(CL1NT0N: the #1 to BE) No doubt in mind: Clinton the #45th President of the USA
Hillary Clinton diminta bahwa saatnya untuk 'bergerak maju' setelah dia menambah para pejabat partai dalam daftar yang ditudingnya menyebabkan kekalahan dalam pemilihan presiden 2016.
Senator Partai Demokrat, Al Franken mengatakan kepada Yahoo News, "Saya kira dia punya hak untuk menganalis yang terjadi tapi kita harus bergerak maju."
Clinton pekan ini menyalahkan data pemilih dari Komite Nasional Demokrat, DNC, sebagai 'biasa hingga buruk'. Selain itu, dia juga menuding FBI, Rusia, dan media.
Habiskan waktu bermain golf, Presiden Trump disentil Hillary
Direktur FBI dipecat oleh Presiden Trump terkait email Clinton
Tim kampanye Clinton ikut penghitungan suara ulang
Al FrankenEPA/MICHAELREYNOLDS AlFranken mengatakan 'kita harus bergerak maju'.
Dalam sebuah konferensi di California, Rabu (02/06), Clinton mengatakan, "Saya mengambil tanggung jawab atas semua kebijakan yang saya ambil, namun bukan karena itu saya kalah."
Menurutnya, Partai Demokrat tidak membantunya begitu dia menjadi calon presiden dari partai.
"Saya mendapat nominasi, saya menjadi calon dari Partai Demokrat. Saya tidak mewarisi apapun dari Partai Demokrat. Maksud saya, nyaris bangkrut."
Clinton mengaku dia harus menyuntikkan uang ke partai tersebut.
"Saya kira saya juga menjadi korban dari asumsi yang meluas bahwa saya akan menang."
Namun Andrew Therriault -mantan direktur data DNC- meluapkan kemarahan kepada Clinton dalam serangkaian pesan Twitter yang kini sudah dihapus.
"Kawan-kawan data DNC: tuduhan hari ini adalah f****** bull**** dan saya harap kalian memahami kebaikan yang kalian lakukan terlepas dari omong kosong itu," tulisnya.
Dia juga menulis latar belakang tentang negara-negara bagian 'berayun' -yang belum memiliki pilihan pasti- seperti Michigan, Wisconsin, dan Pennsylvania yang tak berhasil direbut Clinton.
ClintonAFP/LOGANCYRUSClinton menyalahkan data pemilih dari Komite Nasional Demokrat,DNC, sebagai 'biasa hingga buruk' Tim kampanye Clinton dikritik para pengamat politik karena tidak berkampanye lebih sering di negara-negara bagian 'berayun' yang penting tersebut.
"Timnya merasa mereka lebih tahu," kata Therriault.
Semenara Presiden Donald Trump menanggapi keluhan Clinton dengan kembali mencemooh musuh lamanya.
"Hillary Clinton yang tidak jujur sekarang menyalahkan semua orang kecuali dirinya sendiri, menolak untuk mengatakan dia adalah calon yang payah," tulis Trump di Twttter.
(jor/jor)
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washington post: Hillary Clinton emerged from political hibernation Tuesday by declaring herself “part of the resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency — and spreading blame for why it is not her sitting in the Oval Office.
Making a rare public appearance, Clinton attributed her surprise loss in the 2016 election to interference by Russian hackers and the actions of FBI Director James B. Comey in the campaign’s homestretch.
“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” Clinton told moderator Christiane Amanpour, the CNN anchor, at a Women for Women International event in New York.
Clinton stated broadly that she takes “absolute personal responsibility” for her failure to win the White House. Yet the Democratic nominee declined to fault her strategy or message, nor did she acknowledge her own weaknesses as a campaigner or the struggles by her and her advisers to at first comprehend and then respond to the angry mood of broad swaths of the electorate.
Instead, Clinton attributed her defeat to a range of external forces, including saying she was a victim of misogyny and of “false equivalency” in the news media.
See what Hillary Clinton has been doing since the presidential election
View PhotosThe former Democratic candidate and secretary of state has returned to public life after a post-election-loss respite.
Clinton said she was confident that she was on track to winning the election until two things reversed her momentum: the release of campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, which were allegedly stolen by Russian hackers, and Comey’s Oct. 28 letter to Congress that he had reopened the bureau’s investigation into her use of a private email server.
“I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off — and the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling [and] persuasive,” Clinton said.
On Nov. 6, two days before the election, Comey wrote again to Congress saying that the FBI had found no new evidence to change its conclusion that Clinton should not face criminal charges.
[How Donald Trump won: An oral history of the 2016 campaign]
Clinton talked about “the unprecedented interference, including from a foreign power whose leader is not a member of my fan club” — referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom she tangled as secretary of state.
In a pair of tweets Tuesday evening, Trump responded to Clinton’s claim that Comey’s statements had a role in her defeat, writing that the FBI director “was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”
“The phony … Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election,” the president wrote, before posing a rhetorical question: “Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”
When Amanpour asked whether Clinton thought misogyny contributed to her loss as the first female presidential nominee, Clinton said, “Yes, I do think it played a role.” She added that sexism “is very much a part of the landscape politically and socially and economically.”
Amanpour tried to draw out self-reflection from Clinton.
“He had one message, your opponent, and it was a successful message: ‘Make America great again,’ ” Amanpour said of Trump. “Where was your message? Do you take any personal responsibility?”
“I take absolute personal responsibility,” Clinton said. “I was the candidate. I was the person who was on the ballot.”
But then Clinton went on to blame Comey and the Russian hack of Podesta’s emails for her loss. “There was a lot of funny business going on,” she said.
Clinton added that she would detail her mistakes in her forthcoming book. “You’ll read my confession and my request for absolution,” she said with a touch of sarcasm.
Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist who advised two losing presidential nominees, Al Gore and John F. Kerry, said Clinton is not applying enough weight to her own failures, especially her economic message, in analyzing her loss.
“I have a measure of real sympathy, but it is also true that you can’t just blame the things that happened to you,” Shrum said. “Part of credibility here begins with saying, ‘These were things that happened to me that really hurt and could’ve cost me the election, but there were decisions I wish I made differently as well.’ ”
Losing a close presidential race can be devastating, and even traumatic, for a politician who long aspired to the office. After his 2000 defeat, Gore grew a beard and gained weight. Following his 2012 drubbing, Republican Mitt Romney retreated into seclusion in La Jolla, Calif., where he was spotted pumping his own gas, with his hair preternaturally flopping over his forehead.
“When a presidential candidate loses, they usually fall into a deep funk,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “They’re overtaken by a sense of personal mistakes that they made, but also trying to blame great external forces that robbed them of the prize.”
By her own acknowledgment, the experience has been no different for Clinton. Day after day, photos popped up on social media of her walking her dogs in the woods near her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. Clinton said Tuesday that she has been keeping busy writing a memoir, due out this fall. She described the process as “cathartic” yet “excruciating.”
“It’s a painful process reliving the campaign, as you might guess,” she said.
[In the Chappaqua woods, a search for Hillary Clinton]
Now, six months after the election, Clinton is stepping back into the public arena. She wants to be heard and to stay relevant, even as her Democratic Party is turning the page on the Clinton era and looks for new figures to lead it out of the political wilderness.
“I’m back to being an activist citizen — and part of the resistance,” Clinton said.
Some Democrats would prefer to lead the resistance themselves.
“She continues to be an important voice, but we’re focused on new battles now,” said Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.). “I don’t think it’s productive to re-litigate that race. I get up every morning and I’ve got to live with Donald Trump as president.”
But Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), one of a handful of Democrats who endorsed Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, said that being freed from life as a candidate might change the way voters hear Clinton.
“Maybe she can speak a little more openly now,” Ellison said. “I think it’s a good idea for her to do a book tour, to plug into the energy that’s out there.”
In a 35-minute question-and-answer session with Amanpour, Clinton reprised familiar themes and lines from her campaign. She talked about supporting the aspirations of women and girls, and also weighed in on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
“This is one of those wicked problems,” she said. “There has to be a regional effort to basically incentivize the North Korean regime to understand that it will pay a much bigger price regionally, primarily from China, if it pursues this reckless policy of nuclear weapons development.”
Clinton ribbed Trump a few times in the interview, leaving no doubt that she disapproves of his policies as well as his personal conduct. She suggested that Trump should tweet more about her than about foreign affairs, saying, “I’m happy being the diversion.”
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“He should worry less about the election and my winning the popular vote than doing some other things that would be important for the country,” Clinton said.
To that point, she was quick to fact-check Trump’s regular commentary about his “historic” election, in which he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote.
“Remember,” Clinton said, “I did win more than 3 million votes [more] than my opponent.”
David Weigel, Aaron Blake and Ashley Parker contributed to this report.
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Three swing states were possibly hacked during election, activists urge Hillary Clinton to challenge results
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were potentially manipulated, according to prominent computer scientists and lawyers who have spoken with the Clinton campaign
VOA: Calls among Hillary Clinton supporters for a recount of votes in three key states grew louder this week on the news that her national popular vote lead surpassed 2 million votes, along with reports of voter irregularities in some counties.
Last week, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta spoke with a few election lawyers and computer scientists who urged him to ask for a recount in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan because they thought the electronic voting booths used in those states could have been hacked, according to a report in New Yorkmagazine.
The academics said their findings showed Clinton's support had dropped 7 percentage points in counties that used electronic voting machines, as opposed to those counties that used optical scanners or paper ballots.
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The 2016 presidential-election campaign was long and arduous. And so too is the ongoing process of counting the roughly 135 million ballots cast in a relatively high-turnout election where most Americans did not vote for Donald Trump. What we have learned as the count continues is that the sweeping “Trump Triumphs” headlines and pronouncements from two weeks ago created Republican delusions of electoral grandeur that are not supported by the actual results.
After Trump was declared the winner, his supporters rushed to claim a mandate. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who is now set to serve as the White House chief of staff, announced on ABC’s Good Morning America that November 8 had produced “an electoral landslide” in which “the American people agreed that Donald Trump’s vision for America is what this country has been waiting for.” PolitiFactreviewed the chairman’s statement and concluded: “We rate Priebus’ claim False.”
That’s an understatement. As the votes continue to be counted in a process that will not be completed until mid-December, the myths of election night are giving way to the cold, hard reality that voters turned out in large numbers to reject Trump’s vision. They favored Clinton over the Republican nominee by a significant popular-vote margin. Trump is succeeding not based on the popular will but by assembling an Electoral College majority based on exceptionally narrow margins in a handful of battleground states.
Here’s what we know two weeks after the election:
1. Hillary Clinton is winning the national popular vote by more than 2 million votes.
Two weeks after the polls closed, the Democratic nominee had 64,225,534 votes to 62,209,804 votes for Trump in the well-regarded count maintained by David Wasserman for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Those numbers put Clinton ahead by more than 2 million votes, a number roughly parallel to that seen in a count maintained by David Leip, another serious monitor of the results.
Clinton’s margin will grow significantly, as it is estimated that several million votes have yet to be counted in western states (particularly California) that encourage high turnouts, that are meticulous about the process of counting absentee and provisional ballots, and that have strongly favored Clinton in this election. Clinton has also picked up tens of thousands of votes as local and state election officials in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and other states continue standard reviews of vote tabulations. Wasserman and others now estimate that the Democratic ticket is likely to finish with a popular-vote advantage over Trump of roughly 2.5 million.
2. Clinton’s “winner-but-loser” popular-vote lead is extending to levels that are unprecedented in modern times.
Four candidates who lost the popular vote have assumed the presidency thanks to the Electoral College or decisions made by the Congress. But there has only been one instance since 1900 when a popular-vote loser “won”: that of Republican George W. Bush, who took office despite the fact that 543,816 more Americans voted in 2000 for Democrat Al Gore.
Clinton’s popular-vote advantage over Trump is now more than three times as large as Gore’s advantage over Bush. No Electoral College “loser” has ever opened up so wide a popular-vote lead over the Electoral College winner as Clinton now has over Trump. And the Democrat’s margin is growing.
Clinton’s popular-vote lead is now so substantial that it can be compared not merely with losers of the presidency but with winners. The former secretary of state enjoys a popular-vote advantage that is now 15 times greater than that of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960. Her lead is now more than three times greater than that of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It has even surpassed that of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976.
3. Trump’s percentage of the popular vote is declining.
As Clinton’s advantage grows, her percentage of the popular vote increases; she’s now around 48 percent. At the same time, Trump’s percentage declines; he’s now around 46.5 percent.
The overall results remind us that the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump for president. In addition to the roughly 64.1 million votes that have been counted for Clinton so far, another 7.1 million have been counted for third-party and independent candidates. With scattered write-in votes, that means that 53.5 percent of voters chose not to cast ballots for the Republican nominee. Only 52.8 percent of Americans rejected Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.
