In deciding how to describe the ongoing fratricide within the Republican Party, several metaphors and phrases sprang to mind. Rock, hard place. Rats, sinking ship. Petard-hoisting. There are several which are apt and appropriate, but I finally settled on the wise words of Pogo Possum. Because the Republican Party truly has fulfilled Pogo's reflective prediction: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

That is a rather amusing (and grandiose) way of beginning what is going to be, essentially, a "clip column." Because now that Donald Trump has finally gotten caught saying something which is so outrageous that it is actually impacting him in the polls, I thought it was high time to take a look back and see how we got here.

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I have to begin today with a rather large caveat: nothing in this article deals with what has happened since Friday. Polling always lags reality, meaning that the effect of the Billy Bush/Donald Trump tape and the second debate are not reflected in today's data one tiny bit. That'll all show up in the next week, so you'll just have to check back next Monday to see how all of it turns out. For now, we're dealing with what happened before that tape hit the airwaves last Friday afternoon -- which largely consisted of the public's reaction to Donald Trump's tax returns being leaked (showing an almost $1 billion loss in a single year). So just to be crystal clear: nothing in this article will reflect the reaction to the Bush/Trump tape, or last night's debate.

Even with that big caveat, Hillary Clinton had another good week in the polls. In fact, almost all the news was good news for Clinton and bad news for Donald Trump. Clinton continued to ride the wave from the first debate, and this week shows the public's reaction to Trump's tax returns being leaked, showing an almost-billion-dollar loss in a single year (so much for the "I'm a great businessman" thing...). Trump is defiant about not paying any federal income taxes for almost two decades, which certainly didn't help him any with public opinion.

Let's take a look at our first chart, which shows how the candidates would do in overall Electoral Votes (EV), if the election were held today and the polls were all correct. Hillary (blue) starts from the bottom, and Trump (red) starts from the top. The white gaps are states which are perfectly tied. Whichever candidate crosses the middle line has enough Electoral College votes to win.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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I don't think I've ever done this before, but I'm creating this article just as a placeholder -- an "open thread."

This will allow everyone to comment about the debate tonight, without having to scroll through the already-long comment thread on Friday's article.

So sit back, pop the popcorn, and have fun watching the debate tonight, and if you feel inclined to offer up your thoughts, this is the place to do so. Enjoy!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Hoo boy. Every Friday morning, we sit down and review all the news stories from the past week, in preparation for writing this column. After spending a few hours reading and taking notes and copying URLs, the writing begins. But we've learned, over the years, to do a last-minute check on the headlines right before we stop reading the news and start typing. Because every so often, a big bombshell lands that simply cannot be ignored. This is, to put it mildly, one of those times we're glad we checked, because a bombshell just exploded all over the presidential race.

Donald Trump may be toast. We know, we know -- plenty of other people have made that prediction plenty of times over the past year and a half, but it has never actually come true. This time, we really think it might (we weren't among those predicting Trump's demise early on, we should mention -- we took Trump's campaign seriously all along, because we actually read the polls and believed them). But the old clip that somehow made its way to the Washington Post this afternoon might just be the gaffe that sinks Trump's ship for good.

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Obama Hitting New Plateau?

After August's spectacular improvement in job approval polling, Barack Obama saw his numbers fall in September -- what the stock market might call a "correction." Obama had the best August he's ever had in terms of improving his poll numbers, but it seems now that the whole month was the high end of a slow, two-month cycle which might indicate he's hitting a plateau. That's all a very polite way of saying Obama's numbers went down in September, although not as much as they had risen in August. Let's take a look at his new chart.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

September, 2016

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There is a major political debate currently happening in many parts of this country, but the astonishing thing is that most politicians -- especially those on the national stage -- seem to want to pretend the debate doesn't even exist. We saw this previously on the issue of gay marriage, when even the Democratic candidates for president in 2008 wouldn't support the idea for fear of losing votes -- even though it was obviously the right thing to do. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would only support half-measures whose time had already passed, saying they were in favor of "civil unions," but that "marriage" was too sacred a word to use for these unions. That was only eight years ago, and the political shift since then has been monumental. These days, it would be hard for any Democrat to get elected who didn't wholeheartedly support marriage equality for all. The people led, and the leaders eventually followed.

