If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the 2016 electorate after dozens of polls, it’s this: The Republicans could have nominated a mile-high mound of flaming medical waste and between 38 and 43 percent of the American electorate would have voted for it over Hillary Rodham Clinton.

No one is suggesting Donald Trump is quite that bad (the fire engulfing his campaign is merely dumpster-sized), but this isn’t a guy who is running for president, at times, so much as a man who is running from president.


No recap of post-debate self-immolation is necessary, but it’s become clear that the Corey Lewandowski faction at Trump Tower (“Just be yourself, boss!”), merged with the Roger Stone wing (“Don’t worry, Mr. Trump, WikiLeaks is going to destroy her next week”), is winning. The more conventional Kellyanne Conway/Roger Ailes camp, which had been hoping to retrofit Trump into a marketable political commodity, not so much.

And yet … here the most outrageous and detested presidential nominee in recent memory sits, teetering but never quite falling into the clown chasm of political doom; the aggregators have Clinton back up as a 65-to-70 percent favorite to win, but in no battleground does she currently enjoy the double-digit dominance she had just after the Democratic convention. She is doing most everything right while he is inventing brand-new wrong (like enlisting the jowly duo of marital cheaters, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, to defend his fat-shaming of Miss Universe and attack the Clintons’ marriage). You can’t make this stuff up. But Donald Trump can, and he still gets his 38 to 43 percent in virtually every national poll.

Meantime, a vast swath of the United States still can’t stomach Clinton. In the course of one mid-September day in deep-blue Maryland, I had a doctor pull his stethoscope off my chest to declare, “I’m a lifelong Democrat and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do” and an African-American cabbie, who idolizes Barack Obama, muse about sitting this one out.

The unloved candidate trumps the hated one, the polls say. We are getting into the homestretch of this horse race to the glue factory of American Exceptionalism — and the events of the next week to 10 days will likely be Trump’s final shot at repairing his damaged candidacy. Here are five things to watch in a week that will likely pick a president:

1. Is Donald Trump really this dumb? The Google query “Is Trump trying to lose?” gets you 90 million hits, and his debate performance (and subsequent blame-the-microphone rant) spawned another spate of speculation that he doesn’t want to win.

I don’t buy it. Self-doubt and self-hatred are gravitational forces all politicians struggle with, but nobody works as hard as he does, or competes with his venom, if they want to lose. Maybe he doesn’t want to win as much as Clinton does — but who does?

Back in May, Mark Salter — the wry former right hand to Sen. John McCain — told me he thought Trump was an “unstable” personality who just might “come apart” if he found himself losing in the waning weeks. There’s been a lot of chatter about his mental health — what with his 3 a.m. Twitter rant and seeming inability to stop babbling about Miss Universe and her (alleged) sex tapes — but there’s just as much evidence to place him in the crazy-like-a-fox column.

The more important question: What if this particular fox just isn’t very swift?

At the campaign’s dawn, back in July 2015, the then-reality TV star uttered the immortal words, “I went to the Wharton School of Business … I’m, like, a really smart person.” He’s repeated some variant of that refrain many times since.

Trump is a genuine marketing genius who transformed a failed casino career into a branded empire that includes entertainment, golf courses and a Goodwill bin’s worth of dress shirts. He was a savant in the GOP primaries, inflicting blunt-force trauma on a decayed establishment. But that was months and months ago — and he hasn’t been able to grasp the basic fact that winning the Little League World Series isn’t the same as winning the real World Series.

Knowing what you don’t know — as Trump told many an “Apprentice” contestant — is the key. General election presidential politics isn’t about the gut or the tongue, it’s a brain game, and this is a candidate prone to leading with other body parts. Prior to his forced campaign reboot in August (which wouldn’t have happened if his campaign chairman’s questionable dealings with Russia and Ukraine hadn’t been exposed), this is a candidate who didn’t see the value in 1) polling, 2) advertising, 3) field organizing, 4) metrics or 5) shutting up for, like, 30 seconds.

Oh, he seemed to be getting it right for a while. But after about 10 minutes at Hofstra with Clinton it all fell back into all the old patterns, and he kept at it all week. You can chalk up his mistakes to compulsion, narcissism, ADHD or character flaws — but when you get down to it, he’s running a stupid campaign and needs to get smart fast.

2. What does Roger Stone know — if anything? Welcome to October, month of “surprises” — oft-promised, seldom delivered. Into this nervous month strides the spat-shoed dandy Stone, Trump’s master of mayhem, to offer a different kind of pre-dawn tweet.

“[email protected] is done. #Wikileaks,” he wrote at 1 a.m. on Sunday.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was the source of the damaging Democratic National Committee email hack designed to inflict maximum damage on Clinton on the eve of her convention — it claimed the scalp of the DNC chairwoman. And he has hinted that he has much, much more dirt to be delivered at a time of his own choosing. Since Stone is trafficking in rumor, let me add a rumor on top of a rumor: Scuttlebutt among GOP operatives is that Assange is likely to also release information about Trump, possibly to push back on the accusation that he’s a Putin puppet working to defeat Clinton.

The tweet could be a head fake. Both Clintons, sources have told me over the course of the campaign, have often expressed concern about Stone’s mud-raking expeditions. And he loves getting into their confidence. When I asked him about that role in April, he smiled malevolently and declared: “[It] is part of the strategy of any campaign to psych out the opposition. You know, there's no question that Karl Rove got into John Kerry's head.”

