Category: 2020 Election

Republicans dismiss Trump proposal to delay election

The Hill logoSenate Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close ally of the White House, are dismissing President Trump’s suggestion Thursday to delay the November elections because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I have concerns about mail-in ballots being the exclusive way to cast votes, but I don’t believe we should delay the elections. I want to reopen the economy in a sound way. I want people to go back to school safely,” Graham, who is up for reelection in November, told reporters Thursday morning.

“In South Carolina, we had a very large primary in June and were able to do it in person. I think we can be able to able to safely vote in person in November,” he said. Continue reading.

Trump doesn’t have authority to change election date alone

And if there’s no election by Jan. 20, Trump would have to vacate the White House

Corrected, 3:20 p.m. |President Donald Trump might have floated the idea on Twitter of delaying the presidential election in a tweet Thursday morning, but a president doesn’t have the authority to change the date of the presidential election on his own, legal experts say.

Punctuating his tweet with three question marks, Trump appears to be more raising an issue that will wrest attention away from Thursday morning’s bad economic numbers than announcing what he wants to do with the election timing.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???,” Trump tweeted. Continue reading.

Why Trump’s Blunt Appeals to Suburban Voters May Not Work

New York Times logoPeople living the ‘Suburban Lifestyle Dream’ tend to support recent protests and disapprove of the president’s handling of race.

President Trump’s latest campaign ads warn of left-wing mobs destroying American cities. His recent White House comments have depicted a rampage of violence and a “radical movement” to dissolve the police. His Twitter feed has sounded alarms over an Obama-era fair housing rule he has framed as a threat to “The Suburban Housewives of America” and the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.”

It all amounts, with little subtlety, to a play on the perceived fears of suburban voters. But there are several reasons to believe that a strategy that worked for Richard Nixon on the heels of urban unrest in 1968 is less likely to be effective for Donald Trump in 2020.

For one, these are not the American suburbs of the 1960s (and they have a lot fewer housewives). The scale of urban violence and the threats to that suburban lifestyle are a faint echo of that time. And while polling shows that suburban voters disapprove of the president’s job in general, they disapprove even more of his handling of the very issues he is trying to elevate. Continue reading.

Trump raises idea of delaying election

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Thursday suggested delaying the 2020 elections, something he does not have the power to do unilaterally, as he levied fresh attacks against mail-in voting.

Trump, who is badly trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in national polls, framed the suggestion as a question and argued that with more mail-in ballots there would be more fraud.

There is no evidence to support the idea that either absentee or mail-in ballots increases voter fraud. It also does not appear that there will be universal mail-in voting this fall, though some states require mail-in ballots. Continue reading.

Trailing badly in polls, Trump points to ‘hidden’ voters and the ‘silent majority’ as path to victory

Washington Post logoTrailing badly in the polls and with just over 95 days until the election, President Trump is banking on a questionable phenomenon to defy conventional wisdom and win reelection: the “hidden” Trump voter.

The president has repeatedly touted a “silent majority” of Americans he expects to show up en mass on Election Day to shock pollsters and help him repeat his surprising 2016 victory. His campaign has developed lengthy slide shows aimed at disproving public polls and predicting a swell of unexpected support that will propel Trump past Democratic rival Joe Biden in November.

But researchers and political analysts, who acknowledge that a hidden Trump vote existed in 2016, said differences between this year and then are stark — making it unlikely that unexpected voters alone will be enough to make up the significant advantage Biden holds. Continue reading.

Trump in trouble revisits his tried-and-true — protecting your neighborhood from ‘them’

Old habits are hard to break as president’s fair housing decision illustrates

As polls show his base stagnant and his poll numbers dropping, Donald Trump has decided to replay an old favorite. While trying to strike fear of the invading “other” is right out of the 1968 playbook of both Richard Nixon and George Wallace, it’s also a tactic Trump honed at his father’s knee. It makes perfect sense for Trump in trouble to return to what he knows — and he knows all about shutting the literal and figurative door on Black folks moving into white neighborhoods.

In the 1970s, Trump and his father, Fred Trump — president and chairman, respectively, of Trump Management — were named as defendants in lawsuits brought by the Justice Department, accusing them of turning away African Americans who applied to rent apartments in some of the company’s buildings. That would be breaking the letter and spirit of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, something that was by no means the exception among property owners of the time.

The reaction, though, was pure Donald Trump. Rather than settle the lawsuits quietly, as some did, he called the charges “absolutely ridiculous,” denied them, countersued and said the government was trying to make him rent to “welfare recipients,” all sadly predictable. Though the Trumps eventually settled without admitting guilt, test renters of different races received different treatment, and investigations found that certain discarded applications were marked with “C” for “colored.” Continue reading.

Lindsey Graham’s campaign gets caught using racist imagery in ad against his Democratic challenger

AlterNet logoAlready this week, Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue had to pull an ad for anti-Semitism after The Forward showed that it included a picture of Perdue’s Democratic—and Jewish—opponent, Jon Ossoff, altered to make his nose appear larger. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, though, isn’t taking down an ad that darkens the skin of his opponent, Jaime Harrison, who is Black.

“It’s sad that detractors are making up fake accusations about this graphic,” according to a Graham campaign spokesman, who admitted that the ad used an “artistic effect.” You know, the artistic effect of making a Black man look darker and therefore ostensibly scarier.

Graham’s campaign also insisted the “artistic effect” was innocent because the same effect was, they said, used on Graham recently in a video. Okay, if that happened, was that video from the Harrison campaign? One somehow feels the Graham campaign would mention it if that were the case. Additionally, there’s something different about showing someone’s face thrown into shadow as a frame or two of a video and darkening a still photo. And, oh, right, racism exists and it’s different to darken a Black man’s skin. Continue reading.

Meadows says benefits to expire as negotiators struggle to get deal

The Hill logoWhite House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday that added unemployment benefits will formally expire on Friday as negotiators appear to be struggling to make any progress toward a bipartisan deal.

“Enhanced unemployment insurance provisions will expire,” Meadows told reporters after a meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer(D-N.Y.).

Asked if he believed that it would happen now, he added: “I do.” Continue reading.

DFL Party Statement on Trump’s Push to Delay the 2020 Election

SAINT PAUL, Minnesota – Today, Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin issued the following statement on Donald Trump’s push to delay the 2020 elections:

“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: President Trump is suggesting we delay the 2020 election almost immediately after the United States surpassed 150,000 deaths due to COVID-19 and suffered the worst economic nosedive in American history. Continue reading “DFL Party Statement on Trump’s Push to Delay the 2020 Election”

Don Lemon Shares Grim ‘Secret’ About Trump’s ‘New Tone’ On Coronavirus

Highlighting Trump’s latest relapse to downplaying the coronavirus, the CNN anchor said the president will never change his stripes.

CNN host Don Lemon let viewers in on “a little secret” on Tuesday after President Donald Trump reverted to sharing false information about the coronavirus just days after shifting to what some pundits called a “new tone” on the pandemic.

“There is no pivot. There is no ‘new tone.’ There is no turning over a new leaf,” Lemon said on “CNN Tonight” “There is one Donald Trump, and he never changes. Do not get it twisted.”

“This is a president who, even with almost 150,000 Americans dead, can’t even stay on script to save American lives ― or his own political skin, which is what he really cares about,” he added. Continue reading.