I've heard this a little from people recently - but I haven't seen any change in his actions ... just that the press don't report on his antic quite as much, I presume because they're trying to convince people the race is 'close' by influencing people to make it so.

The CNBC interview the other morning included a LOT of offensive stuff, but a lot of the media generally only jumped on the more positive things he said ..

Trump on CNBC

Well, there's probably my LOL for the day.

Election Update: Has Clinton’s ‘Bad Weekend’ Moved The Polls? | FiveThirtyEight

I am all-in with Nate Silver here. Trump has clear momentum in a race with a ton of undecided voters. I'm still seeing what I believe to be unwarranted optimism from the pro-Clinton crowd.

I love how Trump is claiming to be the first person to ever think about child care expenses. Maybe later he can come up with a plan to offer pensions for people over 65 and with disabilities.

That all well and good, but none of it is as incendiary as a fair bit of his past rhetoric.

Here's what I suspect is happening--and will continue to happen--in the minds of many "undecided" people who never vote Democrat (as long as he doesn't let his outrageousness rise to the level that it has previously):

AUGUST: "I don't want her putting anyone on the Supreme Court, but Trump sounds scary. He might be even worse."

OCTOBER: "I *still* don't want her putting anyone on the Supreme Court, but Trump doesn't sound as scary any more. I'll vote for him."

I suspect that the above has started to happen, and that's a major part of his upward trend. Now, I have no idea if there enough people fitting that profile to put him ahead of HRC, but common sense says that they're out there and at some point (maybe still now) they outnumbered those thinking similarly on the D side.

In other words, HRC at her worst has been less off-putting to the average D voter than DJT at his worst has been to the average R voter. So as a result, he had/has more of those "easier-to-convince" voters than she. These are people who *want* to vote Republican, but when Trump's antics are at their craziest, it makes them "undecided."

Heh. CNN Breaking News: Trump has released the results of his physical.

Pointing back to our (encouragingly increasingly popular, cause I think it means we're getting smarter at the FOFC) recurring theme of "it's the turnout, stupid".

Among the things Trump has to do for a while here is avoid giving Hilary back her "deplorables" gift.

I'll stick to my belief that he has to continue to "be Trump" to keep his existing voters BUT he doesn't need to create a new catch phrase for a while.

Yeah, I've been pretty much won over to that line of thinking regarding this election.

Yeah, pretty big unforced error there.

If Trump he wins all the states 538 says he has a 50%+ chance to win at the moment - which includes Ohio and Florida, he has 260 electoral votes (including 1 in the 2nd district of Maine). If he also wins Nevada (current 47% chance), he'd be up to 266. Then there's a bit of a wall, his next best states odds-wise is New Hampshire at a 35% chance and Pennsylvania where they have him at a 29% chance.

The reason they still see him as significant underdog (though rising, up to a 37.7% chance overall), is because a slight-to-moderate dip from here would hurt him a lot more than a slight-to-moderate gain would help him. And the slight-to-moderate dip seems much more likely, if this truly is Clinton's "worst week" of the campaign.

that's not how statistics works

It's how estimating probability based on a range of odds of the likelihood of future events works.

Edit: If Trump gains in the polls, his likelihood of winning any new states that he doesn't already have a strong chance to win, is very low. If Trump goes down in the polls, his likelihood of losing states he currently has a 50% chance to win goes way up. In other words, from here, a Trump gain doesn't change the map, a Clinton gain does. That's absolutely relevant in 538's probability estimates, they talk about it all the time.

I'm willing to trust Nate Silver & 538 when it comes to statistics.

Classic Trump quote re: the test results.Btw, I didn't realize he was 6'3 236... That definitely explains some of his in person charisma.

Intruiged but confused by that statement - so he's not a midget (he's still short in my eyes ... I'm 6'5'' ;) ) and somewhat overweight (my 'normal' weight at my height is 210lbs) .... how does that translate to charisma? ....

Santa Claus?

So...

...wait for it...

Something you wanna tell us about your tax returns, Donald?

I'm not a big "needs validation" kinda guy but I'll admit that it's kind of uplifting to see someone else independently tackle one of my more common sermons.

Independent Voters Are Overrated | FiveThirtyEight

So Trump has indicated that Hillary started birtherism (total lie). He's also going to give a speech today where it is expected that he will say that Obama was born in the U.S. and that he helped to settle the issue by getting him to release his birth certificate. And the media will write glowing stories about his moderation and pivot.

He is a much, much better politician than I gave him credit for when this all started.

Remember that Ailes is on his team now and he joined right before the pivot. I think he's been the single biggest addition to the campaign. He understands how to manipulate the media.

Tallest Candidate Wins Majority of US Presidential Elections

Why Tall People Make More Money - The Atlantic It is interesting that this also coincided with his replacing Manafort with the Breitbart guy since the media thought that would lead to a much more combative tone. Maybe Ailes is the explanation.

Yeah, Bannon has been invisible. My guess is he's working with Stone and Bossie on the dirty tricks side of things, but who knows. Somebody has gotten Trump to calm down, and my guess is Ailes is the only guy with the stature to make that happen. I think Conway has been solid as the face of the campaign on TV. She's struggled with some of Trump's most outlandish bullshit, but generally she's done a very good job.

"I used to think the world was flat, but I did some research, changed my opinion and settled the issue. You should thank me!"

Fixed.