3. Can Trump be likeable enough? Clinton’s team, giddily patrolling the spin room after the first debate, touted their candidate’s steely performance and her discipline in pulling off mind tricks (digs at his father, references to his slights against women). But if there was a blemish, several aides told me, it was the fact that she was so focused on the debate that she failed to make a connection with the 80 million-viewer audience; tearing Trump down worked so well that the building-up-Hillary part was postponed. “She needs to sell people on her,” a veteran of the Clinton and Obama campaigns told me.

Fortunately for Clinton, the upcoming debate on Sunday in St. Louis is a town hall-style event that accentuates a relative strength — fielding questions from regular people and, in her case, asking probing follow-ups that demonstrate her empathy. There are perils too: On the trail, Clinton has occasionally struggled to explain her email server, and citizen-inquisitors (like “Joe the Plumber” in 2008) can create the most resonant TV moments, and not in a good way.

But Trump’s challenges are at another order of magnitude. His dreadful showing at Hofstra ups the pressure, and the format isn’t a natural fit, even though it seems like he’d do very well in front of a live audience. But he’s accustomed to dealing with only the friendliest audiences (no chucking out dissenters or mean, mean reporters at Wash U) and has a tendency to say dopey and offensive things (often meant in good humor) that are often overlooked at Donald-being-Donald campaign rallies.



Everyone (including the brilliant "SNL" Hillary impersonator Kate McKinnon) focuses on Clinton’s likeability and relatability, but Trump actually has a bigger problem in both departments. In a must-read post on fivethirtyeight.com, Harry Enten makes a much-overlooked point that is central to the outcome. “Equating Clinton and Trump’s popularity problems misses a meaningful part of the story,” he writes. “Sure, they both have terrible favorability ratings compared to past presidential candidates, but Clinton has consistently been more popular than Trump, and we’re now at the point in the campaign when that difference suggests Clinton has a clear advantage.”

It may be late to change the storyline. But if Trump actually wants to win, he needs to try out some sort of kinder-gentler strategy before the debate — this week — to see whether he can change the prevailing narrative that he’s gone over the edge. It starts with abandoning his self-defeating defense of calling the ex-Miss Universe “Miss Piggy” — and getting back to the ‘prompter and his more effective argument against Chinese global domination and American economic stagnation.

Some 60 percent to 70 percent of Americans really don’t like Trump, and some of those skeptics need to change their minds. Hitting Crooked Hillary all week won’t do it — the time has come to sell them on Decent Enough Donald. Good luck with that.

4. Is Hillary healthy enough? Ugly question, but one both Democrats and Republicans have been asking. Clinton has, according to her communications director Jen Palmieri, recovered from the pneumonia and dehydration that caused her near-fall at New York’s Sept. 11th commemoration. She seemed pretty robust at the first debate — mentally she was as sharp as she has been at any debate in this cycle — and, in fact, it was Trump who seemed to tire as the 98-minute brawl dragged on. And she has looked fine, if not overly energized, on the trail, including a crisp performance at a black church in Charlotte this weekend.

But Trump, in one of his patented middle-school lunchroom riffs, made fun of her near face-plant at an event on Saturday, once again questioning the 68-year-old grandmother’s “stamina.” Fairly or not (and presidential politics isn’t), people will be watching to see whether she’s physically up to the job of chief executive — as they did at the first debate, when several Clinton supporters emailed me, concerned about a brief bout of blinking she had at the start of the debate.

She doesn’t have to toss a prop cane and execute a somersault, as fake-Clinton McKinnon did on Saturday, but a sprightly, high-energy romp around the stage will go a long way in allaying lingering doubts about her health.

5. Climate change could be a key wedge issue. Most political professionals see 2016 as an extension of 2012 and 2008 — essentially another base election, and the candidate who maximizes enthusiasm and turnout among their core voters will inevitably win.

But it isn’t, not quite. The percentage of undecideds, and third-party backers, lingered at around 20 percent for much of the race, a higher-than-average number indicative of the unpopularity of both candidates. That changed in early September when a more disciplined (and less scary) Trump chilled out and pulled off what amounted to a Mitt Romney impersonation, flirting with 90 percent support among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.

This, to some extent, represented a capitulation by voters (many of them higher-income and higher-education Republicans) who had previously viewed Trump as an embarrassment. The question now: Can he hold onto them?

His most obvious problem is with suburban women — and Clinton’s small-but-durable lead in Pennsylvania owes much to her dominance in the bellwether Philly burbs with white female voters. Clinton’s Brooklyn brain trust knows it is unlikely to draw GOP men to its candidate, but it hopes to sow enough doubt to divert them to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson — or to suppress their turnout.

“The entire target audience for the debates should be these upper-income whites,” Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign manager, told me as the candidates took the stage in Long Island last week.

Clinton’s focus groups (they seem to be running around-the-clock these days) show that a central wedge issue is global warming, a cultural and political signifier that differentiates Clinton's self-style rationalism from Trump’s visceral populism.

That’s why you heard her slip the words “climate change” into her spiel so often at Hofstra — and why she’ll do the same in St. Louis.