Seeing Some Sobering Senate Surprises

In Texas here in the final weekend of the 2018 midterms, Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke is throwing everything he has at GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, and Cruz is in a lot more trouble than Republicans are willing to admit.

Early Friday afternoon, on the last day of early voting, Jacque Callanen strutted out of the Bexar County Elections Department with a noticeable pep in her step and a smile on her face, her red, white and blue American flag slip-on shoes pounding against the pavement and her “Bexar County Elections” lanyard swinging freely back and forth.

“If you got to see the people behind the scenes right now, you would see them high-fiving,” said Callenen, who is the elections administrator of Bexar County.

That’s because her county, the fourth largest in Texas, saw what she said was record-breaking turnout during early voting this year. By the time the polls closed Thursday, 33.7 percent of registered voters in Bexar County had voted, well past the 17.3 percent turnout at the same point in 2014, the last midterm, and close to the presidential-year turnout recorded at the same point in 2012 and 2016.

And Bexar County’s election officials are not alone in having a lot to high-five each other about. Turnout during early voting in the state’s 30 largest counties easily surpassed the entire turnout – during the early voting period and on Election Day – of the 2014 midterm and continues to race toward the turnout seen in presidential election years.

In Harris County, the state’s largest county, 32.3 percent of registered voters had voted by the end of Thursday, compared to 15.5 percent at the same point in 2014. In Dallas County, the number was 35.1 percent, compared to 15.2 percent at the same point in 2014. Early voting turnout in Travis County had already surpassed total early voter turnout in both the 2014 midterm and the 2012 presidential election by the end of Thursday.

“We’ve got a lot of unhappy and activist voters out there who have been wanting to vote for a long time,” said Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk. She attributed the bump in the number of voters to President Donald Trump.

Texas isn't a purple state or even a red state.  It's a non-voting state.  As I said earlier today, if turnout numbers really are as high as people are predicting, then all bets are off come Wednesday morning. Yes, the generation low turnout of 2014 was quite literally the lowest bar to overcome.  If early voting turnout in Texas hadn't easily eclipsed the total from four years ago, I wouldn't just be worried, I'd be despondent. But it has crushed those numbers, and Ted Cruz is fighting for his political life right now.

Unfortunately for Dems, the most vulnerable Senate seat they are in danger of losing is one many people are overlooking. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota is in trouble, but so is Bob Menendez in New Jersey.

New Jersey Democrats are growing increasingly worried that Sen. Bob Menendez could lose his seat next week in an outcome that would undercut the party’s effort to take back the Senate.

Democratic strategists working on races across the state said in interviews that they have seen a remarkable decline in support for Menendez as his Republican opponent — former pharmaceutical executive Bob Hugin — poured $36 million of his own wealth into his campaign. Hugin has used much of the money to run a seemingly endless stream of negative campaign ads. Even as public opinion polls show the senator up by double digits, some insiders say a post-summer boost, hoped for by team Menendez, never arrived.

Hugin’s relentless attacks, which took a dark turn the last three weeks, have chipped away at the scandal-scarred senator’s standing with suburban voters and women, some strategists said. Menendez, running in a state that has 900,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, is now struggling to hold on to areas where he should have massive support, some said. In several competitive congressional districts, internal polls show votes for Menendez running far behind support for a generic Democrat, one strategist said.

As Menendez’s aides insists they’re “confident” he’ll win, some allies are openly admitting things may not turn out as planned, saying the massive advertising campaign on the other side has been difficult to overcome.

“I think the race is a toss-up,” Loretta Weinberg, the Democratic majority leader of the state Senate, said in an interview. “I think it’s a fight, and we’re all in to continue fighting up until 8 p.m. on Election Day.”

Now, with three days until the election, Menendez is swinging wildly at his opponent, linking him to President Donald Trump, former Republican Gov. Chris Christie and even suggesting — falsely and without evidence — that Hugin was fired under questionable circumstances by investment bank JPMorgan nearly two decades ago. He’s furiously working to get out his base, cranking up the urban turnout machine with the help of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and others.

All of that is playing out as national Democrats are dumping some $7 million into a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972.

I hope New Jersey comes to their senses and finds a way to reelect Menendez, but I have a feeling that when we find ourselves in "all bets are off" territory on Tuesday, there are going to be several surprises in the Senate.

There's no way Ted Cruz should lose in Texas.  There's no way Bob Menendez should lose in New Jersey either.  But I wouldn't bet any money on both of them winning.

We're going to see some major surprises in the House on Wednesday.  Some long-time House Republicans are most likely going to find themselves out of a job in a couple months, hopefully Steve King and maybe even Don Young in Alaska. There's also a lot of reason to believe that Democrat Phil Bresden can pull off a major upset in Tennessee and win back Al Gore's old Senate seat.

But when it comes to Cruz and Menendez, one of the two is going to get an unwelcome surprise.  Maybe both.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Banal proclamation about midterms on Tuesday like "It's about turnout!" aside, as I've told readers, we're largely in uncharted territory when it comes to polling for this year's elections and that's because we really don't have any idea what "likely voter models" really represent in 2018, because we're so far outside the norm.  

Turnout in 2010 was decent, 41%, but Republicans destroyed the Democrats and picked up 63 House seats. Turnout in 2014 was dismal, 36%, but as a result Republicans regained the Senate and took the largest House margin they've had in generations by picking up 13 more seats.  And midterm turnout since I've been alive has largely been hovering around that 40% mark.  Back in the sixties and in 1970, midterm turnout was much higher, 47 or 48%, and Democrats had huge House margins, unthinkable in today's era of gerrymandering down to city blocks.

So what does all that mean in 2018?  As Vanity Fair's Peter Hamby reminds us, if Virginia in 2017 is anything to go by, the polls break down completely if midterm turnout is as high as it was 50 years ago.

In the final week before Election Day last November in Virginia, where the commonwealth was electing a new governor, the polls were tightening. Republican Ed Gillespie, was, like Donald Trump before him, tapping into immigration fears by running campaign ads about the threat of the violent MS-13 gang and sanctuary cities. Polls showed Gillespie was suddenly within 3 points of the Democratic front-runner, Ralph Northam, who had held a sturdier lead for much of the year. Were Democrats about to blow another big race in a battleground state? Were last minute Republican efforts to exploit racial fears actually working? Could Northam lose even with an unpopular president in the White House? That scenario would defy the logic of every previous off-year election in modern times, but never mind. The punditry machine, huffing Twitter fumes, gassed itself up. The day before the election, three out of four panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe solemnly predicted a Northam loss.

The fourth, Harold Ford Jr., predicted a toss-up, but not without pre-writing an obituary. “Democrats are going to look back and wonder, if he does not win, did we lose on the crime issue, did we lose on the public-safety issue?,” Ford offered. Meanwhile, Mika Brzezinski wondered whether the governor’s race in a state populated by 8.5 million people might hinge on “the Donna Brazile stuff,” a niche beltway Twitter scandal so forgettable that I had to Google it to recall what it was about, despite the fact that I cover politics for a living and grew up in central Virginia. Turns out Brazile wrote a book trashing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which surely weighed heavily on the minds of voters in Roanoke.

Not only did Northam win the Virginia race, he won by 9 points, a polling error more substantial than anything we saw in 2016. Gillespie, it turns out, actually won more votes than any previous statewide Republican candidate; he had enthusiasm at his back. It’s just that Democrats had more—and they blew the doors off on Election Day. The whole spectacle was yet another blow to polling and to punditry, two industries sullied by Trump’s victory in 2016. 

