Just eleven days before the election, polls have tightened in the presidential race. Trump and Clinton are tied in today’s Los Angles Times poll. A week ago chances of Donald Trump being elected seemed remote, and the Republican candidate and his surrogates were spending much of their time defending him against charges of being a sexual predator.
During a few days in which WikiLeaks, undercover videographer James O’Keefe, and the National Enquirer have exposed the pecodilloes and possible legal violations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, their Foundation and campaign staffers, and contractors and staff of the Democratic National Committee. New DNC chair Donna Brazille had a meltdown on The Kelly File ( a few days before Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich had his own awkward interview there).
Some of the voters leaving Hillary are high-profile Democrats.
“Hillary says she has a plan for this and a plan for that, but she won’t get any program through Congress, since she’ll spend the first year in office in impeachment hearings,” former Democratic Senator Mike Gravel, who represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate for two terms. “Hillary and Bill are into aggrandizing themselves. They’ve become millionaires and they’d like to be billionaires. It’s a sick situation. And the media is totally biased.”
Gravel is one of several former Democrats turned off by the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign, some even before the emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were published by Wikileaks or the undercover videos from James O’Keefe which seem to show subcontractors to the Clinton campaign promoting voter fraud.
Gravel, a life-long Democrat until 2008, the year he entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination along with fellow Senators Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John Edwards, agrees with Donald Trump that the electoral system “is rigged, but what else is new? That’s why voters are so disillusioned.” Gravel says his 2008 candidacy was torpedoed by the Democratic establishment much as Bernie Sanders’ campaign was, when General Electric chairman Jeff Immelt excluded him from NBC’s presidential primary debates (NBC was owned by GE), because of his opposition to nuclear power. (Gravel now promotes a Constitutional amendment to create direct democracy, and is soured on the possibilities of elections. He quotes a saying attributed to Mark Twain: “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”)
“I learned nothing new from the emails that I didn’t already know about the Clintons,” Terry Michael, a Capitol Hill Democratic press spokesman for 17 years.. “Together, they comprise an unbridled bundle of naked ambition.” Michael was a Democratic press person for most of his career, working for the lIlinois House Democrats from 1973-74; for the late Sen. Paul Simon, during Simon’s first five years in the U.S. House; for the late Cong. Bob Matsui, from 1981-83; and for the Democratic National Committee, where he worked from 1983-87, before serving as communications director for Simon’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and founding the Association of House Democratic Press Assistants.
Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, a Bernie Sanders supporter and member of his Our Revolution group, has also openly criticized the Democratic establishment, telling MSNBC: ““I believe that the Democratic party, when all of this is said and done, will have to deal in a very deep way with the healing process, because the fact of the matter is that the hackers didn’t write the emails,” Turner explained. “We’re dealing with people who talked about needy Latinos. We’re dealing with people who said things about African-Americans and others. Heck, I’m even in the emails, as well. I can tell from you reading the ones that I’ve seen so far with my name in them, the Russians didn’t write those emails. They were by the people within the Clinton camp.”
Turner was originally scheduled to have a prime time speaking slot at the Democratic Party convention, to endorse Bernie Sanders — but the DNC, then headed by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, removed her at the last minute from the schedule. Even before the Wikileaks on DNC “rigging” of elections, Turner summarized her exclusion from the nominating convention for Salon: “picture this: Within that same space they’re giving a salute to black women, and they bring out all these mothers of the movement. At that same time they’re trying to put another black woman in her place, put me in my place. ‘Cause make no mistake about it; that symbolically was putting me in my place. The black woman vote is the vote that they need. It was really the black woman vote in the South that gave her the huge advantages over Sen. Sanders in the South. So just the irony. To have all these speakers come up like Cecile Richards talking about how Secretary Clinton is going to give women voice. And then you take another woman, who is a Democrat in good standing, who supported another Democrat, and you gonna put her in her place — the black woman, I want to emphasize, black woman, in her place.”
Brunell Donald-Kyei, a former Democrat and Obama voter who is a diversity outreach staffer for the Trump campaign, echoes Turner’s idea of a need for healing and Gravel’s prediction that a Clinton administration will be bogged down in hearings. Kyei told FOX News’ Bret Baier yesterday: “The most important issue to me is economics because the last eight years the economy, the poor people of this nation have suffered. The middle class have suffered and let me tell you something, the American people don’t want to be dealing with a presidential person going into office with all the baggage, with all the investigations that are going to be on top of Hillary Clinton.”
“Our nation needs to heal. We want to heal. We want peace between the races. We want to make sure that our youth, whether they’re white, back, Hispanic, have jobs. We want to make sure that the Supreme Court, you know, that the constitution is protected. Those are American issues. That has absolutely nothing to do with your race. That’s to protect this nation.”
Besides Kyei working for Trump, Senator Gravel has endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Terry Michael is woking with the media team for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. Turner has joined Bernie Sanders Democratic Party reform organization Our Revolution, but has not been campaigning for any candidate.
Polls show Hillary Clinton being abandoned mainly by independents and millennials, who left her in the past week both for Trump, and for Governor Johnson, who in several polls is back up to 7 or 8% nationally.