Aug 24, 2016 9 min read

Wake Up To Politics - August 24, 2016

Wednesday, August 24, 2016
76 Days Until Election Day 2016
33 Days Until the First Presidential Debate
I'm Gabe Fleisher for Wake Up To Politics, and reporting from WUTP world HQ in my bedroom - Good morning: THIS IS YOUR WAKE UP CALL!!!
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Today on the Trail Where are the 2016 presidential candidates and their running mates today?
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hits two states today, holding a 1pm rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa and a 7pm rally at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson.
While Florida is a key battleground state that Trump could pick up (recent polls have shown Clinton with a slight lead, but a Florida Atlantic University poll released this morning showed Trump with a 2-point lead), Mississippi is an assured victory for Trump (he leads in the state, which has not gone Democratic since 1976, by 15%, according to a Magellan poll released earlier this month).
Republicans strategists have questioned Trump’s decision to visit deep-red states like Texas (yesterday) and Mississippi that he will definitely win and deep-blue states like Connecticut (last week) that he will definitely lose, especially when faced with uphill climbs in a number of battleground and lean-red states.
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, meanwhile, will hold two events in North Carolina, a state that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 but has leaned toward Clinton in recent polls. Pence will speak at plumbing system manufacturer Charlotte Pipe and Foundry in Charlotte at 10am and hold a rally at Manufacturing Methods, LLC in Leland at 3pm.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton remains on her Bay Area fundraising spree, where she has three more events today (after four on Tuesday and two on Monday), including a luncheon in Silicon Valley co-hosted by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who last month hosted a fundraiser for House Speaker Paul Ryan. Tickets at the Silicon Valley fundraiser range in price from $1,000 to $27,000.
Finally, Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and vice presidential nominee Bill Weld with both speak and answer questions at a 5:30pm rally at Sheraton Burlington Hotel in Burlington, Vermont. Johnson has been attempting to raise his public profile recently, in hopes of qualifying for the presidential debate stage, and caught attention Tuesday with a New York Times interview where he called Donald Trump a “facist.”
Also today: defeated Democratic primary presidential candidate Bernie Sanders launches his new political group Our Revolution today with a livestream at 9pm Eastern to address the volunteer network from his presidential campaign. According to an email to his supporters, Sanders will be joined by other leaders of his campaign to “lay out some of the next steps we can take as a movement to empower a wave of progressive candidates this November and win the major upcoming fights for the values we share” in the livestream.
In the days before today’s launch, the group has seen a departure of at least five staffers from its 15-person team after Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver became president of the group last week. Kenneth Pennington, who worked as digital director of the Sanders campaign and then of Our Revolution, was among the aides to quit. According to reports, the exodus came as the group’s board (chaired by Jane Sanders, the Vermont senator’s wife) has been worried about questions on the group’s finances raised in an ABC News report last week.
As a 501(c)(4) organization, Our Revolution can accept unlimited donations from donors without having to list them – although Sanders’ position as a senator could create an uncomfortable association with the group.
Polling Roundup Two new national polls were released Tuesday, both showing Hillary Clinton with significant leads. Clinton took 41% of likely voters in a Reuters/Ispos poll to Trump’s 33%, while Gary Johnson was supported by 7% of voters and Green Party nominee by 2%.
Meanwhile, a NBC News/Survey Monkey online poll showed a similar race, with Clinton holding a five-point lead. Clinton took 43% of the vote in the NBC poll, with Trump taking 38%, Johnson at 11%, and Stein at 5%.
A number of polls were also released on the statewide level Tuesday: in Virginia, a Roanoke poll gave Clinton a huge lead (48% to Trump’s 32%, Johnson at 8%, Stein at 3%); in Missouri, a Monmouth poll showed Trump with just a 1-point advantage in the lean-Republican state (which has voted Republican since 2000), 44% to Clinton’s 43% and Johnson’s 8%.
Finally, although polls in the deep-red state have shown a close race recently (due to Trump’s unpopularity among Mormons), a Public Policy Polling survey found Trump with a double-digit lead: 39% to Clinton’s 24%, with Johnson taking 12% and Stein taking 1%.
Biden in Turkey Vice President Joe Biden continues his European tour today; he landed in Ankara, Turkey at 10:24am today. After arriving, Biden met with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and Speaker of Parliament Ismail Kahraman before touring Parliament.
Later today, Biden will hold a joint press conference with Yildirim before meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to pool reporter Barbara Plett of BBC, a senior Administration official told reporters that the “main goal of the trip [to Turkey] is to make sure our alliance remains rock and solid and relations get back on track because we have a lot of business to do with the Turks [in] countering ISIL, dealing with Syria/Iraq issues, [and] the Kurdish question.”
“Neither one of us can afford to have that relationship too strained at the moment,” the official said in the briefing. “There are strains but [the] relationship [is] not on the brink of rupture.”
Turkey and the United States are currently launching a major offensive against ISIS in northwest Syria; Biden’s visit is an attempt to cool relations and to assure Erdogan that the U.S. is considering his request for extradition of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.
