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They are living in another universe.
This Republican senator has a wild idea about what voters will care about in November
Washington (CNN)North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has a theory about the 2020 election that you need to hear.
“The stakes are very high this election, but you know why I know we’re going to win?” Tillis said in a speech at the North Carolina Republican virtual convention Friday night. “Because people remember how good their lives were back in February.”
Er, what?
So, under Tillis’ theory, the last five months, which have been among the most trying, unusual, difficult and without a doubt memorable months of any of our lives, will be forgotten – or glossed over – in November because, back in February, the economy was good?
Is it possible Tillis actually believes that? I mean, I suppose so? We can convince ourselves of almost anything – particularly, as is the case for Tillis, when our future job prospects rely on rationalizing away reality. (Tillis is up for a second term this November and is in a serious battle against Democrat Cal Cunningham.)
But, whether or not Tillis actually believes what he said, it’s demonstrably false.
There is absolutely no data that suggests the America that existed in February – before we really knew what Covid-19 was or had ever heard the name George Floyd – bears any real resemblance to the current state of the country.
The past few months have been relentlessly unsettling, scary and tense. And they have changed us.
The nationwide quarantine occasioned by the coronavirus and the ongoing spikes in the disease around the country have made terms like “masking” and “social distancing” common parlance. Acts as simple as getting coffee – did I bring my mask? Do I need gloves? – have been fundamentally altered. Walking down the street is now an act of pre-planning and silent communication as you and the person walking toward you have to do a dance as to who will alter their course to maintain 6 feet of distance.
The death of Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers – and the protests it sparked in cities and towns large and small around the country – have forced race and ethnicity back to the forefront of our national conversation. Floyd’s death has also done more than that, however, effecting real change in the ways big business operates. On Monday, for example, the Washington Redskins announced they would retire the team’s name and logo.
Those tectonic shifts have also altered our political landscape in drastic ways. Large majorities of the public now disapprove of the way in which President Donald Trump has handled both the coronavirus pandemic and the racial unrest set off by Floyd’s death. An ABC-Ipsos poll released last week showed 67% of Americans disapproved of how Trump has handled the coronavirus crisis; an identical 67% disapproved of how he has dealt with the issue of race.
And, as Trump has lost the public on those two issues, he’s also seen his chances of winning a second term fade. Former Vice President Joe Biden now has a 9-point lead over Trump, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, and, just Sunday, CBS News released polling in Arizona, Florida and Texas that showed the incumbent in less-than-ideal shape.
“In all three states, most voters say their state reopened too soon, and those who say this feel their state went too fast under pressure from the Trump administration,” wrote CBS of the results. “Most also say the president is doing a bad job handling the outbreak.”
Nonpartisan political handicappers have begun to suggest that Trump could be headed for a defeat so catastrophic that he costs Republicans their Senate majority and forces them further into the minority in the House.
“This election is looking more like a Democratic tsunami than simply a Blue wave,” wrote The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter earlier this month. “Republican strategists we’ve spoken with this week think Trump is close to the point of no return. A couple of others wondered if Trump had reached his ‘Katrina’ moment: a permanent loss of trust and faith of the majority of voters.”
Given that mountain of evidence that the last five months have profoundly altered the political landscape, Tillis’ insistence that voters will remember the good times is akin to that “joke” about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
Tillis’ hope to simply “yada yada yada” away the Trump administration’s botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his add-fuel-to-the-fire approach to the racial unrest in the country is the most severe form of political wishful thinking I’ve ever witnessed. And that’s saying something.
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If you’ve heard about the Helmut Norpoth poll, I wouldn’t be too worried.
Norpoth’s model has a fatal flaw; it relies almost solely on how a candidate did early in the primaries.
That’s right, the primaries. Biden had a comeback win that was unprecedented, already tossing a wrench in those works.
The Helmut Norpoth model then goes on to basically ignore the pandemic, depression, Black Lives Matter movement, Russian bounty scandal, Mary Trump’s book, Republican PACs rising against him – pretty much ALL of the things that have caused Trump’s polls to plummet.
Ignoring reality is not a reliable polling or predictive method, just as it’s not a reliable governing method.
Adding, since somebody questioned this elsewhere:
“The key to the November election is the primaries,” Norpoth said, adding Trump won Republican primaries quite easily while presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had difficulty winning delegates. “On balance, a stronger performance in primaries gives Donald Trump the edge in November.”
