01 October 2016

BIG NEWS: The next presidential debate 29SEP16

ULTRAVIOLET is committed to human rights, civil rights and civil liberties with emphasis on women's issues. They are a member of the Open Debate Coalition and are asking for your vote for the questions below. Please vote for the questions you want to be asked in the next debate by clicking on them. And if you are not sure if you are still registered to vote , or you need to register to vote click here. REMEMBER, democracy is not a spectator sport so VOTE on 8 NOV 16 !

Huge news--for the first time ever, the public can vote on which questions to ask at the next presidential debate.¹

That means YOU and other UltraViolet members have a huge opportunity to make sure moderators ask the candidates questions actually important to women in real time.

Equal pay, paid family leave, child care--we need clear answers on these issues, and this is our chance to make sure voters hear them.

So far, none of the top questions touch on issues that impact women. But UltraViolet members have already submitted dozens of questions they want the presidential candidates to answer--and if we want questions about issues that impact women included in the debates, we've got to vote on the new, official forum. Can you cast your vote today?

Click on the question below to cast your vote.

This isn't by coincidence--the commission that runs the debates finally gave in to public pressure. Together with progressive allies, UltraViolet has been clamoring about the fact that the debates leave out issues most important to women, including 46,500 members who named over a thousand questions they want asked during the debates.

And it's about time that the debate commission listened. Out of the 700-plus questions that have been asked in the countless number of debates this election, only SIX had been about issues that impact women.² Now here is our chance to make sure the potential next President answer questions that women are asking--questions about abortion, child care, equal pay, and more.

Thanks for taking action.

--Nita, Shaunna, Kat, Karin, Adam, Holly, Kathy, Onyi, Susan, Anathea, Audine, Shannon, Megan, Libby, and Emma, the UltraViolet team

Sources:

1. The Second Presidential Debate Will Try Something New, The Atlantic, September 27, 2016

2. What's Next For Women in this Election?, The United State of Women, July 5, 2016

Want to support our work? UltraViolet is funded by members like you, and our tiny staff ensures small contributions go a long way.Chip in here.

OPEN DEBATES, VOTE FOR THE QUESTIONS ASKED IN THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 9 OKT 16

OPEN DEBATES. This is a non-partisan organization open to everyone to submit questions to be asked to the presidential candidates at the next debate, a town hall forum, moderated by ABC and CNN on 9 OKT 16. THERE IS ONE RULE, No naming candidates. Both candidates must be able to answer. You must register to submit a question or vote on a proposed question, those with the most votes will be considered by the debate moderators. Click on the Open Debates link above to submit a question and / or to vote for a question. MANY organizations of the political left and right, environmental, religious, social activism, human rights, humanitarian, civil rights and civil liberties to list a few, are also encouraging their members and supporters to submit and / or vote on questions. Their links still require you to register with Open Debates to do so. IF you are passionate about this election, your candidate and the future of America you should go to the Open Debates website or respond to e mails from organizations you belong to or support and submit a question and / or vote on questions said organization is supporting because the reflect concerns about their agenda. REMEMBER, Democracy is not a spectator sport! AND don't forget to make sure you are registered to vote, click here.

Open Debate Coalition

We are a coalition of people and organizations from across the ideological spectrum urging that political debates be made more “of the people” by bringing them fully into the Internet age.

Specifically, we endorse this Open Debate principle: The public should be empowered to conceive and select debate questions – so that questions addressed by candidates represent the will of the people.

This is not a matter of right versus left, but new versus old. Participatory democracy is a driving principle of the open Internet. The best ideas rise to the top, and the wisdom of crowds prevails.

Moderators can choose from among the top questions proposed and voted on by the public – and have discretion to ask follow-up questions. Many formats can be experimented with, some typical and others so innovative they have yet to be conceived.

As voter participation declines, voter-driven Open Debates that embrace the Internet’s bottom-up ethos could breathe fresh air into our democracy – and attract more young people to participate.

The members of the Open Debate Coalition don’t agree on every issue. But we agree that by bringing together the power of the Internet with the voices of voters, we can ensure that debates are truly “of the people.” We urge candidates, political parties, the media, and debate hosts to work with us and the public to transform our democracy through Open Debates. This represents the future of democracy, and we can make great strides together in the 2016 election.