The Virginia result went mostly unexamined after the results came in, as everyone in politics quickly moved on to the latest Trump thing. But the question of why Northam outperformed the polls, and why polls continue to wield such mystical power over the political press, is worth keeping in mind as America prepares to head to the polls next Tuesday. Every piece of evidence we have about voting behavior during the Trump presidency—special elections in various corners of the country, public and internal polls, early voting data in key states—indicates that we are heading for a midterm election with explosively high turnout. University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting patterns, estimated recently that almost 50 percent of eligible voters could cast ballots this year, a turnout level not seen in a midterm election in 50 years. Trump, in his way, is loudly trying to juice Republican turnout in red-leaning Senate races by demagoguing the threat of illegal border crossings, which happen to be at their lowest point in decades.

Enthusiasm in this election, though, is mostly fueled by Democrats. Aside from college-educated white women, much of the Democratic coalition in 2018 is comprised of voters—young people, African-Americans, and Hispanics—who don’t typically show up in midterm elections. And the main thing to remember about high-turnout elections, especially ones that bring non-traditional voters into the mix, is that strange things can happen. House seats once thought to be safe are suddenly in jeopardy, like Republican Steve King’ssolidly red seat in Iowa now appears to be.

Still, in the press, it seems written in stone that Democrats will take back the House but fail to take the Senate, thanks to an unfavorable map that has too many Democratic incumbents running in Trump-friendly states like Missouri, North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, and Montana. The prospect of a House-Senate split is the most likely outcome according to the polls and veteran handicappers, and that probability has already started congealing into conventional wisdom. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, writing last weekend, said this scenario is “the sensible thing to root for,” the best way to constrain Trump’s impulses but also an unchecked liberalism.

Polls remain our best tool for reading the electorate and discerning important trends, which is why journalists, handicappers, and campaign managers depend on them so much. Entire media companies are devoted to explaining them. But polls are not predictive. They are wobbly around the margins. Pollsters, the honest ones at least, know this and repeat the warning over and over again. Yet even the shock of 2016 hasn’t stopped people in the media from making predictions about next Tuesday. Journalists, at least on their Twitter accounts, have started to write off certain Senate races. Tennessee is one, North Dakota another. Joe Donnelly was left for dead last week, until a new NBC/Marist poll came out this week, showing him ahead by 2 points. In Nevada, a recent Emerson pollshowed incumbent Republican Dean Heller ahead of challenger Jacky Rosen by 7 points, prompting a chorus of worried groans from Democrats. People who know better urged caution.

“Consistently, the public polling here is garbage,” Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston told me. He pointed out that public polling in Nevada underestimated Democratic performance in every one of the last six competitive statewide elections. In 2010, Harry Reidwas losing to Republican Sharron Angle by 3 points heading into election day. He won by 5.7. “Polls here under-represent Democratic turnout in general. They under-represent Hispanics,” Ralston said. “I don’t know why no one has learned.” Funny stuff happens when people who don’t mainline CNN for a living actually vote.

Then there’s Texas, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke appears to have reclaimed some late momentum against Republican Ted Cruz,who expanded his lead in the race after the Brett Kavanaughhearings energized G.O.P. voters. Right-leaning analysts have fallen all over themselves to mock the endless stream of Texas polling and the glowing coverage O’Rourke has received from the national press. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted that “Beto is and has always been fanfic.” The Weekly Standard published an otherwise sensible piece about the race on Wednesday under the headline “Beto-Mania Is a Joke (Probably).” Yeah, O’Rourke might lose. That’s the most likely outcome and the best bet. But here’s a wild concept: he also might win.

So yes, the blue wave scenario is actually really simple: Democrats turn out in numbers that utterly overwhelm Republican voter suppression efforts.  If this is another year where turnout is 38-42%, the polls are probably pretty accurate, because that's what the likely voter models are based on.  That's still pretty decent news for the Dems as we've seen, at least for the House.

But if turnout is closer to 50%, the likely voter models come apart instantly.  Odds are those additional voters are going to be pulling the levers for the Democrats.  At that point, all bets are off as to where things go, but the possibility of not just a blue wave but a surprise blue tsunami does exist.  I remain extremely skeptical, precisely because of those wildly successful GOP voter suppression efforts in states where Dems are trying to defend those Senate seats.

But let's remember that even in "high" turnout years, the vast majority of eligible voters still don't show up in midterms, and that only helps the GOP.

We need to make 50%+ turnout midterms and 75%+ turnout presidential election years the norm.

Period.

Expanding The Map In Georgia

Going into the final days of the 2018 campaign, Democrat Stacey Abrams is in a neck-and-neck race with Republican Brian Kemp for the Georgia governor's race.  Kemp, who has not recused himself as Secretary of State and will remain in charge of counting the votes in his own race, has done everything he can to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Georgia Democratic voters in a race that will probably be decided by just tens of thousands of votes.  But if Abrams wins, it will be because of black women turning out at presidential election levels in order to expand Medicaid in the wake of a Republican-created public health crisis.

Money, lives, and change. Those three words could roughly summarize any political race, but seem especially important in the state today. The issues facing much of the Georgia electorate are fairly simple: The state is the fifth-poorest in the nation. Its median wages and minimum wages are both below the national average. Across all races, the poor are underserved, often lack insurance, and face remarkably high rates of mortality and morbidity from preventable diseases. The state has huge swaths of rural land whose communities often lack basic services. Outside the urban oasis of the Atlanta metropolitan area, Georgia faces as many challenges to the health and welfare of its citizens as any state in the country. The most important policy issues in the governor’s race boil down to each candidate’s ability to fill those gaps.

But there’s a special dimension in Georgia that could very well mean the difference next week. The state is in the grip of a crisis, one that affects, in particular, the lives of black women like Abrams and like those who form the foundation of her coalition and organizing base. Across the country, black women’s health—particularly the fate of mothers and their newborns—is in peril, and mortality rates have spiked. Nowhere is this truer than in Georgia: The issue has been front and center in mobilizing black women, and it’s central to the policy platform of the candidate seeking to be the first black woman governor in U.S. history. To black women in Georgia, the stakes of the debate over health-care access are no less than life or death.

Perhaps no one is more aware of those stakes than Joy Baker. Baker is an ob-gyn in Thomaston, a little more than an hour south of Atlanta. Thomaston is the picture of a small southern town. It has a Main Street and a Church Street. The town was built around a mill that’s long gone, but it’s still a hub for basic services for people living in the deeply rural surrounding areas. For hundreds of poor, rural women, Baker’s practice in the Upson Regional Medical Center is the sole lifeline. Half of the rural areas in Georgia don’t have any doctors’ offices, hospitals, or clinics where women can seek obstetric care. That means Baker is responsible not just for the care of people in and around Thomaston, but also for women from an average of 40 miles away.

“Twenty-five percent of my patient population lives below the poverty line, on less than $17,000 per year,” Baker told me. Her patients are disproportionately African American. The vast majority of them are on Medicaid, which by federal mandate covers pregnancy and perinatal services for women under or near the poverty line. They often have to rely on booking Medicaid vans three days in advance to get to doctor visits because they can’t afford gas or don’t have cars. “Some of my patients can’t even afford a prescription at Walmart for $4,” Baker says.

Baker told me that at least 60 percent of her patients qualify as having “high-risk” pregnancies, often because of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other comorbidities common among poor and rural populations. For most of those women, the nine-plus months of pre- and postnatal care they are guaranteed under federal law are the only regular primary and preventive care they’ll receive in a given year.

“I see an average of 30 to 40 patients per day in my clinic,” Baker says. “That’s way more than I’d like to be seeing, but I have to be able to accommodate.” Her average week includes two 24-hour shifts in a row, during which she alternates between working in the maternity ward, in the emergency room, and in the operating rooms of her hospital, as well as in her clinic across the street. For her and the one other doctor in her practice, it’s a Herculean task just to provide an adequate standard of care—often squeezed into 10-minute visits.

