Polls of the electorate are now coming at us in swarms.  Like summer’s mosquitoes, they are flying in from every direction, and it is hard to get a fix on any one of them.  That is why averaging them makes so much sense.  Every average so far shows Hillary Clinton with a steady lead.  Anything can happen, though, as the uproar over former President Bill Clinton stumbling into Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an airport in Phoenix on Monday demonstrates.

The damage of any Clinton meeting with the individual whose employees are conducting the investigation into the former secretary of state’s handling of her e-mails is the kind of thing that can turn an election won into paradise lost.  While inordinate, it was not an ordinary sting.

I am often asked whether an event yet unforeseen but easily imagined — a terrorist attack on our country in the days ahead of the elections — can suddenly turn the election.  It is, of course, wholly possible.  More likely it would make the 2016 election closer than it should be.  That is, of course, why Clinton’s political advisors should plan for a tight contest.  If they do not do everything today — including maximizing Hispanic/Latino turnout — they could find themselves ruing the day they got carried away by the polls.

In my heart, I cannot see how Donald Trump should do better than any of the candidates who got wiped out at the polls since 1960.  Would Trump make a better President than Barry Goldwater in 1964; George McGovern in 1972; Jimmy Carter in 1980; Walter Mondale in 1984; Michael Dukakis in 1988?  Of course not.  And these far more worthy candidates than Trump got an average of just 48 electoral votes in their landslide defeats.

Given the furies of our times and the latest polling data, however, it seems that Donald J. Trump could make this election closer than the best of the five landslide losers since 1960: Dukakis won 111 electoral votes.

And it is Dukakis who should be on our mind.  His election turned on a dime when in the first question in a debate against George Bush he could not answer in a convincing manner his positon on the death penalty had his wife being raped and murdered.  Game. Set. Match.

It could be that in one small moment Hillary Clinton against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in October, she, too, could make a mistake that suddenly makes Trump — against  all odds — viable.

Aside from candidates shooting themselves in the foot, bad campaign management indeed can cost a candidate his or her election.  John Kerry and Al Gore should not have lost theirs.  Had Gore’s campaign better understood the true significance of the Hispanic/Latino vote in Florida in 2000, hanging chads and a Supreme Court bullied by Antonin Scalia would not have wrecked his election. The contrast, of course, to those two near-misses is Barack Obama’s brilliant 2008 and 2012 efforts, and about 2008 Hillary Clinton knows every detail, of course.

History would have been totally different after 2000 but along came someone like George W. Bush whose Presidency proved his incompetence and plunged the world into what it is today: A general mess that Republicans are trying to pin on Hillary Clinton.   Campaigns — their strategy, their rhythm, their messaging, their image, their mistakes — do matter.

Between now and the election, we will all suffer near-death from the sting of a thousand polls.

But more important is that we do not let Trump get the last bite.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Any discussion of the data surrounding the Hispanic/Latino vote and its potential always produces the same negative narrative not to be repeated here.  This blog-post is not about numbers.  Rather, it is about motivating Hispanic/Latinos to vote in higher numbers than usual.

The credible, numerical reality that should drive the formulation of a Hispanic/Latino strategy within Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that Hispanic/Latino voters exist in sufficient registered and unregistered numbers to swing the election to Hillary Clinton and bring along additional states that a splintered Republican Party could help push into the Democratic column.

Conventional thinking suggests that Donald Trump’s candidacy will be enough to cause many more Hispanic/Latinos to register and vote in November than four years ago.  Indeed, I cannot remember a Republican candidate so unpopular among Hispanic/Latinos – to the point of being loathed.

That said, what are the messages that can elevate Hispanic/Latino registration and turn-out to historic numbers?

First of all, the Clinton campaign needs to jettison the standard, boiler-plate language about education, health care and jobs that Hispanic/Latinos have heard repeatedly through the years.  Hispanic/Latinos would not have voted Democratic for decades if they did not already understand that voting Republican is not in their best interest.  These issues are of clear and evident importance to Hispanic/Latinos from Seattle to San Antonio to Miami.  I say let the national convention in Philadelphia, the presidential debates and the campaign’s general advertising take care of re-enforcing the Democratic message to Hispanic/Latinos.

To me, the Clinton campaign should find – and deliver forcefully – a core message the like of which Hispanic/Latinos have never heard specifically from a presidential candidate.  Instead of staid, standard commercials and forgetful speeches, the Clinton campaign should make an icon out of the image of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist whose Mexican heritage Trump disparaged in racist language not heard on the campaign trail since George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran for the Presidency in 1968.  And the campaign should use the icon as bludgeon.

I believe the Curiel episode is an existential moment.  For many Hispanic/Latino voters, a Trump Presidency could determine whether some of their relatives and neighbors can continue to live in this country.  But for many more – for many Hispanic/Latinos whose families in what would become the United States predate the American Revolution – the Curiel episode is about how Hispanic/Latinos will exist in the future.

The fact of the matter is that Hispanic/Latinos only recently are beginning to be thought of as part of the mainstream – and that by only some segments of the national population.  It has come as a surprise to many Hispanics/Latinos, especially those who have voted Republican in the past, that many millions of non-Hispanic/Latinos do not consider those of us, who like Judge Curiel share Mexican or Puerto Rican or Central American or South American roots, as ‘Americans’.

It is not lost on Hispanic/Latinos that Republicans in the Senate have blocked President Obama’s selection of another judge,  Merrick Garland, to the Supreme Court in the hopes that a President Trump would appoint a justice to the court that would continue its recent decisions that carry an anti-Hispanic/Latino taint as the nation’s new demography exerts itself.  The court’s decision on affirmative decision on affirmative action notwithstanding, its decision that blocked President Obama’s plan to shield millions of immigrants from deportation is importantly instructive to Hispanic/Latino voters.