4. Trump’s Electoral College lead is narrow.
Sometimes a candidate loses the popular vote, or gets a low percentage of the popular vote in a multi-candidate race, but wins the Electoral College decisively. That’s not the case this year. If the official reconciliation of votes identifies Trump as the winner in all the states where he is leading—as is likely—he will gain an Electoral College victory somewhere in the range of 306 to 232 (depending on whether all electors follow the dictates of the voters in the states they represent). That, as serious analysts of electoral politics remind us, is far short of a “landslide.”
“Calling a 306 electoral-vote victory a ‘landslide’ is ridiculous,” says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “Trump’s Electoral College majority is actually similar to John F. Kennedy’s 303 in 1960 and Jimmy Carter’s 297 in 1976. Has either of those victories ever been called a landslide? Of course not—and JFK and Carter actually won the popular vote narrowly.”
And here’s another twist: Trump’s Electoral College advantage extends from very narrow leads in several battleground states. In Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump’s ahead by around 1 percent of the vote. Out of almost 3 million ballots cast in Wisconsin, for instance, Trump’s ahead by roughly 27,000 votes. In Michigan, the Republican’s roughly 9,500-vote lead (out of 4.8 million votes cast) is so small that some Clinton backers hold out hope that it could be upset in a final review of voting in the state.
5. Clinton and Trump backers should share an interest in ensuring that all the votes are counted and that the final results are accurate.
The long counting process has stirred frustration on the part of Clinton and Trump backers. Social media is filled with bickering between the camps. That’s not new. Close elections in trying times invariably inspire disagreements. But, especially in an era of fake news and hyper-partisanship, getting state and national counts right is crucial. As states complete official reviews in anticipation of the December 13 deadline for certifying results before the December 19 Electoral College vote, a number of sincere calls have been made for reviews, recounts, and audits of the numbers. These are not annoyances or distractions; these are common responses to close contests.
Ron Rivest, an institute professor at MIT who was a member of the US Election Assistance Commission Technical Guidelines Development Committee, and Philip Stark, an associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, who was appointed to the board of advisers of the US Election Assistance Commission, have argued for audits of election results—especially in closely contested states. They note much reported pre-election concerns about hacking, but offer a broader argument for audits. “Computers counted the vast majority of the 130 million votes cast in this year’s election,” the pair wrote in a postelection article for USA Today. “Even without hacking, mistakes are inevitable. Computers can’t divine voter intent perfectly; computers can be misconfigured; and software can have bugs.”
Audits are not full recounts of all the ballots. They are reviews of a random sample of the ballots cast, which provide assurance that voting machinery and procedures have functioned properly.
Clinton backers have embraced proposals for audits, and several computer scientists and voting-rights activists have argued that Clinton’s campaign should call for full recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But Republicans also have reason to be interested in audits and recounts. While Trump’s advantage in several Great Lakes states is narrow, for instance, Clinton’s just barely ahead in states such as New Hampshire and Minnesota. With so many states so closely divided, Rivest and Stark argue that audits can “ensure that the machinery of democracy worked.”
Contrary to much of the initial reporting on results from around the country, the 2016 election drew a relatively high turnout by American standards. Two weeks after the polls closed, the review maintained by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report indicated that 133,475,821 votes had been counted. That’s roughly 4.5 million more than in the final 2012 count. It is also more than the final count in 2008, which was generally viewed as a high-turnout election. The US Election Project is now anticipating that the final count will be around 135,000,000.
The number of eligible voters has expanded, of course, so the actual percentage of the population casting ballots in 2016 is still below that of 2008, when turnout of eligible voters hit 62.2 percent. But this year’s turnout is likely to be comparable to 2012, when turnout was pegged at 58.6 percent. That’s still an absurdly low level of participation when compared to other countries. But the 2016 turnout rate did not collapse nationally.
7. Relatively high turnout did not translate into a mandate for Donald Trump or his party.
Talk of landslides and mandates should be put aside. This election offered a clear indication only that the United States is a divided nation. The Republican Party did not sweep the voting.
The Republican nominee lost the popular vote for the presidency. Preliminary results suggest that Democratic led in the overall popular vote by for Senate seats by almost six million votes. Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate, and Democrats picked up at least six seats in the House.
Democrats should not be satisfied with those results. The party and its candidates made strategic errors in 2016 and those errors cost them dearly. If Democrats do not learn from them, the party’s congressional caucuses will not mount an effective opposition in the next two years, and the party’s candidates will not be prepared to capitalize on the electoral opportunities that are presented in 2018 and 2020.
But Democrats and Republicans ought to be able to recognize that there was no “landslide” victory for Trump on November 8, and that no mandate for Trumpism can be found in the results of the 2016 election.
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WASHINGTON DC, KOMPAS.com —
Keunggulan suara Hillary Clinton atas Donald Trump, keduanya bersaing pada Pilpres AS, di tingkat nasional kini melampaui 2 juta suara.
Selain itu, muncul pula laporan tentang berbagai kecurangan di sejumlah distrik di beberapa negara bagian, sebagaimana dilaporkan Voice of America, Kamis (24/11/2016).
Terkait dengan itu, muncul seruan dari para pendukung Hillary, yang dijagokan Partai Demokrat, agar dilakukan penghitungan ulang kartu suara di tiga negara bagian.
Mereka mengatakan, hal itu penting seiring munculnya informasi bahwa keunggulan suara Hillary atas Trump, yang didukung Partai Republik, pada tingkat nasional kini melampaui 2 juta dan adanya laporan kecurangan.
Pekan lalu, Ketua Tim Kampanye Hillary, John Podesta, berbicara dengan beberapa kuasa hukum pemilu dan ilmuwan komputer yang mendesaknya untuk meminta penghitungan ulang di Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, dan Michigan.
Sebab, mereka yakin bahwa sejumlah tempat pemungutan suarat (TPS) elektronik yang digunakan di tiga negara bagian itu mungkin telah diretas, demikian menurut laporan di majalah New York.
Para akademisi mengatakan, temuan mereka menunjukkan bahwa dukungan Hillary tujuh poin di distrik-distrik yang menggunakan mesin suara elektronik anjlok, dengan distrik-distrik yang menggunakan pemindai optik dan atau surat suara.
Meskipun para akademisi ini tidak memberikan bukti peretasan, mereka menyerukan penghitungan ulang berdasarkan tipisnya kemenangan Trump di tiga negara bagian itu, yaitu kurang dari 2 persen.
Jika Hillary memenangi suara elektoral di ketiga negara bagian ini, ia akan meraih 274 suara elektoral, sedikit di atas 270 suara elektoral yang dibutuhkan untuk memenangi Pilpres AS.
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usa today: Two weeks after Election Day -- as Donald Trump assembles his Cabinet -- votes in many states are still being counted. And the tally shows that Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote, with Michigan's 16 electoral votes still up for grab, continues to grow..
And so the question: How confident can Americans be in the results announced in the wee hours of Nov. 9, given the problems that continue to beset our election system? Here are some answers:
Q: Who won the popular vote?
A: Clinton's lead of more than 2 million votes, according to the Cook Political Report, continues to increase, largely due to an influx of absentee and provisional ballots still being counted in California. She has about 64.2 million votes to Trump's 62.2 million; her margin in California alone is more than 3.7 million.
Question: Who won the electoral vote?
Answer: As of today, Trump has 290 votes to Clinton's 232, with Michigan outstanding. Even if Clinton wins there – a possibility despite Trump's lead since election night – she still would trail, 290-248.
Among other states where the vote was close, only Florida could flip the election. But she trails there and in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by too many votes to trigger an automatic recount.
Q: Where are votes still being counted?
A: Most states have yet to report officials results, meaning they are still counting absentee or mail ballots or, more likely, deciding whether to count provisional ballots. Those often are cast by voters whose names did not appear on registration lists, or who may have voted in the wrong place or lacked proper identification.
Q: Why does it take so long?
A: Millions of ballots come in at the last second -- or, in states that allow it, several days after the election with the proper postmarks. It takes money, manpower and accurate voting machines to get every vote counted correctly.
"We vastly underfund the way in which we run our elections," says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida associate professor who maintains a web site on the electoral system. "The bottom line is that you want to get the count right.”
Q: How close are the two candidates in key battleground states?
A: Three thousand votes are all that separate Clinton and Trump in New Hampshire. The margin is about 12,000 in Michigan, 27,000 in Wisconsin, 68,000 in Pennsylvania and 113,000 in Florida -- close, but nothing compared to the 537 votes that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida 16 years ago.
Q: Can the votes be recounted?
A: Several states, including Pennsylvania and Florida, require the vote difference between the two candidates to be less than one-half of 1 percentage point. In Michigan, a recount is triggered automatically if the margin is less than 2,000 votes. None of those states are close enough at the moment.
Q: Is it possible that provisional and absentee voting results vary significantly from Election Day?
A: Yes, but it's unlikely. Despite changes in voting laws in some states that civil rights groups claim unfairly restrict minorities, the poor and elderly, provisional votes that are accepted usually don't alter the results.
“The chances of changing tens of thousands of votes? That’s just not going to happen,” says Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member now at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Q: What's the deal in California?
A: It's the largest state, with some of the most permissive voting procedures. More than half the state's votes are cast by absentee ballot, since no excuses are necessary to avoid going to a polling place on Election Day. Provisional ballots are treated more leniently than in many other states, requiring time to correct mistakes that otherwise would cause votes to be rejected.
Q: So when will the results be official?
A: Eight states have certified their results; another four are due to do so Tuesday. Nearly all will complete their counts by Dec. 13, in time for the Dec. 19 meeting of the Electoral College -- the 538 individuals who, usually without exception, vote according to the results in each state. In some states, the final count may come even later.
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washington post: Was the 2016 presidential election hacked? It’s hard to tell. There were no obvious hacks on Election Day, but newreports have raised the question of whether voting machines were tampered with in three states that Donald Trump won this month: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The researchers behind these reports include voting rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, both respected in the community. They have been talking with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but their analysis is not yet public.
According to a report in New York magazine, the share of votes received by Clinton was significantly lower in precincts that used a particular type of voting machine: The magazine story suggested that Clinton had received 7 percent fewer votes in Wisconsin counties that used electronic machines, which could be hacked, than in counties that used paper ballots. That is exactly the sort of result we would expect to see if there had been some sort of voting machine hack. There are many different types of voting machines, and attacks against one type would not work against the others. So a voting anomaly correlated to machine type could be a red flag, although Trump did better across the entire Midwest than pre-election polls expected, and there are also some correlationsbetween voting machine type and the demographics of the various precincts. Even Halderman wrote early Wednesday morning that “the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.”
What the allegations, and the ripples they’re causing on social media, really show is how fundamentally untrustworthy our hodgepodge election system is.
Accountability is a major problem for U.S. elections. The candidates are the ones required to petition for recounts, and we throw the matter into the courts when we can’t figure it out. This all happens after an election, and because the battle lines have already been drawn, the process is intensely political. Unlike many other countries, we don’t have an independent body empowered to investigate these matters. There is no government agency empowered to verify these researchers’ claims, even if it would be merely to reassure voters that the election count was accurate.
Instead, we have a patchwork of voting systems: different rules, different machines, different standards. I’ve seen arguments that there is security in this setup — an attacker can’t broadly attack the entire country — but the downsides of this system are much more critical. National standards would significantly improve our voting process.
Further investigation of the claims raised by the researchers would help settle this particular question. Unfortunately, time is of the essence — underscoring another problem with how we conduct elections. For anything to happen, Clinton has to call for a recount and investigation. She has until Friday to do it in Wisconsin, until Monday in Pennsylvania and until next Wednesday in Michigan. I don’t expect the research team to have any better data before then. Without changes to the system, we’re telling future hackers that they can be successful as long as they’re able to hide their attacks for a few weeks until after the recount deadlines pass.
Computer forensics investigations are not easy, and they’re not quick. They require access to the machines. They involve analysis of Internet traffic. If we suspect a foreign country like Russia, the National Security Agency will analyze what they’ve intercepted from that country. This could easily take weeks, perhaps even months. And in the end, we might not even get a definitive answer. And even if we do end up with evidence that the voting machines were hacked, we don’t have rules about what to do next.
Although winning those three states would flip the election, I predict Clinton will do nothing (her campaign, after all, has reportedly been aware of the researchers’ work for nearly a week). Not because she does not believe the researchers — although she might not — but because she doesn’t want to throw the post-election process into turmoil by starting a highly politicized process whose eventual outcome will have little to do with computer forensics and a lot to do with which party has more power in the three states.
But we only have two years until the next national elections, and it’s time to start fixing things if we don’t want to be wondering the same things about hackers in 2018. The risks are real: Electronic voting machines that don’t use a paper ballot are vulnerable to hacking.
