Clinton is up 50-38 in the ABC News national tracking poll, with Johnson down to 5% and Stein getting a mere two percent. I can see zero from Jill Stein’s house.
This inaugural 2016 ABC News tracking poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, was conducted Thursday through Saturday among 1,391 adults, including 874 likely voters. This is the first in what will be daily ABC News tracking poll reports from now to Election Day. The Washington Post will join ABC’s tracking survey later this week.
The previous ABC/Post poll found a sharp 12-point decline in enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters, almost exclusively among those who’d preferred a different GOP nominee. Intended participation now has followed: The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.
Vote preference results among some groups also are striking. Among them:
• Clinton leads Trump by 20 percentage points among women, 55-35 percent. She’s gained 12 points (and Trump’s lost 16) from mid-October among non-college-educated white women, some of whom initially seemed to rally to Trump after disclosure of the videotape.
• Clinton has doubled her lead to 32 points, 62-30 percent, among college-educated white women, a group that’s particularly critical of his response to questions about his sexual conduct. (Seventy-six percent disapprove, 67 percent strongly.)
• That said, Clinton’s also ahead numerically (albeit not significantly) among men, 44-41 percent, a first in ABC News and ABC/Post polling.
• Trump is just +4 among whites overall, 47-43 percent, a group Mitt Romney won by 20 points in 2012. Broad success among whites is critical for any Republican candidate; nonwhites, a reliably Democratic group, favor Clinton by 54 points, 68-14 percent.
Even with the gender gap in candidate support, the results show damage to Trump across groups on the issue of his sexual conduct. While 71 percent of women disapprove of his handling of questions about his treatment of women, so do 67 percent of men. And 57 percent overall disapprove “strongly” – 60 percent of women, but also 52 percent of men. By partisan group, 41 percent of Republican likely voters disapprove of Trump on this question, a heavy loss in one’s own party. That grows to 70 percent of independents and nearly all Democrats, 92 percent.
It didn’t help Trump that he lost all three debates, but I suspect his descent into full-blown InfoWars tinfoil hat bugnuttery is probably the single worst factor contributing to his ninth inning collapse.
It’s hard to say precisely why Republicans are declaring less of an intention to vote, but two main ideas that might explain it come to mind. First, as the consensus grows that he will lose, it just doesn’t seem to matter to a lot of voters if they vote, but this is probably more pronounced for those who anticipate being on the losing side.
Second, by telling people the vote is rigged, Trump may be inadvertently dissuading his own supporters from believing enough in the process to participate in it.
Obviously the sexually assault revelations have turned the stomachs of a lot of erstwhile anti-Clinton voters who may now decline to endorse Trump by actually voting for him.
It all adds up to a swoon, as Trump and the Republicans appear to be fading at the post.
This only works if accompanied by a tsunami of un- or loosely-connected GIFs and JPG’s.
I think the “rigged” argument is definitely contributing – he essentially conceded the election three weeks before Election Day. A supporter who takes that at face value will believe that 1) Trump will lose; and 2) my vote won’t count, anyway. Not a recipe for enthusiasm.
I very much agree with this point. Trump’s voters are depressed because Trump is depressing them. He is actively and aggressively taking away their electoral hopes.
Let’s not forget the part Clinton played in depressing them. Trump and many of his followers lived the the Clinton Derangement Bubble, where she is weak and they are strong, where faced with Bill’s paramours she would wilt, where rhetorical pressure would make her hysterical.
Instead she turned out to be competent, calm, and stronger than Trump.
No wonder they are depressed. They were promised victory, with their opponents humiliated.
.
Right. It’s the same thing as four years ago with all those photographs of depressed white people sitting around moping in campaign offices on election night, stunned, crushed.
They persist in believing that Nixon’s “silent majority” is real and that most people agree with them; that (as somone aroud here put it recently) the Bush-era news media construction that the average American voter is a conservative Republican and liberals are some kind of strange fringe in San Francisco and Greenwich Village and Chicago that nobody listens to.
I’m looking forward to savoring the 2016 vintage of wingnut tears. It looks like a bumper crop harvest, bless the Great Pumpkin’s tiny, incompetent, hands.
delusion (or brainwashing if you don’t want to grant them agency, though I think that’s too generous), along with the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media’s role in enabling it, is fundamental to understanding current U.S. politics.
They believe their own B.S.
My GOP-Base-in-Grief model seems to be working out as I thought.
