“President Obama is approaching the final weeks of the presidential campaign with an intense sense of urgency and concern amid a growing realization that the election could be determined by the narrowest of margins,” the Washington Post reports.
“Earlier this year, Obama seemed to regard the defeat of GOP nominee Donald Trump as a near inevitability, but in recent days the president has changed his tone.”
Donald Trump “is saying ‘yes’ to Fox News almost every day but saying ‘no’ to most other major networks and news organizations — a highly unusual strategy for a presidential nominee,” CNN reports.
“Rousing the base instead of reaching out to undecided voters may ultimately pay off for Trump. If nothing else, it limits the candidate’s exposure to hard-hitting questions — while fueling frustration among journalists.”
Conservative megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, have committed roughly $45 million so far to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and downballot Republicans’ attempt to control Congress, CNN reports.
“The spending amounts to a historic investment in the Republican Party ticket’s hopes for November, putting millions of dollars behind Trump’s bid in a groundbreaking donation that could redefine the final two months of the 2016 campaign.”
A new Morning Consult poll finds that nearly 75% of the registered voters plans to watch the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton next week.
When asked who they think will win the debate, 37% picked Clinton and 31% chose Trump while 32% either didn’t know or had no opinion.
Last week, Joe Scarborough and his “Morning Joe” co-host, Mika Brzezinski, visited Donald Trump at Trump Tower to rekindle a once-rosy relationship that has turned bitter and adversarial, sources with knowledge of the meeting told CNNMoney.
The three also discussed the possibility of conducting an interview for “Morning Joe,” though nothing was decided or finalized.
Sean Trende: “To be sure, Clinton did not want the polls to tighten. At the same time, this was a particularly awful series of news cycles for her, while Trump had managed to go over a month without reprising some of his more polarizing statements, such as his flap with the Khan family, who lost a son in Iraq. We would expect a big swing in the polls, and there was one.”
“But it did not put Trump over the top. A week in, she still leads by 0.7 points in the four-way RCP average, and 0.9 points in the two-way average. She maintains a lead in the Electoral College, and while North Carolina and Nevada appear to be close, her lead in the next-most-Republican state, Virginia (which would put Trump over the 270 mark), is 3.5 points.”
“In other words, a truly terrible news cycle was still not enough to put Trump ahead. In a strange way, that’s good news for Clinton.”
Los Angeles Times: “The voter expectations question is important because it often — although not always — has proved a more accurate way to forecast elections than asking which candidate a person plans to vote for. The expectations question has an especially good track record when an election remains a ways off — seven weeks in this case.”
“Clinton leads 50% to 45% on the question of which candidate people expect will win, the Daybreak poll finds. That’s down from her 13-point lead just a week ago.”
“I’m only 93, so maybe I’ll run again when I’m a little older and have a little more wisdom.”
— Former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), joking about his future political ambitions to the Topeka Capital-Journal.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) “knew that his close associates were involved in a plan to shut down lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge as it was happening and that the closings were intended to punish a local mayor for declining to support him, prosecutors said on Monday,” the New York Times reports.
“The prosecutors made the assertion during opening statements in the trial of two former Christie administration officials charged with closing the lanes in 2013 and then covering it up.”
Donald Trump took aim at “magazines” and other media that publish instructions on how to make explosive devices, CNN reports.
Said Trump: “So I see the other day, and they’re all talking about it so wonderfully because it’s called freedom of the press — where you buy magazines and they tell you how to make the same bombs that you saw. I would — now people will go crazy, they’ll say Trump is against freedom of the press. I’m totally in favor of freedom of the press. But how do you allow magazines to be sold — these are magazines that tell you, from step one, go to the store and buy such-and-such, right?”
He added: “Those people should be arrested because they are inciting violence, OK.”
“I know that presidential races can get intense. I know that people can sometimes say things they won’t mean. But Donald Trump has repeatedly invited his followers to commit a terrible act of violence on his opponents. He has invited them to kill another human being more than once.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by the Washington Post.
Alex Castellanos, a top strategist for a super PAC supporting Donald Trump, said that there is an “otherness” to President Obama, the Washington Post reports.
Said Castellanos: “I think the big question about Obama is not where he was born or his faith. The big question about Obama has been: Has he been — has he considered himself more of a globalist than an American? There’s an otherness to the president, and people have tried to exploit that politically in different ways.”
Politico: “Trump is approaching, and has possibly already passed, $100 million from donors who have given less than $200, according to an analysis of available Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign’s public statements and people familiar with his fundraising operation. It is a threshold no previous Republican has ever achieved in a single campaign. And Trump has done so less than three months after signing his first email solicitation for donors on June 21 — a staggering speed to collect such a vast sum.”
Said one GOP operative: “I’ve never seen anything like this. He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”
“Clinton counted 2.3 million donors as of the end of August, the result of decades of campaigning, a previous presidential bid and allies who painstakingly built her an email file of supporters even before she formally announced her second run. But Trump had zoomed to 2.1 million donors in the last three months alone, his campaign has said.”
Donald Trump was interviewed by Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends: about the bombing in New York City over the weekend:
DOOCY: Change the playbook. OK, change the playbook how?
TRUMP: Well we’re going to have to do something extremely tough over there.
DOOCY: Like what?
TRUMP: Over there. Like, knock the hell out of them. And we have to get everybody together and we have to lead for a change because we’re not knocking them, we’re hitting them every once in a while, we’re hitting them in certain places, we’re being very gentle about it, we’re going to have to be very tough.
“Those in Donald Trump’s orbit appear to be nervous about the swirling scandal around the Trump Foundation—and they should be: the stakes are incredibly high,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The allegations of a quid pro quo between Trump and Florida Attorney General, improper use of the charity for personal benefit, and employment of the charity for political purposes have serious penalties beyond mere campaign optics—the possible consequences range from hefty fines to jail time.”
John Avlon: “Though he’s a uniquely unqualified candidate, I’ve been concerned about an outside X-Factor event suddenly changing the emotional calculus of the electorate in ways that we would later regret. This could be a sudden economic collapse or a cyber October-surprise. But terrorism has always seemed the prime known-unknown.”
“After all, terrorism is now a depressingly regular feature of American life. While no attacks have rivaled 9/11, we saw at least 45 thwarted terror plots in the first ten years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and in the last year alone suffered horrific losses in the San Bernardino and Orlando slaughters. But we have no template for the impact of an attack just before an American election.”
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.