Norpoth cited Biden’s fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucus and his fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary as among his reasons for his forecast.
Nevermind that Trump is the incumbent and the GOP literally rigged the Republican primaries in his favor this year.
I looked up Norpoth’s method more closely. It looks like there’s a LOT of confirmation bias in it.
For the record, the Primary Model, with slight modifications, has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in all five presidential elections since it was introduced in 1996 (Norpoth 1996, 2001, 2004, 2008, Norpoth and Bednarczuk 2012). In recent elections the forecast has been issued as early as January of the election year. Also note that for all elections from 1912 to 2012 the Primary Model picks the winner, albeit retroactively, every time except in 1960.
Norpoth’s method has only ACTUALLY been used for 6 elections.
Three of those were for incumbents, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, who naturally have the advantage.
Its main claim to fame is that it put Trump as winning based on information from March. That’s it.
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Biden unveils $2 trillion clean energy and infrastructure plan
Joe Biden expanded his energy and climate plans Tuesday with a call for spending $2 trillion over four years on climate-friendly infrastructure — a proposal the campaign is casting as part of a wider economic recovery package.
The latest: “Look, these aren’t pie in the sky dreams,” Biden said in a speech outlining the proposal on Tuesday. “These are actionable policies that we can work on right away.”
- “We can live up to our responsibilities, meet the challenges of a world at risk of a climate catastrophe, build more climate-resilient communities, put millions of skilled workers on the job, and make life markedly better and safer for the American people all at once and benefit the world in the process,” he continued.
- “The alternative? Continue to ignore the facts, deny reality, focus only on technologies of the last century, instead of inventing the technology that will define this century. … This is all that Donald Trump and the Republicans offer.”
Why it matters: The plan represents a long-anticipated plan to move his climate platform further left and make it more expansive.
How it works: The spending is part of wider infrastructure and environmental justiceplans the campaign released. Some of the major provisions of the new proposals include …
- An “accelerated” $2 trillion, first-term investment in carbon-free power and grid infrastructure, mass transit, efficient buildings, sustainable housing, “climate-smart” agriculture and more.
- Part of the investment includes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s proposal to give big discounts to consumers who trade in gasoline-powered cars for U.S.-made electric models, and building or re-tooling manufacturing plants to focus on electric vehicles and battery technologies.
- A standard requiring 100% carbon-free power generation by 2035, which was among the proposals last week from a task force that representatives for both Biden and former rival Bernie Sanders set up.
- Creating a new “Environmental and Climate Justice Division” within the Department of Justice.
- Bloomberg first reported on several of the new proposals.
The big picture: The spending is more aggressive than Biden’s climate and energy plan unveiled before the coronavirus pandemic, which called for $1.7 trillion in federal investments over 10 years.
- Campaign officials told reporters that some of new plan would be paid for with Biden’s call for raising taxes on corporations and the rich, but also “some amount of stimulus spending.”
- They pledged to provide more details on financing once Biden’s full economic recovery plans are laid out in the coming weeks.
Reality check: Some of the big new energy policy and spending proposals, like several pillars of Biden’s existing plan, would require congressional approval.
- That makes them unlikely to go far unless Democrats also regain control of the Senate.
- And even then, major energy and climate bills will face big political hurdles unless Democrats scrap or weaken filibuster rules.
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Trump Demotes Brad Parscale, His Campaign Manager, and Elevates Bill Stepien
The replacement of Mr. Parscale with Mr. Stepien, who had served as deputy campaign manager, comes as the president has struggled in public and private polling.
I guess he’ll have to find something new
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You can swap out the salesman, but we still don’t want what you’re sellin’.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
I am pleased to announce that Bill Stepien has been promoted to the role of Trump Campaign Manager. Brad Parscale, who has been with me for a very long time and has led our tremendous digital and data strategies, will remain in that role, while being a Senior Advisor to the…
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‘Trump-y politics’ leave permanent imprint on GOP
Even as he struggles in his own reelection bid, Donald Trump continues to remake the Republican Party at every level.
There was a time not so long ago when Jon Huntsman Jr. and Jeff Sessions were wildly popular politicians. Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, once posted a 90 percent approval rating in his home state. Sessions, in his last Alabama Senate campaign in 2014, won reelection essentially unopposed.
