Hillary Clinton has won Washington, D.C., in the least surprising result of the presidential election. How unsurprising is this? President Obama took 91 percent of the District’s vote in 2012.
Remember in 2012, when everyone was all, “Wow, social media is such a big part of this election. That is very new”? The Associated Press doesn’t.
So entrenched has Twitter become in the 2016 election that it can be difficult to remember just how new it is in this context. Four years ago, candidates Obama and Mitt Romney were just testing the waters with social media. This year, it’s a major source of information — political and otherwise — for a huge number of Americans. In a Pew Research Center poll last January, 44 percent of adults said they had learned about the election in the previous week from social media, more than cited print newspapers.
Uh, four years ago, according to the very same Pew Research Center, President Obama’s campaign social media accounts had more followers than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton today and his campaign was
NBC News has an incredibly stupid take on “How Republicans ended up with Trump” that’s worth a close look, since we’re likely to see more of its kind over the next few weeks. Coming from the crackerjack analysis team of Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Carrie Dann, it has five points:
In the final point, there’s a moment of truth:
But not all Republicans spoke out against Trump. Some — perhaps fearful of the GOP base they helped create and won midterm elections with — stood on the sidelines, like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Emphasis added—because, yeah, you think? We can
The Republican National Committee is absolutely firm in its support of Donald Trump. Or so they say. The dollars might convince a beleaguered, suspicious Trump to see things differently:
In 2004, the committee spent $18.2 million on independent expenditures — or IEs, in campaign parlance — boosting George W. Bush’s reelection bid. In 2008, the RNC’s IE spending surged to $53.5 million in support of John McCain’s campaign against Barack Obama. And in 2012, the RNC spent $42.4 million on IEs boosting Mitt Romney or opposing President Obama — with nearly 80 percent of the spending occurring before mid-October.
By contrast, this cycle the RNC has spent only $321,000 on independent expenditures attacking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And all of that spending occurred last fall — before Trump had emerged as the leader for the GOP presidential nomination.
According to the RNC, it’s nothing to do with
Donald Trump is trailing in just about every national and swing-state poll out there, but that’s OK. His new campaign manager is also a pollster, so when she unskews the polls, she can make it sound somewhat more convincing than the average poll-unskewer. Kellyanne Conway is essentially arguing that the Bradley Effect, in which people tell pollsters they’re voting for a black candidate to make themselves sound not racist even though they’re really voting for a white candidate, applies to her white billionaire boss:
Conway insisted that Trump’s support was not reflected in polls because of the perceived social stigma of supporting the Republican nominee. “Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the elections … it’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college educated person in the US, to say
Is Donald Trump trying to underperform John McCain and Mitt Romney among African-American voters? For context, McCain got four percent and Romney got six percent—both against Obama, of course. But Trump appears to be trying really hard:
In attempting to fashion a populist message, Mr. Trump has criticized Democrats for doing little to address urban joblessness and despair. But in the more than a year since he began his White House bid, the Republican nominee has not held a single event aimed at black voters in their communities, shunning the traditional stops at African-American churches, historically black colleges and barber shops and salons that have long been staples of the presidential campaign trail.
Mr. Trump may not have purposefully snubbed black neighborhoods — he rarely plunges into any community to tour businesses, sample local cuisine or spontaneously engage in the handshake and back-patting rituals of everyday campaigning. His preferred
Donald Trump has left the Republican party to its own devices when it comes to staffing up the ground game in critical states and, despite the party’s relatively good fundraising numbers, it’s still falling far short of its original goals, according to an Associated Press review of staffing levels.
Some examples of Republican shortfalls: Ohio Republicans thought they were going to see 220 paid staffers by May; in reality there are about 50. Plans for Pennsylvania called for 190 paid staffers; there are about 60. Iowa’s planned ground force of 66 by May actually numbers between 25 and 30. In Colorado, recent staff departures have left about two dozen employees, far short of the 80 that were to have been in place. […]
In New Hampshire, a swing state that also features one of the nation’s most competitive Senate contests, the Republican National Committee’s original plan called for more than