FACT CHECK: Trump said Detroit and Michigan are run at all levels by Democrats. Michigan's Gov is Republican.

Fox News host Sean Hannity won’t let go of the number 59. In 2012, there were 59 divisions in Philadelphia where not a single vote for Mitt Romney was registered in the general election. After CNN’s Brian Stelter slammed him and Bill O’Reilly for not questioning Donald Trump’s predictions that the election will be rigged, Hannity responded to Stelter on Twitter Sunday: “Hey Brian check Philly enquirer (sic) after 2012. How many districts not a single Romney vote. Check Cleveland. Do u prep?”
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The 59 divisions may appear remarkable if you think of them as “districts,” what Hannity calls them. Divisions, rather, are subzones of wards; the city has 1,686 divisions in all. Godfrey notes that his division encompasses eight square blocks.
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The divisions that went purely Obama were primarily in overwhelmingly black sections of West and North Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer visited divisions in question and sought out the small number of registered Republicans. Several had moved or told the paper they didn’t realize they were still in the party.
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Urban precincts where no one votes for a Republican presidential candidate are not unusual. Five divisions saw zero votes for Bush in 2004. That Obama claimed more divisions than Kerry did has been attributed to his place in history as the first black president. In 2008, there were 57 divisions where no one voted for McCain.

I asked her whether the time she was spending in Kentucky, a red state, reflected more than her desire to win the primary there the following week (which she did, by a hair). Her eyes lit up; it’s as if she’d been waiting for someone to ask her about the surprising possibilities of the electoral map this year. So which states do you think Trump puts in play? I asked, mentioning the possibility of Georgia, which some think could go Democratic for the first time since her husband won it in 1992.

“Texas!” she exclaimed, eyes wide, as if daring me to question this, which I did. “You are not going to win Texas,” I said. She smiled, undaunted. “If black and Latino voters come out and vote, we could win Texas,” she told me firmly, practically licking her lips.

It’s not just that Donald Trump needs to pivot – it’s that he needs to pivot away from being what’s made him Donald Trump. That means traditional-candidate Trump, maybe even boring-candidate Trump, reading from notes or TelePrompTers, and staying away from interviews and Twitter for a while.
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Remember, with Trump, dominating news cycles is not his problem. It’s dominating them with a message his party can rally behind that has proved vexing.

By advancing a supply-side tax reform that would allow him to bequeath his estate to his children tax free, Trump has surrendered his claim to populism populism, and left himself vulnerable to criticism from Hillary Clinton, who proposes a more genuinely populist tax increase on rich people. To head off those attacks, Trump could have promised to tax the wealthy in other, comparable ways, or propose income support measures for the poor and working class. But those ideas offend GOP leaders like Ryan, so instead of seeking policy balance, he decided to lie about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan instead, and claim that she pledged to raise middle-class taxes.

This never happened, not even in a slip-of-the-tongue kind of way. Clinton specifically promises not to raise taxes on the middle class. But pretending otherwise is the only way Trump can neutralize the weaknesses his new tax policy creates. As a rhetorical gambit this closely resembles the way Republicans distorted and decontextualized President Obama’s words four years ago, to make him seem hostile to business owners, and blunt Democratic criticism of Mitt Romney’s regressive economic policies.

It’s no secret that the Romney campaign believed it was headed for victory on Election Day. A handful of outlets have reported that Team Romney’s internal polling showed North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia moving safely into his column and that it put him ahead in a few other swing states. When combined with Ohio, where the internal polling had him close, Romney was on track to secure all the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. The confidence in these numbers was such that Romney even passed on writing a concession speech, at least before the crotchety assignment-desk known as “reality” finally weighed in.

Pollsters can expect to take their share of blame when their campaigns lose, and this year has been no exception. Not long after Barack Obama and Democrats had a strong night on Nov. 6, Republicans began to complain publicly that the polls conducted by their campaigns and by affiliated groups implied considerably more optimistic outcomes for them than actually occurred.

Perhaps these Republicans shouldn’t have been so surprised. When public polls conducted by independent organizations clash with the internal polls released by campaigns, the public polls usually prove more reliable.

Among men who did not receive the gender question, Clinton bests Trump by 16 points—49 percent to 33 percent. Among men who were asked the gender question, Trump has more support than Clinton by a margin of 50 points to 42 points. All told, reminding men about gender issues, leads to a 24-point swing in the match up, from a 16-point advantage for Clinton to an eight-point deficit.

