Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling says that he’s “serious” about mounting a 2018 challenge to unseat Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Politico reports.
Said Schilling: “Oh, I’m serious about it. If I’m not electable, then I won’t get elected but I believe being a senator, being a governor, being in public office is about being a leader.”
He also derided Hillary Clinton: “I don’t understand how Hillary’s an option, much less the candidate. I don’t understand how she’s not in jail.”
“Fueled by tightening polls and an attention-grabbing TV ad in which he assembles an AR-15 rifle blindfolded, Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Jason Kander is newly confident he can unseat incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The suddenly close race has both Democratic and Republican groups outside the state pouring money into this onetime GOP stronghold as it becomes an increasingly competitive battleground in the fight for control of the U.S. Senate.”
“Donald Trump made an appearance in an explicit 2000 Playboy video,” BuzzFeed reports.
“Trump’s role in the porn is relatively benign and centers around him breaking a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo while several of the playmates are visiting New York City.”
A new Fox News poll finds Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump nationally among likely voters by five points, 49% to 44%.
A week ago, Trump led by one point.
The San Diego Union-Tribune has endorsed Republicans for president from 1868 through 2012, but today they backed Hillary Clinton.
Vengeful, dishonest and impulsive, Trump is no Romney. This is why Hillary Clinton is the safest candidate for voters to choose in a complex world.
Terrible leaders can knock nations off course. Venezuela is falling apart because of the obstinance and delusions of Hugo Chávez and his successor. Argentina is finally coming out of the chaos created by Cristina Kirchner and several of her predecessors.
Trump could be our Chávez, our Kirchner. We cannot take that risk.
New York Times: “The flow of money, documented in Federal Election Commission reports, shows Democrats expanding their fund-raising advantage in the final phase of the presidential race, defying expectations at the beginning of the campaign that Republicans would dominate the money chase. Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats are now outpacing Mr. Trump and the Republicans on every front, according to F.E.C. records: Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, her party and outside groups supporting her have raised almost twice as much as Mr. Trump and his allies.”
“The influx of cash and the new rules have allowed the national Democratic Party to overcome a cash shortage and provide Democrats in key states like Virginia and North Carolina with money for early voting drives, additional staff and canvassing aimed up and down the ticket.”
“For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o’clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!”
— Donald Trump, on Twitter.
“As the last full month of this presidential contest begins, Hillary Clinton is shifting toward a pure base-turnout strategy, inching away from her all-out effort to lure disaffected Republicans in favor of a traditional get-Democrats-to-the-polls effort that mirrors Barack Obama’s 2012 game-plan,” Politico reports.
“Gone are Clinton’s regular references to winning over moderate conservatives and her sly allusions to GOP leaders meant to give defecting Republicans a framework for abandoning their nominee. With 39 days to go, Brooklyn headquarters and battleground state operatives are activating the massive surrogate machinery, a heavy early voting push, and a large-scale registration offensive they think they need to secure a win in November.”
“A video of Donald Trump testifying under oath about his provocative rhetoric about Mexicans and other Latinos is set to go public as soon as Friday, drawing new attention to those comments just weeks before voters cast their ballots in the presidential race,” Politico reports.
Update: BuzzFeed has the video.
“There have been hacking attempts on election systems in more than 20 states — far more than had been previously acknowledged,” a senior Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News.
“The ‘attempted intrusions’ targeted online systems like registration databases, and not the actual voting or tabulation machines that will be used on Election Day and are not tied to the Internet.”
Here are the latest state polls from the presidential race:
New Hampshire: Clinton 42%, Trump 35%, Johnson 13% (WBUR)
Michigan: Clinton 42%, Trump 35%, Johnson 9% (Detroit News)
Florida: Clinton 46%, Trump 42%, Johnson 7% (Mason Dixon)
Florida: Clinton 47%, Trump 46%, Johnson 4% (Opinion Saavy)
Nevada: Clinton 44%, Trump 38%, Johnson 7% (Suffolk)
“I think he’s great when he pivots. I would encourage him to do even more pivoting.”
— Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, on MSNBC.
Rick Klein: “How has Donald Trump gone through three campaign managers without anyone being able to lock him out of his Twitter account? Or at least overnight – or change the password on his smart phone? Trump has redefined the ability to dominate a news cycle with a Tweet. But, as always, that cuts in both directions. Does Trump really want to spend another news cycle on his feud with the former Miss Universe? He’s now calling her ‘disgusting,’ and is urging followers to check out her ‘sex tape and past’ Is that the way to get past a rough debate night? Every passing day has brought more Trump complaints about that debate. The days have also revealed the brilliance of Hillary Clinton’s debate gambits. She set traps that snapped so hard that they continue to reverberate, right through her opponent’s Tweets.”
Politico digs into the recently released FBI files on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up. There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity—MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims.
Tampa Bay Times: “Despite roughly 500 full time campaign staffers spread across Florida to help Clinton win forever close Florida, party leaders and activists across the state are fretting about the campaign’s ground game. Even Clinton campaign staffers in other states are quietly buzzing about the Florida campaign struggling to meet its goals for voter registration and other outreach benchmarks.”
Newt Gingrich called Hillary Clinton’s attack on Donald Trump for mocking former Miss Universe Alicia Machado’s weight “as false as Benghazi” and “the new Benghazi lie,” BuzzFeed reports.
Said Gingrich: “I think as fascinating to look at how the elite media bought — this is the new Benghazi lie — what Hillary tried to set up, and what they spend apparently months preparing was an ambush that was as false as Benghazi. It was as false as her claim she was under fire in Bosnia. It was as false as the lies she told about her emails.”
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.