WTF Community

🗳 2020 General Election - Trump vs Biden

General Discussion
#30

More about where campaign funds went and as you say, @Windthin

  • Brad Parscale was behind some of the subtrefuge in hiding that money.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign violated the law by masking millions in spending, a nonprofit democracy group alleged in a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.
The Campaign Legal Center said in the 81-page filing that the president’s reelection campaign and campaign committee hid $170 million in spending to major vendors as well as family members and associates by diverting the money through firms headed by Brad Parscale, who was replaced as campaign manager earlier this month, as well as other senior campaign officials.
The nonprofit alleged that the campaign effectively laundered money in order to hide payments to contractors and advisors, including the maker of a campaign app, as well as Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host who is dating the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign violated the law by masking millions in spending, a nonprofit democracy group alleged in a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.

The Campaign Legal Center said in the 81-page filing that the president’s reelection campaign and campaign committee hid $170 million in spending to major vendors as well as family members and associates by diverting the money through firms headed by Brad Parscale, who was replaced as campaign manager earlier this month, as well as other senior campaign officials.

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#31

Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well-paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous, well-appointed office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.

Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchases was a pair of Super Bowl ads the campaign reserved for $11 million, according to Advertising Analytics — more than it has spent on TV in some top battleground states — a vanity splurge that allowed Mr. Trump to match the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg’s buy for the big game.

There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Mr. Trump and leak his remarks.

Some people familiar with the expenses noted that Mr. Parscale had a car and driver, an unusual expense for a campaign manager. Mr. Trump has told people gleefully that Mr. Stepien took a pay cut when the president gave him the job.

Critics of the campaign’s management say the lavish spending was ineffective: Mr. Trump enters the fall trailing in most national and battleground state polls, and Mr. Biden has surpassed him as a fund-raising powerhouse, after posting a record-setting haul of nearly $365 million in August. The Trump campaign has not revealed its August fund-raising figure.

“If you spend $800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question ‘What was the game plan?’” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small pro-Trump super PAC, and who accused Mr. Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.”

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#32

I literally just did a thread about how frequently Trump cronies are caught misusing funds, in response to the news that the Trump campaign is strapped for cash.

Now this:
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#33

The billion dollar loser Trump, who grifts for every dime, repeatedly goes bankrupt, & can only get loans through the shadiest bank on earth, is looking at investing $100M of “his own” money into his campaign.

No wonder “Deustche Bank” is trending on twitter.

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#34

Trump tells his supporters to become poll watchers with a baseless claim about fraud at voting locations

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#35

One for the election thread:

Treasury sanctions anti-Biden Ukrainian lawmaker for election interference

Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian, has promoted discredited allegations against the Democratic presidential nominee.

U.S. sanctions Ukrainian lawmaker for election interference targeting Biden

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🗳 2020 Primary Election
#36

Big story on hacking efforts from Microsoft and attempts to hack various political parties…:boom:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/russian-hackers-who-disrupted-2016-election-targeting-political-parties-again-microsoft-says/2020/09/10/301dd5fe-f36c-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html

Russian military spies who hacked and leaked Democratic emails to inject chaos into the 2016 presidential election are active again, targeting political parties, advocacy groups and consultants, Microsoft announced Thursday.

China and Iran are also attempting to penetrate the Microsoft email accounts of people affiliated with the political campaigns, though the efforts against the campaigns of President Trump by Iran and the Democratic nominee Joe Biden by China were not successful, the firm said.

The Republican National Committee also was unsuccessfully targeted, said a person familiar with the matter, but it is unclear by which country.

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#37

Am glad that Rep Schiff, Pelosi and other Dems laid the groundwork to say that the Intel agencies were not divulging more than they wanted to with regard to Russian (foreign) activity. This in turn became the revealing of the whistleblower revised rebuttal (whatever it is called) and now Microsoft is revealing waaaay more.

The Russian military intelligence unit that attacked the Democratic National Committee four years ago is back with a series of new, more stealthy hacks aimed at campaign staff, consultants and think tanks associated with both Democrats and Republicans.

That warning was issued on Thursday by the Microsoft Corporation, in an assessment that is far more detailed than any yet made public by American intelligence agencies.

