy commute.
@hovercraft: the ENTIRE Republican party is incompetent, where was THEIR oppr research on drumpf? They all rolled over when he looked at them sideways.
Although I’m still leaning toward drumpf doing his own oppo research and using it against them in a blackmailish way.
130.
Tim C.
@hovercraft: My Question, and it’s been said by others, is what the hell was going on in the Bush/Rubio/Cruz camps regarding oppo research on Trump from Summer 15 to Spring 16?!?!? All of this could have been used. Even if it didn’t directly come from the campaign, feeding the Times or some other friendly media outlet this info would have made a difference, a huge difference, a year ago.
131.
Gin & Tonic
The Twitter machine tells me that Trump has cancelled his scheduled appearance on Hannity tonight.
wouldn’t there be records that could show the lady and Trump were on the same plane, perhaps even their seating?)
I would seriously doubt it. 1)many fewer computers 30 years ago – although airlines were big users
But the real problem is the original records were on 9 track tapes – and those were not updated to more modern storage,
and are unreadable now. Plus there is no point in keeping those records after a year.
The Twitter machine tells me that Trump has cancelled his scheduled appearance on Hannity tonight.
Wait, wasn’t that supposed to be Bill-Clinton-is-worse-fest? Trump is skipping out on that?
140.
Gindy51
@nonynony: I agree 100%.
One house that sported 4 trump yard signs removed them after the hooha grabbing tape came out. I drove by that day and the signs were in the trash, cut up so no one else could use them! I think Mrs. and the 4 daughters got to the Mr. and let him have it.
most of the white folks in PA outside of the Philly and Pittsburgh area are bat shit crazy wing nuts
I am starting to get this feeling that Trump’s support is strongest in those places where it is a minority of the population. The Northeast.
New Jersey.
143.
OGLiberal
@Tim C.: I’m sure they knew about most of it. But it wasn’t what they were looking for. This is the type of stuff that Donald’s base likes. Gaming the system and not paying taxes? – heck, I wish I was rich enough to do that and if Donald is president he’ll make me rich…it’s just those darned liberals and brown folks stealing stuff that are holding me back. Walking in on naked beauty pageant contestants?….heck yeah! Being rich and powerful enough to walk up and grab a hot woman’s kitty and face no consequences?…man, I wish I was him! Consider who is supporting him. What his GOP contenders of him needed was stuff like Donald supporting liberal health care positions or liberal immigration positions or supporting stuff like keeping Social Security as-is. And they actually had that….but the white folks supporting Trump could forgive that as long as he hated on brown folks and women. And he did that so they didn’t have anything regardless of the fact that they had a bunch of stuff. He only won a plurality of GOP primary voters, the most deplorable and racist and hateful and scared. He lost the moderates. And a good number of those, especially the female moderates, are the ones who the sexist and racist related oppo research works on. So in a general election it’s poison but in a GOP primary with a bazillion candidates, the fact that he was racist and sexist and a system gamer and maybe a racist were actually positive traits for him.
144.
catclub
@dmsilev: The safe zone is gone! Questions would be too tough, these days. O’Reilly was hammering Trump the other night.
145.
piratedan
@Tim C.: I think it speaks to the GOP as a whole. No one over there wants to do the work. They just seem to have the impression that all they have to do is simply show up. Really, when you think back on the GOP debate, how many of them actually had a set of policies to address anything. Trump, asshat that he is, actually offered something to the masses, hideous though it was. He was going to build a wall, he was going to kick people out and deny people entry. Anyone else remember anything else from the GOP debates that would constitute any kind of policy? How much of that is on the media? How much of the GOP is essentially boiled down to Cleek’s Law?
What is daunting is that Trump’s ideas aren’t even “new” they’re recycled crap from the civil war ear of blocking immigration and purging “undesirables” from the know-nothing era. Ryan is running an ad, extolling the virtues of Conservatism indicating that it is a movement to preserve “good”. Who said “good” was under attack? If so, by what? Who gets to decide what is “good”?
146.
catclub
@OGLiberal: Also, proudly ignorant of policy or how the government works was an asset in the GOP primaries.
147.
hovercraft
@Gin & Tonic:
But, but the entire hour was going to be an expose of Bill Clinton’s many crimes against women. How can he show America that she’s worse to women than him if he cancels?
148.
Eric U.
I called the Rasmussen turnaround on Sunday when they had him down by 14
149.
HRA
Interesting to see the word WAG and wondering if it is a new usage for something other than this version of it.
@OGLiberal: My take on why he’s staying in PA (when an actual party muckety muck told me the party gave up on it about a month ago) is that it’s at the center of the delegitimize the election bullet point in his 5-part plan to get the media property up and rolling. He’s been blaring this “watch out for philadelphia, we know there are black people there who may try to vote” thing. He probably needs to keep it within single digits for whatever ratfvcking false-flag stunt they’ve got planned to have any grip.
151.
hovercraft
Trump is supposed to be holding a rally in Palm Beach right now. I had the live feed on, they were showing the venue, with the music blaring and a crowd there, and suddenly it just switched to some kind of town hall with Ivanka at a Philly town hall.
152.
scav
@Jay C: And we wonder why staff aren’t donating. Is it the same staff that plagerized Michelle’s speach, or has Trump finally made an still more astonishing perfect hire of a new scapegoat?
153.
Stan
@RK: Not at all. I’ve been a candidate myself. You need a decent poll sometimes to generate contributions. It’s a hell of a shitty business (being a candidate, that is)
154.
yellowdog
@JMG: I put up yard signs because the guy across the street put a Trump sign up, plus a 3 foot tall eagle draped in an American flag. I encourage my dog to pee on his bushes every time we walk by.
Jughead is nattering about a suspicious ‘oppo drop’. WTF are the loons talking about in the media. It’s like watching morons.
Most of the damaging Trump stuff that has come up has been public for a long time, for years. Both on policy and on his abusive personal and business behavior. Shit, you got on google and youtube and typed in Trump and whatever topic where you wanted to find some dirt, stupidity, venality, dangerous arrogance or incompetence, lies, ignorance or crass and offensive behavior. The media just didn’t have any interest in reporting it. HRC didn’t have to ‘oppo’ or ‘oppo drop’ anything.
And meanwhile we get breathless reports about daily release of very suspect wikileaks crapola with summary that it has embarrassing stuff in it. What embarrassing stuff? They never say.
I can’t listen to the news anymore. The incompetence and malfeasance is infuriating.
156.
skerry
@Jay C: Except that it didn’t originate with a tweet. Donald made statements to a Serbian magazine, Nedeljnik. Looks like Suzanne Ryder Jaworowski, Trump’s Indiana campaign manager and Serbian-American, served as the conduit.
157.
Botsplainer
The office Trumpers have gone from selling Trump to “we don’t care, don’t know who does”.
158.
grandpa john
@C.S.Strowbridge: Rasmussin destroyed their credibility several elections ago
159.
Stan
@JMG: Absolutely true. Signs should probably be paid for out of the “Maintenance of the Candidate’s Morale” fund.
160.
hovercraft
@sukabi: @Tim C.:
They did not believe he could win. They saw and fed the Teahadists but always thought they could control it, they did not realize until it was too late. They didn’t do any research early, and when the tried at the end it was too late, the people had found their prophet, and nothing could dislodge them from him.
I picked the wrong week to start the new Hitler biography.
What made my blood run cold was how Hitler’s speeches emphasized these points:
*stabbed in the back
*anti-Semitism
*racism/ethnic purity
*betrayed by opponents
*treason by those currently in power
*arresting and executing those in power
*outlandish promises to supporters
So if Hitler had bragged about groping women, WWII would not have happened? Discuss.
162.
MattF
@jl: Um, well… I’d say that ‘Election Day is less than a month away’ is an excellent reason for these revelations to be happening right now. Seriously.
@sukabi: Or was he pushed by family members and handlers.
166.
jl
@MattF: i suppose good reason, since many people don’t tune in to general election until after Labor Day. But that is a big given. There were many elections during the primary. Why not then. Better time for vetting since all the crap about partisan balance would not be an issue.
So, sorry. A guy like Trump should have been vetted out of the GOP primary before his possible election to pres office threatened the country. Trump meant $ to media so they wanted their Trump show. So, taking the big picture, I stand by my comment.
But, you do have a point, given that we are where we are right now. Doesn’t explain the horrid reporting on Wikileaks garbage though
@hovercraft: which points to gross incompetence on their part, for not understanding their base, and for not doing due diligence and knocking him out early.
Thought these guys loved business… isn’t the first rule of business to do your due diligence?
168.
Bruce K
@Tim C.: My theory is that if they had the oppo on Trump, they didn’t act on it because they were worried Trump might bolt for a third-party run and take the Southern Strategy core with him, in which case none of them would have a realistic path to general-election victory that didn’t involve at least one trip back in time.
@WereBear: The playbook really is pure Hitler, I think people are so used to godwin-ignoring at any mention of the guy that the perfect parallels fade to black.
The scary thing is this thing ain’t over in November. Hitler got smacked down when he was a little too heavy handed on the approach, and wound up in prison as a hero of the 27-percenters, working on a long-term new media strategy that won out years later. I’d argue it’s not too early for a pivot to the aftermath here, Trump isn’t getting elected in 2016, but he isn’t going away.