Signed,

Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor (Co-Founders, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Progressive Change Institute)

Grover Norquist (Founder, Americans for Tax Reform)

Jimmy Wales (Co-Founder, Wikipedia)

Craig Newmark (Founder, craigslist)

Cindy Cohn (Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Chris Kelly (Former Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook; Founder, Kelly Investments; Chair, Organizer Inc.)

Terry O’Neill (President, National Organization for Women)

Ralph Reed (Founder & Chairman, Faith & Freedom Coalition)

Mindy Finn (Former Digital Strategy Director, Mitt Romney; Former Senior Digital Advisor, RNC; Founder, Empowered Women)

Tim O’Reilly (Founder, O’Reilly Media)

Rashad Robinson (Executive Director, ColorOfChange.org)

Adam Brandon (President & CEO, FreedomWorks)

Paul Rieckhoff (Executive Director, Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America)

Michael Turk (Former eCampaign Director, Republican National Committee and Bush/Cheney '04)

Anna Galland and Ilya Sheyman (Executive Directors, MoveOn.org Civic and Political Action)

Ilyse Hogue (President, NARAL Pro-Choice America)

Shepard Fairey (Artist known for iconic Obama “Hope” poster)

Heather McGhee (President, Demos)

Albert Jacquez (Deputy Executive Director, National Council of La Raza Action Fund)

Jon Henke (Former New Media Director, U.S. Senate Republicans and Fred Thompson for President; Strategic Director, TechFreedom)

Cenk Uygur (Host, The Young Turks)

Nita Chaudhary (Co-Executive Director, UltraViolet)

Ed Martin (President, Eagle Forum)

Ben Rattray (Founder and CEO, Change.org)

Chris Shelton (President, Communications Workers of America)

Michael Brune (Executive Director, Sierra Club)

Markos Moulitsas (Founder, DailyKos)

Glenn Reynolds (Founder, Instapundit)

Joichi Ito (Director, MIT Media Lab)

Matt Nelson (Executive Director, Presente)

Louis Elrod (President, Young Democrats of America)

Gene Karpinski (President, League of Conservation Voters)

Cory Doctorow (Author, blogger, journalist)

David Moore (Executive Director, AskThem.io, Participatory Politics Foundation)

Ethan Zuckerman (Director, MIT Center for Civic Media)

Jared Friedman (Founder, Scribd; Partner, Y Combinator)

Marvin Ammori (Lawyer, Technology Strategist)

Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej (Co-Founders, Personal Democracy Media, Civic Hall)

Jim Dean (Chair, Democracy for America)

May Boeve (Executive Director, 350 Action)

Jose Antonio Vargas (CEO, Define American)

Roy Beck (President, NumbersUSA)

Jeremy Ben-Ami (President, J Street)

Joseph Bast (President & CEO, The Heartland Institute)

Alex Lawson (Executive Director, Social Security Works)

Alexandra Flores-Quilty (President, United States Student Association)

Christopher Long (President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute)

Ana María Archila (Co-Executive Director, Center for Popular Democracy Action)

Heather Hargreaves (Vice President, NextGen Climate)

Greenpeace

David Segal (Executive Director, Demand Progress and Rootstrikers)

Ashley Thorne & Peter Wood (President & Executive Director, National Association of Scholars)

Kenneth Roth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch)

Murshed Zaheed (Political Director, CREDO Action)

Rea Carey (Executive Director, National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund)

Crowdpac

Robert Greenwald (Founder, Brave New Films)

Marissa Brown (Executive Director, Democracy Initiative)

Karen Hobert Flynn (President, Common Cause)

Dennis M. Kelleher (President and CEO, Better Markets)

Mark Riddle (President, New Leaders Council)

Robert Weissman (President, Public Citizen)

Jodi Jacobson (President and Editor-in-Chief, Rewire)

David Donnelly (President and CEO, Every Voice)

Nick Nyhart (President and CEO, Every Voice Center)

Mary Rickles and Eric Thut (Communications Director and Interim Executive Director, Netroots Nation)

Robyn Thomas (Executive Director, Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence)

Dean Baker (Co-Founder, Center for Economic and Policy Research)

Stosh Cotler (CEO, Bend the Arc Jewish Action)

Deepak Pateriya (Executive Director, Center for Community Change Action)

Rhea Suh (President, NRDC Action Fund)

Akshat Tewary (President, Occupy the SEC)

Arianna Huffington is also a member of the Open Debate Coalition.

