A new Morning Consult poll shows Hillary Clinton now leading Donald Trump, 43% to 40%, in the days following the DNC gathering.
It’s a 7-point swing from the previous poll, in which Trump surged to a 4-point lead following the Republican National Committee’s convention in Cleveland.
Khizer Kahn told the Washington Post that Donald Trump’s latest statement about his Democratic convention speech was “faked empathy.”
Said Khan: “What he said originally — that defines him . . . People are upset with him. He realizes, and his advisers feel that [his original statement] was a stupid mistake. That proves that this person is void of empathy. He is unfit for the stewardship of this great country. You think he will empathize with this country, with the suffering of this country’s poor people? He showed his true colors when he disrespected this country’s most honorable mother… all the snake oil he is selling, and my patriotic, decent Americans are falling for that. Republicans are falling for that. And I can only appeal to them. Reconsider. Repudiate. It’s a moral obligation. A person void of empathy for the people he wishes to lead cannot be trusted with that leadership. To vote is a trust. And it cannot be placed in wrong hands.”
In response to Trump’s attack on his wife, Khan said the Republican nominee’s words were “typical of a person without a soul.”
“I’m taking the gloves off. Take the gloves off. Right? Taking the gloves off! Just remember this: Trump is gonna be no more Mr. Nice Guy.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Politico.
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“Donald Trump, confronting a daunting electoral map and a significant financial disadvantage, is preparing to fall back from an expansive national campaign and concentrate the bulk of his time and money on just three or four states that his campaign believes he must sweep in order to win the presidency,” the New York Times reports.
“Even as Mr. Trump has ticked up in national polls in recent weeks, senior Republicans say his path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed for election has remained narrow — and may have grown even more precarious. It now looks exceedingly difficult for him to assemble even the barest Electoral College majority without beating Hillary Clinton in a trifecta of the biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.”
“President Obama won all three states in 2008 and 2012, and no Republican has won Pennsylvania in nearly three decades.”
Trump adviser Paul Manafort told the Washington Post that Pennsylvania is “wide open,” and that if Trump wins its 20 electoral votes, his path to victory would become “a lot more varied and hers more limited.”
He added: “We can carry Michigan, we can compete in Wisconsin and win. Iowa is in play. If they think they’ve got Colorado, they’re smoking something.”
Manafort went on to describe Connecticut and Oregon — two reliably blue states — as within reach for Trump: “Those are not states that are on my front burner, but she’s going to have to put resources into those states in order to carry them.”
Donald Trump said that Republicans wary of his campaign have little choice but to vote for him anyway, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”
He added: “Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice.”
In his first response to a searing charge from bereaved Army father Khizr Khan that he’d “sacrificed nothing” for his country, Donald Trump told ABC News that he had in fact sacrificed by employing “thousands and thousands of people.”
He also suggested that Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim: “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”
And he questioned whether Khan’s words were his own: “Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it? I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”
Meanwhile, Khizr and Ghazala Khan told MSNBC why they decided to call out Trump.
Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of intentionally stacking debates against prime time programming to “rig” the election process, despite the fact that the schedule has been set since last September, Politico reports.
Said Trump: “As usual, Hillary and the Dems are trying to rig the debates so two are up against major NFL games. Same as last time w/ Bernie. Unacceptable!”
“To be honest, it’s very possible in my view that Trump wins. I wouldn’t think it’d be by a landslide, but I think he could win. I think he could lose, I think he could lose by a landslide. But, I don’t know which it’s going to be and a lot of that depends on what happens to Hillary Clinton. Is there a meltdown moment, or some implosion of some kind?”
— Mitt Romney, talking on Radio Free GOP.
The new RABA Research tracking poll shows Hillary Clinton has opened a significant lead over Donald Trump, now leading him by 15 points, 46% to 31%, with Gary Johnson at 7% and Jill Stein sits at 2%.
A similar poll conducted the day after the Republican convention showed Clinton ahead by only five points.
“Democrats marked a decisive turn in their campaign against Donald Trump this week, moving to recast the 2016 race not as a conventional battle between left and right but as a national emergency that requires voters of all stripes to band together against a singularly menacing candidate,” the New York Times reports.
“Abandoning their standard critique against conservative Republicans, allies of Hillary Clinton argued that Mr. Trump was not merely another champion of right-wing ideas, deserving of rejection for his views on the environment or health care.”
“Instead, in an onslaught of astonishing ferocity led by President Obama, they used their convention to portray Mr. Trump as a dangerously unstable figure and a friend of foreign despots like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Some Democrats suggested Mr. Trump might have authoritarian impulses of his own: Prominent in Mrs. Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday night was a pointed reminder that the American system was designed to prevent the rise of a dictator.”
Politico: “That was the beginning of a 7-minute speech that became an instant sensation—eloquent, emotional and notably original, coming as it did at the end of four days of highly processed political cliche. Khan, a 66-year-old immigration lawyer from Charlottesville, told the story of his son’s death in combat in Iraq, but he turned that elegy into a viral rebuke of Donald Trump: ‘You have sacrificed nothing!'”
“And Khan delivered his broadside without using the teleprompter. There was nothing to put on it, because he had written nothing down.”
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by six points, 41% to 35%, with another 25% picking “other.”
“The presidential tracking poll reflects a slight change of wording from previous surveys, replacing the ‘Neither/Other’ option given to respondents with just ‘Other.’ An internal review had found the word ‘Neither’ has, at times, siphoned support away from one or the other candidate.”
For members: What to Watch For In the Next Wave of Polling
Donald Trump fired back at Hillary Clinton a day after she accused the Republican nominee of being too thin-skinned to have control of the country’s nuclear arsenal, ABC News reports.
Said Trump: “I think I have a great temperament, I have a temperament where I know how to win. She doesn’t know how to win, she’s not a winner. She doesn’t know how to win. And this country, if they choose her, this country will not be in good shape.”
He added: “I’ve had a beautiful, I’ve had a flawless campaign. You’ll be writing books about this campaign.”
Gallup: “Trump’s speech got the least positive reviews of any speech we have tested after the fact: 35% of Americans interviewed last weekend said it was excellent or good. Of the nine previous speeches we have rated, the top one was Barack Obama’s in August 2008, which 58% of Americans rated as excellent or good.”
“The computer network used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations,” Reuters reports.
“The latest attack follows reports of two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee and the party’s fundraising committee for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.”
The New York Times says the intrusion “appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services.”
From Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs, covering a Donald Trump rally in Colorado:
Audience: “Lock her up!”
Trump: “I’ve been saying just beat her on Nov. 8 but you know I’m starting to agree with you.”
“Top Donald Trump donors tried to set up a meeting between the GOP presidential nominee and Charles Koch in Colorado Springs on Friday, but Koch aides rejected the entreaties,” Politico reports.
“Koch and his brother David Koch, who helm an influential network of advocacy groups and major conservative donors, have been sharply critical of Trump’s rhetoric and policy stances and have indicated they do not intend to support his campaign.”
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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