Robert Penn Warren on the Trump Revelation

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth.

--Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Poor Whites in 2016

Carol Graham and Sergio Pinto write at Brookings:

The 2016 election has highlighted deep social and political divisions in the United States, and related unhappiness. The starkest marker of desperation is the trend of increasing mortality rates – driven by preventable deaths – among middle aged, uneducated whites. That stands in sharp contrast to gradual improvements in health and well-being of blacks and Hispanics over the past decades, and high levels of optimism about the future among these same groups. The trends among poor whites – and the frustrations that they are generating – have complex causes that we do not fully understand. Yet they constitute a social crisis that the next president will have to face. There are no magic bullets. We highlight the importance of documenting the extent of the crisis and exploring its causes as a first step towards finding solutions in the safety net, health, and well-being arenas.

Outside Money in Governor Races

The Center for Public Integrity reports:

This year, as states elect 12 governors, fill scores of other offices and several thousand legislative seats, television ad spending on state races has outpaced the last comparable election at this point, even when adjusted for inflation. The more than $148 million spent so far this year dwarfs the $83 million spent in the same period in 2012, according to data from media tracker Kantar Media/CMAG.

The heated governors’ races account for more than half of all state political advertising this year. And independent groups are playing a larger role, sponsoring 23 percent of all ads in 2016, compared with 18 percent in 2012.
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Seven of the 12 gubernatorial races this year are open races with no incumbent candidates, and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has classified five of those as toss-ups: Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire,Vermont and West Virginia. That’s in contrast to 2012, when the center classified only three states as a toss-up at this point.
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The Democratic Governors Association and its Republican counterpart are typically the largest national drivers of spending in state races, and that’s no different this year.
The groups can accept unlimited donations and annually count numerous pharmaceutical companies, insurers and major corporations among their top donors. The biggest contributors to the Republican group this year also include Koch Industries Inc. and hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, while labor groups are among other top donors to the Democratic group.

\Because the groups are regulated by the IRS and don’t typically file state-specific reports, it’s difficult to tie donations the groups receive to ads in specific states.

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And sometimes they don’t include their national namesin their campaigns, instead using state-specific ones that obscure their national and partisan ties, such as in Vermont. In total, the associations and the groups that they’ve backed have spent more than $8 million already just on TV ads.

The Changing Map, 1992-2016

Ron Brownstein writes:

Since 1968, Democratic presidential nominees have almost always run better in the big battlegrounds of the Midwest than they have in the key Sunbelt prizes.That’s been especially true since 1992, when Democrats began their current streak of winning the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections.Together, the five Rustbelt states offer 70 Electoral College votes, and the five Sunbelt prizes 72.

This year, the competitive picture looks very different, especially when considering the three Rust belt states where Trump has shown the most strength: Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.

In the averages of state polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com, Clinton is winning a greater share of the vote in all five Sunbelt battlegrounds than in either Ohio or Iowa. In the averages compiled by RealClearPolitics.com and Pollster.com, Clinton’s vote share in all five Sunbelt battlegrounds also exceed her showing in Iowa and she’s running better in all of them than in Ohio, except for Nevada.

Clinton is in a stronger position in Wisconsin. But even so, her Wisconsin numbers lag her showing in Florida and Virginia in all three averages, as well as her numbers in North Carolina and Colorado in the Pollster.com compilation. Pennsylvania and Michigan, to this point, look safer for her than the other three Rustbelt swing states (though in some cases the averages place her vote share behind some of the Sunbelt states in each of them as well).

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That new geographic pattern is rooted in the race’s defining demographic trends. In the six major national polls released just before last week’s first presidential debate, Trump led among white voters without a college education by resounding margins of 20 to 32 percentage points. But he confronted deficits of 40-50 points among non-white voters, and was facing more resistance than any previous Republican nominee in the history of modern polling among college-educated whites: five of the six surveys showed him trailing among them by margins of two-to-eleven percentage points (while he managed only to run even in the sixth.) The race is on track to produce the widest gap ever between the preferences of college-and non-college whites, while Trump may reach record lows among voters of color.

The McCutcheon Decision Helps the Democrats

Nicholas Confessore and Rachel Shorey report at The New York Times:

The Democratic National Committee — in debt and underfinanced a year ago — has poured nearly $30 million into these key states through the beginning of September.

The funding was powered by a surge of six-figure contributions raised by Mrs. Clinton from the likes of James Cameron, the Hollywood director, andGeorge Soros, the retired hedge fund manager, as well as several members of the billionaire Pritzker family.

The Republican National Committee has provided the states with just $11 million, limited by Donald J. Trump’s difficulties in persuading the traditional Republican big-donor base to invest in his campaign.

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Like other candidates for federal office this year, Mrs. Clinton can accept only up to $5,400 from any one donor over the course of her campaign. But after the McCutcheon decision, Mrs. Clinton established an agreement last year with the Democratic Party under which she asked her wealthiest patrons to write checks in excess of $300,000, more than double the old limit, to the Hillary Victory Fund, an account made up of the national and state parties and the Clinton campaign.

