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Hillary Clinton is using herfundraising dominance to unleash all manner of modern votertools that Donald Trumps organization is too cash-poor, disorganized or uninterested into use but are they worth the massive pricetag?

The question will be argued until election day, and probably for years after. But one thing clear right now is the Clinton campaign is leaving nothing to chance. Launching apps that track the movements of paid canvassers and organizing poetry slams to build camaraderie in field offices, the Clinton operation is in the final frenzy of assembling some of the most sophisticated campaign infrastructure ever.

Itis building on the hallowed playbook written by President Obamas campaign teams, implementingtechnological advancements that enable field organizers to find, track and prod potential voters with even more precision and efficiency.

Clintons approach is a stark contrast from Trumps. Heleft fieldorganizing in the hands of a Republican National Committee that must incorporate Trump into its broader effort on behalf of down-ballot candidates often at odds with the nominee.

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The most advanced field technology available to Republicans is controlled by the Koch brothers network, which has declined to work on Trumps behalf. The field offices that are a hub of organizing activity are few and far between on the Trump side as compared with the dozens Clinton has operational.

Gauging the likely return on all this investment is complicated. Strategists and scholars are still hotly debating how much credit Obamas vauntedhigh-tech get-out-the-vote operation deserves for his victories.

Obamas 2008 campaign manager,David Plouffe, once described this part of thecampaign as an elitefield goal unit there to push the team over the top in a close race. Obama would probably have lost Florida in both his presidential races without a superior ground game. And in 2008, research suggests he would have been defeated in North Carolina and Indiana, too.

Now, the infrastructure mismatch is the most severe it has ever been.

We have never seen an imbalance as great as we are seeing this election, said Eitan Hersh, a political science scholar at Yale University and author of Hacking the Electorate.If Republicans fail to shore up their ground gamein the crucial swing states, he said, they risk giving Clinton an advantage of as much as 3 percentage points in them.

Clinton is pouring money from a war chest expected to grow to $1 billion by election day into a massive push to find and motivate voters who might have even the slightest inclination to vote for her. Since April, Clintons team has sent thousands of volunteers to dozens of field offices in crucial swing states and armed them with software designed to get voters invested in casting ballots. The programs compose personalized follow-up emails and texts from the canvasser, catered to the specific interests of thevoters they chat up.

Weve added digital components to the ground game that gives it a speed that wasnt there before, said Stu Trevelyan, chief executiveof the software firm NGP VAN, which manages the Democratic Partys massive voter file.

Canvassers carrying mobile deviceshave real-time script automation that guides their interactions with voters based on the way questions are answered, and then guides which text messages, online ads, fundraising pitches and reminders to vote are sent to the person.

If voters cast their ballots in the last election through early voting, the campaign knows it and once voting begins will send gentle nudges.

The pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, which dwarfs all of the super PACs supporting Trump, has been road-testing its strategies for drawing voters to the polls in a few key states since the primaries. One involved targetingmessages at Latino and African American voters that prompted 36,000 of them to look up their polling places on a Priorities USA website.

Priorities USA is on track to have more than double the funding it did when it supported Obama in 2012, and it is aggressively expanding its get-out-the-vote efforts.

Weve already been able to see what is effective and what is not effective, said Priorities USA spokesman Justin Barasky. It is brand-new for a Democratic super PAC to be investing in some of these activities.

The tech innovations do only so much. Their effectiveness depends on an army of paid activists and volunteers, and Clintons early start and massive field office presence gave her a leg up in pulling one together even as her tepid approval ratings and discouraging poll numbers with millennials signal the campaign will struggle to attract a volunteer force the size of Obamas. The Clinton campaigns cumulative payroll was more than $51 millionthrough July. The Trump campaign had spent just$3.2 million on payroll by then.

Clintons Mujeres in Politics women in politics are scouring communities for Latina matriarchs such as church secretaries and small-business owners open to recruiting their social circles. All Latinas have a very powerful network, said Lorellla Praeli, the campaigns director of Latino outreach. Starting with one, youve committed them to reach out and engage five more. And that begins to multiply.

The campaign is recruiting bilennials bilingual millennials in strongholds like California and New York to hit the phones to motivate Latino voters in states where they are becoming a growing force, such as Utah, North Carolina and Iowa. In Florida, where the Latino vote will be decisive, the large campaign payroll aims to look as diverse, and as fluent in Spanish, as the electorate.

Republican officials bristle at the suggestion Trump is getting outmaneuvered on the ground. They point to tens of thousands of their people in the field and a far more robust and sophisticated presence in swing states than in 2012, when Obamas voter turnout organizationfar outperformed that of rival Mitt Romney. And they note encouraging registration figures in several swing states that suggest the advantage the Democrats hold in them is shrinking.