The findings come one day after a government whistle-blower claimed that officials at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security suppressed intelligence concerning Russia’s continuing interference because it “made the president look bad,” and instructed government analysts to instead focus on interference by China and Iran.

Microsoft did find that Chinese and Iranian hackers have been active — but often not in the way that President Trump and his aides have suggested.

Contrary to an assessment by the director of national intelligence last month that said China preferred former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the election, Microsoft found that Chinese hackers have been attacking the private email accounts of Mr. Biden’s campaign staff, along with a range of other prominent individuals in academia and the national security establishment, including groups like the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center.

Notably, only one of the Chinese targets detected by Microsoft was affiliated with Mr. Trump, a former administration official whom Microsoft declined to name.

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#38

omg thank you @anon95374541 I moved Windthin’s article to the wrong f*ing thread ffs! You’re the best :hugs:

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#39

More,

We have observed that:

  • Strontium, operating from Russia, has attacked more than 200 organizations including political campaigns, advocacy groups, parties and political consultants
  • Zirconium, operating from China, has attacked high-profile individuals associated with the election, including people associated with the Joe Biden for President campaign and prominent leaders in the international affairs community
  • Phosphorus, operating from Iran, has continued to attack the personal accounts of people associated with the Donald J. Trump for President campaign
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#40

Trump held six indoor rallies after acknowledging the coronavirus was airborne

Despite raising these concerns with Woodward, Mr. Trump held six rallies indoors between February 7 and March 2. Public health experts have raised concerns about holding large events in indoor venues, given the risk of spreading the virus. Mr. Trump participated in rallies in New Hampshire on February 10; Arizona on February 19; Colorado on February 20; February 21 in Nevada; South Carolina on February 28; and in North Carolina on March 2. No social distancing measures were put in place for these rallies.

The president’s campaign rallies in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and North Carolina occurred in the days before the Democratic primaries in those respective states. The Trump campaign canceled its planned March 19 rally in Wisconsin due to the coronavirus.

Let’s not forget

The diagnosis came more than a week after Cain had attended a rally for Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The announcement of the diagnosis said Cain “did not require a respirator” at the time he was first hospitalized. But Cain’s condition worsened over time, despite some glimmers of hope, according to Calabrese.

His campaign is like one big super spreader event.
How are people not totally grossed out by these large rallys? People be so gross to me right now. :unamused: What happened to all that psych babble about conservative leaning folks being easily disgusted? I’m not seeing it.

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🤮 Coronavirus (Community Thread)
#41

By mid November, we should have results for the Presidency. The things that a sitting president might have going for him are now off the table, aside from incumbency. T’s solid with his base
yet his unfavorables are about 51%.

Aside from the 6 battleground states, and even with FL in a dead heat, the conditions within which T could win would include - a better economy, and no pandemic. But these two items are not going away anytime soon. One of the Republican strategiest Stuart Stevens, thought that if T could give an ‘apology’ for his handling of the pandemic, then people might feel better towards him. Here we have the rock and hard place and VERY FAVORABLE to the Dems, despite the circumstances…T will NEVER APOLOGIZE.

So the other factors that T could harness - scare and fearmonger the country, divide and conquer, prevent voting, have social media and servers upended by Russia and friends, and invasive cheating at the polls which T and his people (if T wins) will try to make stick.

So no sure path to victory for anyone. But we do have an energized pack of voters out there to get out the vote.

The professionals who remain at Trump reëlection headquarters are, with fewer than sixty days until the election, faced with a challenging set of statistics. For months, Joe Biden has led in national polls by at least seven percentage points. In order to win the Electoral College, Trump would need to beat Biden in about half of six swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. He trails Biden in all of them, though the margin in North Carolina and Florida is under two per cent. About forty-two per cent of Americans approve of the job he has done as President, a number that has remained fairly constant throughout his Presidency, but fifty-four per cent now disapprove, which puts him behind the ratings of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan at similar points in their reëlection campaigns—though well ahead of George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. In other words, Trump looks likely to be either the least popular incumbent to win reëlection in the modern polling era or the most popular one to lose it.

