Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

The worst part of the day is the time between when a favorable poll comes out and when RCP updates their site to include it in their average!

 

They may wait awhile today, nets delay their polls to coincide with Sunday gabfests. NBC/Marist just released Clinton up one in FL, up six in NC. YF, did you read that great article in Times/Upshot back in September where they gave four different well-respected pollster the same data set and they got back four different results?

 

Want to see a dinner table chat between Alex Jones and Macy Gray ... those gravely voices.

 

Cubs fans and Trump supporters are in the same boat.

 

538 has it 78.6 % for Clinton, down from 84.6% last week

 

Don't cherry pick. It still isn't a close election, and it won't be until Trump show an signs of life in both North Carolina (-6 in today's poll) or Pennsylvania (-8)

 

Or Michigan or Wisconsin!

 

It would have to be both.

If he loses Pennsylvania and NC, both of which he is getting consistently smacked around in in the polls, he can win Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine CD-2 and one of Michigan/Wisconsin and he still loses.

It really, truly is over.

 

One ran off on his own. I think he might not have wireless in his van down by the river.

 

There has to be another Trump video or audio that gets released this week.

 

You and 538 are massively overstating his chances, albeit for different reasons.

It took less than two hours for the "reopening" story to evaporate. At best for Trump it is a situation where Clinton spin and media bias neutralized it so that it became a polarized issue.

He has a massive deficit in cash on hand and reserved ad buys. He has an even larger deficit in field operations. Undecided voters have an unprecedentedly high negative view of him.

That last one is a big problem. This isn't a sporting event where you can just keep scoring points. You can only grab what is out there. Trump gaining a point doesn't mean he has momentum to gain the next one. It means he has gotten the easiest available point and the next one will be harder. In a perfect world for Trump the next 10 days, he probably can gain another 1-2 points from Republican consolidation. But those are the only two points available to him. Everybody else has already mentally disqualified him from being president.

And those next 10 days won't go perfectly for him. He has an ad buy deficit, a cash on hand deficit, and a massive field operations deficit.

And even if they did, the effect would be minimized because 20-25% of the final total have already voted. And a nice side effect of that fact is that we have a way to check the polling in advance to see if there is a turnout ratio happening that nobody expects, an early warning sign of the systemic polling error that is literally his only hope. But the early voting is corroborating the polls, telling the exact same story.

Media polling, though, is cheap and dirty. It gives us a good picture because we have such a volume of it, but the campaigns and parties have access to much better polling because they actually spend the money to do it right. We can look at their behavior to see what information they have. What do we see? The national Republican Party coming up with "don't give President Clinton a friendly congress" campaigns and telling downballot candidates they have permission to break with the nominee. The Trump campaign pulling back on spending and playing defense in states like Utah and Arizona while staffers spend more time planning their next career move than talking up their chances. The Clinton campaign pushing to expand the map and diverting resources to places where it helps downballot more than her direct chances.

It is boring, so people whose livelihoods depend on the horse race narrative are disincentivized to frame it that way, but it is over and it has been over for quite some time. Republicans have a hard time winning national elections with their current demographic coalition, they nominated a man who steered right into that demographic problem, and that man is a narcisstic amateur who doesn't like to listen to the people who know how to run a campaign. Those three facts decided this campaign, not the media or the conventions or some imaginary key moment in history. And they decided it months ago.