Clinton supporters are seizing on this story as their last lifeline of hope. I sympathize with them. When I wrote about vote-hacking the day after the election, I said: “Elections serve two purposes. First, and most obvious, they are how we choose a winner. But second, and equally important, they convince the loser — and all the supporters — that he or she lost.” If the election system fails to do the second, we risk undermining the legitimacy of our democratic process. Clinton’s supporters deserve to know whether this apparent statistical anomaly is the result of a hack against our election system or a spurious correlation. They deserve an election that is demonstrably fair and accurate. Our patchwork, ad hoc system means they may never feel confident in the outcome. And that will further erode the trust we have in our election systems.
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usa today: Hillary Clinton's margin in the popular vote against President-elect Donald Trump has surpassed 2 million, furthering the record for a candidate who lost in the Electoral College.
Thanks to votes still being counted in California and other western areas, Clinton's vote advantage hit the 2 million mark on Wednesday morning, according to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.
As of mid-day Wednesday, Wasserman's spread sheet had Clinton at 64,225,863 votes to Trump's 62,210,612.
Much of that lead was generated by California, where Clinton had 3.7 million more votes than Trump in the last totals reported Tuesday evening.
The Democratic vote was not distributed well enough across the country, however; Trump carried most of the states and prevailed in the Electoral College.
In the wake of this latest split decision — the same thing happened in 2000, when Al Gorewon the popular vote but lost to George W. Bush on electoral votes — some Democrats are calling for an end to the Electoral College.
Their chances aren't good; the Constitution authorizes the Electoral College, and smaller states — especially swing states that see a lot of presidential candidates — would likely block its abolition.
Trump, who was once a critic of the Electoral College, now says a popular vote-only system would force candidates to campaign only in bigger states like California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
"I think the popular vote would have been easier in a true sense because you’d go to a few places," Trump told The New York Times. "I think that’s the genius of the Electoral College. I was never a fan of the Electoral College until now."
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newsweek: Hillary Clinton is being pushed by computer scientists and lawyers to challenge the presidential election results in three key swing states, two of which Donald Trump won two weeks ago. While one member of that group said in an online post Wednesday that the results were “probably not” hacked, he advised Clinton to file for an examination of the physical evidence.
The group believes it found evidence that vote totals in the three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—might have been affected by a cyberattack, saying the Democratic nominee received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines instead of paper ballots or scanners, New York magazine reported.
But the professor who posted online, J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan (who also directs the Center for Computer Security and Society), said the most likely explanation for Trump’s win is that the polls “were systematically wrong.” Most pre-election polls indicated Clinton would win the presidency.
Trump defeated Clinton in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and while the billionaire businessman is ahead of the Democrat in Michigan, the state’s results are not yet final.
Halderman also argued that a foreign government could have probed certain election offices prior to November 8 to find ways to break into computers and ultimately spread malware into voting machines in states where polling data showed close electoral margins. The Obama administration has publicly accused the Russian government of directing hacks to influence the election, including leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee and from several individual accounts, such as that of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta.
Russia, Halderman said, “has sophisticated cyberoffensive capabilities.” He cited an instance from 2014 when attackers linked to Russia reportedly sabotaged Ukraine’s vote-counting infrastructure during elections.
“The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result,” Halderman said of the 2016 U.S. election, “is to closely examine the available physical evidence—paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.” He said that doing so would solidify the results and erase some Americans’ doubts about the outcome.
He added, “Nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.”
It remains unclear how Clinton’s campaign would respond to the group’s call. She conceded the race in an early-morning phone call to Trump on November 9. Just hours later, she gave her concession speech to Americans on TV.
Deadlines are approaching to file for recounts. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have signed an online petition calling for an audit of the electronic results against the paper ballots. And the sister of Clinton aide Huma Abedin has encouraged her followers on Facebook to call the U.S. Justice Department to demand audits in key states. Also, thousands of Clinton supporters across the country have taken to the streets to protest Trump’s win, often declaring he’s “not my president.”
Trump is headed to the White House because he won the electoral vote. But Clinton beat him in the popular vote, which suggests she was favored by more Americans. As some voters wonder if her election loss means the end of the Clinton era, the former secretary of state has been spotted in public a few times since November 8—speaking at the Children’s Defense Fund; on a hike in the woods near her home in Chappaqua, New York; and shopping at a Rhode Island bookstore.
Trump will remain a private citizen until he is sworn in as president on Inauguration Day, January 20. Perhaps the irony about the possible Clinton recount challenge isn’t lost on the members of his campaign: Toward the end of the campaign, the real estate mogul suggested he would challenge the results—if he lost.
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VOX: Earlier this year, US intelligence agencies blamed the Russian government for leaking emails stolen from senior Democrats in an attempt to influence the US election. We also know that someone — likely the Russian government — tried to hack voting infrastructure in Ukraine to change the outcome of the election there.
So could the Russian government have used its hacking capabilities to directly modify the results of the 2016 election in the United States? It’s a serious possibility — serious enough that US election officials should be on their guard against it. But under current law, election officials in most states don’t perform even basic checks to make sure that the results have not been modified by malware.
In a Wednesday post, computer scientist Alex Halderman, a leading expert on the security of voting systems, argues that this needs to change. (Halderman’s post follows a widely circulated New York magazine articlethat Halderman says incorrectly described his views.) The first step, he argues, is for the Clinton campaign to request recounts in key swing states.
“Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not,” Halderman writes. “I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.” But he argues that a recount is the best way to make sure.
Traditionally, recounts have been viewed as an extreme step that should be taken only in the event of a razor-thin result like we saw in Florida in 2000. But in today’s era of hackable voting systems, these checks need to become routine. It’s the only way to ensure that foreign governments or other malicious parties can’t tamper with the results of US elections.
Elections are hackable even in states that use paper ballots
In the wake of the messy 2000 election, Congress provided states with billions of dollars to improve their voting systems. Many states “upgraded” to touchscreen voting machines that stored voting results electronically. That proved to be a huge mistake. In 2006, Halderman was part of a team of Princeton researchers that showed how easy it is to hack these machines and make them produce inaccurate results.
Over the past decade, election officials in many states have heeded these warnings and switched to using paper optical-scan ballots. However, this doesn’t totally foreclose the possibility of election hacking, because the machine that counts the votes is still a computer that could be hacked.
These vote-counting computers are not online, so they can’t be hacked directly from the internet. However, as Halderman explains, “shortly before each election, poll workers copy the ballot design from a regular desktop computer in a government office, and use removable media (like the memory card from a digital camera) to load the ballot onto each machine. That initial computer is almost certainly not well secured, and if an attacker infects it, vote-stealing malware can hitch a ride to every voting machine in the area.”
The good thing about optical-scan voting machines is that a human being can double-check the machine’s work. If a vote-counting machine is systematically shifting votes from one candidate to another, a manual recount of randomly selected ballots should detect the discrepancy. But this only works if someone actually performs the check. And under current election law in most states, that doesn’t happen.
America’s recount laws are outdated
Most states allow candidates to request a recount in the event of a close election. If the result is very close, the state will often cover the costs of the recount. Otherwise, the candidate has to pay for the costs of the recount. In Wisconsin, for example, a candidate must pay for the recount if the margin of victory was larger than 0.5 percent.
In the pre-computer era, this rule made a lot of sense. Back then, the main concern was about humans making honest mistakes or old-fashioned voting machines malfunctioning. These kinds of errors could only alter the result of an election by a small margin. So it only made sense to do a recount if the result was very close to start with.
But things look different if you’re worried about someone deliberately manipulating an election result. Malware can change 3 percent of votes as easily as 0.3 percent of votes. So a comfortable margin of victory doesn’t tell us much about whether the election was hacked.
So in a world of computerized voting systems, it’s a good precaution to automatically do manual checks of the electronic counts. And fortunately, modern statistical techniques allow election officials to verify the results of an election at a much lower cost than it would take to perform a full-blown statewide manual recount.
Asking for a recount would enhance public confidence in the election
The key swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan predominantly use paper ballots, so their results can easily be checked. Pennsylvania uses a mix of paper ballots and electronic voting machines. So verifying its results will be harder, but at least the paper ballots can be checked.
The deadlines for the Clinton campaign to request recounts in these states are coming up within the next week.
But that doesn’t mean it will request a recount. In fact, there are two big reasons for the Clinton campaign not to.
One is money. Today’s cumbersome recounts can cost millions of dollars to perform, and the Clinton campaign might have to pay those costs. However, this doesn’t seem like a very big obstacle. There are millions of disappointed Democrats out there who are worried about tampered election results. Some fundraising emails to Clinton’s existing base of contributors could raise the necessary funds.
The second and more serious objection is that frivolous recount requests could compromise public faith in the election results. Throughout the campaign, Hillary Clinton stressed the importance of accepting the results of the election. Skeptics worry that if Clinton were to request recounts without any tangible evidence that the original count was wrong, it could legitimize conspiracy theories and ultimately undermine confidence in the election result — and the democratic process more generally.
But in the era of hackable voting systems, that gets things precisely backward.
Foreign governments tampering with US voting machines is a real threat. And if someone carried out a sophisticated attack on America’s voting systems, there might not be any obvious signs other than the changed outcome. So if no one manually checks to verify that the electronic results were accurate, it’s totally rational for the public to doubt the integrity of the results.
The solution is to make recounts (or equally reliable but much more affordable statistical audits) a routine part of the vote-counting process. If election officials audit the results of every election, then the decision to audit a particular election won’t give credence to conspiracy theorists, and it will bolster rather than undermine public confidence.
Making audits a routine part of the election process would have another big benefit too: It would deter foreign governments from trying to steal election results in the first place. Our current procedures create a significant chance that a hacked election would go undetected — which is a huge temptation for someone to try it. Under a system of routine audits, in contrast, hacked results would almost certainly be found, which means a foreign government probably wouldn’t bother. By requesting a recount this year, Clinton would help to set a precedent that integrity checks should be a routine part of the election process.
Swing states could change their laws by 2020 so that audits happen automatically, without the losing candidate having to request them. But until that happens, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Liputan6.com, Ann Arbor - Tim kampanye Hillary Clinton sedang didesak oleh sejumlah ilmuwan hebat di bidang komputer untuk menuntut penghitungan ulang perolehan suara saat pemilihan presiden 8 November lalu di negara bagian Wisconsin, Michigan dan Pennsylvania.
Dikutip dari CNN, Rabu (23/11/2016), ilmuwan tersebut meyakini bahwa mereka menemukan bukti bahwa jumlah penghitungan suara di tiga negara bagian telah dimanipulasi atau diretas. Mereka mempresentasikan penemuan itu kepada asisten tertinggi Hillary melalui sebuah panggilan telepon pada Kamis 17 November lalu.
Salah satu ilmuwan, J. Alex Halderman yang merupakan direktur University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, mengatakan kepada tim kampanye Hillary bahwa mereka meyakini terdapat kecenderungan yang harus dipertanyakan.
Hal tersebut terkait dengan performa buruk Hillary di negara bagian yang bergantung pada mesin pemungutan suara elektronik, dibandingkan dengan pemungutan yang menggunakan surat suara dan pemindai optik.
Kelompok ilmuwan tersebut memberikan informasi kepada ketua kampanye Hillary, John Podesta, dan penasihat umum kampanye, Marc Elias, bahwa Hillary menerima suara tujuh persen lebih rendah di beberapa negara bagian yang mengandalkan mesin pemungutan suara. Mereka menyebut bahwa hal tersebut bisa saja terjadi karena peretasan.
Tim tersebut mengatakan kepada Podesta dan Elias, sementara mereka tidak menemukan bukti peretasan, namun pola itu perlu dilihat oleh tinjauan independen.
Baik Halderman maupun John Bonifaz, yakni seorang pengacara yang juga mendesak kasus tersebut, merespons permintaan untuk berkomentar pada Selasa malam. Desakan mereka pertama kali dilaporkan oleh New York Magazine.
Terdapat kekhawatiran yang meluas mengenai peretasan menjelang pilpres AS, termasuk pemerintahan Obama yang menuduh Rusia berupaya untuk menerobos data pemilih. Namun para penanggungjawab pipres dan ahli keamanan cyber mengatakan, hampir tidak mungkin bagi Rusia untuk mempengaruhi hasil pemilu.
Mantan asisten Hillary menolak merespons pertanyaan, apakah mereka akan meminta diadakannya pemeriksaan berdasarkan temuan tersebut.
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Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States
Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.
Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.
According to current tallies, Trump has won 290 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 232, with Michigan’s 16 votes not apportioned because the race there is still too close to call. It would take overturning the results in both Wisconsin (10 Electoral College votes) and Pennsylvania (20 votes), in addition to winning Michigan’s 16, for Clinton to win the Electoral College. There is also the complicating factor of “faithless electors,” or members of the Electoral College who do not vote according to the popular vote in their states. At least six electoral voters have said they would not vote for Trump, despite the fact that he won their states.