Tuesday’s Trivia Answer Yesterday’s question: who is the only U.S. President to have served as chairman of their national party committee?
The answer…George H.W. Bush, who chaired the Republican National Committee from January 1973 to September 1974, during the Watergate scandal.
GREAT JOB… Joe Bookman, Steve Gitnik, Marlee Millman, Sharron Greenberg, Joan Zucker, David Molho, Toby Epstein, and @ArthurLieber!
WUTP Picks If you read anything else today, read these stories:
Clinton runs out the clock “She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.”
“With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to ‘run out the clock,’ confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.”
“Some Democrats, including close Clinton allies, have started to warn that their nominee might be under-estimating the danger lurking in the fall as Trump and Republicans prepare to launch negative ads on these twin controversies and remind American voters just how little they trust the former secretary of state. Their best hope is that Trump continues to veer wildly off script.” (Politico)
Clinton’s troubles with the foundation continued this week after the Associated Press reported Tuesday that “more than half the people outside the government who met Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money...to the Clinton Foundation.”
Clinton’s campaign pushed back on the report, calling the calendars released to the AP by the State Department “utterly flawed data,” while her opponent seized on the news. “It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history,” Donald Trump said in a statement Tuesday. “We’ve now learned that a majority of the non-government people she met with as secretary of state gave money to the corrupt Clinton Foundation. ... It was wrong then, and it is wrong now – and the foundation must be shut down immediately.”
#Throwback to 2012 “When President Barack Obama ran for re-election, Democrats made no secret of their disdain for Mitt Romney. That was all before Donald Trump.”
“Horrified by the prospect of Trump in the White House, Obama and his party have changed their tune about Romney. As they denounce Trump as ‘unhinged’ and unfit, they're getting nostalgic about the 2012 Republican nominee they now describe as principled, competent and honorable.”
“It’s a sharp reversal from four years ago. Back then, Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars portraying the former Massachusetts governor as a callous, unpatriotic, pet-abusing caricature of the uber-rich.”
“Yet as Trump is proving, everything in politics is relative.” (AP)
Potential Second Lady Could Make History “When Hillary Clinton was first lady of Arkansas in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, she went by her maiden name, Rodham, embracing an increasingly popular practice among women of that era — highly educated professionals influenced by second-wave feminism.”
“But by the time she became first lady of the United States she had bowed to lingering political and societal pressures and was using her husband's last name.”
“If Clinton is elected president in November, she will bring with her to the White House a woman who is less likely to face the same kind of scrutiny for using her maiden name, Anne Holton, the wife of Clinton's running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.”
“Holton would be the first wife of a U.S. president or vice president to use her birth surname.” (Washington Post)
Thinking Clinton Landslide? Think Again. “Donald J. Trump, after weeks of self-inflicted damage, has seen support for his candidacy in national polls dip into the 30s – Barry Goldwater and Walter F. Mondale territory – while Hillary Clinton has extended her lead to double digits in several crucial swing states.”
“Time to declare a landslide, right? Not so fast…Landslides do not really happen in presidential elections anymore.”
“It has been 32 years since a president won the popular vote by a double-digit percentage…There are a variety of factors that are likely to prevent a candidate today from rallying the huge, 60-plus-point majorities that swept Franklin D. Roosevelt back into office in 1936, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Richard M. Nixon in 1972.”
“The country is too fragmented and its political temperature too overheated for any single person to emerge as a consensus choice for anything nearing two-thirds of the electorate.” (New York Times)
Trump Attempts to Shed “Racist” Label “Donald Trump is rapidly trying to turn around his presidential campaign with a vigorous and at times strained effort to shed a label applied to him by a substantial portion of the electorate: racist.”
“Guided by his new campaign leadership, the Republican nominee has ordered a full-fledged strategy to court black and Latino voters and is mobilizing scores of minority figures to advocate publicly for his candidacy.”
“Trump is planning trips to urban areas — with stops at churches, charter schools and small businesses in black and Latino communities — and is developing an empowerment agenda based on the economy and education, aides said. Under consideration is an early September visit to Detroit, where retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary rival Ben Carson would guide him on a tour of the impoverished neighborhoods where he grew up.”
“Trump’s team also hopes to exploit what the campaign’s internal poll of black voters nationally shows to be a potential vulnerability for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton once voters are informed of the crime policy record of former president Bill Clinton, according to two Trump associates.”
“At his rallies, meanwhile, Trump has been spotlighting black supporters and making a blunt pitch to minorities.” (Washington Post)
The story’s author Robert Costa tweets: “Before his birther crusade against Obama, private Trump Organization research showed Trump popular w/ African Americans...Trump advisers are hoping in the campaign's final 75 days to get him back to that place: admired for wealth, lifestyle. Won't be easy...The unfolding Trump strategy: Seek historic white turnout, hope non-traditional GOP pitch + outreach improves suburban & minority support.”