Baker’s patients often have chronic conditions that her office can address only while they’re there for pregnancy-related care. That includes the mental-health problems that have come to characterize rural American life. Most often, the mental-health dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth involve postpartum depression, but Baker sees women who are already depressed, suffering from undiagnosed disorders, or having suicidal ideations before and during pregnancy. She’s also obtained a special license to treat opioid addiction among women who want to rehabilitate themselves during pregnancy. “We don’t have any mental-health services and supports,” Baker told me.

Her office tries to confront those challenges head on, counseling patients and finding psychiatric services for them. And Baker utilizes group prenatal care—an attempt to alleviate patients’ potential isolation and to provide women with support networks that can help their pregnancy outcomes.

But there are mounting structural issues that even Baker’s ingenuity and willpower can’t fix. Dozens of labor-and-delivery units across the state have faced closures in the past two decades. Eight rural hospitals in Georgia have shuttered in the past eight years. And that’s amid other stresses on rural and maternal health in Georgia, like the opioid crisis.

The biggest challenge is still insurance. Even though poor pregnant women are entitled to Medicaid coverage, that coverage is difficult to navigate, and under state law it comes with a firm expiration date. “Medicaid usually ends about six to eight weeks after the delivery,” Baker says. “But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has come out with a strong suggestion that we follow those patients for the entire year.” Baker estimates that after those six to eight weeks, she won’t see 90 percent of her patients until they’re pregnant again. In the dangerous medical crucible that is the first few weeks after childbirth, she estimates that some 30 percent of her patients won’t even make it to their first postpartum visit.

For Baker, the only solution is the one that’s at the center of the Georgia governor’s race: Medicaid expansion. “I feel like I’m kind of piecing things together here, and I would love to have the resources to do the things we need to do,” she told me. Because Medicaid expansion would offer health insurance to more low-income adults than the state’s current program, it would provide many residents of Thomaston with the first steady guarantee of coverage in decades. That would give them access to more regular care and reduce their own health-care costs. And it would give Baker’s patients year-round access to her services.

The Medicaid expansion would also signal that the state is serious about assisting Baker on the front lines of the crisis—and that it cares about her, too. “As a black woman, it is just really unacceptable to me that black women are more likely to die” than white women, Baker says. “I take it personally because I am a black woman and I would like to live if I should decide to have a baby.”

Nearly five million Georgians live outside the Atlanta metro, effectively the entire population of Alabama.   A lot of Georgia outside Atlanta is rural and poor and a full third of Georgia's population is black.  You can imagine then why Kemp is so eager to disenfranchise as many black voters as he can, and why Abrams appealing to black women -- one-sixth of the state's population -- to help her tackle the health care crisis is such an existential threat to the GOP there.

If black women showed up to vote at 2012 levels, Kemp would be obliterated.

That's how Abrams wins.

Last Call for Meanwhile In Gunmerica...

Another mass shooting, this time in Tallahassee as five were shot at a yoga studio, killing at least one and putting several more in the hospital.  Andrew Gillum, Democratic candidate for Florida governor and current mayor of Tallahassee, is taking time off the campaign trail in the final days to oversee the city's response.

Tallahasee Mayor and Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum said Friday he will return to the state’s capitol city after of a shooting there at a yoga studio.

“I’m deeply appreciative of law enforcement's quick response to the shooting at the yoga facility in Tallahassee today. No act of gun violence is acceptable. I'm in close communication with law enforcement officials and will be returning to Tallahassee tonight,” Gillum tweeted Friday evening.

A lone shooter entered a yoga studio in Tallahassee and shot five people, killing one and injuring four, who remain in critical condition. The shooter is dead from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a Tallahassee police spokesperson told The Hill.

Police said they do not believe there is any further threat to the public and do not yet know the identity of the shooter.

The shooting Friday comes four days ahead The Sunshine State’s gubernatorial election between Gillum and former Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) to replace Gov. Rick Scott (R). The race has been one of the nation’s tightest contests, with The Cook Political Report rating it a “toss up,” and an average of polls calculated by RealClearPolitics showing Gillum up 2.7 points.

It is unclear if and how the shooting and Gillum’s absence from the campaign trail will impact the race.

The race continues to be extremely close heading into the home stretch, but good for Gillum to continue his duties as mayor.  It's the right thing to do both morally and politically.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Apparently Trump's open white nationalism in the final days of the 2018 midterm campaign is finally a bridge too far for suburban GOP voters, who are now looking for the exits in suburban purple House districts.

Two years ago, the presidential election hinged in large part on a rightward shift among working-class whites who deserted Democrats.

Tuesday’s House election may turn on an equally significant and opposite force: a generational break with the Republican Party among educated, wealthier whites — especially women — who like the party’s pro-business policies but recoil from President Trump’s divisive language on race and gender.

Rather than seeking to coax voters like these back into the Republican coalition, Mr. Trump appears to have all but written them off, spending the final days of the campaign delivering a scorching message about preoccupations like birthright citizenship and a migrant “invasion” from Mexico that these voters see through as alarmist.

In Republican-leaning districts that include diverse populations or abut cities that do — from bulwarks of Sunbelt conservatism like Houston and Orange County, Calif., to the well-manicured bedroom communities outside Philadelphia and Minneapolis — the party is in danger of losing its House majority next week because Mr. Trump’s racially-tinged nationalism has alienated these voters who once made up a dependable constituency.

One of those disenchanted voters is J. Mark Metts, a 60-year-old partner at one of this city’s prestigious law firms. Mr. Metts had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate until 2016. Now he and some of his neighbors in the moneyed River Oaks enclave of Houston are about to oppose a Republican once again, to register their disapproval of President Trump.

“With Congress not really standing up to Trump, this election is becoming a referendum,” Mr. Metts said, explaining why he would no longer support the re-election of Representative John Culberson, an eight-term Republican.

Mr. Culberson is now running roughly even with the Democratic candidate, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last week — an extraordinary development in a district that has not elected a Democrat since before an oilman named George H.W. Bush won here in 1966, and one that illustrates how difficult Mr. Trump has made it for his party to retain control of the House.

The president amplified his fear-peddling Wednesday night with an online video that is being widely condemned as racist, showing a Mexican man convicted of killing two California deputies with a voice-over saying “Democrats let him into the country.”

Trump knows as long as he keeps 50 Republican senators, he gets all the federal judges, Supreme Court justices, and treaty agreements he wants.  Another two years of the Mitch McConnell federal judge factory, and god forbid another Supreme Court justice, means it doesn't matter what Democrats do in the House in the short run.

Sure, it means investigations and oversight.  But on the big issues, Trump can turn to the courts, and grind down the civil rights era one decision at a time until we're back to the 1950's...or the 1850's.  There's nothing that makes me believe that Trump won't finish out his term and be a clear favorite for re-election unless he crashes the economy, a legitimate concern.  And even then, Trump can blame House Democrats.

And remember, all these Republicans who hate Trump would come back to the party in a heartbeat if Mike Pence was running.  We'd be right back to 2016, only without Trump.

The Republicans will be fine without the House.  If anything, it gives Trump what he loves the most: an "enemy of the people" to scream at on Twitter every day for the next two years.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

CNN doesn't pull any punches for once, calling Donald Trump's new GOP campaign ad days before the midterm election what it is: racist, plain and simple.

In the most racially charged national political ad in 30 years, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party accuse Democrats of plotting to help people they depict as Central American invaders overrun the nation with cop killers. 

The new spot, tweeted by the President five days before the midterm elections, is the most extreme step yet in the most inflammatory closing argument of any campaign in recent memory. 