The Clinton camp is running out of time to challenge the election. According to one of the activists, the deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday. Whether Clinton will call for a recount remains unclear. The academics so far have only a circumstantial case that would require not just a recount but a forensic audit of voting machines. Also complicating matters, a senior Clinton adviser said, is that the White House, focused on a smooth transfer of power, does not want Clinton to challenge the election result. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri did not respond to a request for comment. But some Clinton allies are intent on pushing the issue. This afternoon, Huma Abedin’s sister Heba encouraged her Facebook followers to lobby the Justice Department to audit the 2016 vote. “Call the DOJ…and tell them you want the votes audited,” she wrote. “Even if it’s busy, keep calling.”
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Milwaukee, Nov 21, 2016 (AFP)
On North Avenue, young black men with nothing to do wander past boarded-up buildings and dilapidated shops. It is a sad, desolate landscape.
They and other African Americans in Milwaukee contributed to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat in the presidential election: not only did they not vote for her, as had been expected, some even backed Donald Trump.
Wisconsin's largest city is also America's most racially segregated one, according to a study based on the 2010 census.
And Wisconsin served up one of the biggest surprises of an election day that shocked America and the world: no one thought the midwestern state would fall to the Republican billionaire.
Clinton was so sure of victory she did not even bother to campaign here after the Democratic primaries, instead sending her daughter Chelsea or her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
"She probably thought she had Wisconsin wrapped up," said Ronald Roberts, a 67 year old retiree, as he left a shop called Bill the Butcher. Its aging sign is missing the R.
"You can't take the voters for granted because they'll stay home," said Roberts, who used to work as an auto mechanic.
That is just what happened here, according to exit polls taken on November 8. Stop anyone in this part of town, where there is not a white person in sight, and they will tell you as much.
"I feel that she is no better than Trump. That's why I didn't vote," said Brittany Mays, a young woman who works in a beauty salon.
Around her decay abounds: empty housing developments or boarded up homes symbolizing the economic woes of families that fell on very hard times.
- Divide deepened -
Barack Obama had won over the state's traditionally Democratic electorate in 2008 and 2012, and Clinton had been banking on a strong turnout here among African Americans as she campaigned with the blessing of the nation's first black president.
But in Milwaukee, turnout slumped the most in poor, black areas of the state, compared to wealthier -- whiter -- areas.
Many black people here were left out of the economic recovery that Wisconsin enjoyed after the Great Recession.
"Now you have got a lot people walking around here with no job. There is not a lot of money circulating," said Roberts.
In Milwaukee, practically all of the white people have moved to the suburbs, and Trump campaigned there, of course.
Black residents moved here from the south in the 1960s, just as the city's manufacturing base was starting to decline. The settled in the north of the inner city, and Hispanics set up in the south.
Over time, little by little, the racial divide has deepened. These days the unemployment rate among black people is three times that of whites. African Americans hold the national record in school drop-outs.
In Milwaukee County, more than 50 percent of black people aged 30 to 40 have spent time in jail, meaning they are barred from voting for a while.
What is more, a recent law forces people to show a photo ID in order to vote. Advocacy groups argue that this was designed to limit minority turnout in the presidential election.
"In some case, voters were wrongly turned away," said Andrea Kaminski, who runs the Wisconsin chapter of the League of Women Voters, which deployed 250 observers on Election Day.
- 'Dismal picture' -
"You cannot count the number of people who did not even try to vote because of the voter ID law. But that's probably a much bigger number than the people who were actually turned away," Kaminski said.
"I do know a few people who did not have ID or were restricted to vote and they feel like it was unfair to them," said Derricka Wesley, 24, who works at a Walmart store.
Hard hit by drug abuse, violence, a collapse in real estate prices and unemployment, many people in black neighborhoods of Milwaukee have simply lost hope, said LaTonya Johnson, a black local elected official.
"You see this dismal picture where people aren't really seeing the correlation between actually casting their ballot and improving their living conditions," Johnson said.
She argued that Trump's relentless campaign rhetoric about corruption discouraged people from voting.
"Trump was talking about all the corruption in politics and the rigged voting. So you got a lot of people who just really felt like their vote wasn't going to matter," said Johnson.
Some black voters reasoned themselves into backing the real estate tycoon with no experience in government.
"I voted for Trump because I believe he can create jobs. Period," said Dennis Johnson, a 39-year-old truck driver.
"He said, 'Hey, what have you got to lose?' To me, it just made perfect sense," said Johnson.
He added: "Now, listen, this country will survive four years of Trump. We survived eight years of Obama and eight years of Bush."
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Miami, Nov 7, 2016 (AFP)
Voter turnout among African American and Hispanic voters in the United States has surged in early voting, and this swell of minority participation could spell trouble for Donald Trump's White House hopes.
On Sunday -- the last day of early voting before Election Day on November 8 -- hundreds of people attended "Souls to the Polls" events, aimed at encouraging churchgoers to vote across the key swing state of Florida.
Some came straight from morning worship, wearing three-piece suits and dresses as they made their way past dozens of campaigners hoisting signs for local candidates and urging support for solar energy and education issues.
At one event in central Miami, people held hands and prayed outside an early voting site, while at another in southern Miami-Dade County, about 20 African American men rolled in together on motorcycles.
For some, the vote they cast was as much for Democrat Hillary Clinton as it was against her Republican billionaire challenger.
"I'm scared if Trump wins," said Ines Curbelo, 57, a nurse who described herself as Afro-Cuban and was handing out Democratic flyers at a polling place Cutler Bay, south of Miami.
As speakers blared gospel and R&B music, a line formed near a smoky barbecue pit and several young boys jousted with inflatable swords on the grassy lawn behind her.
"He would set back politics and set back race relations and set back women's fight for equality in the workplace -- everything is going to get set so far back," Curbelo said.
- 100% increase in Hispanic voters -
Hispanics make up a powerful voting bloc in the battleground state of Florida, and are widely expected to lean toward Clinton, particularly since Trump has described Mexicans as rapists, repeatedly vowed to build a border wall and promised to deport masses of undocumented immigrants.
As of early Monday, nearly one million of the state's total 6.4 million votes so far were cast by Hispanics, according to Daniel Smith, a University of Florida professor who tracks voter turnout.
Among those who showed up in person rather than mailing in a ballot, there was a 100 percent increase over the close of early voting in 2012, he said.
In another sign of voter enthusiasm, 36 percent of Hispanics who cast a ballot this year did not vote in the last presidential election.
Nationwide, about 12 percent of voters are Hispanic, or about 27.3 million people, according to Pew Research Center projections.
High Hispanic turnout has also been seen in other states such as Nevada.
"The Hispanic community is coming out," teacher Marcela Stewart, 37, told AFP at the Souls to the Polls event.
"I think as far as the black community, we need to work a little harder," she added.
"Some people are just discouraged and feel they cannot impact the election, so we want to let them know that their voices will be heard and they need to come out."
- Black turnout 'explodes' -
Indeed, when early voting in the United States started two weeks ago, African American turnout was low.
According to Tornell Jenkins, a 37-year-old student, President Barack Obama's historic victory as the first black president in 2008 "really drove the black vote."
"Now there is confusion. Some blacks feel that both parties are bad," he added, predicting that many in his community would wait for Election Day to vote.
Early last week, Smith said black turnout was "lackluster" -- at about 14 percent of early voters -- compared with 26 percent in 2012, when Obama was re-elected.
But that changed, after Obama made a series of appeals for black voters to support Clinton, and Clinton herself appeared at a campaign event with Beyonce and Jay-Z.
"Over the past few days, we've seen black turnout explode, with more African-Americans voting early in-person than in 2012," Smith told AFP on Sunday.
As of Monday, a total of 835,000 African Americans had already voted in Florida. That is higher than in 2012, when 764,000 blacks voted early.
Mixing religion and politics on the last Sunday of early voting can be an important draw for the working class, according to Namita Waghray, an organizer with the American County of Federal, State and County Employees (AFSCME), a 1.6 million-member union that includes bus drivers and garbage collectors.
"In African American communities, this is when people vote," she said, recalling about 800 people came out for Souls to the Polls events in 2012 and a dozen were held statewide this year.
"The reason we partner with churches and people of faith is because they have such belief in their community."
JAKARTA. Nilai tukar rupiah ditutup melemah pada perdagangan hari ini, Senin (7/11/2016).
Rupiah ditutup terdepresiasi 18 poin atau 0,14% ke level Rp13.086 per dolar AS setelah diperdagangkan pada kisaran  Rp13.077 – Rp13.117 per dolar AS.
Rupiah sebelumnya juga dibuka di zona merah dengan pelemahan 0,28% atau 37 poin di Rp13.105 per dolar AS.
Pada perdagangan Jumat pekan lalu, rupiah ditutup menguat 7 poin atau 0,05% ke posisi Rp13.068 per dolar AS.
Pelemahan rupiah terjadi sejalan dengan pergerakan mata uang Asia lainnya yang juga terdepresiasi terhadap dolar AS.
Adapun indeks Dolar AS terus menguat setelah FBI menyatakan tetap pada rekomendasi sebelumnya bahwa tidak ada tuntutan pidana terhadap calon presiden partai Demokrat Hillary Clinton.
Seperti dilansir Reuters, sentimen masih berkisar pada ketatnya pemilihan presiden AS antara calon dari Partai Demokrat Hillary Clinton dan Partai Republik Donald Trump, di mana sikap pada kebijakan luar negeri, perdagangan dan imigrasi mereka mempengaruhi pasar keuangan.
Clinton dipandang sebagai calon status quo dan kebijakannya dipandang lebih dapat diprediksi daripada saingannya, Donald Trump.
FBI mengatakan pada Minggu bahwa tidak ada tuntutan pidana terhadap Clinton atas penggunaan server surel pribadi untuk kerja pemerintah.
Direktur FBI James Comey membuat pengumuman melalui surat kepada Kongres, mengatakan lembaganya tidak menemukan alasan untuk mengubah temuan pada Juli lalu.
Investigasi atas surel Clinton teersebut telah mengguncang pasar keuangan sepanjang pekan lalu.
Mata uang lainnya di Asia Tenggara bergerak melemah. Dolar Singapura melemah 0,50%, baht Thailand melemah 0,11%, ringgit Malaysia turun 0,28%, dan peso Filipina melemah 0,37%.
Sementara itu, indeks dolar AS yang memantau pergerakan mata uang dolar terhadap mata uang lainnya terpantau menguat 0,692 poin atau 0,71% ke posisi 97757 Â pada pukul 15.57 WIB.
Hillary Clinton has one of the strongest resumes of anyone ever to run for U.S. president, with stints as first lady, senator and secretary of state, but she is also a polarizing figure and a Washington insider with decades of political baggage.
Should Democrat Clinton, 69, defeat Republican Donald Trump, 70, in Tuesday's election, she would become the first woman elected U.S. president, having already been the only first lady to win elected office and the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. party.
Clinton fell short in her first presidential bid in 2008, losing her party's nomination to Barack Obama.
Her time on the American political scene has come during an era of intense partisanship and gaping divisions in U.S. society. Americans hold dramatically differing views of Clinton.
Clinton's admirers consider her a tough, capable and sometimes inspirational leader who has endured unrelenting efforts by political enemies to chop her down. Her detractors consider her an unscrupulous and power-hungry opportunist.
Clinton entered the 2016 race as her party's odds-on favorite, but was an establishment figure, the ultimate insider with decades of political baggage, at a time when voters seemed enamored with outsiders. She staved off an unexpectedly stiff challenge from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, to claim the Democratic nomination in July.
For decades Clinton has battled conservatives and Republican adversaries and weathered controversies including her husband Bill Clinton's infidelity, a failed Republican effort to remove him from office, investigations into past business dealings and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. She famously complained in 1998 during her husband's presidency about a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Many Democrats back her for championing women's rights at home and abroad, social justice and access to healthcare, but opinion polls show a majority of U.S. voters do not trust her. [polling.reuters.com/#!poll/TM752Y15_2]
Against Trump, she portrayed her candidacy as a bulwark against a unique threat that she said the real estate developer posed to American democracy.
As President Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she grappled with civil wars in Syria and Libya, Iran's nuclear program, China's growing clout, Russian assertiveness, ending the Iraq war, winding down the Afghanistan war, and an unsuccessful bid to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Clinton was already running for president when, during a testy 11-hour congressional hearing in October 2015, she deflected Republican criticism of her handling of a 2012 attack by militants in Benghazi, Libya in which the U.S. ambassador died.
That hearing and another in January 2013 while she was still secretary of state focused on allegations of State Department security lapses related to the attack.
'WHAT TO MAKE OF ME'
A mistrust of rivals and the media has long prompted Clinton to keep her guard up.
"The truth is, through all these years of public service, the 'service' part has always come easier to me than the 'public' part," Clinton said in accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination. "I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me."
At the same convention, Obama cited her years of experience and said, "There has never been a man or woman, not me, not Bill - nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States."
