Ahead in the polls for most of the year and not afraid to boast about it, Donald Trump has little to brag about after his summer plummet made Hillary Clinton the overwhelming favorite to win in November. But his new campaign manager - his third in as many months - has a new spin on his awful August.
"I think it helps us to be a little bit behind, and we are," said Kellyanne Conway, a veteran of Newt Gingrich's 2012 presidential bid, on CNN Thursday. "It lights a fire under us and reminds us what we need to do to get this done."
She adds: "We like our odds in this sense: We're the ones giving these policy speeches. We're talking to the press and not ignoring them. We're the ones who have the issues set in our favor because at the end of the day, this is 2000. This is 2008 all over again. It's a change election. It's 1992."
Of the polls in Georgia and other competitive states that show Trump losing his edge with Republicans, Conway predicted that conservatives will inevitably come back to the fold: "They're basically saying, I don't like the way the last couple weeks went, and I want you to get back to fighting Hillary Clinton."
He'll have his next chance to put his latest strategy on display at a rally tonight in Charlotte, the beating heart of must-win North Carolina.
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We want to be a fly on that wall: Georgia Muslims are meeting with tea party groups around the state to counter Donald Trump's rhetoric.
Faced with calls from the Republican nominee to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants and ask would-be citizens if they believe in Shariah law, the Georgia chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations said it has begun outreach with GOP chapters and tea party members. The goal is deliver an "Islam 101" presentation and soothe concerns about terrorism.
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The latest attempt by Democrats to make Georgia a competitive state: Bill Clinton is apparently headed here next week.
Already this week, Trump has gone so far as to hire new operatives in Georgia, a state where President Barack Obama raised money for Clinton earlier this summer, where Bill Clinton is due to do the same next week, and where leading Democrats see a real opportunity to make inroads. His team this month requested ad rates there, too, as well as in other states most Republicans have not often had to worry about defending, such as Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri. He's even hired a pair of operatives in South Carolina, a usually deep red state where one recent public poll showed Clinton within striking distance.
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GaPundit's Todd Rehm took to Medium to respond to our most recent story on how third-party voters U.S. Senate race. His argument is that it wasn't Allen Buckley who sent Georgia's U.S. Senate race into a runoff in 2008, but Republican voters themselves:
"What denied Chambliss an outright victory was the 181,662 voters who pulled the lever for John McCain, but did not vote for Saxby Chambliss. Most of those just left the ballot slot blank...
Winning just over 5% of those voters who were already in the ballot box and voting for a Republican at the top of the ticket would have put Chambliss over the top in November 2008."
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Some Hillary Clinton shade.
That's what our story about "Scandal" star Tony Goldwyn helping Hillary Clinton's open her first Georgia field office got from Donald Trump's Georgia state director:
Adds the folks at zpolitics:
"The actor who plays a corrupt television president on the television drama "Scandal" will be in Atlanta this weekend to help open Hillary Clinton's campaign office. Let that sink in."
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