The Trump campaign ad is the latest example of the President's willingness to lie and fear-monger in order to tear at racial and societal divides; to embrace demagoguery to bolster his own political power and the cause of the Republican midterm campaign. 

The ad -- produced for the Trump campaign -- features Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican man who had previously been deported but returned to the United States and was convicted in February in the slaying of two California deputies. 

"I'm going to kill more cops soon," a grinning Bracamontes is shown saying in court as captions flash across the screen reading "Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay."

It's being done on purpose, and Trump is happy to do it.

The Trump ad also flashes to footage of the migrant caravan of Central American asylum seekers that is currently in Mexico, which Trump says is preparing an invasion of the United States, implying that everyone in the column of people fleeing repression, poverty and economic blight is bent on murder and serious crime on US soil. 

"Who else would Democrats let in?" a caption asks. 

A source close to the White House told CNN's Jim Acosta that the web ad was produced by Jamestown Associates for the Trump campaign for the midterms and was designed to fit into Trump's broader immigration push and to change the argument from "family unification to invasion." 

"It's clearly working. We are all talking about it and not health care," the source said.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the point.  We're talking about what Trump wants to talk about as his national hate rallies continue in key battleground states like Florida.

President Trump introduced the polarizing issue of birthright citizenship as a central plank of his closing argument to voters here Wednesday night as he began his final campaign sprint to Election Day.

Trump said illegal immigration was the driving issue of the midterm elections and vowed that with enlarged Republican congressional majorities he would achieve his immigration priorities, including eliminating the constitutional right to citizenship for those born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

The president spoke at length about birthright citizenship, which he called “this crazy policy” that he said allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children” born on U.S. soil to automatically become U.S. citizens and therefore eligible for every privilege and benefit of citizenship.

“Birthright citizenship — you know all about it — we will keep the criminals, the drug dealers, we will keep them all out of our country,” Trump said. “We will get rid of all of this. We will end, finally, birthright citizenship. It’s costing us so many billions of dollars.” 

This is what the GOP is in 2018.  This is what they stand for.  This is what Republican voters want: permission to hate millions.  And if you think this is all a stunt, well all Trump needs is the five Republicans on the Supreme Court to agree with him.

The Dred Scott decision used to be law of the land too.

Last Call For What's Up With Team Aftab?

Kind of a big local story here in Cincinnati as the House race for OH-1 between GOP Rep. Steve Chabot and Democratic challenger Aftab Pureval has gotten very strange, and definitely not in a good way for the blue side.

A resignation and two firings have cast a pall on the campaign of Democratic congressional Aftab Pureval six days before the election.

His campaign manager Sarah Topy resigned late Tuesday night and two staffers were fired.
Now some see his challenge of Republican Congressman Steve Chabot, R-Westwood, in jeopardy.

Pureval wouldn't say why other than "new information" came to light.

"Yesterday, I learned new information that led me to believe that members of my staff may not have lived up to that standard," Pureval said in a statement "We have dismissed those staff members. I do not want this issue to be a distraction in the final days, and therefore have accepted the resignation of my campaign manager."

In an interview with The Enquirer, Pureval gave little additional information. He wouldn't say what the new information was. He also wouldn't reveal the identity of the two staffers.

The staff shakeup comes on the eve of a hearing Thursday in front of the Ohio Elections Commission about whether Pureval improperly spent money from his local election campaign fund for his federal campaign.

The campaign came under a bigger cloud of suspicion with allegations a worker on Pureval's campaign posed as a Chabot campaign worker and infiltrated his campaign.

"While the actions of a few are inappropriate, we're proud of the campaign we've run," Pureval said yesterday.

Republicans see Pureval's troubles as not only assuring a Chabot victory, but also helping their candidates in the other races, including the close gubernatorial race between Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Rich Cordray.

"When something like this happens so close to the election, his supporters are probably starting to walk away from him," said Jane Timken, chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party. "That might mean fewer supporters for the other Democrats on the ticket."

When asked who will manage the campaign in the final week, Pureval said local political consultant Jens Sutmoller will serve as chief of staff.

The latest two NYT polls in the last few weeks show Chabot up by a comfortable nine points after surveys earlier this fall showed Pureval within a couple of points, but if this turns into a campaign finance scandal with days to go, Pureval's done blue wave or not.

If there is a blue wave, there's no sign of it in Cincy.  OH-1 is an R+9 district, and Chabot is leading by that margin.  Unless the NY Times polls are badly overestimating Chabot, he's going to win.

We'll see.  Cincy readers, get out and vote.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent takes a look at the Trump regime "strategy" to hold the House and keep damage to a minimum, which apparently involves crafting different groups of lies to different blocs of Trump supporters that manage to contradict each other and could bring the whole GOP House firewall crashing down under a blue wave.

Republicans are mostly on defense in districts that are both economically prosperous and are filled with voters who are badly alienated by Trump. Why this disconnect?

One likely answer is that the story Trump has told about the economy — and the country — just isn’t resonating in many of these districts. That narrative is that immigration and globalization pose major threats to the well-being of Americans, and Trump is now acting on those threats, via stepped-up deportations from the interior, efforts to slash legal immigration and refugee flows, and trade wars. That, plus his tax cut, has created the supposed “Trump boom,” in stark contrast with the economy under Barack Obama, which is uniformly depicted as a pre-Trumpian hellscape.

At the same time, Trump and Republicans have distilled down Trumpism’s core narratives into a series of ludicrous and menacing cartoons for the GOP base’s consumption. Why? Brownstein’s analysis provides an answer: Because the bulwark against truly large GOP losses in the House is made up of many districts that are competitive but are also heavily populated with blue-collar, rural, small-town, exurban and evangelical whites. Hold off Democrats in all those districts, and if they win the majority, it will be a limited one.

And so, to galvanize those voters, Trump has directed bread-and-circuses belligerence at euro-weenie elites and China. He has employed endless lies and hate-mongering to hype the migrant “caravan” into a national emergency, and will send in troops as props to dramatize the point. Republicans are running ads absurdly depicting immigrants as criminals and invaders alongside many other ones that indulge in naked race-baiting. Trump is vowing an end to birthright citizenship, confirming the ethno-nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism and further fanning the xenophobic flames.

But Trump’s political team recognizes that all this risks a backlash among more-educated white voters. So this is the $6 million ad campaign that his team is running right now, that appears to be targeting those voters.

The split in GOP messaging is notable. While Republicans employ garish race-baiting to galvanize the hard-core white GOP base, this ad’s soft-focus messaging directed at white suburban women features none of that imagery. The spot’s iconic white suburban woman is obviously conflicted over her vote — we aren’t told why, but we know full well why — but finally checks the “Republican” box out of concern over her child’s economic future.

Yet the ad’s core narrative — the contrast of the Obama hellscape with the Trump boom — is an invention, and as the first study noted above suggests, it might not even resonate in these districts. What’s more, the Trump/GOP economic agenda is being dramatically falsified as well: Trump is promising a huge middle-class tax cut that isn’t going to happen, to obscure the truly regressive nature of the actual Trump/GOP tax cut, which lavished a huge windfall on the wealthy and corporations and as such is deeply unpopular.

Republicans are also running ads vowing to protect people with preexisting conditions, yet they have also locked themselves into opposition to Obamacare, which Democrats are now campaigning on protecting. As Ezra Klein explains, this has left Republicans with no alternative but to lie relentlessly to obscure the real GOP health-care agenda, which is to deregulate insurance markets and regressively strip protections and economic assistance from millions. This, too, is deeply unpopular.

