WASHINGTON: Campaign missteps and relentless trash talk have resulted in Donald Trump’s
poll numbers plunging in past week. Helped by a post-convention bounce for
Hillary Clinton and Trump’s own self-destructive streak, the Democratic nominee is surging ahead, leading by 9 per cent and above in several nationwide polls.
Clinton led 47% to 38% in an NBC/WSJ poll and by a massive 15 per cent (48-33) in a McClatchy-Marist poll released on Thursday. If the margins hold, pollsters are saying Clinton is headed for the largest election blowout since 1984 when Republican Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale, carrying 49 states and 525 electoral votes (leaving Mondale only 13 electoral votes from his home state Minnesota and Washington DC)
Political pundits are warning that Trump cannot be written off yet with three months to go for Election Day. A
sharply polarized country will also preclude such a rout, with states such as Oklahoma, Alabama, Wyoming, Idaho considered shoo-in for Republicans no matter who the nominee is.
But it is a measure of the Trump train-wreck that states such as Georgia, Utah, and even Texas -- all Republican redoubts -- are now considered competitive.
Hillary Clinton is leading comfortably in swing states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and toss-up states such as New Hampshire and Colorado are starting to lean towards Democrats.
"Trump’s favorability ratings, following modest improvement after his convention, are now about as bad as they’ve ever been," statistician-pollster Nate Silver said on Friday, projecting that Hillary Clinton now has a 74 percent chance of winning (her highest mark in the polls-plus forecast all year) compared to Trump’s 26 per cent, while cautioning that there was a lot of play left and elections tend to tighten in the final stretch.
Silver is projecting that if current poll numbers hold or if polls were held today, Clinton’s victory would be similar to the 365 electoral votes that Obama won in 2008.
The decline in Trump’s poll numbers is attributed largely to a series of gaffes that began from the day he declared his candidacy but have started to attract more scrutiny now that the novelty of his unorthodox campaign has worn off.
Some of his utterances have been so bizarre that questions are now being asked about his mental stability and judgment, and while no one is saying he is completely unhinged, his pouty petulance, repetitive rambling, and incessant whining has embarrassed even the Republican leadership.
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday said bluntly that his support for Trump was not a "blank check" while barely holding back his distaste for what he called the Republican nominee’s "pretty strange run" since the convention.
A fundraising appeal Ryan sent out on Thursday reflected fear that the GOP could even lose the House majority (let alone Democrats regaining Senate and winning White House), something that is inconceivable right now considering the 247-188 advantage Republicans had in the 114th Congress – the largest House majority since 1928.
A reversal of that magnitude – and majority – would be staggering in a country where typically 90 per cent of lawmakers are re-elected.
But the mood in the GOP is now so toxic and the infighting is becoming so ferocious that Democrats are starting to see a glimmer of hope from developments like this one: While Ryan condemned Trump’s scrap with the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier, describing it as "beyond the pale," Paul Nehlen, a Trump supporter who is challenging Ryan in the primaries (where Trump has refused to endorse Ryan), has backed Trump’s position that Muslims, including US citizens, could be deported from America of they don't subscribe to prescribed norms.
Even President Obama, barely able to contain his aversion for Trump’s histrionics, pitched in repeatedly at a White House press conference on Thursday, saying, with reference to the classified briefings presidential candidates are slated to get, "they got to start acting like President, and that means being able to receive these briefings and not spread them around. The remark was clearly aimed at Trump, who former CIA Director Mike Morell on Friday described as a national security threat."
"In sharp contrast to Mrs Clinton, Mr Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief," Morrell wrote in an op-ed.
"These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law," he added.
Meanwhile, Trump’s chronicles of everyday gaffes continue on the campaign trail, providing plentiful fodder for the liberal media and late-night comedians.
On Thursday, after saying in campaign speeches that he had seen a video of a US plane delivering $ 400 million sent by the Obama administration to Iran, he backed down from the claim, tweeting, "The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!"
It’s one of the few times he has reversed -- without explanation or acknowledgement of error -- the many falsehoods he essays on the campaign. They are so frequent that political talking heads and bloggers have now taken to calling it out immediately amid a growing debate on a serious personality disorder.