The Election is still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose

Among respondents the pollsters deemed “likely voters” that was true: the poll showed Trump at forty-four per cent, and Clinton at forty-two per cent. But among the broader pool of registered voters, Clinton was still ahead, forty-four per cent to forty-one per cent.

Essentially, the pollsters screened out some of Clinton’s supporters because they didn’t adjudge them likely to turn out on November 8th.

.. Asked to choose the most honest and trustworthy candidate, just thirty-five per cent of respondents picked her, and fifty per cent chose her opponent.

.. To many Americans, the election has come down to a choice between the unpalatable and the unthinkable.

The Challenge of Rebranding Donald Trump

Talking with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly earlier this week, Trump appeared to be edging toward a deportation policy not much different from the one adopted by the Obama Administration. “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country,” he said. “Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.” Then, speaking to CNN on Thursday night, he backtracked, saying that under a Trump Administration all undocumented immigrants would have to leave the country before applying for legal status.

.. In many rebrandings, there is a tension between the urgent need to change public perceptions of the company and the danger of alienating existing customers and stakeholders.

.. A successful rebranding campaign has to have two elements. It must be surprising enough to attract people’s attention and make them think again about a company or product. And it must be credible.

This exercise never passed the credibility test. In 2005, a BP-owned refinery in Texas blew up, killing twenty-five people; in 2006, a pipeline owned by BP failed in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude; and, in 2010, the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a huge oil spill that threatened the entire Gulf Coast. Six years later, BP is still struggling to recover from a huge hit to its finances and reputation.

.. The “Beyond Petroleum” fiasco proved that you can’t deny who you are.

.. If he’s looking for guidance from the corporate world, Trump could do worse than reading up on the recent history of McDonald’s

.. It was all partly a con, of course. As McDonald’s broadened its menu choices, it still sold huge amounts of unhealthy fried food.

.. McDonald’s turnaround came “not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches

.. McDonald’s rebranding was effective because it challenged perceptions of the company without undermining its core value proposition: cheapness and convenience

.. Given how central immigration has been to Trump’s campaign, announcing a more humane approach toward the undocumented could send a forceful signal that he is willing to compromise

.. He’d also need to do some damage control with his base, of course. If he does change tack on deportations, he could also make clear that he still intends to build a wall across the southern border, and to make it much harder for foreigners from other parts of the world, particularly Muslims

.. Kellyanne Conway, the veteran Republican polling expert he brought on as his campaign manager, is reportedly pushing for a U-turn on immigration, and so is Chris Christie.

.. Is he in it to win? Or is his real goal to build up the Trump brand among conservatives and ultra-conservatives, perhaps with the ultimate ambition of launching a media venture?

.. If winning is a secondary concern, it might make more sense to stick with his existing policy and preserve his image as a conservative renegade.

 

Trump paid dearly to boost fundraising

The campaign increased its spending in July, but not on building a staff or field organization.

Though the campaign touted an $80 million figure for its July fundraising, just $36.7 million of that total went directly to the campaign.

.. The campaign more than doubled its spending from the previous month to $18.5 million in July, far more than in any other period of the campaign. Most of that money went toward expanding the campaign’s online fundraising operation.

.. A full 45 percent, or $8.4 million, went to Giles-Parscale, the San Antonio-based digital marketing firm that has done Trump’s online advertising. (The company had never worked for a campaign before 2016.) The campaign also paid $100,000 to the Prosper Group for fundraising consulting.

.. Legal fees for the campaign’s outside law firm, Jones Day, gobbled up more than $660,000. The Clinton campaign paid its outside counsel about a sixth of that.