Hispanic/Latinos do not want to exist in a world in which a form of second-class citizenship characterizes their lives.  Messaging, then, on the part of the Clinton campaign should be aimed at Hispanic/Latino parents and grandparents and young Hispanic/Latinos contemplating raising a family to consider how their children and grandchildren exist and live their lives in the future.

The opportunity for the Clinton campaign extends to the traditional Hispanic/Latino Republican vote that usually comprises about 35 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote.  In some states, these voters can push Clinton’s vote totals higher to bring unexpected victory in unexpected places and in unexpected down-ballot races.

Hispanic/Latino business owners would understand that Trump’s fiscal theories could wreck the economic recovery now underway and incur billions of additional debt that more and more will land on Hispanic/Latino taxpayers in the future.  Hispanic/Latino veterans are aware that Trump is all-talk about his support of veterans.  Veterans would react to a message that a disastrous Trump Presidency would jeopardize their benefits and the social security and medical benefits that the country affords their parents.   Veterans instinctively would come to realize how Trump’s domestic and foreign policies would set up the country for another round of George W. Bush’s failures.  Fallujah, anyone?

The goal to reduce the total Republican Hispanic/Latino vote in some places to near-naught and explode it in others is not fantasy.  There was a time, remember, that a Republican candidate for President in some Hispanic/Latino precincts would receive zero votes.

The Democratic ticket has an heretofore unknown opportunity to drive a series of sophisticated messages into the Hispanic/Latino community to maximize its vote.

And to sweep Trump and his view of the world from history in which the existence of more than Hispanic/Latinos eventually would be in peril.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

After almost four years, I am reclaiming my space amongst the blogheads.  In 2012, I said to myself I was finished writing on a regular basis.  But then Donald Trump came along and everything changed.  He is the demagogue Jefferson most feared would emerge at some point to threaten the republic.  The nation has dealt with other demagogic threats. The others never got this close to the White House.

It is a high moment, indeed, and it not outlandish to invoke La Marseillaise and Father Hidalgo’s cry at Dolores to start México’s revolt against Spain:  To arms, citizens!  Long live our national independence!

Recent polls indicate the Democratic presumptive nominee will win.  That historic possibility should excite us but not distract us from the possibility that the election will be close.  And though her standing among Hispanics/Latinos is high, I believe she and her strategists must handle the Hispanic/Latino vote well.  By this I mean, among other things, that she, you and I should work to amplify its impact, for it could deliver victory.  I, for one, am not yet sold on the idea that she should plan to win without a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket.

Every day, Hillary Clinton is driving a new nail into Trump’s political coffin.  Yet every day the phone rings, and I have to listen to the contagious hysteria about Trump that has infected seasoned political operatives.  In my gut I suspect they are wrong to fret as much as they do and that Clinton is in good shape.  Yet there is reason to be cautious and prudent.

I shall write in English.  Translation into Spanish will occur when and if time permits.  I have been working on another project now consuming my life, and it is amazing how aging slows down our best efforts and intentions and even bumps up against our responsibilities.

But, at whatever age, our responsibility to maintain and extend the American Experiment is perennial.

Before we are Hispanics or Latinos or Americans, we must be Jeffersonians.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

The day was long, its shadows stretching their elongated forms across the road.  To the left of me at a car mall along the interstate, a super-sized American flag too heavy to fly full was at half-mast, its drooping symbolic of a nation weighed down by grief and bewilderment about what to do next about the blood-madness unleashed by guns in our society.  I wondered if the political system could bear the responsibility of steering the nation around and through what has become a moment of turning, when we as a people are presented with the opportunity to grow.  This, after all, is not like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks were of an enemy foreign to our land; there was no reason to doubt anything.  Connecticut was an attack from within.  The question now is whether we can react against those who attack us every day and then attack us all at once on a campus of innocents.

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Reposted from August 7, 2012

A recent news report on CNN — followed immediately by a television commercial — put our current state of affairs in bas-relief. The news report headlined Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood. Reporters captured Longoria, the beautifully young and erudite Hispanic or Latina actor most famous for her role in Desperate Housewives, attending a fundraising event for President Obama. In stark and almost desperate contrast, observers recapped the aging Eastwood endorsing Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee. After the news anchor took the viewers to break, up popped a commercial for Cisco touting a computerized robotic arm that fixes broken computer production lines at a factory with not a human worker in sight. The producers of the commercial dispensed with all body parts – not even a face. Only a voice accompanied the ad. Intended to be innocuous, the voice instead must cause viewers to conclude unsettlingly that American manufacturers will need fewer and fewer workers in the future.

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Thanks for those who called and asked about the blogs.  I am on travel but plan to comment on Obama Administration’s announcement that affects the Dream Actors and the possible Supreme Court ruling on Arizona that might be announced tomorrow.

A cousin forwarded me what I thought was one of those ridiculous internet chain letters.  Instead of blogospheric claptrap, the letter contained a brilliant, graphic description of how almost insignificantly small the earth is compared to other stars and planets in the universe.  The earth’s sun – that thing we see every day that we might not realize is one million times the size of earth – is not even a pencil dot next to the massive supergiant, Antares.

“Humbling, isn’t it,” the letter smugly asks.  Ah, no.  Not humbling at all.  Quite the opposite:  It is exhilarating!  Despite our dinky size, we are alive compared to what we know – so far – of the rest of the universe, which appears to be generally a large empty, chilly, gaseous mass.

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