Trump's critics cite Trump's advancing years - he is now 78 - and apparent mental decline as the cause for his inability to deliver a succinct closing message as to why voters should, despite everything, return him to office.

"Age and cognitive decline?" offered one veteran Republican consultant on condition of anonymity.

"Psychological decompensation," said George Conway, whose former wife, Kellyanne Conway, ran Trump's 2016 campaign in its final months. George Conway supported Trump that election before quickly concluding he had made a terrible mistake.

Trump's increasingly erratic campaign rhetoric in the finals of his 2024 campaign stands in stark contrast to his performance eight years ago, when he robotically stuck to reading poll-tested themes from his teleprompter multiple times a day. Eight years later, Trump instead spends most of his hour-and-a-half speeches on ... side tracks.

As I said before, there has to be some empirical data identifying this phenomena or there'd be no reason to create such commercials.

If you're a guy, and you're concerned that somebody else might find out about you vote.

It's there a pool of men worried about being emasculated by voting for Harris? Trump already has their vote.

I think both of you discount the effects of peer pressure, especially for those whose lives and friends promote the same toxic faux white male dominance oozing from Trump himself.

This commercial is geared toward specifically girl dads who otherwise might like what Trump stands for, but who also understand what abortion bans and the withholding of lifesaving reproductive healthcare means in regards to their own daughter's and granddaughter's ability to live their own lives free from control by anyone but themselves.

As I said before, there has to be some empirical data identifying this phenomena or there'd be no reason to create such commercials. This is nothing more than the final attempt to create a permission structure for erstwhile Trump-leaning voters to vote as their conscious tells them to even if their friends and family might do just the opposite.

The ad, paid for by Vote Common Good, a religious nonprofit aimed at urging religious people to vote Democrat, begins with two male friends walking into the voting center together.

"Come on, boys. Let's make America great again," one of the men says to another, referencing former President Donald Trump's campaign slogan.

After the man votes for Harris, his daughter runs up to him and they hug. The man assures his friend that he did his "patriotic duty."

"What happens in the booth stays in the booth," Clooney says at the end of the ad. "Vote Harris/Walz."

It's funny that anyone would find issue with voter autonomy inside the booth, but that obviously isn't the case in right wing world as they feel couples keeping their choices to themselves are tantamount to violating their marriage vows relating to spousal trust.

Just another example where equality feels like oppression to those who've always lived with and utilized unearned privilege, even within their own relationships.

Trump wins the popular vote.

Trump is losing the women's vote by up to 18 points in some swing states, and women have comprised 55% of early voters. Harris also is winning over 65 voters by a smaller percentage, while these women are voting for her by a 2 to 1 margin.

There are far more women in the electorate than men, so by math alone, Trump winning a popular vote is utterly daft. You cannot win a popular majority when the two largest voting blocks in the electorate are going in favor of your opponent.

Harris will likely win the popular vote by more than 10 million votes.

Seen on the interwebs:

Kamala Harris: "I got Donald to work at McDonald's."

Joe Biden: "I got him to dress up as a garbage man."

Stormy Daniels: "I got him to pick up a mic, and ... "

Above should be attributed to #48, not #43 but both fit the sentiment.

#43

I think it's become rather clear that Trump's play for the bro-vote has cost him dearly amongst both women and seniors, especially due to his close relationship with both Putin and avowed white supremacists - as he's made 'whiteness' the central part of his own life story.

Women are the first Americans to have a constitutional right taken away from them by the SCOTUS and the results have been more catastrophic for women's' healthcare provision involving reproductive services than previously imagined.

And senior women lived in the pre-Roe world, and have personal memories of stories and anecdotes from those days who do not want to see life returned to where women do not have complete autonomy over their own health and well being.

The coalition formed around support for Kamala Harris - against the unfitness of Donald Trump - is unprecedented in modern American political history.

The breadth of Trump's coalition is different: It stretches from anti-corporate naturalists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - who says Trump has promised him "control" of public health agencies - to post-liberal Catholics like JD Vance to crypto bros to Elon Musk. This, too, is a coalition with vast policy differences. They are united by a shared distrust in - and desire to take control of - American institutions.

We're used to elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. This election pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries.

To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side "Woke Inc." and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

In 2024, Pew polled Democrats and Republicans on their views of various government agencies. The net favorability gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a stunning 92 points; on the Environmental Protection Agency, it was 80 points; on the Department of Education, it was 73 points. Fine, all those are liberal-coded agencies. But it keeps going: a 62-point gap for the F.B.I., a 60-point difference on the Department of Transportation; a 37-point gap on the Department of Homeland Security. In all of these cases - yes, even the Department of Homeland Security - it was Democrats reporting far more favorable feelings.

Based on a binomial distribution - which assumes that all polls are independent of one another, which theoretically they should be - it's realllllllllllllly unlikely. Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin.

This is a clear-as-day example of what we call herding: the tendency of some polling firms to move with the flock by file-drawering (not publishing) results that don't match the consensus or torturing their turnout models until they do.

In this election, the incentives are doubly bad, because the polling averages in the swing states are close to zero - so a pollster can both herd toward the consensus and avoid taking a stand that there's a ~50/50 chance they'll later be criticized for by publishing a steady stream of Harris +1s, Trump +1s and ties. Lately, a lot of national polls have also shown near-ties after usually showing Harris leads earlier in the race. We wonder if there's been an increasing amount of herding there too, perhaps involving the use and abuse of likely voter models - national polls have tightened and moved toward Trump considerably more than state polls have become Trumpier over the past month, except in Nevada and Florida.

