Week 37: "The Taco-pocalypse is Coming!" (September 4, 2016)

Dear Readers,

The great chaos that is the 2016 election season keeps hurtling at us, and I’ll help you make sense of it all. Remember, all newsletters (and more) are available at www.electreport.blogspot.com

Days until General Election: 65

Trump Goes to Mexico; Chaos Ensues

Donald Trump decided to visit Mexico this week. There, he visited president Enrique Peña Nieto. As you can imagine, it was not very friendly. Trump claimed the wall was discussed, but not who would pay. Peña Nieto insists that they did discuss it, and he maintained Mexico would not pay. Trump’s campaign, of course, relented, and moved on to...

Trump Goes to Arizona; Chaos Ensues

... Trump’s speech in Phoenix, immediately following his Mexico trip. His willingness to go down to Mexico and speak, humanely, to their president, means that his speech was all about working together, right? Of course not! Trump’s top surrogates, Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions showed up to the rally to introduce him in “MAKE MEXICO GREAT AGAIN ALSO” hats, a grammatically awkward slogan Trump came up with himself. Trump then spent over an hour railing at illegal immigrants and advocated punishing them. He also said government should be able to “pick and choose” what immigrants come into the country, which may be an acceptable policy for refugees, but for immigrants, no. Left with nothing to defend, the leader of Hispanics for Trump warned of the dangers of Mexican immigration: “There will be taco trucks on every corner!”

Trump Goes to Detroit; Chaos Ensues

Trump turned to outreach to African-Americans next, by going to Detroit, and, among other things, visiting the childhood home of Ben Carson (whose attention span was well documented here). Trump also visited a black church, and received a Jewish prayer shawl, for some reason. In all fairness, he made a legitimately uplifting speech that outlined why African-Americans should vote for him. I guess he’d had enough of alienating minority voters for the week. Oh, and there were a ton of protesters.

Hillary Clinton Releases Her Plan to Stop Drug Pricing Hikes

During all this, Clinton responded to the huge increase in the price of EpiPen by creating a plan to stop drug price increases. This issue first made news when Martin Shkreli, noted Trump endorser, increased the price of an anti-parasite drug by dozens of times its original price. Clinton plans to set up a government team to monitor prices in order to protect consumers, which was not very popular with Shkreli himself. Shkreli said “I think important medicines should be expensive because they’re valuable,” which means that he thinks a company’s profits are more valuable than people’s lives. I can’t say I’m surprised.

Labor Day Swing State Polling Update

Arizona: Trump +3.1

South Carolina: Trump +3

Iowa: Trump +1.4

Georgia: Trump +0.8

North Carolina: Clinton +1.6

Nevada: Clinton +1.9

Ohio: Clinton +2.8

Florida: Clinton +4.1

Wisconsin: Clinton +5.2

Pennsylvania: Clinton +6.4

Virginia: Clinton +7.3

New Hampshire: Clinton +8.6

Colorado: Clinton +9.7

Electoral Vote Count: 341-197

Senate Preview #8

NEW YORK:

Senator Chuck Schumer, three-term incumbent and a beloved figure in New York and within the Democratic party, has minimal opposition. Republican nominee Wendy Long has continually polled in the low 20s, and Schumer should hit 70% come November,

Rating: Safe D

NORTH CAROLINA:

Richard Burr may be running for a third term in office, but he doesn’t have it easy. He was challenged in his primary by a tea party activist who garnered 25% of the vote, and now in the general Deborah Ross is running a strong campaign. In addition, pizza deliveryman Sean Haugh of the Libertarian Party, who got almost 4% of the vote in 2014, could do well.

Rating: Tilt R

NORTH DAKOTA:

Senator John Hoeven’s only opposition is State Rep. Eliot Glassheim, who is a 78-year-old used book salesman and has no photo on his Wikipedia page. North Dakota is so small, uncompetitive, and hard to poll that we haven’t seen a poll here yet.

Rating; Safe R

Seat Count:

45-43

This Week In World Elections

Hong Kong: Today, the controversial Hong Kong election was held. Results are not yet known, but Hong Kong’s complex system involves many, many parties, some of which were disqualified by the government, and different types of constituencies and proportional representation. This is the polling graph.

Gabon: Results have been counted, and Ondimba defeated Ping by 1.5%. Ping claimed fraud, which seems silly until you realize that “the official results from Haut-Ogooue (the Bongo family's native province) showed Bongo receiving 95.5% of the vote on a 99.9% turnout.” Convenient.

Seychelles: This week, Seychelles holds an assembly election. The election will be between the socialists, the People’s Party, and the liberals, the Seychelles National Party.

Thanks for reading! As usual, comments are welcome!