Sunday Long Read: The Democrats' Nevada Gambit

Fusion's Ester Wang visits Nevada and talks to the voters that will most likely decide the swing state next month and in elections to come: the state's large Asian voting-eligible population.  But will they finally turn out?

2016 was supposed to be the Year of the Asian American Voter, the year that a swelling electorate finally turned out in massive numbers in November’s presidential election and provides the margin of victory not just in Hawaii or California but in swing states as disparate as Virginia, North Carolina, and Nevada. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the country, and the size of this voting bloc has doubled since George W. Bush entered the White House. Already, one of every four Congressional districts has a population that’s more than 5% Asian American, numbers high enough where these voters can be the decisive force in tight races that are sometimes won by mere decimal points.

It’s not just changing demographics. Asian Americans, advocates say, care more about this election than the last—more than half, according to a recent national survey. In the same survey, a full 85% of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters reported they plan on turning out in November.

This all paints a rosy picture. Silent, docile and passive no more, in 2016, Asian Americans are, in the words of one advocate’s op-ed, “ready to be heard!”

Not so fast. Asian Americans are also traditionally the most disengaged racial group in America, with only 56% of eligible Asian Americans even registered to vote, the lowest percentage out of all racial groups. Of those, less than half tend to come out on election day, lagging far behind black and white voters.

This leaves Asian Americans like Michelle Chen in a curious position: a fattening slice of the electoral pie, widely seen as crucial to victory, yet also the voting bloc with the least interest in political participation. As Election Day nears, the question remains: Will a record number of Asian Americans actually vote, or will the majority, as in previous years, stay home?

I know we've talked about the black and Latino vote around here at length, but by 2020 Nevada will join Hawaii, California and New Mexico as majority-minority states and that will be largely due to the state's major Asian population growth.

The Democrats aren't stupid here.  They know they will have to have these votes and these voters and are working to get them, but there's a LOT of work that has to be done.

It’s easy to understand why, despite voting for Obama twice, Michelle Chen is going to sit this election out. Their lives haven’t improved as much as she would have hoped. Her husband, who works for a car service as a driver and used to be able to make $3,000 a month, now faces stiff competition from Uber and Lyft drivers and his income has dropped sharply. A self-described member of the working poor (she makes $1,300 a month at her job), it was largely Obamacare, which she says she and her husband can’t really afford, that turned her off of politics.

In a different world, one where the Bernie Sanders campaign had prioritized reaching out to immigrant voters, she might have been a Bernie fan. I asked if she’d heard of him, using the Chinese transliteration of his name and describing him as the “old white guy with the messy hair.”

“Who? Do you mean Trump?” Nevermind.

Of the presidential election, she repeated firmly: “It has nothing to do with my life.” She then went back to work, hawking steamed pork buns to a steady stream of customers.

Chen clearly feels no loyalty to the Democratic Party, and she’s not alone; 46% of Asian American registered voters are independents. Despite the general tilt towards Democratic candidates—in 1992, Bill Clinton only captured about a third of Asian American voters, yet by 2012, 73% of all Asian American voters cast a ballot for Barack Obama—voters remain stubbornly unaffiliated, due largely to the fact that two out of every three AAPI voters are immigrants. (Without a family history of voting for one party or the other—one of the greatest predictors of party affiliation—immigrants tend to register as independents.)

To build any sort of majority in the future, Democrats need to make the case to Asian voters that America's politics actually do matter to people.  So far that has been a lukewarm case at best.  Donald Trump's awful politics can only go so far.

The Orange Martyrs Brigade

Republicans are now in full and complete crisis mode as a result of the Washington Post/NBC story on Trump's awful misogynist 2005 interview.  Several Republicans have withdrawn their endorsements in the wake of the revelations, including GOP Sens. Mike Crapo, Kelly Ayotte, and Lisa Murkowski.  Others are now calling for Trump to drop out of the race entirely and let Mike Pence be the nominee.

The party's past nominees were unflinching in their condemnation.

“Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world,” Mitt Romney, the party’s last GOP presidential nominee, wrote on Twitter. And Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 nominee, said Trump could have no excuse: "No woman should ever be victimized by this kind of inappropriate behavior. He alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.”

Even within Trump’s own campaign, there was an overriding sense of doom. One aide expressed doubt that the GOP nominee, who has successfully weathered a number of scandals, would be able to ride the current firestorm.

