A mock ad for former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign has gone viral on social media in recent days.
“Biden: He won’t inject you with bleach,” it reads.
The joke gets at a serious point: whether President Trump’s ardor for provocative and sometimes bizarre statements, as well as his general love of the spotlight, is backfiring as the coronavirus crisis deepens. Continue reading.
Some allies worry the president is damaging his reelection prospects with his dominance of the briefing room during a public health and economic crisis.Donald Trump’s top aides are fiercely debating a question their boss rarely confronted during his decades of jousting with tabloid newspapers, starring on reality TV shows and running a media-soaked presidential campaign: whether there’s such a thing as too much Donald Trump.
A series of missteps during Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is triggering fears among some advisers that the president is damaging his reelection prospects with his communications during the crisis.
White House allies have become exasperated with his dominance at coronavirus task force briefings, a daily rundown of testing and public health updates that Trump has transformed into a performance-art version of his freewheeling — and sometimes conspiracy-filled — Twitter feed. Continue reading.
If you listen to Donald Trump, before him there was nothing.
According to Trump, before he was elected, the United States military, which was fighting wars in two countries, confronting foreign navies on the high seas, launching drone attacks willy-nilly, and had soldiers stationed in more than 100 outposts around the world, had no ammunition. In the Rose Garden on March 30, Trump said, “I’ll never forget the day when a general came and said, ‘Sir’ — my first week in office — ‘we have no ammunition.’”
On Oct. 9 of last year, he told the same story: “When I took over our military, we didn’t have ammunition. I was told by a top general — maybe the top of them all — ‘Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘I’ll never let another president have that happen to him or her.’ We didn’t have ammunition.” Continue reading.
WASHINGTON, DC (CNN) — Former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday he believes President Donald Trump will try to delay November’s presidential election.
Mark my words: I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden said at a virtual fundraiser, according to a pool report. Biden has maintained the November election should not be postponed and has previously made similar comments.
Trump cannot unilaterally change the date of the election in November, as it has been set into law by federal statute and Congress would have to OK such a move. However, that has not stopped some Democrats from worrying that he will try to do so, and voters had asked the previously large field of Democratic presidential candidates if they had concerns that Trump would try to delay the election or refuse to leave office if he were defeated in November. Continue reading.
The coronavirus pandemic that has hammered some of America’s largest cities is now spreading to smaller rural areas, a progression that will bring a virus President Trump once downplayed to the doorsteps of voters who sent him to the White House.
Early epicenters of the disease in the United States have concentrated in urban settings. The first major outbreaks struck Seattle and San Francisco, followed by the greater New York City area that has suffered hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases.
But in recent weeks, the coronavirus has spread to rural areas, especially southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and the Midwest, hitting Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Continue reading.
Maybe they exist, but it’s hard to tell in the middle of a national health crisisANALYSIS — Writing in The Washington Post recently, columnist and veteran political analyst Henry Olsen suggested that we may all be missing something important: President Donald Trump’s showing in head-to-head ballot tests against expected Democratic nominee Joe Biden is lagging his job approval numbers in recent RealClearPolitics polling averages.
After noting the strong relationship between presidential job approval and election outcomes, Olsen wrote: “Biden leads Trump by nearly six points, 48.3 to 42.4 percent, in the most recent RCP average. Trump’s approval rating in the RCP average was 46.0 percent on Wednesday morning. If Trump’s true vote share approximates that, he only trails Biden by about 2 points. If that happens on Election Day, Trump could once again win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.”
That’s the secret stash of voters that could help the president win a second term, apparently — voters who now say (in the middle of a health care crisis) they approve of the president’s job performance but don’t also say they will vote for him in the fall. Continue reading.
Algorithm developed by DNC expert in the field of record linkage will increase organizing efficiency by 9 percent and provide campaigns with more comprehensive view of the overall electorateToday the Democratic National Committee is launching a new, proprietary national record linkage system that will be integrated into the DNC’s voter file — deduplicating millions of voter records, providing campaigns with a more comprehensive view of the electorate and increasing the effectiveness of Democratic organizers across the country.
“This record linkage system is an example of how the DNC is developing and implementing cutting-edge data science solutions to increase the effectiveness of Democratic organizers, improve our view of every possible voter and make sure Trump is a one-term president,” said Democratic National Committee Chief Technology Officer Nellwynn Thomas. “The DNC made early, historic investments in our data and technology infrastructure and is working with top data scientists to develop these kinds of innovative products that will help Democrats at every level of the ballot secure victory in November.”
“At the DNC, we’re taking the most advanced data science ideas and applying them to help Democrats win,” said DNC Data Science Director Jody Heck Wortman, who developed this record linkage model. “Having a high-quality record linkage system in place will help Democrats talk to more voters, more efficiently — and we are proud to support the work of our organizers with the best data possible.” Continue reading “DNC Announces New National Record Linkage System”
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In a deeply cynical move, President Donald Trump has attempted to convince Republicans to oppose expanding vote-by-mail options during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential for all Americans to be given the option to vote by mail in upcoming primary elections and the November general election, given that in the United States, the pandemic has alreadyinfected more than 784,000 people, resulting in more than 42,000 deaths. Seemingly without concern for the public’s health, Trump has cravenly claimed that if more Americans cast votes by mail, fewer Republicans will win elections. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund recently addressed, Trump’s goal of suppressing voters to boost his chances of reelection also includes his bogus claim that voting by mail leads to fraud. Despite Trump’s arguments, the real-world facts show that voting by mail does not disadvantage either major political party and is extremely popular with Americans across the political spectrum. Moreover, many Republican state officials disagree with Trump and are taking steps to expand voting by mail to help protect the health and safety of their voters. Continue reading “Trump Is Trying To Make Voting by Mail a Partisan Issue”
Voting rights advocates demanded state and federal lawmakers expand voting-by-mail immediately on Wednesday as Wisconsin health officials announced that nearly 20 new cases of the coronavirus were linked to the in-person voting that took place in the state on April 7.
Two weeks after Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that moving ahead with in-person voting for the state elections could “prove deadly” and dozens of civil rights groups and public health experts urged the election be postponed, 19 people who voted in person or worked at polling locations have since tested positive for the virus.
Critics of the decision to go ahead with the vote were unsurprised by the new cases, and said they offered more proof that other state, local, and federal elections this year must be completed with widespread vote-by-mail systems in place. Continue reading.