To a younger generation of Republican consultants—those who have made their careers in the rancorous twenty-first century, when there have been sharp partisan divisions and few swing voters—those numbers don’t look so bad. The President, they point out, has consolidated his support among Republicans, roughly ninety per cent of whom say they support him. Nearly every poll that has asked voters whom they trust to manage the economy has found a preference for Trump over Biden, even polls that have Biden up by ten points—which suggests that any skeptical Republicans and independents might be persuaded to vote for Trump because of their perceived self-interest. Then, too, almost all of Trump’s decline has taken place among white voters. Among Latinos—a crucial electoral coalition in the swing states of Florida and Arizona—Trump’s position has held steady and may even have strengthened. Last month, a Public Religion Research Institute poll put his approval rating among Latinos in 2020 at thirty-six per cent, eight points ahead of the percentage of Latino voters that exit polls found he won in 2016. More ominously for Democrats, a recent survey of Florida Hispanic voters found Biden polling eleven points behind Hillary Clinton’s exit-poll results in 2016.

But even these strengths look more suspect on closer examination. They do not, for one thing, account for the immense suffering of the coronavirus pandemic, in which more than a hundred and ninety thousand Americans, many of them elderly, have died, and nearly thirty million people have begun receiving unemployment benefits. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about twenty points among senior citizens; now poll after poll finds that he leads Biden among seniors by only a few points. His strength on the economy may have been buoyed by the temporary unemployment benefits that Democrats demanded this spring, but those benefits have begun to expire, and Republicans have declined to renew them. The Census Bureau has been surveying households this summer and has asked families whether they expect to make their next month’s rent or mortgage payment. The responses put a lump in your throat. Worse numbers came midway through the summer, when in Florida, a state the President has to win, thirty-two per cent of respondents said that they had either missed their last housing payment or did not feel more than slightly confident that they would meet the next one.

Such numbers are almost unimaginably bleak. So it surprised me a little to notice, in poll after poll, that the public’s view of Trump’s handling of the virus isn’t so bad—it tends to track with his over-all approval ratings and to run five or ten points ahead of the public’s view of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s death. Most Republicans think that Trump is doing a fine job handling the pandemic, the universal crisis that he often seemed to want to minimize, but millions of Republicans disliked his response to demands for racial equity—an issue that he has deliberately sought to weaponize because he thought it might give him an advantage.

I mentioned this discrepancy to Charles Franklin, who runs the highly regarded Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin voters. Franklin said that he had been looking into that issue: “Race is by far his worst evaluation, both in our data but, more importantly, in national data, and it has been for years.” Franklin found that most Trump voters in Wisconsin don’t support his message on race—not even close. “It is really a rural and a non-college phenomenon,” he said. In the suburbs of Milwaukee, as well as smaller cities, such as Green Bay and Appleton, “you have a Republican constituency that has never really wanted to embrace the negative messages on race that he focusses on and who are reluctant to see themselves as racist.” This pattern held true even after the violence in Portland and Kenosha. Trump spent days tweeting about “LAW & ORDER!” and claiming that liberal cities needed a strong hand. But the following week, polls suggested that this gambit hadn’t worked. Trump remained behind in every swing state, and an ABC poll found that fifty-five per cent of voters thought that Trump’s response to the protests made the situation worse, while only thirteen per cent thought that it made the situation better.

The raw statistical material is unpromising, but politics, at the highest level, is just talk. Is there a story that Trump could tell that would change something important about the election? Is there a way, in other words, that he might alchemize a likely loss into a win? Just before the Conventions, I called political consultants of every stripe—devoted and dissident Republicans, Democrats, progressives, and independents—to see whether they could imagine a winning path for the President. I found that, because of the pandemic, a striking number of them seemed to have spent the spring and summer far from Washington, holed up in their ski houses. (“Scout, no,” one former Presidential adviser instructed his dog, when I reached him in the Rockies. “No bark.”) But I also found that the isolation, and maybe the vistas, and maybe, too, the nearing possibility of a post-strategist politics, had caused them to focus on a single, pivotal question. Spin is such a weak, twentieth-century term for hard twenty-first-century realities: the pandemic, with more than a hundred and ninety thousand dead; the mass unemployment; the continuing patterns of unrest; the climate-catastrophe wildfires that have menaced Silicon Valley, the center of America’s twenty-first-century economy. Nevertheless, the consultants wondered, can all of this somehow be spun?