All of this herding - and hedging - increases my concern about another systematic polling error. It might be an error in Trump's favor again, but it won't necessarily be: pollsters may be terrified of showing Harris leads after two cycles of missing low on Trump, and they probably won't be criticized too much for a Harris +1 or even a Trump +1 if she wins in Michigan by, say, 3 or 4 points.

In 60 or so hours, none of this will matter anymore except as ground for forensic examinations of the pollsters based on the accuracy - or lack thereof - of their work.

It's up to us, the voters to show up - if you haven't already voted - and make your individual voice heard amongst the tens upon tens of millions of fellow Americans in deciding the type of future you want this nation to have and particularly whom you want to see representing us as elected representatives for the next 2/4/6 years. VOTE!

AU, the thread about the poll is on the Backpage, that's why no one is engaging you.

I cannot wait to read the upcoming stories about this last week of Trump's campaign, especially today. It will be amazing to find out how the braintrust decided to tell Trump about the Iowa poll if it wasn't already a widely known signpost of what Tuesday may have in store. I also wonder who got tasked with first telling him that the very poll that nailed both of his races in 2016 and 2020 has come out and he's 3 points down to Kamala .... in IOWA. White Iowa. Lilly white Iowa. A state populated mainly by Trump's favorite color of folks. And he's down 3 points.

Somebody somewhere in or around the Trump camp is writing this story as we speak, or Woodward is hooving up all the facts and players for his inevitable next tell-all. It will be riveting reading.

Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important, manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.

Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.

The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part, laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few days must take its place.

It's no secret that this year's gender gap is shaping up to be the largest in memory, with polls showing men favoring Trump by double digits, and women favoring Harris by a similar margin. In many ways, that gap was preordained not because of who's on the ballot, but what's at stake - the future of reproductive freedom, and one side that's actively pushing to regress back toward restrictive gender roles and limited rights.

But instead of trying to counter that, Trump has leaned in. The Trump gambit depends on winning over more men faster than he alienates women. And that's hardly a safe bet.

Overall, according to a recent Politico analysis, women are accounting for 55% of the early vote across battleground states. And in Pennsylvania, a state that many strategists consider the most important for each candidate, data suggests that early voting includes a relatively high proportion of Democratic women who did not vote there in 2020.

One of those storylines is the determination and enthusiasm of women who back Democrat Kamala Harris, including women who might be afraid to say so publicly because their husbands support Republican Donald Trump.

I first heard about this last week, in Michigan, while covering a campaign event for Democratic Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin. Slotkin said canvassers were reporting stops at houses with large Trump signs, where women would answer and - when asked which candidate they were supporting - would quietly point to a photo of Harris on the canvassers' campaign literature.

Slotkin went on to say she'd been hearing of an organic campaign to put notes in bathroom stalls, reminding women that their votes are confidential and that they should vote like their daughters' lives depend on it.

This story has nothing to do with the political dynamics of the presidential race and everything to do with just how dysfunctional, manic, and bizarre life in Trump's inner circle truly is, coming from those inside it. It also shows how everyone around him has learned exactly how he must be handled and manipulated in order to keep themselves relevant while fighting off competing internal factions always out to kneecap those who they feel oppose them.

This is simply the type of Machiavellian ethos that Trump demands without a shred of the wisdom or foresight Machiavelli assumed proponents must possess in order to achieve the ruler's desired results.

Once the debate was behind them - and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart - Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign.

Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period - money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.

Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money - and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with - it was nowhere near that amount.

LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18... As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out - profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low - as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn't ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. "Okay, I get it, I get it," he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest.

Less than a week after the dtente, CNN unearthed LaCivita's Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him - that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. This home stretch of the campaign hadn't just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me that they'd had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump - even if the nation was not.

Anyone want to proffer a guess what would happen if one person had nine guns aimed at their head during a war skirmish?

That person would be killed. Brutally - based on modern field weapons - if all 9 shooters fire - which is exactly what they'd do with an enemy in their sights.

There is no other plausible outcome for such a scenario. N.O.N.E.

Anyone making such a case is a moron, gaslighter, and a tactically ignorant doofus.

IOW, Strawlighter.

It's an ad stereotyping husbands (pretty much all of them) of treating their wives as property that they get to boss around and control.

Isn't that PRECISELY what Jesse Watters and Charlie Kirk implied with their whining responses demanding their rights to "treat their wives as property that they get to boss around and control"?

Judging by how many trump cult men are furious about it, it must be accurate.

Bingo! How can you be so blind at times? - all of you Bellringers

I doubt that there's a single person on this blog who would be dissuaded from voting because of positive trend news, especially those living in swing states. There is a HUGE reason stories of Harris momentum MUST BE WRITTEN because Trump's whole "rigged election" message is based on the public believing that trends are in his favor for re-election, giving him credibility for doing exactly what he did in 2020 - dispute the results if/when he indeed loses.

And second, almost every Harris supporter that I know has also bought into the always looming reality that Trump could win based on the plethora of largely GOP polls, all showing him ahead. So again, anti-Trump voting trends are news that should be widely broadcast, but doing so in no way should be interpreted as a reason for Harris supporters to become overconfident.

Everyone understands that this race isn't over until every last vote has been cast and all of them have been tallied.

One last piece of breaking election news is that Pennsylvania is also seeing a marked rise in first time women voters, far outpacing men.

Happy Roevember everybody, and if you haven't yet, VOTE.

In 2018, the NBA all-star said Trump doesn't "give a ---- about the people."

"The number one job in America, the appointed person, is someone who doesn't understand the people and really don't give a ---- about the people," James said in a video. "And this time right now, with the president of the United States, it's at a bad time. And while we cannot change what comes out of that man's mouth, we can continue to alert the people that watch us, that listen to us, as this is not the way."