How Hillary’s Very Bad September Could Be Very Good for Her in November Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-2016-september-214265#ixzz4KqkIh5ef Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

The greatest threat to her was soft turnout. Now Trump’s proximity in the polls could light a fire under wavering Clinton supporters.

constituencies most critical to her campaign seem to have no sense of urgency about keeping the Donald Trump out of the White House. While Hispanics, who backed Obama in 2012 by a more than 2-1 margin, support Clinton by a similar margin, they seem far less inclined to vote than they did four years ago.

.. That is what could change now that Trump threatens to actually take the White House.

.. But what may be their most powerful weapon is the clear possibility that Trump could win, which is why Clinton’s very bad few weeks could, in the end, be very good for her.

.. see what a similar vote—for Ralph Nader—did. His 94,000 voters in Florida would have wound up giving Gore a net of about 20,000 votes—more than enough to make butterfly ballots and hanging chads irrelevant. Now, between launching the Iraq War and the two Supreme Court justices Bush appointed, did it really make no difference?”

.. If you vote for Jill Stein as a progressive, you are helping to put in power a president whose tax plan makes the rich richer, who thinks climate chance is a hoax, who wants to abolish whole swaths of environmental protection laws. So voting for Johnson or Stein means you’re voting for a label—a ’libertarian,’ or a ‘progressive’—without realizing that the consequence of that vote could lead to a president who rejects everything you claim to hold dear.”

O’Reilly: ‘You can’t second-guess’ Trump’s birther strategy

Bill O’Reilly brushed aside Donald Trump’s refusal to say earlier Friday whether he was going to disavow his questioning of President Barack Obama’s citizenship, saying, “you can’t second-guess the strategy that has him tied with Hillary Clinton, who should be ahead by 15 points.”

“I wouldn’t have done it this way, but I would have put it to bed a long time ago,” O’Reilly said in a telephone interview on Fox News in the minutes preceding Trump’s speech in Washington.

Trump punks the media

The Republican nominee scores free airtime to promote his new hotel and veterans’ endorsements after promising an announcement on his birther obsession.

The media took the bait. The cable networks offered wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s plane taxiing at Reagan National Airport (cozying near Hillary Clinton’s own “Stronger Together” jet). With Trump running late for the 10 a.m. news conference, the image of an empty podium was flashed for more than an hour. And when Trump finally did appear, he got more than 20 minutes of free airtime promoting his new Washington hotel and showcasing endorsements from Medal of Honor recipients.

Only after that extended infomercial did Trump deliver the goods — a speedy statement that Obama was indeed born in the United States, coupled with a blatantly false accusation that Hillary Clinton started the conspiracy to begin with.
The media got punked.
“It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick-roll,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper vented on air after Trump’s hotel event. His colleague John King followed up with, “We just got played.”

.. “He opened the event making a plug for his hotel, he has a new hotel so in a sense, you could say he was leveraging five years of birther conspiracy to promote his hotel. Now we have been listening to veterans and military officials praising Donald Trump. He has lined up quite a bit of support onstage.”

.. It was a cunning move on Trump’s part — entice the media with a topic that was dominating the news cycle, package it with a promotion for his brand new hotel, and then add in bona fide military heroes and Medal of Honor recipients, for whom cutting away from quickly could be viewed as disrespectful.

.. but there’s the competing feeling that news organizations have almost let too much slide to have any bargaining power at this point,”

.. “The TV pool traditionally doesn’t participate in events that our reporters or producers are not allowed to attend.”

.. “Right now, Trump has it all,” the Washington Post’s Robert Costa said on MSNBC on Friday morning. “He has his property debuting in D.C. He’s on every network. He’s at the center.”

We broke down Trump’s supporters. We needed more baskets.

The Washington Post and ABC Newsfound that Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters who supported Trump in the primary could be divided into not two, but four baskets of roughly equal size based on their economic and racial anxieties:

.. Only 26 percent of Trump’s supporters said that they were not struggling economically or in the lower class, but that it was a bigger problem that whites were losing out to African Americans and Hispanics than vice versa

.. Another 20 percent said they did not think it was a problem that whites were losing out, but they did put themselves in the lower class or said they were struggling economically.

.. Twenty-five percent of Trump’s supporters said both that whites were losing out and reported economic distress.

.. Finally, 24 percent said neither that they had financial problems nor that whites were losing out.

.. Republicans and independents who supported primary candidates other than Trump were much less likely to say either that they were in economic straits or that whites were losing out to other racial and ethnic groups.

.. those who think African Americans aren’t trying hard enough or are getting more than they deserve, for example — also have more negative views of the economy.