But that was in the pre-Donald Trump era.
Both fell short in recent efforts to regain their former offices, casualties of a new Republican Party that Trump continues to remake at every level even as he struggles in his own reelection bid.
Regardless of the president’s fate in November — Trump trails Joe Biden by double-digits, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll released Wednesday — the 2020 primary season is ensuring that the GOP will be imprinted with his political DNA for years to come.
After steamrolling many of the GOP’s biggest national stars to win the nomination in 2016, Trump’s first term has seen scores of other one-time presidential prospects sidelined or defeated since then — Huntsman, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford among them. A new presidential bench has taken shape, filled with candidates like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who are more attuned to Trump’s style of politics.
The House and Senate have been similarly overhauled. Since Trump took office in 2017, according to the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, nearly half of the House Republican conference “have either retired, resigned, been defeated or are retiring in 2020.” Many of the GOP newcomers to Congress will be MAGA through and through, having won primaries where fealty to Trump was a determinative issue.
“Whether the president wins or loses, his policy views and style have firmly taken over the Republican Party – nationalism and white grievance, those kinds of things,” said Matt Moore, the former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. “I don’t think that Trump-y politics will be leaving the stage anytime soon.”
The drubbing of Sessions, the former attorney general who drew Trump’s ire, in the Alabama Senate primary runoff Tuesday served both as a punctuation mark on four years of chaos for the party’s entrenched class — and as a reminder that the humiliation is likely to endure.
“He got Trumped,” Jonathan Gray, a Republican political strategist based in Sessions’ hometown of Mobile, said on Tuesday night, even before as the race was called for Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach backed by Trump. Sessions had been the first senator to endorse Trump in 2016, then saw Trump turn on him, transforming him into a pariah.
Sessions succumbed to Trump’s direct rebukes — what Gray called “brutal punches to the face from the president of the United States." But his defeat also appears to have reflected a sea change that Trump has accelerated — and that will outlast him — elevating personality politics over platform-based campaigns.
Within that environment, there was no room for a textbook conservative like Ryan, who elected not to run for re-election in 2018. Nor was there any space for Sanford, a one-time South Carolina governor, who embarked on a quixotic primary campaign against Trump after being abandoned by his party. He said he hoped to “raise and elevate a discussion and debate about where are we going as a country” but quickly abandoned the effort.
Concluding the obvious, Sanford said at the time, "There is no appetite for a subtle discussion of issues on the Republican side.”
Then there was Huntsman, who failed to get his old job back this year, losing in Utah’s Republican primary last week to Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox.
“[Trump] has transformed the party in his image, for sure,” said Bill McCoshen, a Republican strategist based in Madison, Wis. “The base is a little bit different than it was even one or two cycles ago, and Trump has a lot to do with that. These are people who are impatient, they are looking for stuff to get done … If you are not an agent of change, they’re going to look for a different option.”
Trump didn’t directly torpedo Huntsman, who had served as his ambassador to Russia, the way he did Sessions. But the anti-establishment hostility that he has foisted upon his party is not abating at all as Trump falls behind in his own re-election campaign. If anything, it is worse for the Republican institutionalists than it was before.
Asked what happened to Huntsman and Sessions, Brent Buchanan, a Republican political strategist with years of experience in Alabama politics, said, “Huntsman and Sessions are boring … Nobody said, ‘Oh, that guy hits me in the feels.’ But they did about Trump and Obama and Bernie [Sanders].”
“The whole person-over-policy is only exacerbated in the Trump era,” he said, predicting campaigns across the country in 2022 and 2024 in which “we’re going to see a resurgence of personality-based candidates.”
The current election cycle has already provided a glimpse of what’s to come. Cotton, the 43-year-old Republican from Arkansas, drew national attention for his controversial op-ed in The New York Times calling for the deployment of U.S. troops to stop riots following the death of George Floyd.
In Colorado, Lauren Boebert, a restaurateur and gun-rights activist, defeated Rep. Scott Tipton, who had Trump’s endorsement. She is one of a growing class of Republican candidates who have expressed at least some support for QAnon, the conspiracy theory about deep state forces in conflict with Trump. At least two of them, Boebert and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, are favored to win House seats in November.