Trump and Republicans are closing by lying about health care and taxes to limit losses among suburban and well-educated white voters, and lying about immigration while race-baiting against individual Democratic candidates to keep the downscale white GOP base energized. This probably won’t be enough for Republicans to keep the House. But whatever is to be on this front, the need to lie so relentlessly about all these matters itself constitutes an admission of failure. The public has seen Trump’s fusion of ethno-nationalism and orthodox GOP plutocracy put into governing practice, and is rejecting it.

So there you have it:  In order to keep the House, the GOP has to appeal to white college graduate women to keep the house (44% voted GOP in 2016) and to white women without degrees (61% voted GOP in 2016).  Together, they made up 37% of the electorate.  You have two different campaigns, based on two separate sets of lies.  They're getting crossed up, and it's not working.

In the final week we'll see how it goes, but should the blue wave become a blue tsunami, you'll know why.
 

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Once again, I guarantee that GOP operative Roger Stone is going to be indicted after the midterms by the Mueller probe, and it's going to get very ugly, very quickly.  There's a reason that the bizarre and ultimately fruitless right-wing hatchet job that emerged this week of paying former associates of Mueller to fabricate sexual assault allegations, and it was a last-ditch effort to save Roger Stone from the dock as Mueller's trap jaws close in.

The special counsel investigation is pressing witnesses about longtime Trump ally Roger Stone’s private interactions with senior campaign officials and whether he had knowledge of politically explosive Democratic emails that were released in October 2016, according to people familiar with the probe.

As part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III appears to be focused on the question of whether WikiLeaks coordinated its activities with Stone and the campaign, including the group’s timing, the people said. Stone and WikiLeaks have adamantly denied being in contact.

On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, about claims Stone is said to have made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.

In recent weeks, Mueller’s team has also interviewed several Stone associates, including New York comedian Randy Credico and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. Both testified before the grand jury.

Investigators have questioned witnesses about events surrounding Oct. 7, 2016, the day The Washington Post published a recording of Trump bragging about his ability to grab women by their genitals, the people said.

Less than an hour after The Post published its story about Trump’s crude comments during a taping of “Access Hollywood,” WikiLeaks delivered a competing blow to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by releasing a trove of emails hacked from the account of her campaign chairman John Podesta.

The group trickled out new batches of Podesta’s private messages nearly daily through the campaign’s final weeks, ensuring the stolen documents would vex Clinton’s campaign until Election Day.

Investigators have been scrutinizing phone and email records from the fall of 2016, looking for evidence of what triggered WikiLeaks to drop the Podesta emails right after the “Access Hollywood” tape story broke, according to people with knowledge of the probe.

In an interview this week, Stone vehemently denied any prior knowledge of the Podesta emails. He said he did not play any role in determining the timing of their release by WikiLeaks or suggest they be used to blunt the impact of the “Access Hollywood” tape.

It is unclear whether the special prosecutor has evidence connecting Stone to WikiLeaks’s activities. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, could have concluded on his own that releasing the emails on that day would benefit Trump.

The results of Mueller’s inquiry could answer the central question of his probe: whether there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian activities. Trump has repeatedly declared there was “no collusion.”

Again, if Steve Bannon is being questioned about Stone, and if you somehow don't believe Bannon will give up Stone to save his own slovenly hide, November is going to be a fun education for a lot of people.  There's always the chance Trump will pull the trigger sometime next week and make his move trying to get rid of Mueller, but I don't think he'll beat Mueller to the punch when it comes to saving Stone.

Still, anything's possible once the midterms are done with.  We'll see.

 

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With a week to go until midterm elections, Republicans are in full and total panic mode as they move to try to hold increasingly vulnerable House districts in Southern states. Paul Ryan is headed here to try to save Republican Andy Barr's Lexington House seat from Democratic retired Marine pilot Amy McGrath, and if Republicans are relegated to defending states like Kentucky in the final week of the campaign, all bets are off as to how many dozens of seats they now expect to lose.

Ryan will be in Kentucky on Tuesday to campaign for Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr, whose 6th District stretches from Lexington to more rural areas. Former fighter pilot Amy McGrath has given Democrats hope of flipping the seat, despite the district’s naturally conservative tilt.

Meanwhile, the NRCC plans to launch ads Tuesday in South Carolina’s 1st District, an area along the coast including Charleston that has leaned conservative in recent federal elections. But Republican nominee Katie Arrington has had trouble putting away her Democratic opponent, Joe Cunningham.

Arrington, who defeated Rep. Mark Sanford in a primary defined by her support for Trump and the incumbent’s criticism of the president, has lost some GOP support to Cunningham, whose slogan is “Lowcountry over party” and who casts himself as a moderate.

C'mon, Republicans are now on defense in Kentucky and South Carolina?  It's going to be a bloodbath when we're done.

In Virginia’s 7th District, which Trump also carried, a new poll released Monday showed more possible trouble. The survey from the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University showed 46 percent of likely voters picking Democrat Abigail Spanberger and 45 percent choosing Republican Rep. Dave Brat.

The NRCC also hit the airwaves for the first time last week in Georgia’s 6th District in the Atlanta suburbs, where Democrat Lucy McBath has received help from well-funded gun control groups. Trump narrowly won the district.

“We’re not trying to cover the spread,” said NRCC communications director Matt Gorman. “We’re looking at victories.” He added: “The name of the game is volatility. And we’ve seen it on both sides.” 

Democrats have raised huge sums of money, prompting Republicans to warn about a “green wave” of Democratic dollars, even in districts where the GOP has established a strong presence.

McBath started the final weeks of the campaign with $565,000 in her account; her Republican opponent, Rep. Karen Handel, had $402,000 left to spend.

The NRCC hit the airwaves for the first time last week in Washington’s 3rd District in the southwest corner of the state. Trump won there by seven points. Democrat Carolyn Long capitalized on a strong primary vote by outraising Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler by nearly $1 million.

Even in Florida’s 18th District, where Trump won by nine points and Rep. Brian Mast outraised his Democratic challenger, former diplomat Lauren Baer, Republicans are not taking any chances. The NRCC went up with an ad in the district that stretches north from Palm Beach County last week.

KY-6 and VA-7 are knife-edge toss-ups and have contested for months.  But if Republicans are only now worried about SC-1, GA-6, FL-18, and WA-3 (and you can add Utah's 4th to this list as GOP Rep. Mia Love is now behind to Democratic Salt Lake City Mayor Ben McAdams) enough to commit an 11th hour defense to these districts, the GOP is now reduced to trying to stop a blue wave from becoming a total 2010-style wipeout.

I don't think they'll succeed.  With a week to go, we're still seeing the smart money on 35-45 Dem House pickups as an average and 55-60 if they overperform.

Five Thirty Eight now has Dems at 216 of the 218 they need to gain a House majority with more than 20 toss-ups left to fight over, another 16 "Lean R" seats in play and a whopping 49 "Likely R" seats that could fall, and it's these seats that the GOP is now moving to defend.  If the Dems get 80% of the toss-ups breaking their way, half the leaners and a quarter of the likely seats, that's 62 seats.  That's 2010 in reverse.

Guess who'a s also in trouble now?  GOP Rep. Steve King in IA-4.  Cook Political report has now shifted his race from "Likely R" to "Lean R".  King won in 2016 over Kim Weaver by 22 points, Trump won this district by 27 points two years ago.

Let's overperform.  Get out there and vote if you haven't already, and get somebody besides yourself to the polls while you're at it.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King doesn't apologize for his white nationalist views because he's simply reflecting the will of his white nationalist constituents.

Across the 4th District — a highly conservative swath of Iowa nearly 200 miles wide, mile upon mile of fertile farmland dotted with towns the length of a two-block Main Street — King has widespread support. 

