Category: 2020 Election

Polls Indicate Trump Defectors Could Tip Texas For Biden

While the Cook Political Report still has Texas as a “lean red” state in its 2020 Electoral College Ratings, a Quinnipiac poll released last week showed former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump 45 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. And according to the Houston Chronicle, a decisive number of anti-Trump Republicans could be contributing to Biden’s lead in the state.

Jacob Monty, an immigration attorney in Houston, became a Republican years ago — attributing his party affiliation to an affection for the Bush family.

“I never had to apologize for them,” Monty told the Chronicle. “I always felt welcome. I never had to explain, ‘Oh, what Bush meant was …'” Continue reading.

Trump, Biden build legal armies for electoral battlefield

The Hill logoPresident Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden with help from allies have amassed an expansive legal war chest and marshaled armies of attorneys for what is on track to be the most litigated election season in U.S. history. 

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.

With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.  Continue reading.

One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?

Washington Post logoBoth President Trump’s advisers and operatives laboring to defeat him increasingly agree on one thing: The best way for him to regain his political footing is to wrest control of the coronavirus.

In the six months since the deadly contagion was first reported in the United States, Trump has demanded the economy reopen and children return to school, all while scrambling to salvage his reelection campaign.

But both allies and opponents agree he has failed at the one task that could help him achieve all of his goals — confronting the pandemic with a clear strategy and consistent leadership. Continue reading.

Trump’s Dementia is on Vivid Display in Sunday Twitter Tantrum

There is nothing that Donald Trump likes better than to childishly insult his critics and political opponents. With regard to Joe Biden, that has included numerous references to mental stability and fitness for office. Unfortunately for Trump, the American people have thoroughly rejected his claims and, even worse, believe that Trump is the one with the cognitive dysfunction. And in a head to head comparison, more voters say that Trump is unfit to serve.

Trump has been surprisingly helpful in providing abundant evidence of his acute psychoses. And on Sunday morning he added to the voluminous documentation that he is utterly nuts. This naturally came in the form of rage-filled tweets. Even though he has lately been curtailing the quantity of his Twitter output, this has not impacted that “quality” in any way. Such as this…

No matter how many times Trump asserts that President Obama spied on his campaign, it still isn’t true. And Trump’s allegations of corruption by Obama are a laughable demonstration of projection. It’s Trump and his confederates who have actually been charged and convicted of criminal – even treasonous – conduct. Continue reading.

Trump keeps touting New Jersey fraud case to attack mail voting. Local leaders say he’s not telling the whole story.

Washington Post logoFive days before the citizens of Paterson, N.J., selected new members of their city council in May, a postal employee in a neighboring town spotted something suspicious in a local post office: 347 mail-in ballots, bundled together.

The discovery kicked off weeks of tumult in New Jersey’s third-largest city, a densely populated and diverse community. Four men, including a city councilman, have been charged with fraud. Amid the controversy, the county election board disqualified 19 percent of ballots cast in the race.

The episode probably would have remained a local dust-up but for the sudden interest of President Trump, who has spent the last several months attacking voting by mail as a practice he claims is susceptible to massive fraud. In recent weeks, he has seized on the situation in Paterson as the prime exhibit in the case he is making about why the November election will be “rigged,” as he has repeatedly put it. Continue reading.

4 Million COVID-19 Cases Later, Donald Trump Wants To Take It Seriously

The president canceled Republican National Convention events in Florida and wore a face mask in public. But it’s too late.

Five months, 4 million cases and nearly 144,000 deaths after the coronavirus was first detected on U.S. soil, President Donald Trump seems to finally be taking some of the most basic steps to show that the pandemic is serious.

He was shown wearing a mask in public. He rebooted the White House’s coronavirus briefings as a brief, more informative affair than the hour-plus rant sessions of the past. And on Thursday, he canceled the Jacksonville, Florida, portion of the Republican National Convention ― a mass public gathering exactly of the type that public officials have warned against ― saying his convention speech would happen “in a different form.”

“The timing for this event is not right,” Trump said. “To have a big convention, it’s not the right time. It’s really something that, for me, I have to protect the American people.” Continue reading.

Trump proves he’s not very good at the whole ‘spin’ thing as he tries to explain away his convention humiliation

AlterNet logoImpeached bunker-hider Donald Trump’s idiocy, plus the incompetence of his Republican Party, conspired to deliver yet another humiliating defeat to the beleaguered president, forcing them to give up their last-minute attempt to move their convention to Jacksonville, Florida, in a fit of pique. So how do you retreat after making such a big show of dissing Charlotte, North Carolina, along with the Democrats who run the city and state for enforcing limits on public gatherings and mask wearing?

You make stuff up, of course.

Look at Trump’s hilariously bad spin:

Trump said on Thursday he informed his team that his focus was on protecting the American people, even though aides advised him they could make an in-person convention safe.

‘He’s kind of co-opted the party’: Trump-Republican defectors in Texas could tip the state in Biden’s favor

AlterNet logoWhile the Cook Political Report still has Texas as a “lean red” state in its 2020 Electoral College Ratings, a Quinnipiac poll released last week showed former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump 45% to 44% among registered voters. And according to the Houston Chronicle, a decisive number of anti-Trump Republicans could be contributing to Biden’s lead in the state.

Jacob Monty, an immigration attorney in Houston, became a Republican years ago — attributing his party affiliation to an affection for the Bush family.

“I never had to apologize for them,” Monty told the Chronicle. “I always felt welcome. I never had to explain, ‘Oh, what Bush meant was …’” Continue reading.

I’ve taken the cognitive test, too. We need to talk about it

AlterNet logoI was reading a community diary story today that you really should read, if you haven’t already, about the writer’s experience taking the cognitive assessment test. I have had difficulty processing Donald Trump’s answer regarding this matter to Fox News in a way that I hadn’t really come to terms with until reading that diary and thinking about how it made me feel.

I had my first MOCA test years after rehab recovering from a violent crime assault, and, unfortunately, since then for the past 25 years, I’ve had a version of this test given to me with decreasing regularity. The point of a cognitive test isn’t to “ace” it or prove how much of a smart person you are: The point is to track whether or not you are experiencing a negative trend in your ability to function, which can be caused by time, disability, or even medication. As the president bragged about his test results, one question kept popping up: Why brag? This test is easy. Only once, due to a bad drug interaction, did I ever suffer difficulties. It was that one time, though, that was a clue to doctors around me that something was wrong, resulting in changes to my medication. A follow-up test showed me, I guess in Trump’s terms, “acing the test” with “unbelievable” results. I don’t know if I would call them unbelievable, because they were to be expected. At the time of my traumatic brain injury (TBI), the MoCA didn’t exist. Still, the goal of neurologists was the same. It wasn’t to determine if I was smart—it was to determine if brain trauma was having a degenerative effect, or if the damage had stopped. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Spending Millions In Attempt To Suppress Free Speech

This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.

The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen.

Dozens of stations ran the ad. But the Trump campaign chose to sue just NBC-affiliate WJFW, which is owned by a relatively small company that only has two other local TV stations, both in Bangor, Maine. The campaign did not initially sue the political organization that produced the ad. That group later joined the case as a defendant. Continue reading.