President Trump is on a campaign swing out West this weekend, while former vice president Joe Biden attended a church service in Wilmington, Del., but has no public events. The president holds a Latinos for Trump roundtable in Las Vegas on Sunday morning, followed by two fundraisers and an evening rally in Henderson, Nev.
Biden, who is leading Trump in the money race, got even more good news in the form of a pledge by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect the Democratic presidential nominee.
Trump’s Nevada visit comes as he continues to defend his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, after the release of an interview with Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward in which Trump acknowledged he played down the severity of the virus. Continue reading.
President Trump has leveled scathing law-and-order attacks on Joseph Biden for weeks. But a new poll shows Mr. Biden ahead in three states Mr. Trump hopes to pick up, and maintaining a lead in Wisconsin.
President Trump’s weekslong barrage against Joseph R. Biden Jr. has failed to erase the Democrat’s lead across a set of key swing states, including the crucial battleground of Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump’s law-and-order message has rallied support on the right but has not swayed the majority of voters who dislike him, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College.
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, leads Mr. Trump by five percentage points in Wisconsin and by a wider, nine-point margin in neighboring Minnesota, a Democratic-leaning state that Mr. Trump has been seeking to flip with his vehement denunciations of rioting and crime.
The president has improved his political standing in Wisconsin in particular with an insistent appeal to Republican-leaning white voters alarmed by local unrest. But in both Midwestern states, along with the less-populous battlegrounds of Nevada and New Hampshire, Mr. Trump has not managed to overcome his fundamental political vulnerabilities — above all, his deep unpopularity with women and the widespread view among voters that he has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading.
The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions Thursday on a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker the agency said had been serving as “an active Russian agent for over a decade.”
The lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, is the son of a former KGB officer and also happens to be a key source of disinformation for top allies of Donald Trump who have been actively working to smear Joe Biden with baseless claims of corruption. Chief among those allies are Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
In sanctioning Derkach, the Treasury Department did not name Biden but accused Derkach of releasing “edited audiotapes” and “unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures,” according to TheNew York Times. The Times writes that the sanctions announcement “appears to describe recordings Mr. Derkach released of Mr. Biden talking to Petro O. Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, that Mr. Derkach claimed revealed corruption.” Continue reading.
President Trump’s campaign is investing heavily in digital ads on Facebook and Google as it seeks to counter Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s massive advantage in television advertising.
The Trump campaign has plowed more than $170 million into Facebook and Google since 2019, compared with $90 million by the Biden campaign, according to data from Bully Pulpit Interactive.
Biden’s campaign has ramped up its spending on Facebook and Google in recent weeks, cutting into Trump’s spending advantage and matching the president’s digital spending in battleground states. The Biden campaign trounced the Trump campaign in digital fundraising in August. Continue reading.
The effort began six months ago when the campaign consulted David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton, and Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general under President Barack Obama, on how to run a presidential campaign during a pandemic.
The pair, along with a growing cadre of volunteer health experts, has been working behind the scenes to craft plans that could take effect Jan. 20, when the next president will take the oath of office, said Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser on the Biden campaign. Continue reading.
The President consistently trails Joe Biden in polls, but political strategists from both parties suggest that he still has routes to re-election.
Among the categories of professionals that Donald Trump seems intent on obliterating, one is Republican political strategists. The figures who guided his political rise in 2016 have been much diminished, because of criminal indictment (Steve Bannon), criminal prosecution (Roger Stone), incompetence (Brad Parscale), or domestic ruptures (Kellyanne Conway). Trump’s campaign does not have many strategists, nor, it has often seemed, much strategy. At the Republican National Convention, the idea of a second Trump term remained so undefined that the Party did not even offer a formal platform. Asked by the Times’ Peter Baker what he meant to do with a second term, Trump said, “I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.” The President has long succeeded by creating an environment of constant chaos; now his campaign seems to be drowning in it.
The professionals who remain at Trump reëlection headquarters are, with fewer than sixty days until the election, faced with a challenging set of statistics. For months, Joe Biden has led in national polls by at least seven percentage points. In order to win the Electoral College, Trump would need to beat Biden in about half of six swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. He trails Biden in all of them, though the margin in North Carolina and Florida is under two per cent. About forty-two per cent of Americans approve of the job he has done as President, a number that has remained fairly constant throughout his Presidency, but fifty-four per cent now disapprove, which puts him behind the ratings of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan at similar points in their reëlection campaigns—though well ahead of George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. In other words, Trump looks likely to be either the least popular incumbent to win reëlection in the modern polling era or the most popular one to lose it. Continue reading.
In a summer where movie trailers are otherwise in limited supply thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s reelection campaign is filling the void.
A pair of videos shared by the campaign and the president on Thursday offer a preview of coming attractions: rampant violence and danger under a prospective Joe Biden presidency. And each leans heavily on an increasingly common conflation, blending the former vice president’s stated support for peaceful protests with scenes of turmoil, violence and vandalism.
Even simply considered on their own merits, each of the ads is a bit odd. Continue reading.
Microsoft on Thursday reported that it is seeing “increasing” cyberattacks originating in Russia, China and Iran targeting its customers, including attacks against political groups and the presidential campaigns of President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, detailed in a blog post the efforts by three major foreign hacking groups to target the campaigns, along with other political organizations and individuals.
“The activity we are announcing today makes clear that foreign activity groups have stepped up their efforts targeting the 2020 election as had been anticipated, and is consistent with what the U.S. government and others have reported,” Burt wrote. Continue reading.
Representatives for both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates made stops in Minnesota this week, indicating the state will be an important part of both campaigns this fall.
President Donald Trump spoke in Mankato in mid August and his son Donald Trump Jr. visited Duluth Wednesday, where he hosted a Make America Great Again event.
On that same day, former second lady of the United States Dr. Jill Biden visited Prior Lake where she conversed with Governor Tim Walz, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Education Minnesota President Denise Specht and Minnesota educators at Jeffers Pond Elementary as part of her national “Back-to-School Tour.” Continue reading
The U.S. Treasury on Thursday added Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach to its “Specially Designated Nationals” list for alleged efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, including by promoting “false and unsubstantiated” allegations targeting Joe Biden.
The big picture: Derkach has been “an active Russian agent for over a decade,” maintaining close ties to Russian intelligence services, according to a statement by the Treasury. The designation will freeze Derkach’s assets in the U.S.
The Treasury also designated three Russian nationals — Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev and Darya Aslanova — for their work for the Internet Research Agency, which was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for its social media disinformation operations. Continue reading.