171.
Uncle Cosmo
@Barbara: IIRC when incumbent Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich (Croat-American) was challenged by George Voinovich (Slovenian-American), someone remarked on the sheer nastiness of the campaign, & an Ohio pol responded, It’s the Balkan Wars all over again.
Descendants of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia seem to have preferentially settled in the old Rust Belt cities (Pittsburgh through to Chicago) but as has been pointed out, for every Serb-American still pissed off over the 1996 bombings there is probably at least one Croat/Slovenian/Bosniak/Macedonian/Kosovar-American still pissed off at the Serbs. (Hell, some years back I met a Kosovar in the Copenhagen main rail station who upon finding out I was America effusively thanked me on behalf of his countrymen for our support.)
172.
Lizzy L
Amazon Prime just informed me that I get to read *some* books on my e-reader for free. So I looked at the list of freebies, and in the first batch was PKD’s The Man In The High Castle. Downloaded it. Feels like the right time to re-read that. Everything old is new again.
The Hannity appearance tonight was supposed to highlight Trump’s strategy of running against Bill Clinton’s p****. Interesting that they decided to cancel it; a sign of intelligence? Nah. Confusion and desperation, more likely.
there seems to be an assumption that if you’re a white guy in my neighborhood you’re probably a Trump voter, and that pisses me off too because it’s probably true).
Unfortunately true. I look at any white man and assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a Trump supporter. That goes to almost 70% if it’s an older white man. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves. Fact is that women and non whites are going to save the country from this horror show and we deserve a medal. Thanks in advance!
174.
OGLiberal
@bupalos: Single digits definitely a possibility but will be high single digits. But I guess the Dems are so good that they can manufacture 12% or more votes towards them. And I say 12% because Trump winning PA by 1% wouldn’t be satisfying enough for him or his base – they need like a 4-5% to show that the “real” Americans in PA – you know, the folks who don’t live in Sodom and Gomorrah, ie, Philly – just love, love, love Trump.
@Uncle Cosmo: They settled in the Rust Belt because their compatriots who emigrated to America between 1880 and 1910 went to those same cities in order to work in mining and heavy manufacturing. They established national churches (in the tradition of their homeland) and in some cases still had language communities in place.
177.
Calouste
@Aleta: As if I needed any more reasons not to fly Delta.
178.
dmsilev
@jl: Even by Scarbourough’s standards, that’s stupid. The chronology is pretty clear. The tape came out, and a few days later, Anderson Cooper committed an act of journalism by asking the blindingly obvious follow-up question and (to his credit) kept asking until Trump gave an unequivocal denial that he had done such things. At that point, several of the victims, who were among the 70 or so million debate watchers, screamed ‘liar!’ and called either their local paper or the NYT. A few days of due-diligence work by reporters, and now here we are. No conspiracy, just media outlets doing actual reporting.
@sukabi:
They are nothing if not incompetent. And take a look at the business men and pro business governors around the country, how are they doing?
@Bruce K:
That may have been true at the beginning, but if they had the goods on him, they had to know the Clinton campaign would get them too, and so they were going to crash and burn at some point. Surely it would have been better to so in the primaries and spent the year shoring up congress. Now they have to answer to both the crazies for not committing Seppuku, and the non crazies for not kicking him to the curb in the first place.
Someone pointed out on one of the shows last night that the lyrics to The Snake he recites at his rallies is a perfect analogy to how he has behaved towards the GOP.
181.
scav
@sukabi: If it keeps his tweeting and groping fingers occupied. People used to use laudanum for teething, so it’s even traditional.
@bupalos: I think Trump goes away because a) he’s old, b) he’s bored, c) he can get the adulation he needs without running for office, d) this is hurting his overall brand, and all Trump is is a brand by this point, e) he doesn’t have the money, f) one loss will be bad enough, another lost – which would be likely – would completely smash his ego and g) unlike Hitler, he has no deeply held beliefs or ideology…becoming president for Trump was simply about idiot white folks cheering on his hatred and winning. But the “movement” he created isn’t going away. The folks for whom Trump made it OK to be openly racist, sexist, stupid, etc, can’t put that back in the shadows. I just don’t know who the next champion will be they can rally behind. None of Trump’s 2016 GOP competitors have the temperament or personality to be Donald Trump. Christie is close but not enough and, well, he might be facing jail time. Guiliani and Newt are done….old news. The other crazies like Steve King and Jeff Session don’t have the charisma and would never sell on a national stage. They’d need another celebrity. Sean Hannity would probably be somebody they could embrace but he ain’t going to give up his job and the cash it brings in for what would almost certainly be a losing cause. So they will be a “movement” looking for a leader. I don’t know yet if it’s scarier for them to be leaderless or not. But they aren’t going away – they can’t….they’re exposed….they’re lawn signs and Facebook posts are now public evidence. So they have to soldier on. If you vote for Trump because you just can’t stand Hillary and you’re a loyal Republican that’s one thing. But as somebody above or in another thread noted, if you’re putting lawns signs up or singing his praises on Facebook, you’re not just opposing Hillary, you are proud of supporting Trump. And if you are proud of it, you are a sexist, racist, xenophobic idiot.
isn’t the first rule of business to do your due diligence?
I thought it was to marry the boss’s daughter. Worked for McCain.
186.
Uncle Cosmo
@HRA: WAG = Wild-Ass Guess. Much beloved of engineers. With a frisson of numerical justification it can mutate into a SWAG or Scientific Wild-Ass Guess, even more beloved of the engineering community.
187.
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
Today everyone including, Halpern, Barnacle, Geist, Confessori, and virtually everyone who came on tried to explain this to him, but he just refused to believe that the evil scheming Clinton’s are not behind this “opo dump”. He insists that Megan Kelly’s first question in the first debate was enough to elicit this same reaction from these women as the tape and his denial at the debate. Ergo the fact that it didn’t is proof the Clintons did this. Even if no believes him now, he will be proved right in the future even if it’s years from now. But he’s not hedging.
188.
Joel
@bupalos: Two things that work in our favor (among others) in this comparison:
1) Trump is twice as old as Hitler was in 1924.
2) Trump’s supporters are much older than Hitlers’ were.
They don’t have the (forgive the term) stamina for the long haul.
189.
OGLiberal
@jl: Even if they were timed, isn’t that freaking good political strategy? Hell, I would hope the Hillary campaign was that smart, and while I think they are, as you noted, I don’t even think they needed to coordinate because there is just so much out there in plain sight. Trump’s political strategy and timing was to, right before the debate, march out a bunch of women and allegations that have been public for a generation about a guy who isn’t running for president. Yeah, that’ll work. Rasmussen – yeah, I know – has a poll saying that people are more concerned about Clinton’s behavior towards women then Trump’s. OK, numbers probably cooked but, again, Bill Clinton isn’t running for president and, sorry, given what I’ve seen of Hillary and Bill post Bill’s presidency, while Bill might give Hillary advice on how to, say, handle the media, he’s going to have almost zero influence on policy and I don’t think he even has interest in having influence on policy. He’ll be too busy jetting around the world being First Gentleman and doing speaking gigs. He’s going to love the job but not because he can be involved in policy again.
@Joel: and 3) 47% unemployment in Germany in 1933 – mostly veterans of WWI.
192.
OGLiberal
@catclub: I think it’s also because folks in the Northeast – I was born, raised and live in NJ, work in NYC – are the most OK with his vulgarity. Midwesterners and Southern whites may be racist and xenophobic but they respect decorum and politeness. Not so much in the Northeast. He’ll probably almost certainly lost FL but he’ll campaign there because there are so many old, angry, racist Northeastern transplants down there to cheer him on – he’s probably the cat’s meow in The Villages. Lots of Northeastern transplants in places like Virginia and NC but Hillary will win there because of them and because they a) went there to go to college and stayed or b) went there because they wanted to get away from obnoxious Northeasterners but didn’t want to move to far away from family and didn’t want to end up in Florida with the older and even more obnoxious Northeasterners. (plus, it’s just too freaking hot in Florida)
193.
shomi
This is very concerning. It’s a poll after all and often quite accurate from what I hear (on drudge). Ball Juice was right all along about polls and Al Gore. I should have listened. Need more Depends.
194.
OGLiberal
@rk: I think it’s much more than 50/50, in the wrong direction, for any white dude over 25-30.
If you want to see reich-wing delusion in action, read this.
John Roberts signs off on Obama’s Removal for Treason
Jesus. The whole “article” is Sovereign Citizen-level legalese and wishful thinking. All that’s missing are the arbitrary Capitals and the red markups.
But the scary stuff is that the 1000+ commenters believe every word, and what they say about Clinton.
We live in a nation that has 35% of it’s citizens living in a complete alternate universe.
The scary thing is this thing ain’t over in November. Hitler got smacked down when he was a little too heavy handed on the approach, and wound up in prison as a hero of the 27-percenters, working on a long-term new media strategy that won out years later. I’d argue it’s not too early for a pivot to the aftermath here, Trump isn’t getting elected in 2016, but he isn’t going away.
Like Joel just asked, how OLD was Hitler when he did jail time? I know I’m kind of oldish (48) and I ain’t nearly as old as Trump. Was Hitler on drugs that early? How unhealthy were Hitler’s grassroots shock troops back in the day?
