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🗳 2020 General Election - Trump vs Biden

The headline on that article is nuts.

Could be infectious? He could be dead. This is not the sort of thing where he should be traveling and debating and doing ANY of this!

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Another Blue Chip Company recognized Biden’s lead and potential win would spead up the economy.

It’s true that if Democrats sweep into power early next year, it would likely translate to higher taxes and regulation. Such a reversal from the Trump agenda could eat into corporate profits and the earnings for affluent families.

But Joe Biden is also promising a bonanza of government spending that, coupled with extremely low interest rates, would likely speed up the economy.

Goldman Sachs wrote that a blue wave would “sharply raise the probability” of a fiscal stimulus package of at least $2 trillion shortly after the January 20 inauguration. The bank also cited Biden’s longer-term spending plans on infrastructure, climate, health care and education.

Taken together, this spending “would at least match the likely longer-term tax increases on corporations and upper-income earnings,” Goldman Sachs wrote.

“It would likely result in substantially easier US fiscal policy, a reduced risk of renewed trade escalation, and a firmer global growth outlook,” the report said.

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Trump support craters after contracting coronavirus, new FPU/Herald poll reveals

In two days of polling before Trump got COVID, the president trailed Biden by just a 46-41% margin. In the three days of polling after the coronavirus diagnosis, Biden held a 55-34% lead. That means Biden’s lead grew by a whopping 16 points from pre-COVID to post-COVID.

Among all the 1,003 registered voters in the nationwide Franklin Pierce-Herald poll, Biden now holds a 51-37% lead over Trump less than a month before Election Day. Three percent support a third party candidate while 8% say they are still undecided.

Biden is holding a 12-point lead among independent voters — a key to the election in battleground states. The former vice president also holds a massive 58-31% lead among women voters. Male voters are evenly split between Trump and Biden, the poll shows.

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Biden giving speech at Gettysburg - where Lincoln made his address.
Trying to project strength, yet compassion for America as a divided nation, and a country that has mixed thoughts on science. Recognizes it will be difficult but a duty to do so.

In a speech in Gettysburg, where a Civil War battlefield serves as a symbol of a country divided against itself, Mr. Biden will reiterate the notion that the election is “a battle for a soul of the nation,” according to his campaign, reprising a central theme of his candidacy four weeks before Election Day.

Though it is perhaps too soon for the address to amount to a closing argument, his remarks suggest that he intends to end his bid for the White House as he began it: by casting the election as a national emergency whose outcome will determine the trajectory of the country for years to come.

Seizing on the latest President Trump-fueled chaos — this time the president’s cavalier attitude toward the coronavirus despite being sickened by it himself — Mr. Biden, whose campaign said he had again tested negative for the virus on Tuesday, intends to build on his longstanding arguments about the need for calm and to further make the case for himself as a unifying figure who transcends partisan battle lines.

Earlier in the day, at the end of a virtual fund-raising event, Mr. Biden said he had “worked and worked and worked on” the speech and indicated it would be “about how the soul of America and racial equality and what significant trouble we’re in right now.”

He’s earnest, and heartfelt…and the only choice right now.

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:boom: :boom: :boom: :pray: :pray: :pray:

As sung to the tune EVITA…a presidential take-down

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‘Fed up’: Trump losing support of key demographic ahead of election, polls show

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It would be pretty great if he somehow misunderstood and showed up to the debate in a bathing suit and floaties. It might make this one actually worth watching. I tried to watch clips of the last one and only made it about 30 seconds.

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It will all come down to the Electoral Vote count…and every state counts. WI is pretty close and there are very questionable actions at the polls which could be considered roadblocks to safe voting.

President Donald Trump’s once-comfortable advantage in the pivotal region of Wisconsin around the blue-collar hub of Green Bay has dwindled. In suburban Milwaukee, long a Republican-dominated area, it has thinned as well.

And his supporters are far from confident he can find thousands of new voters in the state’s sparsely populated rural areas to make up for the setbacks.

Trump’s path to victory in Wisconsin, a state he won narrowly in 2016, has become increasingly complicated, and so has his path to the 270 electoral votes needed for his reelection.

“It’s challenging. There are far more states in play in 2020 than there were in 2016,” said Whit Ayers, a veteran Republican pollster. “And they include states Trump won by a significant margin like Arizona, Iowa, Ohio and Georgia.”

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Here comes a truthful Ted Cruz

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More obfuscation on Trump’s part…
and a response from Sen Chris Murphy…(D-CT)

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New polls show Trump is trailing not just in must-win battlegrounds but, according to private GOP surveys, is repelling independents to point where Biden has drawn closer in solidly red states, including Montana, Kansas, Missouri.


