thebigp

Hillary Clinton's Big Worry--47jh.,b43
Trump has also deeply divided the Republican Party, with many of the most prominent leaders refusing to endorse him. Usually when parties divide this badly they lose.

Clinton campaign seems focused on attacking Trump, not Sanders 02:37
Unlike almost any other Republican in the current age of polarization, Trump has the potential to generate a backlash of Republican v**ers against their own party, causing them to either stay home on E******n Day or, even worse for the party, consider v****g for the Democratic nominee.
Yet with all of these advantages, Democrats should be extremely careful about becoming overconfident. There are many reasons that Democrats should fear Trump and anticipate a campaign that is much closer and much tougher than they are expecting.

Poll: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump run tight races in key swing states
The E*******l College can be much more fluid than most commentators have argued. Yes, Democrats have an advantage, but that advantage can be broken. Nate Silver and Jonathan Bernstein have both written about how these predictions overstate how inevitable the outlook looks for the fall.
While swing states have gone to Democrats in most recent e******ns, if the Republicans have a good year those swing states could easily shift in a different direction. Bernstein also points out that individual states like West Virginia have undergone very big shifts. (A poll released Tuesday showed close match-ups between Clinton and Trump in three swing states.)
What we don't know-- How Trump will do in a general e******n campaign is also unknown. Predictions about his candidacy are almost impossible to make. We should remember that just a few months ago, most of the major experts were predicting that a Trump nomination was virtually impossible.
Now that he will be nominated, they are shifting to predictions that a Trump general e******n victory will be impossible. Next, they might find themselves predicting that his ree******n will never happen.
The point is that we don't really know what his candidacy will look like or how it will play out. He has already demonstrated that his campaign is different. His unorthodox blend of policies, his mastery of the modern media, and his ability to tap into the anger and frustration of the e*****rate have moved v**ers in a different direction.
Tapping into unrest
With his attacks on free trade he has tapped into clear unrest in key states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, that could attract Democratic v**ers. Trump will also do more than any other candidate would have done to drive up underlying animosity that exists about v****g for a female candidate.
If he can cut into independent v**es and even some Democratic constituencies in blue states like Pennsylvania, he might be more threatening than expected. We also don't know how honest v**ers have been to pollsters about whether they would v**e for him. It is possible some people are not comfortable admitting that they would give him their support.
And while it is true that there have been a number of high-profile defections among Republican leaders in recent days, it is far too early to conclude that the party will be split. After all there will be equally strong political pressure for Republicans to fall in line behind their candidate, with the potential for a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress being much more frightening to them than a maverick from within their own party.
Nor is it yet clear that the defections among leaders will be followed by defections in the e*****rate. This certainly could happen, and a e*******l backlash against the GOP is a very real possibility in 2016, just as it was when Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964.
This could leave Democrats with control of the White House, Senate and House -- and with a huge window for legislating. But it also could play out differently. Given the anti-establishment mentality that exists right now, political leaders saying that they are against Trump might just lead more v**ers to support him.
Clinton's stumbles
There are also many reasons for Democrats to worry about Hillary Clinton. She has proven herself again and again to be vulnerable. With all of her campaign experience and with all of her immense political sk**l, we have seen time and time again how she and her team can stumble badly, like when she said in June that she and her husband were "dead broke" when leaving the White House, a comment that didn't sit well with many Americans who struggle every day to survive.
Nobody expected a 74-year-old socialist from Vermont to mount a serious challenge to her candidacy. But Bernie Sanders did. Whether it's the Goldman Sachs speeches or the e-mail server issue, we have also seen how Clinton often has trouble responding to the kind of scandal warfare that is an inevitable part of the political system, frequently allowing small issues to get blown up into much bigger controversies. Her disapproval ratings are very high -- though not as high as Trump's -- and one never knows what kind of trouble Bill Clinton might bring her campaign. There should be some more sober perspectives on predictions for the fall. The t***h is we don't know what we are in for, and Democrats should not be overly confident about this race being a slam dunk.
Hillary Clinton is unraveling quickly-- A liberal friend is very concerned about the Republican Party. He tells me that Donald Trump will make it impossible for anybody anywhere running under the “R” column to win e******n. Even a dogcatcher in Podunk is doomed!
The New York Times shows a similar concern. Surely written with furrowed brow, its front page worries because “Sparring in GOP Rises” and because “Rift Grows Wide as Republicans Abandon Trump.” It joins two other concerned lefties, the Huffington Post and CNBC, in declaring that the GOP is “unraveling.”
All stand ready to help sponsor a dignified funeral, but that won’t be necessary. Their reports of the Republican Party’s death are premature. Very premature.
A new Quinnipiac poll tells the inconvenient t***h. Trump and Hillary Clinton are tied in each of the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Big Media’s fixation on the defections of Big-Name Republicans is the latest proof that both groups remain stubbornly disconnected from real Americans. If Trump had been dependent on the support of Mitt Romney or Sen. Lindsey Graham or assorted pundits and donors, he never would have gotten 10 million primary v**es.