2012. Rmoney: The End of Denial
2015 – 2016.5. Strongman Trump: Anger and Bargaining
2016.5 – Beyond. Trump Collapse: Depression
If they stay home to binge watch Storage Wars and Duck Dynasty, it can be a wave election. I still think the Strongman Trump supporters show up enough to prevent the House from flipping, but 2018 could be interesting, depending on how the post-2016 election period goes. Do Strongman Trump supporters go and seek revenge on the backstabbing Republicans? Does Strongman Trump create his own propaganda outlet to make the revenge efficient and effective? Do the sane, grifter-subtype Republicans change party to (I) or even (D) in order to remain relevant national players? Does some unknown-unknown event negate everything else?
The prize seems to be flipping the Senate, appointing 2-3 USSC justices, and having a shot at flipping the House in 2020. Although we’ll probably have a shooting war or two with Russia in the meantime. Because neoliberal neoconservatives. Also: Drones.
Acceptance for the GOP Base is when conservatives (not reactionaries) vote for the Democratic party, because the Progressive party (P) is full of utopian liberals who want the poors to have the same stuff as the working and middle classes.
The sooner we get there, the better.
Progesssive party? What’s the secret code here?
Yep, definitely going to war with Russia, because Hillary Clinton is an ignoramus who doesn’t know what the nuclear codes are even for.
I find it intriguing that the folks convinced that Clinton is lying about the TPP are equally convinced that anything she says about no-fly zones, say, is absolutely to be taken at face value.
How does the US get the right to install a no-fly zone in another country about a third? of the way around the globe? Wouldn’t that be an act of war, naked aggression against Syria and, by extension, Russia?
How does the US get the right to install a no-fly zone in another country about a third?
It doesn’t. That’s why declaring a NFZ is effectively an act of war. Syria invited Russia. They didn’t invite us.
And whether it’s true or not, it certainly creates the IMPRESSION of necrophilia, which is clearly a problem the Trumps will need to deal with.
whoops, wrong thread for that comment…
Are you sure?
What is the right thread for necrophilia?
Every thread is the right thread for necrophilia.
.
Shucks — and here I was trying to figure out how the US establishing a no-fly zone in Syria would create an impression of necrophilia that the Trumps would have to deal with.
I suspect the NFZ statements are bluster, but I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
Suppose the United Nations declared an NFZ? Suppose NATO did? (I believe this happened as part of the NATO intervention in Kosovo. In case anyone has forgotten, Serbia was ethnically cleansing Kosovar Albanians.) I kind of think that the same objection voiced by Quentin would still apply.
I’m a fan of avoiding ends-justify-the-means reasoning. I’m also a fan of recognizing that few things in life are black and white.
American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.
the opiate of the masses.
I’m amused at how accurate Joel’s point is re. statements about the TPP and no-fly zones.
An unfortunate number of progressives believe if Clinton takes a good progressive position on a whole swath of issues, she’s lying. And if Clinton takes a bad or less than good progressive position, she’s totally telling the truth.
Propaganda, it’s a helluva drug.
Here’s a good question: what’s in the emails and other documents that WikiLeaks hasn’t selectively released? Some of those documents may refute some of the impressions taken from the documents that they have selectively released, but since Assange and Co. are clearly trying to damage Clinton and the DNC as their #1 priority, and abandoning the priority of creating more transparency in government, we may never know the info they’re suppressing which is flattering to Clinton and the DNC.
I know right?
It’s almost as if they have been conditioned by 25+ years of Republican Propaganda to only believe the bad things about Hillary Clinton. Or perhaps it’s because they have been conditioned by their own left wing-nut ideology to believe that only they have the correct answers to all the worlds problems.
Either way it is always interesting to watch authoritarians pretend to be anti-authoritarians.
My reading of the issue has to do with ideological analysis not accepting the fuzziness or reality compared with clear and simple models. By far the biggest illusion is the power of an American President and the denigration of the power of other players.
Getting Bernie Sanders a chair of the Senate Budget Committee would be a huge deal, but their analysis is that US elections don’t matter because of Florida 2000 and Citizens United.
Boom. Headshot. Same applies to Syria. Great comment.
I’ll believe everything you guys say when I see it.
But she ain’t president yet.
No snark intended.
I’m moderately — very moderately — optimistic.
Don’t agree. I think what they’ve released is exactly what you should expect from a Clinton admin. She’s exactly who I’ve thought she is. If anything, the emails put her in a more positive light — Podesta comes out not bad at all. Sandler, too, showing a lot of power brokers behind the party know Piketty is right.
Tanden? Exactly how I’ve pictured her based on public persona.