Cindy Bishop is the sort of voter who has some Republicans bracing for a wipeout next month.

Standing inside her garage, shielded from the 102-degree desert heat, Bishop, a 61-year-old medical professional, said she voted for Trump four years ago because “he wasn’t a politician.” But then, she said, “I got a taste of him and I’m like, ‘God, he’s disrespectful’ — there’s so much about him I don’t like.” She is now leaning toward Joe Biden.

The inflammatory behavior that has alienated voters beyond his base has long posed the most significant impediment to Trump’s reelection. But one week after he rampaged through the first presidential debate and then was hospitalized with the coronavirus, only to keep minimizing the disease as it spread through his White House, the president’s conduct is not only undermining his own campaign but threatening his entire party.

New polls show Trump’s support is collapsing nationally, as he alienates women, seniors and suburbanites. He is trailing not just in must-win battlegrounds but according to private GOP surveys, he is repelling independents to the point where Biden has drawn closer in solidly red states, including Montana, Kansas and Missouri, people briefed on the data said.

Nowhere has Trump harmed himself and his party more than across the Sun Belt, where the electoral coalition that secured a generation of Republican dominance is in danger of coming apart.

“There are limits to what people can take with the irresponsibility, the untruthfulness, just the whole persona,” said Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona. Flake is crossing party lines to support Biden, who made his first visit of the general election here Thursday.

Many of the Sun Belt states seemingly within Biden’s reach resisted the most stringent public-health policies to battle the coronavirus. As a result, states like Arizona, Georgia and Texas faced a powerful wave of infections for much of the summer, setting back efforts to revive commercial activity.

In Arizona, a low-tax, regulation-resistant state, the focus on reviving business helped drive the unemployment rate down to 5.9% in August, with some of that apparent improvement coming from people leaving the labor force in a state with a large hospitality sector that has suffered in the pandemic.

Still, Arizona continues to face a long climb to return to its pre-pandemic economy. Twice as many Arizona residents filed new claims for unemployment benefits at the end of September than they did at the previous time last year, the Labor Department reports.

Biden is mounting an assertive campaign and facing rising pressure to do more in the historically Republican region. He is buttressed by a fundraising gusher for Democratic candidates, overwhelming support from people of color and defections from the GOP among college-educated whites in and around cities like Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix.

“Cities in states like Arizona and Texas are attracting young people, highly-educated people, and people of color — all groups that the national Republican Party has walked away from the last four years,” said the Oklahoma City mayor, David F. Holt, a Republican. “This losing demographic bet against big cities and their residents is putting Sun Belt states in play.”

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a Republican who like Holt has won in increasingly forbidding environments, said his party needed to recognize an enduring verity about politics: “It’s a game of addition.”

Some of the states that appear effectively tied today, such as North Carolina and Georgia, could still prove difficult for Biden to carry. Few Democratic nominees have proved able to forge coalitions to tip these states and the president’s appeal among working-class whites in the South will at least keep him competitive.

Even in South Carolina, Republicans have grown deeply concerned about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s reelection campaign, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has had several sobering conversations with Graham, according to Republicans familiar with the discussions.

The Senate Republican campaign arm has also intervened in Graham’s imperiled campaign, with a handful of senior aides at the committee taking a more hands-on role.On Thursday, in a conference call with a group of lobbyists, McConnell vented that the party’s Senate candidates are being financially overwhelmed because of small-dollar contributions to ActBlue, the online liberal fundraising hub.

In some ways, the shifts in the Sun Belt have accelerated since Trump’s nomination four years ago.

Even as he stunned Hillary Clinton in three crucial Great Lakes states, he lost Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico and fared worse in Arizona, Texas and Georgia than Mitt Romney had four years earlier.

Two years later, Democrats performed even better in a series of high-profile races across the region with college-educated white voters and people of color.

Now Republicans are at risk of that wave cresting again, and even higher.

“Racism and misogyny and demagoguery and being just hateful and cruel and intolerant are not things in the Southwest that play very well,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat. She said Republicans had left a wide space for her party in her region by clinging to “messaging that’s 40 years old” on issues like immigration and climate.

If Biden wins by simply flipping back the Democratic-leaning Great Lakes states, Trump and his allies can pin the blame on the virus. But if Trump loses across the South and West, it would force a much deeper introspection on the right about Trump and Trumpism — and their electoral future in the fastest-growing and most diverse part of the country.

“The Southern strategy has been flipped on its head,” said Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., alluding to the Nixon-era tactic of expanding the Republican coalition by winning in once-Democratic strongholds of the South.

