Take a moment to look at this closing ad from Donald Trump.
A list of election/numbers observations to peruse as you bite your nails and obsess over the polls.
Read this note from TPM Reader MJ. It is equal parts illustrative, humanizing and disturbing …
The last line of your recent post struck me: “Even at this late stage, I find it genuinely shocking that so many elected Republicans and GOP elites can actually say to themselves that it is safe to have this man become President.”
I’m shocked too. But I’ve witnessed first hand the psychology of accepting Trump. I have close relatives, an aunt and uncle, who are moderate Republicans. It’s been frustrating (but also fascinating) to watch their evolution through this election. It really follows Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, finally acceptance.
Tierney Sneed has been all over this story since the night of the final presidential debate, when it bubbled into the open: whether the RNC was violating that decades-old consent decree it is saddled with by virtue of having an atrocious record of trying to deny minorities their right to vote.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent more of my time on this story than any other we’ve been covering, so I was eager to see the ruling from the federal court in New Jersey that was handling the case.
The judge’s decision just came down, and I think he nailed it.
You can read it here.
Let me share a basic premise with you. Right or wrong, it’s informed my understanding of the race for months. The Clinton campaign has better information about the race than the media (i.e., public polls) or the Trump campaign.
More than 800 polling places across the South closed since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Check it out.
I flagged this yesterday but here Deadspin or whoever put together this video has put the two segments together.
You Make The Call: https://t.co/62pm8bNWVO pic.twitter.com/oU1Tjbg5Uu
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) November 5, 2016
This follows up on what David wrote below about watching Trump’s speech this morning. This has been going on for so long a lot of it starts to seem normal. Like a child or a spouse living in an abusive household, your perception of what’s normal, tolerable and okay becomes deformed by the impact of the abuse. Some of it though is simply not having listened – listened closely – to Trump for a while and what he actually says. As David said, here’s Lauren’s write up of this morning’s rant.
One of the challenges for journalists on the trail covering any presidential campaign is that the stump speeches become a sort of metronomic monotony. After a few weeks or months of hearing the same themes and the same canned lines over and over, you begin to listen only for what is new or different, and everything else becomes background noise. This isn’t a news flash. It’s just one of the hazards of the job, but in a real sense it colors the coverage in its own way.
Which brings us to Trump.