But it is undeniable that the partys vows to revamp its campaign infrastructure, invest heavily in a united digital operation and create a framework that resembles what the Democrats had in both 2008 and 2012 was disrupted by Trump. Those goalshave not been a priority for him.

Trump only recently began to invest heavily in digital. His campaign enlisted the firm Cambridge Analytica, which helped drive Texas Sen.Ted Cruzs impressive voter targeting operation in the Republican primariesby developing psychographic profiles of voters propelled by consumer data.

But prominent GOP digital strategists say the delay in getting such innovative efforts underway undermines their effectiveness considerably.

There is, though, a wild card: the voter anger Trump has so successfully harnessed. It remains to be seen how he will use it to drive voters to the polls. Trump has gotten this far disregarding the usual rules, and analysts caution he may yet prove the laws of the general election turnout operationsdo not apply to him.

There is no evidence that Republicans have the kind of presence in the field that Clinton does, said Hahrie Han, a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara who researches political organizing. But Trump is tapping into this populist outrage that is out there. We dont have a good sense of how strong it is and how much it will impact the ground game.

evan.halper@latimes.com

Follow me: @evanhalper

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An earlier version of this article indicated the amounts each candidate had spent on payroll were monthly. The totals are cumulative since the start of each campaign.

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Hillary Clinton has a massive fundraising advantage. She's ...

Hillary Clinton is back on the campaign trail after a weekend bout with pneumonia, but the episode left many Americans unsure about the state of her health, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

Clintons physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack, wrote Wednesday that the Democratic nominee continues to remain healthy and fit to serve as President of the United States.

But just 39 percent of Americans currently believe that Clinton is in good enough physical condition to effectively serve as president for the next four years, according to the poll. A nearly equal 38 percent say she isnt in good enough condition, and 23 percent say they are unsure.

That marks a significant shift from just over a week ago, when an Economist/YouGov survey posing the same question found that 52 percent of Americans believed Clinton was in good enough shape, 33 percent didnt think she was and 16 percent didnt know.

By a 14-point margin, 45 percent to 31 percent, those surveyed in the latest poll which predated Bardacks letter said that Clinton had not provided enough information about her physical health.

YouGov

Republicans have long been willing to cast aspersions on Clintons health, but until recently, those attacks seemed to have little resonance beyond those already disinclined to vote for her.

The latest survey, however, shows increased uncertainty among some of her supporters.

Although 64 percent of Democrats said in the most recent poll that Clinton was in good enough condition, thats down 20 points from the previous survey. Few believe outright that she is unhealthy, but more now say that theyre not sure.

YouGov

In contrast, 63 percent currently believe GOP nominee Donald Trump is in good enough condition, almost unchanged from the 62 percent who said so earlier this month.

(The survey was also taken largely before Trumps interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz on Wednesday, in which he discussed his love for fast food and shared that he considered emphatic hand-waving a form of exercise.)

Even before Clinton stumbled while leaving a Sept. 11 commemoration event, she had long battled allegations from Trump and his surrogates that she was concealing a serious health problem. Her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), denounced such claims as idiotic.

Thirty-six percent of Americans say they believe Clintons illness last weekend was a symptom of a larger problem with her health. Twenty-seven percent say that it was an isolated incident, and 21 percent say that speculating about her health is inappropriate.

More broadly, 45 percent of Americans say that people are right to question whether Clinton may have a serious health condition, while 37 percent believe claims that shes seriously ill are driven purely by politics.

Opinions on both questions are divided deeply along partisan lines: 62 percent of Republicans, but just 13 percent of Democrats, believe that Clinton has a larger health issue. Three-quarters of Republicans view questioning Clintons health as valid, while 62 percent of Democrats see such questions as a nakedly political tactic. Independents fall somewhere in the middle 39 percent believe that Clinton is concealing a larger health problem and 46 percent say that people are right to raise questions.

Politicians health wasnt always believed to be a topic for public debate. In a 2004 survey conducted by Gallup for CNN and USA Today, 61 percent of Americans said that a president should have the same right as every other citizen to keep his medical records private, while just 38 percent believed a president should publicly release all medical information that might affect his ability to serve his term. That conviction was shared largely across party lines, with 57 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of independents saying that a president had the right to keep medical records private.

A similar question on the HuffPost/YouGov poll garnered very different results, underscoring the degree to which Republicans especially have seized on the issue, but also indicating a more widespread shift in expectations for transparency.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans said that a presidential candidate should publicly release all medical information that might affect his or her ability to serve his term as president, while just 34 percent believed that a presidential candidate should have the same right as every other citizen to keep his or her medical records private.

Democrats were about evenly split between the two positions, while large majorities of both Republicans and independents said they favored greater transparency. Similarly, 87 percent of Republicans, but a comparably small 52 percent of Democrats, said it was fair for the media to question a candidates health.