The next issue where this is already happening is marijuana legal reform. The arc of history is clear, and it is bending in one obvious direction. But politicians from Hillary Clinton on down refuse to show more than lukewarm support for half-measures which are already outdated. This is nothing short of political cowardice. Hillary Clinton is a special case, because her husband was the first United States president to admit smoking marijuana, although even this admission was hedged in lawyerly fudging ("I didn't inhale"). But that was almost 25 years ago, and in the meantime public opinion has shifted dramatically.

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Tonight, the candidates for vice president will debate. Now, the vice-presidential debate is truly the Rodney Dangerfield of political events. Don't believe me? Here an the actual headline I read in my morning newspaper today: "Oh, There's A Vice Presidential Debate, Too." It don't get no respect, I tells ya... no respect.

I find that even I am not sufficiently excited about this event (which is another way of saying to my readers: "I won't be after-blogging tonight"). The two campaigns have made it pretty impossible to get excited about the vice-presidential debate, by dint of their choices for vice-presidential candidates. Mike Pence? Tim Kaine? Really? That's who you picked? Excuse me while I yawn enormously....

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It's time to take a look at the presidential race once again, and I have to begin with a program note. Up until now, I've been writing these columns every two weeks, but from now until the election, they'll appear each Monday like clockwork, since the race is about to head into the homestretch.

In the past two weeks, the presidential race has certainly had some ups and downs. Hillary Clinton saw the end of her slide in the polls, and the beginning of the bounce she earned by her first debate performance. Donald Trump has seen his numbers fall, which is likely only going to get worse as the impact of his unusual debate performance (and everything that happened in the week thereafter) begins to be reflected in more and more state polls.

The overall chart of the race for Electoral Votes (EV) looks better for Clinton than last time around, but I would caution that this chart doesn't show the underlying strengths (which we'll get to in a moment). As always, Clinton (blue) starts from the bottom, Trump (red) starts from the top, and whichever line crosses the middle (the 270 EV needed to win) would win the election if it were held today and all the polling was accurate.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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Our subtitle today is not original, so we've got to start by giving credit where credit is due. David French, a writer for the ultraconservative National Review (and a man once so horrified by Donald Trump's candidacy that he considered running himself), had the funniest metaphor for Trump's performance in Monday's first presidential debate:

After the first 20 minutes, it may have been the most lopsided debate I've ever seen -- and not because Clinton was particularly effective. But you don't need to be good when your opponent is bad. Why didn't he have a better answer ready for the birther nonsense? Has he still not done any homework on foreign policy? I felt like I was watching the political Titanic hit the iceberg, back up, and hit it again. Just for fun.

The extraordinary thing about this is not that a conservative is ridiculing a debate performance of the Republican candidate for president, since he's not the only one who did so this week (more on this in the talking points), and also since the list of Republicans who support Hillary Clinton is growing by the day. No, the extraordinary thing is that the author wrote this before Trump started actually fighting back against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. French was just talking about the debate itself, but for the entire rest of the week, Trump backed his personal Titanic up again and again, and tried to just ram through the iceberg, over and over. He was even up early this morning, providing yet another day's legs for this story.

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With only about four months left to go in his second term in office, President Barack Obama just had his first veto overturned by Congress. Considering Obama's rather aloof attitude towards Congress (including even members of his own party), what is extraordinary isn't so much that Obama just got overturned -- it's that it hasn't happened before now. The contentiousness between the White House and the Capitol has been pretty fierce during Obama's term, but up until this week none of his vetoes has been overturned.

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