Vox

[Commentary] For months now, pundits and politicians have been waiting for Donald Trump to “pivot,” presumably moving away from his divisive, inflammatory rhetoric of the Republican primary and toward a more inclusive, mild demeanor for the general election. Since the first debate, we have seen a pivot, but not the one we’ve been waiting for: Trump has fully pivoted from presidential candidate to media mogul for a budding political entertainment movement.

This may seem like a strange transition for a presidential candidate to make, but recent events, and Trump’s reactions to them, suggest that his primary goal of building a lucrative audience has finally eclipsed his purported goal of building a winning electorate, with traditional allegiances to political party, fellow candidates, and even a running mate falling by the wayside. Trump’s recent behavior is almost certainly informed by a need to place blame for his looming defeat. But it’s also an amplification of a thread that’s always been present in his campaign, even back when his poll numbers were rising instead of plummeting.

[Jason Mittell is a professor of film and culture and American studies at Middlebury College]

A few dozen cities in America have next-generation broadband networks that offer speeds of 1 gigabit per second — about 50 times faster than a typical connection. These super-fast connections were supposed to revolutionize Americans’ experience of the Internet and rev up the country’s noncompetitive broadband market. When these networks were being built, advocates pointed to a number of potential applications.

Gigabit networks, they promised, would enable users to interact in complex virtual reality environments. They’d make possible good-as-life teleconferencing that could allow seniors to visit doctors from home. But six years after the first super-fast connections went live, even proponents concede no “killer” gigabit application has emerged. Most of their potential, critics say, is simply ignored by users. And building gigabit networks nationwide would be a colossally expensive undertaking. That has caused even some former enthusiasts of these networks to wonder whether the early hype around gigabit networks was misplaced. Perhaps it makes sense to settle for more incremental — and much less expensive — upgrades to the networks we already have.

Even after President Barack Obama released his longform birth certificate in 2011, Donald Trump repeatedly questioned its authenticity and insinuated there was a conspiracy (including murder!) to keep the truth of President Obama’s foreign birth from the public. Then in September 2016, Trump finally acknowledged that he did in fact believe President Obama was born in the US — and said that he’d dropped the issue after the longform birth certificate came out, even going so far as to falsely blame his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for starting the whole thing.

Trump did something — for years — and then denied he’d done it. Is it fair to call him a liar? Common sense says this is a pretty open-and-shut question. But New York Times public editor Liz Spayd — the paper’s independent ombudsperson — is really, really resistant to the idea that it’s ever okay to say, in so many words, that a politician “lied.” Ultimately, she’s okay with it in the case of Trump’s post-birtherist denials — because it was a particularly sustained and particularly racist kind of lie. But she protests that journalists shouldn’t use the word “lie” just because it’s “factually accurate” that a lie has taken place: "That said, I think The Times should use this term rarely. Its power in political warfare has so freighted the word that its mere appearance on news pages, however factually accurate, feels partisan. It feels, as Ryan said, as if you’re playing the referee in frivolous political disputes."

How much do the debates even matter, anyway? The evidence isn’t entirely conclusive, but in my read of it, debates have the potential to make a small but real impact on the race. Polls have often shifted by a few percentage points during debate season, and in a close race, that could really matter. Now, the effect of general election debates has been overhyped by some. There’s little historical evidence that they’ve ever swung polls by more than a few percentage points. General election debates aren’t like primary debates — there are strong partisan loyalties, the vast majority of debate viewers have already made up their minds about who they’re voting for, and few are willing to change their minds because of what happened in one debate. But, in a close race, with a very polarized electorate, a shift of just a few percentage points could matter a great deal. And even if debates don’t swing the presidential outcome, if they help or hurt a presidential candidate by a few percentage points, that could have a domino effect in down-ballot races — such as the battle for the Senate.