Republicans have accused Clinton of breaking the law while corresponding through a private email server as secretary of state. In July, FBI Director James Comey called Clinton "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information by email, but Obama's Justice Department accepted his recommendation not to bring criminal charges.
"If I had to do it over again, I would, obviously, do it differently," Clinton said during a Sept. 26 debate with Trump, referring to her use of the private server as a "mistake" for which she took responsibility.
The controversy flared again on Oct. 28 when Comey told U.S. lawmakers the FBI was investigating a new trove of emails as part of its probe, but said their significance was unclear.
Trump seized on the probe into Clinton's email, deriding her as "Crooked Hillary," saying he would seek to put her behind bars if elected and encouraging his supporters to chant "lock her up."
Clinton portrayed Trump as a racist hate-monger, a sexist and a tax-dodger enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin and unfit to serve as president and commander in chief.
"Such a nasty woman," Trump retorted during their Oct. 19 debate when she suggested he would try to get out of paying the higher taxes she advocates for the wealthy.
MIDWESTERN ROOTS
Born in Chicago on Oct. 26, 1947, Hillary Rodham Clinton was the eldest of three children of a small-business owner father she called a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican" and a mother who was a closet Democrat.
She said she inherited her father's distinctive laugh - she called it "a big rolling guffaw" - and Americans have heard it frequently.
She attended public schools, then enrolled in 1965 at all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she headed the Young Republicans Club.
In a Wellesley commencement address, she seized the spotlight by starting her speech with extemporaneous remarks challenging comments made by the preceding speaker, a U.S. senator.
Her political views changed during the 1960s civil rights struggles and Vietnam War escalation. She attended the 1968 Republican convention that nominated Richard Nixon, but soon became a Democrat.
At Yale Law School, she met a similarly ambitious fellow student from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and they became a couple. She moved to Washington to work for a congressional panel in the impeachment drive against Nixon, who resigned as president in 1974 during the Watergate scandal.
She moved to Arkansas to be with Bill, married him in 1975, and was hired by a top law firm. He jumped into politics, eventually being elected governor, at age 32, in 1978. She gave birth to the couple's only child, daughter Chelsea, in 1980.
As Arkansas' first lady, she was a high-powered lawyer in the capital Little Rock and a Wal-Mart corporate board member.
Most Americans were introduced to her during her husband's bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Bill Clinton said voters would get "two for the price of one" if they elected him. She unapologetically said she was not a woman who "stayed home and baked cookies."
After a woman named Gennifer Flowers accused Bill Clinton during the campaign of a sexual affair, Hillary Clinton appeared on TV with her husband and referred to singer Tammy Wynette's song, "Stand by Your Man."
"You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette," she said, adding that she loved and respected her husband. "And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him," she added.
Conservative critics painted her as a radical feminist and a threat to traditional family values.
Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush in November 1992. As first lady from 1993 to 2001, she was unusually exertive, diving into policy matters unlike many of her predecessors.
Critics assailed her failed effort to win congressional passage of healthcare reform, deriding it as "Hillarycare."
At a 1995 U.N. conference in China on women, she declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."
She and her husband faced a long investigation into past business dealings but ultimately no criminal charges were brought. A real estate venture known as Whitewater faced scrutiny, spawning an independent counsel investigation that later encompassed Bill Clinton's sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, a figure in the Whitewater controversy and a close friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, was found dead of a gunshot in 1993. His death was ruled a suicide. In a 2003 memoir, Hillary Clinton blasted "conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove that Vince was murdered to cover up what he 'knew about Whitewater.'"
In 2000, the independent counsel investigation concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the Clintons had been involved in any criminal behavior related to Whitewater.
In December 1998, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to impeach a president for only the second time in U.S. history, charging Bill Clinton with "high crimes and misdemeanors" for allegedly lying under oath and obstructing justice to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky.
The Republican-led Senate acquitted Clinton in February 1999. Hillary Clinton called the impeachment an abuse of power by Republicans with a "Soviet-style show trial" and condemned what she called "an attempted congressional coup d'etat."
She also said she "wanted to wring Bill's neck" for the affair and upbraided him privately. Ultimately, she said, she decided she still loved him and remained after they went through counseling.
"All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does," she wrote in her 2003 book "Living History."
Hillary Clinton soon launched her own bid for elected office. She bought a house in the town of Chappaqua to officially become a New York resident. She won election as a U.S. senator the same month her husband left office in January 2001. She served until 2009.
She entered the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as the front-runner, but then-senator Obama won the party's nomination and beat Republican John McCain to become the first black president.
In 2016, Obama campaigned vigorously for her against Trump.
"What sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying. And she never stops fighting for us, even if we haven't always appreciated it," Obama told a September rally.
(Writing and reporting by Will Dunham in Washington; Editing by Howard Goller)
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Milioner Richard Branson menuliskan dalam blog-nya tentang isi percakapan dia dengan Donald Trump beberapa tahun lalu. Branson menilai Trump aneh setelah mengucapkan sumpahnya untuk membalas dendam dengan menghancurkan hidup lima orang di sisa hidupnya. Brandon tidak menyebutkan nama lima orang itu.
"Dia mulai menjelaskan pada saya mengenai bagaimana dia meminta bantuan kepada sejumlah orang setelah bangkrut terakhir ini dan bagaimana lima orang itu tidak mau membantunya. Dia mengatakan kepada saya bahwa dia akan menghabiskan sisa hidupnya untuk menghancurkan lima orang itu," kata Branson, pemilik perusahaan Virgin Group, dalam blog-nya yang dipublikasikan pada Jumat, 21 Oktober 2016.
Trump mengundang Branson untuk bertemu empat mata sambil makan siang saat itu. Branson menemuinya di apartemen Trump di Manhattan, Amerika Serikat.
Anehnya, dalam pertemuan itu Trump hanya membicarakan soal rencana balas dendamnya kepada lima orang itu. Branson kemudian memberikan saran kepadanya.
"Hal itu hanya akan menghancurkan dia dan akan lebih membuatnya hancur nanti. Pasti ada cara yang lebih konstruktif untuk menghabiskan sisa hidupmu," kata Branson, yang memberikan saran kepada Trump.
Seusai pertemuan itu, Branson merasa terganggu dan sedih dengan pembicaraan yang dilakukannya dengan Trump yang kemudian menjadi kandidat Presiden Amerika Serikat dari Partai Republik tersebut.
Brandon kemudian membandingkan isi pembicaraan empat matanya sambil makan siang dengan Hillary Clinton, kandidat presiden dari Partai Demokrat, baru-baru ini.
"Di sini kami membahas tentang reformasi pendidikan, perang terhadap narkoba, hak-hak perempuan, konflik di seluruh dunia, dan hukuman mati. Dia pendengar yang baik, sama baiknya sebagai pembicara. Karena dia memahami dengan baik, Presiden Amerika Serikat perlu mengerti dan lebih memahami lebih luas tentang isu-isu di dunia ketimbang disuguhi percekcokan pribadi," kata Brandon memuji Clinton.
Di blog-nya, Brandon menulis keinginannya, ia ingin seorang pengusaha menjadi presiden di Amerika pada suatu hari nanti. Namun, ujarnya, bukan Trump. Brandon mendukung Clinton dalam pemilihan Presiden Amerika.
REUTERS: Republican Donald Trump had one last chance at a nationally televised debate to reach out to the undecided voters he badly needs to keep his presidential campaign viable.
He passed on the opportunity. Instead, he chose on Wednesday to stay with the strategy he has employed during recent weeks: Pump up his hard-core supporters and hope that's enough to win.
He suggested he might not accept the election result if his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton wins on Nov. 8, called her a “nasty woman,” and repeated hard-line conservative positions on issues such as abortion and immigration.
While that kind of rhetoric was catnip to his passionate, anti-establishment base, it is unlikely to have appealed to independent voters and women who have yet to choose a candidate.
“When you’re trailing in the polls, you don’t need a headline the next morning saying that you’re not going to accept the election results,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who supports Trump.
With less than three weeks left in the race, Trump is behind Clinton in most battleground states and is underperforming in almost every demographic voter group compared to the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, four years ago. Party strategists had said before the debate that he needed to use the event to draw in voters beyond his hard-core supporters.
Trump didn't listen or perhaps didn't care.
STRATEGY MAY BACKFIRE
His debate was a continuation of his apparent strategy to ensure his most fervent supporters show up on Election Day, while betting that his attacks on Clinton's character and truthfulness will discourage voting by already skeptical young and liberal Democrats.
But experts who study voter behavior warned that his attacks on Clinton may backfire, saying he may instead awaken Democratic voters who have so far been uninspired by Clinton.
“The risk he faces by engaging in a scorched-earth policy is that he activates people rather than turning them off,” said Michael McDonald, who runs the U.S. Election Project at the University of Florida.
McDonald, who tracks early voting returns and absentee ballot requests, said he is seeing larger than expected surges of support for Clinton in southeastern states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project, which uses a massive online opinion poll to project election outcomes in all 50 states, estimates that Clinton has a 95 percent chance of winning the election by about 118 votes in the Electoral College if it were held today.
It is against this backdrop that Trump has apparently decided to double down on energizing his base rather than broadening it. But the poll results cast doubt on the wisdom of that strategy.
If Trump’s core white, male, working class supporters vote at high rates, as expected, that likely won’t be enough to win. Trump, for example, already does well with white men who are at retirement age. Nine out of 10 of them are already expected to vote, according to the polling results, so, there is little room to squeeze out more votes.
Voting rights activists have accused Trump of trying to suppress voter turnout by claiming, without evidence, that the election has been rigged against him. He has also said his supporters need to monitor polling stations to ensure a fair vote, which the activists decry as an act of intimidation.
Should Trump's comments succeed in discouraging some Democratic voters from turning out, that may also not be enough to help him secure the White House. He still loses under what could be considered a dream scenario for the Republican nominee: white men show up in greater numbers than expected, while turnout among racial minorities is lower than expected.
In this scenario, the States of the Nation project estimates that Trump would win the battleground states of Ohio and North Carolina, and he would have a shot at winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Colorado. Even then, Clinton would still have an 82 percent chance of winning the election.
There’s yet another risk to Trump’s strategy. By claiming the election is rigged, he could be unintentionally signaling to his supporters that voting no longer matters.
Michael Sopko, 63, a mortgage broker from Denver and a Trump backer, said before the debate that he sees his vote as pointless.
"They have already been corrupted," he said of voting machines, speaking ahead of a Trump rally in Colorado Springs. "I think the results are already cast."
(Reporting by James Oliphant, Chris Kahn, and Emily Stephenson, editing by Paul Thomasch and Ross Colvin)
Washington detik - Untuk ketiga kalinya, calon presiden Amerika Serikat (AS) dari Partai Demokrat, Hillary Clinton, mengalahkan capres Partai Republik, Donald Trump, dalam debat. Hillary dianggap tampil lebih unggul dari Trump dengan selisih 13 persen suara.
Seperti dilansir CNN, Kamis (20/10/2016), polling terbaru CNN/ORCmenunjukkan 52 persen responden menyebut Hillary lebih unggul dalam debat. Hanya 39 persen responden yang menyebut Trump lebih unggul.
Polling ini dilakukan terhadap kalangan penonton debat ketiga yang digelar di University of Nevada, Las Vegas pada Rabu (19/10) malam waktu setempat. Debat yang dimoderatori presenter berita Fox News Chris Wallace ini membahas enam topik utama, antara lain imigrasi, bantuan finansial pemerintah dan utang, Mahkamah Agung, perekonomian, kawasan-kawasan berbahaya di luar negeri dan kelayakan masing-masing capres untuk menjadi Presiden AS.
Hillary terus mengungguli Trump dalam debat pertama pada 26 September dan debat kedua pada 9 Oktober lalu. Kendati demikian, besarnya dukungan untuk Hillary terus menurun sejak debat pertama. Dalam debat pertama, Hillary mengungguli Trump dengan 62 persen melawan 27 persen. Saat debat kedua, Hillary unggul melawan Trump dengan perolehan 57 persen melawan 34 persen.
Separuh atau sekitar 50 persen dari responden yang menonton debat, mengaku mereka lebih sepakat dengan Hillary untuk sejumlah isu penting. Sedangkan 47 persen responden lainnya mengaku lebih sepakat dengan Trump.
Polling itu juga menunjukkan, sekitar 61 persen responden menyebut Hillary memiliki pemahaman isu yang lebih baik, dibanding Trump yang hanya didukung 31 persen responden. Sementara itu kesiapan menjadi Presiden AS, sebanyak 59 persen responden menyebut Hillary lebih siap, dibanding 35 persen yang menyebut Trump lebih siap.
Terlepas dari itu semua, kebanyakan responden menyatakan pilihan mereka tidak berubah usai menonton debat ketiga ini. Sebanyak 54 persen responden menyatakan debat ketiga dan terakhir ini tidak akan mempengaruhi pilihan mereka untuk pilpres November mendatang.