Website

30 September 2016

Election Update: Clinton’s Debate Performance Is Helping Her In Swing States & Trump Is More Unpopular Than Clinton Is — And That Matters & Who Will Win The Senate? 30SEP16

WE can not become complacent , the fact that the drumpf/trump-pence campaign is still in the race is cause for concern. The election is the Clinton-Kaine campaign's to loose and we have to keep that in mind until the day after the election. Here is the latest on the presidential race from +FiveThirtyEight .....

Chance of winning

Hillary Clinton

67.5%

Donald Trump

32.5%

Electoral votes

Hillary Clinton

301.1

Donald Trump

236.6

Gary Johnson

0.3

Popular vote

Hillary Clinton

47.0%

Donald Trump

43.8%

Gary Johnson

7.8%

Election Update: Clinton’s Debate Performance Is Helping Her In Swing States

BETHANY HECK

National polls conducted since Monday’s presidential debate have shown Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by an average of about 4 percentage points — a meaningful improvement from her position before the debate, when she led by just 1 or 2 points. Now, it’s becoming clearer that battleground state polls are moving toward Clinton as well. These include the first results since the debate from high-quality, live-caller telephone polls; the numbers we’d been getting earlier this week were all from online or automated polls.

Here’s what I wrote on Thursday about what we might expect to see in swing state polls, assuming that Clinton led Trump by 3 to 5 percentage points nationally, as national polls seem to show:

A 4- to 8-point lead in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan, which have been slightly bluer than the national average this cycle.
Somewhere between a tie and a 4-point Clinton lead in Florida and North Carolina, which have been slightly redder than the national average.
A roughly tied race in Ohio and Iowa, which have been significantly redder than the national average.

So, what data have we gotten since then?

In New Hampshire, a MassINC Polling Group poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 7 points.
In Michigan, a Glengariff Group poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 7 points.
In Florida, a Mason-Dixon poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 4 points.
Also in Florida, an Opinion Savvy poll (conducted by automated telephone and online) had the race essentially tied (Clinton up by 0.3 points).
And finally, in Nevada, a Suffolk University poll (live caller) had Clinton ahead by 6 points.

As you can see, these results are pretty much exactly what we’d expect with a Clinton lead of 3 to 5 percentage points nationally. In fact, they’re mostly toward the high end of the range, which means that her lead over Trump nationally could eventually turn out to be more like 5 points than 3 points as more data comes in.

The most impressive result for Clinton is probably the Suffolk poll of Nevada. I didn’t establish a benchmark for Nevada in Thursday’s write-up because there’s been a divergence between polls and demographics there all cycle, with polls showing it as a Trump-leaning state while demographics imply it should remain Democratic. But her 6-point lead in the Suffolk poll — the largest lead she’s had in any live-caller poll in Nevada all year — is the sort of number our model was expecting to see there all along. As a caution, Suffolk’s sample sizes are on the smaller side (500 people) so we’ll need to see more data from the Silver State.

Still, the polls have told a pretty consistent story overall. Among the 11 swing state polls conducted since the debate, Clinton has led in all 11.¹

You may notice that I’ve focused on the top line numbers (“Clinton’s up by 4”) instead of trend lines (“she’s gained 2 points”) in these last couple ofupdates, because with trend lines there’s more to keep track of. The period from Sept. 11 through the Sept. 26 debate was one of Clinton’s worst polling stretches of the year, for example, so a new survey from a pollster that last tested the race in that period will probably show Clinton gaining ground since then. But if a pollster had last surveyed a state in early August, when she was up by 7 or 8 percentage points nationally, you’d still expect Clinton to lose ground since then.

Our models keeps track of all this stuff, of course, although they may not yet have Clinton’s debate bounce fully priced in. Her chances of winning have risen to 67 percent in our polls-only model and 64 percent in polls-plus. But our hyper-aggressive now-cast has Clinton’s popular vote lead at 4.1 percentage points, as compared with 3.1 points in the polls-only model. Since the now-cast doesn’t need as much data to show a big change, the gap implies that Clinton has some further room to grow in polls-plus and polls-only if we get more polls confirming the results we’ve seen over the past couple days.

Trump Is More Unpopular Than Clinton Is — And That Matters

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the two most disliked presidential nominees in modern American history. That was true at the beginning of this campaign, and, as we sprint towards Election Day, it’s still true now. But equating Clinton and Trump’s popularity problems misses a meaningful part of the story. Sure, they both have terrible favorability ratings compared to past presidential candidates, but Clinton has consistently been more popular than Trump, and we’re now at the point in the campaign when that difference suggests Clinton has a clear advantage.

