There is no good time for party leaders to call the actions of their presidential candidate “sickening”, “despicable” and “vile”, but such a chorus of condemnation 31 days before an election that is already sliding out of view suggests more than just the White House is at stake.



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Reaction to hearing Donald Trump boast of molesting women, in a tape reported by the Washington Post, was particularly fierce among Republicans in Congress, who are not only worried about losing control of the Senate but perhaps even the House of Representatives too, with this man at the top of their ticket.

To see Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, describing the taped comments as showing “utter lack of respect for women” and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, quickly canceling a planned campaign event was on one level unsurprising. Even Trump is now apologising for Trump.

Both have held their noses before. Ryan even once accused his party’s nominee of “textbook racism”, only to stick by his previous day’s endorsement. But this time may be different, because it may be too late to take cover. Washington fears the Trump train is finally hurtling off the tracks and the question now is how many carriages will be pulled off with it before it ends in a ditch.

To see why, one only needs to look at polling among women in particular, even before Trump was heard using obscene language to brag about groping.

His reputation for making derogatory comments was already damaging him among key electoral groups, according to the latest polling: 56% of white women, 64% of suburban women and 67% of women with a college degree rate the Republican “unfavourably”, according to the NBC and the Wall Street Journal.



Even women without college degrees – a demographic known to be more sympathetic – are now negatively disposed toward him by a margin of 62% to 28%.

Such sliding popularity can be seen clearly enough in the realclearpolitics.com national polling average, which puts Clinton some five points ahead after the candidates’ numbers briefly came close to touching before the last debate. But the more worrying shift has come for Trump in key swing states like Ohio and Florida, which he looked until recently to stand a good chance of winning but are now slipping dangerously out of contention.

The reaction of religious conservatives in states such as Utah to the latest shocking revelations – leading Utah politicians Jason Chaffetz and Governor Gary Herbert rescinded their endorsements of Trump on Friday – indicates that a swath of Republican red states could now join blue Democratic targets and purple swing states that are lost to Trump forever, pointing to a blow-out electoral college defeat.

‘I can be nastier than she ever can be’

On Sunday night in St Louis, Trump will face Hillary Clinton in a second presidential debate that was already shaping up as a crucial, maybe final chance to change the campaign’s momentum. Now, Trump’s strategy to turn tables on the Clinton family will be hugely complicated, not least as the new revelations appear to confirm allegations of sexual assault victims who claimed he had groped them in just such a manner.

Last week, Trump said he was planning to raise Bill Clinton’s infidelities to repulse female voters and unsettle his Democratic opponent after a first debate in which she appeared to get under his skin, not least with remarks about his attitude to women.



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“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” Trump told the New York Times. “Hillary Clinton was married to the single greatest abuser of women in the history of politics. Hillary was an enabler, and she attacked the women who Bill Clinton mistreated afterward. I think it’s a serious problem for them, and it’s something that I’m considering talking about more in the near future.”

Any attempt to go negative to try to restore momentum will also be complicated by the format of Sunday’s debate in St Louis, during which members of the public will ask the candidates questions in a “town hall” event of a kind that tends to lead to more polite policy discussions than head-to-heads hosted by media moderators.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Workers prepare ahead of the second presidential debate at Washington University, in St Louis. Photograph: John Locher/AP

It is also unclear whether Trump really wants to follow through on his repeated threats to bring up Clinton personal scandals. A lawyer who represents several women to have made unproven allegations against Bill Clinton – including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones and Dolly Kyle – claims that her offer to bring one of them to sit in the front row at St Louis was rebuffed by the Trump campaign, because he wanted to “take the high road” rather than focus on sleaze.

The tactics adopted by Trump on Sunday will also be heavily shaped by his choice of advisers. The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani are thought to have played a much closer role this time around after Roger Stone and Roger Ailes – two media veterans without extensive political experience, the latter with a sexual harassment scandal of his own – were blamed for encouraging him to skip lengthy preparations for the first debate.

Christie in particular has proved a highly effective and pugnacious debater in the past, helping to destroy the 2016 presidential hopes of Marco Rubio in a primary debate when he mocked the Florida senator’s habit of repeating fixed talking points.

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Yet fears that the Trump campaign is in freefall were exacerbated on Friday before the release of the taped remarks, by reports that it had canceled planned television advertising in key target states – a sign perhaps of cash shortages or that he is dialling back expectations of actually winning and wants instead to minimise the humiliation.

A separate leak of a Trump tax return revealing he may have avoided paying income tax for nearly two decades by booking a loss of $916m has further dented his reputation for business acumen and empathy for hard-working taxpayers.

Clinton, meanwhile, has continued her habit of extensive preparation, though not using a stand-in for Trump as she did before the first debate.

“Hillary did a lot of town hall debates and a lot of town halls during the course of the primaries and into the general,” her campaign chairman, John Podesta, told reporters on Wednesday, after five hours of policy rehearsal over strawberries at the family home in Washington.

“She’s very used to the format. She likes it. She likes answering questions from individual citizens and she listens hard and relates to people. That’s a format that Donald Trump isn’t as used to, so we’ll see. I think it’s a natural format for her and she likes really engaging with people.”

Clinton is likely to face tough questions of her own, though. New details of her highly lucrative speeches to Wall Street bankers emerged on Friday in transcripts published via WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, as leaked emails show Clinton advisers attacking Barack Obama during the last election, the period up to the next debate has seen a barrage of potential new ammunition dumped at the feet of both candidates.



