| Mike Pence's campaign plane lost control when landing at New York City's LaGuardia Airport Thursday night, sliding off a wet runway with more than 30 people aboard. Everyone ended up OK, despite Donald Trump later saying the incident put Pence in "grave danger." |
| With less than two weeks left until the election, people began to wonder: Was this bumpy landing some grand metaphor? With Hillary Clinton building a convincing lead, will Pence ride the Trump Train Plane to a rocky conclusion before evacuating and calmly walking away? |
| We'll know soon enough. Eleven days until election day. |
| It's For the Record, the politics newsletter from USA TODAY. Enjoy the flight. |
| President Pence? In another universe, this is a much closer race |
| In some alternate reality, perhaps Mike Pence became the Republican party's nominee and decided to select Donald Trump as his running mate. (Hey, unexpected VP picks happen.) If that's the case, the Republican ticket in that universe probably isn't faring so poorly. |
| A new AP-GfK poll released Thursday showed Trump trailing Clinton by 13 points. But in a hypothetical race with Pence swapped in for Trump, Clinton only leads by 4 points. Likewise, Clinton's running mate fares better than she does, too: Kaine tops Trump by 16 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup. |
| But if America's two awkward religious dads faced off directly, Americans might have the closest race of all: Pence and Tim Kaine basically tied in a hypothetical contest. |
| Pence and the Trump campaign no doubt know their relatively conventional VP pick holds a different kind of sway for conservatives. Unlike Trump, Pence holds legitimate evangelical credentials. (He's also never publicly supported abortion rights or extolled Hillary Clinton as a "great senator.") |
| Perhaps that's why it dispatched Pence on Thursday to God's Country, aka Iowa, to win over still-skeptical Republicans. |
| "It is time to come home," Pence said Thursday at a community college in Fort Dodge. "It is time to come home and make sure that Hillary Clinton is never elected president of the United States of America." |
| Clinton aide involved in alleged conflict of interest: Bill's doing it too! |
| A memo that turned up in a Wikileaks dump this week showed just how messy the ties were between the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton's personal wealth, as detailed by a long-time Clinton aide. |
| An internal audit of the Clinton Foundation prompted the 2011 memo, in which Doug Band, the aide, explained how some of the foundation's donors also paid Clinton for consulting and speaking gigs. |
| The memo's sure to solidify Republican suspicions of the Clinton Foundation, often criticized as an organization that has too often overlapped with the Clintons' money-making endeavors, which Band referred to as "Bill Clinton, Inc." |
| At one point, Band noted that he had to sign a conflict of interest policy but that Clinton did not, "even though he is personally paid by 3 cgi (Clinton Global Initiative) sponsors, gets many expensive gifts from them, some that are at home etc." |
| "I could add 500 different examples of things like this," Band said. |
| In other Clinton money news: Hillary Clinton's campaign and aligned committees pulled in about $5 million a day in donations this month. Dang. |
| Around the campaign trail: |
| • | Michelle Obama hit the trail with HIllary Clinton for the first time (USA TODAY) | | • | The reason why: Voters view Obama as more trustworthy and likable than Clinton (USA TODAY) | | • | The first lady even appears in a new ad from a Pro-Clinton PAC (USA TODAY) | | • | Police arrest suspect for smashing Trump's Walk of Fame star (USA TODAY) | | • | Yuengling beer drinkers to brand's pro-Trump owner: You're fired (USA TODAY) | |
| Boxing experts: Trump would beat Biden in a fight |
| After Joe Biden mentioned wanting to take Trump "behind the gym" to duke it out, USA TODAY Sports asked the biggest names in boxing who would win. The majority picked Trump. |
| "He's a little bit rougher; he has that bad hairdo. He's a former street guy, he was in Atlantic City running those hotels," said Freddie Roach, a Hall of Fame trainer. "I like Trump by knockout; I think early." |
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