Speaking at a rally in Fresno, Calif., Trump accused state officials of denying water to Central Valley farmers so they can send it out to sea “to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

• “Inside the mind of a Trump voter: Part I, where nothing but the Middle East matters”, August 1, 2016.
• “Inside the mind of a Trump voter, Part II: My dad continues to be completely irrational about Hillary Clinton”, August 8, 2016.

“We should temporarily suspend immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, which I think is altogether fitting and appropriate,” Pence said. “When you look at the Syrian refugee program — we had another incident in Belgium over the weekend — the simple fact is that both our Homeland Security and F.B.I. have said there are countries like Syria where people are coming in through routine means, the refugees program and otherwise and we can simply not know who they are for sure. So suspending that program from those countries, I think is in the best interest of the security of our people.”

Pence was asked if this meant the program would include Jewish and Christians citizens of those countries and he reiterated again the policy was based on countries where terrorism existed.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said Donald Trump’s new “expanded” ban would include not just Muslims, but Christians and Jews from countries with a history of terrorism.

“We should temporarily suspend immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, which I think is altogether fitting and appropriate,” Pence said. “When you look at the Syrian refugee program — we had another incident in Belgium over the weekend — the simple fact is that both our Homeland Security and F.B.I. have said there are countries like Syria where people are coming in through routine means, the refugees program and otherwise and we can simply not know who they are for sure. So suspending that program from those countries, I think is in the best interest of the security of our people.”

Historically, once the tumult of the conventions has settled, the polls tend to be fairly stable. There's sometimes a closing toward the end. Gore caught up with Bush at the end of the 2000 race. But again, people seem to make basic decisions during the conventions and they're usually hard to dislodge. That seems especially the case when the margin is substantial.

Asked specifically about House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and former Republican presidential candidate -- and fellow Republican with deep ties in Utah -- Mitt Romney, McMullin said that he has not spoken to any of those individuals about his run.

"I've been wrestling with the decision for a couple of weeks," noting that he spent "time in prayer" before deciding.

TRUMP: “The United States also has the highest business tax rate among the major industrialized nations of the world, at 35 percent. It’s almost 40 percent when you add in taxes at the state level.”

THE FACTS: The stated corporate tax rate looks high, but most U.S. businesses don’t pay it. The tax code is full of deductions, credits and loopholes that limit the tax burden for many companies. The effective corporate income tax rate is around 27 percent, roughly in line with global averages, according to government estimates.

Another way to look at it is examining federal corporate taxes as a share of the U.S. economy. Corporate taxes made up just 1.9 percent last year, according to the government. That is well below the historic average of 2.7 percent, but slightly above the Reagan-era levels during the 1980s. In some years, the majority of all large U.S.-controlled corporations reported no federal tax liability, according to the Government Accountability Office.

I understand that outsourcing means that employees lose jobs. Because work is often outsourced to other countries, it means Americans lose jobs. In other cases, nonunion employees get the work. Losing jobs is never a good thing, but we have to look at the bigger picture.

she also acknowledged that it is sometimes difficult for her to understand why people don't see her father as the warm and empathetic man she knows well.

Part of the reason, she said, may be that he has been underestimated for far too long.

"They’re scared," Ivanka Trump said of her father's harshest critics. "They never thought that he’d be where he is."

She added that "I think there will be many people who will seek to diminish him." But Ivanka Trump said she has faith in the American's electorate to decide for themselves.

"Everyone has one vote and the American people will make up their own minds," she said. "And they are coming out in droves in support of his fresh perspective, his honesty, his candor, his bold version for the future of this country. And the support has been tremendous."

“I think if we paid attention as much as much as pollsters and as much as the media does to the polling we can get complacent and I think there’s a risk that people might not come out to vote. But we’re not going to do that,” she said. “This election is too important and the poll numbers are great now, but the poll numbers that matter are the polls in November and that’s getting people out to the poll to vote. There’s so much that’s happening with voter’s suppression. Why? Because that’s the only way the republicans win–If they close the tent, reduce the tent, keep voters away from the polls. We are not going to be fooled. So all of this, the bad week for Trump, the good week for Clinton, that’s fine this week, but we’re very focused on a grassroots game to get people to the polls this election matters too much.”

Trump fired back on Twitter calling the Baltimore mayor a joke.

“I see where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore is pushing Crooked hard,” he said. “Look at the job she has done in Baltimore. She is a joke!”

“Crooked” is a term Trump uses to refer to Hillary Clinton.

...he lives in a super blue state so he gets to have his protest vote confident that others will do the work of electing the qualified president for him

"They’re scared," Ivanka Trump said of her father's harshest critics. "They never thought that he’d be where he is."

Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails.

To zero in on the white underclass in or near slaveholding areas is, understandably, to dwell on the fraught dynamic between poor whites and enslaved African Americans ... But there were whole other swaths of the country where many poor whites lived without any blacks nearby to speak of—not least the broad expanse of Appalachia. ....

In Appalachia, that homogeneity, along with the region’s populist tradition, helps explain why white voters there took so much longer to flip from Democrat to Republican than in the Deep South. This does not mean that racism is absent in these areas—far from it. But it suggests that the racism is fueled as much by suspicion of the “other” as it is by firsthand experience of blacks and competition with them—and that political sentiment on issues such as welfare and crime isn’t as racially motivated as many liberal analysts assume.

Donald Trump’s entire candidacy has been premised on purging the United States of the foreign enemies within as a means of restoring national greatness. Among his most trusted surrogates are men like Paul Manafort, Chris Christie, and Rudy Giuliani, who now speak of Muslims and Mexicans in the same tone and language that was once reserved for their Italian-American ancestors, targeted by the nativist movement that began in the late 19th century.
But this incident — and the way the accompanying fervor was spread in the national press — helped define the character of Italian immigrants for Americans for generations, providing proof of their fundamental dangerousness for the anti-immigrant backlash that followed.

Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, "oh he's using gas!" [@1:08:02]

"It is concerning that the Trump campaign is already engaged in shenanigans around these debates," said Podesta. "It is not clear if he is trying to avoid debates, or merely toying with the press to create more drama."

Said Podesta: "Either way, our campaign is not interested in playing along with a debate about debates or bargaining around them. The only issue now is whether Donald Trump is going to show up to debate at the date, times, places and formats set by the commission last year through a bipartisan process. We will accept the commission's invitation and expect Donald Trump to do the same."

The funny thing is, there’s a side of Donald that not even [Marla] has seen. She has never seen him completely naked—at least almost never—because he won’t let her. Whenever they’re about to have sex, he makes her go into the bathroom while he gets undressed. As soon as he takes off his clothes, he jumps into the bed and pulls up the covers.

Has FiveThirtyEight (or one of its contemporaries) done any longform analysis of what these 4-way numbers actually mean? Because in every election during which I've been of age, third-party candidates have polled between 3 and 10 percent all the way up until the election, but have never garnered more than 2 or 3% in the general.

Historically, third-party candidates tend to underperform their early polls. Essentially, some third-party voters may really be undecided voters using the third-party candidate as a placeholder. (Note that third-party candidates do not necessarily underperform their late polls. This is more of a concern in the summer and early fall.)
Therefore, early in the race, the polls-plus model will subtract some of the vote from the third-party candidate based on this pattern and reallocate it to undecided.

I can see it now. Trump will continue to become more and more unacceptable, and we will all see the worst qualities of ourselves in that orange manifestation implode before our very eyes. We will come to terms with the darkness in ourselves that sought to cultivate this monster, and we will all put our differences aside to achieve a common goal. Democrats and Republicans alike will come together in harmony to build a wall around Trump, and Mexico will insist on paying for it. We will then all live together and love each other in peace, racial tensions will disintegrate, and foreign relations will be the best they've ever been. And America will be Great Again™.

-69% of Trump voters think that if Hillary Clinton wins the election it will be because it was rigged, to only 16% who think it would be because she got more vote than Trump. More specifically 40% of Trump voters think that ACORN (which hasn't existed in years) will steal the election for Clinton. That shows the long staying power of GOP conspiracy theories.

-48% of Trump voters think that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton deserve the blame for Humayun Khan's death to 16% who absolve them and 36% who aren't sure one way or the other (Obama was in the Illinois Legislature when it happened.) Showing the extent to which Trump supporters buy into everything he says, 40% say his comments about the Khans last week were appropriate to only 22% who will grant that they were inappropriate. And 39% of Trump voters say they view the Khan family negatively, to just 11% who have a positive opinion of them.

-Even though Trump ended up admitting it didn't exist 47% of his voters say they saw the video of Iran collecting 400 million dollars from the United States to only 46% who say they didn't see the video. Showing the extent to which the ideas Trump floats and the coverage they get can overshadow the facts, even 25% of Clinton voters claim to have seen the nonexistent video.

