Here are the latest state polls in the presidential race:
South Carolina: Trump 45%, Clinton 43% (Feldman Group)
New Mexico: Clinton 40%, Trump 31%, Johnson 16%, Stein 4% (PPP)
Florida: Trump 43%, Clinton 41% (Florida Atlantic University)
North Carolina: Clinton 44%, Trump 42% (Monmouth)
North Carolina: Clinton 44%, Trump 43% (CNN/ORC)
Arizona: Trump 43%, Clinton 38% (CNN/ORC)
Jonathan Rauch: “Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.”
“Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction.”
“Assembling power to govern a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly divided democracy is inevitably hard. Chaos syndrome makes it all the harder. For Democrats, the disorder is merely chronic; for the Republican Party, it is acute… Nearly everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected.”
Just published: GOP GPS: How to Find the Millennials and Urban Voters the Republican Party Needs to Survive by Evan Siegfried.
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Eric Trump said that it would be “foolish” for his father to release his tax returns and subject them to scrutiny by people who don’t know what they are looking at, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Said Trump: “You would have a bunch of people who know nothing about taxes trying to look through and trying to come up with assumptions on things they know nothing about. It would be foolish to do. I’m actually the biggest proponent of not doing it.”
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told the UK’s Channel 4 that Donald Trump is actually winning the election, but every poll is wrong because Trump voters are undercover.
Said Conway: “Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the election. It’s because it’s become socially desirable, if you’re a college educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump.”
Associated Press: “Horrified by the prospect of Trump in the White House, Obama and his party have changed their tune about Romney. As they denounce Trump as ‘unhinged’ and unfit, they’re getting nostalgic about the 2012 Republican nominee they now describe as principled, competent and honorable.”
“It’s a sharp reversal from four years ago. Back then, Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars portraying the former Massachusetts governor as a callous, unpatriotic, pet-abusing caricature of the uber-rich.”
“Yet as Trump is proving, everything in politics is relative.”
First Read: “The latest controversy over the Clinton Foundation — the allegation that special access was given to Foundation donors when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state — follows a familiar pattern: The entire arrangement appears sloppy, careless, and seedy… But there’s another familiar pattern to the discussion, especially regarding the AP report showing that Foundation donors met with Clinton when she was secretary of state: This kind of behavior is standard operating procedure for any politician. If you’re a sitting congressman, senator, or governor — raise your hand if you’ve never granted meetings with big donors (either ones you’ve known before or after the donation). This is a practice that happens ALL of the time in American politics. And as a result, none of it is illegal or demands a special prosecutor. So two things can true at the same time: One, what the Clintons are doing can be sloppy, careless and seedy. And two, they’re not the only ones doing it.”
“Of course, the ‘they’re-not-the-only-ones-doing-it’ reasoning isn’t always sufficient in a political campaign, especially one for the highest office in the land. The Clinton Foundation was always going to be a target in this campaign. And if you’re scratching your head as to why the Clintons didn’t have a better plan for dealing with it — like having well-devised exit strategy months ago — remember that the decisions are usually coming from the principals rather than the political advisers.”
Rude Pundit: How is it different from anything else in our broken political system?
Jonathan Chait: “The main difficulty Trump faces in dispelling the impression that he is a racist is that Trump is, in fact, a gigantic racist.”
Daily Beast: “Donald Trump used his campaign funds to buy thousands of copies of his own book at retail cost, simultaneously diverting donor money back into his pockets while artificially boosting his sales figures. It’s a tactic that may be illegal, campaign finance experts say.”
Hillary Clinton latest ad will air in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Just out: We’re Still Right, They’re Still Wrong: The Democrats’ Case for 2016 by James Carville.
Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) got his Indianapolis address wrong over the weekend in an interview with WISH-TV.
Bayh’s fumbling of his own address comes amid attacks that he doesn’t really live in Indiana.
Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) called Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) “unhinged” after the senator referred to President Obama as the “drug dealer in chief,” Politico reports.
Said Duckworth: “If you look at all of the things that he said, I think that he lacks the ability to control what he’s saying. If you look at the numerous gaffes he’s had over the years,” Duckworth said Tuesday after she addressed the City Club of Chicago. “I do think he is unhinged.”
Mark Blumenthal: “Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party appeared on state ballots in all but two states in 2012, and Stein and the Green Party appeared on all but 12. They will likely gain access to at least as many state ballots this year, if not more. Without offering supporters of those candidates an explicit option to register their preferences, we have no practical way of tracking their support.”
“Yet if we prompt for third party candidates, many voters who are undecided about Clinton and Trump (or about voting generally) tend to grab for these alternative options as a way of indicating their uncertainty. Whatever the reason, both history and our own data yield evidence that mid-summer polls greatly inflate the true preference for third party candidates.”
“She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials,” Politico reports.
“With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to ‘run out the clock,’ confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.”
Washington Post: “Guided by his new campaign leadership, the Republican nominee has ordered a full-fledged strategy to court black and Latino voters and is mobilizing scores of minority figures to advocate publicly for his candidacy.”
“Trump is planning trips to urban areas — with stops at churches, charter schools and small businesses in black and Latino communities — and is developing an empowerment agenda based on the economy and education, aides said. Under consideration is an early September visit to Detroit, where retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary rival Ben Carson would guide him on a tour of the impoverished neighborhoods where he grew up.”
Wall Street Journal: “A Trump victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton likely would require a sweep of a set of battleground states where he is competitive but trailing in recent opinion polls—Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina—and both campaigns describe them as the heart of the race. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, could win with just one of them, partly because Democrats start with a larger number of states that historically side with them.”
“Both campaigns have put their money and their time in those states, despite suggestions they might turn elsewhere. Mr. Trump has traveled to those states more than others and has paid advertising in only these four states. Of the 20 media markets that have received the greatest number of ad spots placed by either the Clinton campaign or its main super PAC, 16 are in one of them, according to data from an ad tracker not affiliated with either campaign.”
Donald Trump’s campaign “rolled out a revamped schedule, making sure to emphasize — twice — that Trump is focusing on battleground states,” Politico reports.
“Some Republicans have been scratching their heads lately over Trump’s campaign schedule, which had been heavy on red states and relatively light on those states that could prove decisive on Election Day.”
“The new approach, which includes visits to Florida and Nevada, appears to have the fingerprints of Kellyanne Conway, a respected Republican pollster who was elevated last week to the role of campaign manager and who has been credited for Trump’s toned-down approach in recent days.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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