“I actually have a strong opinion about that,” Stuart Stevens, the Republican strategist who ran Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign, said, when I reached him in Stowe, Vermont. “If you are thinking about what it takes for an unpopular incumbent to come back and win, there actually is a significant history. And I don’t know of any process that didn’t involve a mea culpa—an apology.” :exclamation::exclamation::exclamation:

In general, this is a losing tide for Republicans—the Party washing out from growing metro areas, leaving the suburbs open for Democrats. But Thompson and other Republicans working on congressional elections in 2020 believe that with the right message and a strong enough economy the demographic tide could be slowed. Maybe enough suburban Republicans could be persuaded to vote for their party’s candidate one last time, even though they dislike Trump. Thompson pointed to a couple of clear demographic opportunities. One was non-college-educated Latino men under fifty, who often have socially conservative views and low levels of social attachment—very similar characteristics to the white voters who had followed Trump into his coalition. “And when you ask them in polls, a lot of Hispanics describe themselves as white, even though political professionals say they are Hispanic,” Thompson said. A second, even bigger group is traditional suburban Republicans who do not regularly attend church; many are women in households attached to small businesses, whose social conservatism has helped them resist the general turn toward Democrats.

“And Trump doesn’t disgust them?” I asked.

Pollsters don’t ask about disgust, Thompson said. But those voters didn’t much like him.

One question that political consultants ask themselves a lot now is whether they should think about political talent differently than they have in the past. Biden’s ascendence suggests that not much has changed—that it is still important to channel the center of the country, that elections are still decided by the middle. But Trump’s triumphs make the opposite case, that elections now are just base versus base—trench warfare—and that they require a politician with more of a talent for incitement. This has been the story of much of American politics since the rise of the Tea Party, in 2010—of Trump but also of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and of Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, all of whom evoke strong positive reactions within their own party and strong negative ones within the other, and who do not spend much time competing for a diminishing center.

…

Less than sixty days out from the election, Trump, unburdened by official campaign themes or facts, seems to be chasing a surprisingly large and protean coalition. At a Florida rally on Tuesday, Trump, who has long publicly doubted the science of climate change and championed coal mining and fracking, called himself “the great environmentalist” and called on Congress to expand protections against offshore drilling. Roe said that Trump might still be the Party’s best bet to reach conservative Latino and Black voters. He also pointed out that Trump has had more success at bringing white working-class voters into the Party than anyone since Reagan. Even in a pandemic, Trump’s crowds fill stadiums and overflow into parking lots. Roe said, “It’s a startling thing to say, but he’s the best crossover politician Republicans have.”

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#42

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Trump’s overtures struggle to register with religious voters

New signs point to Trump losing a sizable chunk of his Christian voters, upending his path to reelection.

He recently renewed his promise to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He drew bipartisan praise for brokering an agreement that’s expected to boost Israel’s influence in the Middle East. And he released an updated list of Supreme Court nominees on Wednesday.

But so far, President Donald Trump’s overtures to religious voters appear to be falling flat.

Months after worries first exploded inside the Trump campaign over his eroding support among white evangelicals and Roman Catholics, some of the president’s top religious allies are now in a panic — concerned that Joe Biden’s attentiveness to Christian voters, whom Democrats largely ignored in 2016, is having an impact where the president can least afford it.

One prominent evangelical leader close to the White House said Biden’s policy positions on abortion and religious freedom, which would normally spoil how some religious voters view the Democratic presidential nominee, have been overshadowed by the contrast between the former vice president’s palpable faith and Trump’s transactional view of religion. Another chided Trump for his “cold response” to the nationwide reckoning over systemic racism, claiming the president’s law-and-order messaging has given Biden an opening to connect with churchgoing Americans who are accustomed to calls for courage and justice.

Their concerns may be registering, according to a new study of Catholic and evangelical voters that suggests Trump is poised to lose a sizable chunk of his Christian voters in November, raising questions about his path to reelection and the potential value in religious outreach that Biden’s predecessor Hillary Clinton largely eschewed.