People joke around about Hoveround battalions and it’s sort of whistling past the graveyard really. Not all of them are grossly unfit Medicare-dependents. Asymmetric warfare isn’t about masses of healthy, fighting-fit troops, in fact it benefits from having access to maniacs who are otherwise doomed: if you’re a suicide bomber, helps if you know you’re in the last stages of cancer. We will be seeing more from those domestic enemies.
BUT, if they want war, bring it. I know a lot of millenials who are seriously economically challenged, ground down by life and the economy to near-suicide (amazing how many of them end up looking at that when shit goes uncertain for ’em, they’re too young to feel that hopeless) and yet physically and mentally fit. It’s not like they’re ‘weak competitors, not up to the standard of earlier generations’: they’re just fucked more than anybody, and I’m Generation X and saw the beginning of that trend.
And WE would let women fight to defend America.
Shit, if it got nasty _I_ would be prepared to fight for my country (as defined by the platform Hillary’s run on). I haven’t got all that much to lose, and this matters. If they are prepared to bring domestic terrorism to the USA (more than before) I’m prepared to stand in harm’s way to defend it.
I agree the fantasy is a Hitler-like uprising led by a ‘charismatic’ dictator galvanizing the worst fuckers we’ve got. The trouble is, they have Trump for a leader, and he’s a shit leader and he’s going to just plain die. I bet all his doctors are quacks and their main function is to tell him how strong he is. Reality doesn’t put up with that bullshit for very long. Trump is not going to be able to to put his Reich dreams into action. In a very practical sense he is not as good as Hitler.
198.
Applejinx
@catclub: Labor force participation rate gives us 37.2% and then U6 is another 9.7% giving a total of 46.9% of people in the country out of work. That’s probably pretty on track with your 47% figure: I’m seeing more ‘over 30% unemployed’ which is probably not gamed as much as ‘labor force participation rate’ allows.
This seems like a dry but accurate picture of the employment situation of Germany at the time. Note some of the techniques used to fix the unemployment: on the one hand, government jobs Clinton could create (doing things like “The VYS planted forests, repaired river banks and helped reclaim wasteland” and of course the Autobahn network (!)) but also, kicking women out of the labor market to make room for men! I can see that fitting in perfectly with Trump’s worldview, and we may see that proposed as well.
199.
Gelfling 545
@Lizzy L: Perhaps someone was able to get through to him that this particular type of attack was likely to damage him more than Hilary, who still hasn’t assaulted anybody. Or they tied him up & stuffed him in a closet to keep him from saying any more foolish things.
200.
smintheus
Rasmussen is Exhibit A in the case against poll aggregation that lumps in all polls and pretends that their array of ‘ordinary biases’ to the left and right will balance each other out. There are several other Republican pollsters (like Gravis) that for years have been generating specious polls to skew public perception of the state of races. They should be tossed out, not thrown into the mix.
201.
gex
@dmsilev: Or if he really wants to get mad about the timing, he can get pissed at the GOP who could have exploded this bomb further away from election day but chose not to. Conservative white men think that playing by the established rules (each candidate tries to make the case that they are better than the other) and declaring it mean and unfair if they don’t come out ahead. What the fuck does he think this is? Conspiring to release this at a beneficial time didn’t make Trump do any of the things that disqualify him.
I look at any white man and assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a Trump supporter. That goes to almost 70% if it’s an older white man. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves.
I didn’t do shit to deserve that appraisal, and shame on you for thinking that way.
“I look at any black kid in a hoodie, and I assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a gangster. That goes to almost 70% if he has gold crowns. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves.”
I mean, what the fuck, Jack?
203.
catclub
@Grumpy Code Monkey: When polls show that over 50% of white men favor Trump, and that number goes up
with age. It is a reasonable assumption. So you NOW think it is unfair when the store security guy follows you around, just because you are a white male over 50?
Let me know when real research shows 50% of black youth are gangsters.
Unfortunately true. I look at any white man and assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a Trump supporter. That goes to almost 70% if it’s an older white man. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves.
Gee. That feels downright bad. If only there were people, perhaps personal friends of mine, who knew exactly what that feeling was like, seeing as I don’t get to decide whether I’m going to be treated that way.
How terribly, terribly unfair it is. Who could possibly understand. ;P
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
I see they include an ‘online survey’ in this data.
I’m sure that’s not skewed at all.
Soylent Green
Clap louder.
eric
not buying she is 76 percent dem support now
EriktheRed
Pretty sure this one’s more reliable:
Sam Wang
Castanea
He’s not up with non-black minorities. Yawn.
dr. bloor
So Rasmussen has no use for fig leaves anymore. Is their work being included in the 538, PEC and other aggregators?
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
If you want to see reich-wing delusion in action, read this.
John Roberts signs off on Obama’s Removal for Treason
IANAL, but I don’t need to be a lawyer to point out what’s wrong here.
I just have to remember
highgrade school civics/government class.schrodinger's cat
GOP’s bubble is going to be punctured by reality, real soon!
Kylroy
Crappiest thing about Rasmussen? They always adjust their model to reflect reality in the last week or two of the race, so that their final result actually approximates reality. The transparent manipulation at work here is really stunning.
MattF
Looks like Christie has a serious problem.
Cermet
On-line polls tend to favor the activist demographic – even if a minority; yes, that poll is likely accurate for the demographic it is profiling and Rasmussen knows their paying clientele very well.
scav
“Any reasonable poll would have shown Trump winning for decades now,”
hovercraft
I’m sure this is just a show of their strength in the Old Dominion. Am I right?
FlipYrWhig
Not gonna click. Does the mention of the debate mean that this was a “who won the debate?” poll, or is it supposed to be a national presidential preference poll?
eric
@hovercraft: given the allegations against trump, how bout we retire the phrase “pulling out of” for the rest of this cycle.
eric
@hovercraft: lets be honest, shouldnt that have been where his money was going all along, with nevada and iowa (to be safe)
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Cermet:
I agree that those polls are useful for keeping tabs on what your base is thinking*, but as a measurement of how one is doing with the entire electorate, they’re pretty much useless.
*I have no doubt HRC has polls that focus on committed Hillary voters as well as the electorate at large.
scav
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Interpol? What, did the Russian secret police take a rain check?
Patricia Kayden
@schrodinger’s cat: And it’s going to be ugly. They are so delusional.
C.S.Strowbridge
After Hillary Clinton wins, she should have some of her surrogates mock Rasmussen in the media. Make Rasmussen a joke among the general public and destroy their credibility.
hovercraft
@eric:
Touche, or is it spelled touch?
Patricia Kayden
@hovercraft: Northern Virginia is very blue and swings the whole state blue. I suppose Trump has decided that he can afford to lose Virginia.
MomSense
@MattF:
Oh my dog. Wow, it’s like we are playing the insult game rubber and glue.
Patricia Kayden
@C.S.Strowbridge: Rasmussen is doing a great job of destroying its credibility via its shady polling. All Secretary Clinton has to do to mock them is win.
hovercraft
@C.S.Strowbridge:
The “make” in your sentence assumes facts not in evidence.
Patricia Kayden
@MattF: About bleeding time.
Botsplainer
@eric:
I’ve seen this type of movie before. Having Krispy Kreme in one wouldn’t be a visual that would inspire any feelings of sexual excitement.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Kylroy: I repeat myself, but: Rasmussen is like an NFL cornerback with closing speed. However, that’s poly a good trait in a DB,not a pollster.
nonynony
@C.S.Strowbridge:
Meh – general public doesn’t know who does these polls. They generally see the top lines.
People minimally involved in politics might recognize some of the names of the pollsters, but that’s about it.
The poll aggregators who weight these polls into their averages – now those are the guys who need to understand that Rassumussen’s credibility is in the toilet. Except that all of them except for Sam Wang do it for the clicks, and showing a horserace is better than showing a blowout until the last few weeks of the campaign. So having some biased polls in the averages helps to keep the narrative moving.
I’m actually happy that Rassmussen keeps the thumb on the scale. Between them and that highly skewed LATimes/USC tracking poll they’re keeping Trump’s head above water and making it impossible for downticket Republicans to write him off as a loser. That’s a good thing – if the polls all show Trump losing with nothing for them to hang their delusions on they might actually be able to strategize to save the downticket races a bit more.
(That said – only a delusional winger thinks Clinton is getting only 41% of the vote. Rassmussen can’t even tweak their samples to give Trump a McCain level share of the electorate! That’s how weak it is – even if they downweight all of the minority votes, and women voters, they still apparently can’t upweight white male voters to get Trump over 45%. Impressive!)
hovercraft
@schrodinger’s cat:
Since “facts” have a liberal bias, I doubt it. Besides I was told that there are no facts.
“I think, personally, if you are starting to get into the fact-check, I’m not sure what is the big fact, and what is a little fact? And if you and I [have] information, does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?”
Janet Brown, the Commission on Presidential Debates’ executive director.
Reality like facts is whatever they say it is, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to wake up to the fact that while they were busy creating their own reality, the country changed. No amount of denial or wishful thinking is going to change it back.
Woodrowfan
I am waiting to hear what the “unskewed” polls guy says..
