Hard to lose when you see the other guys' cards.

I wrote a while back that I didn't think the "deplorables" line Clinton dropped at a fundraiser was as damaging a gaffe as people thought it was. Turns out I was right I think. Clinton is now polling at over ten points higher than Trump, and his supporters are increasingly demoralized, at this point I don't know how bad it's gonna be, but the RNC thinks it's gonna be pretty bad, and I agree.

The sexual assault scandals are of course a large contributor to this, but I think deplorables, and the reaction to it, really set the stage for that. Hillary Clinton basically chose the identity of the Trump campaign with roughly two months to go and the campaign and supporters reacted in exactly the worst way possible to it, they embraced the label.

Now Trump's most hardcore fans aren't going anywhere, for which we can all be grateful as they are unlikely to actually go out and vote, just as Ron Paul supporters never turned up in poll matching numbers for him. However their presence, and adoption of the Deplorable label, means that they are... not good advocates for their candidate. Like, say you are an undecided voter, or just a conservative who isn't sure about Trump, first you see the sexual assault allegations, then you see his supporters defining him on social media using the label of Deplorables as a badge of honor, nothing in the equation leads to confidence.
Now perhaps it doesn't make you vote Clinton, but odds are you stay home at least, and that is almost as good.

By embracing the label, the Trump campaign and it's supporters willfully allowed Clinton to control their own movements identity and set their perception in the public eye, it turned out to be a masterstroke and to me might just be one of the defining moments of the campaign. I would give a great deal to know if they used the term intentionally hoping for a similar reaction, or if this was an off the cuff mistake.

Lack of control is in a nutshell the entire problem with the GOP throughout this campaign, there was never a cohesive attempt and messaging, no real commitment to a platform, and no teamwork at all. Hell a good argument can be made that even the nomination of Trump himself was engineered in part by the DNC and Clinton. Remember the party was awfully silent on Trump during the primary, and spoke occasionally against other challengers of his, or at least Democratic surrogates did. Meanwhile the RNC flailed randomly, helpless against the pocket candidates of the billionaire backers to make a meaningful campaign organization. We''ll likely never know the full extent of DNC impact on the primary, but I do know that Trump was a dream come true for them and the party did indeed jump on it.

To a greater or lesser extent, the Democrats have been running both campaigns this year, and so far ot appears that this strategy will pay off greatly, at least for this election cycle.