“An election analysis conducted in the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project shows that the race has tightened considerably over the past few weeks.”
“If the election were held today, the project estimates that Clinton has a 60 percent chance of winning by 18 electoral votes. Last week, the project estimated that Clinton had a 83 percent chance of winning the election.”
In a separate national Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll, Clinton continues to lead Trump by 4 percentage points, 42% to 38%.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates writing in the Wall Street Journal:
Mrs. Clinton has time before the election to address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment, to demonstrate her willingness to stake out one or more positions on national security at odds with her party’s conventional wisdom, and to speak beyond generalities about how she would deal with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East—and international trade. Whether and how she addresses these issues will, I believe, affect how many people vote—including me.
At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.
New York Times: “A few hours after Donald J. Trump publicly backed away from a $1 trillion tax cut for small businesses, campaign aides on Thursday privately assured a leading small-business group that Mr. Trump in fact remained committed to the proposal — winning the group’s endorsement.”
“The campaign then told the Tax Foundation, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank it asked to price the plan, that Mr. Trump had indeed decided to eliminate the tax cut.”
“Call it the trillion-dollar lie: Both assertions cannot be true.”
“We got played again.”
— CNN’s John King, after Donald Trump staged another media spectacle before announcing he agreed that President Obama was in fact born in the United States.
New York Times: “For both parties, every election can feel like the most vital of a lifetime, the one day standing between a still-proud nation and its imminent demise. Among liberals, there is an especially rich tradition of bed-wetting, as even some practitioners call it, at the faintest sign of shakiness from their candidate.”
“But as Hillary Clinton lurches toward Election Day, her supporters at times seem overwhelmed by a tsunami of unease, exacerbated by Mrs. Clinton’s bout of pneumonia and a slow-footed acknowledgment of the illness. They are confronting a question they had assumed, just a few weeks ago, they would not need to consider in a race against the most unpopular presidential nominee in modern times: Could Mrs. Clinton actually blow this?”
Nate Silver: Democrats should panic… if the polls still look like this in a week.
Donald Trump “once again raised the specter of violence against Hillary Clinton, suggesting Friday that the Secret Service agents who guard her voluntarily disarm to ‘see what happens to her’ without their protection, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. I think they should disarm. Immediately.”
He went on: “Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, O.K. It’ll be very dangerous.”
New York Times: “The essential question — Why promote a lie? — may be unanswerable. Was it sport? Was it his lifelong quest to court media attention? Was it racism? Was it the cynical start of his eventual campaign for president?”
“It might not matter. He kept doing it, even as his most senior aides assured the public that he had long since abandoned the fallacy.”
“He had not. He was disingenuous until the very end, telling a Washington Post reporter just 72 hours before that he was unready to concede the president’s place of birth. But he treated the weighty topic, as he does so much else, like a television cliffhanger, promising a major declaration on Friday.”
Washington Post: Trump’s stance on display: Never wrong, and never loved more by his supporters.
With the trial of two key allies of Gov. Chris Christie set to begin — and last for six weeks — the Wall Street Journal offers a readers’ guide to the trial based on conversations with defense attorneys and former federal prosecutors experienced in public-corruption cases.
Here are the latest state polls from the presidential race:
Ohio: Trump 42%, Clinton 42% (OnMessage)
Florida: Clinton 46%, Trump 43% (Global Strategy Group)
Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have missed the cut for the first presidential debate, The Hill reports.
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the only presidential candidates who will participate in the first debates.
Matt Taibbi: “No doubt about it, the country is in a brutal spot right now. We are less than two months from the possibility of one of the dumbest people on the planet winning the White House. And it seems that all anyone’s talked about this week, whether around the water cooler or on TV news, Twitter or Facebook, is the lung capacity of Hillary Clinton.”
“That sucks. But it’s not all the media’s fault. This is classic horse-race stuff, and if you’re getting it, it’s at least in part because you spent decades asking for it.”
“The campaign has devolved over time into an entertainment program, a degrading and vicious show where the contestants win the nuclear launch codes instead of a date with a millionaire. Under the rules of this reality series which media consumers turn into a gigantic hit every four years, collapsing in front of a cell-phone camera at a 9/11 memorial service is more important than a dozen position papers.”
“It just is. You proved it when you clicked on that video of the episode last weekend and didn’t read a compare-and-contrast piece on, for instance, the candidates’ banking policies.”
The Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold sent this to Donald Trump’s campaign:
I noted that today Mr. Trump said he believes President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is legitimate. That makes this a story for me now: Can you provide details of where and when he will donate the $5 million Mr. Trump promise to give to charity?
“Hillary Clinton’s once-commanding lead among young voters has collapsed as millennials look toward third-party candidates, a development that helps explain why the presidential race has tightened substantially in recent weeks,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Young voters are a pillar of the Democratic coalition, and the Clinton campaign is making a new effort to keep them in the fold. On Friday, First Lady Michelle Obama will campaign for Mrs. Clinton on a college campus in the battleground state of Virginia.”
“Sen. Bernie Sanders, a sensation among younger voters during the Democratic primaries, will campaign for Mrs. Clinton this weekend, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a liberal icon, will attend campaign events this weekend at two Ohio universities.”
For members: The Obama Coalition Isn’t Coming Together — Yet
Louisiana State Treasurer John Kennedy said he won’t back off asking about allegations that his opponent in the U.S. Senate race was allegedly involved with prostitutes, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.
Said Kennedy: “The most prestigious publisher in the world has alleged that he was serviced by not one, not two, not three but four prostitutes and has cheated on his wife. He says it’s a lie. I didn’t write that. Simon and Schuster did. He needs to sue them if it’s not true.”
Donald Trump reversed himself and acknowledged the fact that President Obama was born in the United States, the AP reports.
Said Trump: “Not to mention her in the same breath but Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America great again.”
“Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies, unnerved by the tightening presidential race, are making a major push to dissuade disaffected voters from backing third-party candidates, and pouring more energy into Rust Belt states, where Donald Trump is gaining ground,” the New York Times reports.
“With Mrs. Clinton enduring one of the rockiest stretches of her second bid for the presidency, her campaign and affiliated Democratic groups are shifting their focus to those voters, many of them millennials, who recoil at Mr. Trump, her Republican opponent, but now favor the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.”
“A major criminal-justice overhaul bill seemed destined to be the bipartisan success story of the year, consensus legislation that showed lawmakers could still rise above politics and take on a serious societal problem,” the New York Times reports.
“Then the election got in the way. With Donald J. Trump demanding ‘law and order’ and Senate Republicans divided on the wisdom of reducing federal mandatory minimum sentences, the effort that began with real promise stalled, and now its Senate authors acknowledge there is virtually no chance for action on the measure this year.”
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.