Losing Candidate Does Okay in Debate, Remains in Losing Position

October 10, 2016

By the cold light of morning, Donald Trump's surprisingly good performance in the debate is less significant than it seemed when everyone turned off their televisions last night.

He entered the first debate almost tied, then had a bad night, stepping into every trap and forgetting to bring up his strongest issues. Then he exacerbated it with a terrible week, re-fighting the Miss Universe allegations and tweeting in the wee small hours of the morning. He lost ground in the state and national polls. Last week, Mike Pence had a good night in the vice-presidential debate, and that seemed to stop the bleeding . . . and then the "grab them by the" tape appeared.

Sunday brought a slew of new polls, almost none of them good for Trump. After leading in Ohio for a long while, he's trailed the last three surveys there. Another two new polls in Florida have him trailing; he's trailed six of the last seven surveys there. Pennsylvania continues to look out of reach.

Yes, CBS puts him within four in Wisconsin, but he's never led there, so there's little reason to think it will suddenly flip to red on Election Day. He still leads in Iowa.

Before the revelation of the "grab them by the" tape, Trump needed something dramatic to change the race in his favor. The tape is likely to be the opposite. We won't know for a couple of days whether it lowered Trump's numbers, but it made it much harder for him to add new supporters. If a voter thought badly of him before, they probably think even worse of him now.

A million and one Trump fans will insist, "but I don't care about what he said." For the purposes of getting Trump 270 electoral votes, that doesn't matter that much. His ability to win the election depends upon adding new supporters, breaking past that low-40s threshold he's been at most of the year. He could do this by dislodging Hillary supporters, winning over and motivating previously undecided voters, or getting supporters of Gary Johnson or Jill Stein into his pile.

The Trap

Remember this exchange. There's a good chance this will come back to hurt Trump.

TRUMP: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

COOPER: So, for the record, you're saying you never did that?

TRUMP: I've said things that, frankly, you hear these things I said. And I was embarrassed by it. But I have tremendous respect for women.

COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

TRUMP: And women have respect for me. And I will tell you: No, I have not. And I will tell you that I'm going to make our country safe. We're going to have borders in our country, which we don't have now.

How much are Trump fans willing to bet that no woman is going to come forward in the next month and claim Trump groped her? Right now, some voices are laying down their bets, insisting this is just wild hyperbolic language by Trump, and that he would never just come up to a woman and touch her in inappropriate places. Based upon his history, temperament, and past behavior . . . how much are you willing to bet?

Trump will argue that any accusers are lying . . . but he'll face the unique challenge of arguing that they're lying when they claim he acted that way, and that he himself lied identically when he boasted that he could act that way without consequence.

For what it's worth, Jill Harth, a makeup artist who worked with Trump, claims he groped her and filed a sexual harassment suit against Trump back in the 1990s — but then withdrew the suit:

At the time, Trump vigorously denied the charges saying the suit "was a desperate attempt to get me to settle a case they can't win." But then, not even a month after filing the case, Harth withdrew it. The court record indicates it was "voluntarily dismissed" but "without prejudice," meaning she could have re-filed the case. The timing is interesting because at around the same time the case was withdrawn, Trump reportedly agreed to settle with her husband's company, The American Dream Enterprise, according to an obscure 1997 gossip article in the New York Daily News which appears to be the only mainstream media coverage of either suit.

She also has this counter-intuitive behavior for someone claiming to be victimized by Trump:

The Trump campaign also released emails from last fall and winter in which Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York, sends warm wishes and pleads for jobs doing his hair and makeup. "I am definitely Team Trump," she emailed the campaign a year ago, and at a Trump event in January she was ushered backstage to see him.

The Debate Itself . . .

What a bizarre debate.

It began with the candidates refusing to shake hands, an indication of the seething hostility between the two campaigns and the two candidates. The growing nastiness must have been cathartic for each of them, finally being able to bring out all of the arguments and opposition research they've wanted to bring up, directly to each other's faces.

