A Basket Full of Favorable Polls for Trump

September 14, 2016

Time to panic, Democrats?

Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in a Bloomberg Politics poll of Ohio, a gap that underscores the Democrat's challenges in critical Rust Belt states after one of the roughest stretches of her campaign.

The Republican nominee leads Clinton 48 percent to 43 percent among likely voters in a two-way contest and 44 percent to 39 percent when third-party candidates are included.

The poll was conducted Friday through Monday, so the "basket of deplorables" controversy and her health problem were in the news.

Also, get ready to give Rob Portman the MVP this year. His race was supposed to be a nail-biter:

Another Republican, Senator Rob Portman, holds a commanding lead of 53 percent to 36 percent over former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland in the state's U.S. Senate contest. The incumbent leads with a ratio of more than 2-to-1 among independents and is even getting 14 percent from Democrats and those who lean that way.

Meanwhile, up in Maine, Trump has a really good shot at getting at least one of Maine's electoral votes. He's down three statewide according to a new Boston Globe poll, but remember that Maine gives an electoral vote to whoever wins each congressional district, and right now, Trump is up 10 in the Second Congressional District. If the Election Day results shake out this way, Clinton will win the state overall but get three electoral votes and Trump will get one.

What's more, Texas looks reasonably safe, at least for now. The new Emerson poll puts Trump up by 6 points. (This is a state Romney won by 16 and McCain won by 12, so it's still a mildly bad sign to see a GOP nominee with a single-digit lead.)

'She So Overcharged Them, They Came Under Heat'

Reading hacked e-mails of American public officials and public figures is terrible. Just terrible, I tell you!

But since they're out there, we might as well discuss them . . .

Colin Powell got hacked. There's actually not that much in there that, at least so far, seems scandalous or greatly contradicts his public accounts. We all knew he thought of Trump as a "national disgrace" and "international pariah."

But he's also getting increasingly irked with Hillary:

Powell's private messages were leaked by D.C. Leaks, an anonymously managed website that shares hacked emails from U.S. military and political figures. D.C. Leaks has a relationship with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker that many allege to have ties with Russian intelligence. D.C. Leaks provided access to Powell's emails to a number of reporters on Tuesday.

The emails show Powell regularly corresponding with reporters and friends about the Clinton email server scandal, explaining that his situation was different. When Powell arrived at the State Department, the information technology system was badly dated, he argued. And unlike Clinton, Powell never set up a private server. Instead, he used his personal AOL account, on a server maintained by AOL, and used a government computer for classified communications.

This little anecdote was the funniest, and perhaps most revealing:

"They are going to dick up the legitimate and necessary use of emails with friggin record rules. I saw email more like a telephone than a cable machine," Powell wrote last year to his business partner Jeffrey Leeds. "As long as the stuff is unclassified. I had a secure State.gov machine. Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris."

Powell added in a tangential complaint: "I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn't [pay] any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill."

Was it UCLA?

Before Hillary Clinton spoke at the University of California at Los Angeles in March, her representatives had a few specifications to negotiate with school officials.

A team at the Harry Walker Agency, a speaker's bureau handling Clinton's appearance, requested snacks in the green room ("diet ginger ale, crudité, hummus, and sliced fruit," they wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Post.) They described her preferred onstage refreshments (water, both hot and room temperature, and lemon wedges). They specified the type of chair Clinton should be sitting in during part of her appearance, and the type of pillows to be placed on that chair (long and rectangular, with an additional pillow backstage for added support, if needed.) They even requested that a medal being presented to Clinton be given in a box instead of being draped around her neck.

And of course, there was the matter of Clinton's $300,000 speaking fee. When officials asked for a price reduction on behalf of the public university, Clinton's representatives didn't budge, saying $300,000 was already the "special university rate."

Or UNLV, where she spoke for $225,000, and talked about how terrible it was that university tuition kept going up. Hey, maybe schools should stop paying old politicians six-figure sums to speak for an hour?

Welcome to Night Vale, the Perfect Concept Run Aground

I'm reading Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale which is based on an apparently phenomenally popular podcast series.

As a concept, Welcome to Night Vale is near perfect: a small town in the American Southwest where every imaginable conspiracy theory and supernatural phenomenon is present: aliens, ghosts, monsters, time travel, shadowy government agents . . . and all of the residents have pretty much gotten used to it, and just go about their daily lives amidst the weirdness. You're probably giggling already. It's a really funny concept, and for the first, oh, five to ten minutes, it's really enjoyable to picture the local PTA meeting disrupted by an opening in the space-time continuum, setting loose "numerous confused and aggressive pterodactyls."

The very first news item discussed is the opening of a new dog park . . . which doesn't allow dogs, or people, and is only to be used by unidentified hooded figures, and oh, by the way, the dog park has an electrified fence, and citizens should avoid looking at it or the hooded figures.

And then you just keep getting variations of the same joke, over and over again. The podcast is in the form of the news updates from the community radio station, and the newscaster, Cecil Baldwin, seems to only intermittently find the town's events odd, and worthy of further questioning. He's much more interested and/or obsessed with the new arrival in town, a scientist named Carlos. In a normal show, Carlos would be our protagonist and the audience would discover the town's mysteries and secrets along with him. But Carlos just seems to make a series of brief cameos in the first 150 or so pages. Maybe he's having thrilling adventures discovering the sinister underbelly of the town, but we'll never know, because we're stuck in the radio station broadcast booth, listening to Cecil report latest claim of the bowing alley owner that he's discovered a tiny civilization underneath one of the lanes.

I'm sure the Night Vale fan base loves this as a subversion of traditional narrative. I'd argue that some storytelling "rules" don't need to be subverted, they're there for a reason. "Show, don't tell?" This whole concept it just telling. David Mamet once offered really important storytelling advice in just a few sentences: "Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?" The town's mysteries are so thoroughly inexplicable and surreal, there's no way to even explore them; they just happen.

The town is full of over-the-top insane occurrences, but none of them seem to have much lasting consequence. In the pterodactyl attack, Cecil first informs his listeners, "fortunately no one was injured or killed in the incident," then a few moments later updates, "earlier we reported a death toll of zero when, in fact, the number is closer to thirty-eight. We regret these errors." He then moves on to discussing the town's high school football team. The radio station interns keep meeting horrific ends, and Cecil offers a perfunctory salute to those "lost in the line of community radio duty." There's no weight to the mysteries or events, no lasting impact, just a series of absurdities piled higher and higher.

Obviously, some people love these stories. It left me cold.

ADDENDA: Here's yesterday's Facebook Live chat, which is now weekly, Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Eastern. Drop by and type in a question, and I may answer it! Or I may not.

Here's part of Monday's appearance on CNN International. All of my coughs were psychosomatic from discussing Hillary's health.