The online survey, which was commissioned by the left-leaning group Vote Common Good and conducted by a team of academic pollsters from the University of Southern California, Duke University, University of Maryland College Park and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, predicts an 11 percentage point swing toward Biden among evangelicals and Catholics who backed Trump in 2016, based on input from both demographics across five major 2020 battleground states: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Other polls have captured similar gains in Biden’s religious support, including an August survey by Fox News that showed the former vice president at 28 percent support among white evangelicals — up 12 percentage points from 2016 exit polls for the Democratic nominee.

“The cumulative effect of the convention and the way that faith has been woven into Biden’s messaging speaks to the kinds of numbers we’re now seeing,” said Michael Wear, who directed faith outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

While Biden’s campaign “hasn’t done everything they could” to reach people of faith, according to Wear, he said Trump’s blunt messaging on coronavirus and race has created an opportunity for the Democratic nominee to “overturn the who-shares-your-values debate that Republicans have been winning.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The “Vice and Virtue” survey by VCG, set to be released Thursday, is based on input from 1,430 self-described evangelicals and Catholics in five swing states who were surveyed from Aug. 11 to Aug. 26. It includes an overall margin of error plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Wendy Wood, a USC psychology professor and one of the pollsters, said the survey not only identified the principles that distinguish evangelicals and Catholics from other voters, but also demonstrated how those principles will “relate to their vote choice” come November.

According to the study, evangelical voters are split over which presidential candidate is more virtuous, while Catholic voters selected Biden over Trump by a 21-point margin. The largest gaps in voter perceptions of Biden and Trump emerged when respondents were asked to weigh each candidate against commonly recognized Christian virtues, including generosity, diligence, chastity, kindness, patience, modesty and humility. Only 22 percent of respondents gave the president a higher rating on his displays of humility and modesty versus Biden’s, while the pollsters cited Trump’s perceived lack of kindness — 44 percent of respondents said Biden is more kind than Trump, while 30 percent said Trump is kinder — as the leading cause of defections among Catholics and evangelicals who supported him in 2016.

“While it was baked in back in 2016 that Donald Trump was bombastic and crude, he always hinted that he would be presidential when he needed to be presidential,” said Doug Pagitt, a Minnesota-based pastor and an executive director of Vote Common Good, adding that some 2016 religious Trump voters have since “woken up to the fact that [Trump] has not changed one bit.”

“People of faith who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton saw her as more corrupt and less kind than Donald Trump, and now some of those same voters see Donald Trump as more corrupt and less kind than Biden,” Pagitt said.

The Trump campaign sees it differently. In its view, most religious voters are less concerned with a candidate’s religiosity or virtuosity than they are with the impact of proposed policies. Biden, campaign officials claim, has adopted unreasonable positions on the issues that matter most to Catholics and evangelicals, including judicial appointments, religious freedom and abortion.

“I don’t think it’s going to work for Biden to say, ‘Don’t look at my policies, just look at the fact that I carry a rosary in my pocket,” said former GOP Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a member of the president’s Catholics for Trump advisory board.

“The idea that Biden is a nice guy with good policies when he picked a very pro-abortion running mate who wants religious Americans to pay for abortion, it’s just not going to work,” he added.

Trump went even further last month when he questioned the depth of Biden’s faith and accused his opponent of being “against God.” During an Aug. 6 appearance in Ohio, the president told his supporters Biden wants to “hurt the Bible [and] hurt God.”

Though the former vice president has outlined a plan for “safe-guarding America’s faith-based communities” on his campaign website, the plan gives outsized attention to protecting the physical safety of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities from “extremist violence” as opposed to the so-called “conscience” protections — which prohibit certain employers from coercing workers into performing services that violate their religious beliefs — that are at the core of Trump’s platform on religious freedom.

Biden also walked back his support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion procedures, early on in the Democratic primary — a development that the Trump campaign and its conservative allies have used to court Catholic voters.

“I do think on both the positive side and the defensive side, the Biden campaign has work to do over the next eight weeks,” said Wear, noting the presidential debates are likely to expose Biden to questions about abortion and religious freedom that he believes Clinton fumbled in 2016. Wear has previously suggested that Clinton’s support for repealing the Hyde Amendment damaged her own appeal with religious voters in 2016.