Here’s a 10-poll rolling average of each candidate’s net favorability rating — the percentage of voters who have a favorable opinion of them minus the share who have an unfavorable opinion — since June, when Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The trend in Trump’s and Clinton’s net favorability ratings tracks with thehorse-race polls and the overall trajectory of the race. Trump’s likability improved right around the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-July, closing in on Clinton’s. Clinton’s edge in favorability expanded after the Democratic National Convention. And things slowly tightened after that.¹ Yet, unlike the horse race, Trump has never truly moved to within striking distance of Clinton’s net favorability rating except for that brief moment after the GOP convention.

Why has Clinton maintained a greater edge in net favorability than the horse-race numbers? The gap might suggest she has more latent support that she isn’t currently capturing but could on Election Day. There’s also evidence of that upside when you compare two-way surveys (just Clinton vs. Trump) to four-way polls (which include Gary Johnson and Jill Stein). Clinton does better when Johnson and Stein voters are forced to choose between the two major party candidates.

That upside is one reason to keep an eye on the candidates’ favorability ratings. Especially now. Take a look at the average net favorability of the candidates in the final two weeks of September in elections since 1980.

The candidate with better favorables tends to win
		NET FAVORABILITY RATINGS IN LATE SEPT.
YEAR	WINNER	DEMOCRAT	REPUBLICAN	DIFFERENCE
1980	Ronald Reagan	-10.5	+6.0	R_+16.5
1984	Ronald Reagan	-9.0	+14.0	R_+23.0
1988	George H. W. Bush	+11.8	+17.4	R__+5.6
1992	Bill Clinton	+11.4	-9.0	D_+20.4
1996	Bill Clinton	+18.7	+3.1	D_+15.6
2000	George W. Bush	+23.2	+24.4	R__+1.2
2004	George W. Bush	-0.4	+10.6	R_+11.0
2008	Barack Obama	+17.0	+12.4	D__+4.6
2012	Barack Obama	+6.5	-5.4	D_+11.9
2016	—	-13.8	-23.6	D__+9.8

A few things stick out. First, as I said at the outset, Clinton and Trump remain very much disliked relative to previous candidates. Jimmy Carter in 1980 was the only candidate before 2016 who had a net favorability of -10 percentage points or worse. Now, both Clinton and Trump fall into that category, and Trump’s is below -20 points.

Second, the difference in popularity between the candidates right now is fairly predictive of the November result. You can see this more clearly in the chart below, plotting the average difference in net favorability ratings of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees in the final two weeks of the September before the election and the final result.

In every election, the candidate who was leading in net favorability ratings in late September won the Electoral College and the election. The campaign with the closest favorability margin, 2000, also featured the closest final result. This year, the net favorability differences aren’t anywhere near as small. Since mid-September, Clinton’s net favorability rating is 10 percentage points better than Trump’s — similar to the edges George W. Bush had in 2004 and Barack Obama had in 2008. Bush and Obama both won small but solid victories.

Indeed, if you were going to project the 2016 election using a simple linear regression based on the difference between candidates’ net favorability ratings, you’d have Clinton winning by a little over 4 percentage points. That’s slightly larger than the 3.1-point margin the FiveThirtyEight polls-only model currently forecasts. Again that suggests that Clinton may have some upside potential our model may not be showing.

Of course, it could also be that the unusually large share of voters who don’t like either candidate makes these numbers less meaningful than usual. And even if the 2016 campaign isn’t operating on a different set of rules, net favorability at this point in the campaign is not a perfect predictor of the final result. Bill Clinton, for example, beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, but by a smaller margin than their net favorability rating difference implied. Further, as my colleague Nate Silver pointed out four years ago, we can’t be sure why favorability ratings correlate with the election results — the relationship might be the result of confounding variables. It could be, for example, that some set of other factors, such as underlying economic conditions, determines both how voters view the candidates and which one they cast a ballot for. If that’s the case, then net favorability may not tell us anything the horse-race polls aren’t already.

My guess, however, is that Clinton’s being better liked than Trump matters. Clinton has been better liked throughout this campaign, and elections are ultimately choices. Right now, the polls reflect that, and it’s why Clinton is ahead of Trump even if voters aren’t thrilled with their choices.

Who will win the Senate?

Chance of winning control

Democrats

54.7%

Republicans

45.3%

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