This is part of the case that former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas is making to Biden’s campaign.

Polls show the presidential race in Texas is effectively tied, and congressional polling for both parties has found Biden running up significant leads across the state’s once-red suburbs. A Biden victory there could be transformational, providing Democrats an opportunity to enlarge their House majority, shape redistricting and deliver a devastating psychological blow to Republicans.“Texas is really Biden’s to lose if he invests now, and that must include his time and presence in the state,” O’Rourke said. “He cannot only win our 38 electoral votes but really help down ballot Democrats, lock in our maps for 10 years, deny Trump the chance to declare victory illegally and send Trumpism on the run.”

O’Rourke said Biden heard him out and promised “full consideration.” For now, Biden’s campaign is increasing its ad spending in the state and dispatching his wife, Jill, there next week.

Texas’ growth has been explosive: Over 1.5 million new voters have registered since 2016, a third of them in the diverse, transplant-filled counties that include San Antonio, Houston and Austin. The anger toward Trump has emboldened Democratic candidates to run more audacious campaigns.

In a Dallas-area House district held by a Republican who’s retiring, the Democratic Party is sending mailers telling voters that their nominee will “stand up to President Trump.” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, running for reelection, has lamented privately that Trump is stuck in the low 40s in polling, holding back other Republicans, people familiar with his comments said.

Trump is at even greater risk in the next-largest red state in the South: Georgia. In the latest Republican polling, Trump has fallen several points behind Biden in the state, where 16 Electoral College votes, two Senate seats and several competitive House races are on the ballot.

“It feels like after the debate there was a real shift,” said state Sen. Jennifer Jordan, a Democrat from suburban Atlanta.

Jordan’s district is exactly the kind of area that has swung away from Republicans in the Trump era. She said she believed Trump still had more ground to lose with the professional class and that his bout with the coronavirus was not helping.

“The fact that he has it is kind of a living example of how he has mismanaged and misjudged this virus,” she said, adding, “The Chamber of Commerce Republicans, business Republicans, who may have been on the fence, I think they’re breaking now for Biden.”

The Trump campaign appears sensitive to that risk. Trump recently visited the state to unveil an economic plan for Black Americans, while Vice President Mike Pence addressed an evangelical political conference.

Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist, said his party was confronting a “demographic bubble” that had accelerated with the flight of white women.

“The GOP has to stop that bleeding,” Robinson said.

In the House, the Sun Belt appears to represent the area of greatest peril for the GOP, as Democrats make inroads not only in the suburbs but in outer-ring communities that are typically whiter, older and more conservative.

That was evident, quite literally, from the Glendale, Arizona, home of Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency room doctor who is challenging a Republican incumbent in an exurban district that Trump carried by 10 points.

Sitting in her outdoor courtyard with a view of the stucco sprawl enveloping greater Phoenix, Tipirneni made the case for why the daughter of Indian immigrants could win a seat long held by white Republican men.

“Our county is a good microcosm of our state and I think the state is becoming a good reflection of our whole country,” she said of Maricopa County, which is now the fourth-largest county by population in the country.

After winning it by about 3 points in 2016, roughly the same as his statewide margin, Trump is now trailing in Maricopa by 9 points, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

If the election here unfolds like many Arizona Republicans are dreading it might, they will in two years have lost the presidential race, both Senate seats, both chambers of the state Legislature and watched as voters approved a ballot measure levying a surtax on the wealthy for increased education funding.

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Trailing in the Polls and Time Running Out, Trump Looks for One More Comeback - WSJ

WASHINGTON—President Trump is at his lowest point in the polls in months, behind in ad spending and has spent the past week off the campaign trail after a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. Now, with just weeks to go before Election Day, he’s hoping for one more reset.

From inside the White House, Mr. Trump has spent the past week employing unusual strategies to close the gap. He pulled out of the second debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden after organizers said it should be held virtually to avoid health issues. He has criticized two of his highest-profile cabinet secretaries, Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for not being tougher on his political rivals.

Campaign aides are hoping they can get their candidate back on the road and back on message, as they try to narrow a gap that they insist is smaller than in the public polls which show him trailing Mr. Biden nationally and in battleground states. But they have just 24 days and one remaining debate to do it.

“Our races have certainly gotten tighter since the presidential debate,” said Sarah Chamberlain, president and chief executive of the Republican Main Street Partnership. She expressed confidence that Republicans running in suburban congressional districts could still succeed, but added “everybody talks about all the days [left], but really in a lot of states, people are already voting.”

Mr. Trump, who has been frustrated by his confinement in the White House, is planning to resume in-person events Saturday, nine days since the announcement [he tested positive for Covid 19.