The Republican Party after Trump — whether that’s in 2021 or 2025 — will still have familiar Republican heavyweights like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley. But it is difficult to know what flavor of Republican candidate will sell — a looming uncertainty that is in large part a function of Trump, a politician who has not yoked his political fortunes to ideology in the way that previous presidents have.
“The thing that I think is interesting about [Trump] is that his brand and the defense of his brand goes beyond a party platform or a set of principles,” said Brett Doster, a Florida-based Republican strategist who served as the state’s executive director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential reelection campaign. “When we do get beyond Trump … the question is, ‘What is the Republican Party?’ I don’t know that anyone’s really looked at the platform beyond Trump’s Twitter account for the last four years.”
He said, “For the last four years, it’s been easy for people to say, ‘Are you for Trump or are you not for Trump,’ and that litmus test is not going to be there” when Trump is gone, whether that happens next year or four years later.
Ed Brookover, a partner at Avenue Strategies who managed Republican Ben Carson’s presidential campaign in 2016 and later was a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, described the GOP as undergoing a “slow changing of the guard” that is “bigger than one person,” dating back at least to the beginning of the Tea Party movement in 2009. He sees a Republican Party tilting increasingly to politicians who “came of age a little bit later in the process, since 2010, 2012.”
“Those who have been around for a while,” Brookover said, may not be perceived to “accurately reflect the Republican electorate.”
Calling the political landscape unfavorable for “the more traditional, elite part of the party,” Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, suggested that the GOP has become a more blue-collar-oriented party under Trump, with his trade policies and “America First” messaging. And he suspects that will last.
“I think you’re going to have more populist candidates in the future, and the trick’s going to be getting the populist candidate that also can appeal to the suburban voter, which we can’t lose,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Republicans are going to find some future, conservative AOCs.”
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Reality check…absentee ballots are necessary. R’s may see the light too.
Republican officials throughout the country are reacting with growing alarm to President Donald Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots, saying his unsubstantiated claims of mass voting fraud are already corroding the views of GOP voters, who may ultimately choose not to vote at all if they can’t make it to the polls come November.
Behind the scenes, top Republicans are urging senior Trump campaign officials to press the President to change his messaging and embrace mail-in voting, warning that the party could lose the battle for control of Congress and the White House if he doesn’t change his tune, according to multiple GOP sources. Trump officials, sources said, are fully aware of the concerns.
The impact could be detrimental to the GOP up and down the ticket, according to a bevy of Republican election officials, field operatives, pollsters and lawmakers who are watching the matter closely. Every vote will count in critical battleground states, they argue, fearful that deterring GOP voters from choosing a convenient option to cast their ballots could ultimately sway the outcome of races that are decided by a couple of percentage points.
And with the coronavirus pandemic potentially bound to get worse in the fall, voting by mail is becoming an increasingly popular option since many voters may prefer not to wait in long lines at polling stations. That will leave Democrats with a major advantage if their voters send their ballots by mail while Republican voters forgo that option simply because they are listening to the concerns of the President.
…
GOP leaders in the House and Senate have publicly and privately called for more resources for mail-in voting – and hope the President changes his tune.
"A lot of people are going to vote by mail, and we need to do what we can to both see that is done safely and encourage people to believe and ensure people that it is going to be done safely," Senate Rules Chairman Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said Thursday.
New York’s 27th Congressional District special election last month illustrated the potential dangers for Republicans if their voters swear off mail-in voting. The state, which has several closely contested House races, expanded mail-in voting this year after Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order in April to mail all residents applications for absentee ballots.
>
In the solidly Republican district, GOP state Sen. Chris Jacobs was leading Democrat Nate McMurray 64%-27% after election night – but before absentee ballots were counted, according to the state’s unofficial results. After the district’s absentee ballots were tallied, the margin shrank to 55%-44%.
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From Axios ------ YES!
A combination photo of President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Former Vice President Joe Biden is the preferred candidate to handle the coronavirus pandemic and he’s opened up a 15-point lead over President Trump, an ABC News/Washington Post poll published early on Sunday finds.
By the numbers: Biden is ahead of Trump 55-40% among registered voters. However, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s margin narrows to 54-44% among likely voters.
Why it matters: Per the poll news release, “Three and a half months ago the two candidates were virtually even in trust to handle the pandemic, Trump +2 percentage points, 45-43 percent. Today, with COVID-19 cases surging around the nation, Biden leads Trump on the issue by a 20-point margin, 54-34 percent.”