There's "absolutely no excuse to ever talk about women in such a crude and demeaning way," Trump’s Texas chair, Dan Patrick, was quoted as saying.

As the hours passed, some Republicans began to call for Trump to step aside, leaving the presidential race to vice presidential nominee Mike Pence. Rob Engstrom, the Chamber of Commerce’s national political director, was the first to call for Trump to quit, followed by Rep. Mike Coffman, former N.Y. Gov. George Pataki, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee said: “You are the distraction... I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside.”

Trump of course has no plans to drop out and is meeting this afternoon with his "brain trust" to decide a course of action.

Meanwhile Reince Preibus and the RNC are apparently cutting Trump off.

The Republican National Committee on Saturday appeared to at least temporarily halt the operations of some of the “Victory” program that is devoted to electing Donald Trump.

The move comes as the GOP nominee is under mounting pressure from elected Republicans to step aside after he was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

In an email from the RNC to a victory program mail vendor, with the subject line “Hold on all projects,” the committee asked the vendor to “put a hold” on mail production.

“Please put a hold/stop on all mail projects right now. If something is in production or print it needs to stop. Will update you when to proceed,” Lauren Toomey, a staffer in the RNC’s political department, wrote in an email that was obtained by POLITICO.

The email was sent to at least one RNC victory program vendor. Rick Wiley, a top RNC official, was cc’d on the email.

At this point the Trump campaign is in total and complete freefall.  And please note all the people who were cool with Trump through his racism, misogyny, bigotry and white supremacist garbage, what actually pissed them off was realizing he was going to most likely lose a ton of working-class white women over this.  It didn't affect any of these newly-minted converts to women's rights until it was Trump offending people that were going to vote GOP and looked like them.

So no, zero sympathy.

When these same Republicans looked the other way and allowed Trump to be the nominee, they did nothing.

They did nothing for months when the target was "Mexican rapists" or "The blacks living in hell" or "China" or Clinton herself.

Now that Trump blew it so badly that they are going to be hurt by it, only now is it a problem to them.  Only now is Trump unacceptable.  Only now do they care.

They can burn along with him and the party in the dumpster fire they made.

Tell 'Em Bobby D Sent You To Vote

Robert De Niro takes a minute out of his busy schedule of being awesome to read Donald Trump like a book and slams it shut in his face.

Robert De Niro on Donald Trump: 'He's a punk, he's a dog, he's a pig ...' pic.twitter.com/avaZOB4vW9

— David Lewis (@davidclewis) October 8, 2016

I think we're done here.

Orange, Crushed

Donald Trump continues to be an awful human being in every sense of the word, and he's been that way for decades, folks. No wonder then that somebody did enough actual opposition research to catch this gem of an interview with the man in 2005 where he basically admits to sexually assaulting a woman.

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.

The tape includes audio of Bush and Trump talking inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.

In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.

“Whoa,” another voice said.

“I did try and f--- her. She was married,” Trump says.

Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”

“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap-opera set.

“Your girl’s hot as s---, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.

“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p---y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

And America, about sixty million of you are gonna vote for this guy for president. What the hell is wrong with you?  Oh, and just so you know, Billy Bush?  Dubya's cousin. Billy's dad is Jonathan Bush, Poppy Bush's younger brother. Isn't that just perfect?

Seriously though, if this isn't the end of Trump's run, then there's no hope for the country.  We're done.  There are some indications that this may be the event Republicans needed to jettison the man, but as I have said countless times, Trump is merely the symptom of a diseased and debased Republican party that is frankly headed for the dumpster fire of their own making.

Racism, bigotry, misogyny were all problems with the party and with its supporters long before Trump, and the ugly truth is that the real problem has long been the "moderate Republicans" who looked the other way and allowed that hatred to take root in order to gain ephemeral political power, especially in the last eight years.

Your white sheets were showing long before Trump was your candidate, guys.  I have no sympathy for you now that you finally disagree with your standard-bearer. You voted for him in the primaries, you still plan to vote for him for president, and the rest of your party still looks the other way as your elderly frat boy pig of a candidate hoots and hollers because you still want to "Trump That Bitch".