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Compare and contrast

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Not much deviation with Biden with a steady lead, and more so with women.

Definitely close on the economy and well, Coronavirus, unmatched.

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Dr. Fauci is coming out reprimanding the T campaign for using his words out of context.
Not only do they control who and where he can be seen on TV, he is being misquoted.

Dr. Fauci will not quit. He hangs in no matter what.


Adding

Dr. Anthony Fauci did not consent to being featured in a new advertisement from the Trump campaign touting President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert told CNN his words were taken out of context.

In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate. The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials,” Fauci said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN when asked if he agreed to be featured in the ad.

The Trump campaign released the new ad last week after the President was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center following treatment for Covid-19. The 30-second ad, which is airing in Michigan, touts Trump’s personal experience with the virus and uses a quote from Fauci in an attempt to make it appear as if he is praising Trump’s response.

“President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” the ad’s narrator says. “Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.”

The ad then flashes to an interview with Fauci in which he says, "I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more."

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And the response???

The truth - the R’s took his words out of context, and did not ask for permission to use Fauci in an ad. And yes, people trust Fauci way more than T, so that Fauci is mad, makes everyone mad.

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Joe Biden’s polling better than any challenger since 1936

Former Vice President Joe Biden is dominating President Donald Trump in the latest polls. No, the election is not over yet, and Trump still has a non-negligible chance of winning.

But a look through history reveals that Biden is in a better position at this point than any challenger since 1936, when the first scientific polls were taken in a presidential race.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Sunday was the latest poll to indicate Biden’s strength. Biden led Trump by a 55% to 43% margin among likely voters. The poll was the third high quality national poll published this week that had Biden up by at least 10 points and above 50%. The other two being from CNN/SSRS and Fox News.

Indeed, the average of polls has Biden at around 52% or 53% and up by somewhere between 10 and 11 points. This is an unprecedented position for a challenger with a mere 23 days to go until Election Day.

In the 21 previous presidential elections since 1936, there have only been five challengers who led at this time. Of those five, only one (Bill Clinton in 1992) was ahead by more than 5 points. None of those five were earning more than 48% of the vote in the polls.

In other words, Biden is the first challenger to be above 50% at this late juncture in the campaign.

This also continues to mark a massive difference with the 2016 campaign. While Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by as high as 7 points in October 2016, she never came anywhere close to approaching 50% of the vote. Trump merely had to win the lionshare of the undecided or third party voters (who would bolt their candidate) to earn a victory in 2016.

Even if every undecided or current third party voter went to Trump now, he’d still be down about 5 to 6 points nationally. That’s never been the case with an incumbent since 1936 at this point.

Of course, it’s the Electoral College that matters. There are very few universes in which Trump could win the Electoral College, if he were to lose nationally by 5 to 6 points.

New polls out on Sunday from CBS News/YouGov demonstrate that Biden’s above 50% in some key battlegrounds. He leads 52% to 46% in Michigan and Nevada. In Iowa, a state that Trump took by 9 points in 2016 and is not anywhere close to must win for Biden, the race is tied at 49%.

A look under the hood reveals why Biden is in such a strong position. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Covid-19 has either been, or been within the margin of error of being the nation’s most important problem in Gallup polling.

The three challengers in the polling era (Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992) who defeated incumbents have all been trusted more than the incumbent to deal with what Americans thought was the nation’s most important problem. None, however, were trusted by more than 50% of the voters.

Today, Biden has a huge advantage over Trump when it comes to the pandemic. The clear majority (59%) of likely voters in the last CNN poll said Biden would better be able to handle the outbreak. Just 38% said Trump would do a better job than Biden.

As I noted in July, the only issue that really matters is Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. He’s failing in the minds of voters right now.

The result of which is a majority of those same voters favor Biden to be the next president of the United States.

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Trump’s cries of fraud have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but as usual it is the right that is doing the cheating, as the GOP has been installing fake ballot drop off boxes across California!


California GOP installed unofficial ballot drop-off boxes. State officials say they’re illegal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/california-illegal-ballot-boxes/

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There’s a huge turn out of Democrat voters in PA which is a battleground state, and will be one of the contested ones if Republicans have their way.

Democrats are responsible for 76% of the ballots cast so far in the state, despite making up roughly 47% of registered voters. Meanwhile, Republicans make up almost 39% of registered voters in Pennsylvania but have only cast 16% of the ballots so far.

With 22 days until Election Day, Democrats also lead Republicans in pre-election voting in eight more key states that could decide the next president.

Democrats are far outpacing Republicans in ballots cast so far in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that President Donald Trump won by less than one percentage point in 2016.

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