Why are liberals acting so hard to downplay their significance, while at the same time saying we don’t learn anything new? The peak behind the curtain should embolden leftists — there is no grand conspiracy, a lot of money players behind the party are to the left of a lot of elected Dems, and they’re paying attention to where the energy on the left is.
You talking objective significance or propaganda/cherrypicked to support preconceptions significance? Because the former, yes, ranges from nothingburger through do you not know how this game is played to that’s actually helpful, while the latter is emboldening cries from the Jill Stein demographic of see? see? she’s just as horrible a neolibcon as we said!
My default position with politicians, just as it is with co-workers or other people in my life, is to accept what they say at face value until proven otherwise. Hence I regard Donald Trump’s outlandish statements as reflecting exactly what he would do (or at least propose to do) as president. Thus when I hear people describing Trunk as a con man or carnival baker, I’m mystified.
Well, aside from the details, he’s saying that everything’s going to start getting unbelievably fantastic within a day after he’s elected. He’ll bring back jobs to the rust belt. He’ll solve the crime problem. He’ll solve every problem. And he won’t even break a sweat, because he knows exactly how to do it. You really believe that?
The real question is, does Trump believe all that? Is he so narcissistic and uninformed that he really thinks that’s all there is to it? — Just order his underlings do this, do that, and either it’s done or they’re fired?
Hard to take that line with a guy who changes his mind every two seconds on every issue aside from MAGA, the death penalty, and getting revenge on his enemies.
Aside from being completely unqualified for the job and emboldening fascists and racists in our midst, I could give a fuck about Trump’s “promises” of what he says he’ll do. All one needs to know is that Steve Bannon has his ear, and that he can in no way shape or form be allowed near power. Ever.
I get the feeling that for Trump all this stuff is just irrelevant details. All he has to do is tell his flunkies to deal with whatever while he does the vision thing, and hey, no problem. Issues are just slogans, and whatever the ad campaign of the moment requires he’ll say.
Here’s the thing though, seabe.
WikiLeaks has departed from their previous behavior in the way they are releasing these documents. In the past, they have usually taken time to curate their releases and make them searchable, but they have almost always released documents in a large dump, not in drips and drabs.
In the case of the releases of the documents gained by the DNC and Podesta hacks, they are suppressing the release of many documents, making only partial releases of others, and choosing day by day to highlight which documents and which portions of documents we should have access to and pay most attention to.
And all this now has the quite evident intent to depress liberal/progressive/Democratic Party voter turnout. This increases the chance of electing Donald Trump President, a candidate who specifically opposes the very things WikiLeaks claims to value most.
WikiLeaks will be unsuccessful in their quest to win the White House for Donald Trump. But please answer, for yourself if no one else, exactly why they are abandoning their claimed mission and their past release practices.
Assange has been locked in the Ecuador embassy since 2011. He has got to finance his stay, the operation of Wikileaks, and pay his attys. So, maybe Putin made him an offer he could not refuse.
Exactly what is your point? That Wikileaks is selectively releasing their stuff to drip drip across media cycles? A lot of journalists do that — mostly because they’re curating the documents and seeing what’s in the public interest, and what’s not. Are you saying Wikileaks should release it all? None of it? You can’t have it both ways. I’m surprised you’re not taking Joy Reid’s line of “fabrications” at this rate.
If they’re going to release this hacked info, I believe WikiLeaks should release it all, as they have in the past. I would make exceptions for personal/private information, such as phone numbers, emails, credit card information, addresses and emails involving people’s private relationships. Those should be excluded from release.
It is a remarkable change in WikiLeaks’ past practice that they are releasing information in the way they are. It is also remarkable that they are asking the public to pay special attention to certain information which they spin with a negative presentation. WikiLeaks is not presenting the information neutrally or allowing ambiguous interpretations; they are clearly attempting to influence readers in order to get them to take on the most damaging interpretations of the information. Finally, WikiLeaks appears to be withholding information which flatters the DNC and the Clinton camp.
Also, this:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/heres-what-i-learned-about-julian-assange?utm_term=.mxbW4en5J#.as
51KAPWY
Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange
The WikiLeaks founder is out to settle a score with Hillary Clinton and reassert himself as a player on the world stage, says BuzzFeed News special correspondent James Ball, who worked for Assange at WikiLeaks.
posted on Oct. 23, 2016, at 1:11 p.m.