“If he answers the question like the nominee in 2016 did and lacks any sense of the moral nuance he’s brought these issues his entire career, it could be a big moment against him,” suggested Wear. “On the flip side, there’s a lot he can do to point out the damage Trump’s policies have done to religious services like World Relief, and the causes of racial justice and environmental stewardship.”

One adviser to the Trump campaign said the debates this fall will test the president’s ability to show he understands the importance of the policy promises he’s made to his religious supporters in the wake of comments and photo ops that have raised questions about his ability to relate to the conservative Christians who support him.

A new book by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen claims the thrice-married New York businessman once remarked to aides after meeting with evangelical leaders in 2016, “Can you believe people believe that bull----?” The president was also roundly criticized earlier this summer for waving a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House minutes after law enforcement officials tear-gassed protesters to clear the area for his arrival.

“This is a different election for several reasons, but one of them is that the sheer disgust most religious voters felt for Hillary Clinton in 2016 doesn’t exist with Joe Biden,” said the Trump adviser. “If President Trump wants to ensure those voters still view him as the best choice, he needs to show he’s not just a champion of their causes but a believer in the cause himself.”

While it’s unlikely Biden will pull in a majority of Catholic or evangelical voters on Election Day, Trump could find himself in serious jeopardy if the Democratic nominee shaves off even a couple of percentage points in the president’s support among white evangelicals and Catholics. A central question of the president’s reelection strategy is whether he can marginally improve his 2016 levels of support among religious Americans, and black and Hispanic voters, to offset anticipated declines in his support among white women and suburban voters.

Pagitt believes the current environment — with a Covid-19 death toll nearing 200,000 in the U.S. and recent police-involved shootings igniting a nationwide conversation about racism — will preclude Trump from expanding his appeal among religious Americans before the Nov. 3 election, in addition to making it more difficult for him to maintain his grasp on the evangelical and Catholic voters who backed him four years ago.

“Joe Biden is getting support from religious voters who don’t even know what his religious background is,” he said. “This isn’t tribal voting. There’s an enormous amount of religious Americans who didn’t think there were good options in 2016 and voted for Trump, but now see Biden as the superior option.”

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#43

Twitter And Facebook Flag Trump’s Mail-In Voting Post for Platform Violations

Twitter and Facebook both flagged posts by President Trump on Saturday that encouraged Americans to vote by mail as early as possible and then follow up that vote by going to the polls on Election Day to check that it was counted — action that could cause unnecessarily long lines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“NORTH CAROLINA: To make sure your Ballot COUNTS, sign & send it in EARLY,” the tweet and Facebook post read. “When Polls open, go to your Polling Place to see if it was COUNTED. IF NOT, VOTE! Your signed Ballot will not count because your vote has been posted. Don’t let them illegally take your vote away from you!”

Twitter placed a banner over the tweet that said it “violated the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity” and noted that the platform kept the post accessible because “it may be in the public’s interest.” Facebook also placed a banner underneath the post with a link to their voting information center and a note that read: “Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the U.S. and the same is predicted this year.”

In response to the president’s comments, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, encouraged people to simply vote by sending in their ballot and tracking it online. He warned that voting twice is a felony.

“The only GOOD thing about the President’s tweet is that he FINALLY encourages voters to VOTE BY MAIL,” Stein tweeted. “It’s an easy, safe & secure way to cast a ballot.”

Trump’s tweet comes just days after the North Carolina State Board of Elections reminded voters that it is illegal to cast a ballot twice after the president encouraged voters to do just that in another series of tweets that Twitter blocked. His comments went against guidance from Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the election board, who said in a statement on Sept. 3 that voters should not show up to a polling place on Election Day if they already voted by mail.

“That is not necessary, and it would lead to longer lines and the possibility of spreading COVID-19,” the statement read.

Although the president has voted by mail, he has attacked mail-in voting as a potential avenue for voter fraud. In June, he tweeted that the country should consider delaying the election because of the pandemic and increased use of mail-in voting (he cannot do this). Election experts say that while there is slightly more fraud in mail-in voting than with in-person voting, election fraud is extremely rare in all instances.

