Sep 19, 2016 7 min read

Wake Up To Politics - September 19, 2016

Monday, September 19, 2016

7 Days until the first Presidential Debate (Sept. 26)

11 Days until the Government Funding Deadline (Sept. 30)
50 Days until Election Day 2016 + my 15th birthday (Nov. 8)
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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Politics Planner

All times Eastern.

Campaign 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will hold a 1pm rally at Germain Arena in Fort Myers (Estero), Florida.
Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence campaigns in Iowa today, holding a 4pm town hall at The Music Man Square in Mason City and an 8pm rally at Giese Manufacturing in Dubuque.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will deliver a 12pm address at Temple University, where she will discuss "the stakes of November's election for millennial voters in Pennsylvania and across the country...[and] the challenges facing young people today and how her agenda would support them, including her plans to make free community college and debt-free college available to all Americans," according to her campaign.
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine and his wife Anne Holton will hold a 3pm organizing event at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, also focused on young voters.
Both nominees campaign in key battleground states, Pennsylvania (RealClearPolitics average: Clinton +6.6) and Florida (RCP average: Trump +1), before they heading to New York later today for meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Each nominee will meet with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt today; Clinton will also meet with President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, both major-party running mates will campaign in Iowa today, visiting a traditionally Democratic state leaning Trump in recent polls (RCP average: Trump +4.3).
Today on TV: Clinton will appear on tonight's episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." The interview was aired Friday. Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice-presidential nominee Ajamu Baraka will participate in a Fusion TV town hall moderated by Univision's Jorge Ramos and Fusion's Alicia Menendez, airing from 9-10pm tonight.
White House President Barack Obama wakes up in New York City today, to hold meetings ahead of the UN General Assembly's opening tomorrow. His first event of the day is political: an 11:55am fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
At 3:30pm, the President will meet with Premier Li Keqiang of China. At 4pm, he will sit down with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq. In the latter meeting, the President and the Iraqi Prime Minister will "strategize about the upcoming offensive to take back the northern city of Mosul," according to the Associated Press.
Finally, at 5:40pm, Obama will be joined by Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Ambassador Samantha Power at a meet and greet with staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
Vice President Joe Biden is in also in New York today: the VP will highlight his "cancer moonshoot," meeting about the initiative with health experts from Japan and South korea; speaking about it at the Social Good Summit; and delivering remarks on scientific research in the field at the Bloomberg/Hopkins Gala.
Biden will also attend President Obama's meeting with Prime Minister al-Abadi.
Congress The House is not in session today; the Senate meets at 3pm for legislative business. At 5:30pm, the upper chamber will hold a procedural vote to advance the legislative vehicle for the short-term continuing resolution designed to fund the government. Publicly, the only agreed-upon details in the CR is the date: the measure is expected to last through December 9, so lawmakers can negotiate a long-term solution after the November elections.
Before a spending bill is negotiated in the lame-duck session, the CR is expected to keep mot spending levels from last year's spending bills, although a few additions (such as funding to combat the Zika virus, the opoid epidemic, and the Louisiana flood) are possible.
Current government funding runs out on September 30; many senators are anxious to finish work on the CR so they can return home and campaign.

Daily Data

New Poll Shows Close Race in Florida A poll released this morning by The New York Times Upshot and Siena College show Hillary Clinton with a slight lead in Florida, underscoring the competitiveness of the state's 29 electoral votes.
In the survey of 867 likely Florida voters, Clinton took 41% of the vote to Trump's 40% (Gary Johnson took 9%, with Jill Stein nabbing 2%). Despite Florida's diverse electorate, Trump's support is nearly all from Caucasians: Trump wins white voters, 51% to 30%, while Clinton has a huge lead among Hispanic voters (61% to 21%). In addition, Clinton wins Florida's black population, 82% to 4%.
The poll was conducted in an unorthodox manner: while most major news organizations contact voters with random telephone numbers, The Upshot relied on Florida records in political data vendor L2's voter registraion file. This approach allowed the pollsters to look at the voting records of the people they were talking to, and skip past questions on their voter registration (since they already had the file). Instead of weighing information to the census like most polls, The Upshot simply weighted their sample to make information in the voter file, and expanded the normally variables to include matching for party registration and likelihood that the person will vote.
More on the poll's methodology here and results here.

Smart Reads

Trump is the Small-Donor Republican "Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, and one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the last decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations, $5, $10 and $20 at a time."
"Trump has only been actively soliciting cash for a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors of the last two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns."
“'I’ve never seen anything like this,' said a senior Republican operative who has worked closely with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation. 'He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.'" (Politico)
Political Communication Through the Ages "We take for granted that Donald Trump can, at any moment, tweet whatever complaint he has about whichever pundit he sees on TV -- and that Hillary Clinton can respond just as fast, slotting the tweet into whichever basket is most appropriate. There's not necessarily any delay between what the candidates want to say and our hearing it, though Trump supporters often wish there were more of one and Clinton's less..."
"In 1928, this was trickier. Herbert Hoover, sitting secretary of commerce, was running for president in hopes of succeeding Republican Calvin Coolidge. In his position, Hoover was responsible for managing the roll-out of the still-relatively-new technology of radio...Four years later, when Hoover was ready to run for the country's top job, things had evolved once again. The candidate was ready."
"His campaign created a 42-minute silent film called "Master of Emergencies" that highlighted his experience in managing food supplies during World War I and his response to flooding in the South. The problem, of course, is that the technology to compress that film onto something that could be mailed to voters was still a few years off. Hoover understood the need for scale from his radio days, so how do you get a film in front of voters who need to see it? Simply enough, by truck. The campaign, working with a company called Transport Publicity Corp., created a fleet of trucks that brought the film across the country. (Washington Post)
Joe Scarborough Pens Trump: The Musical "At the center of America's schizoid political-fame complex, there sits Joe Scarborough, a congressman turned TV star who somehow built the most influential show in Washington despite never wanting to be a mere morning-show host. Now, as he quests for something grander—he's turned his fraught relationship with Donald Trump into grist for a nutty new project, a Trump musical—the ample-egoed Scarborough is trying to prove there's no business like political show business." (GQ)