Trump probably didn't mitigate too much of the damage from the "grab her" tape with his excuse that "it was locker-room talk" and "I'm not proud of it." Lots of Republicans wondered if he would open with a blistering, furious counterattack, but early on, he almost seemed medically subdued. He did briefly rip into Bill Clinton's record of sexual misconduct, and intriguingly, Hillary Clinton barely addressed those arguments. Hillary did offer her indictment that Trump's behavior doesn't represent the great country full of good people that we want to be . . . and if everyone had switched over to the football or baseball games after that, she had a good night.

But the debate went on for another hour and 15 minutes, and Trump seemed to have actually cracked the briefing books this time. He didn't always explain all his references that he wedged into his two-minute answers — Sid Blumenthal, Jonathan Gruber, 33,000 e-mails — but he seemed to have more to say in all of his opportunities. He also pivoted to the topics he wanted to get to tonight; he barely did this in the other debate. He remembered to hit Obamacare early and enjoyed a whole segment on it. Whether or not viewers came away believing Trump had a detailed plan to fix it, Hillary Clinton had to concede the glaring and worsening problems in the program. If voters head to the polling places thinking about how disappointed and angered they are by Obamacare, that's a bad sign for Clinton and Democrats in general.

Moderator Martha Raddatz detests Donald Trump, didn't hide it much at all, and she seemed to want to debate Trump herself. That was an exceptionally unwise approach to the role of moderator, in part because it validated his complaint from earlier in the evening that it would be "three on one."

Finally, it ended on something resembling a genuine gracious note. Asked if they could find something to praise in the other, Clinton praised Trump's children. Trump offered comments that could pop up in an ad for Hillary Clinton. For one shining moment, Trump actually took the high road, and praised Clinton for never quitting, and for being a fighter. She seemed surprised and a little flattered — and she should, since those are undoubtedly among the qualities that Trump admires the most in himself.

Once he got beyond the opening 20 minutes, Trump had a much better performance. Will it change the dynamics of the race? That may depend upon the size of the audience. Perhaps an audience as large as the first debate's 80 million or so tuned in, expecting a Trump meltdown . . . and then didn't get one.

The Horrible, Horrible Evan Bayh

Evan Bayh is going to have a much tougher time winning that Senate race in Indiana than Democrats thought he would.

Evan Bayh spent substantial time during his last year in the Senate searching for a private sector job even as he voted on issues of interest to his future corporate bosses, according to the former Indiana lawmaker's 2010 schedule, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press.

The Democrat had more than four dozen meetings and phone calls with headhunters and future corporate employers over the months, beginning days after announcing his surprise retirement from the Senate on Feb. 15, 2010, through December of that year as his term came to an end. Bayh is now running to get his old seat back and help his party regain Senate control.

Announcing his retirement, Bayh claimed he was fed up with the gridlock and that it was time for him to "contribute to society in another way." His announcement stunned party bosses; Democrats lost his Senate seat in the midterm elections later that year. . .

In June 2010, Bayh was among a small group of Democrats who helped kill a tax increase on private equity gains known as carried interest that was opposed by Apollo Global Management. That fall he stayed overnight three times at one Apollo executive's Central Park South residence in Manhattan, and met twice with the company's chief executive, Leon Black.

Weeks after Bayh left the Senate, Apollo announced he had been hired as a senior adviser.

In May 2010, Bayh lunched with a Marathon Oil board member. Then in June, he and a minority of Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would have eliminated billions in tax deductions and exemptions for oil and gas companies.

Marathon Petroleum Corp., a new Marathon spinoff, announced Bayh had been elected to its board in July 2011.

Separately, in post-Senate life, Bayh "earned $440,033.72 as a Fox News analyst." I don't know whether that figure is more bothersome for what it says about Bayh or what it says about the network. He joined Fox News in 2011 and suspended his contract to run for Senate this year. That comes out to about $73,000 per year for part-time work.

ADDENDA: Thanks to everyone who asked about the condition of my family and friends in the Hilton Head, South Carolina area. My folks are fine, and local coverage shows the Hilton Head/Bluffton/Savannah area was hit, but not catastrophically — power outages, trees down, sand dunes washed away. It's bad, but it could have been a lot worse.