While its clear that concerns about Clintons health have become more prominent, its less certain to what extent those concerns will affect the race.

The most likely outcome, of course, is that Democrats and others who are inclined to vote for Mrs. Clinton will stick with her, political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote Tuesday in The New York Times. He noted thatpast elections have shown that concerns about older candidates health came largely from voters who opposed them. However, a modern precedent does exist for serious concerns about a candidates age and health. Ronald Reagans meandering closing statement in the first presidential debate during the 1984 campaign was widely perceived to have harmed him.For Mrs. Clinton, then, the goal is to quickly reassure voters, as Mr. Reagan appeared to do back in 1984, that she is in good health.

One possible effect of an increased focus on the candidates health could be to raise the profile of their vice presidential nominees a prospect raised inadvertently by former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D), who said during a rally that Kaine was a wonderfully prepared person to be vice president, and to be the president if that ever became necessary.

On that measure, neither side holds much of an advantage. Thirty-two percent of Americans believe Kaine is qualified to serve as president, with 27 percent saying that he is not and 41 percent unsure. GOP pick Mike Pence fared almost identically, with 34 percent calling him qualified, 27 percent calling him unqualified and 40 percent not sure.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Sept. 12-Sept. 14 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGovs opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn moreabout this project andtake partin YouGovs nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be foundhere. More details on the polls methodology are availablehere.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGovs reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate.Click herefor a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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Uncertainty About Hillary Clinton's Health Is On The Rise ...

#HillarysStools

This is picking up steam. Apparently, all secret service and local police are on standby and told she may fall any second.

During her speeches this week they have removed the stools after being called out for hiding her health.

The rumor is she is calling for the debates to be done while sitting down. They dont think she can stand for 15-30 minutes let alone 2+ hours.

Hillary Clinton has serious health problems. She needs stools and pillows at hand constantly. She wants to debate Trump sitting down. She may be wearing adult diapers as well as a catheter bag. She may have the onset of dementia. It appears she has recurring seizures. She needs long bathroom breaks. She needs a lot of rest.

Trump is getting 10x the people at his rallies that Hillary is getting at hers. Few like her. Most despise hereven progressives.

Therefore, shes probably making sure the polls are rigged. She will probably rig the election, too. After all, she likes rigging things in her favor. She had the DNC rig things in her favor and against Bernie. Lets see if she tries this tactic again. If the lying criminal traitor Hillary Clinton gets away with it, it may be time for a revolution.

check out my official website for more cartoons! http://www.grrrgraphics.com

Right-wing Trump fans now attacking Hillary for ... sitting on stools

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Donald Trump: Also known to sit down sometimes Juicebrolawyer/Trump superfan Mike Cernovich has been pushing the ridiculous and thoroughly debunked Hillary Clinton is too physically frail to be President theory for some time now. Now hes found DRAMATIC NEW EVIDENCE to support his dubious sick Hillary thesis: Photos and video footage of Hillary SITTING and sometimes LEANING ON stools at

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He did not apologize or speak to his own role in spreading the falsehood, which many people see as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of America's first black president. Instead, Trump offered a curt admission tainted by yet another demonstrably false charge: that Hillary Clinton and her 2008 primary campaign "started" the racially charged smear.

Not exactly. The claim predates Trump's interest in promoting birtherism.

One of the first documented questions about Obama's provenance came in early 2007, when the right-wing Insight Magazine reported that researchers with ties to Clinton's campaign were trying to make hay over his schooling during the years he lived in Indonesia. The Clinton team denied this.

The rumor was that Obama attended a madrassa, or Muslim religious school. The connotation, at least at the time, would be that he had been educated in Islamist or radical anti-American ideology.

But even then, there was no suggestion Obama had been born outside the US.

There is no evidence that Clinton in 2007 or 2008 bolstered, supported or much less "started" the birther crusade.

And in recent years she has repeatedly blasted it, calling the movement "insidious" in a speech to supporters during an NAACP dinner in May. Last September, speaking to CNN's Don Lemon on the "Tom Joyner Morning Show," Clinton called the idea that she created the birther rumor "ludicrous."

"First of all," she added, "(the birther claims are) totally untrue. And secondly, you know, the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that."

Proponents of this allegation tend to point to a memo, written by Clinton pollster Mark Penn, and a conspiratorial email forwarded by a pair of campaign staffers in 2007.

He wrote: "I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

However unsavory the sentiment, Penn, who is not working for Clinton's current campaign, did not at any point address Obama's birthplace.

Clinton never pursued Penn's notion as a line of attack. Later in the year, the campaign dismissed two staff members in Iowa who passed along an email that cast Obama as a Muslim agent bent on "destroying the US from the inside out."

CNN has attempted unsuccessfully to reach Asher for comment. He told his former employer, McClatchy, Friday that he met with Blumenthal in 2008, and that the newspaper chain dispatched a reporter to Kenya to investigate. Nothing came of it. He said there already had been stories published with the allegation before that meeting.

Some 2008 staffers told CNN that Blumenthal was not officially part of the Clinton campaign, and a CNN check of Federal Election Commission records shows no payment to Blumenthal from the campaign.

In 2007 and 2008, the birther conspiracy mostly took a backseat to another bogus tale -- one that suggested Obama, a Christian, was secretly a Muslim.

Clinton: "Of course not. I mean, that's, you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that."

Kroft: "And you said you'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not a Muslim."

Clinton: "Right, right."

Kroft: "You don't believe that he's a Muslim or implying? Right?"

Clinton: "No. No. Why would I? No, there is nothing to base that on -- as far as I know."

Kroft: "It's just scurrilous --"

Clinton: "Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors that I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time."

But Clinton's use of five words -- "as far as I know" -- prompted outrage from many Obama supporters. Critics argued that they left the door open for unsavory innuendo.

Could Clinton have been more forceful in pushing back on the rumors? Yes.

Is there evidence that she or top campaign officials stoked the fire that Trump and assorted right wingers have openly and gleefully fueled in public for years? No.

Trump's decision to backtrack on the birther issue -- and pin it on Clinton -- is likely a campaign tactical move designed to improve his standing with moderate voters who might be susceptible to charges that Trump is racist.

The same survey found that 61% of Trump's own supporters did not subscribe to birther rumors, so the campaign likely considered that it had more to gain than to lose by dropping this as a wedge issue in his race against Clinton.

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No, Hillary Clinton did not - CNNPolitics.com

One day after dropping his long-standing claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, a claim that fueled several conspiracy theories, Donald Trump has ignited two more.

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Washington Post political columnist Philip Bump joins "CBS This Morning: Saturday" to discuss why Donald Trump's walk-back of comments about Pres...

Now he says his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was behind the so-called birther movement.

And for the second time in the presidential campaign, Trump is again raising the specter of violence against Clinton, this time joking about disarming her Secret Service agents.

CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett reports that after enjoying a rise in the polls and a week in which he stuck mostly to the script, it seems Trump is back to the flash-bang style of politics his supporters have come to enjoy.

But there was blowback on Saturday after the Republican nominee made another ad-libbed reference to violence and reignited controversy with a popular sitting president.

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At a rally in Miami Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton's bodyguards should drop their guns, then "let's see what happens." Trump has long claimed,...

I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons, they should disarm, Trump said during a rally in Miami on Friday night.

Trump seemed to turn gun control into a threat against Clinton.

Take their guns away, Trump said. She doesnt want guns. Take their, lets see what happens to her.

This after a day spent walking back his refusal to admit that the nations first black president is an American-born citizen.

Play Video

Donald Trump conceded Friday that President Barack Obama was born in the United States. He claimed to be burying the long-running issue -- but th...

President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period, Trump said Friday morning in Washington.

Trumps unwillingness a day earlier to make that same admission in a Washington Post interview gave new life to a conspiracy theory he has peddled since 2011.

Why doesnt he show his birth certificate? Trump said on The View.

You are not allowed to be a president if youre not born in this country, he told NBC News.

But Trump couldnt help but trade one fiction for a new legend.

Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy, Trump said Friday morning.

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The Georgia congressman and civil rights pioneer talks with "Face the Nation" moderator John Dickerson from the National Museum of African Americ...

Neither Clinton nor anyone on her 2008 campaign claimed then-Sen. Barack Obama was not born in the United States, though some Clinton supporters spread the idea through anonymous emails.

Its an issue even the president took a moment to address on Friday.

I was pretty confident about where I was born, Mr. Obama said in the Oval Office. I think most people were as well.

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At a Friday event at his new hotel in Washington, Donald Trump finally admitted that President Obama was born in the U.S. CBS News chief White Ho...

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus said Trump has moved beyond dogwhistle politics to the howls of wolves.

We will not elect a chief bigot of the United States of America, said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.

Donald Trump is nothing more than a two-bit racial arsonist, who for decades has done nothing but fan the flames of bigotry and hatred, said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York.

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Donald Trump's family foundation is under investigation by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. The Washington Post reported that Trump m...

And his opponent wasted no time in holding Trump accountable for his years as myth-maker.

Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple, Clinton said at the Black Womens Agenda Symposium, and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.

The media attention on these latest controversies has taken focus away from an investigation into Trumps foundation by the New York attorney general, but all of this is likely to serve as material for Clinton at the first presidential debate on Sept. 26.

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Donald Trump again raises specter of violence against ...