Para responden terbelah saat ditanya capres mana yang lebih bisa mereka percaya. Trump unggul dalam kategori ini, dengan sebanyak 47 persen responden meyakini Trump lebih tulus dan dapat dipercaya. Hanya 46 persen responden yang menyebut Hillary lebih dapat dipercaya.
Polling terbaru CNN/ORC ini dilakukan via wawancara dengan 547 pemilih terdaftar yang menonton debat ketiga pada Rabu (19/10) waktu setempat. Polling ini memiliki margin of error kurang lebih 4 persen. Para responden pernah diwawancarai via telepon dalam polling lain pada 15-18 Oktober lalu. Mereka yang menjadi responden merupakan orang-orang yang menyatakan akan menonton debat dan bersedia diwawancarai setelahnya.
beritasatu.com: Las Vegas -Debat calon Presiden Amerika Serikat ketiga dan terakhir sebelum Pemilu dilaksanakan pada 8 November nanti telah selesai. Sepanjang debat, kedua kandidat: Donald Trump dari Partai Republik dan Hillary Clinton dari Demokrat saling melontarkan serangan. Tidak jarang serangan tersebut bersifat personal dan memelintir fakta yang ada.
New York Times dan sejumlah media melakukan pengecekan fakta dari sejumlah pernyataan yang dilontarkan sepanjang debat.
"33.000 orang mati akibat senjata api setiap tahun," kata Hillary Clinton.
Separuh benar. Menurut data Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sekitar 33.599 orang tewas akibat senjata api pada tahun 2014, tetapi 21.334 di antaranya adalah bunuh diri.
"Hillary Clinton menginginkan perbatasan terbuka," kata Trump.
Separuh benar. Dalam bocoran Wikileaks, Hillary memang mengindikasikan perbatasan terbuka namun Hillary mengklarifikasi bahwa yang dia maksud adalah dalam konteks perdagangan dan pengembangan energi bersih. Hillary sendiri berpandangan bahwa perbatasan perlu diperketat tetapi tidak ditutup, selama calon imigran bisa lolos tes masuk.
"Hillary juga ingin membangun tembok untuk mencegah imigran," kata Trump.
Pernyataan Trump berlebihan. Saat masih menjadi senator, Hillary menyetujui dibangunnya pagar sepanjang 700 mil dengan Meksiko pada 2006, bukan tembok.
"Hillary mendukung aborsi terhadap janin yang sudah berusia 9 bulan," kata Trump.
Pernyataan ini betul tetapi menyesatkan. Hillary mengatakan bahwa aborsi boleh dilakukan di trimester terakhir kehamilan sepanjang dilakukan atas alasan kesehatan seperti keselamatan nyawa si ibu. Menurut Hillary, negara tidak perlu campur tangan dalam pilihan personal seperti aborsi.
"Rusia diduga kuat ingin mengacaukan pemilu AS dengan melakukan peretasan email Demokrat. Dengan demikian, Putin mendukung Trump karena bisa dijadikan bonekanya," kata Hillary.
Sebagian yang diucapkan Hillary ada benarnya. Ada 17 dinas intelijen AS yang menyimpulkan bahwa Rusia merupakan dalang serangan cyber dalam Komite Nasional Demokrat. Namun tidak dapat dibuktikan bahwa Presiden Rusia Vladimir Putin ingin menjadikan Trump bonekanya.
"Kebijakan fiskal Trump akan menambah utang AS sebesar US$ 20 triliun," kata Hillary.
Benar. Menurut lembaga nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, rencana ekonomi Trump akan meningkatkan utang federal sebesar US$ 20,9 triliun dalam periode 20 tahun.
"Imigran akan berdatangan dari Suriah. Hillary ingin jumlah imigran Suriah ke AS naik lima kali lipat," kata Trump.
Benar. Pemerintahan Barack Obama menargetkan menampung 10.000 pengungsi Suriah di AS dan pada praktiknya Obama menerima 13.000 orang. Hillary ingin menambah jumlah pengungsi yang ditampung AS menjadi 65.000. Hillary mengatakan hal ini dilakukan atas dasar kemanusiaan dan para pengungsi harus melalui pengawasan ketat sebelum masuk.
"Rencana Trump memangkas pajak bagi si kaya malah akan menyebabkan 3,5 juta orang kehilangan pekerjaan," kata Hillary.
Ucapan Hillary berdasarkan analisa Moody's Analytics yang dilakukan oleh Mark Zandi, ekonom yang juga donatur bagi Hillary. Sehingga, meskipun analisanya kredibel tetapi banyak pihak yang menilai analisa ini sarat kepentingan.
"Saya tidak akan menambah utang," kata Hillary.
Janji manis seorang capres. Menurut analisa lembaga nonpartisan Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, kebijakan ekonomi Hillary akan menambah utang AS sebesar US$ 200 miliar dalam 10 tahun ke depan.
"Trump menggunakan imigran ilegal untuk membangun gedungnya," kata Hillary.
Pernyataan Hillary merupakan pelintiran untuk menyerang Trump. Trump memang menggunakan imigran ilegal dari Polandia, tetapi bukan untuk membangun gedung melainkan meruntuhkan gedung Bonwit Teller yang kemudian dibangun gedung Trump Tower.
"AS kehilangan pekerjaan dan industri mati," kata Trump.
Tidak benar. Tingkat tenaga kerja di AS telah meningkat sebanyak 10 juta orang sejak Presiden Barack Obama menjabat sebagai presiden. Output industri manufaktur AS juga berada dalam angka tertinggi sepanjang masa.
"Trump menggunakan besi impor ilegal dari Tiongkok untuk membangun Trump International Hotel di Las Vegas," kata Hillary.
Belum terkonfirmasi dari sisi Trump. Investigasi Newsweek menyebutkan bahwa Trump memang menggunakan besi dan aluminium impor dari Tiongkok untuk pembangunan Trump International Hotel di Las Vegas, yang dibuka 2008. Ironis, karena Trump selalu berkoar untuk menggunakan produk besi AS. Trump belum menyangkal temuan Newsweek.
"Perempuan yang mengaku dilecehkan adalah orang-orang bayaran Hillary," kata Trump.
Tidak benar. Sejak beredarnya rekaman Trump yang melecehkan perempuan secara verbal, sebanyak sembilan perempuan mengaku mereka pernah dilecehkan. Meski tidak ada saksi tapi setelah rekaman Trump beredar, kesaksian mereka menjadi relevan.
"Hillary menghapus 33.000 email setelah terkena skandal email bocor yang menyebabkan insiden Benghazi," kata Trump.
Benar. FBI menemukan bahwa asisten Hillary menghapus sejumlah email tetapi Hillary mengatakan hal tersebut dilakukan tanpa sepengetahuannya.
"Trump tidak berani mengangkat isu tembok dengan Presiden Meksiko ketika mereka bertemu," kata Hillary.
Benar. Dalam pertemuan Donald Trump dengan Enrique Pena Nieto Aagustus lalu, keduanya tidak menyinggung masalah tembok.
"Hillary melakukan pelanggaran kriminal serius dalam skandal server email pribadi," kata Trump.
Salah. Menurut investigasi FBI, pelanggaran yang dilakukan Hillary adalah kelalaian luar biasa tetapi bukan kejahatan pidana.
"US$ 6 miliar hilang dari Kemlu saat Hillar menjabat sebagai Menlu," kata Trump.
Salah. Menurut Inspektur Jenderal Steve Linick, temuannya tidak menyimpulkan adanya kehilangan uang sebesar itu tetapi memang ada kesalahan dalam kontrak yang berpotensi menimbulkan risiko keuangan.
"Perjanjian nuklir dengan Iran bisa membuat Iran membuat senjata nuklir," kata Trump.
Tidak sepenuhnya benar. Iran memang diperbolehkan melakukan pengayaan uranium dan plutonium secara terbatas tetapi sangat sulit bagi Iran untuk membuat senjata nuklir.
"Obama melakukan kesalahan dengan mempublikasikan serangan ke Mosul," kata Trump.
Opini pribadi Trump. Pemerintahan Obama mempublikasikan serangan untuk memberikan kesempatan bagi warga agar mengungsi. Serangan senyap yang melibatkan 30.000 personel juga amat sulit dilakukan.
"AS 'dikadali' Rusia dalam perjanjian gencatan senjata. Rusia malah berhasil menambah wilayah penguasaan di Suriah," kata Trump.
Benar tapi ini alasan AS melakukan gencatan senjata, Menlu AS John Kerry berusaha menegosiasi gencatan senjata supaya bantuan kemanusiaan bisa masuk ke AS. Di saat yang bersamaan, Rusia dan Bashar Al Assad secara agresif menyerang pasukan pemberontak.
bbc.com: This may have been the debate Donald Trump wanted, but it wasn't the one he needed.
With one last chance to make a pitch to the American public that he should be trusted with the presidency, the Republican nominee had to make efforts to expand his base of support.
He had to find a way to distance himself from the allegation that he has a history of sexual harassment.
He had to position himself as the change candidate - just days after a Fox poll showed that Hillary Clinton, whose party has held the presidency for eight years, was beating him on the question of who would "change the country for the better".
Instead, after a roughly half an hour of something resembling an actual policy debate about the Supreme Court, gun rights, abortion and even immigration, the old Donald Trump - the one who constantly interrupted his opponent, sparred with the moderator and lashed out at enemies real and perceived - emerged.
He called Mrs Clinton a liar and a "nasty woman".
He said the women accusing him of sexual harassment bordering on assault were either attention-seekers or Clinton campaign stooges.
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He said the media were "poisoning the minds" the public. And, most notably, he refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election if he loses.
Mrs Clinton had her own moments where she was put in the defensive - on her emails, on the Clinton Foundation and on embarrassing details revealed in the WikiLeaks hack.
The difference, however, is that Mrs Clinton largely kept her poise and successfully changed the topic back to subjects where she was more comfortable. It was, in fact, a master class in parry-and-strike debate strategy.
The key takeaway from this debate, however - the headline that Americans will wake up to read in the morning - will certainly be Mr Trump's refusal to back way from his "rigged" election claims.
That was what Mr Trump wanted to say, but it isn't something the American people - or American democracy - needed to hear.
The Russian gambit
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Mrs Clinton's skill at deflecting attacks and baiting Mr Trump into unhelpful answers first was on display when moderator Chris Wallace brought up a line from one of her Wall Street speeches - revealed in the Wikileaks hack - that she endorsed a hemispheric free-trade and open-immigration zone.
After saying she was only talking about an open energy market - an assertion that seems somewhat questionable - she tried to turn the question into a discussion of whether Mr Trump would renounce the Russian government, which US officials have said is behind the cyber-attack.
Mr Trump actually called Mrs Clinton out on her attempted "great pivot" - but then he went on to get bogged down on the Russian issue.
He said he'd never met Mr Putin (although he boasted during a primary debate that he had talked with him in a television green room), and said that Mrs Clinton was a liar and the real Russian "puppet".
Oh, and this all came up when the debate topic was supposed to be immigration.
A bad experience
Mrs Clinton's next chance to pull a rhetorical switch-a-roo came during the economic portion of the debate. After a discussion of their tax proposals - and a predictable exchange of allegations over who's cutting and who's raising them too much - Mr Trump went after Mrs Clinton on her past support of trade deals.
When she waffled a bit, he tried to tag her with a line he used in an earlier debate with some success.
Why didn't Mrs Clinton enact her economic reforms over her 30 years in the public sphere? Mr Trump asked.
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"You were very much involved in every aspect of this country," he said. "And you do have experience. I say the one thing you have over me is experience, but it's bad experience, because what you've done has turned out badly."
The problem with reusing attack lines is that sometimes your opponent prepares a defence - and Mrs Clinton had a scathing response ready to fly.
She said that while she was defending children's rights in the 1970s, Mr Trump was defending himself against charges he engaged in housing discrimination against African-Americans.
When Mrs Clinton was speaking out for women's rights as first lady in the 1990s, Mr Trump was taunting a beauty contest winner about her weight. And when she was in the White House situation room watching the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, Mr Trump was hosting a television reality
"I'm happy to compare my 30 years of experience, what I've done for this country, trying to help in every way I could, especially kids and families get ahead and stay ahead, with your 30 years," she said.
"I'll let the American people make that decision."
It was a scripted set-piece, yes, but it drew blood.
Women trouble
Quick on the heels of the exchange about experience came the question Mr Trump had to expect - but didn't appear ready for. What did he think of all the women who had come forward since the last debate to allege that, when it came to sexual harassment, Mr Trump's actions matched his candid words in that recently revealed recording?
The Republican nominee's response was that the women were either attention-seekers or Clinton campaign stooges and that the allegations have been "largely debunked" - which, when you think about it, isn't exactly a blanket denial.
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In the last debate, Mrs Clinton appeared to hold back a bit in her condemnation of Mr Trump on the topic.
