This made for good AM reading.
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African Americans top targets of 2016 Russian info warfare, Senate panel finds
Panel says campaigns, media outlets need to verify source of viral social media posts before sharing
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Trump is paying Facebook to spread political disinformation to millions of people.
Unbound by truth on one of the world’s most powerful advertising platforms, Trump’s anti-impeachment ads are drawing in donors with clickbait disinformation.
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A hopeful story out of Louisiana from their elections this year that may tell us how things will go next year:
Jeremy S. LaCombe just won HD-18 for the Louisiana House against a serious Republican opponent in a district that Trump won by over 17 points!
And Francis Thompson has flipped HD-19 for the Louisiana House in a district that Trump won by 43 points!
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What Time Is Tonight’s Democratic Debate? Our Guide on How to Watch
- The debate is 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern in Westerville, Ohio.
- You can watch it on nytimes.com, The New York Times’s app, CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español and CNN.com.
- Twelve Democratic candidates will debate: Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Kamala Harris, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the entrepreneur Andrew Yang, Senator Cory Booker, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, Senator Amy Klobuchar, the former housing secretary Julián Castro, Representative Tulsi Gabbardand the billionaire Tom Steyer.
- The candidates will have 75 seconds to answer questions and 45 seconds for rebuttals. There will be no opening statements. The moderators are the CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett and The Times’s National editor, Marc Lacey.
- The New York Times will have live video of the debate, accompanied by live analysis from six reporters: Maggie Haberman, Lisa Lerer, Astead W. Herndon, Sydney Ember, Patricia Cohen and Elizabeth Dias.
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Cross-posting
WATCHING 
the Democratic Debate - here are some ways to follow.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2019-10-15/democratic-white-house-hopefuls-debate-in-ohio
Pushing back against disinformation, Trump re-tweeted Dan Scavino…
Note the big caveat: “assuming average Democratic turnout.” Nothing about the Democratic party’s turnout has been average since Trump stole the presidency. And this flies in the face of all other polls I’ve heard about.
Reading more about the poll itself, it seems to be basing its data on narrow assumptions about the economy. This poll feels rather like it’s bending over backwards to make its point, and every news outlet is happily devouring what it’s spoon-feeding them.
Moody’s found that if turnout among non-incumbent voters — Democrats and independents — were to match historical highs, the Democratic nominee would win under the stock market and employment models as well as an average of the three models.
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Good post! 
I saw the Moody story briefly this morning but it was quickly buried. Thanks for posting, these polls are fascinating.
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I just did a little thread about it, eight posts. It turns out that the news outlets are cherrypicking to get sensational headlines, but if you read the articles, at least some of them, a Trump win is still a long-shot. The pollster is reputable, but the presentation of its findings by these various outlets is not.
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Madam Secretary just putting that out there, whoa. Yes we all have our suspicions but…
Hillary Clinton suggests Putin has kompromat on Trump, Russia will back Tulsi Gabbard third-party bid
In a conversation on former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, Clinton suggested the Russians are leveraging a number of top U.S. politicians. She suggested Russia had kompromat on Trump. She accused 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.” And she suggested Russia might back Gabbard as a third-party candidate.
“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
The “again” referred to Stein, whom some Clinton supporters have accused (rather baselessly) of serving as a spoiler for Clinton in 2016. Stein got around 1 percent of the vote in the three decisive states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but exit polls showed most of her voters wouldn’t have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein weren’t running.
Clinton then flat-out labeled Stein a “Russian asset.”
“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
At another point in the interview, Clinton wagered that Russia does in fact have some compromising material on Trump, suggesting that’s why so many of Trump’s decisions have erred in a pro-Russian direction.
“I don’t know what Putin has on him, whether it’s both personal and financial,” Clinton said. “I assume it is.”
She then switched gears: “But more than that, there is this bizarre adulation Trump has for dictators and authoritarians. He dreams of being able to order people to do things and make them do it. He has no democratic instincts, really.”