That amount is a lump sum equal to the total contributions each donor is allowed to give to her campaign and the Democratic National Committee, along with $10,000 to each of the 38 state party organizations now participating in the arrangements.

Because there are no limits on how much money party committees can transfer to one another, most of the state parties have cycled their share back to the Democratic National Committee. The party then moved the cash into a smaller number of battleground states to prepare for Election Day.

Trumplosion, Continued

The New York Times reports:

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Jenna Johnson reports at The Washington Post:

 Donald Trump's campaign announced Saturday evening that the candidate would soon deliver a nine-sentence critique of comments Hillary Clinton made months ago about many of the millennials supporting her primary rival, Bernie Sanders. It was an attempt to latch onto a new headline in hopes of finally escaping the controversies that had consumed his week.

It didn’t work.

It took Trump nearly 25 minutes to read the brief statement because he kept going off on one angry tangent after another — ignoring his teleprompters and accusing Clinton of not being “loyal” to her husband, imitating her buckling at a memorial service last month, suggesting that she is “crazy” and saying she should be in prison. He urged his mostly white crowd of supporters to go to polling places in "certain areas" on Election Day to "watch" the voters there. He also repeatedly complained about having a "bum mic" at the first presidential debate and wondered if he should have done another season of “The Apprentice.”

Trumplosion

A week ago, it actually looked as if Trump might overtake Clinton in the polls.

Then he botched the first debate with Clinton and did even worse in the days to follow.  No doubt, Democratic oppo guys were throwing accelerants onto the fire.
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Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, and Alan Rappeport report at The New York Times:

The tweets started around 3:20 a.m. on Friday. Inside Trump Tower, a restless figure stirred in the predawn darkness, nursing his grievances and grabbing a device that often lands him in hot water.

On his Android phone, Donald J. Trump began to tap out bursts of digital fury: He mocked Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe and a popular Latin American actress, as a “con,” the “worst” and “disgusting.”

In a final flourish, before the sun came up, the Republican presidential nominee claimed — without offering any evidence — that she had appeared in a “sex tape.”

The tirade fit a pattern. It is when Mr. Trump is alone with his thoughts, and untethered from his campaign staff, that he has seemed to commit his most self-destructive acts.

Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Sean Sullivan report at The Washington Post:

Also this week, Trump raised former president Bill Clinton’s past extramarital affairs as a campaign issue, delivered his most direct attack yet on Hillary Clinton’s health and waged war with news organizations over alleged bias.

Reflecting upon Trump’s actions, Matt Borges, the Republican Party chairman in battleground Ohio, said, “Can this thing just end — please?”

“My God,” he sighed, “what a nightmare.”

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At an intimate fundraiser Wednesday for Rep. Joseph J. Heck (R-Nev.), who is running for the Senate, McConnell asked the group of about a dozen supporters how many of them think Trump can win. About half of the attendees raised their hands. But when McConnell then asked how many thought Trump would win, no hands went up, and the room fell silent, according to a person familiar with the scene who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a closed event.

Andrew Kaczynski and  Nathaniel Meyersohn report at Buzzfeed:

Donald Trump made an appearance in an explicit 2000 Playboy video.

Trump’s role in the porn is relatively benign and centers around him breaking a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo while several of the playmates are visiting New York City. BuzzFeed News obtained the footage from the online-only Buffalo, New York–based video store Cinema Cornucopia.

Oh yes, and he broke the law. Kurt Eichenwald reports at Newsweek:

The response of Donald Trump and his staff on September 29 to the revelation that one of his companies illegally violated the Cuban trade embargo during Fidel Castro’s presidency has exposed a growing problem for the Republican nominee: His campaign operation is disorganized and shares Trump’s disdain for facts.

Both the Trump campaign staff and the Trump Organization had been told for days byNewsweek that it was about to publish an article disclosing that a Trump company had paid at least $68,000 to explore business opportunities in Communist Cuba. Federal law at the time imposed tough restrictions against spending even a penny in Cuba, with the intent of financially starving the country, which for decades been categorized as an American enemy. While there were some exemptions, such as engaging in humanitarian work approved by the government, the Trump venture did not qualify for any of them, and once the Cuba business trip was over, consultants and Trump executives discussed ways to make the trip appear to be a charitable effort.

Newsweek’s requests for comments, documents and even an interview with Trump were ignored, which was unusual.

David A. Farenthold reports at The Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Under the laws in New York, where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is based, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 a year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump’s must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks — among other things — whether the charity spent any money for the personal benefit of its officers.

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) finds that Trump’s foundation raised money in violation of the law, he could order the charity to stop raising money immediately. With a court’s permission, Schneiderman could also force Trump to return money that his foundation has already raised.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.