James Ball
BuzzFeed Special Correspondent
“…Assange is routinely either so lionised by supporters or demonised by detractors that his real character is lost entirely…
…What’s often underestimated is his gift for bullshit. Assange can, and does, routinely tell obvious lies: WikiLeaks has deep and involved procedures; WikiLeaks was founded by a group of 12 activists, primarily from China; Israel Shamir never had cables; we have received information that [insert name of WikiLeaks critic] has ties to US intelligence…
…Redaction – possibly one of the clearest apparent changes between 2010 and 2016 WikiLeaks – became one of these trust issues. For Assange, redacting releases was essentially an issue of expediency: It would remove an attack line from the Pentagon and state, and keep media partners onside. For media outlets, it was the only responsible way to release such sensitive information.
These days, WikiLeaks routinely publishes information without redaction, and seemingly with only minimal pre-vetting. This is merely a change in expediency: There are no longer newspaper partners to keep onside. The results are a partial vindication for both sides – while it’s hard to dispute that some of WikiLeaks’ publication of private data has been needlessly reckless and invasive, there remains no evidence of any direct harm coming to someone as a result of a WikiLeaks release.
Conversely, Assange often trusts strangers more than those he knows well: He dislikes taking advice, he dislikes anyone else having a power base, and he dislikes being challenged – especially by women. He runs his own show his own way, and won’t delegate. He’s happy to play on the conspiratorial urges of others, with little sign as to whether or not he believes them himself.
There are few limits to how far Assange will go to try to control those around him. Those working at WikiLeaks – a radical transparency organisation based on the idea that all power must be accountable – were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million.
I refused to sign the document, which was sprung on me on what was supposed to be a short trip to a country house used by WikiLeaks. The others present – all of whom had signed without reading – then alternately pressured, cajoled, persuaded, charmed and pestered me to sign it, alone and in groups, until well past 4am.
Given how remote the house was, there was no prospect of leaving. I stayed the night, only to be woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign. It was two hours later before I could get Assange off the bed so I could (finally) get some pants on, and many hours more until I managed to leave the house without signing the ridiculous contract. An apologetic staffer present for the farce later admitted they’d been under orders to “psychologically pressure” me until I signed.
And once you have fallen foul of Assange — challenged him too openly, criticised him in public, not toed the line loyally enough — you are done. There is no such thing as honest disagreement, no such thing as a loyal opposition differing on a policy or political stance…
…Those who have faced the greatest torments are, of course, the two women who accused Assange of sexual offences in Sweden in the summer of 2010. The details of what happened over those few days remain a matter for the Swedish justice system, not speculation, but having seen and heard Assange and those around him discuss the case, having read out the court documents, and having followed the extradition case in the UK all the way to the supreme court, I can say it is a real, complicated sexual assault and rape case. It is no CIA smear, and it relates to Assange’s role at WikiLeaks only in that his work there is how they met.
Assange’s decision – and it was a decision – to elide his Swedish case with any possible US prosecution was a cynical one. It led many to support his cause alongside those of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. And yet it is not: It is more difficult, not easier, to extradite Assange to the US from Sweden than from the UK, should Washington even wish to do so.
Assange coming to believe his own spin may be what’s been behind six years of effective imprisonment for him. No one is keeping him in the Ecuadorian embassy – where he has fallen out with his hosts – but himself, and a fear of losing face. But the women who began the case have lost at least as much, becoming for months and years two of the most hated figures on the internet, smeared as “whores”, “CIA spies”, and more. They will never get their time back…”.
I’m not opposed to them releasing it all and keeping personal stuff that has no public interest from seeing the light. But I’m also not opposed to curating of documents and releasing them as time goes on. Clearly, their spin on the release of the documents is propaganda, but how does that bear on what’s actually inside the documents?
Your last statement is asserted without evidence. I would not be surprised in the least if all of it is eventually released.
I’ve read that James Ball piece. Doesn’t change my opinion, although I did find it interesting and largely within my own read on Wikileaks/Julian. Just as an aside, your quotations of articles on this site frequently goes well beyond fair use.
I think it’s very safe to claim that there are emails and documents gained from the DNC and Podesta hacks which shows the players in a good light. Why is that information selectively excluded from feature presentations?
Well, because, as you concede here, WikiLeaks is currently executing an ongoing exercise in anti-Democratic Party propaganda.
So you are merely assuming this is the case without any proof. Like I said, and like Tarheel highlighted from Kit, what they’ve released isn’t even that bad and/or there’s no “smoking gun”. All sizzle and no steak. There’s some embarrassing things, but the fact that Julian wants to damage Clinton while I (a person who does not like Clinton’s politics and is already predisposed to not like her) finds much to like about her team shows me that they’re already releasing what they’ve got. Indeed, a lot of times their “spin” isn’t even reflected in the document(s) that accompany it. Go to the source and it says something different. He’s trying to maximize potency by leaking until the election. but I believe all of it will be out there by Nov 8. Further, if they were doing what you’re saying why would there be a lot of personal crap in the trove that has nothing to do with Clinton/DNC and shouldn’t have been released at all?
