| Yes, Trump Could Win. Emphasis on 'Could.' Words I don't type often: Salute Jonathan Chait. He's seeing the race pretty clearly — or at the very least, he's not telling Democrats what they want to hear. The website FiveThirtyEight gives Trump more than a four-in-ten chance of actually, for real, winning. The Upshot, the New York Times' forecaster, puts it at a slightly more comforting one in four, which sounds low except that, as the model's authors point out, this makes the odds of a Clinton victory about equal to an NFL placekicker's chances of making a 49-yard field goal. Also, the kicker has pneumonia. Citigroup recently warned that investors are underappreciating the significant risk to the economy of a Trump victory. A Trump presidency has felt unimaginable all summer long for the same reason Brexit couldn't pass in England and Trump couldn't win his party's nomination: We refused to believe what the numbers were telling us . . . The battle lines do not resemble those of a race between a regular politician and a freak-show buffoon. They reflect the normal Republican coalition, minus heavy defections from college-educated white women, against the normal, slightly larger Democratic coalition, minus the usual enthusiastic youth support. At the official level, public GOP defections are confined mostly to a handful of blue-state politicians and prestige print pundits. The party's political and messaging apparatus, from Fox News to talk radio, remains pro-Trump, albeit often with muffled reservations. With all of that in mind, it's worth noting that Trump was on a really hot streak in polling for a while, but that streak appears to have cooled a bit. Nationally, most of the surveys show a small lead for Hillary Clinton or a tie. Clinton might be retaking the lead in Florida. While Trump's numbers jumped almost everywhere, he's still consistently trailing in Pennsylvania. His lead in Georgia is consistent but pretty small. That's the bad news for Trump. At this moment, Ohio looks good for Trump, Iowa is looking increasingly solid, North Carolina's looking better and while Clinton still leads in Virginia, that lead is looking smaller. The one poll in Colorado this month had Trump ahead by 3, and if that isn't an outlier or odd sample, then it's a whole new race, because Clinton had been crushing Trump there earlier in the year. Echoing the assessment of our Tim Alberta, Trump just doesn't have any margin for error. He needs North Carolina and Colorado and Florida and Ohio and Iowa and Nevada. His most likely winning map would look something like this: 
Remember Sharron Angle led the final polls in Nevada in 2010 over Harry Reid; the unions had their get-out-the-vote efforts in the highest gear and Reid won by almost six points. Trump needs his turnout machine – largely outsourced to the Republican National Committee – to be hitting on all cylinders in every key state on Election Day to have a chance at 270 electoral votes. 'Hillary, Do You Think Russia Is Behind These Terror Attacks?' Our press at work: Monday morning, Hillary Clinton held a press conference, and Bloomberg Politics reporter Jennifer Epstein chose to ask an intensely speculative question: "Are you concerned that this weekend's attacks or potential incidents in the coming weeks might be an attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group — maybe the Russians — to influence the presidential race in some way and presumably try to drive votes to Donald Trump, who is, as you've said before, widely seen as perhaps being somebody who they would be more willing to — or seen as an easier person to be against?" It's not often you see a softball with a conspiracy-theory topspin! Apparently, I Accidentally Created Birther-ism. Whoops! At least PolitiFact doesn't quite blame me for Birtherism. In early March, [Alan] Peters wrote in a blog post stressing Obama's "Arab affiliations" that Obama's mother "allegedly had Obama in Kenya." A month later, Peters penned a note on his other blogs alleging that Obama's mother "gave birth to him in Kenya, immediately got on a plane and then registered as being in Hawaii." This began to spread across several conservative forums and blogs (more examples here, here, here and here) until it reached a Snopes discussion board and the eyes of National Review columnist Jim Geraghty. Geraghty, who previously debunked a rumor about Michelle Obama, encouraged the Obama campaign to release Barack's birth certificate to squash all the conspiracy theories once and for all. Though Geraghty's June 9, 2008, piece notes that the rumor around Obama being born in Kenya is unlikely, Geraghty may have unwittingly shined a national spotlight on a fringe internet theory, according to [Georgia attorney Loren] Collins. (Back then, the fuss was all about Obama being a secret Muslim.) "The rumor just got so little traction before June. Virtually every instance of it I could find before June (amounted to) a couple dozen," Collins said. "After the National Review piece, you had hundreds of hits within days." Geraghty's column was reposted by popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin on June 10, and the Obama campaign released Obama's short form birth certificate three days later. So apparently this was the post that launched one of the great conspiracy theories of our time: Rumor one: Obama was born in Kenya. Rather unlikely, as it would require everyone in his family to lie about this in every interview and discussion with those outside the family since young Obama appeared on the scene. However, if it were true, it would probably raise a major question of "does he qualify as a natural-born citizen"? If Obama were born outside the United States, one could argue that he would not meet the legal definition of natural-born citizen under because U.S. law at the time of his birth required his natural-born parent (his mother) to have resided in the United States for "ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Ann Dunham was 18 when Obama was born — so she wouldn't have met the requirement of five years after the age of 16. To paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer/The Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become conspiracy theory, destroyer of truth." ADDENDA: Great news everyone! The Senate is scheduled to consider a spending bill that no one has ever seen! "There is still no bill text. No one has seen the bill, yet the Senate is still expecting to vote on it in a few hours." It's like the Loch Ness Monster of appropriations bills! There are only sketchy eyewitness accounts and grainy black and white photos of the bill, and theories that it's a dinosaur! You may have noticed that we now have sponsors for the Three Martini Lunch podcast. (There are "sponsors" for The Jim and Mickey Show, but most people recognize the not-quite-real Soylent Corporation or Wayne Enterprises.) | 
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