Modal Trigger
He launched a rocket-fueled revolution, defeated 16 rivals and became the presumptive nominee by running against the entire national establishment, not to mention conventional wisdom and both political parties.
Now he’s doomed if Romney doesn’t back him? Nonsense.
Yet each day, the drum beats louder about a new and greater threat to GOP harmony. The current one is the insistence from everybody on the left, and a few on the right, that Trump is toast if he can’t get House Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse him.
By all means, endorsements are generally a good thing for candidates, and party unity is usually regarded as an essential starting point. But the claim that Trump must finally conform to all the traditional norms repeats the false assumptions that led the media and most Republicans to miss Trump’s astonishing appeal in the first place.
He is a phenomenon, much as Barack Obama was in 2008, and he could do to Clinton what Obama did to her then. Obama was fresh, and she was tired. Now Trump is fresh, and Clinton is even more tired.
One result is that the campaign will be fought on his turf. The issues most associated with him — immigration, terrorism, trade, jobs — dominated the GOP primaries.
Indeed, try to imagine the last year without Trump. Who would have set the GOP agenda, what issues would have led the way, and how would v**ers have responded? Would turnout have hit record levels when so many Republican v**ers feel betrayed by their own party leaders?
Trump stirred the drink from day one and the ability to set the terms of the contest is usually the hallmark of a winning campaign. That’s what he’s done so far, and that’s what he’ll try to do in the fall.
Clinton can’t let him succeed, and instead must put him on defense with nonstop attacks on his character and lack of government experience. She’s already doing that, but is paying a price with his fierce counter-punching.
Her big advantage is the E*******l College, and she will try to shut him down by relentlessly playing the women’s and racial cards. And it’s certain Trump will hand her gaffe gifts and display an embarrassing lack of detailed knowledge.
Check out Hillary’s history of changing stances:
The continuing blizzard of subpoenas demonstrates that New York’s twin corruption scandals are no mere spring fling. Investigations are expanding in the offices of both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo and could make for a very hot summer.
Coming after numerous lawmakers were convicted in separate cases, the probes paint the era as one of the most corrupt in history. How’s this for a slogan: More crooked than Tammany!
Things are so bad that de Blasio is using Al Sharpton as a character witness. The mayor made a visit to Sharpton’s headquarters and again painted himself a do-gooder caught up in a witch hunt. “The voices of the status quo find many, many ways to undermine progress,” he claimed.
Sharpton echoed the “woe is us” tone, calling de Blasio a man of “integrity.” He should have found a word with less baggage.
Recall that the mayor had called Sheldon Silver a “man of integrity” when Silver was charged in the federal case that saw the former Assembly speaker sentenced to 12 years in prison and hit with nearly $7 million in fines and restitution. And this Thursday, another alleged man of integrity, former GOP state Senate leader Dean Skelos, gets sentenced for his thievery.
Silver and Skelos are Cuomo’s former amigos from three-men-in-a-room infamy, and now the governor himself could be under the feds’ microscope again. Prosecutors want records showing whether six current and former members of his inner circle did anything to “benefit” 20 different companies that got state business.
A Khan-do mayor
Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, wrote an op-ed promising that: “As mayor, I will be the British Muslim who finally roots out extremism and radicalisation from British society. I will support mainstream Muslims to challenge extremists and work with the internet providers to ban extremist websites.”
Wait, if he’s saying there is an actual link between Islam and Islamic terrorists, he must be wrong. President Obama says there is no connection, and he always knows best.
T***s-fer fight to lockers
A reader offers a suggestion on the t*********r tempest in a pisspot.
“Bathrooms are very private places,” he writes. “Locker rooms and shower rooms are not. How many women would be happy to share a locker room or shower with a t*********r woman who has male sexual organs?
“My guess is that the polling numbers would be dramatically different if pollsters asked about locker rooms instead of bathrooms.”
Hillary’s IT tech who apparently never used email-- Brian Pagliano’s emails have gone missing, the State Department confirmed this week. Is anyone really surprised that the guy Hillary Clinton hired to keep her communications secret also seems to have scrubbed his own?
Back in 2009, Clinton hired Pagliano to set up and maintain that now-infamous home-brew email server. She also had him hired at State — whose bureaucrats were more than a bit befuddled at having the first-ever political appointee in the IT department.
State’s admission was prompted by a Republican National Committee lawsuit seeking Pagliano’s emails. RNC spokesman Raj Shah made the obvious point: “It’s hard to believe that an IT staffer … never sent or received a single work-related email” in four years on the job.
Pagliano started invoking his right against self-incrimination the instant he was asked to testify on Clinton’s email mess. Before leaving State, did he purge his own trail from the department’s servers, to eliminate any possible incriminating evidence?
He may be explaining it all to the FBI: Pagliano has been given immunity in exchange for cooperating fully with the feds’ investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
The Clinton campaign has yet to comment on the news. Hey, it takes time to make up even a bad lie for a mess this bad.
source-julian zelizwe, realclear politics, nate siver, jonathan bernstein,sh post, ej dionne, michael goodwin, huffingtonpost, cnbc, sheldon silver, dean skelos, sadiq khan, ny post, raj shah,