The idea that Russia had information on Trump that provided leverage over him was a key, unproven claim in the Steele dossier, a document consisting of allegations involving Trump and Russia that was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
She seems to be referring to this NBC report on Ms. Gabbard from earlier in the year. It’s weird.
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Hillary is working all those speculative angles. Whether Tulsi has Russian bots working in her favor or not, her possible 3rd party run does bring some speculation.
But the Russian kompromat question on T still runs through his presidency, and definitely stokes all the questions from Schiff/Pelosi/SDNY 'n co.
There is no question there is something up with Putin/T - a gravy train, and access to election tampering (manipulation via social media).
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Indeed. Trump loves dictators, but he will usually also argue with and rant at them. There are very few exceptions. He fought with Kim. He has tussled with Erdogan. There are really only two he has never once said a bad word against:
MBS and Putin. And his track record on Putin is especially notable given that Putin has NOT returned the favor. He’s said some brutal things about the US, and Russian state media has often trolled Trump. Trump’s utterly obsequious attitude toward him is mind-boggling unless Putin owns him.
What is the nature of that relationship? Monetary, criminal, both, or something more? I don’t pretend to know. But I have a whole thread here demonstrating how Putin owns Trump.
Yet another House Republican has decided to spend more time with his family. Interestingly, just the day before announcing his retirement he said he wouldn’t rule out voting for impeachment.
Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida, who has refused to rule out voting to impeach President Trump, said on Saturday that he would not be seeking re-election.
Mr. Rooney, who first won his district in southwest Florida in 2016, said on Fox News that he believed he had accomplished what he wanted to do in Congress and had grown frustrated with aspects of legislative service.
Asked if he was interested in a third term, Mr. Rooney said, “I don’t really think I do, and I don’t really think I want one.”
…
A day earlier, Mr. Rooney became the first House Republican to indicate that he was willing to consider supporting articles of impeachment over the president’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, but he said on Saturday that his decision to retire was unrelated. (He emphasized to reporters that the allegations did not rise to the level of the Watergate scandal.)
BTW, saying that what Trump did with Ukraine “does not rise to the level of the Watergate scandal” is pure B.S. It’s far, far worse. Watergate involved breaking into a campaign office here in the U.S. while Trump’s impeachable offenses are rooted in a traitorous act – extorting a foreign government to interfere in our elections. The Democrats need to hammer home this message. I think it should simply be abbreviated to something like “Ukraine is worse than Watergate.” That’s not very articulate, but it gets the message across.
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Good time to repost this. For a feel good boost this weekend, give it a quick look.
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Ballotpedia
List of U.S. Congress Incumbents who are not running for re-election in 2020
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Check out this chart. Ha! 
Some of the Republicans retiring are from “safe” districts, but even so, their retirement weakens the national Republican push to recapture what they lost in 2018. Wherever an incumbent is not running, Republicans must expend additional resources in time and money to guard against an upset. Take the latest retirement, for example. Rep. Francis Rooney, from Florida’s 19th District, is retiring after two terms. According to Ballotpedia, he received a comfortable 66% (2016) and 62% (2018) of the vote in those elections and could have been expected to repeat the performance in 2020. But a fresh face running will be an unknown quantity and could lose to a strong contender. As recently as 2010 (again according to Ballotpedia), this district was blue. In that election, the Democratic candidate won by 63%. So a flip here is always possible. The Republican coffers will be depleted as they divert resources to avoid that.
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I wanted to thank you for posting this, as it inspired me to use it and other info to make this for others:
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- Pete Buttigieg has jumped 7 percentage points since a June Suffolk/USA TODAY poll.
- Joe Biden was by far the candidate seen as doing worse than expected in last week’s debate.
- Support for impeaching President Donald Trump has risen significantly since the June poll.