No.  Take the loss.  Take the Goldwater/Dukakis level loss in November and rebuild into a party that Lincoln founded and America needs in order to keep the Democrats honest.  People are already voting and there's no way you can get him off the ballot now.  Frankly, most Republicans don't care anyway, because Trump That Bitch, right?

And the best part is that Republicans are wishing Mike Pence was at the top of the ticket, himself a vile, bigoted misogynist who signed into law making LGBTQ folks into second-class citizens and forcing women to pay for funerary services for their own aborted fetuses just to shame them for having an abortion.

Finally, how did Trump's primary opponents, ONE OF WHOM WAS THE COUSIN OF THE MAN TRUMP WAS TALKING TO IN THIS INTERVIEW miss this as a possible way to stop him from becoming the nominee?

Take the L, GOP.

Do that or stay in the trash where you belong.

Last Call For Putin On The Fritz

In what has to be a pointed response to Putin's latest nonsense in Syria as Russia has now deployed its top anti-air missiles to stop any US or EU interference with Moscow's plans to help the Assad regime, the US intelligence community is no longer playing nice and is flat out accusing Russia of trying to influence US elections through cyberwarfare.

The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, came as pressure was growing from within the administration and some lawmakers to hold Moscow accountable for a set of actions apparently aimed at sowing discord around the election.

“The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”

The DNC publicly disclosed the intrusions in June, saying its investigation determined that Russian government hackers were behind the breach. That was followed shortly after by a major leak of DNC emails, some so embarrassing that they forced the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.

So yeah, things just got serious (and about time).  There's no doubt in my mind that Putin and his boys are trying to help Trump win for a number of reasons.  If Assange and his crew wasn't going to drop their little October surprise before, they are certainly going to do so after this.

Stay tuned.

The Truth Hits Like A Hurricane

We now live in a world where the Republican party has so pervasively spread mistrust and hatred towards the idea of any government body controlled by the Democrats (and in particular the nation's first black president) that we have idiots like Matt Drudge screaming that the Obama administration is lying about Hurricane Matthew in order to keep up the "myth of global warming".

Hours ahead of Hurricane Matthews’ landfall on Florida’s Atlantic coast, some climate change skeptics downplayed the danger of what meteorologists say could be the worst such storm since Hurricane Katrina.

Public officials and meteorologists have repeatedly stressed the strength of the storm, especially to those living in the evacuation zones on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“This storm will kill you. Time is running out,” Gov. Rick Scott (R) said in a press conference Thursday. “There are no excuses. You need to leave. Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate. Are you willing to take a change to risk your life? Are you willing to take a gamble? That’s what you’re doing.”

Yet in the face of those pleas conservative aggregator Matt Drudge, who has a house in Florida, tweeted that “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” and“Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims. Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165mph gusts? WHERE?”

Drudge later posted the web address of a NOAA buoy and encouraged readers to monitor the storm on their own, to see if “observations match the Hurricane Center’s claimed 140 mph sustained winds."

That's right.  Obama Derangement Syndrome has gotten so bad that we now have friggin hurricane truthers who believe the National Hurricane Center is in on a massive plot to lie to America about global warming, and that somehow data on Hurricane Matthew is being manipulated in order to play up the "hoax" of climate change.

That's where we are in America in 2016.  One party is systematically dismantling the integrity of government itself and has been for decades in order to convince America that they are the only ones who should be legally allowed to run that government, and that the very concept of the other party ever being in charge should be automatically considered an invalid, corrupt, and illegal administration, to the point where Americans should consider armed revolution if that happens.

Unfortunately, a major hurricane one month before the election could very well lead to chaos if Florida is close.

Meanwhile the government is lying to you about hurricanes, Matt Drudge says, so you should ignore them on safety. They're totally illegitimate you know.

That's Donald Trump's America, folks.  I'm not going to be a part of it.

Jobapalooza

The September jobs numbers are in and things are still looking pretty good, just not quite as good as this time last year.

U.S. employment growth unexpectedly slowed for the third straight month in September, which could make the Federal Reserve more cautious about raising interest rates. 

Nonfarm payrolls rose 156,000, down from a revised gain of 167,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday. 

Economists polled by Reuters had expected employers to add 175,000 jobs last month.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said the economy needs to create less than 100,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth.Average monthly job gains have been about 180,000 this year, which Yellen has described as "unsustainable." 

The unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a percentage point to 5.0 percent last month, though the increase was driven by Americans rejoining the labor force. 

