Attorney in Texas
Attorney in Texas's JournalDonald Trump, protesters go big in Texas
Source: Politico
Meanwhile, both the number of protesters that have become common outside his campaign events and the intensity of their clashes with Trump supporters reached new heights.
Recognizing the roused spirit of the crowd inside the arena, Trump re-evaluated the label of “the new silent majority” he has bestowed on his supporters. “Maybe we should call it the noisy, the aggressive, the wanting-to-win majority,” he said. “That’s what it is.”
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On Monday evening, the most pointed message at the rally came from Trump’s introductory speakers, tea party activists Katrina Pierson and Scottie Nell Hughes, and was aimed at the Republican Party. “I hope Donald Trump tears up that loyalty pledge,” said Pierson, who railed against the Republican establishment's attempts to undermine tea party candidates, including the Republican National Committee's insistence that White House contenders sign a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee, whoever that might be.
Hughes said the Republican Party takes its conservative base for granted. “They think we’ll always be there. We need to end that this election cycle,” she said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/donald-trump-2016-dallas-megarally-213625
The Question: How does this news relate to the yesterday's New York Times report that "43 Percent of Republicans Think Obama Is Muslim"?
The Answer: if you want to know where Trump's ceiling is, you have to conclude that it is not below 43%.
Ezra Klein: "Why Bernie Sanders's rise is more impressive than Donald Trump's"
Excerpts from some excellent analysis:
New polls show Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His leads aren't Trump-size — at least not yet — but they were secured without the wall-to-wall media coverage that attends Trump, without the name recognition Trump brought to the race, and against a much stronger frontrunner than Trump faced.
And Sanders has built those leads while remaining, well, Sanders. He promised he wouldn't run a negative campaign, and he hasn't — a fact that Clinton allies privately mention with relief. He hasn't signed on with a Super PAC or begun taking money from the kinds of donors he campaigns against. His campaign has been free of stunts and provocations and dense with policy proposals and issue papers. He's attracting supporters the old-fashioned way — by convincing people he's the kind of politician they want to back.
There is nothing inevitable about any of this. It was not obvious six months ago that Sanders would pull ahead of Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nor can his rise be explained away as simple "anyone but Hillary" sentiment: Sanders holds huge leads over Vice President Joe Biden, former Govs. Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee, and ex-Sen. Jim Webb.
The full article is well worth a careful reading.
If you don't understand Trump's rise in the Republican polls, ask yourself three questions:
Trump's campaign is perfectly tailored to the driven-by-talk-radio-fabricated-fear voter. For over 2 decades, hate radio has created fact-free paranoia to drive no-information voters to the polls. These voters are not low-information voters, but are the people who go to the polls strongly believing utter nonsense:
* Saddam Hussein attacked the US on 9/11 and was hiding weapons of mass destruction,
* tax cuts for the wealthy trickle down to benefit the poor,
* Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya,
* the scientific community is sharply divided on the "theories" of evolution and climate change,
* the Estate Tax was killing off family farms, and
* voter fraud is a huge problem that must be addressed.
Ask yourself 3 questions:
Question 1: How stupid would you have to be to believe such nonsense?
Question 2: How stupid would you have to be to support Trump?
Question 3: If your answer to both questions is "pretty fucking stupid," do you think that's a coincidence?
Ron Fournier for The National Journal: "Rise of the 'Crazy Buts'” (an interesting article)
Here is an excerpt:
I spent most of the summer with Crazy Buts.
From Detroit, where my family lives, to northern Michigan, where my family vacations, I heard Republicans, independents, and even Democrats begin sentences this way: “Donald Trump is crazy, but…”
“Crazy, but he’s a winner, and I’m tired of America losing.”
“Crazy, but he can’t be worse than what we got.”
“Crazy, but he’s punishing the establishment.”
“Crazy, but he’s driving the media nuts.”
“Crazy, but he says what I can’t say.”
Most don’t mean “crazy” in a clinical sense. “Crazy as in crass,” a landscaper from rural Michigan told me in mid-July. “I’m not sure he has the temperament to be president, but I like how he’s messing with your minds in Washington. Crazy like a crash-test dummy.”
Christie far behind with Trump and Carson ahead in GOP race
Source: NJ.com
Trump, with 33 percent, and Carson, with 20, were the only GOP hopefuls to reach double figures in an ABC News/Washington Post survey of registered Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who began the year as the Republican front-runner, was in third place with just 8 percent.
Gov. Chris Christie received 1 percent, tied with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out last week; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
Read more: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/09/trumpcarson_lead_gop_field_with_christie_fare_behi.html
Deadpool on Christie vs. Jindal vs. Santorum anyone?
Insider vs. Outsider Matchup Finds Clinton, Trump Near Even
Source: ABC News
The hypothetical contest stands at 46-43 percent, Clinton-Trump, a gap that's within the survey's margin of sampling error. That compares to a clear Clinton lead among all adults, 51-39 percent, indicating her broad support in groups that are less apt to be registered to vote, such as young adults and racial and ethnic minorities.
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The close result in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, says as much about partisanship as it does about the candidates. Registered voters divide 45-40 percent between identifying themselves as Democrats, or leaning that way, vs. Republicans or GOP leaners. And 82 percent of leaned Democrats say they’d support Clinton, while 76 percent of leaned Republicans say they'd back Trump, were they the party nominees.
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Clinton's support among women is based on her overwhelming backing from college-educated women, 68-20 percent. By contrast, Trump leads Clinton by a broad 55-34 percent among men who aren't college graduates. He runs about evenly with Clinton among women without a college degree and among men who've graduated from college.
