Democrats who’ve been dreaming of running against Donald Trump or those Bernie Sanders supporters who aren’t the ones out to extract revenge on the Democratic Party but feel they can sit this election out since it won’t matter take note: all-but-certain Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump is now leading former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in key swing states:
Donald Trump has overtaken Hillary Clinton in Florida and has a lead in the swing state of Pennsylvania, according to a new poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University.
Trump leads Clinton, 42 to 39 percent, in Florida in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. That’s an 11-point swing from last month, when Clinton led 47 to 39 percent.
Trump has also retaken the lead from Clinton in Pennsylvania, where he is now up 43 to 41 percent. Last month, Clinton held a slim lead, 42 to 41 percent.
The pair remains tied in Ohio, where Republicans will gather to formally nominate Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next week. Trump and Clinton each get 41 percent apiece there. In the poll last month, each won 40 percent.
The shift in the polls comes after a tough week on the campaign trail for Clinton, who dodged criminal charges from the FBI over her use of a private email server while secretary of state but was criticized harshly by FBI Director James Comey.
Clinton has had difficulty in winning over voters throughout the election, and Comey’s remarks were further ammunition for Trump and Republicans to attack her trustworthiness.
“While there is no definite link between Clinton’s drop in Florida and the U.S. Justice Department decision not to prosecute her for her handling of e-mails, she has lost ground to Trump on questions which measure moral standards and honesty,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
The figures come ahead of Trump’s expected announcement of a running mate pick later this week and as he attempts to unify a reticent GOP ahead of the party’s convention. Clinton is also expected to announce her VP pick soon.
Third Party candidates are also seemingly helping Trump.
Trump sees a bigger lead over Clinton in each of the states when third-party candidates are factored in: He leads Clinton by 5 points in Florida, 41 to 36 percent, with 7 percent going for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and 4 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Respected voices warning the electorate against Trump are becoming louder.
Trump is calling on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to resign after she has now used several occasions to go after him. That seems as likely an outcome as Trump winning a national hair stylist award for 2016.
Meanwhile, some highly respected historians are warning against Trump:
Now Mr.[David McCullough and Ken Burns, the filmmaker and author, have assembled a group of distinguished American historians to speak about the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in videos being posted to a Facebook page, Historians on Donald Trump.
It is a diverse, honored group — including, among others, Robert A. Caro, Ron Chernow, David Levering Lewis, William E. Leuchtenberg, Vicki Lynn Ruiz — that speaks with alarm about Mr. Trump’s candidacy and his place in the march of American history.
Mr. McCullough, raised in a Republican home and now aligned with no party, said the prospect of a Trump presidency so distressed him that he felt he could not remain publicly detached. “When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way — it’s just crazy,” he said. “We can’t stand by and let it happen. The Republican Party shouldn’t stand by and let it happen.”
“I should say, I’m a registered independent,” he added. “I’m strongly in favor of a number of Republicans both past and in our own time. It’s not as though I’m doing this from lifelong ideology against Republicans. By no means.”
….Like many of the others, Mr. Burns said he heard echoes of dangerous populist demagogues in Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. Among the issues that were cited were his calls to ban all Muslims, his characterization of many Mexicans as criminals and his mockery of veterans and people with disabilities. Mr. Trump has said that the country faces crises that require strong action to protect its borders, and that his role as an outsider has cost him the approval of elites and entrenched interests, including in his own party.
In the 1920s, fear of immigrants fueled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and exclusionary laws aimed at European Catholics and Asians, said Ms. Ruiz, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the American Historical Association. Also, about one-third of the Mexican population in this country was pushed out, more than half of them United States citizens by birth, she said.
“Playing with hate has had tragic consequences throughout our history,” she said.
Mr. Chernow, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Alexander Hamilton” was a principal source for the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” said he had been struck by Mr. Trump’s lack of reference to the founding documents of American history, or to presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The only historical movement that Mr. Trump alludes to is a shameful one — ‘America First,’” Mr. Chernow said, recalling an isolationist political organization at the time Nazi Germany was taking power across Europe.
Mr. Lewis, a professor at New York University and biographer of W. E. B. DuBois, recalled Wendell Willkie, a presidential candidate with a superficial resemblance to Mr. Trump, in that he was a wealthy businessman who had held no prior electoral office and became a Republican just shortly before the 1940 campaign against Roosevelt. But after the election, Willkie distinguished himself by calling for a loyal opposition, Professor Lewis said. (Willkie served as Roosevelt’s informal emissary to Britain, in a sign of bipartisanship.) “For Donald Trump, Willkie’s loyal opposition concept is surely anathema,” Professor Lewis said.
Mr. Leuchtenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of the American presidency, said Mr. Trump was essentially ahistorical. “He has no sense of the American past,” Professor Leuchtenberg said. “He doesn’t understand the achievements of this country.”
Perhaps Trump will now demand these historians no longer publish.
This poll will further undermine the remnants of the stop Trump movement at the Republican convention. It’s quite clear that Clinton is indeed a flawed candidate and Trump — given certain political conditions and the efficacy of Clinton’s campaign — could win.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.