Friday's employment report will be the last before the Fed's Nov. 1-2 policy meeting. Investors see almost no chance of a rate increase at that meeting given how close it is to the Nov. 8 presidential election. 

Yellen said last month that the Fed will likely raise rates once this year, but prices on fed funds futures suggest just above even odds the hike will come at the Fed's last policy meeting for the year in December.

Hourly wages for private sector workers rose 2.6 percent in September from the same month a year earlier, in line with economists' expectations. The annual growth rate has shown signs of accelerating over the last year although it remains slower than before the 2007-2009 recession.

So people are coming back to the labor force, wages are increasing, but new job growth is slowing a bit.  Again, you would have to wonder what kind of recovery we'd be having if Republicans hadn't killed the American Jobs Act five years ago.  And despite the GOP doing everything it could to sabotage the economy, it has still managed to create 11 million jobs compared to Dubya's 1.3 million.

But we need Trump to fix it?  OK, sure.

Here's the reality: this now means we're in a 72-month private sector job growth streak.

Six straight years.  Best in US history.

But Obama disappointed you?

Yeah. Sure he did.

StupidiNews!

• As Hurricane Matthew rips up Florida's east coast today with 1.5 million evacuated, GOP Gov. Rick Scott says voter registration that ends Tuesday will not be extended due to the storm.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is daring the EU and US to withdraw foreign aid to his country if they are unhappy with his brutal and bloody crackdown on drug sellers and users.
• Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize for trying to end the country's 50-year civil war with FARC rebels, despite the deal being rejected by voters.
• US airlines are asking the the Obama administration for a one-year exemption from anti-trust and collusion rules in order to try to recover money from Venezuela's crashing economy.
• Chinese PC giant Lenovo is in talks to purchase Fujitsu's ailing PC and laptop business, a move that would give the combined company 40% of Japan's PC market.

Our Dark Orange Future, Con't

Should Donald Trump win and Republicans retain Congress in November, GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is promising massive, draconian austerity cuts across the board and plans to make sure the Democrats have no power to stop him.

Typically, party leaders offer at least the pretense of seeking bipartisanship when discussing their policy plans. But Ryan is saying frankly that Republicans would use budget reconciliation — a powerful procedural tool — to bypass Democrats entirely. It’s the same tool Republicans slammed Democrats for using to pass the 2010 health care law over their objections.

While GOP leaders have made empty threats to use reconciliation to repeal Obamacare in the past, Ryan is making it clear that this time he plans to use it when it counts. And he would likely have support from a Trump White House. Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser to the GOP presidential nominee, said he is also strongly urging Trump to embrace reconciliation in order to pass sweeping tax cuts. 

Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters. 

“This is our plan for 2017,” Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. “Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.” He explained that key pieces are “fiscal in nature,” meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. “This is our game plan for 2017,” Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.

Now granted, Ryan has made promises before and he's fallen on his face.  But a Trump administration would remove the final obstacle to a Ryan budget, and you can kiss Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security goodbye if that happens.

I suggest we don't find out if Ryan's telling the truth or not.

That's Real White Of You, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Harry Enten breaks the bad news to Trump fans: he just doesn't have the numbers with white voters in order to win in November.

Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.

But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys.1 He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.

So if he's doing worse than Romney, why is Clinton still only predicted to have a modest win?  Third party support from Millennials.

Trump’s less-than-overwhelming margins among white voters in the polls listed above are a big reason why all five surveys showed him trailing Hillary Clinton overall. In fact, Trump would be losing by a larger margin, but third-party candidates are getting support from younger and minority voters, so that Clinton is slightly underperforming Obama among these groups. But the magnitude of Clinton’s struggles with young and nonwhite voters isn’t anywhere big enough to cancel out Trump’s relatively poor showing among white voters.

In other words, Clinton winning by four or five points would be something like eight or nine if Johnson and Stein were out of the picture and those voters made a Clinton v. Trump choice in November instead.  Not saying that will happen, but that's why this race isn't a blowout.

To be more specific, Trump is trading one type of white voter for another. Even as he piles up support among white men without a college degree, he’s on track for a record poor performance for a Republican among white voters with a degree. And right now, that tradeoff is a net negative for Trump, compared with Romney. If a ton of new white voters without a degree flooded into the electorate, that could change the math for Trump. But such a surge doesn’t look like it’s in the offing. 