This time - perhaps inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama's well-received speech condemning Mr Trump last week - was much sharper.
"Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger," she said.
"He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don't think there is a woman anywhere who doesn't know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That's who Donald is."
Mr Trump's response, that no one respects women more than he does, was met by laughter in the debate hall and the nearby media hall.
Mrs Clinton brushed off his efforts to turn the topic to her private email server.
He may have lost this election even without the live-mic revelation two weeks ago, but it's becoming increasingly clear his campaign has been irreparably wounded by it.
Cracked foundation
During the presidential "fitness" portion of the debate, Wallace had some pointed questions for Mrs Clinton, as well.
He asked her to defend the Clinton Foundation against allegations it was a pay-to-play organisation that granted insider access to the state department in exchange for big-money donations.
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Mrs Clinton responded by defending the foundation's actions - noting its high ratings from non-profit watchdogs and its global health efforts.
Mr Trump called it a "criminal enterprise" - but then Mrs Clinton was able to push the conversation to Mr Trump's foundation, which has had its own share of controversies.
She noted that Mr Trump had used foundation money to purchase a six-foot portrait of himself. "Who does that?" she asked.
Mr Trump tried to defend himself, but Wallace wouldn't let him off the hook, asking him why he used charitable money to settle a fine levied on his Florida resort.
The Republican's response was only that the money had gone to charity.
An exchange on the Clinton Foundation could have been - perhaps should have been - a winning moment for Mr Trump. Instead, it was another opportunity for Mrs Clinton to knock him off his stride.
washington post: Hillary Clinton holds a decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the competition for votes in the electoral college, leading in enough states to put her comfortably over the 270 majority needed to win the presidential election in November, according to a new SurveyMonkey poll of 15 battleground states conducted with The Washington Post.
Based on the results from the 15 state surveys, along with assumptions of the likely outcomes in other states that have consistently voted for one party or the other, Clinton, the Democratic nominee, holds leads of four percentage points or more among likely voters in states that add up to 304 electoral votes.
Trump, the GOP nominee, has the advantage in states with an estimated electoral vote total of 138. Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Texas, which account for 96 electoral votes, remain as toss-ups. All results in the 15 state surveys are based on ballot tests that include Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
The results underscore the importance for Trump of Wednesday’s final presidential debate, in Las Vegas. National polls have moved in Clinton’s direction since the exchanges began in late September. Her current average margin is seven points in polling averages from the Huffington Post Pollsterand RealClearPolitics. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll put her national lead over Trump at four points.
The effect of the shift toward Clinton in national polls is evident in the new 15-state study. In late August, The Post, using SurveyMonkey’s online methodology, conducted individual polls in all 50 states among registered voters. At that time, Clinton led in states that added up to 244 electoral votes, while Trump led in states accounting for 126. Toss-up states equaled 168 electoral votes.
The SurveyMonkey surveys also included polls of Senate and gubernatorial races, where applicable, in the same 15 states. The results show two things. First, many Republican Senate candidates are outperforming Trump in their states. Second, that still may not be enough to maintain the GOP’s majority in the chamber.
Democrats need a net gain of five seats to take outright control of the Senate, four to exercise control if Clinton becomes president. The results showed Democrats with leads of four or more points in three states with GOP incumbents: New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
newsweek.com: Clinton’s defense of her stamina, meanwhile, was arch and sly. She noted the 112 countries she has been to and the 11 hours she spent testifying before the Benghazi committee. Her gender-based critiques of Trump were pointed and effective. And many women may see his constant interrupting as as a sign of condescension.
The former Secretary of State gave supporters reason to go to the polls. She talked about “endemic racism” and vowed to reform police departments—issues especially close to many African-Americans. She cited a Latina beauty contestant Trump had belittled and offered other examples of discrimination that were aimed Hispanic voters. Clinton’s coalition of the ascendant—younger voters, minorities, educated professionals—got the kind of reassurance they crave from the Democratic nominee.
Trump gave her some help. He faltered on his tax returns, offering a clumsy excuse for not releasing them, and defended his use of bankruptcy, which won’t help him with average American voters. Clinton pounced when he seemed far too casual about nuclear proliferation: A man “who can be baited by a tweet shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes,” she quipped. And Trump talked too much about murders in Chicago instead of wages in Pennsylvania.
The GOP nominee was on the defensive for much of the night, but he at times he bested Clinton. On the Trans Pacific Partnership, he forced her to either defend the treaty or denounce President Obama, who supports it. But Trump never quite exploited the email controversy, even when asked about cyber security, which was the perfect segue to talk about her private server.
Trump probably helped himself by agreeing with Clinton on child care—even though their plans are quite different. He broke with the NRA and agreed we should ban gun sales to those on the terrorist watch list. And he wisely presented himself as a non-politician, while dismissing Clinton as a hack who has been around for 30 years, promising everything and accomplishing little. “Politicians,” he said, “are all talk and no action.”
Usually the challenger does well in the first debate: Ronald Reagan in 1980, John Kerry in 2004, Mitt Romney in 2012. This time the challenger faltered. After months of using debates to pummel other Republicans, the GOP nominee failed to reassure the country he’s ready to be president. The good news for Trump: he still has two more debates.
bloomberg: Financial markets are judging the first of three U.S. presidential debates a win for Hillary Clinton so far, with U.S. stock index futures reversing losses, Mexico’s peso rebounding from a record low and haven assets including the yen and gold falling.
Futures on the S&P 500 Index gained 0.4 percent as shares in Asia pared losses. Mexico’s peso rose as much as 1.5 percent versus the greenback and the yen, which tends to do well during periods of risk aversion, went from being the best-performing major currency to being the worst. Oil fell before major producers meet Wednesday to discuss output curbs, while copper declined.
Citigroup Inc. has said an election victory for Republican candidate Donald Trump could sink equities and warned this week it may also spur volatility in both gold and currency markets. While the U.S. lender said it sees a 40 percent chance of Trump winning, a Bloomberg Politics poll had him and Clinton deadlocked heading into the debate. Wagers against the Mexican peso surged to a record ahead of Monday’s debate after recent surveys showed popularity growing for Trump, who has pledged to renegotiate the two-decade-old Nafta trade accord that turned Mexico into an export powerhouse.
“The peso started the debate near its weakest levels but at least the first 30 minutes or so looks to have been taken as a Hillary win," said Sean Callow, a senior currency strategist at Westpac Banking Corp. in Sydney. "The peso, Canadian dollar, S&P futures and Australian dollar are all surging -- very much a relief rally in risk assets.”
If the U.S. presidential election were held today, Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia and have a 95 percent chance of beating Republican Donald Trump to become America’s first female president, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.
The project, which combines opinion polls with an analysis of voting patterns under different election scenarios, shows Clinton currently beating Trump in the popular vote by six percentage points and ahead in 19 states, including most of the larger-population ones that heavily influence the outcome of the election.
At the moment, Clinton would win at least 268 votes in the Electoral College, the body that ultimately chooses the next president, just two shy of what she needs to win the White House. On average, the former secretary of state would win by 108 electoral college votes.
Trump would win at least 21 states, many of them with smaller populations, giving him a minimum of 179 electoral votes.
The election is still 10 weeks away, and a great deal could change prior to Nov 8. The candidates are running about even in eight states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, and the polling sample is too small to determine the winner in Alaska, Wyoming and Washington D.C. But Trump would need to win the 21 states currently in his column and sweep all of the remaining "toss-up" states to win the presidency.
That is a steep challenge for Trump, whose bare-knuckled, anti-establishment campaign helped him win the Republican Party's nomination but has so far failed to build broad support with voters.
If Trump cannot draw in far greater numbers of women, moderate Republican voters and minorities, he will almost surely lose the White House race, according to the polling project.
Consider, for example, what would be an ideal scenario for Trump: white men with below-average incomes showing up in record numbers on Election Day. This group strongly favors the real-estate mogul, yet even if all of them vote it wouldn't hand Trump any of the states currently slated for Clinton or any of the toss-up states. Clinton would still win the election.
The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project is driven by an online survey that gathers responses from about 16,000 people per week. Respondents answer questions about their demographic background, their party affiliation and their choice for president. Their responses are weighted according to the latest population estimates, and each respondent is ranked according to their likelihood to vote.
Once the poll is complete, the project tallies the levels of support and estimated error for both candidates, and then runs multiple election simulations given their respective support. A separate set of simulations is run for each state and Washington D.C. The project runs more than 25 million simulations to determine the chances that one candidate would win.
Click on the image above for the project's interactive tool that allows users to set turnout targets for various voter groups.
Representatives from the Clinton and Trump campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on the project.
OCTOBER SURPRISE?
A polarizing candidate, Trump has called for a more extensive border wall with Mexico, a ban on Muslim immigrants and a rejection of international trade agreements. His personal attacks, including his criticism of the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action, have undermined his support within the Republican establishment.
Still, Clinton is far from guaranteed a victory in November.
A majority of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of both Trump and Clinton, and nearly one out of four likely voters says they do not support either of them for president, according to a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The candidates are scheduled to square off in a series of televised debates, and a poor showing by either could quickly change the dynamic of the race. A strong showing by a third party candidate could also influence the outcome.
Democratic Party operatives also fear there may be more revelations about ties between wealthy foreign donors to the Clinton family charity, the Clinton Foundation, and the State Department under her stewardship. Clinton has denied any impropriety but Trump has seized on the disclosures as a new line of attack against his rival.
“There’s always a chance of an October surprise – something definitive and striking about Clinton – that could change the race,” said Tom Smith, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Society at the University of Chicago. “But, short of any scandals by the Clintons, I just don’t see any way that Trump catches up.”
If Trump were to rely heavily on support from white voters, he would face an extremely narrow path to victory. Even if all male and female white voters showed up at the polls, and turnout among blacks and Hispanics was half of what it was in 2012, respectively, the project shows Clinton would still be favored to win.
It appears that Trump’s best chance is to turn out Republican voters in huge numbers and hope that a lot of Democrats stay home.
There’s only one problem with this: Republicans appear to have turned out as strongly as Democrats only once in presidential elections since at least 1976. That was in 2004, when the electorate was made up of 37 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Independents, according to exit poll data collected by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.
"There's still a lot of this demolition derby of an election to go," said Donald Green, a political scientist at Columbia University. "A lot of people who support Trump don't have a very good record of voter turnout, and who knows if they show up this time.
(Editing by Paul Thomasch, Ross Colvin and Stuart Grudgings)
Philadelphia, July 26, 2016 (AFP)
Vanquished White House hopeful Bernie Sanders on Monday told a riven and lively Democratic convention that his rival Hillary Clinton must win the US presidential election in November.
To cheers and some boos, Sanders said that "based on her ideas and her leadership," Clinton was a better choice than Republican nominee Donald Trump and that she "must become the next president of the United States."
"The choice is not even close," Sanders was to say, according to his prepared remarks released to reporters. But he stopped mid-sentence when he addressed the convention, as his supporters cheered.
"This election is about which candidate understands the real problems facing this country and has offered real solutions -- not just bombast, not just fear-mongering, not just name-calling and divisiveness," Sanders, 74, told the convention in a lengthy speech in which he highlighted some of the accomplishments of his insurgent campaign.
The endorsement was expected, and had already come from Sanders weeks ago when he campaigned alongside Clinton in New Hampshire.
But it appeared aimed in part to help quell the loud voices of Sanders supporters who had spent much of the day booing and shouting out their opposition to speakers as they expressed support for Clinton.
That mission was not thoroughly accomplished, however.
When Sanders closed his speech by saying "Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her tonight," a smattering of loud boos was heard among the applause.
Sanders stunned the political world when his campaign, which began as a fringe effort by a self-described democratic socialist, earned broad grassroots support and gave Clinton a run for her money.
It became clear a few months after the primaries began that Clinton's momentum would carry her through to the nomination.
But Sanders's impressive showing helped him push through the most progressive Democratic Party platform in generations.
"Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton presidency -- and I am going to do all that I can to make that happen," Sanders said.
Throughout the campaign, Trump had said Sanders was being swept aside by a "rigged" system, but the brash billionaire accused Sanders of capitulating on Monday.
"Bernie Sanders totally sold out to Crooked Hillary Clinton," Trump tweeted before Sanders had finished speaking.
"All of that work, energy and money, and nothing to show for it! Waste of time."
Philadelphia, July 26, 2016 (AFP)
The Democratic convention opened to chaotic scenes Monday, as rival supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders traded boos, jeers and taunts in a very public show of party disunity.
As shock polls showed Republican Donald Trump leading the race for the White House, Democrats gathering in Philadelphia to make Clinton the first woman presidential nominee from a major party were in disarray.
Diehard supporters of Sanders booed when a pastor leading the invocation prayer mentioned Clinton's name, setting the stage for each successive mention to spark a raucous chorus of outbursts.