WereBear
They see it delusional as one of their strengths! Belief is intrinsic to everything they do!
The classic work, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, a group got ready for an alien ship to pick them up before the planet Earth is destroyed. And the ship did not come.
The more fervent the believer, the less they were deterred. They just went through mental gyrations to keep on believing. According to Wikipedia, the group is still going on now, since 1954.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have not been deterred by decades of failed prophesy.
They are not going to convert to a new way of thinking. But it is likely they will withdraw from the world which is treating them so cruelly. That was their pattern after the Scopes Trial exposed them to some heavy ridicule. Even though they “won” in court, the world was not kind.
Shana
@Patricia Kayden: My congressman in Northern Virginia did a poll that showed Trump has about 23% support. This was from about a month ago.
The Moar You Know
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Yes. Obama will be removed from office. Pretty soon in fact. Somewhere around January 20th or so if I recall correctly. And I’m sure John Roberts will “sign off” on it, just as every other Justice will.
These fucking morons. But they gotta keep the grift machine rolling at full blast.
They’ll get another four years worth of butthurt in the bank when that same John Roberts gives Hillary Clinton the oath of office and fails to have her arrested on the spot.
Calouste
@hovercraft: Good, that gives Clinton the opportunity to sweep up Arizona and Georgia. And if Clinton wins either of those, even in the highly unlikely event that the orange pedophile wins NC, FL, OH, PA, and IA, she still wins.
RK
@WereBear: That gave birth to cognitive dissonance in social psychology I think.
What does Rasmussen have to gain by putting out outliers? Is skewed polls lucrative business?
Barbara
OT, and maybe Adam will post on it, but apparently, Trump has issued an apology to Serbia for Clinton’s decision to bomb it in 1996. Other than being anti-Clinton, being pro-Serb is also pro-Russia (Russia is avidly pro-Serbia) and also apparently, a distinguishing feature of alt-right foreign policy views. Some are speculating that it might also be a kind of outreach to Ohio and Pennsylvania, to which I say, “you’ve got to be kidding.” As the granddaughter of a bona fide Serb, maybe 1 out of 10 Serbian-Americans has current allegiance to Serbia, and for every Serb who is excited by the idea, there is at least one Croat or Slovenian who is violently opposed. What is going on here?
hovercraft
Sometimes there are reasons for traditions when running for office.
That last sentence is ridiculous, anyone with google could have foreseen what was coming. Incompetent campaign is incompetent.
Corner Stone
I can barely even these days. I went from having to order and re-order new bags of “can’t evens” to just blowing right through them to the “can barely even” stage.
skerry
I thought apologies showed weakness.
Jay C
@hovercraft:
PA, FL, NC and OH? Wouldn’t Trump have to win ALL the EVs from these states to even make the race close?
And even then, would that get him to 270?
Corner Stone
@hovercraft:
Oh, he’s paying for it alright. What a cheapo con man.
khead
So, over the weekend I was trolling FB. Turns out that one of my friends from home also knows someone who works for a Fox TV station in FL. When I started poking fun at the nice Fox lady for thinking Trump was winning, she informed me that SHE WORKS FOR FOX and I didn’t know what I was talking about. Then she told me about ALL OF THE YARD SIGNS she has seen in Florida. I told her to learn to read polls and, well, that was when the thread was deleted.
Also, one of my hometown newspapers actually endorsed Clinton. I was stunned, but it was great to stop by the BDT’s FB page to drink the sweet wingnut tears.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
Couple of local notes from Kentucky.
I do appreciate local congressman Brett Guthrie (R)
for his honesty and candor, the shorter of: Trump is despicable, but he would sign our legislation.
Also, an interesting ad from Democratic Senate candidate Jim Gray with video of Christie and McCain trashing Rand Paul. Not sure how well those two will play here. Maybe pickup a few middle of the roaders.
Russ
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): Interpole? After reading the article, it sounds VERY serious. I wonder if they’ll go after Hillary.
Corner Stone
@Jay C:
Maybe not PA, but if he loses any of the other three it is over.
MattF
Rather OT, but interesting and important. The NY Review of Books has an article (yes, a long article) about the Panama Papers. You think you know the magnitude of what the Panama Papers revealed? Guess again.
hovercraft
@Barbara:
Apparently he’s never heard of the Srebrenica Massacre.
How long before his campaign walks this back and says he didn’t say what we heard him say?
Patricia Kayden
@WereBear: If by withdrawing you mean that Deplorables stop voting, that would be great in my opinion. They can continue living in their own alternate reality cocoon and leave the rest of us alone.
Eric NNY
What the everloving hell happened last night? I left work, went to a firefighter class, went to bed, got up and checked this here blog and the already ugly mess of an election took several more rolls into the muck. I’ve got to quit everything just to keep up.
Aleta
@hovercraft: And if the wanna be candidate refuses to be researched … why, there’s a research result right there!
danielx
@schrodinger’s cat:
But Trump’s reality bubble will remain intact.
In Trump’s mind, or what passes for it, Donald Trump does not lose – period. Therefore if he appears to lose, by definition it’s because whatever contest is involved was rigged, whether it be an election, civil legal proceedings, or criminal charges for which he is summoned to appear. Unfortunately, his followers will go right along with him because they are no more attached to objective realities than he is and will believe whatever he says.
hovercraft
@The Moar You Know:
My crystal ball is telling me right around noon.
MattF
@Corner Stone: According to the NYT Upshot decision tree, if Trump wins those four states (in addition to the usual red states), he wins the election.
Gin & Tonic
@skerry: I’ll bet real money that if you put a map of Europe in front of Donald and gave him three tries he wouldn’t be able to point to Serbia.
Botsplainer
RINO sellout cuckservative Newt Gingrich throws hands in air and shrieks “DONE!”
Stan
@RK: “What does Rasmussen have to gain by putting out outliers? Is skewed polls lucrative business?”
Polls can be used to drive donations. Every candidate wants a poll to show potential donors to make the pitch.
Still, I am not sure how stupid you need to be to fall for this particular poll at this moment in history.
cmorenc
@Patricia Kayden:
GOING to be ugly…as if Trump and his hard-core supporters haven’t already gone light-years past any modern (past 100 years) threshold of ugliness in a Presidential campaign. You’re correct that in the immediate aftermath of the election and also inauguration, there’s a real possibility some of Trump’s most extreme supporters might attempt to militia up and declare “free enclaves” of armed resistance to any assertion of federal authority, abetted by “constitutional sheriffs”.
Patricia Kayden
@Shana: Much worse than Romney and McCain. Sad!
bemused
Wingnuts reject reality. They view the world as it actually is as unacceptable because this is not how it is supposed to be.
I wonder if Karl Rove (we create our own reality, we’ll create other new realities and you people can just study what we do) approves of the new Trump reality show.
MattF
@Botsplainer: Well, Noot is, after all, the world’s expert on guys with sensitive egos– so he’s qualified to diagnose Trump’s difficulties.
scav
Here’s a little tidbit
It’s so short I just copied it all from Reuters which has some other Russian details for those that indulge.
Iowa Old Lady
I’ll bet Trump has no memory of groping any of these women because it sounds like he did it so often that they’re lost in the crowd. Chance are he never knew their names in the first place, even if they introduced themselves.
hovercraft
@Jay C:
When even Steve Kornacki is saying at this point that the task is not to plot his path to 270, but instead to plot a plausible path to hold onto all of RMoney’s electoral vote count, he’s behind in NC, tied in UT, barely ahead in GA, AZ, AK yes that’s f**king Alaska. The orchestra is done warming up they are playing the opening bars.
Jay C
@Barbara:
Just a WAG here, but I’m guessing this (lame) attempt to shore up his foreign policy “chops” has several inter-related “aims’
1. Clinton-bashing (Bill, not Hillary, but he probably hopes for some splashback)
2. Russia-fluffing (But with an obscure-enough topic that it won’t be too obvious)
3. Muslim-bashing (“Fighting Islamist terrorism” was a major excuse for Serbian atrocities)
4. Generalized Democrat-bashing (supporting a “wrong” war)
Pretty weak stuff, IMO, but then, this IS Donald Trump we’re talking about: dragging up old issues from the ’90s to slag his opponents with to try to deflect attention from his own innumerable shortcomings. And hopefully, this will work about as well as the rest.
Major Major Major Major
@Stan:
All of them, Katie.
hovercraft
@khead:
I was so sure that Dame Peggy lived on Manhattans Upper East Side, who knew she moved down to Florida.
PPCLI
@Barbara: OMG!!! Trump is apologizing for America again!
JMG
@cmorenc That won’t last long if it ever starts.
RK
@Stan:
If Rasmussen isn’t paid by campaigns for a poll like this how do they profit?
dww44
@Calouste: And, I aim to help HRC in this regard. Signed up for canvassing 5 days out of 7 between now and the election. It’s good here in my state that Trump is remaining viable to so many GOP’ers who are so focused on why they can cast a vote for him and not that evil corrupt HRC.
Plus Sen. Isakson has long ago endorsed him and the no-name mostly self-funding Democratic challenger stands a small chance of ousting him if the the HRC coattails are long enough. Now, that would be real sweet if Barksdale pulls off a miracle upset.
hovercraft
@Botsplainer:
“Little Trump” is going to be really upset, he doesn’t like people talking about him, he so too not pathetic!!
