Category: 2020 Election

Fact-Checking Misinformation Can Work. But It Might Not Be Enough.

Last week, Twitter tried something new. When President Trump tweeted that “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” Twitter appended this message to Trump’s tweet: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” — which in turn, linked to a page with the headline: “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”

Given the dangers misinformation poses to both democracy and public health, many believe social media platforms have a responsibility to monitor and correct misinformation before it spreads. But can corrections like this even work? And what role should social media platforms play in combating misinformation?

Well, it turns out there is evidence that fact checks do work. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when confronted with a correction, a significant share of people do, in fact, update their beliefs. Continue reading.

Trump and allies try to rewrite history on handling of police brutality protests

Washington Post logoPresident Trump claimed on Wednesday that he had not hunkered down in a secure bunker as hundreds of protesters gathered around the White House last Friday night. He said Secret Service had not raced him to the secret underground location. And he described his trip to the subterranean space as a “tiny little short” visit that was really “much more for an inspection.”

But the president’s alternate history, which he unspooled to Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio Wednesday, was a false one — one facet of his days-long attempt to rewrite the history surrounding the police brutality protests that have engulfed the fortified White House in recent days.

Trump and his family were rushed to a secure bunker after at least four protesters breached the temporary fences set up near the Treasury Department grounds Friday around 7 p.m., according to arrest records and people familiar with the incident. Continue reading.

White House targets protesters with misleading video

Washington Post logo“Antifa and professional anarchists are invading our communities, staging bricks and weapons to instigate violence. These are acts of domestic terror. The victims are peaceful protesters, the residents of these communities and the brave law enforcement standing watch.”

— The White House, in a tweet, June 3, 2020

From the Rose Garden on June 1, President Trump warned that the voices of “peaceful protesters” against the killing of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis by police have been drowned out by “professional anarchists, violent mobs, or, arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters, Antifa and others.”

Two days later, the White House tweeted (and then later deleted) a 58-second video that appeared to offer evidence to support this claim. The video, which gained more than one million views in the less than three hours it was online, purported to show “Antifa and professional anarchists … staging bricks” for future nefarious use.

Yet a closer examination of the video tells a different story. Continue reading.

Chaos is all Trump has, as he hopes ‘law and order’ appeal will work in GOP’s favor

Will Americans demanding justice be heard? Or will fear once again prevail?

The Queen of Soul sang it clearly. The “Respect” Aretha Franklin was craving — yes, demanding — in that classic is still in short supply for black Americans. More protesters have been arrested than police officers involved in the death of George Floyd, the black Minneapolis man who died after now-former officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on the handcuffed man’s neck for nearly nine minutes while three fellow officers stood by or assisted.

Would there have been protests across the country and the world if Chauvin and his fellow officers had been charged immediately? There is no way to know for sure. But it is clear that the anguished reaction has been about much more than the death of one man, and has been generations in the making.

In 1967, Aretha’s anthem blared from radios and record players, the soundtrack for African Americans frustrated with the disconnect between the lofty words of equality in the country’s founding documents and the reality. Sound familiar? If history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. And as citizens fill the streets, demanding justice in the face of police brutality, not enough has changed. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Looks at Electoral Map and Doesn’t Like What It Sees

New York Times logoAs polls show President Trump significantly trailing his rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., his campaign is spending heavily in states, like Ohio, that it had hoped would not be competitive at all this year.

President Trump is facing the bleakest outlook for his re-election bid so far, with his polling numbers plunging in both public and private surveys and his campaign beginning to worry about his standing in states like Ohio and Iowa that he carried by wide margins four years ago.

The Trump campaign has recently undertaken a multimillion-dollar advertising effort in those two states as well as Arizona in hopes of improving his standing, while also shaking up his political operation and turning new attention to states like Georgia that were once considered reliably Republican. In private, Mr. Trump has expressed concern that his campaign is not battle-ready for the general election, while Republicans are concerned about whether the president can emerge in a strong position from the national crises battering the country.

