Category: 2020 Election

How does Trump’s approval rating compare to the big losers in presidential history?

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A couple weeks ago, Trump hit 40% approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate. I watched eagerly to see if he might fall below that threshold, which would have been a clear sign the bottom was absolutely dropping out from his campaign.

Unfortunately, Trump managed to bounce back a bit, but not by much. He’s currently sitting at 41.4% approval and has been bobbing around that 41% mark since early June. But not to worry, a look at the history of the worst political routs in modern U.S. history shows that presidents and major-party nominees pretty much get 40% of the votes no matter how dreadful their leadership or campaign.

Take President Herbert Hoover, for instance, running for reelection against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 amid the Great Depression, with food lines and shanty towns across America. Hoover still won 39.7% that year to FDR’s 57.4%. Continue reading.

Biden picks Harris for VP

The Hill logoPresumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate on Tuesday, ending months of speculation over one of the most consequential decisions of his 2020 presidential bid.

Biden called Harris, a former rival in the Democratic primary, the best equipped to help him defeat President Trump and lead the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, economic downturn and racial divide.

Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, would be the first woman to be vice president if Biden is elected. Continue reading.

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips wins primary

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Rep. Dean Phillips won the Democratic primary in Minnesota’s 3rd District on Tuesday as he looks to clinch a second term in November.

The first-term Democrat won with 91 percent of the vote after 96 percent of precincts had reported, according to The Associated Press. He beat out Democratic rival Cole Young.

Phillips defeated then-Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-Minn.) by more than 11 points to flip the seat for Democrats. Continue reading.

The Memo: Five ways Trump could come back

The Hill logo President Trump is in trouble.

He has lagged his presumptive Democratic opponent Joe Biden by a significant margin in national opinion polls throughout the year. His standing in the crucial swing states is not much better.

The economy, which was to be Trump’s central asset as he sought reelection, has been battered by the coronavirus. The pandemic, which has killed more than 160,000 people in the United States, is set to be the election’s dominant issue — and polls show Trump’s handling of it meets with broad disapproval. Continue reading.

Trump Teases a Gettysburg Convention Speech. Experts Say It’s an Ethics Breach.

New York Times logo If he accepts his nomination at the Civil War battlefield, the president will be conducting partisan business on federal property.

After repeatedly throwing a wrench into plans for the Republican National Convention this summer, President Trump on Monday tried to offer something tantalizing about the upcoming gathering, saying that his renomination speech would take place either at the White House or the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa.

“We will announce the decision soon!” Mr. Trump teased in a Twitter post.

It was perhaps a predictable move by the first president to be credited as an executive producer of a network reality show while sitting in office. Continue reading.

George Conway: I (still) believe the president, and in the president

Washington Post logo I believe the president Made America Great Again. I believe we need him reelected to Make America Great Again Again.

I believe Joe Biden is “Sleepy” and “weak.” I believe Biden could “hurt God” and the Bible.

I believe that if Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” He would “abolish” “our great,” “beautiful suburbs,” not to mention “the American way of life.” There would be “no windows, no nothing” in buildings. Continue reading.

It’s Still News When the President Wages a 40-Minute Assault on Reality

The avalanche of dishonesty from Donald Trump at a briefing Monday evening came to a crescendo with his talk of pre-existing conditions

It’s still worth remarking on when the President of the United States appears in public to unleash an avalanche of lies, particularly during a pandemic and an encroaching economic cataclysm. We should mention up front that it’s a good thing that the incident that caused the Secret Service to temporarily remove the president from the briefing Monday evening did not turn out to be a major threat. We also won’t count Trump’s claim that the person shot by law enforcement outside the White House grounds was “armed” as one of his false ones—things were happening fast, and besides, there was enough to go around here without it.

The president lied about mail-in ballots in Virginia, about Russian interference in the coming election, about foreign countries messing with mail-in ballots, about mail-in voting in New York, about whether the novel coronavirus spread in China, about tariffs, about how testing creates cases (again), about the stockpile of ventilators he inherited, about how the Obama administration “spied” on him. The chance to spout the last one was served up by a good friend from OAN, the network for people who think Fox News is insufficiently loyal to the president (a group which sometimes includes the president), who began her query—which she called an “opinion” question—by essentially asking the president whether it was difficult to be so victimized by very nasty people. This kind of Dear Leader vaudeville has become commonplace in the American republic.

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How Suffering Farmers May Determine Trump’s Fate

As rural Wisconsin’s fortunes have declined, its political importance has grown.

Last October, Jerry Volenec, a dairy farmer from southwestern Wisconsin, took the morning off to go to Madison for the World Dairy Expo, an annual cattle-judging contest and trade show. Volenec wanted to hear a town-hall discussion led by Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, to learn how the Administration planned to address the economic crisis gripping Wisconsin’s family dairy farmers.

Volenec’s farm sits atop Bohemian Ridge, a jagged plateau named for the Czech immigrants who settled there in the late nineteenth century. Among them was Joseph Volenec, Jerry’s great-great-grandfather, who established the farm, in 1897. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Volenec’s grandfather milked a herd of sixteen cows; he could make a living because New Deal policies used price supports and other measures to boost farmers’ earnings and limit overproduction.

Jerry Volenec always wanted to become a farmer. “You couldn’t keep me out of the barn,” he said. “I was milking cows by myself by the time I was fourteen.” By the early nineties, when Volenec began farming full time, the New Deal policies had largely been dismantled. The family increased its herd to about seventy, and Volenec’s father started paying him a salary, enough money for his education at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and to start an I.R.A. In 2000, Volenec installed a milking parlor, and since then he has increased the herd to three hundred and thirty cows. “We’re the biggest of the small guys,” Volenec, who is forty-five, with a sturdy build and a thin goatee, said. “But I was making more money, doing less work, when I started, twenty-five years ago. I’m basically paying myself living expenses now.” Continue reading.

Trump equates mail-in voting to Russian election interference

The president rebuffed a reporter’s question on whether he had confronted Vladimir Putin about reports of meddling.

President Donald Trump asserted on Monday that a force other than foreign adversaries was interfering in U.S. elections: Democrats.

“I’ll tell you who was meddling in our elections,” the president said at a White House news briefing. “The Democrats are meddling by wanting and insisting on sending mail-in ballots when there’s corruption all over the place.”

Trump had just rebuffed a question on whether he had confronted President Vladimir Putin of Russia on reported efforts to meddle in U.S. elections. Instead, he said Democrats were playing unfairly by pushing for more mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading.

White House Forced Changes In Intel Warning That Russia Wants Trump To Win: Report

Then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was forced out after refusing to water down the language so it might not enrage the president.

The White House last year forced changes in a pointed intelligence conclusion that the Kremlin wanted President Donald Trump reelected, according to The New York Times Magazine.

Wording was dramatically watered down concerning Russia’s strong backing for Trump shortly after then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was forced into early retirement when he refused to make the changes, the Times reported. The classified document reportedly also discussed Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence U.S. elections in 2020 and 2024.  

“I can affirm that one of my staffers who was aware of the controversy requested that I modify that assessment,” Coats told the Times. “But I said, ‘No, we need to stick to what the analysts have said.’” Continue reading.