WereBear
It’s not over yet. We still don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
MattF
@RK: I think Rasmussen’s main business is internal polling for Republican candidates. The Presidential polls are targeted to appeal to that market.
Patricia Kayden
@Iowa Old Lady: That’s pretty scary. No way he should be President if he is a routine sexual harasser. This is beyond reprehensible.
Joel
@dr. bloor: don’t know about 538 but they don’t conduct state polling so (no) on PEC. I think pollster filters them out by default.
jonas
@Barbara:
There are much larger Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian immigrant communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania that are fuming mad over the Trump campaign’s relentless Putin knob-polishing.
Corner Stone
@MattF: Haven’t checked the reference but yeah, if he sweeps those four states we are all well and truly…um, fucked.
Major Major Major Major
@RK: they get known as a wingnut-friendly fellow traveler polling firm and get contracted for all the wingnut polls.
PPCLI
@Barbara:
And at least as many Bosniaks and Kosovars.
Corner Stone
@Iowa Old Lady:
It seems like it was pre-programmed behavior in any given situation, almost de rigueur for him. As to the women, I agree. He doesn’t ever seem to distinguish a woman as an individual person so no names needed. I was surprised he could actually recall Nancy O’Dell’s name. Maybe Billy Bush fed it to him during the conversation.
RK
@MattF:
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeah, still seems an odd business model. Makes more sense if they’re actually partisan.
hovercraft
@Patricia Kayden:
Joel
@Jay C: Correct. PA is just as blue as VA, too.
Botsplainer
@scav:
I’d say that if the Trump businesses were healthy, they should start cobbling together resumes for a wave of pretext firings, the pretexts put to words by his asshole stereotype lawyers. Since the whole rotten edifice is on a collapsing clifftop, they’ll be eligible for unemployment due to the mass layoffs.
Cermet
@Barbara: The Christian Serb I know – born, raised and educated in Serbia! – did NOT like the policies of that country then (why he left) and despises people who supported that Serbia or even the Serbia of today.
DanF
@Kylroy: Exactly right. I expect them to start adjusting toward reality this weekend. Rasmussen exists solely to create narrative, and you can’t influence narrative if you’re a joke 100% of the time.
MattF
@Corner Stone: Has to sweep all four, and that may assume he wins Utah. I’ll have to check on that.
FlipYrWhig
@khead:
People are very weird about this kind of thing. Like Trump supporters (or Sanders supporters) with their love of rally attendance figures. Even when a lot of people show up to stuff, there are MASSIVE numbers of people not showing up to stuff whose opinions also count.
WereBear
And might I just add, for the record:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Republicans wished for this, and they got it.
Paul P
@nonynony: It’s pretty well known that Rasmussen has been playing this polling charade for many election cycles. Well before the election, they will produce polling “data” showing that the Republican is ahead (which is meant to boost political donations and support for the Republicans, while discouraging Democrats). Then, about a week before the election, they’ll pivot back to reality and produce further “data” showing that the Democrat had gained ground. Their very last poll will usually be reasonably accurate. Accordingly, after the election results are in, they’ll say, “See? We were accurate after all. So, next time, you should believe our polling numbers.” A shameful game.
SRW1
@Botsplainer:
Don’t you love how the guy who got mad about being asked to leave the plane via the rear exit throws the guy under the bus who got mad about not getting a phone call.
BR
I think it’s best for the nation if he doesn’t show up to the Third debate. He’s unhinged at this point, and could do more damage to our democracy by getting that big of a platform again. I’m hoping there’s enough bad news for him in the next few days that he drops out of the debate.
Barbara
@PPCLI: No, not living in Pennsylvania and Ohio. There are a lot of people of Croatian and Serbian heritage in Ohio and Pennsylvania, along with Polish, Czech, and Baltic communities. Not so many from Bosnia or Kosovo. When I was a kid, I remember my dad talking about fraternal Croatian and Serbian clubs that perpetuated deep grudges against each other arising out of WWII. I vividly remember a news item in which someone’s house was bombed, and it turned out that the bomb had been met for his neighbor, an avowed Croat nationalist, probably planted by a Serbian counterpart. For us, it was utterly incomprehensible. We used to think, “why aren’t they just Americans now?”
JMG
@FlipYrWhig: My son, who has worked on a lot of campaigns, from Obama ’08 to the LA and Boston mayor’s races in 2013, says that campaigns themselves hate yard signs as a total waste of energy and money, but that they all do them because the candidates themselves LOVE them, It’s reassurance for the insecurities generated by the risky proposition of running for office. So that’s what the yard sign arguers are doing, telling themselves somebody loves them/their side.
Corner Stone
Any bets on if Ivanka says even one word about all the recent allegations?
bystander
@MattF: This would be perfect if the judge had been seated in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
craigie
What if he is complaining about rigged elections because he knows he is rigging this one? You know, projection and whatnot.
Of course, that would take competence and cunning, things I don’t see in his campaign. But perhaps his friends the Russians might be helpful there…
catclub
@danielx: There are some bits in there that the GOP is not going to own either:
Proudly ignorant guy gets GOP nom.
Bigot who is unappealing to large numbers of people gets the nom.
Guy with skeletal campiagn and grifting campaign gets the nom.
hueyplong
Falwell Jr now saying it doesn’t matter if allegations are true because Trump is a changed man.
1. Totally predicted here by too many people to list. All you have to do is claim to have just been saved.
2. Trump does in fact seem to have changed a little. He seems to be a little worse now. By the day. And there are several days to go.
3. Trump will need to get saved again on Nov 7.
Barbara
@Corner Stone: When I think of Ivanka, I think of Tricia Nixon Cox, who apparently believed in her father’s innocence until it was literally impossible not to. She has shunned public life for a long time. These are the kinds of scars that do not heal easily. I don’t know what to make of the fact that Ivanka’s husband is in the thick of the poisonous strategizing.
Botsplainer
@WereBear:
Ominous part is they could have made its close run by putting up someone with every single one of his views, just without the rape-y and loathesome business practice part of his personality.
However, I don’t know if you get one without the other.
SRW1
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
That web site looks like it specializes in announcing the end of careers. Didn’t know there was a niche for that.
MattF
@hueyplong: I think Falwell is feeling heat from Evangelicals who actually have beliefs. Strange but true.
Major Major Major Major
@RK: they are actually partisan. Their ‘accurate’ polling at the end gives them a veneer of respectability. That’s their product.
ETA: @JMG: I worked for Obama in 2008 and we DESPISED yard signs. They’re an anti-pattern, it makes people think they’ve done their part. We raffled them off to volunteers.
Joel
@MattF: That’s his only way; and PA was +5 in the last election, currently polling at +7 for Clinton.
In order to win those four states, Trump essentially needs to win the popular vote outright.
Lizzy L
I live in blue CA, in the very blue Bay Area, in an East Bay district which is so blue that the Republicans stopped funding a candidate to run against our previous congressperson because he routinely got 80% of the vote without any effort. I have not seen a single Clinton yard sign. I don’t have one. Yet, oddly enough, I am unworried as to whether the voters in my district, my neighborhood, will vote for the Democratic candidate for President.
Yard signs? We don’t need no stinkin’ yard signs.
SRW1
@MattF:
Falwell is looking at an insurrection from the student body of his U. The students published a statement distancing themselves from Falwell besmirching the U by linking its name to Trump.
BR
I’m hearing volunteer numbers at phonebanks are declining — too much complacency. We need to keep up the pressure — so please sign up to volunteer!
bystander
If Christie gets convicted for a full ten years in prison he could serve the 8 years of the Trump Administration as AG and still have two years left to write his memoirs.
WaterGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: Trump: “That lady from Alaska Airlines is crazy! The only women I groped on a plane were on a different airline!” (Typing that made me wonder, wouldn’t there be records that could show the lady and Trump were on the same plane, perhaps even their seating?)
Also, as for Trump’s recent denial… when asked about the video from 2005, what kind of person responds with “I never said that” instead of “I would never do that!!!”?
Major Major Major Major
@Lizzy L: I live in SF and I have a Hillary sticker on my laptop. People give me side-eye, I swear. Among my friends it’s not cool to be enthusiastic, you have to be voting for her reluctantly and make sure everybody knows it.
nonynony
@Paul P:
Oh yeah – Nate Silver has obliquely commented on it in the past. Also that Rassmussen’s samples tend to overweight Republicans.
It is interesting – I figured that that manipulation was mostly due to the influence of Scott Rassmussen himself – he’s a partisan figure and I think he understands the need for polling propaganda to the base of the party. But he got ousted from the company back in 2013 and I’m not sure who the new partners are. It will be interesting to see if their polls come back into line like they did in ’08 and ’12 or if they don’t this cycle. I personally would not be surprised to find out that Rassmussen was using his own “special sauce” on the numbers in the final two week stretch rather than letting someone else on staff do it. We’ll see if the current owners got the recipe before they kicked him to the curb.