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A significant portion of Trump’s Republican supporters are open about their belief in his infallibility: 42 percent of Republicans said there is virtually nothing the president could do to lose their approval. Among Republicans who cited Fox News as their primary news source, this number was even higher, at 55 percent. And Trump’s most steadfast supporters are also most likely to condone his behavior: Nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals said Trump has not hurt the dignity of the presidency. By contrast, majorities of all other religious groups said Trump has damaged the image of the office.
These numbers reinforce the idea that some of Trump’s supporters have come to see American politics as an all-out war. Whatever reservations they may have had about Trump when he first ran for office have apparently been soothed, either by his full-throated defense of his supporters’ priorities or because these voters resent what they see as unrelenting attacks against him and his administration. Trump’s evangelical surrogates have said as much. The Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress recently said that Democrats were inviting a “civil war” by pursuing impeachment proceedings.
Hard-core Trump supporters are not representative of America, and they’re not the only voters who have hardened their political position in the past few years. Only 29 percent of registered voters told PRRI that they would vote for Trump in the 2020 election, no matter who becomes the Democratic nominee. By comparison, 40 percent of registered voters said they would support the Democratic candidate no matter who it is, while 29 percent said their ballot remains up for the taking.
Regardless of how impeachment plays out in the coming months, the proceedings are not likely to bring any semblance of political unity or compel committed Trump supporters to change their mind. Even if the president goes down, some Americans have apparently decided that they’re willing to go down with him.
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A sad, if expected, ruling:
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Momentum is building. It will be a long, hard fought battle, but we are positioned to win if we doggedly pursue the goal. Seize the day!
The political world’s focus on the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump by the House has obscured a critical shift in the battle for control of the Senate: Democrats now have a genuine chance at retaking the majority come November 2020.
…So why are Democrats now in a better position to make that scenario a reality? A combination of a continued decline in the national political environment for Trump coupled with strong fundraising numbers by a slew of Democratic challengers.
The 2020 map was always a bit of a challenge for Republicans. The party has to defend 23 seats next November as compared to just 12 for Democrats, the result of a 2014 election that delivered GOP wins across the Senate map. It’s never an easy road when you are defending almost twice as many seats as your opponents.
…
In Colorado, Democrats convinced former Gov. John Hickenlooper to drop out of the 2020 presidential race and challenge Sen. Cory Gardner who was already among the most vulnerable GOP incumbents in the country.In Arizona, astronaut Mark Kelly (D) has proven to be a dynamite fundraiser, ending September with $9.5 million in the bank – more than Joe Biden had on hand at the same time for his presidential bid. And Republicans continue to worry about Arizona Sen. Martha McSally’s ® abilities as a candidate.
In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins ® looks to be in for the most serious race of her two-plus decade career as former state House Speaker Sara Gideon reported raising more than $3 million dollars over the past three months – outpacing the incumbent by more than $1 million.
In North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis has to deal with a self-funder running to his right in the GOP primary and then the prospect of a race against a Democratic military veteran in a state that has become a genuine tossup.
And then there are a slew of other races in states – Georgia, Texas, Iowa – where Trump won by single-digits in 2016 and where Democratic challengers are likely to be well-funded enough to be in a position to capitalize if a) the national political environment goes even more south for Republicans or b) the GOP incumbents make a major mistake or slip-up between now and next November.
As Gonzales noted in his recent overview of the state of the Senate playing field:
“Individually, each of those races has its challenges, whether it be a strong incumbent, unproven Democratic candidates, or the political lean of the state. But when taken collectively, that Democrats need to win (or Republicans need to find a way to lose) less than 20 percent of those competitive contests, Democratic odds look much better.” …
As the article points out, fundraising by Democrats is providing crucial leverage in the close races. If the Senate seats in your state are not in play (either because they are not up for a vote in this election cycle or they are solidly Red or Blue), you could consider using ActBlue to donate to the leading Democratic candidate in one of the pivotal states mentioned above (Colorado, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina). Every dollar makes a difference!
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An interesting analysis with possible implications for DC counter measures – definitely a thread worth reading.
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