The education gap, like the gender gap, is outsized. In exit polls since 1980, there has been little difference in candidate support among those with a college degree vs. non-graduates, an average of just 2 points; the biggest gap was 11 points in 1996, when Bill Clinton's support was higher among non-grads (+14 points) than among college graduates (+3 points). In the Clinton-Trump matchup, there's a vast 35-point gap; it's 57-31 percent, Clinton-Trump, among those with a college degree, vs. 49-40 percent, Trump-Clinton, among those without one. Indeed, even among college-educated leaned Republicans, Trump’s support slips to 67 percent, vs. 80 percent among those without a degree.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/insider-outsider-matchup-finds-clinton-trump/story?id=33689594
Don't just look at the headline; the internal numbers are most interesting.
Clinton is crushing Trump among moderates (48%-36%), 18-29 year olds (63%-27%), college grads (57%-31%), in the Northeast where they know Trump best (63%-32%) as well as the West (55%-30%).
Chris Cillizza (Washington Post, The Fix): "Scott Walker’s remarkable Iowa collapse, in 1 chart"
"Are you a fan of Scott Walker? If so, you might want to avert your eyes from this chart":
Since February, Walker has gone from the front-runner in the state's first-in-the-nation caucuses to an also-ran. In a new Quinnipiac poll out of Iowa released Friday morning, Walker took a meager 3 percent of the vote -- which puts him in 10th place. TENTH!
Trevor Timm for The Guardian "One good thing about Donald Trump's campaign: it's ruining Jeb Bush's"
This was an enjoyable read:
There are many, many reasons to abhor Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but there’s at least one reason to appreciate it, for now: his constant and merciless trolling of Jeb Bush that is currently tanking Bush’s shot at the presidency. In some sense, Trump is doing democracy a service by helping ensure we will not have to suffer the embarrassment of having a third Bush family member as president within two decades.
Trump’s penchant for insulting anyone in his path is now well-known (and often deplorable and sexist), though most candidates usually have to deliberately poke the bear for Trump to engage in his usual charade. But just about every day, Trump will go after Jeb unprompted – whether on Twitter or at campaign events or in interviews with journalists – with a voracity virtually never seen in primary politics. Oftentimes it’s substantive and other times it’s not, but it’s almost always delightful to watch.
Trump will attack Jeb for his support for the Iraq War, but if Bush lightly criticizes George W Bush, Trump questions why he would throw his brother under the bus. Trump attacks Jeb for his record in Florida, rips him for his $1.3m “no show job” at Lehman Brothers after he left the governorship. He calls Jeb out for being “100% CONTROLLED” by his wealthy donors, and when a few donors recently left Jeb’s campaign, Trump made fun of him for that too.
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During a recent 35-minute interview with the Washington Post, Trump criticized Jeb and the two other Bush presidents a total of 33 times (which the Post helpfully documented in a separate article). As one anonymous Trump associate told the Post, Trump is “driven and he has two goals: one, to be elected president, and two, to have Jeb not be president.” The former remains a terrifying prospect, but the latter is something a lot people can get behind.
I added the bolding just because I especially liked those parts.
Sanders votes 96% with Sen. Boxer, Markey, Booker, Cantwell, Leahy, Gillibrand, and Brown, and he
voted 93% of the time with the Obama administration. When Sanders and Clinton were both in the Senate they voted the same 93% of the time.
That makes Sanders more of a Democrat than Democratic Sen. Manchin, Heitkamp, Donnelly, King, and Tester.
I cherish Democratic Sen. Manchin, Heitkamp, Donnelly, King, and Tester so don't think I'm trying to criticize them, but Sanders supports Democratic legislation and the Obama administration more than many with the party label "Democrat" and so, to me, actions and votes speak louder than labels.
Do you feel otherwise?
If so, you should probably ask yourself why.
James Zogby "Remember Talk of a Bush-Clinton Match-up?" ("I wouldn't place a bet on it")
I'm in the Sanders camp and not a Clinton supporter, but it bugs me when pundits suggest that her campaign is collapsing -- Bush's campaign is collapsing, Walker's campaign is collapsing, Perry's campaign has collapsed -- Clinton is still the favorite, she still has the overwhelming superabundance of endorsements, she has the campaign infrastructure, she has almost limitless funds, she has a very high approval rating and low disapproval rating among Democrats, etc.
Notwithstanding the fact that Clinton's campaign is experiencing a normal downward correction and not a collapse as some mischaracterize it, here is some interesting analysis (mostly notable for how the Bush campaign has fallen of the rails):
It wasn't that long ago that the pundits had the 2016 presidential contest pegged as a Clinton-Bush match-up. While that may still occur, I wouldn't place a bet on it.
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On the Republican side, Jeb Bush and the rest of the GOP field of governors and senators ran smack into two non-politicians who, in most polls, are far and away leading the pack. Donald Trump, billionaire showman, and Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, are currently capturing the support of about one-half of Republican voters. Meanwhile, Bush is polling in the mid-single digits.
Just how disturbed the GOP base has become was in evidence after the last debate. At its conclusion, the consensus among the pundits was that Trump had performed not only poorly but badly and that Carson had been present/absent. But in the weeks following the debate, Trump's lead grew and Carson significantly increased his polling numbers, while the candidates favored by the GOP establishment (Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker) lost ground. Too many Republican voters, it appears, are mad at, fed up with and just don't trust politicians.
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For those who thought that Jeb was the "smart one" -- the Bush who should have been president -- his lackluster performance, to date, has been disappointing. He has repeatedly stumbled when confronted with both tough and easy questions. His supporters were baffled by his failure to have a quick and ready response to questions about his position on the Iraq war. After all, it was started by his brother over 12 years ago and was one of the most consequential foreign policy events of this century. His bungled response was inexcusable.
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