So yes, at this point you can expect a Clinton win.  It's looking more and more likely every day as Trump continues to lose more voters than he gains with his racist rhetoric.

StupidiNews!

• As many as two million in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia have been asked to evacuate out of the path of Hurricane Matthew as the storm is expected to gouge the southern coast this weekend.
• A Maryland government contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing classified material from the NSA in what could be a second Edward Snowden style document theft.
• Poland's parliament rejected legislation that would have all but outlawed abortions after tens of thousands of women demonstrated against the measure in rallies around the country.
• Embattled medical testing startup Theranos will close its testing labs and fire 340 as CEO Liz Holmes restructures to focus on testing devices.
• Cable giant Charter is joining AT&T to sue the city of Louisville over blocking access to utility poles to prevent competition from Google Fiber in what could be a battle with national implications.

Last Call For Weld Damn There, Bill

Looks like Mike Pence isn't the only Veep candidate more interested in shaping a post-Trump GOP than helping his running mate win in November.

The Libertarian vice presidential candidate, William F. Weld, said Tuesday that he plans to focus exclusively on blasting Donald Trump over the next five weeks, a strategic pivot aimed at denying Trump the White House and giving himself a key role in helping to rebuild the GOP. 

Weld’s comments in a Globe interview mark a major shift in his mission since he pledged at the Libertarian convention in May that he would remain a Libertarian for life and would do all he could to help elect his running mate, Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico. 

But things have changed. Johnson has committed several high-profile gaffes in recent weeks that revealed apparent weak spots in his foreign-policy knowledge. Meanwhile, Trump had seemed to be surging back into contention after he fell well behind in the polls in early August. 

While Weld insisted he still supports Johnson, he said he is now interested primarily in blocking Trump from winning the presidency and then potentially working with longtime Republican leaders such as Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour to create a new path for the party after the election.

“Maybe somebody is going to come up with a new playbook, and I don’t know who it’s going to be, but it would be fun to participate,” Weld said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where he was holding a fund-raiser and rally and planned to watch and tweet about Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate featuring his major-party rivals, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence.

Insert joke about Libertarians just being Republicans who want to legalize weed here.

In all seriousness, if Bill Weld wants to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, the best thing he can do is talk Gary Johnson into dropping out and supporting Hillary Clinton. We all know that's never going to happen, but that would be not only the most effective way to stop Trump, it would also be the right thing to do.

At least Weld has his eyes on the larger picture.

As far as rebuilding the GOP, well the Republican party will still exist in some form after 2016, what form that takes I couldn't tell you.  The last time they tried to fix their problems, the post-mortem of 2012 was thrown in the nearest incinerator and it produced Trump and the current era of overt GOP racists.

Fixing the party again may get us somebody worse.  You know, like Ted Cruz.

Mike's Pence-ive Defense Of Trump

I'm with Vox's Matt Yglesias on last night's debate: Mike Pence pulled off a pretty good demonstration of how the GOP will continue after Trump loses in November: simply pretend The Donald never happened.

Republican Party elected officials in contested races around the country have been grappling with a basic but profound issue all year — how do you stand up for the GOP and conservative principles and against Hillary Clinton without getting sucked into defending every crazy, offensive, or weird thing that Donald Trump said? It can be a tough line to walk, as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte learned this week. 

Debating Tim Kaine Tuesday night, Mike Pence taught a master class in how it’s done. Every time Kaine attacked, Pence parried and deftly shifted the conversation to something else entirely. 

When Kaine demanded that Pence defend Trump’s secrecy on his taxes, Pence ducked and talked about how low taxes are good for economic growth. When Kaine offered an extended list of Trump insults that he said he couldn’t believe Pence would defend, Pence didn’t defend them — he pivoted to complaining about Clinton and the “basket of deplorables.” Pence was tight, disciplined, and focused on his talking points. He never took the bait, never let himself get dragged into unfavorable terrain, and simply ignored subjects he didn’t want to discuss. 

It was a genuinely bravura performance, one that a passel of GOP senators and Congress members running in tough races ought to study. The problem is Trump is at the top of the ticket.