If the media judges Trump by extremely low expectations, or if his outrageous conduct is normalized, that could really affect how some viewers understand what happened. Overall, if Hillary Clinton were still leading Trump by 9 percentage points, then she and her supporters could feel confident that the debates would be highly unlikely to change that. A lead of about 3 percentage points is a different story, though.

[Commentary] In December 1987, six Democratic presidential candidates joined six Republican presidential candidates on the stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington (DC) for a primary debate. The Democrats answered some questions from moderator Tom Brokaw, and then Republicans offered their critiques. Then the parties would switch. This was unlike presidential primary debates that occurred before or after. Indeed, most primary debates of the day were precedent-setting.

The rules we are accustomed to today in presidential primary debates are actually very recent inventions. Those rules and customs have developed over the past four decades as parties have slowly asserted their control over the process. We explore this odd history in a paper we're presenting , looking at how this development has affected democracy within the parties.

[Seth Masket is a professor of political science at the University of Denver. Julia Azari is a political science blogger and professor at Marquette University.]

New Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon and new campaign adviser Roger Ailes aren’t business titans who are promising to help Trump come to Washington, roll up his sleeves, and solve problems with some good old-fashioned private sector knowhow. Indeed, more and more American business leaders are coming out against Trump. Instead, as Trump aims to become the Trumpiest Trump that he can be, he’s increasingly surrounding himself with media figures.

It’s hard to imagine today, but thinking back to a year ago you might have thought an outsider Trump campaign would feature an all-star group of business leaders promising to put their heads together to fix what’s ailing America. Tom Barrack and Peter Thiel in roles more substantive than convention speaker. Turnaround artists Carl Icahn and Sam Zell. Brash outsider Mark Cuban. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina from the technology world. It might have been a total disaster, but it would have been something. But instead of a business all-star team, Trump is giving us retreats from far-right media. It all comes as a reminder of a fundamental truth of this campaign: Trump isn’t really a businessman in the conventional sense anymore, and hasn’t been for some time. He’s a television star.

[Commentary] There is a case to be made that the media created Donald Trump. It was, reportedly, his anger at being dismissed by political pundits that led him to run for president in the first place. And it was, arguably, the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of his every utterance that powered his victory in the Republican primary. But slowly, surely, the media has turned on Trump. He still gets wall-to-wall coverage, but that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. Increasingly, the press doesn’t even pretend to treat Trump like a normal candidate. It’s a common criticism of political reporting that it’s hampered by a faux-evenhandedness — if one side says the sky is blue and the other side says it’s orange, then the headline will be "Opinions on Color of Sky Differ." But that hasn’t happened this year. The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon. Trump, for one, has noticed the negativity of his coverage. It’s become a favored explanation for his sagging poll numbers.

Three months out, Donald Trump has already started warning people the election in November might be "rigged" for Hillary Clinton, telling Republican voters to "watch very closely." Speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump insinuated President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 in fixed election, said his own primary win was rigged "a little bit," that Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in a "rigged" primary, and that Democrats would attempt to rig the 2016 election for Clinton. "I’m telling you, November 8th, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged," Trump said. "And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us."

Trump’s new commentary on voter fraud seems to be coming from political strategist and Trump’s close adviser Roger Stone, who told Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos that Trump has to "begin talking about it constantly." "I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly," Stone said. "He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’" Stone added that if Clinton were to "steal" this and win, her inauguration would be a "bloodbath."

Expanding visas to allow more high-skilled workers to come to the United States was supposed to be the last bipartisan immigration proposal standing. But Hillary Clinton described comprehensive immigration reform as a way to "keep the pressure on" the tech industry to "resolve the bigger problem" — "and then we can look to see what else, if anything, can and should be done."

Clinton is making it clear that for Democrats, immigration is an issue primarily about Latino voters — not tech donors. The tech industry has sometimes thought of itself as first among equals when it comes to the "immigration reform" coalition — now there’s reason for it to worry it might be last.

States, even neighboring ones, can have wildly different average Internet speeds, according to Akamai's "State of the Internet" report. Broadview Networks put the report's data together in a map.