Donald Trump just held a press conference in St. Louis 90 minutes before the debate with three of Bill Clinton’s most prominent accusers, including Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick. (The fourth woman sitting with Trump was a child rape victim whose attacker Hillary Clinton defended when she was a lawyer.)
We’ll be updating you every day from today to election day with our constantly updated TPM Electoral Scoreboard – bookmark it and return often. It includes every state poll when it’s released. Today the Scoreboard stands at Clinton 341, Trump 186, as Ohio moves from Toss Up to Lean Clinton. Arizona is currently the only state in the Toss Up category. Click on the map below to visit the full-interactive TPM Electoral Scoreboard with detailed trend estimates, ratings and all the polls in every state.
If the build up of election awfulness is becoming too much for you, take a time out to listen to the 5th episode of my new podcast where we travel back three thousand years to the twilight of the Bronze Age to talk to historian and archeologist Eric Cline about his fascinating book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Truly fascinating stuff.
Yesterday I noted that there were two conversations going on in the GOP. One is party elites and officeholders finally distancing themselves or fully cutting ties with Donald Trump. The other is GOP voters themselves. They only started to make themselves heard yesterday afternoon when they booed and heckled Paul Ryan, Nevada Senate candidate Joe Heck and others in afternoon rallies. We can now see them in a fuller light in the first post-Trump Tape poll.
As we see numerous elected Republicans disavow Donald Trump and withdraw their support, let’s remember the endless number of things that they were willing to tolerate. Everything. The whole list. If this was too much, all the rest was apparently okay. But there’s another point too. Donald Trump has never been ahead through the entire race. But he’s been on a full skid since the first presidential debate on September 26th. For anyone who had eyes to see it, it was clear before yesterday afternoon’s revelations that Trump was almost certainly going down to defeat. If he were still just a bit behind in the polls, would they be walking away from him now? I think the question answers itself.
You may have thought the shoe dropped yesterday or at various other points in the campaign. But the big one, in electoral terms, just dropped in the last hour. In any case, Trumpism has more than two shoes to work with. Last night, GOP electeds all agreed to issue statements of condemnation of Donald Trump, maintain their endorsements and hunker down. Today there’s been a steady stream of Republicans, especially those in tight races, abandoning Trump. As I said in my previous post, all the abandonments can do is leave the GOP in an acutely vulnerable electoral limbo – with zombie Trump, a name on the ballot, either dropped out or disowned by his party. But now we have the real players returning to the stage.
It’s not that I feel the least bit sorry for them. They made their bed with eyes wide open. Nor is ethical or civic decision very hard. But as a purely political matter, the choice now faced by Republicans in tight reelection battles must be an excruciating one – particularly for embattled senators like Ayotte, Toomey, Heck and the rest.
I wanted to share a few thoughts on that already infamous Trump video and its likely political repercussions.
In a statement just released moments ago, Speaker Paul Ryan says he’s “sickened” by the Trump tape and says Trump is “no longer attending tomorrow’s event in Wisconsin.”
Ryan appears to remain a supporter and endorser of Trump, saying he hopes Trump “works to to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests.”
Variety and Access Hollywood (I know, I know) are reporting that the woman Donald Trump was describing in his now infamous comments with Nancy O’Dell, Billy Bush’s then-co-host on Access Hollywood.