-Trump said last week that Hillary Clinton is the devil, and 41% of Trump voters say they think she is indeed the devil to 42% who disagree with that sentiment and 17% who aren't sure one way or the other.

We've been writing for almost a year that there's a cult like aspect to Trump's supporters, where they'll go along with anything he says. Trump made some of his most outlandish claims and statements yet last week, but we continue to find that few in his support base disavow them.

The public as a whole is a different story though.

New Mexico isn't competitive, which is reassuring, because the local TV reporters are kind of rubbish tonight. "Hillary Clinton says she can improve the economy, but the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, disagrees." Gee, thanks for that balanced coverage.

Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee. He was chosen by Republican voters in Republican primaries, and then backed by Republican elites at the Republican National Convention. And less proximally, but no less obviously, much of his rise is the direct result of the Republican Party's behavior and decisions over the last several years.

But Trump is about much more than the GOP.

We also have to wrestle with what evangelicalism actually was and remains, which is a religious identity shaped by money, marketing, corporate power, corporate executives, and private-sector places and spaces.

Indeed, places and people typically deemed “secular” or “non-evangelical” were also the means by which the evangelical sense of “the religious” was made. Detailing evangelical activities in the business world reveals the porous boundaries around a modern faith that—especially in journalistic treatments—typically appears as anti-modern or reactionary. Resistance to change is a part of the story, to be sure. But when taking account of its friendliness toward business, conservative evangelicalism emerges as a proactive, pragmatic faith.

Its practitioners were savvy and strategic, welcoming a variety of ideas from what they certainly saw as “outside” their world (from reformist progressivism to positive thinking to ecumenical pluralism) when constructing their visions for what it meant to live, think and work in a nation of corporations.

This insight should help to contextualize the present with the past, especially in this election year. White conservative evangelical fandom for a tycoon and top-down authoritarian such as Donald Trump is hardly out of step with how previous born-again Americans wooed business elites who seemed the best champions for their social, economic and political aspirations.

"I think that you know my temperament has gotten me here. I've always had a good temperament and it's gotten me here," Trump said in an interview with Fox Business, according to a transcript of the appearance. "I certainly don't think it is appropriate to start changing all of a sudden when you have been winning."

As I said, I can understand why my evangelical friends would choose not to support Duke. But based on my extensive years studying Christian ethics I disagree. Since Duke has announced his candidacy for the senate race in Louisiana, I think it is a morally good choice to support David Duke.

Now, I know some of you will be wondering how an evangelical like myself could support a self-described white supremacist and neo-Nazi like Duke. How could someone who has previously expressed such concern about the moral qualifications of office holders suddenly turn a blind eye to Duke’s considerable failings? Am I simply sacrificing all of my credibility as a public Christian in order to seize a final dying chance at political power such that I’m willing to even support a charlatan who has so far furnished us with no credible reasons to think he will fulfill his promises to my constituency?

No, the truth is that I have credible reason to believe that Duke is a baby Christian. In fact, a friend of mine who pastors a large church in Houston, which is located quite close to Duke’s home state of Louisiana, has given me his personal assurance that Duke prayed the sinner’s prayer with him recently.

Trump has a staffer in the region, the Enquirer reports -- a woman named Missy Walters who has been with the Trump campaign since January. That "ground zero" doesn't appear to have been her work, though. According to a campaign official, it's a function of enthusiastic volunteers -- volunteers filling a vacuum left by the Trump campaign's non-existent outreach operation on the ground in the region.

It's not clear where Trump's team is running anything of any scale. The campaign continues to trail Hillary Clinton's staff head-count by a wide margin. Trump has regularly argued that his low spending on staff saves him money, but organizing in battleground states requires staff in those states. The internet allows campaigns to coordinate phone calling remotely, but no one has yet figured out how to knock on a voter's door over the web. Volunteers can run phone banks or precinct walks, but relying on unpaid staff to do that effectively is risky.

Jesus H. Christ on a biscuit, can we stop with the Party of Lincoln crapola?

You forfeited the right to that title the moment that Harry Dent sat down to write a memo. You are now the Party of Calhoun, the party of voter suppression. Hell, I don't know what "constitutional conservatism" even means any more, except to note that it seems to involve radical Tentherism and a desire to roll back the effects of Amendments 13-15.

"Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writing has appeared at Forbes, The Atlantic, First Things, Commentary Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Federalist, Quartz, and other places."