I’m not sure what documents you expect to see, really.
Adding more, this entire episode is another revealing exercise. Did the liberals have some wild expectation of the politics of a campaign not being what’s shown? Sanders supporters and leftists sure are derided as naive by liberals of all stripes (heh, as documented in the emails), but the liberals longing for something else to be exposed feel like the naive ones.
And to leftists with their “I’m shocked shocked!” attitude about the emails are equally exposing themselves as hacks. They can take that tack if they want, but I don’t want to be part of that.
I’m not shocked by what’s in the emails. I’m just interested in observing what WikiLeaks is trying to accomplish. It does not appear to me that their chief goal is to create open, transparent, accountable government.
Maybe the garish scowling-Hillary-with-bombs-and-dollars cartoon on the introduction page to the Clinton email archive on the WikiLeaks site helped inform my opinion in this area. Maybe hearing Assange say recently “The American liberal media is…erecting a demon who is going to put nooses around everyone’s necks as soon as she wins this election, which she is almost certainly going to do” made it clear to me how distorted his viewpoint has become, and how his goals have changed.
A person has to be looking through a funhouse mirror to believe that a Trump Presidency would be better on the issues WikiLeaks has traditionally been preoccupied with.
We simply look at what she does, rather than what she says.
Recommended in all cases. But imperative when dealing with a Clinton.
Hillary, and Bill, have done plenty of good things.
And many not so good.
We’ll see. My guess is Trump loses most of his influence once he’s stomped. He may call for revenge but I doubt there’ll be a lot of folks listening. How this all plays out is very much a guessing game but he’s ripped the mask off the Republican base and created a template for the next demagogue. Perhaps the next one will be a smarter politician with less dirt for opposition researchers to turn up. Perhaps the next one will be merely evil without any kind of major personality disorder.
I am still moderately terrified at how close we can come to voting in fascism.
I think the Republicans could have won with a competent demagogue. Fortunately for the USA, they nominated an incompetent. But next time ?
There’s an interesting story about how Kurt Godel, the logician, had discovered a flaw in the Constitution which would allow the rise of fascism. He was just barely dissuaded by his friend Albert Einstein from discussing it with the judge at his naturalization hearing, and he never wrote it down, but I suspect this is what he had in mind.
So the arrogant patriots are our greatest national security liability; quelle surprise! They are apostates too. A confederacy of ignoramuses; better off without. Conservatism as a mental health problem.
I don’t know what he had in mind but I agree that a competent demagogue could have spelled trouble. Wouldn’t seem all that hard to appeal to Bernie supporters by running to the left and right of Clinton with a strong and credible reform agenda.
I think we need to have a serious discussion about what an unsustainable national security vulnerability is created by all these armed yahoos willing to believe any anti-government nonsense. Sedition is an actual crime.
It’s tempting to say we’re in new territory but, historically, we’re not. There were significant rebellions in our early history and the years leading up to the Civil War were rife with various forms of insurrection. Even in the early part of the 20th Century, there were credible risks of revolution. The communist party was once quite strong. My grandparents were members. It’s just not something we’ve seen within the memory of anyone now living.
It’s tempting to say we’re in new territory but, historically, we’re not. There were significant rebellions in our early history and the years leading up to the Civil War were rife with various forms of insurrection. Even in the early part of the 20th Century, there were credible risks of revolution. The communist party was once quite strong. My grandparents were members. It’s just not something we’ve seen within the memory of anyone now living.
And the Wikileaks email gambit fizzled. So did the Putin attribution apparently, but we will have to wait for that to settle out.
On the Podesta emails, proof that it failed. When you’ve lost a former Firedoglake frontpager,….
The “fizzling” of the Putin attribution you speak of is only a minor qualification and does not change what intelligence has been saying for months.
“The intelligence community concluded that the hacks were ‘almost certainly directed by senior Russian government officials.’ Whether that includes Putin, [Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said, only the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Homeland Security Department can say.
“Earnest did say that the Kremlin’s motivation is destabilization.”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/white-house-wont-point-finger-at-putin-for-email-hacks/article/260
4380
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-account
s
What kind of evidence would lead you to accept that Russia might be responsible for the hacks and subsequent leaks to Wikileaks? Do you deny that evidence exists or whether it is sufficient to reach a conclusion?
All the Trumpsters have left going for them I guess is stealing Clinton yard signs and sulking. We’re pissed about our sign getting stolen, though.