The picture: The phone survey of 1,006 adults, conducted from July 12-15 with a margin of error of 3.5 points, comes as coronavirus cases spike across the United States.
- 19 states this week set new highs for coronavirus infections recorded in a single day this week and the U.S. on Saturday reported more than 71,500 new coronavirus cases — second highest to the record 75,600-plus set last Thursday.
- A Quinnipiac University poll out last Wednesday reported 62% of registered voters said Trump’s hurting efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Of note: Trump’s new campaign manager Bill Stepien on Thursday dismissed recent polls showing the president losing five of six swing states — and sinking into a double-digit hole nationwide, noting that similar surveys “had the world convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016.”
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Watching a local news program this morning and saw an ad that seemed exclusively to feature Pence only…turns out the T campaign is running ads featuring Pence…and in this one, T only gets 2 seconds. Hmmmmm the America First campaign…minus T.
Googled and found this article
# ‘Is Pence running for election or Trump?’: Pro-Trump ad only shows president for two seconds
Video highlights job-related policies from current administration
A group co-founded by Donald Trump’s campaign manager for the 2020 presidential election has released a new election ad that only features the president for a couple of seconds.
The new ad titled, America Back To Work, was published by non-profit organisation, America First Policies, on Wednesday and features vice president Mike Pence discussing the Trump administration’s job policies.
A speech Mr Pence gave at an event for the organisation’s Great American Comeback Tour is played over images of him meeting workers and detailing policies put in place by the administration.
Mr Trump is only shown in the ad once and is featured for two seconds - signing an updated free trade agreement with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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Pelosi Says Trump Will Be ‘Fumigated Out’ if He Refuses to Leave After White House Loss 
The top U.S. Democrat said on Monday that Donald Trump might not like the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election but reminded the Republican president that he will have to vacate the White House if he loses.
"There is a process. It has nothing to do with if the certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there because the presidency is the presidency," House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC.
“No. I have to see,” Trump said. “Look you - I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no.’ And I didn’t last time, either.”
Despite lack of evidence, Trump frequently complains that mail-in balloting, which promises to be more widely used in this coronavirus-plagued election year, could lead to voter fraud.
He did not elaborate on what he believed his options are.
“Whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving," Pelosi said. "Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn’t mean we won’t have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly elected president of the United States.”
Trump, who is seeking re-election in November against Democrat Joe Biden, faces plunging approval ratings amid a widespread resurgence of the coronavirus that has crippled the U.S. economy and altered everyday life for Americans.
Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said Monday: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
Pelosi hinted that the subject of Trump refusing to go came up at a regular “continuation of government” briefing last week.
“This might interest you because I say to them, ‘This is never going to happen. God willing, it never will.’”
Maybe this should go under 2020 election please? Thanks @Pet_Proletariat @MissJava !!!
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Ohio House Speaker Arrested In Connection With $60 Million Bribery Scheme
Larry Householder’s arrest is tied to a racketeering conspiracy, a spokesperson for the federal prosecutor’s office said. Four others, including Ohio’s former GOP chairman, were also arrested.
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Don’t vote for these cult members, they don’t have the critical thinking skills required for the job. They’ll believe anything they read on the internet.
Here are the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2020
The QAnon conspiracy theory is rooted in the chan message boards. Here are 66 current or former congressional candidates who embrace it.
Related story
Twitter Takedown Targets QAnon Accounts
The QAnon theories stem from an anonymous person or group of people who use the name “Q” and claim to have access to government secrets that reveal a plot against President Trump and his supporters. That supposedly classified information was initially posted on message boards before spreading to mainstream internet platforms and has led to significant online harassment as well as physical violence.
“QAnon is not conventional political discourse,” Alice Marwick, an associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s a conspiracy theory that makes wild claims and baseless accusations about political actors and innocent people alike.”
Over several weeks, Twitter has removed 7,000 accounts that posted QAnon material, a company spokeswoman said. The accounts had been increasingly active, and had been involved in coordinated harassment campaigns on Twitter or tried to evade a previous suspension by setting up new accounts after an old account was deleted.
It’ll be interesting to see how these candidates fair as Twitter cracks down on their conspiracy cult.
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2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
In the race for the White House, 45 percent of voters support former Vice President Joe Biden, while 44 percent back President Trump. That compares to early June when the race was equally tight and voters backed Trump 44 percent to Biden’s 43 percent. In today’s survey, Democrats back Biden 94 - 3 percent, independents back Biden 51 - 32 percent and Republicans back Trump 89 - 6 percent.
“With crises swirling through American society and a country deeply divided, there’s no other way to slice it. It’s a tossup in Texas,” Malloy added.
BIDEN VS. TRUMP: THE ISSUESIn direct matchups, Trump holds a clear lead when it comes to handling the economy. Biden holds a clear lead when it comes to addressing racial inequality. On health care, handling a crisis, and response to the coronavirus, the candidates are tied or essentially tied.
Asked who would do a better job handling …
The Economy: Trump 56 percent, Biden 40 percent.
Response to the Coronavirus: Biden 48 percent, Trump 45 percent.
Health Care: Biden 47 percent, Trump 47 percent.
A Crisis: Biden 47 percent, Trump 47 percent.
Addressing Racial Inequality: Biden 51 percent, Trump 39 percent.
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The video camera captures former president Barack Obama emerging from a black SUV in the garage of an office building and making his way upstairs via an elevator, where he is seen trailing Joe Biden down a hallway.
The two sit in distant leather chairs in an expansive office and talk — trash talk, actually — about Obama’s successor and the man Biden hopes to unseat in November. They express disbelief about how President Trump has handled the public health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic and tried to avoid blame for his government’s failure to contain it.
“Can you imagine standing up when you were president and saying ‘it’s not my responsibility. I take no responsibility.’ Literally. Literally,” Biden says. Obama’s response: “Those words didn’t come out of our mouths when we were in office.”
The unusual video — a teaser for a longer taped conversation between the two men set to be released via social media Thursday — serves both to troll the current president and send a signal that Obama will start playing a much more active role in the campaign.
Biden Obama ad - Trolling Trump
This video is followed by a T ad…on the defunding police issue. How ironic?
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And here’s your Friday uplifting news…#WishfulThinking.
Looks like some good trends lined up for the Blue wave 
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
With 102 days until Election Day, the blue wave threatening to swamp President Trump’s re-election chances keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Why it matters: We all know that anything can happen. But right now, every measurable trend is going against Trump — and with each day that passes, it gets increasingly harder for him to claw his way back.
The Cook Political Report on Friday flipped Florida from “toss-up” to “leans Democratic,” with national editor Amy Walter citing the state’s spiraling coronavirus outbreak.
- That follows a Quinnipiac poll on Thursday that showed Joe Biden leading by 13 points in the Sunshine State. For context, Trump led Hillary Clinton by 3 points in the same poll in mid-July 2016.
Our thought bubble, from Axios White House editor Margaret Talev: Trump’s re-election path has to go through Florida.
- Without it, he’s done.
The tsunami flows down-ballot: Charlie Cook and his team now like Democrats’ chances to reclaim the Senate, with Cook’s Senate editor Jessica Taylor shifting races in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa in their favor this week.
- Cook also moved 20 House races toward Democrats.
- Dave Wasserman, its House editor, said he couldn’t recall a similarly sized shift for one party.
The big picture: Trump’s net approval rating (-15) has remained remarkably consistent throughout his presidency, highlighting the difficulty he faces in trying to quickly turn around public opinion.
- CNN’s Harry Enten noted morning that, since 1940, incumbent presidents who were re-elected had an average net approval rating of +23.
- Those who lost had an average net approval rating of -14.
The bottom line: The pandemic isn’t going anywhere. And no matter what the president wants, it’s going to define everything from here on out.
- 102 days ago, the U.S. had 860,000 confirmed coronavirus cases (now 4 million), and Trump claimed “total” authority over ordering states to reopen.
- Think of everything that’s happened since.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that journalist Harry Enten now works at CNN, not FiveThirtyEight.
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Mitch McConnell blocks election security bill after Mueller’s 2020 interference warning
A new bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report says Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016 and issued blunt warnings about the 2020 election.
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Yes, the pecking order for GOP funds get stalled with Kushner…hmmm wonder what that is about?
Senior House Republicans are pleading with the deep-pocketed Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign to provide financial help as Democrats vastly outraise the GOP, but top campaign officials are so far declining to commit.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has been prodding the RNC to write a check to the National Republican Congressional Committee — a request he has made multiple times. McCarthy specifically has asked Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to make a financial commitment to the House GOP, according to several officials familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe private conversations.
But Kushner, who oversees such decisions and has a greater say than RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, has refused thus far, the officials say. While the Trump campaign and the RNC have brought in record amounts of money, some Trump officials see donating to the House as a wasteful investment as the GOP’s chances of reclaiming the majority sharply deteriorate. **Their decline in fortunes can largely be attributed to Trump’s sagging support over his handling of the **coronavirus pandemic and the sliding economy.
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Trump knows his reelection chances are in trouble, so now he’s trying to confuse Americans and erode trust in our elections
- In 2016, then-candidate Trump tried to sow discord and confusion about the election in the face of long electoral odds.
- Now, facing a possible defeat in November, President Trump is using that same playbook to confuse Americans and undermine their faith in the election.
- By raising doubt about the validity of the election, Trump is harming our democracy in an attempt to try and preserve his power.
- Reed Galen is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project and an independent political strategist.
Four years ago, facing almost certain electoral defeat, then-candidate Donald Trump mused that he might not accept the outcome of the election. Given our nation’s long tradition of peaceful transitions of power, Trump’s remarks were one more red flag we all watched flapping in the wind but refused to take seriously.
His words then had real-world effects. Wikileaks, Russian troll-farms and seedy Facebook groups stoked fear among voters that the election would indeed be stolen from Trump. Conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, her emails, Seth Rich and all of the ugliness the Trump-Fox News-Steve Bannon circle of hell could conjure up injected a level of uncertainty and doubt never before seen in our politics.
In 2020, now President Donald Trump is at it again. This time, Trump, his White House, and his campaign are playing a double game.
In a recent interview on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Trump directly if he would accept the outcome of this November’s election. At any other time in history with any other president, the answer would be: “Yes, of course. I’ll accept the will of the American people.” But at this time and with this president the answer was, instead: “No. I have to see.”
Trump doesn’t care about the American people. That much is clear from his inability to respond to the coronavirus crisis, plan for rebuilding a shattered economy, or doing the first thing to heal a country in the throes of its worst racial unrest in generations.
Trump’s impairment stretches to understanding how the American electoral system actually works. For him, like everything in life, an election is performative – the outcome doesn’t really matter, so there’s no point worrying about the details.
What Trump does know, intimately, is that there are millions of Americans out there are who believe the deep state is out to get them and to rig the election in favor of a “well-known socialist plant” like former Vice President Joe Biden.
When he says that mail-in voting is regularly abused by fraudulent voters, Trump knows he’s not telling the truth, but he’s never claimed he was. When he brings in the Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, to back up those charges with the imprimatur of the Justice Department, the president is not worried about which individual Americans vote.
He instinctually knows that the further he degrades and delegitimizes the process, the less people are likely to turn out. For a president sitting at 38% approval nationally, his only hope of reelection at this moment is for tens of millions of Americans to sit out November, again.
Ironically, it was the Republican Party that for years mastered the art and science of identifying voters who were eligible to vote absentee, contacting them directly and repeatedly, and thereby making their targeting more efficient and allowing them to bank votes well before Election Day.
It is not unusual to see Trump rail against mail-in ballots on Twitter on the same day his campaign emails its supporters pleading with them to fill out their absentee ballot application. These mixed signals confuse voters, give his staff and supporters their marching orders and give new shadowy groups such as QAnon the ability to stir up confusion, disorder and distrust across numerous, unseen social media accounts.
While Trump himself is incapable of playing a double game, he instinctually understands the dynamics at play in America, today. About 35% of the country will do and say anything he asks of them, amplified by conservative media outlets. Trump also lives and dies by the zero-sum game. He doesn’t have to win by much, just enough to make sure everyone else loses.
Perhaps this is where Trump has done the most long-lasting institutional damage to the country. Democracies are tests of faith. Millions of people must believe that the system we’ve collectively agreed to, works for us. They must believe elections are fair and free of interference.
Trump preys on the weakness and suspicions of those Americans the system has failed. In November, we must show them that those of us that believe in this country far outnumber those that would hasten its downfall with four more years of Donald Trump.
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