Mr. Trump has been consistently unpopular as president with a majority of Americans; his advisers have long seen his effort to win a new term as depending on the loyalty of his conservative base and the Republican-friendly tilt of the Electoral College — factors that could allow the president to capture another thin victory despite the strong possibility of losing the popular vote again. Continue reading.

How Partisan Gerrymandering Hurts Kids

Center for American Progress logoIntroduction and summary

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district lines to unfairly favor particular politicians or political parties in elections.1 It is a political dirty trick—and an extremely harmful one—that turns democracy upside down, letting politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. Gerrymandering allows politicians to get reelected even if they fail to address the problems that the majority of the public wants them to solve. That failure has consequences for every issue that Americans care about, including efforts to expand health care and to protect Americans from gun violence—two issues that the Center for American Progress has written about at length.2 It also has very real and harmful consequences for some of the most vulnerable Americans: children.

Redistricting is the process of redrawing district lines, which occurs every 10 years after a new census, to account for changes in district populations. In most states, redistricting is controlled by state legislators,3who use this opportunity to solidify their power by drawing opposition voters out of their districts and maximizing the number of districts that can be won by their political allies. These gerrymanders can wipe out electoral competition and result in dramatically different political outcomes than if districts were fairly drawn.

The effect is most clear in heavily gerrymandered states where one party’s candidates win a majority of the vote, but the opposing party nonetheless wins the majority of the seats—and control of the state legislature. This anti-democratic outcome is the status quo in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—three of the four states discussed in detail below. In Michigan, for example, Democratic candidates won the majority of the votes for both the House and the Senate, but Republican candidates won the majority of the seats in both chambers. This had a major negative impact on programs that benefit children. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI)—a supporter of full-day, universal preschool—proposed an $84 million increase to Michigan’s preschool programs, but the legislature whittled that increase down to $5 million—an outcome made possible by partisan gerrymandering.4 

Continue reading.

GOP Group Scorches Trump On Fox News With Call To End His ‘American Carnage’

Republican Voters Against Trump is urging Americans to vote the president out of office in November.

A Republican group opposed to President Donald Trump is urging voters to end his “American carnage” by voting him out of office in November. And it’s using one of Trump’s favorite TV shows to spread the message.

Republican Voters Against Trump ― a campaign that launched last week to highlight the voices of disaffected party members ― is running an ad this week on “Fox & Friends” that uses the president’s own words against him. The spot is centered around a line from his inauguration: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” which has taken on new meaning amid a deadly pandemic and nationwide civil unrest:

“As demonstrations and riots roil the country, he is only dividing us, rather than uniting us,” Sarah Longwell, the group’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “President Trump owns this American carnage. It’s time to stop the bleeding.” Continue reading.

Trump bets his presidency on a ‘silent majority’

With his law-and-order, tough-on-protesters rhetoric, Donald Trump is courting a suburban vote that might no longer exist.

The lines of demarcation between the nation’s cities and their suburbs have faded in the decades since Richard M. Nixon courted the “Silent Majority” that elected him to the White House.

With his law-and-order, tough-on-protesters rhetoric, Donald Trump is betting his presidency it still exists.

The suburbs — not the red, but sparsely populated rural areas of the country most often associated with Trump — are where Trump found the majority of his support in 2016. Yet it was in the suburbs that Democrats built their House majority two years ago in a dramatic midterm repudiation of the Republican president. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Denies What America Watched In Horror

The Trump campaign sent the following request to Media Matters:

Hope you all are doing well, staying healthy and safe.
Saw your piece this morning on the use of tear gas at Lafayette Square. Wanted to make sure you saw our official statement on the false reports and would appreciate it if you would retract and correct your piece.
As always, happy to be a resource for you.

You can read the full statement from the campaign here.

Our response: No. Continue reading.