The more he talks about how complicated his taxes are, the more likely it is that he has "virtually" no money of his own. Someone wrote some article about 6-8 months ago about how he was possibly nowhere close to as rich as most people thought he was. I bet he's not a billionaire on paper, and it's possible he might only be worth a few hundred million or less and is heavily leveraged.

Well of course he is heavily leveraged.
He is a real estate guy at heart.
The way the tax code is written he'd be a fool to not be heavily leveraged. Depreciation and such compounded by interest write offs 1031s...you build an empire that spits out millions per month in cash flow but you always owe more than the property is worth so you are "broke" lower taxed, and have a mult million dollar income.

Makes him my hero and me jealous.

I should have added heavily leveraged to "unknown and questionable foreign sources".

I guess i do like the part where he's routinely ripped off the Ivy League kiddos and continued to only pay back dimes to quarters on the dollars he owes. I don't like the part where he claims to be super wealthy when he's not. And I'm not sure how I feel if our president is several hundred million(billion?) dollars in debt to a variety of foreign sources.

I'm not a finance guy at all but he reminds me a lot of the shell game they were running around Sears when i was employed there with all of the holding companies, etc. Read a bunch up on that cause I was curious.

I mean, something came out the other day that the most cash his charity ever had on hand was something like 3.5million dollars. For someone who is allegedly worth 4-10billion dollars that seems like a joke amount of money.

The bigger problem is that his debt, especially to foreign banks and investors, is a real conflict of interest. If the U.S. were a corporation there's no way legal would let him serve until his conflicts had been cleared up. It's a serious question as to how should a candidate with at minimum hundreds of millions of foreign debt be handled.

So I must have missed it...was all this stuff that came out today just an attempt at a strategic move by Trump or did something happen in the past couple days that led to this being scheduled?

Except the US itself is a carbon copy of that, with our debt.

I love that Trump believes Obama was born in the US now that most people seem to agree that his place of birth wouldn't affect his eligibility.

So he got all the mileage out of the birther fiasco that he could, So Trump today was back to another favorite-Clinton is going to take away all our guns.

I think he and his team wanted it "dealt with" before the debate. Stiffing the media like he did probably ensures they won't let him forget it.

I honestly have no idea what your point you're making.

That the country has its own "leverages" but that hasn't stopped it from doing whatever it pleases. Not to mention, how much money again is the Clinton foundation getting from Saudi Arabia or wherever else?

My point is, there is a lot more to worry about with Trump besides this. If you really think this is an issue, you're grasping at straws so hard, your knuckles are white.

There's a rather big difference between if you do this I'll stop donating to your charity and if you do this I'll call in the remaining balance of your loans.

There isn't a corporate board in America that would accept this level of conflict. There's a reason that we've expected politicians to step away from their businesses when they run for office.

I don't get what he means by "I finished it". Does he mean that he was the last birther and now the issue is gone now?

So I'm looking at the electoral map. It would seem that it'd be really difficult for Trump to win without Pennsylvania.

Considering he has tweeted about it as recently as 2014, when did he consider it closed?

He thinks he got the President to cave on the issue and show his birth certificate.

And he brought it up again in Jan of this year in an interview with Wolf on CNN. He's milked it for all he can so he's given up on it and moved on.

It's true that Hillary didn't start it, but her supporters were the first ones to really bring it up in 2008. Her campaign started a whisper campaign about it and sent out that photo of Obama in Somali garb. The head of campaign wrote about attacking his lack of "American roots". The PUMA group was all over it as well.

So while Trump went too far with that claim, he's not wrong in that Hillary's campaign and supporters were spreading this info long before Republican nuts got a hold of it.

Maybe Hillary started this with rumors during the 2008 primary (I haven't researched this enough to determine either way ) but he held a press conference saying his people were finding unbelievable things in Hawaii and kept pushing it after Obama produced the long form in 2011, Trump has zero high ground here.

Great news for everyone, Trump will keep his tax cut plan to help small businesses but drop the plan to not increase nation debt. Everyone wins.

Log In - The New York Times

Yeah, yeah, this is the POTUS thread, but since part of the stakes for the Presidential election are who gets to nominate Scalia's replacement, and the ideological tenor of that replacement hinges on who controls the Senate, I feel like this merits attention.

Background Checks - YouTube

I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with being a good legislator? I know at least three near brain-dead guys who can do that. Mad respect for your service and all, but it doesn't mean you should be elected to anything.

Somewhere up the thread was discussion about the various "ground games" for the campaigns. And somebody mentioned Trump having an operation in a supposedly secure state like Georgia.

Fairly fluff article today from the AJC but it mentioned something that, honestly, I hadn't thought much about: just how early "early voting" begins. Counties will start to mail out absentee ballots next week and advance in-person voting starts on Oct. 17. It makes a little more sense to me now, I've preached the importance of turnout lately, and the surest turnout of all is to get the vote submitted and done a.s.a.p.

Neither does playing the saxophone. No matter, this is what we all inexplicable like to see from our candidates.

Stop.

The ad is about identity, which is a big driver for voters. They want to vote for the person like them. The ad isn't about the mechanics of the rifle, it's about saying that I'm a gun guy like you.

Why do you think the drink a beer with candidate X is a decent predictor of votes?

What does that have to do with being a good legislature?

Nothing, but don't act like these is unique. Every candidate advertises that they are a part of the tribe. Those that only engage on policy almost always lose. Persuadable voters generally don't know or care about policy.

They do care about who seems to be like them.

I have no idea how my mentioning others doing the same is equivalent to me saying it's unique.