Hillary Clinton is seeing the benefits of her strong debate performance in battleground state polls released Thursday and Friday.

In Nevada, a Suffolk University poll released Friday found Clinton had the support of 44% of likely voters while Donald Trump had 38%. Libertarian Gary Johnson had 7%. Clinton’s boost in Nevada shows a surge past previous polls in the state in recent weeks which had Trump ahead by a percentage point or two. The poll of 500 likely Nevada voters was conducted Sept. 27-29 and has a margin of error of 4.4 points.

In New Hampshire, a WBUR-FM poll had Clinton 9 points ahead of Trump with likely voters in a two-way race, 47%-38%. When third party candidates are added the lead narrows slightly to 7 points. Clinton had 42%, Trump had 35%. Johnson had 13% backing and the Green Party's Jill Stein had 4%.

The numbers released Friday are a few points better for Clinton than polling in early September that indicated a tighter race. The telephone poll of 502 likely New Hampshire voters was conducted Sept. 27-29 and has a margin of error of 4.4 points.

And a Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll released late Thursday showed Clinton with a 7-point lead over Trump in both a head-to-head matchup and four-way field with Johnson and Stein. In the four-way race Clinton had 42%, Trump had 35%, Johnson had the support of 9% of Michigan likely voters and Stein had 3%. Just under one-tenth (9%) are undecided.
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Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Under the laws in New York, where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is based, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 a year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump’s must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks — among other things — whether the charity spent any money for the personal benefit of its officers.

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) finds that Trump’s foundation raised money in violation of the law, he could order the charity to stop raising money immediately. With a court’s permission, Schneiderman could also force Trump to return money that his foundation has already raised.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
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Donald Trump is an unusual candidate who does a lot of unusual things. For example, after flubbing a debate performance in which he appeared volatile, irritable, and uninformed about key issues, he did not attempt to refocus his campaign on proven message points or topics where he has a firm grasp of talking points. Instead, he’s been lashing out at Alicia Machado while using apophasis to bring up Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity by saying he’s not talking about Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity.

It seems like a bad strategy because it almost certainly is in fact a bad strategy.

But not everyone sees it that way. In certain quarters, there’s a tendency to assume that Trump is crazy like a fox.

Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter for much of his career in national politics, sees the post-debate binge in that light.

[blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en" style="border: solid 1px #aaaaaa;padding:10px;background:#ffffff;"]
The Trump campaign is talking about affairs because they don't want a conversation about Trump not paying his taxes or stiffing his workers.— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs)
https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/781181905970434048">September 28, 2016



Ken Baer, a veteran Democratic Party operative, even believes that Trump’s feud with the Khan family was a successful effort to distract attention from a bread-and-butter economic critique of Trump.

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The Arizona Republic says it has received death threats and countless subscription cancellations over its endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the paper's first-ever​ endorsement of a Democrat. KPNX's Bryan West reports.

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Former presidents

George H.W. Bush (?) -- Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in a Facebook post that Bush told her this in-person. The president's office isn't confirming it, but she stands by it. "That’s what he said," she told Politico.

Members of Congress

Rep. Richard Hanna (N.Y.), a moderate Republican who is retiring this year, told Syracuse.com that he will support Clinton and that Trump is unfit to lead. He cited Trump's criticism of Khizr Khan. "I think Trump is a national embarrassment," Hanna said. "Is he really the guy you want to have the nuclear codes?"

Former Republican elected officials

John Warner, former senator from Virginia -- “Loose lips sink ships. Got that, Trump? Loose lips sink ships." Warner added: "You can’t pull up a quick text like ‘National Security for Dummies.'"

Chris Shays, former congressman from Connecticut — "I have friends who are up for office and they say, you know, if you don't support Donald Trump, you're hurting us because then we have to answer the question. And now I'm going one step further. So I am hurting them. But, you know, there's a time when you put your country first."

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Mrs Clinton argued that Mr Trump’s economic plans would benefit wealthy individuals like himself, rather than the broader population, calling his proposals “trumped-up trickle-down” because they entailed large tax cuts for the best-off in society. She brandished policies that she said were focused on fairness and helping the middle class through “broad-based, inclusive growth”.
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Federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards require automakers to manufacture vehicles that will achieve average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. That’s more than double the actual average of 24.3 mpg in 2014. Automakers are responding to these aggressive standards by exploring a broad range of technologies that can boost fuel economy. ....

Accordingly, the auto companies are pleading for more octane. Just two weeks ago at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit, GM’s vice president of propulsion systems underscored that “Higher octane is necessary for better engine efficiency. It is a proven low-cost enabler to lower CO2.”

There are a variety of options for increasing the octane rating of gasoline, but one octane source stands out from the crowd: ethanol.

Made from the starches and sugars in crops, waste and other biological material, ethanol is a renewable fuel that reduces CO2 emissions and has an incredibly high octane rating of 113. That compares to an octane rating of 84 for base gasoline produced at the refinery. In addition, ethanol costs less than other octane enhancers produced by oil refineries, many of which are toxic in nature.

Research by automakers and the Department of Energy confirms that gasoline blends containing 20-40 percent ethanol can provide the necessary octane boost for high-compression, turbocharged engines, while delivering better fuel economy than today’s gasoline. In the words of a Mercedes-Benz engineer, ethanol-based high octane fuels can provide “ridiculous power and good fuel economy.”
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I spent the weekend trying to figure out how to start this piece — how to ground my sense that this presidential debate is beginning in a bad place — and then MSNBC put up this graphic:




This is the Donald Trump curve. Hillary Clinton needs to answer every question perfectly and make people laugh while she does it. Trump needs to stop lying and bragging so much. It defies parody. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

MSNBC is simply echoing the conventional wisdom. Clinton “faces higher expectations than Donald Trump when the two square off for the first debate on Long Island,” reports Politico. This is the conclusion of Politico’s “insiders poll,” which surveys a select group of political elites. The responses — Politico provides anonymity to participants in the survey — are darkly comic.

“To win the debate, all Trump really needs to do is meet expectations, keep his cool, and look presidential,” says one Republican.
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