OFF TO THE RACES: Conspiracy theories
From NBC’s Benjy Sarlin: “If Donald Trump loses in November, he'll have no shortage of people to blame. Besides himself, that is. Trump, who has peddled a variety of conspiracy theories throughout his campaign, is in the midst of building his most elaborate one yet around the recent flood of allegations that he groped, kissed, and grabbed women without their consent.”
Here are our latest polls in North Carolina and Ohio.
Here’s our wrap of Michelle Obama’s striking speech about women and the 2016 election.
"Donald Trump on Thursday reprised his attack on Hillary Clinton's health and stamina, theorizing that if she fainted in China's Tiananmen Square she would be left there,” writes Ali Vitali.
The RNC has transferred $6.35 million to down ballot races, Bloomberg reports.
Most Republican swing state leaders are taking Trump’s side so far in the dispute over sexual assault allegations, POLITICO reports.
From the Wall Street Journal: "Donald Trump will broaden his attack against the media to hit globalism and the Clinton Foundation by charging that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is part of a biased coalition working in collusion with the Clinton campaign and its supporters to generate news reports of decades-old allegations from several women."
Dan Balz’s take on yesterday: "In back-to-back appearances, in what might be the two most compelling hours of the entire election, Michelle Obama in New Hampshire and Donald Trump in Florida delivered the fiercest, most provocative and hardest-hitting speeches of an election cycle that has been without precedent in hot rhetoric.”
"The allegations about Mr. Trump’s treatment of women became the all-consuming focus of the political world, a remarkable turn as the sexual history of a presidential nominee became a dominant and unavoidable issue in the final weeks of the race. Rarely, too, has a candidate in a general election so darkly insinuated that a conspiracy of forces was trying to undermine him and his admirers, as Mr. Trump did Thursday at events in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio,” writes the New York Times.
Did Trump actually cause a surge in Hispanic voter registration?
The Washington Post notes how Trump’s surrogates often seem to be making things worse.
What will happen to Paul Ryan after the election? POLITICO takes a look at his options.
"Several of the Republican Party’s most generous donors called on the Republican National Committee on Thursday to disavow Donald J. Trump, saying that allegations by multiple women that Mr. Trump had groped or made inappropriate sexual advances toward them threatened to inflict lasting damage on the party’s image,” writes the New York Times. "To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered standard-bearer, finally and fully."