PPCLI
@Barbara: Yes — I knew several people on different sides of that divide. When I was an undergraduate in Toronto, I lived in a neighborhood where a lot of people from what was then Yugoslavia lived. There were even savage graffiti wars in Serbo-Croatian in the men’s rooms of restaurants. (I remember one astonishing one that went on for several cycles on the topic of whether Tito — who both sides agreed was a p—- [a vulgar Serbo-Croatian word meaning the thing that Trump likes to grab] — was a “Slovenski p—–” or a “Hrvaški p—–“
Aleta
Wild late night thoughts. Have donations flatlined ? Do the history-making hats need to go on sale soon? Contractors must be very nervous about their unpaid billings. And they were so proud back when they got the first button order. (Are they just now reading the fine print that contradicts the We Want You to Be Rich handshake?)
Staff in campaign arteries must feel troubled as they drive out to get more bulk sacks of coffee and cheap pens, suspecting it’s all coming out of their pocket now, and that the lugs back in the office who plan to be billionaires will keep ignoring the cute urgent “Chip in for your cup and please wipe up!!” picture sign.
If even Romney tried to stiff Midwesterners for downtown office rents after he folded, imagine the concern over Trump’s unpaid bills rippling through this great nation today.
OGLiberal
@Corner Stone: Hillary actually has a path even if she loses FL, NC, and OH.
Punchy
Not a cupcake’s chance at a 5-year old’s birthday party that Trump can win PA. That ship sailed 3 weeks ago and is already docked somewhere in Malmo.
dr. bloor
@bystander: This blog does not tolerate Zeppelin-shaming.
Elizabelle
Catching up on this thread.
I’d love to know what the Secret Service’s pet name(s) for Trump are. Gropeass? Mr. Hands?
Officially, I’ve heard it’s Mogul. Only in the sense of being something small, white, and a bump in the road.
nonynony
@Major Major Major Major:
Trump yard signs this cycle are serving a valuable purpose. They’re letting me know which of my neighbors I can’t trust to act like human beings in a pinch. I’m disgusted by people who are going to vote Republican, but the people who are not only voting Republican but also putting signs up in their yards? They might as well put on some white sheets and start up some cross burnings. I know a few Jewish families in the neighborhood who are not amused, and a few Hispanic families in the neighborhood who will open up to being somewhat afraid (if you can convince them that you’re not a Trump voter – there seems to be an assumption that if you’re a white guy in my neighborhood you’re probably a Trump voter, and that pisses me off too because it’s probably true).
hovercraft
@Punchy:
Even on morning Joe they said his goose was cooked, Willie Geist pointed out he is polling at 23% in the Philly suburbs.
scav
@WaterGirl: Let alone the He didn’t grope the lady, the armrests in first class are fixed line of defense.
I’m also wondering why the Big bossman had to Inspect his Beauty Employees (or products might be closer to his mindset) normalization seemingly entitles the big alpha bossman to browse the dressing rooms. Inspections outside the door as the women choose to exit fundamentally don’t work? Snap QC a must-have?
nonynony
@Aleta:
If they didn’t get their money up front, then it sucks to be them.
I’d feel bad for them, but since they were enabling a hate-monger I really don’t.
WereBear
Good point. It’s like when people are accused of a crime, and instead of protesting, they say, “You can’t prove it.”
Dude, that’s a tell.
OGLiberal
@nonynony: Yup, it always swings back to normal numbers the last week or so of the race, allowing them to claim that they are among the most accurate pollsters. But they are clearly GOP hacks. A 9-point swing since the pussy comments based on a debate he didn’t even win followed up by no bad news for Hillary and continued bad news – but not as bad as the pussy stuff – for Trump? How can anybody even believe that? But then again, Trump tweeted that he won ever post second debate poll, although I’ve never seen a poll that says he won the debate.
hovercraft
Jay C
@Barbara:
PS: according to an account I saw at LGF, Trump has supposedly already walked back his “Serbian apology” comments, claiming they were tweeted by a staffer, not him personally.
Right.
OGLiberal
Regarding PA, RCP poll average, which tends to lean a bit to the right but does, to their credit, exclude Rasmussen – has Hillary up 8.7 in PA. There is no way Trump has even the slightest chance of winning PA. My guess is that he’s keeping a focus there because a) it’s easy to get to from NYC and b) he can speak to Northeastern cons a lot easier than cons outside of his region and c) most of the white folks in PA outside of the Philly and Pittsburgh area are bat shit crazy wing nuts who will show up in large numbers to wildly cheer on his racism and sexism, which is what pleases him more than anything….and, again, easy commute.
sukabi
@hovercraft: the ENTIRE Republican party is incompetent, where was THEIR oppr research on drumpf? They all rolled over when he looked at them sideways.
Although I’m still leaning toward drumpf doing his own oppo research and using it against them in a blackmailish way.
Tim C.
@hovercraft: My Question, and it’s been said by others, is what the hell was going on in the Bush/Rubio/Cruz camps regarding oppo research on Trump from Summer 15 to Spring 16?!?!? All of this could have been used. Even if it didn’t directly come from the campaign, feeding the Times or some other friendly media outlet this info would have made a difference, a huge difference, a year ago.
Gin & Tonic
The Twitter machine tells me that Trump has cancelled his scheduled appearance on Hannity tonight.
WereBear
@Tim C.: They are stupid AND incompetent?
bupalos
@Elizabelle:
Noice!
catclub
@WaterGirl:
I would seriously doubt it. 1)many fewer computers 30 years ago – although airlines were big users
But the real problem is the original records were on 9 track tapes – and those were not updated to more modern storage,
and are unreadable now. Plus there is no point in keeping those records after a year.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: they’re just going to have a nice deep conversation on the phone, possibly while taking bubble baths and sipping wine.
Mike R
@WereBear: Yes they are, and we should thank them for their incompetence.
Aleta
Plane Crew Nearly Lets Passenger Die Because They Couldn’t Believe A Black Woman Was A Doctor
Doctor Cross’s statement on facebook:
Lizzy L
@Major Major Major Major: You need better friends.//snark
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic:
Wait, wasn’t that supposed to be Bill-Clinton-is-worse-fest? Trump is skipping out on that?
Gindy51
@nonynony: I agree 100%.
One house that sported 4 trump yard signs removed them after the hooha grabbing tape came out. I drove by that day and the signs were in the trash, cut up so no one else could use them! I think Mrs. and the 4 daughters got to the Mr. and let him have it.
Botsplainer
@Aleta:
I’d say the ersatz cheerful polling news is about the small donors – the big money dried up.
catclub
@OGLiberal:
I am starting to get this feeling that Trump’s support is strongest in those places where it is a minority of the population. The Northeast.
New Jersey.
OGLiberal
@Tim C.: I’m sure they knew about most of it. But it wasn’t what they were looking for. This is the type of stuff that Donald’s base likes. Gaming the system and not paying taxes? – heck, I wish I was rich enough to do that and if Donald is president he’ll make me rich…it’s just those darned liberals and brown folks stealing stuff that are holding me back. Walking in on naked beauty pageant contestants?….heck yeah! Being rich and powerful enough to walk up and grab a hot woman’s kitty and face no consequences?…man, I wish I was him! Consider who is supporting him. What his GOP contenders of him needed was stuff like Donald supporting liberal health care positions or liberal immigration positions or supporting stuff like keeping Social Security as-is. And they actually had that….but the white folks supporting Trump could forgive that as long as he hated on brown folks and women. And he did that so they didn’t have anything regardless of the fact that they had a bunch of stuff. He only won a plurality of GOP primary voters, the most deplorable and racist and hateful and scared. He lost the moderates. And a good number of those, especially the female moderates, are the ones who the sexist and racist related oppo research works on. So in a general election it’s poison but in a GOP primary with a bazillion candidates, the fact that he was racist and sexist and a system gamer and maybe a racist were actually positive traits for him.
catclub
@dmsilev: The safe zone is gone! Questions would be too tough, these days. O’Reilly was hammering Trump the other night.
piratedan
@Tim C.: I think it speaks to the GOP as a whole. No one over there wants to do the work. They just seem to have the impression that all they have to do is simply show up. Really, when you think back on the GOP debate, how many of them actually had a set of policies to address anything. Trump, asshat that he is, actually offered something to the masses, hideous though it was. He was going to build a wall, he was going to kick people out and deny people entry. Anyone else remember anything else from the GOP debates that would constitute any kind of policy? How much of that is on the media? How much of the GOP is essentially boiled down to Cleek’s Law?
What is daunting is that Trump’s ideas aren’t even “new” they’re recycled crap from the civil war ear of blocking immigration and purging “undesirables” from the know-nothing era. Ryan is running an ad, extolling the virtues of Conservatism indicating that it is a movement to preserve “good”. Who said “good” was under attack? If so, by what? Who gets to decide what is “good”?
catclub
@OGLiberal: Also, proudly ignorant of policy or how the government works was an asset in the GOP primaries.
hovercraft
@Gin & Tonic:
But, but the entire hour was going to be an expose of Bill Clinton’s many crimes against women. How can he show America that she’s worse to women than him if he cancels?
Eric U.