In other words, the GOP are already masters of gaslighting and fact-free rhetoric, so why wouldn't pretending Donald Trump is invisible not work in 2018 and 2020?  Vox's Dara Lind follows up on this and a lot of it comes back to race:

The question is this: Has the median American voter has moved so far to the left on race in the last decade that she won’t get upset by the implication that America’s race problem runs so deep it probably includes her? (Democrats only other option is mastering the art of mobilization of nonwhite voters so thoroughly that they can change where the median voter is by changing the population of voters — a much tougher battle.) 

Or is it just that Donald Trump, short-tempered and Twitter-fingered as he is, is such an anomaly that he liberates Democrats from the task of moderating their own message?
Mike Pence, by all appearances, believes the latter: that there is a large population of people who really don’t like being called racist but who, for Trump-specific reasons, don’t like Trump. 

It’s not that Tim Kaine (or Clinton, or other Democrats) can’t defend their racial ideology. At least during the section on implicit bias — one of the clearest, most honest segments of the night — Kaine showed he was willing to address the meat of what Pence was saying. 

But it’s not clear that Kaine (or Clinton, or other Democrats) think that those defenses will persuade enough of the American public. Kaine wasn’t satisfied simply to offer an explanation of what implicit bias actually is, and how it manifests itself in criminal justice. He felt the need to pivot to a riff on Donald Trump’s insults, and all the things the Republican nominee hasn’t apologized for. 

The political theory behind what Mike Pence was doing Tuesday night — the theory behind the new law-and-order conservatism — is that without Donald Trump to pivot to, Democrats won’t win the argument on race with “mainstream” America. 

In other words, pretend that somehow, Donald Trump's overt racism does not represent the GOP as a whole, and there are plenty of Republicans who are going to buy into that and move on after November.  The Village Media certainly will.

So yes, expect the "Pence Defense" going forward.  "We're not racist, gay-hating Islamophobic bigots, that was Donald Trump, and you're the real racists for thinking otherwise!" will be the order of the day until at least 2020.

How well they will be able to get away with it depends on a number of things, but that's what's coming for sure.

Orange You Going To Be His Friend, Kelly?

The Donald Trump rain of destruction on GOP downticket candidates is starting to take a real toll on Republicans being able to keep control of the Senate and several state legislatures (not that Republicans not named Trump aren't somehow contributing to their own demise) but NH GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte looked comical this week when stuck with the question of whether or not Trump makes a good role model for America's kids.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said she would “absolutely” point to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a role model for children but still declined to endorse him for president in an awkward answer to a debate question Monday night.

During the second debate of 2016 in the critical New Hampshire Senate race, Ayotte, who faces a tough challenge from New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan (D), was asked whether she sees Trump as a role model. 

“Well, I think that certainly there are many role models that we have, and I believe he can serve as president, and so absolutely I would do that,” Ayotte said. 

When asked why she still won’t endorse Trump outright, she reiterated that she differs with him on certain issues and then pivoted to hit Hassan for the governor's support of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

“Because I’ve had some disagreements with him, and I’ve been quite clear about those disagreements,” Ayotte said. 

“And this is an area where Gov. Hassan has been lockstep with Secretary Clinton. I haven’t heard major disagreements that she’s had with Secretary Clinton, so who’s going to stand up on behalf of the people of New Hampshire?”

And then Ayotte immediately ran away from her own statement, screaming.

Following the debate, Ayotte walked back her comment in a statement sent by the campaign, saying she "misspoke." She said neither Trump nor Clinton are good role models for her own children.

"I misspoke tonight. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example and I wouldn't hold up either of them as role models for my kids," Ayotte said.

Those pretzel knots that GOP candidates are tying themselves into over Trump are cutting off blood flow to the brain. Who knew?

StupidiNews!

• Residents of the Bahamas are bracing for Hurricane Matthew, now a strong Category 3 storm, as it churns northward towards Nassau and Miami after devastating Haiti and Cuba yesterday.
• Voters in more than a dozen states are already casting early voting ballots for president as Americans are taking advantage of the chance to vote ahead of November 8th.
• Three scientists as part of an international team are splitting this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on molecular machines that could lead to new materials.
• Miami has taken the dubious honor of top spot among America's most unequal cities when it comes to income, edging out Atlanta and New Orleans.
• Hacker Guccifer 2.0 has released what he claims are documents from the Clinton Foundation, but some of the documents appear to be public domain and even propaganda.