“Steve’s Steve. He’s a local guy. He graduated from high school here. He comes in for breakfast on Sundays,” says Crawford County Supervisor Eric Skoog, who with his wife, Terri, owns what they believe to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Iowa. 

At the counter of Cronk’s, which has been open since 1929, Skoog says he disagrees with King on immigration and hasn’t been afraid to share his conflicting views. Skoog has worked hard to help local schools adjust to the influx of immigrant children in Denison, one place in the heavily white district where a major meatpacking plant has drawn a sizable Hispanic community. 

Still, Skoog said, “I don’t see him as racist. I don’t know. He’s just Steve.” Come November, he said, he’ll probably vote for him. 

Some in the district welcome King’s blunt talk. 

“We’re getting pretty happy in this country about kicking the white guy. Only one group of people haven’t achieved minority status, and it’s white men,” says Steve Sorensen, a former truck driver, watching the World Series in a Hampton bar. “You can fire a white man every time you want. He’s got no recourse. Try that with anybody else.” 

Mindy Rainer also believes that others get government benefits more easily than she does, as a white woman. “There are people out there that are desperate as hell, and I’m one of them,” she says, sliding up to the bar at the restaurant in the town of Cherokee where she works. 

Rainer’s husband was injured on a job site 25 years ago, she said, and denied disability benefits because of bureaucratic hurdles. She has supported them both, but now her kidneys are failing and she fears that she won’t be able to work for the eight years until her husband can collect Social Security. 

Rainer recalled lining up to try to get help with her utility bills when she lived in South Carolina and becoming suspicious of the others in line, almost all of them African American. 

“What upset me more than anything was all them black babies were dressed up in the best clothes,” she said. “When their kids are wearing $150 tennis shoes, what do you think?” 

She sides with King when he talks about immigration. “Why should we feed others when we can’t feed ourselves?” she asked.

Steve King is just representing the views of rural Iowans who want a political party that puts white people first, particularly white men, because that's how it should be in America.  The difference is thanks to Donald Trump, it's perfectly okay to say that you want to vote for the guy running on the platform of "white advocacy", and not a single one of them thinks it's racist because there's a generation of white folk in America who believe they have been discriminated against since birth.

This is America, the party of whites versus the party of those people and Steve King is happily running as a proud member of the former.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With eight days to go, new CBS polling finds that three Senate toss-up races are still very much toss-ups.

Tight contests dominate the Senate landscape: In Florida, incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott are tied among likely voters, 46 percent to 46 percent including those who have cast ballots already. Scott, the sitting governor, gets positive marks from voters on his handling of the recent hurricane and benefits from Republicans reporting that they're more likely to vote than the Democrats who haven't already.

Nelson's support, meanwhile, is underpinned by voters who place health care atop their issues list. The Republicans have a favorable map in their effort to hold their Senate majority, and winning two or three of these states would probably put them in strong position to hold it. Democrats would probably need wins in all three to have a good shot at taking the Senate. 

Health care concerns have helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to a slight three-point advantage over Republican Martha McSally, 47 percent to 44 percent. Sinema does well with voters who say health care is a very important concern and is also helped by nine percent of Republicans who say they're backing her — it's hardly an overwhelming number, but it could be essential for a Democrat in a Republican-leaning state like Arizona. 

But Republican chances of holding on to their Senate majority – or even adding to it – are helped by the prospect of picking up a seat in Indiana, where Republican Mike Braun leads incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly, 46 percent to 43 percent. In Indiana, where many voters say that agriculture plays a role in their economy, three-quarters of Republicans feel that new tariffs will ultimately lead to better trade deals for the U.S. 

President Trump appears to be a large factor in these states. In all of them, large majorities say their vote for Senate will be either to support or oppose the president.

All three of these races are within the margin of error, so effectively they are all tied, at least using CBS's likely polling model.  Of course, it depends on how accurate that likely polling model is compared to who actually turns out in both early voting and next Tuesday.

CBS is right however that Democrats need to win all three of these races, plus Nevada, to have any chance of taking the Senate.  I continue to have a bad feeling about Heitkamp in North Dakota, but Dems can still get to 51 if they run the rest of the table and Phil Breseden and/or Beto O'Rourke come through.

I will admit however that the odds of that are not exactly favoring the Dems. A 50-50 split may be the best we can hope for, but if we reach that point there could be some horse trading in the lame duck session.  That would give any one single senator a tremendous amount of power. It's happened before, and it ended up a minor disaster for the Dems when it did.

We'll see.

Trumpsona Non Grata, Or Steeling For A Fight

Thousands have signed on to a letter from a group of Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh to Donald Trump saying that he is no longer welcome by the city's Jewish community until he denounces white nationalism.

More than 16,000 people have signed an open letter to President Trump from the leaders of a Pittsburgh-based Jewish group who say the president will not be welcome in the city unless he denounces white nationalism and stops “targeting” minorities after a mass shooting Saturday at a local synagogue left 11 dead.

The letter, which was published and shared on Sunday, was written by 11 members of the Pittsburgh affiliate of Bend the Arc, a national organization for progressive Jews focused on social justice, following what is being called the deadliest attackon Jews in U.S. history. The shooting at Tree of Life synagogue also left several people injured, including law enforcement. As of early Monday morning, the letter had 16,533 signatures.

“For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence."

The letter continued: “Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment late Sunday night.

On Saturday, Trump strongly condemned the shooting as “pure evil,” adding that the “vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism” and all other forms of prejudice must be rejected, The Washington Post reported. The president also announced he would be making a visit to Pittsburgh.

The news of the president’s possible travel plans did not sit well with Josh Friedman, who is one of the leaders of Bend the Arc’s Pittsburgh chapter.

“My immediate reaction was he is not welcome here,” Friedman, who does not attend services at Tree of Life, told The Post in a Sunday phone interview. “I immediately wrote to the rest of our steering committee that he is not welcome, we have to make that clear.”

That's a pretty hefty condemnation of Trump, I can't think of a time where the person in the Oval Office was flat out told they were not welcome by a group representing a community that suffered a deadly tragedy like this.  There's no question that Saturday's slaughter at Tree of Life was an atni-Semitic hate crime of the most awful level.

Good for Bend The Arc for saying this:

Four boldfaced lines stand out from the rest of the letter’s 338 words.

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees.”

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.”

I absolutely guarantee you though that Bend The Arc is going to be immediately attacked by Trump's anti-Semitic trolls and dismissed by the White House for having a political action PAC being funded in part by George Soros and that PAC being chaired by Soros's son, Alexander, and there's extremely good odds that Trump is not only going to visit Pittsburgh, but that the visit is going to be followed by (or be morphed into) a pro-Trump rally for Pennsylvania Republicans ahead of midterms next week.

It's going to be horrid, just like everything else the man does.  It's possible that somebody talks sense into Trump and he stays away, but given his narcissism, the state's importance to the GOP keeping the House, and his screaming inchoate base howling "How dare those people tell my President that he's not welcome" I give it an 80% of a Trump visit to Pittsburgh this week and 50% chance of that visit being part of a ghoulish rally, Halloween or no. Once again last night, Trump called the media the "true enemy of America" so it's going to be a bad week no matter where Trump goes.

Meat The Press, Con't

NY Times reporter Jim Rutenberg admits that after three years, the American media still has no idea how to handle Donald Trump, and that Trump continues to use the media as targets to beat up on a near-daily basis and will basically always get away with it.

The question is, is it working?

The short answer is yes. Increasingly, the president’s almost daily attacks seem to be delivering the desired effect, despite the many examples of powerful reporting on his presidency. By one measure, a CBS News poll over the summer, 91 percent of “strong Trump supporters” trust him to provide accurate information; 11 percent said the same about the news media.

