Trump Could Win Pennsylvania, May Not Debate, Ex-Governor Rendell Says

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-07-28/trump-could-win-pennsylvania-may-not-debate-ex-governor-says

By Elizabeth Titus

Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said Thursday he’s skeptical that Republican Donald Trump will take part in the three debates against Democrat Hillary Clinton scheduled for this fall.

“He not only doesn’t put any meat on the bones, I think if you asked him for specifics he couldn’t tell you, and that’s why I think he may duck the debates,” Rendell, a Democrat, said at a Bloomberg breakfast in Philadelphia during his party’s national convention.

Trump could upend the pattern of the last six presidential elections and win Pennsylvania thanks to a “simple” message that appeals to angry and unemployed voters, Rendell said. The most recent Republican to win in Pennsylvania was George H.W. Bush in 1988; Barack Obama won the state in 2012 by over 5 percentage points.

Rendell spoke alongside Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who said that he was “very confident” Clinton will win his politically divided state if current conditions hold, partly because Trump has alienated Colorado Republicans who vote on “family values.”

Debate Advice

Rendell said Americans consider the general-election debates “sacred,” but they thought the same about presidential candidate releasing their tax returns and Trump hasn’t done that either, citing Internal Revenue Service audits.

If he were advising Trump, Rendell said he would tell him to study three hours per day for the debates. If Trump didn’t want to do that, Rendell would suggest an adviser such as former UN Ambassador John Bolton travel with Trump for a week.

“Trump is not a dumb man, he’s a very smart man,” Rendell said in the question-and-answer session with reporters, calling the billionaire real estate developer “complex” and “charming.”

“He’s not insane by any means.”

Inner Circle

Rendell said it’s “absolutely a problem” that Clinton appears to surround herself with people who won’t challenge her opinions. There’s “no question” that if she had, it would have saved her some of the political trouble she ran into for using a private e-mail server as secretary of state, he said.

“They should occasionally bounce some stuff off other people,” Rendell said.

Hickenlooper spoke of another, positive side to the remarkable loyalty he has observed among Clinton’s longtime aides. It could help Clinton alleviate her problem with the high share of voters who consider her untrustworthy or dishonest, he said.

“Somehow the Clinton campaign, somehow they have to figure out how to get this sense of loyalty and devotion that people have towards her” out into voters’ view, Hickenlooper said. On trust issues, “she has to live with it” and “she’s also got to work at it.”

Suffolk Poll

Clinton led Trump 50 percent to 41 percent among likely voters in a Suffolk University poll of Pennsylvania released Thursday. Trump had a 3-point lead among male voters while Clinton had a 19-point lead with women. The poll was conducted July 25-27.

Still, Rendell said Trump has “already made inroads” with traditionally Democratic voters, based on registration figures. That’s despite Rendell’s view that advancing technology, not the international trade agreements that Trump regularly trashes, is the more likely culprit for many of the job losses in Pennsylvania’s manufacturing sector.

Trump’s likely gains among Democrats will probably be offset by Clinton’s pick-ups in the Pennsylvania suburbs and among independents, he said.

Clinton can’t recreate President Barack Obama’s turnout in key areas of the state, but “this president is on fire” to help her, Rendell said a day after Obama spoke on Clinton’s behalf at the convention.

“He may work harder to generate turnout than he did for himself,” Rendell said.

Pennsylvania is “right up there among the primary targets” for the fall contest, Rendell said. Trump is an “X factor” for the state who is also polling strongly in the battleground state of Florida right now, he said.

“The Russia thing should hurt him but nothing has,” Rendell said. Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russian hackers could find thousands of e-mails from her time as secretary of state that Clinton deleted from her private server because she said they were personal.

Effective Surrogates

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton’s primary-election opponent, could be Clinton’s best surrogate in Colorado, Rendell said. Hickenlooper added that Obama and his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, could also be very effective for Clinton.

On Clinton’s struggle to appeal to white male voters, Rendell said Representative Joe Crowley of New York should have been tapped to help put Clinton’s name into nomination at the convention -- beyond just having a pre-primetime speaking slot -- because he “looks like the white man we’re trying to get” and was impacted by 9/11, a key issue for Clinton when she served in the U.S. Senate.

Reflecting on a sense that voters are hungry for change after eight years of a Democrat in the White House, Rendell said, “if you’re hurting, it’s hard to convince you that you should vote to keep the people” who are already in office.