With just 51 days until Election Day, efforts to expand mail-in voting have increased as a way to avoid overcrowding at polling places during the coronavirus pandemic. According to The New York Times , at least 75% of all American voters are eligible to vote by mail-in ballot, the most in U.S. history.

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#44

Finally Bloomberg shows up with some cash which he promised in March. He’s going to support Biden’s campaign to win in FL which is virtually tied. Thanks for finally acting…with a big give.

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, a massive late-stage infusion of cash that could reshape the presidential contest in a costly toss-up state central to President Trump’s reelection hopes.

Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.

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#45

How the Trump Campaign’s Mobile App Is Collecting Massive Amounts of Voter Data

The Trump 2020 app is a massive data-collection tool in its own right. When it launched, on April 23rd, Parscale, who was then Trump’s campaign manager, urged his followers on Facebook to “download the groundbreaking Official Trump 2020 App—unlike other lame political apps you’ve seen.” Despite the hype, the 2020 app recapitulates many of the functions found on the 2016 app. There’s a news feed with Trump’s social-media posts, an events calendar, and recorded videos. The “gaming” features that distinguished the 2016 app are still prominent—a “Trump’s army” member who accumulates a hundred thousand points by sharing contacts or raising money is promised a photograph with the President, while other members can use points to get discounts on MAGA gear. Users are prompted to invite friends to download the app—more points!—and can use the app to sign up to make calls on behalf of the campaign, to be a poll watcher, to register voters, and to get tickets to virtual and in-person events.

The most obvious new feature on the 2020 app is a live news broadcast, carefully curated by the campaign to push the President’s talking points. It is hosted by a cast of campaign surrogates, including Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend and the campaign’s national finance chair. There are also channels aimed at particular demographic groups, among them Women for Trump, Black Voices for Trump, and Latinos for Trump. Though it is a crude approximation of a traditional news outlet, the Trump app enables users to stay fully sequestered within the fact-optional Trump universe. “I think everything we do is to counter the media,” Parscale told Reuters in June. “This is another tool in the tool shed to fight that fight, and it’s a big tool.” In May, after Twitter labelled one of Trump’s tweets as being in violation of its standards, sparking renewed claims of liberal-media censorship of conservatives (despite the fact that the tweet was not taken down), downloads of the campaign app soared.

To access the Trump app, users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign. “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” Parscale told Reuters. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.” Michael Marinaccio, the chief operating officer of Data Trust, a private Republican data company, said recently that “what’s new this year, or at least a sense of urgency, is getting as many cell-phone numbers as we can in the voter file data.” An effective way to do that is to entice supporters to share not only their own cell-phone numbers with the campaign but those of their contacts as well. One estimate, by Eliran Sapir, the C.E.O. of Apptopia, a mobile-analytics company, is that 1.4 million app downloads could provide upward of a hundred million phone numbers. This will enable the Trump campaign to find and target people who have not consented to handing over their personal information. It’s not unlike how Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of nearly ninety million unsuspecting Facebook users, only this time it is one’s friends, family, and acquaintances who are willfully handing over the data for a chance to get a twenty-five-dollar discount on a MAGA hat.

By contrast, the new Biden app still collects data on users, but it outlines the specific uses of that data and doesn’t automatically collect the e-mail and phone numbers of users’ friends and family. “Unlike the Biden app, which seeks to provide users with awareness and control of the specific uses of their data, the Trump app collects as much as it can using an opt-out system and makes no promises as to the specific uses of that data,” Samuel Woolley, the director of the propaganda research project at the University of Texas’s Center for Media Engagement, told me. “They just try to get people to turn over as much as possible.”

If you use the Trump app, it’s collecting data about not just you but all your friends and family too.

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#46

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Adding

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#47

From the Coloradio Secretary of State:
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In other news:

Mike Bloomberg to spend at least $100 million in Florida to benefit Joe Biden

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#48

The Mormons are not happy with Trump either.

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#49

A big retailer - Target has come to the table with paying its workers to work at the polls on election day, as well as a few others - Warby Parker, Tory Burch and zold Navy.

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Companies from Old Navy to Tory Burch, Warby Parker and Target are doing something different this year to help fill a shortage of poll workers on Election Day.

Those four companies have announced they will pay store employees who serve as poll workers for eight hours of work.

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