I called the Rasmussen turnaround on Sunday when they had him down by 14
HRA
Interesting to see the word WAG and wondering if it is a new usage for something other than this version of it.
http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/21/wag.the.dog/
Is it “oops” or is it intentional?
bupalos
@OGLiberal: My take on why he’s staying in PA (when an actual party muckety muck told me the party gave up on it about a month ago) is that it’s at the center of the delegitimize the election bullet point in his 5-part plan to get the media property up and rolling. He’s been blaring this “watch out for philadelphia, we know there are black people there who may try to vote” thing. He probably needs to keep it within single digits for whatever ratfvcking false-flag stunt they’ve got planned to have any grip.
hovercraft
Trump is supposed to be holding a rally in Palm Beach right now. I had the live feed on, they were showing the venue, with the music blaring and a crowd there, and suddenly it just switched to some kind of town hall with Ivanka at a Philly town hall.
scav
@Jay C: And we wonder why staff aren’t donating. Is it the same staff that plagerized Michelle’s speach, or has Trump finally made an still more astonishing perfect hire of a new scapegoat?
Stan
@RK: Not at all. I’ve been a candidate myself. You need a decent poll sometimes to generate contributions. It’s a hell of a shitty business (being a candidate, that is)
yellowdog
@JMG: I put up yard signs because the guy across the street put a Trump sign up, plus a 3 foot tall eagle draped in an American flag. I encourage my dog to pee on his bushes every time we walk by.
jl
I guess the counter attack starts:
Scarborough Says He’s ‘Skeptical’ About Timing Of Trump Sexual Assault Stories
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/joe-scarborough-skeptical-timing-trump-sexual-assault-allegations
Jughead is nattering about a suspicious ‘oppo drop’. WTF are the loons talking about in the media. It’s like watching morons.
Most of the damaging Trump stuff that has come up has been public for a long time, for years. Both on policy and on his abusive personal and business behavior. Shit, you got on google and youtube and typed in Trump and whatever topic where you wanted to find some dirt, stupidity, venality, dangerous arrogance or incompetence, lies, ignorance or crass and offensive behavior. The media just didn’t have any interest in reporting it. HRC didn’t have to ‘oppo’ or ‘oppo drop’ anything.
And meanwhile we get breathless reports about daily release of very suspect wikileaks crapola with summary that it has embarrassing stuff in it. What embarrassing stuff? They never say.
I can’t listen to the news anymore. The incompetence and malfeasance is infuriating.
skerry
@Jay C: Except that it didn’t originate with a tweet. Donald made statements to a Serbian magazine, Nedeljnik. Looks like Suzanne Ryder Jaworowski, Trump’s Indiana campaign manager and Serbian-American, served as the conduit.
Botsplainer
The office Trumpers have gone from selling Trump to “we don’t care, don’t know who does”.
grandpa john
@C.S.Strowbridge: Rasmussin destroyed their credibility several elections ago
Stan
@JMG: Absolutely true. Signs should probably be paid for out of the “Maintenance of the Candidate’s Morale” fund.
hovercraft
@sukabi: @Tim C.:
They did not believe he could win. They saw and fed the Teahadists but always thought they could control it, they did not realize until it was too late. They didn’t do any research early, and when the tried at the end it was too late, the people had found their prophet, and nothing could dislodge them from him.
WereBear
I picked the wrong week to start the new Hitler biography.
What made my blood run cold was how Hitler’s speeches emphasized these points:
*stabbed in the back
*anti-Semitism
*racism/ethnic purity
*betrayed by opponents
*treason by those currently in power
*arresting and executing those in power
*outlandish promises to supporters
So if Hitler had bragged about groping women, WWII would not have happened? Discuss.
MattF
@jl: Um, well… I’d say that ‘Election Day is less than a month away’ is an excellent reason for these revelations to be happening right now. Seriously.
sukabi
@hovercraft: cancelled Hannity appearance and no show at a rally…
Has he fallen into a barrel of Bolivian blow?
Major Major Major Major
@Lizzy L: got any extras laying around?
scav
@sukabi: Or was he pushed by family members and handlers.
jl
@MattF: i suppose good reason, since many people don’t tune in to general election until after Labor Day. But that is a big given. There were many elections during the primary. Why not then. Better time for vetting since all the crap about partisan balance would not be an issue.
So, sorry. A guy like Trump should have been vetted out of the GOP primary before his possible election to pres office threatened the country. Trump meant $ to media so they wanted their Trump show. So, taking the big picture, I stand by my comment.
But, you do have a point, given that we are where we are right now. Doesn’t explain the horrid reporting on Wikileaks garbage though
sukabi
@hovercraft: which points to gross incompetence on their part, for not understanding their base, and for not doing due diligence and knocking him out early.
Thought these guys loved business… isn’t the first rule of business to do your due diligence?
Bruce K
@Tim C.: My theory is that if they had the oppo on Trump, they didn’t act on it because they were worried Trump might bolt for a third-party run and take the Southern Strategy core with him, in which case none of them would have a realistic path to general-election victory that didn’t involve at least one trip back in time.
sukabi
@scav: into the barrel?
bupalos
@WereBear: The playbook really is pure Hitler, I think people are so used to godwin-ignoring at any mention of the guy that the perfect parallels fade to black.
The scary thing is this thing ain’t over in November. Hitler got smacked down when he was a little too heavy handed on the approach, and wound up in prison as a hero of the 27-percenters, working on a long-term new media strategy that won out years later. I’d argue it’s not too early for a pivot to the aftermath here, Trump isn’t getting elected in 2016, but he isn’t going away.
Uncle Cosmo
@Barbara: IIRC when incumbent Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich (Croat-American) was challenged by George Voinovich (Slovenian-American), someone remarked on the sheer nastiness of the campaign, & an Ohio pol responded, It’s the Balkan Wars all over again.
Descendants of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia seem to have preferentially settled in the old Rust Belt cities (Pittsburgh through to Chicago) but as has been pointed out, for every Serb-American still pissed off over the 1996 bombings there is probably at least one Croat/Slovenian/Bosniak/Macedonian/Kosovar-American still pissed off at the Serbs. (Hell, some years back I met a Kosovar in the Copenhagen main rail station who upon finding out I was America effusively thanked me on behalf of his countrymen for our support.)
Lizzy L
Amazon Prime just informed me that I get to read *some* books on my e-reader for free. So I looked at the list of freebies, and in the first batch was PKD’s The Man In The High Castle. Downloaded it. Feels like the right time to re-read that. Everything old is new again.
The Hannity appearance tonight was supposed to highlight Trump’s strategy of running against Bill Clinton’s p****. Interesting that they decided to cancel it; a sign of intelligence? Nah. Confusion and desperation, more likely.
rk
@nonynony:
Unfortunately true. I look at any white man and assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a Trump supporter. That goes to almost 70% if it’s an older white man. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves. Fact is that women and non whites are going to save the country from this horror show and we deserve a medal. Thanks in advance!
OGLiberal
@bupalos: Single digits definitely a possibility but will be high single digits. But I guess the Dems are so good that they can manufacture 12% or more votes towards them. And I say 12% because Trump winning PA by 1% wouldn’t be satisfying enough for him or his base – they need like a 4-5% to show that the “real” Americans in PA – you know, the folks who don’t live in Sodom and Gomorrah, ie, Philly – just love, love, love Trump.
Joel
@Punchy: Hejdo!
Barbara
@Uncle Cosmo: They settled in the Rust Belt because their compatriots who emigrated to America between 1880 and 1910 went to those same cities in order to work in mining and heavy manufacturing. They established national churches (in the tradition of their homeland) and in some cases still had language communities in place.
Calouste
@Aleta: As if I needed any more reasons not to fly Delta.
dmsilev
@jl: Even by Scarbourough’s standards, that’s stupid. The chronology is pretty clear. The tape came out, and a few days later, Anderson Cooper committed an act of journalism by asking the blindingly obvious follow-up question and (to his credit) kept asking until Trump gave an unequivocal denial that he had done such things. At that point, several of the victims, who were among the 70 or so million debate watchers, screamed ‘liar!’ and called either their local paper or the NYT. A few days of due-diligence work by reporters, and now here we are. No conspiracy, just media outlets doing actual reporting.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@HRA: Dude. Really?
hovercraft
@sukabi:
They are nothing if not incompetent. And take a look at the business men and pro business governors around the country, how are they doing?
@Bruce K:
That may have been true at the beginning, but if they had the goods on him, they had to know the Clinton campaign would get them too, and so they were going to crash and burn at some point. Surely it would have been better to so in the primaries and spent the year shoring up congress. Now they have to answer to both the crazies for not committing Seppuku, and the non crazies for not kicking him to the curb in the first place.
Someone pointed out on one of the shows last night that the lyrics to The Snake he recites at his rallies is a perfect analogy to how he has behaved towards the GOP.
scav
@sukabi: If it keeps his tweeting and groping fingers occupied. People used to use laudanum for teething, so it’s even traditional.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@WereBear: Hitler wasn’t stupid.
