There’s so much at stake, I think many voters are beginning to realize that we cannot keep on with business as usual.
Kae Roberts and Jay Eardly were leaning toward Hillary Clinton before Monday night’s debate.
By the end, they had both pulled away.
John Kokos and Hank Federal were undecided going in, potential Clinton backers.
By the end, they’d ruled her out.
Indeed, while polls said that Clinton won the first general election debate with Donald Trump Monday, she may not have won actual votes. And she may even have lost some, at least in the battleground state of North Carolina.
In a focus group of 21 voters from around Charlotte conducted by McClatchy and the Charlotte Observer, four who were up for grabs before the debate moved away from her by the end.
The racially diverse group included seven Republicans, six Democrats, seven unaffiliated voters and one Libertarian. Their votes are crucial in one of the nation’s key swing states, one in which Trump and Clinton are neck-and-neck in the most recent polls. They live in or around a city rocked in recent days by turmoil over last week’s police shooting of an African-American man.
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Is Tsun Tsu being validated? He said that an insurgent wins against the established army by not being crushed. Oversimplified, but Hillary IS the establishment candidate. She is business as usual. Trump is the insurgent. He wasn’t crushed and he did land some good licks in the debate. Official scoring may have awarded the bout to Hillary, but it was a technical, not a knock out. Rounds 2 and 3 will be interesting, but that Trump is still here and close is winning.
This shouldn’t be a surprise because it is part of the pattern of this election. Every time Hillary Clinton shows her face, her numbers go down. In essence, Hillary the abstraction is much more appealing than Hillary the real person.