Twice on Monday, Sanders appealed to supporters to help build party unity, ahead of a pivotal primetime address to delegates.
"We have got to defeat Donald Trump. We have got to elect Hillary Clinton and (running mate) Tim Kaine," Sanders told a gathering of his supporters.
"Trump is a bully and a demagogue," he said. His call to support Clinton was nevertheless met with loud jeers.
He later sent a text message to supporters asking them not to protest on the floor of the convention as a "personal courtesy" to him.
But that appeared to have minimal impact.
The party is reeling from leaked Democratic National Committee emails which show nominally neutral party staff trying to undermine Sanders' insurgent campaign and questioning his Jewish faith.
WikiLeaks at the weekend released nearly 20,000 emails from between January 2015 and May 2016, gleaned by hackers who apparently raided the accounts of seven DNC leaders.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating the "cyber intrusion," which the Clinton campaign blamed on Russian hackers bent on helping Trump.
Sanders, a leftist who promised a "political revolution," lost to Clinton in the primary handily.
But the scandal has angered his already embittered supporters, who believe the deck was stacked against them.
It has led to the ouster of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology from party leaders.
"We want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email," the Democratic National Committee said in a statement.
- Trump vs a ham sandwich -
As the boos and chants of "Bernie! Bernie!" continued inside the convention hall throughout the evening, Sanders protesters outside tried to breach security barriers, leading to a handful of people being detained.
"Clinton can't beat Trump. Period," said Michigan delegate Melissa Arab, a Sanders supporter.
"A ham sandwich could beat Trump and she's not going to beat him. If she's nominated, people are going to end up with somebody bad for president."
This was meant to be a celebration for Clinton, who was the primary runner-up in 2008 to Barack Obama.
Later this week, she will make history when she formally accepts the Democratic presidential nomination -- the first woman to lead a major party's White House ticket.
But disunity overshadowed the convention's anti-Trump message and its courting of Latino voters.
Clinton's running mate Kaine, a senator from Virginia, said in an interview broadcast Monday that their administration would press for immigration reform in their first 100 days in office.
- Prime time -
Clinton will hope that two other prime-time addresses can help foster unity later Monday -- from firebrand Senator Elizabeth Warren and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Warren was to tell the convention that Trump wants an "America of fear and hate," according to prepared remarks.
"When we turn on each other, we can't unite to fight back against a rigged system," she was to say.
Some Democratic delegates agreed it was time to come together.
New polls showed Trump surging since his confirmation last week as the Republican presidential nominee, with a CNN poll putting him three percentage points ahead of Clinton -- a six-point post-convention bump.
"The stakes are too high. In the end it's going to be either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and it's not even a close call," said Paul Czisny, a 57-year-old delegate from Wisconsin who had supported Sanders.
The party is seeking to project a more unified message than the Republicans did at their convention last week in Cleveland, where fissures over Trump's candidacy were laid bare.
"The Democrats are in a total meltdown," Trump taunted on Twitter. "E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!"
He later told supporters Clinton "worked very, very hard to rig the system. Little did she know that China, Russia, one of our many, many friends came in and hacked the hell out of us."
Trump has long sought to scoop up disaffected voters who feel Sanders -- a self-described democratic socialist -- was denied a fair shot at the nomination.
Former president Bill Clinton is the star speaker at the convention Tuesday, while President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden take the stage Wednesday.
Clinton got a modest boost Monday when former vice president Al Gore offered his endorsement.
Republican Donald Trump trails Democrat Hillary Clinton by 10 points in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a poll released on Tuesday, showing little change from a week ago and suggesting his comments about a Mexican-American judge had yet to affect his standing in the race.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll came after several days in which Trump faced sharp criticism over his insistence that a federal judge who was born in Indiana to Mexican parents was biased in a case involving the celebrity billionaire.
But the fallout from Trump's comments appeared to have done little to help Clinton build her lead over the presumptive Republican nominee.
The online survey showed that 44.3 percent of likely voters said they would vote for Clinton, compared with 34.7 percent who would support Trump. A further 20.9 percent said they would not vote for either candidate. The results were little changed from last week's survey.
The poll was conducted from Friday to Tuesday, starting shortly after Trump's first comments about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing fraud lawsuits against Trump University, the New York businessman's defunct real estate school.
Trump has suggested that Curiel's heritage is influencing the judge's opinion about the case because of Trump's campaign rhetoric about illegal immigration.
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump's comments textbook racism on Tuesday, while Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Trump should stop attacking minority groups.
Bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans, Trump said on Tuesday he would no longer talk about the judge, adding that his previous remarks about Curiel had been misconstrued.
Other events, including news that Clinton had secured enough delegates and superdelegates to become the first female presidential candidate of a major U.S. political party, occurred toward the end of the poll.
The poll included 1,261 respondents and had a credibility interval of 3.2 percentage points. See the poll results in Reuters' Polling Explorer. [polling.reuters.com/#poll/TM651Y15_13/filters/LIKELY:1/dates/20160401-20160607/type/day]
For most of the year, Clinton has maintained an edge over Trump in the Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely voters. That edge briefly disappeared in May after Trump’s remaining rivals for the Republican nomination dropped out and party leaders started to line up behind his campaign.
Trump’s level of support has since eroded as he sparred with his party's leadership and continued to be dogged with questions about Trump University.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll differs from others that are often days removed from when their data was collected. As a result, the Reuters/Ipsos poll often detects shifts in opinion well ahead of other surveys.
(Reporting by Chris Kahn in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney)
time.com: His analysis of what was working economically is partly flawed
I’ve been pondering Paul Krugman’s recent column in theNew York Times about how great the 1990s were economically. Hillary Clinton has, of course, been saying the same thing on the campaign trail. In fact, she wants to put her husband Bill back in charge of the economy if she’s elected—a mistake, in my opinion, both on economic grounds and because it smacks of nepotism.
The key question is this: What is the true economic narrative about the 1990s? In other words, was it a time of shared American prosperity brought on by smart policy? Or was it a time when the style of laissez-faire attitudes forged in the 1980s was co-opted by Democrats and began to create the growing inequality and periodic crises we’ve since become used to?
It’s risky to take issue with a Nobel laureate, but having just written a bookthat looks deeply at some of these issues, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Krugman has it partly wrong when he waxes nostalgic about the “boom” days of the 1990s.
For starters, most of the 1990s did not produce a boom for ordinary people. Wages for the bottom 90% of the population in America were flat until 1996. (If you want to track the data yourself, check out this wonderful interactive graphic from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with the labor movement, which allows you to set the frame anywhere you like over the last 100 years.) After that, the wage share of the lower 90 % began growing slightly, and in the last couple years of the 90s, America got some decent wage growth for average people.
Why did this happen? Because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates quite low which allowed for full employment. This was in part because there was little risk of inflation due to globalization and new technologies; unemployment was around 3.9% in the late-1990s. That also encouraged a stock boom, which for a period of time meant more private investment into the economy. Finally, there was a brief productivity boom from new technology, which made investors bullish on the future and helped contribute to some wage growth.
As we know, however, none of this lasted. By 2001, the dot com crash (a result of that stock bubble) had wiped out much of the investment boom. Productivity dipped and hasn’t gone up since. Incomes for average people have been stagnating, and we’ve gone back to business as usual—the 1% taking the vast majority of all income gains.
In his column, Krugman advocates thinking about the policies of the 1990s as a model for how to create another bout of prosperity. But what were those policies, exactly?
Bob Rubin, then Treasury secretary, balanced the budget and focused on market-led growth, rather than the massive public investment plan advocated by the other Bob, former labor secretary Robert Reich. Reich’s strategy of real, sustained investment in infrastructure and education (which Bill Clinton actually campaigned on) was deep sixed in favor of a more market-oriented, quick hit growth plan.
“I pushed hard for a major public investment strategy, but it got ground up in demands from Republicans and some Democrats to cut the budget deficit,” says Reich, now a professor at Berkeley. “In some ways, it was an early exercise in austerity economics.”
Would the Rubin strategy work today? Absolutely not. If we tried to balance the budget right now, we’d get European-style austerity. And while we still rely on the sugar high of super low interest rates, their effectiveness for boosting Main Street has decreased. Low rates have led to record stock prices, but Main Street growth is still sluggish, and wages are still relatively flat (as is productivity).
The Band-Aid of easy money that worked in the 1990s simply won’t work anymore. It only changes asset prices–not what’s actually happening on Main Street. Central banks can buy time for governments to do real fiscal stimulus. But they can’t fix what’s wrong with the underlying system all by themselves.
What’s more, one of the solutions Krugman advocates is actually the one that Bill Clinton’s administration didn’t take up–a massive infrastructure program. In fact, public investment as a percentage of GDP in the U.S. began falling in the 1990s. While it’s true that Clinton made some investments in education and infrastructure (and spent a lot of time talking about the “information superhighway”), they weren’t anywhere near the levels that would have changed the underlying growth paradigm.
The wrong Bob won the liberal economic debate of the 1990s. That’s why the decade brought a false, financialized growth that quickly evaporated at the first bubble popping, rather than the real thing. (I actually left journalism briefly to work in a high-tech incubator and, for this sin, I got to watch the bubble pop first-hand).
This is exactly why I worry when I hear that Hillary wants to put Bill back in charge. The suggestion begs an uncomfortable question: Has she learned the lessons of the 1990s?
Maybe. Clinton recently proclaimed her desire to pull off a bold public infrastructure program. And she’s been somewhat critical of the ramifications of certain go-go 90s phenomenon like share buybacks (which create saccharine growth by artificially jacking up the value of company stock, which increases inequality).
But I have yet to hear a full tally of what Hillary thinks was right about the 1990s, policy wise–and what wasn’t. In today’s economic climate, simply laying claim to the good parts of the 90s without explicitly outing the bad is not enough.
Certainly, we should be thinking about how to achieve a healthier labor market, but we also need to recognize that just letting the markets do their thing, as many in Bill Clinton’s administration advocated, isn’t a real growth strategy. It’s a head fake. In that sense, it’s misguided to lavish unadulterated praise for the era. The economic policy of the 90s only worked for some people, some of the time.
REUTERS: Republican Donald Trump had one last chance at a nationally televised debate to reach out to the undecided voters he badly needs to keep his presidential campaign viable.
He passed on the opportunity. Instead, he chose on Wednesday to stay with the strategy he has employed during recent weeks: Pump up his hard-core supporters and hope that's enough to win.
He suggested he might not accept the election result if his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton wins on Nov. 8, called her a “nasty woman,” and repeated hard-line conservative positions on issues such as abortion and immigration.
While that kind of rhetoric was catnip to his passionate, anti-establishment base, it is unlikely to have appealed to independent voters and women who have yet to choose a candidate.
“When you’re trailing in the polls, you don’t need a headline the next morning saying that you’re not going to accept the election results,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who supports Trump.
With less than three weeks left in the race, Trump is behind Clinton in most battleground states and is underperforming in almost every demographic voter group compared to the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, four years ago. Party strategists had said before the debate that he needed to use the event to draw in voters beyond his hard-core supporters.
Trump didn't listen or perhaps didn't care.
STRATEGY MAY BACKFIRE
His debate was a continuation of his apparent strategy to ensure his most fervent supporters show up on Election Day, while betting that his attacks on Clinton's character and truthfulness will discourage voting by already skeptical young and liberal Democrats.
But experts who study voter behavior warned that his attacks on Clinton may backfire, saying he may instead awaken Democratic voters who have so far been uninspired by Clinton.
“The risk he faces by engaging in a scorched-earth policy is that he activates people rather than turning them off,” said Michael McDonald, who runs the U.S. Election Project at the University of Florida.
McDonald, who tracks early voting returns and absentee ballot requests, said he is seeing larger than expected surges of support for Clinton in southeastern states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project, which uses a massive online opinion poll to project election outcomes in all 50 states, estimates that Clinton has a 95 percent chance of winning the election by about 118 votes in the Electoral College if it were held today.
It is against this backdrop that Trump has apparently decided to double down on energizing his base rather than broadening it. But the poll results cast doubt on the wisdom of that strategy.
If Trump’s core white, male, working class supporters vote at high rates, as expected, that likely won’t be enough to win. Trump, for example, already does well with white men who are at retirement age. Nine out of 10 of them are already expected to vote, according to the polling results, so, there is little room to squeeze out more votes.
RIGGED ELECTION
The SurveyMonkey surveys also included polls of Senate and gubernatorial races, where applicable, in the same 15 states. The results show two things. First, many Republican Senate candidates are outperforming Trump in their states. Second, that still may not be enough to maintain the GOP’s majority in the chamber.
Democrats need a net gain of five seats to take outright control of the Senate, four to exercise control if Clinton becomes president. The results showed Democrats with leads of four or more points in three states with GOP incumbents: New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Click on the image above for the project's interactive tool that allows users to set turnout targets for various voter groups.
Representatives from the Clinton and Trump campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on the project.
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