Mr. Trump was open about the tactic in a 2016 conversation with Lesley Stahl of CBS News, which she shared earlier this year: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” she quoted him as saying.

And with the president settling on “Fear and Falsehoods” as an election strategy, as The Washington Post put it last week, the political information system is awash in more misleading or flatly wrong assertions than reporters can keep up with. It’s as if President Trump has hit the journalism industry with a denial-of-service attack.

We have seen gross distortions aplenty during political low moments in this country. But something like the “Swift Boat” campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004 — with its accusations that the candidate had faked his war record — seems almost quaint in retrospect. That attempt drew scrutiny from major media organizations, and eventually led to broad condemnation, even from the candidate it was intended to benefit, President George W. Bush.

Now, partisan smears are a staple of every single news cycle. As crude pipe bombs were discovered at CNN headquarters and in mailboxes across the country, Mr. Trump’s supporters like the Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative writer Ann Coulter asserted that the crime was a frame job by Democrats.

Before pipe bombs and the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings dominated the news, the main story was the migrant caravan — and it was accompanied by wild speculation on talk radio, social media and from opinionated personalities on Fox News. A myth went viral: the thousands of desperate Hondurans making their slow way toward the American border were players in a drama hatched by Democrats and funded by the right’s all-purpose villain, Mr. Soros, a notion Mr. Trump seemed to nod to at a rally in Montana.

Reporters respond by pointing out that these assertions have no basis in fact, just as they attempt to knock back Mr. Trump’s manufactured content by producing running tallies of his false statements — more than 5,000, says The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column.

Now and then journalists will resort to the L-word, “lie,” as The New York Times has done on occasion. Other frequent targets of the president’s disdain, CNN and MSNBC, have debunked his claims with onscreen headlines and endless panel discussions.

Such good-faith efforts, however, seem increasingly ineffectual. The president has succeeded in casting journalists as the prime foils on his never-ending reality show, much to the delight of those who cheer him on at rallies.

“He has succeeded in creating a daily narrative in which he is the central figure,” Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, told me. “And he uses props and invented opposition — whether they are migrants hundreds of miles from the U.S. border or the press right in front of him — to pursue this kind of idea he has about how his populism works.”

Again, the media has allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a position where 90% of Trump supporters don't believe a word they say, and more than half of everybody doesn't either. There are many reasons for this, the rise of online media that more easily manipulates people and that can be easily manipulated by people, increasingly corporate control of news outlets by a handful of companies, the consolidation of local newspapers and local TV news, and the massive layoffs in the news business over the last 15 years.  And all those actions were conscious choices.

In other words, everything the American media could have done in order to make themselves vulnerable to a proto-fascist demagogue like Trump, they did.  Trust in the media is in shambles means that not only are Americans being massively misinformed, it means there are Americans who know they are being fed lies, but the lies are convenient enough to allow them to hate who they want to, as Steve M tells us.

I want to know what percentage of the American public -- and, specifically, what percentage of the Republican electorate -- believes what's been reported about Cesar Sayoc. I assume that Democrats and independents will overwhelmingly say they believe what we've been told about him: that he's a Trump supporter who decided on his own to build and mail pipe bombs to people on the president's enemies list.

But what percentage of Republicans believe that? Is it even a majority?

A polling firm should lay out law enforcement's allegations and the conspiracy nuts' scenarios -- that Democrats or a certain billionaire Democratic donor paid the guy, or that the recipients sent the bombs to themselves -- and ask what respondents believe. Or the poll could ask whether law enforcement's story is true and then give doubters an open-ended chance to tell us their pet theories.

I think most Republicans will be doubters, or at least the number of doubters and "not sure" respondents will outnumber those who believe what law enforcement has told us.

That's exactly right.  Trump's lies are all the excuse bigots need to be bigots.

There is no longer shame in being a racist hatemonger in America when the elected leader of the country is arguably the most vocal example of one, and now that the trust in the news media has been lost, most likely irrevocably, there's little the media can now do to stop him.

You guys had your chance.  You blew it.  The time to ask these questions was in Summer, 2016.

Instead it became "But her emails."

The game's over, and we all lost.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump remains the most cancerous symptom of the diseased Republican party, because the problem is the party refuses to rein him in and say "no more".  The Never Trump cowards denounce Trump and some have even left the party, but refuse to take any responsibility for his rise or for the fact that 98% of his policies they still agree with and that they're fine with the direction of the remaining GOP. This means of course that nobody bothers to stop Trump when he decides to make an already volatile situation exponentially worse, as he headed to my old neck of the woods in Charlotte to scream at the enemies of the state that Cesar Sayoc tried to assassinate this week.

For two days, the president toyed with a bipartisan message and watched as the news cycle focused not on him, and not on the midterm elections, but on at least 14 explosive devices delivered to prominent Democratic figures.

By Friday, he had had enough.

As he left Washington for his latest campaign rally here, President Trump made it clear that he was no longer going to sit through another news cycle without President Trump at the center.

“The Republicans had tremendous momentum, and then, of course, this happened, where all that you people talked about was that,” Mr. Trump said to reporters about the bomb scares. “But now we have to start the momentum again.”

His supporters in North Carolina appeared to agree. When Mr. Trump took the stage at the Bojangles’ Coliseum, hours after Cesar Sayoc Jr., a Florida man with a lengthy criminal record, was arrested in connection to sending the devices, chants of “Build the wall” and “CNN sucks” had already rung out repeatedly.

“The suspect has been captured — great job — and is now in federal custody,” Mr. Trump said. “These terrorist actions must be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.”

The president, who made a show on Wednesday of being “nice” as bomb scares were affecting several of his political enemies, resurrected some of his favorite political insults two days later. Taunts including “Crooked Hillary” and “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” were brought out once again in a pull-out-all-the-stops partisan effort 11 days before the midterms.

While Mr. Trump did spend a few minutes railing against the Democrats and their immigration policies — “A vote for Democrats is a vote for open borders,” he once again falsely claimed — he reserved special ire for the news media.

Touching on a “broader conversation about the tone and civility” of political discourse, the president said that “everyone will benefit if we can end the politics of personal destruction.”

He added, “The media has a major role to play whether they want to or not.”

He did not address the political leanings of Mr. Sayoc, 56, who was active in several pro-Trump Facebook groups and had attended at least one Trump rally, waving a “CNN Sucks” sign and wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Mr. Sayoc’s van was covered in pro-Trump stickers. He turned up in Washington, again with the red hat, for Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

But on Friday, Republicans, from Mr. Trump on down, made it clear that Mr. Sayoc was not one of them. In fact, the president said that the coverage of Mr. Sayoc’s political leanings was a result of the news media trying to pin the attempted bombings on his politics.

“We have seen an effort by the media in recent hours to use the sinister actions of one individual to score political points against me and the Republican Party,” Mr. Trump said. “The media has tried to attack the incredible Americans who support our movement to give power back to the people.”

Once again, Trump telling his screaming hordes that the Democrats are your enemy and that you will have to do something about them.  Once again, Trump telling his screaming hordes that the media is your enemy and that you will have to do something about them.  Once again, Trump telling his screaming hordes that those people are your enemy and that you will have to do something about them.

And so far in the last 72 hours, they did.

Just like Trump told them to do.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Time to check in with Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball team of election prognosticators as the 2018 midterm elections are now under two weeks away, and while Sabato sees Sen. Heitkamp's seat in North Dakota as vulnerable, the rest of the Senate map remains in play with Florida, Missouri and Indiana as true toss-ups that Dems must defend, and two GOP tossups that are vulnerable in Nevada and Arizona.  Texas and Tennessee remain in play for the Dems to pick up, as do Montana and WV for the GOP to go after.

