This is interesting, if not a little disconcerting. The Democrats are already laying the groundwork to damage potential Republican 2020 presidential candidates. Mostly by tying them to Trump.
Maybe it was a little naive of me, but I didn't know this industry existed. You can get paid to figure out ways to hack on a guy who might not even be in politics in a couple years? You guess who your opponent might be decide on how to best attack them three years down the road? Kinda sickening. And apparently standard operating procedure for both sides.
Also of note, Obama fouls up the use of "begs the question" and that always makes me snicker when Mr. Smart Guys do it:
"He also called Donald Trump a dangerous con artist who has spent a career sticking it to working people,” Obama said in Miami Gardens last week. “Now, that begs the question, since we’re in Florida. Why does Marco Rubio still plan to vote for Donald Trump? Why is he supporting Donald Trump?""
Quote:
“We started the 2016 cycle the day after the 2012 election, and that was a successful model,” said David Brock, founder of American Bridge, the main Democratic opposition research group, which is helping to lead these efforts.
uhh, was it successful? Would they even be winning if they hadn't been handed the worse candidate for president in the last 50 years as an opponent?
uhh, was it successful? Would they even be winning if they hadn't been handed the worse candidate for president in the last 50 years as an opponent?
Seems pretty presumptive.
Yeah that's a good point. I can't imagine they started digging up dirt on Trump four years ago and really, he has provided nearly all the dirt on himself.
Interesting write-up by Nate Silver on the current state of the race. Basically saying this thing isn't over yet, and the Dems shouldn't get too cocky.
Quote:
While Trump’s performance during the second and third debates was middling as judged by post-debate polls, he at least tossed his base plenty of red meat. And there’s been less discussion recently of the videotape released on Oct. 8 that showed Trump condoning unwanted sexual contact toward women, or of the many women who came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
Quote:
The race could easily tighten further. And our forecast gives Trump better odds than most other models because it accounts for the possibility of a systemic polling error, a greater risk than people may assume. A 16 percent chance of a Trump presidency isn’t nothing — as we’ve pointed out before, it’s about the same as the chances of losing a “game” of Russian roulette. And 15 percent is about the same chance we gave the San Antonio Spurs of beating the Golden State Warriors last night — the Spurs won by 29 points.
Agreed. Their system really does breed this. When you only have 2 main parties, it becomes a competition for pride moreso than a collection of people actually trying to do something useful. Not saying pride isn't prevalent in every political system, but there's a different dynamic between us vs them, and us vs them and them and them. In the latter scenario, parties are required to work together.
So Everytime a new game finishes, it instantly becomes how to win the next game, and it's way easier to trash and obstruct your opponent than it is to actually do things that require real work. This happens at all levels of their government. And even personally. Politics ends friendships and families. Again, it does elsewhere, but I don't think the team mentality is as prevalent. People align themselves with whomever they agree with, and that does change in other systems. there's no room for change in the US because both parties need to appeal to everyone.
So Everytime a new game finishes, it instantly becomes how to win the next game, and it's way easier to trash and obstruct your opponent than it is to actually do things that require real work. This happens at all levels of their government. And even personally. Politics ends friendships and families. Again, it does elsewhere, but I don't think the team mentality is as prevalent. People align themselves with whomever they agree with, and that does change in other systems. there's no room for change in the US because both parties need to appeal to everyone.
And this is why, as a non-American who is also an expatriate living across the globe, American politics is my favourite sport.
I get to pick my team and cheer for my team and it has almost no bearing on my life whatsoever. (though living in Taiwan, I legitimately fear a Trump Presidency as I have absolutely no confidence he'd stand up to Chinese agression).
On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are being manned by Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, whose buzz cut and long narrow beard make him look like a mixed martial arts fighter. His Trump tie has been paired with a dark Zegna suit. A lapel pin issued by the Secret Service signals his status. He’s equipped with a dashboard of 400 prewritten Trump tweets. “Command center,” he says, nodding at his laptop.
Parscale is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf. He’s sitting at a long table in a double-wide trailer behind the debate arena, cheek to jowl with his fellow Trump staffers and Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. The charged atmosphere and rows of technicians staring raptly at giant TVs and computer screens call to mind NASA on launch day. On the wall, a poster of Julian Assange reads: “Dear Hillary, I miss reading your classified emails.”
Quote:
Beginning last November, then ramping up in earnest when Trump became the Republican nominee, Kushner quietly built a sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign that’s become the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid. Trump’s top advisers won’t concede the possibility of defeat, but they’re candid about the value of what they’ve built even after the returns come in—and about Trump’s desire for influence regardless of outcome. “Trump is a builder,” says Bannon, in a rare interview. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”
If Trump wants to strengthen his hold on his base, then his apocalyptic rhetoric on the stump begins to make more sense. Lately he’s sounded less like a candidate seeking to persuade moderates and swing voters and more like the far-right populist leaders who’ve risen throughout Europe. Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he’ll go away quietly if he loses. But given all that his campaign—and Kushner’s group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around. They may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun.
Quote:
Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.
