Peter Schorsch
Damaged but defiant, Donald Trump is limping toward a critical presidential debate against Hillary Clinton absent the backing of a growing group of Republican leaders. Trump insists he will “never” abandon his White House bid despite calls for him to step aside after his vulgar descriptions of sexual advances on women were revealed.
Trump’s task in Sunday’s faceoff is enormous, and perhaps insurmountable. Even before the recording of his remarks were made public, the businessman was lagging behind Clinton after an undisciplined first debate and struggling to overcome deep skepticism among women about his temperament and qualifications to be commander in chief.
Here is the latest in the run-up to Sunday night’s debate:
6;57 p.m. – Hillary’s secret weapon – Trump’s No. 1 problem at tonight’s debate, according to Indira A.R. Lakshmanan of POLITICO Magazine, is “the continuing uproar over the appallingly non-empathetic things he has done to and said about women.”
But the biggest challenge for Trump, she says, is that a few candidates have been better prepared for the town hall debate format than Hillary Clinton.
Over her four years as Secretary of State, Clinton has held 60 town halls worldwide, averaging at least one a month; most of them focusing on women’s issues – the topic sure to be at the top of the agenda at tonight’s debate.
Lakshmanan, who served as a diplomatic correspondent during Clinton’s tenure, observed many of these events. Although Hillary Clinton may not be the greatest public speaker or politician, especially compared to Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, few can deny the experience she accumulated over hundreds of hours of town hall events.
“Clinton’s town halls — dubbed ‘townterviews’ by her canny media adviser Philippe Reines — were a unique and distinctive feature of her tenure as secretary of state,” Lakshmanan writes, “a chance for her to engage with ordinary people around the world and State Department employees back home.”
Although Clinton has never faced quite the personal affronts that will certainly be part of tonight’s debate, Trump should still be aware that the she is “fully primed for the inevitable questions about the treatment of women.” If nothing else, it will certainly offer Clinton a chance to use the skills she has honed addressing this issue abroad.
6:00 p.m. – A disaster of Trumpian proportions? – According to Brent Griffiths of POLITICO, Hugh Hewitt believes that if Trump attempts to attack Hillary Clinton over her husband’s past affairs, “the next 29 days will be a calamity for the entire Republican Party.”
Hewitt, a conservative radio talk show host who has repeatedly called for Trump to exit the presidential race, told MSNBC that “If [Trump] goes on attack on the behalf of the party on issues of substance in this campaign, he could exit with grace at the end.”
“But if he doesn’t, if he engages in re-litigating the ’80s and ’90s,” Hewitt warns, “it will be a disaster for the party.”
The leaked 2005 video of Trump crudely talking about a woman he tried to seduce has led to scores of Republicans fleeing the nominee, calling for Trump to drop out. It’s a situation that reminds Hewitt of the situation around then-President Richard Nixon, which led to his decision to resign in 1974.
“As the circle gets closer and people say there’s no way you can win and you’re embarrassing yourself,” Hewitt added, “you will hurt the family, you will hurt your brand, historians will be kind to you if you exit.”
5:09 p.m. – @Poniewozik: CNN reporting that Chris Christie not attending tonight’s debate.
3:59 p.m. – Trump to play Bill Clinton rape accusation card in debate – In a Sunday morning tweet, Trump highlighted a new interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed in 1999 that she was raped by Bill Clinton. The New York Times is reporting that Trump’s tweet signals that he may bring up the accusation in tonight’s debate, as a way to combat the recent release of a 2005 video showing a making vulgar sexual comments about a woman he was trying to seduce. The 8 ½ minute clip of the interview, posted exclusively on Breitbart News, shows Broaddrick recounting the story first reported by the NBC News “Dateline” show recorded soon after impeachment proceedings began against Clinton. In the interview, Broaddrick said the rape took place in 1978. Ten years later, she recounted the event for investigators working with former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, renouncing an affidavit she signed a year earlier saying that the incident had not taken place. At the end of the video, Broaddrick accused Hillary Clinton of “enabling” her husband. The Times article notes that Breitbart News reporter Aaron Klein, who interviewed Broaddrick, asks her if she thought Hillary Clinton knew what Broaddrick claims to have experienced. “At that moment, and I have to go by what I felt then and the look that she gave me, I felt like she knew,” Broaddrick responds. “And that she was telling me to keep quiet.”
3:56 p.m. – Tweet, tweet: @cbfowler: the Gameday formula seems better suited for CFB than politics. See sign far right at Wash U in St.Louis.
2:45 p.m. – Debate watch Top 5 – POLITICO’S Glenn Thrush outlines 5 things to watch in tonight’s debate: How will real humans react to Trump? The 90-minute showdown at Washington University will feature a (relatively) freewheeling town hall format that often leads to wild-card moments. Play this game at home: What would you say if you were Trump? That’s a question many of the estimated 70 million viewers will ask themselves — and if nobody can answer it, he’s basically cooked. Play this game at home: What would you say if you were Trump? That’s a question many of the estimated 70 million viewers will ask themselves — and if nobody can answer it, he’s basically cooked. Trump can’t really say anything to make it better. But he’s got to try. His poorly lit, robotically recited and defiantly half-assed videotaped apology released under pressure from his staff was laughably (or cry-ably) inadequate. There’s a good reason that so few surrogates (apart from the let-no-cable-slot-go-unfilled defender Rudy Giuliani, who suggested Trump will ask for “forgiveness”) are jumping to his defense. It’s indefensible. He can, of course, temper the torment. And he’s likely to do his standard three-step, previewed on his video and in subsequent dial-in chats with favored reporters. 1) He’ll offer a broad, scripted mea culpa. 2) He’ll take a page (ironically) from Bill Clinton’s 1992 strategy in coping with the Gennifer Flowers firestorm by dodging questions and talking about “the country.” 3) He’ll go on the attack, likely a sustained assault on damaging details from her campaign’s hacked email trove and a more sustained examination of the Clinton Foundation.
2:09 p.m. – Trump is entering the debate in terrible situation. Never in the modern era has any candidate entered a consequential debate in such a degraded position: Trump isn’t merely facing an uphill climb (as John McCain did in 2008) or the widespread perception he’s not up to the job (Gerald Ford in 1976) or even that he was too unlikeable to get elected (Richard Nixon in 1960). No, he’s having to grapple with all of these problems at once while cloaked in disgrace and coping with an unprecedented defection of more than two dozen former Republican supporters who feel that endorsing him has become a moral transgression. (Per POLITICO)
1:11 p.m. – Tweet, tweet: @KellyannePolls: @realDonaldTrump on phone with @mike_pence @Reince on plane en route to #StLouisdebate
1:00 p.m. – FiveThirtyEight: No second debate bounce for Trump — Coming off a “horrible” first debate, and with a campaign “teetering on the brink,” Harry Enten predicts Trump is unlikely to see much of a rebound from tonight’s second debate.
“Second debates usually don’t move the needle much,” Enten writes in FiveThirtyEight.com. “Seven out of nine times, the polls moved by less than about 2 percentage points.”
According to the FiveThirtyEight popular vote forecast, Trump is currently behind by 5.6 percentage points in polling.
“Clinton would still be up by a wider margin than she was heading into the first debate, if Trump got an average second-debate bounce,” Enten says. “Still, the polls moved by 5 to 6 points twice, in 1988 and 1992, so such a shift isn’t out of the question.”
Enten also points out data showing no sign that candidates who lose the first debate are likely to rebound in the second debate.
“Sometimes the candidate who does better in the first debate does better in the second too,” he says. “Sometimes he does worse. Either way, there isn’t a tendency for the race to revert to some sort of pre-first debate polling equilibrium.”
That is not to say Trump cannot make up for lost ground, since history shows (in 1992 and 1998) that second debate bounces can be larger than the first. More so, a big moment in the debate can lead to momentum in polls.
However, “even if tonight’s debate does move the polls,” Enten says, “that’s no guarantee they’ll stay moved. Historically, the polls taken immediately before the second debate have been more predictive of the final election result than the polls taken immediately following it.”
11:26 a.m. – Tweet, tweet:
— @JoshuaGreen: Trump source on debate strategy: “She’s as much an attacker of women as Bill. We’re fully loaded. She’s gonna have to confront her accusers”
— @jasonnobleDMR: @SenTomCotton calls tomorrow’s debate Donald Trump’s last chance to “beg for forgiveness’ and ‘pledge to finally change his ways.”
11:16 a.m. – The first set of questions at Sunday night’s presidential debate will be about Trump’s vulgar comments on a newly published 2005 videotape, and the fallout from it, CNN reports. And Clinton will get the first question.
11:15 a.m. – Gov. Mike Pence told Republican donors that he is “fully committed” to Trump, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Speculation that Mr. Pence might leave the ticket, following in the footsteps of other Republicans who abandoned Mr. Trump on Saturday after the release of a videotape of the nominee making lewd comments of women, is ‘categorically false,’ one aide said… None of the donors at the Saturday fundraiser in Providence, R.I., canceled after the release of the video, or asked questions about it.”
— Saturday —
11:55 p.m. – Politico: The bombshell Trump video that surfaced Friday has so dramatically altered expectations for Sunday’s town hall debate that one Democrat close to Bill and Hillary Clinton had a new view of what may unfold in St. Louis: “Expect Armageddon.” Clinton will arrive at the Washington University debate stage Sunday prepped for battle against an opponent many of her allies believe has already lost the election. Trump, in contrast, will walk onto the debate stage with nothing to lose.
6:55 p.m. – Clinton campaign waiting for debate to unleash on Trump: The campaign has gone quiet and asked surrogates to do the same, waiting for Sundaynight’s debate to pounce,” by Annie Karni in New York: “Hillary Clinton will first address the explosive recording of Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault from the debate stage on Sunday night – a move designed to maximize a moment her aides believe could be the deathblow for the Republican nominee. On Saturday, Clinton’s top aides decided not to release any statement in reaction to the shocking new video posted Friday night. And they discussed and ruled out putting Clinton out for any interviews to respond, a campaign official said …
[T]he Clinton campaign official intimated that she plans to address the latest controversy head on, in prime time. The decision was made, the source said, after discussions about how to capitalize on what the campaign saw as fortuitous timing: an opportunity to deliver the first, raw, response from the Democratic nominee in front of one of the largest audiences Clinton will benefit from in the final 30 days of the election … [T]he campaign official said there were no immediate plans to shift its battleground state resources to new openings in the map. The official, however, said the campaign was always monitoring shifts in the map and did not rule out such a plan in the coming days.
4:30 p.m. – Since Friday afternoon, Google searches for Trump are somewhere around four times as high as their already-insanely-high levels — in line with the sort of spike that usually occurs around a debate. (Per FiveThirtyEight)
Inside the debate hall:
