| | | | Clinton takes aim at down-ballot Republicans | | After nearly five months of ripping into Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton suddenly has a new list of enemies on the campaign trail: Republican candidates in competitive down-ballot races. Clinton's pivot is an unmistakable sign that she and her top aides have never felt more confident about victory on November 8, write CNN's MJ Lee and Dan Merica.
It started Saturday, when Clinton slammed Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. Then on Sunday, she called North Carolina Democratic challenger Deborah Ross "exactly that kind of partner I need." And today in New Hampshire, Clinton touted Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte's challenger, Maggie Hassan, saying that "unlike her opponent, (Hassan) has never been afraid to stand up to Donald Trump."
Clinton also is increasingly planning for what she believes will be her transition to the presidency, per CNN's Jeff Zeleny. West Wing staff is part of what she's considering -- and there's buzz about Ron Klain as her potential chief of staff.
A scathing attack from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who campaigned with Clinton and Hassan today in New Hampshire: "He thinks that because he has a mouthful of Tic Tacs he can force himself on any woman within groping distance. Well I've got news for you, Donald Trump. Women have had it with guys like you. And nasty women have really had it with guys like you. And on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever." Dan explains the full context. | | | Hillary Clinton's lead over Donald Trump is 5 points nationally among likely voters, a new CNN/ORC poll shows. That's after an ABC News poll released yesterday found Clinton ahead by 12 points. Here are the demographic breakdowns from the CNN/ORC poll: | | No, the polls are not rigged against Donald Trump | | Donald Trump and his supporters are clinging to a new -- and utterly false -- conspiracy theory: Pollsters are oversampling Democrats in a bid to convince Trump supporters that voting is a lost cause and rig the election against him.
The origin of this new theory is a 2008 email from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked account in which a pollster asks Podesta for "oversamples for our polling." That has been spun (here and here and here) into evidence that polls like one from ABC News released Sunday -- which, like the overall electorate, included more Democrats than Republicans -- is the product of a media in cahoots with Clinton's campaign. Trump picked up on it in Florida today, saying: "WikiLeaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique, and that's happening to me all the time." He also played it up on Twitter: | | Here's the reality about "oversampling." Pollsters often dive deeper into certain subgroups (such as Latinos, or African-Americans) to reduce their margins of error for those groups. Then they weight those groups to their actual proportion of the population. Pew has a helpful explainer.
As for the specific email in question -- it doesn't reveal much of anything. Podesta didn't even send the email -- it was Tom Matzzie, who was conducting private polling. His email mentions "media" -- but that's a reference to TV ads, or "paid media" in campaign lingo, not to news outfits' polling. And it makes no reference whatsoever to "oversampling Democrats." Matzzie himself -- now out of politics -- mocked these conspiracy theories today: | | | Trump himself conceded he's "somewhat behind" in an interview today. (Though he later claimed at a rally, "I actually think we're winning.") And Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, seemed to admit that Trump trails in the polls today on Twitter -- writing "don't count him out." | | The oddest part of all this: We've been here before. In 2012, Mitt Romney's supporters argued polls were "skewed" against him. Dean Chambers launched the now-defunct site UnskewedPolls.com, based on the claim that the electorate's demographics would look more like the 2010 Republican wave than that of the 2008 presidential race. It turned out to be wrong. Former George W. Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino wrote on Medium: "By believing that the polls were wrong, I had let both myself and our viewers down. I had done them a disservice. ... We shouldn't have to learn this lesson again."
This has been a frustrating episode for Republicans who work in politics, such as ex-National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer Liam Donovan: | | | Annie Cardelle posed for a picture with Donald Trump's son Eric Trump at a rally ... while wearing a Trump that says "Latina Contra Trump." Contra means "against" in Spanish. | | What the leaks reveal about the Clintons' differences | | | BuzzFeed's Ben Smith dives into the WikiLeaks hack of John Podesta's email and writes: "(T)hey revealed one truth about the Clintons' world, something that has long been said privately but rarely laid so bare: The deep cultural difference between Bill Clinton's freewheeling circle and Hillary Clinton's more disciplined and professionalized aides. And underneath that is the difference between a politician who fought his way to power by any means necessary; and one whose own political career began in the White House." | | Ayotte: 'I made a mistake' calling Trump a role model | | New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte has dropped Donald Trump -- and now, facing a tough re-election challenge, she is making the case that she'd be a check on Hillary Clinton in Washington. "There's so much at stake in this presidential election: the Supreme Court, our national security, so many issues that matter to people of this state," Ayotte told CNN's Manu Raju in an interview. "And Gov. (Maggie) Hassan is going to essentially follow Hillary Clinton's lead on all of them, where I'm going to stand up to her when she's not taking us in the right direction."
She also explained the moment she said in a debate with Hassan that Trump is a role model. "I corrected that because I made a mistake. I mean (in) debates many people are -- you're asked a lot of questions at a debate. But it's clear to me that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, are role models," Ayotte said.
Other Senate race news and notes:
Indiana: Evan Bayh had lunch with bank lobbyists on the day of the 2008 bailout vote, Politico's John Bresnahan reports.
North Carolina: GOP Sen. Richard Burr has a 49% to 43% lead over Democratic challenger Deborah Ross, a Monmouth poll finds. | | | Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane was sentenced to 10 to 23 months in prison over a politically motivated act of retribution. ... Rapper Jay Z will headline a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland. ... A former aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie believes she was set up as the scapegoat for Bridgegate. | | | Get the Nightcap, a comprehensive summary of the most important political news, delivered to your inbox daily. | | | | | |
Post a Comment