Quote:
To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
Quote:
Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”
Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”
Anyone watch this exchange between Gingrich and Megyn Kelly?? He flips out on her says that she's fascinated with sex after she brings up a hypothetical. She handles him quite well IMO, I wonder where she'll go after she's done with Fox]
Talking about sexual assault is worse than committing sexual assault.
Trump takes any rumour or minor story and fabricates a whole conspiracy out of it and it becomes part of his platform. It's kind of tiring to have so many thing that compete for the most truly dangerous behaviour in one candidate.
Tweets about lots of active fraud (despite no evidence).
Also RNC could be in trouble over Trump's efforts to 'monitor' the vote.
Quote:
In a motion filed in New Jersey federal court on Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee charges that the RNC has violated the consent decree “by supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election.”
Trump takes any rumour or minor story and fabricates a whole conspiracy out of it and it becomes part of his platform. It's kind of tiring to have so many thing that compete for truly dangerous behaviour in one candidate.
Tweets about lots of active fraud (despite no evidence).
According to an email from Marissa Astor, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook’s assistant, to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, the campaign knew Trump was going to run, and pushed his legitimacy as a candidate. WikiLeaks’ release shows that it was seen as in Clinton’s best interest to run against Trump in the general election. The memo, sent to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also reveals the DNC and Clinton campaign were strategizing on behalf of their candidate at the very beginning of the primaries. “We think our goals mirror those of the DNC,” stated the memo, attached to the email under the title “muddying the waters.”
#Puppet
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to troutman For This Useful Post:
According to an email from Marissa Astor, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook’s assistant, to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, the campaign knew Trump was going to run, and pushed his legitimacy as a candidate. WikiLeaks’ release shows that it was seen as in Clinton’s best interest to run against Trump in the general election. The memo, sent to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also reveals the DNC and Clinton campaign were strategizing on behalf of their candidate at the very beginning of the primaries. “We think our goals mirror those of the DNC,” stated the memo, attached to the email under the title “muddying the waters.”
#Puppet
Haha. That makes the Republicans looks worse than the Democrats. Played them like a fiddle.
__________________
"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to FlamesAddiction For This Useful Post:
That might be the funniest thing to come out of this election and I really hope Trump addresses it. That must be such a blow to someone of his ego, he was the preferred opponent for Hillary to walk away with an easier W.
The Following User Says Thank You to ResAlien For This Useful Post:
Fallout from these voter ID laws, even in places where the laws were struck down or the courts have instructed them to not be enforced.
Some Texas polling stations have or had signs saying ID was required, when it isn't.
Quote:
Additionally, reports have surfaced of voter intimidation in Denton County with an armed marshal standing beside the line at the Carrollton polling location talking to the voters about political controversies.
A federal court in Texas has ordered the state to reissue voter education materials that were misleading to residents. And in the Texas county that includes Fort Worth, voting rights advocates pointed to an email from Republican officials warning election workers in “Democrat-controlled” polling locations “to make sure OUR VOTER ID LAW IS FOLLOWED.” The note did not explain that polling places are supposed to allow people without the correct identification to cast a ballot if they show other documents, following a federal appeals court’s ruling that the Texas voter-ID law discriminates against minority voters.
In North Carolina, another July federal appeals court ruling struck key provisions of a far-reaching state law that had restricted early voting, limited registration, and imposed new ID rules. But the North Carolina GOP’s executive director nonetheless encouraged Republican election officials to reduce early voting hours, limit polling sites and close the polls on Sunday.
Now that early voting has begun in North Carolina, the impact on voters is measurable. A half-dozen counties have cut early voting, prompting a 50 percent decline in early balloting compared to the 2012 election, according to Liz Kennedy, director of democracy and government reform at the Center for American Progress, which has put out a series of state-by-state issue briefs on preventing problems at the polls.
In Guilford, a county of 517,600 people where 42 percent of the residents are nonwhite, election officials cut early voting sites from 16 in 2012 to one this year, according to Michael P. McDonald, a voting expert at the University of Florida. The upshot is an 85 percent decrease in the number of in-person Guilford County voters on the first Thursday and Friday of early voting this year, compared with the same window in 2012.
In Georgia, a recent Washington Post report pointed to several particularly egregious voter suppression efforts. Election officials in Georgia have failed to process as many as 100,000 voter registration applications. As in North Carolina, one of the state’s largest counties made early voting available only at a single polling place, forcing voters to wait up to three hours to cast ballots. And in Macon-Bibb County, local officials moved a polling place in a largely African American region from a gymnasium that was under renovation to the sheriff’s office.
“When we complained, we were told if people weren’t criminals, they shouldn’t have a problem voting inside of a police station,” Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, a progressive group, told the Post. After activists objected, the polling site was moved to a church.
It's no secret HIllary and her campaign understood her largest obstacle was her unfavourability.
So, they played a bit of chess to get someone even more unfavourable to run against her.
Like I've been saying countless times, if this is Hillary Vs Romney she's likely done already.
Trump the Tire Fire makes voting for Hillary not only OK, but now likely seen as 'the right thing to do' by many voters who will hold their noses on election day when they cast a ballot for her.
The Following User Says Thank You to Flash Walken For This Useful Post:
