2020 Election 168 , CD3 DFL

Trump-Biden race tightens as both sides expect close contest

President Trump has lagged Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidenbadly in the polls for much of 2020, but strategists in both parties predict his numbers will rise and the race will tighten as the Republican Party consolidates further behind him this fall.

There are already signs that the race is tightening.

In Michigan, Biden’s average polling lead dropped from 8.4 percentage points on July 28 to 2.6 percent a month later, according to the average of polls kept by RealClearPolitics, while in Pennsylvania Biden’s average lead dipped from 7.4 points to 5.8 points during the same period. Continue reading.

Why Minnesota Could Be The Next Midwestern State To Go Red

In the fabled “blue wall” — the collection of historically Democratic states that pundits (wrongly) assumed gave Hillary Clinton an Electoral College advantage in 2016 — Minnesota is the cornerstone. The Democratic candidate has won Minnesota in 11 straight presidential elections, the longest active streak in the country. What’s more, no Republican has won any statewide election in Minnesota since 2006 — not for Senate, not for governor, not even for state auditor.

It’s tempting to conclude from this that Minnesota is a safe Democratic state. But Minnesota is much more evenly divided than that record suggests: For example, it came within a couple percentage points of voting for now-President Trump in 2016. And as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012 — showed in 2016, streaks are meant to be broken.¹

Most ominously for Democrats, there is evidence that Minnesota is becoming redder over time, with 2016 being a particular inflection point. In 1984, the state was 18.2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. But in 2016, for the first time since 1952, Minnesota voted more Republican than the rest of the U.S. Continue reading.

NOTE: If you’d like to work to help this potential reality not come into being, please consider volunteering to be an election judge if you can do so safely, find campaign events you can work on (most of these are virtual, a few lit drops with no voter contact are being done, as well), make certain you’re registered to vote and that your family and friends are registered as well and last but not least that you, your family and friends vote.

The Minnesota GOP’s Maskless Campaigning Puts Lives At Risk

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – Today, DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin held a press conference to criticize the Minnesota Republican Party and the Trump campaign for putting people’s lives at risk by holding events indoors, in close quarters, with few if any masks (examples are presented starting at 4:30 into the press conference).

A video of the press can be viewed here and downloaded here.
A copy of the slide show from the press conference can be found here.

The Minnesota GOP and Trump campaign even embarked on a tour of the state of Minnesota, which risked exposing Minnesotans to a deadly pandemic that has killed over 180,000 Americans and whose infection rates are growing here in Minnesota. Here’s what today’s speakers said:

“The plain truth here is that Minnesota Republicans and the Trump campaign are putting people’s lives at risk to win political campaigns,” said DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin. “The Minnesota Republican Party’s unsafe events could be spreading COVID-19 across our state, landing people in the hospital, and even killing them. If Minnesota Republican events have not caused serious harm, it is only because their fellow Minnesotans are taking this threat seriously and making the sacrifices necessary to save lives.”

Michael Moore offers ‘reality check’: Swing state polls signal Trump could pull off electoral victory in November

Pointing to polls in swing states and the wide gap in enthusiasm between President Donald Trump’s supporters and voters planning to cast a ballot for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, progressive filmmaker Michael Moore warned Friday of signs that Trump may win the November general election.

Calling for Democrats to ensure a massive voter turnout in November, Moore cited a CNN poll from August which showed that in 15 swing states, Biden was only one point ahead of Trump.

“In Minnesota, it’s 47-47,” Moore wrote on Twitter and in a Facebook post. “In Michigan, where Biden had a big lead, Trump has closed the gap to four points.” Continue reading.

Longtime GOP consultant: This election ‘is the most dangerous period since the Civil War’

In response to the civil rights movement and Black America’s embrace of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party chose to make racism the centerpiece of their electoral strategy.

From the “Southern strategy” and Richard Nixon’s summoning of “law and order” to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and appeals to “states’ rights”, Willie Horton, the Tea Party and “birtherism” — and now to Donald Trump’s naked racial authoritarianism — racism and white supremacy have paid electoral dividends for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

But this devil’s bargain rests upon a very slippery foundation: as the country’s racial demographics change from an absolute white majority toward one where white people are “just” a plurality as compared to Black and brown people, the Republican Party’s power as a de facto “whites only” party is imperiled. Continue reading.

In Trump, much of the world sees an act that’s wearing thin

Last week’s Republican National Convention saw a blizzard of misinformation. President Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday was itself “a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history,” according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which cited more than two dozen significant falsehoods in that address.

Trump and his allies warned, with classic demagoguery, of the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency with defunded police departments and invasions of the suburbs. They also conjured a kind of alternate reality, wrote my colleague, Toluse Olorunippa, one where “the coronavirus has been conquered by presidential leadership, the economy is at its pre-pandemic levels, troops are returning home, and the president is an empathetic figure who supports immigration and would never stoke the nation’s racial grievances.”

That is not the America that actually exists. Critics can credibly claim that Trump has goaded hard-line supporters into taking violent action against protesters. All the while, the United States inches toward 200,000 coronavirus-related deaths, maintains the highest number of infection cases in the world and has seen its economy crash by a third of its GDP. But none of this may matter for a president who sees stoking the country’s polarization as a pathway to reelection. Continue reading.

Trump tries to dance around a devastating backdrop

Despite unemployment above 10 percent and millions of jobs vaporized, Trump is running on his economic record before the pandemic.

In the nine weeks left in the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump has an especially daunting task: Convince a skeptical American public that the coronavirus-ravaged U.S. economy is actually roaring back and will soon return to the status he regularly calls the greatest in world history.

He faces serious obstacles. The U.S. economy pre-coronavirus was far from the greatest in history, leaving most Americans with little cushion for the latest plunge. Now Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other senior White House officials risk sounding out of touch cheerleading a still-struggling economy with a jobless rate over 10 percent — above its peak during the Great Recession — and close to 30 million people getting some kind of unemployment assistance.

Republican speakers spent much of the GOP convention talking up recent gains — for women, for people of color, for other lower-wage workers — that have since evaporated. For millions of Americans, the rosy picture simply no longer exists while for others the numbers were technically accurate but skipped the context of the devastation that came before. Continue reading.

Biden accuses Trump of ‘recklessly encouraging violence’ in response to Portland shooting

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence in Portland, Ore., accusing President Trump of “fanning the flames of hate and division in our society” and “recklessly encouraging violence.”

“We must not become a country at war with ourselves,” Biden said in a statement. “But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are. … All of us are less safe because Donald Trump can’t do the job of the American president.”

His response came after Trump denounced Black Lives Matter protesters as “agitators and thugs” on Sunday morning, calling for a federal crackdown on demonstrations in cities such as Washington and Portland, where a man died after tensions between pro-Trump and liberal groups burst into violence. Continue reading.

Trump Embraces Fringe Theories on Protests and the Coronavirus

In a Twitter barrage, the president advanced conspiracy theories claiming that protests are an organized coup and that the virus death toll is inflated. He also reposted a call to imprison New York’s governor.

WASHINGTON — President Trump unleashed an especially intense barrage of Twitter messages over the weekend, embracing fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are actually an organized coup d’état against him.

In a concentrated predawn burst, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:04 a.m. on Sunday on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes in Portland, Ore., where a man wearing the hat of a far-right, pro-Trump group was shot and killed Saturday after a large group of Mr. Trump’s supporters traveled through the streets. He resumed on Sunday night.

In the blast of social media messages, Mr. Trump also embraced a call to imprison Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatened to send federal forces against demonstrators outside the White House, attacked CNN and NPR, embraced a supporter charged with murder, mocked his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and repeatedly assailed the mayor of Portland, even posting the mayor’s office telephone number so that supporters could call demanding his resignation. Continue reading.

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