With Georgia moving into the “Lean Clinton” column (yes, actually Georgia), The TPM Electoral Scoreboard now stands at Clinton 305, Trump 179, Toss-up 54. See the details here.
I think there are two big takeaways and one big point going forward that we can draw from today’s polls, apart from the obvious fact that Hillary Clinton has for now opened up a significant lead over Donald Trump.
First, Clinton got a sizable bounce out of her convention. That bounce appears not only to be persisting but actually growing. That’s a big deal. It’s still too soon to say we’re in the post-convention period. I’d say we need about a week more to be there. But historically speaking where the polls are a week or two out of the conventions tends to remain fairly stable. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to really change the game. The debates are the big exception. But for all frenzy, there have been few cases where the presidential debates have really reset the race. People say a lot that three months is a long time, that polls are only a snap shot of the race as it stands today. All true. But we’re coming up on the phase of the campaign where polls really start to matter and become much more predictive of the outcome.
This is more thank than brag. But with all the florid tribulation of this election cycle which literally amazes me every day, I wanted to just thank our incredible team. I generally prefer talking about the news rather than us because that’s what you come here for. But this is just an amazing team of people. And what I’m not sure people always realize is that it’s a really small team of people. To use the old boxing metaphor, as an organization, we’ve always prided ourselves with punching above our weight.
Trump tells crowd how Mike Pence had to ask his permission to endorse Paul Ryan.
When I saw Fox News come out with its poll yesterday with Hillary Clinton opening up a 10 point lead over Donald Trump nationwide, I couldn’t help wonder whether some top Republicans might have gotten a heads up the day before, thus contributing to what we might call the ‘Reince Apoplectic’ freakout. Would they do that? Who knows. But c’mon, it’s Fox. Today we have three new state polls each showing big leads for Clinton. Michigan (Clinton +9), Pennsylvania (Clinton +11), New Hampshire (Clinton +15).
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I cringed this morning when I read this story in Politico which pretty clearly demonstrated that Melania Trump was an undocumented worker for years when she began her modeling career in the US in the mid-90s. I say I cringed not because there’s anything wrong with the piece but because we too were working on it back in February and March and had it pretty well nailed. The hold up was that there was at least one theoretically possible way she could have been legal that we couldn’t definitively rule out since the Trumps’ of course were not going to answer any questions or provide any of her immigrants papers. The irony in all of this is that the evidence against Trump comes almost entirely from her own mouth, specifically a January interview she gave to Harper’s Bazaar and a subsequent TV interview with Mika Brzezinski in which she explained that she was nothing like those awful ‘illegals’ her husband wants to expel en masse.
Days before the Cleveland convention, Donald Trump’s top advisor on Europe and Russia, went to Moscow to deliver a speech blasting US policy in the region.
Yes, this is the guy I mentioned in my post from a couple weeks ago.
Let me reiterate a point I made this morning. For all the talk about “interventions”, ‘en masse’ defections from the Trump campaign, major GOP leaders renouncing their support, let’s not kid ourselves about what’s driving this. It’s the polls.
Polls, polls, polls.
Zachary Roth was our go-to reporter on voting rights and voter suppression issues for years. He left TPM a while back and now he’s out with a whole book on the topic, The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy. This is an incredibly important issue at any time. But it’s very relevant today with the raft of recent court decisions knocking down state voter suppression laws and Donald Trump’s new push to put bogus claims of ‘voter fraud’ at the center of the election and perhaps use them to lay the groundwork to contest a loss in November. Zack is going to join us for a Live Chat in The Hive (sub.req) tomorrow at 1 pm eastern.
Come by and get your question in now or join us tomorrow at 1 pm.