The State of the Race: Not Good

I’ve been on vacation this week so haven’t been able to follow every jot-and-tittle of Trump’s battle against Khizr Khan, Paul Ryan, and assorted other enemies, but a few thoughts:

–We have learned more about where we are over the last few weeks. It was a big question whether Trump would get a bounce at his convention, and he did, perhaps augmented by James Comey’s public rebuke of Hillary in the run-up to the GOP convention. It was a big question whether Hillary, in turn, would get a bounce at her convention, and she has, perhaps augmented by the Khan controversy. Mark noted some of the numbers earlier. Additionally, now we have a NBC poll showing her up 9 and a McClatchey poll showing her up 15. It will presumably be a couple of weeks before we see whether her bounce settles down. You would assume it will and she might have, say, a 5-point lead at the end of this period. That’s not insurmountable, but it would make her a strong favorite going into the Fall, although she is vulnerable to Russian information operations, a debate gaffe, and her own inherent weakness, among other things. (I know nearly everyone is writing as if the race is already over, and perhaps Trump–the weakest of all the general-election candidates the GOP could have selected this year–does indeed simply melt down. But the media narrative could flip in a couple of weeks to “this guy has done everything to destroy himself and look, he is still in striking distance”).

–Speaking of the media, before Trump wrapped up the nomination I thought–and I know this was very foolish of me–there was at least some chance that the media wouldn’t turn on him the way it does every other Republican nominee. Maybe they would be so desperate to have him on and to keep enjoying the ratings bonanza, he would experience something like the latitude he got in the primaries, when interviewers rarely nailed him down on anything. But the media has clearly squared the circle by giving us wall-to-wall Trump coverage via a continuous anti-Trump feeding frenzy. Of course, Trump has stupidly played into its hands at nearly every turn, but that doesn’t mean the mainstream media isn’t blatantly biased against him.

–There is a loose talk of the possibility of Trump quitting the race, based, in part, on the assumption he doesn’t want to lose a presidential election. This feels like crazy talk, although perhaps less crazy than it would it be about any other nominee for president. But I doubt Trump sees the campaign as lost yet (see above) and it also may be that his metric for success is different than that of other politicians. Even if he does lose the election, as long as he can explain it away to his own satisfaction by charging the election was “rigged” and as long as he has garnered more media attention than he ever would have dreamed of if he hadn’t run for president, he may consider the entire venture a smashing success.