OGLiberal
@bupalos: I think Trump goes away because a) he’s old, b) he’s bored, c) he can get the adulation he needs without running for office, d) this is hurting his overall brand, and all Trump is is a brand by this point, e) he doesn’t have the money, f) one loss will be bad enough, another lost – which would be likely – would completely smash his ego and g) unlike Hitler, he has no deeply held beliefs or ideology…becoming president for Trump was simply about idiot white folks cheering on his hatred and winning. But the “movement” he created isn’t going away. The folks for whom Trump made it OK to be openly racist, sexist, stupid, etc, can’t put that back in the shadows. I just don’t know who the next champion will be they can rally behind. None of Trump’s 2016 GOP competitors have the temperament or personality to be Donald Trump. Christie is close but not enough and, well, he might be facing jail time. Guiliani and Newt are done….old news. The other crazies like Steve King and Jeff Session don’t have the charisma and would never sell on a national stage. They’d need another celebrity. Sean Hannity would probably be somebody they could embrace but he ain’t going to give up his job and the cash it brings in for what would almost certainly be a losing cause. So they will be a “movement” looking for a leader. I don’t know yet if it’s scarier for them to be leaderless or not. But they aren’t going away – they can’t….they’re exposed….they’re lawn signs and Facebook posts are now public evidence. So they have to soldier on. If you vote for Trump because you just can’t stand Hillary and you’re a loyal Republican that’s one thing. But as somebody above or in another thread noted, if you’re putting lawns signs up or singing his praises on Facebook, you’re not just opposing Hillary, you are proud of supporting Trump. And if you are proud of it, you are a sexist, racist, xenophobic idiot.
WereBear
@bupalos: And Trump may just yet wind up in prison.
catclub
@sukabi:
I thought it was to marry the boss’s daughter. Worked for McCain.
Uncle Cosmo
@HRA: WAG = Wild-Ass Guess. Much beloved of engineers. With a frisson of numerical justification it can mutate into a SWAG or Scientific Wild-Ass Guess, even more beloved of the engineering community.
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
Today everyone including, Halpern, Barnacle, Geist, Confessori, and virtually everyone who came on tried to explain this to him, but he just refused to believe that the evil scheming Clinton’s are not behind this “opo dump”. He insists that Megan Kelly’s first question in the first debate was enough to elicit this same reaction from these women as the tape and his denial at the debate. Ergo the fact that it didn’t is proof the Clintons did this. Even if no believes him now, he will be proved right in the future even if it’s years from now. But he’s not hedging.
Joel
@bupalos: Two things that work in our favor (among others) in this comparison:
1) Trump is twice as old as Hitler was in 1924.
2) Trump’s supporters are much older than Hitlers’ were.
They don’t have the (forgive the term) stamina for the long haul.
OGLiberal
@jl: Even if they were timed, isn’t that freaking good political strategy? Hell, I would hope the Hillary campaign was that smart, and while I think they are, as you noted, I don’t even think they needed to coordinate because there is just so much out there in plain sight. Trump’s political strategy and timing was to, right before the debate, march out a bunch of women and allegations that have been public for a generation about a guy who isn’t running for president. Yeah, that’ll work. Rasmussen – yeah, I know – has a poll saying that people are more concerned about Clinton’s behavior towards women then Trump’s. OK, numbers probably cooked but, again, Bill Clinton isn’t running for president and, sorry, given what I’ve seen of Hillary and Bill post Bill’s presidency, while Bill might give Hillary advice on how to, say, handle the media, he’s going to have almost zero influence on policy and I don’t think he even has interest in having influence on policy. He’ll be too busy jetting around the world being First Gentleman and doing speaking gigs. He’s going to love the job but not because he can be involved in policy again.
HRA
@Uncle Cosmo: @Uncle Cosmo:
Thank you!
catclub
@Joel: and 3) 47% unemployment in Germany in 1933 – mostly veterans of WWI.
OGLiberal
@catclub: I think it’s also because folks in the Northeast – I was born, raised and live in NJ, work in NYC – are the most OK with his vulgarity. Midwesterners and Southern whites may be racist and xenophobic but they respect decorum and politeness. Not so much in the Northeast. He’ll probably almost certainly lost FL but he’ll campaign there because there are so many old, angry, racist Northeastern transplants down there to cheer him on – he’s probably the cat’s meow in The Villages. Lots of Northeastern transplants in places like Virginia and NC but Hillary will win there because of them and because they a) went there to go to college and stayed or b) went there because they wanted to get away from obnoxious Northeasterners but didn’t want to move to far away from family and didn’t want to end up in Florida with the older and even more obnoxious Northeasterners. (plus, it’s just too freaking hot in Florida)
shomi
This is very concerning. It’s a poll after all and often quite accurate from what I hear (on drudge). Ball Juice was right all along about polls and Al Gore. I should have listened. Need more Depends.
OGLiberal
@rk: I think it’s much more than 50/50, in the wrong direction, for any white dude over 25-30.
Ella in New Mexico
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
Jesus. The whole “article” is Sovereign Citizen-level legalese and wishful thinking. All that’s missing are the arbitrary Capitals and the red markups.
But the scary stuff is that the 1000+ commenters believe every word, and what they say about Clinton.
We live in a nation that has 35% of it’s citizens living in a complete alternate universe.
sukabi
@catclub: diligence not dalliance.
Applejinx
@bupalos:
Like Joel just asked, how OLD was Hitler when he did jail time? I know I’m kind of oldish (48) and I ain’t nearly as old as Trump. Was Hitler on drugs that early? How unhealthy were Hitler’s grassroots shock troops back in the day?
People joke around about Hoveround battalions and it’s sort of whistling past the graveyard really. Not all of them are grossly unfit Medicare-dependents. Asymmetric warfare isn’t about masses of healthy, fighting-fit troops, in fact it benefits from having access to maniacs who are otherwise doomed: if you’re a suicide bomber, helps if you know you’re in the last stages of cancer. We will be seeing more from those domestic enemies.
BUT, if they want war, bring it. I know a lot of millenials who are seriously economically challenged, ground down by life and the economy to near-suicide (amazing how many of them end up looking at that when shit goes uncertain for ’em, they’re too young to feel that hopeless) and yet physically and mentally fit. It’s not like they’re ‘weak competitors, not up to the standard of earlier generations’: they’re just fucked more than anybody, and I’m Generation X and saw the beginning of that trend.
And WE would let women fight to defend America.
Shit, if it got nasty _I_ would be prepared to fight for my country (as defined by the platform Hillary’s run on). I haven’t got all that much to lose, and this matters. If they are prepared to bring domestic terrorism to the USA (more than before) I’m prepared to stand in harm’s way to defend it.
I agree the fantasy is a Hitler-like uprising led by a ‘charismatic’ dictator galvanizing the worst fuckers we’ve got. The trouble is, they have Trump for a leader, and he’s a shit leader and he’s going to just plain die. I bet all his doctors are quacks and their main function is to tell him how strong he is. Reality doesn’t put up with that bullshit for very long. Trump is not going to be able to to put his Reich dreams into action. In a very practical sense he is not as good as Hitler.
Applejinx
@catclub: Labor force participation rate gives us 37.2% and then U6 is another 9.7% giving a total of 46.9% of people in the country out of work. That’s probably pretty on track with your 47% figure: I’m seeing more ‘over 30% unemployed’ which is probably not gamed as much as ‘labor force participation rate’ allows.
This seems like a dry but accurate picture of the employment situation of Germany at the time. Note some of the techniques used to fix the unemployment: on the one hand, government jobs Clinton could create (doing things like “The VYS planted forests, repaired river banks and helped reclaim wasteland” and of course the Autobahn network (!)) but also, kicking women out of the labor market to make room for men! I can see that fitting in perfectly with Trump’s worldview, and we may see that proposed as well.
Gelfling 545
@Lizzy L: Perhaps someone was able to get through to him that this particular type of attack was likely to damage him more than Hilary, who still hasn’t assaulted anybody. Or they tied him up & stuffed him in a closet to keep him from saying any more foolish things.
smintheus
Rasmussen is Exhibit A in the case against poll aggregation that lumps in all polls and pretends that their array of ‘ordinary biases’ to the left and right will balance each other out. There are several other Republican pollsters (like Gravis) that for years have been generating specious polls to skew public perception of the state of races. They should be tossed out, not thrown into the mix.
gex
@dmsilev: Or if he really wants to get mad about the timing, he can get pissed at the GOP who could have exploded this bomb further away from election day but chose not to. Conservative white men think that playing by the established rules (each candidate tries to make the case that they are better than the other) and declaring it mean and unfair if they don’t come out ahead. What the fuck does he think this is? Conspiring to release this at a beneficial time didn’t make Trump do any of the things that disqualify him.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@rk:
I didn’t do shit to deserve that appraisal, and shame on you for thinking that way.
“I look at any black kid in a hoodie, and I assume there’s a 50/50 chance he’s a gangster. That goes to almost 70% if he has gold crowns. All I can say is: sorry guys you did it to yourselves.”
I mean, what the fuck, Jack?
catclub
@Grumpy Code Monkey: When polls show that over 50% of white men favor Trump, and that number goes up
with age. It is a reasonable assumption. So you NOW think it is unfair when the store security guy follows you around, just because you are a white male over 50?
Let me know when real research shows 50% of black youth are gangsters.
Applejinx
@rk:
Gee. That feels downright bad. If only there were people, perhaps personal friends of mine, who knew exactly what that feeling was like, seeing as I don’t get to decide whether I’m going to be treated that way.
How terribly, terribly unfair it is. Who could possibly understand. ;P
one such friend’s thoughts
The Lodger
@hovercraft: Clearly, the message is Make Yugoslavia Yuge Again.
Although I’d always figured he was more of a Pol Pot or Mobutu Sese Seko fan.