He said he suggested to Clinton aide Huma Abedin that when Clinton talks about the Black Lives Matter movement, she also say that the majority of police officers are good. Rendell said he was pleased to see that message incorporated into the convention, along with support for the U.S. military -- a traditionally Republican theme.

My model shows Donald Trump has an 87 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton

Updated July 28, 2016 9:08 AM

By Helmut Norpoth

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/my-model-shows-donald-trump-has-an-87-percent-chance-of-beating-hillary-clinton-1.12102905

THE BOTTOM LINE

Donald Trump may be lucky to have picked an election in which change trumps experience.

When voters demand change, they are willing to overlook many foibles of the change candidate.

To be sure, Donald Trump, is a long shot in betting markets to win in November. PredictIt, a popular legal wagering website, gives Hillary Clinton a 66 percent chance to win the presidency. She has consistently led Trump in that market for three months, as well as in the Iowa Electronic Markets. And Trump has trailed Clinton — with rare exceptions — in the poll averages by RealClearPolitics and The Huffington Post.

So how can a reasonable person predict that Trump will be the next president?

For starters, pre-election polls have selected the wrong candidate many times. Who can forget Tom Dewey defeating Harry Truman in 1948 polls — until he didn’t? Or Michael Dukakis leading George H.W. Bush in 1988 by 17 points this time of year? Or Mitt Romney edging Barack Obama in the final Gallup poll four years ago?

My advice: Beware of pollsters bearing forecasts, especially anyone trying to peek into the future, especially those with money to bet.

Some 20 years ago, I constructed a formula, The Primary Model, that has predicted the winner of the popular vote in all five presidential elections since it was introduced. It is based on elections dating to 1912. The formula was wrong only once: The 1960 election. That one hurt because John F. Kennedy was my preferred candidate.

The Primary Model consists of two ingredients: The swing of the electoral pendulum, and the outcomes of primaries.

You can see the pendulum work with the naked eye. After two terms in office, the presidential party in power loses more often than not. In fact, over the past 65 years, it managed to win a third term only once. In 1988, President George H.W. Bush extended Ronald Reagan’s presidency by one more term. Reagan made this possible by winning re-election by a bigger margin than when he first got elected. That spells continuity, a desire for more of the same.

President Barack Obama has not left such a legacy for a Democratic successor. He did worse in his re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012 than when he beat John McCain in 2008. That spells, “It’s Time for a Change!” The pendulum points to the GOP in 2016, no matter whether the candidate was named Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich or whoever.

Now add the outcomes of presidential primaries. Although some experts claim primary votes have no bearing on general elections, the fact is that primaries prove uncanny in forecasting the winner in November. Take the first election with a significant number of primaries, in 1912. In November that year, Woodrow Wilson, the winner in Democratic primaries, defeated William Howard Taft, the loser in Republican primaries; Taft was renominated since most states then did not use primaries. In general, the party with the stronger primary candidate wins the general election.

This year, Trump has wound up as the stronger of the two presidential nominees. He won many more primaries than did Clinton. In fact, this was apparent as early as early March. Trump handily won the first two primaries, New Hampshire and South Carolina, while Clinton badly lost New Hampshire to Sen. Bernie Sanders before beating him in South Carolina.

The Primary Model predicts that Trump will defeat Clinton with 87 percent certainty. He is the candidate of change. When voters demand change, they are willing to overlook many foibles of the change candidate. At the same time, the candidate who touts experience will get more intense scrutiny for any missteps and suspicions of misconduct of the record of experience.

Trump may be lucky to have picked an election in which change trumps experience and experience may prove to be a mixed blessing.

Helmut Norpoth is the director of undergraduate studies and political science professor at Stony Brook University.

WATCH: Hillary Clinton Actually Reads 'Sigh' Cue Off Of Her TelePrompter

5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

By Michael Moore

[…]

Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.  I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.

From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream! And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!

That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!

The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. To date, I haven’t broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I’m breaking that promise. I sadly believe Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She’s a hawk, to the right of Obama. But Trump’s psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.

Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.

The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her  — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.

The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.

Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher’s Republican Convention special this week on HBO, a man stopped me. “Mike,” he said, “we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” That was it. That was enough for him. To “shake things up.” President Trump would indeed do just that, and a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.

[…]