On the House side, Sabato sees 20 pickups for the Dems and 2 for the GOP, 18 of the 23 pickups the Democrats would need, still leaving 20 GOP seats as tossups and 1 Dem tossup, and a staggering 33 more GOP leaners that could be picked off compared to just 2 for the Dems.  Longer shot races still find 29 more likely House Republican seats in play, with only 10 Dem likely seats in the same condition.  The Dems are in excellent position to retake the House.

Having said all that, it's the gubernatorial races that could be the most surprising.

The highlights of this week’s ratings changes come in the gubernatorial races, where we’re moving three additional races into the Toss-up column, giving us a whopping 10 races where we don’t see a favorite with less than two weeks to go. Red states Kansas and South Dakota go from Leans Republican to Toss-up, while Gov. Kate Brown (D-OR) moves from Leans Democratic to Toss-up.

Notice that these are all states with decided federal political leans where, nonetheless, the federal minority party may have a chance to steal a governorship. In the case of the minority parties in Oregon and South Dakota, gubernatorial wins would break very long losing streaks: A Republican has not won a governor’s race in the Beaver State since 1982, and a Democrat has not won such a contest in the Mount Rushmore State since 1974. A key ingredient in the potential upset bids of both state Senate Minority Leader Billie Sutton (D-SD) and state Rep. Knute Buehler (R-OR) is that they both can point to mainstream (for their respective states) positions on abortion: Sutton does not support abortion rights, Buehler does. Our sense is that both races are very close. Buehler is running against Brown’s management of the state; Sutton is running against Rep. Kristi Noem (R, SD-AL) as a Washington insider.

When it comes time to pick these races, as we will, it may be hard to go against the ingrained federal partisanship of each state. But they are very much in play.

The same goes for Kansas, where Democrats have won the governorship recently — for instance, former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) won in 2002 and 2006 before becoming President Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services. If this race was just a head-to-head contest between Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) and state Sen. Laura Kelly (D), Kelly probably would have an edge. But the presence of independent former 2014 Senate candidate Greg Orman has pushed this race into something of a tie, although some Republicans believe Kobach is a little bit ahead. Kelly has to hope Orman, who attracts something around 10% support, performs worse than that on Election Day, as often happens to third-party candidates. Kelly has the support of several prominent Kansas Republicans against Kobach, who is from the more conservative wing of the party. One challenge for Kelly: In a socially conservative state, she’s pro-choice on abortion.

One other change this week: Gov. Gina Raimondo (D-RI) has seemed very much in trouble throughout the cycle, but polling has shown her taking a stronger lead against her 2014 opponent, Allan Fung (R), as well as former state Rep. Joe Trillo, an ex-Republican who is running as a pro-Trump independent and splitting the vote in a way helpful to the incumbent. A group backed by the Republican Governors Association recently stopped running ads in the Ocean State, signaling that Raimondo’s path to a second term is clearer. We’re moving Rhode Island from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic.

So now we’re left with 10 gubernatorial Toss-ups, a situation similar to four years ago, where many gubernatorial races (although fewer) were up in the air at the same point of the cycle.

A quick word on all the current Toss-ups:

Of the three races we just moved to Toss-up, Kansas seems like it might be the likeliest to flip, but we also remember how embattled Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) was left for dead in 2014 but won anyway. However, that year featured a GOP-leaning national environment, whereas this one does not. If one goes by the polls, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers (D) may be a tiny favorite over Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI). The same is true of Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum (D) in his open-seat Florida race against former Rep. Ron DeSantis (R, FL-6), as well as state Attorney General Janet Mills (D) in Maine, where she faces businessman Shawn Moody (R) and a couple of independent candidates who may hurt her more than Moody. We don’t have even a slight lean at this point in Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. In Georgia, we think a runoff is likelier than not.

One final note: Late last Friday, Gov. Bill Walker (I-AK) dropped out of the Alaska governor’s race. He remains on the ballot but his exit makes former state Sen. Mike Dunleavy’s (R) position a little less secure against ex-Sen. Mark Begich (D). We moved that race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, but it remains the GOP’s best opportunity to win a governorship the party currently does not hold.

Overall, Democrats are going to net governorships, and perhaps many, but a lot of the individual races remain up in the air.

Oregon is always unpredictable, as is Alaska, and it's a shame that Ben Jealous isn't getting more help in Maryland against Larry Hogan.  But for Kansas, Iowa, and South Dakota to be in play right now really feels good.  Dems are already poised to pick up Michigan, New Mexico, and Illinois, and it's entirely possible that Dems could pick up eight more seats, vitally important going into 2020 and the Census.

We'll see.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Nate Silver reminds us that predictions of Democrats taking the House (and Republicans keeping the Senate) are only as good as the accuracy of state-level polling, and the accuracy of state-level polling is only as good as the likely voter models in those polls. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, state-level polling underestimated Republican turnout because likely voter models were wrong, especially here in the Midwest.

The forecasts are in, and they say the 2018 elections can go any number of ways.

If you’re following election coverage and forecasting models, you know the conventional wisdom at this point: Democrats are the favorites to take the House, and Republicans are the favorites to hold on to the Senate.

FiveThirtyEight’s “classic” forecast — which has become the gold standard in elections forecasting — gives Democrats an 85.6 percent chance of retaking the House and Republicans a 81.3 percent chance of holding the Senate, as of Tuesday evening.

So both of those are highly likely to happen, right?

Well, one person who’s been trying to complicate that assessment is FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver himself.

One point Silver has made over and over again in recent weeks is that even if you take his House and Senate forecasts at face value, when you think about both of them together, there’s around a 40 percent chance that one of them will be wrong.

He elaborated on this on Twitter this week, making a point that’s important to understand — that a “very normal-sized polling error” in either direction could result in a dramatically different outcome.

If polls underestimate Republicans by 2-3 points—which is a very normal-sized polling error—the House is a district-by-district nail-biter.

If polls underestimate Dems by 2-3 points, their path to victory in the Senate is much more viable; toss-ups go their way, TN/TX close etc.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 22, 2018

That's a major issue.  If those state-level polls are once again underestimating Republican turnout as "likely voters" by 2-3 points, then a lot of those 29 GOP tossups I talked about yesterday become Republican leaners and the proposition of the Dems taking half of those tossups and the House becomes Republicans defending the vast majority of those seats and limiting their losses to 15-20.

In the Senate, that means that Republicans defend Nevada and Arizona and pick up North Dakota, but it also means they pick up Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Montana and maybe, just maybe New Jersey, one of Minnesota's seats (Tina Smith's), and Joe Manchin, Tammy Duckworth, and Debbie Stabenow have very, very long nights.

On the other hand, if this goes in the other direction, then yes, we see the Blue Wave scenario where Democrats pick up 40-50 seats and maybe more, and in the Senate, Dems defend nearly all of their Trump state seats and pick up Nevada and Arizona, and maybe even Tennessee and dare I say it, Beto slays a troll in Texas, and suddenly Dems have 51 or 52 in the upper chamber to go with it.

So yeah, I take Nate at his word when he says there's a decent chance one party takes Congress.

We should vote like we have that chance.  Early voting started in Florida on Monday and continues.

Arkansas, Alaska, Idaho, Massachusetts and Texas also opened their polls for early voting Monday. They will be followed by Hawaii, Louisiana and Utah on Tuesday; West Virginia on Wednesday; Maryland Thursday and the District of Columbia Friday.

Kansas and Oklahoma will start early voting next week.

A large swath of states -- including Arizona, California, Georgia, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee -- have been voting early for weeks.

The time to cast your early vote in these states is now.  Do it today if you can.