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.
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.
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.
Visit follows those of surrogates and family members of both major candidates.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will travel to Minnesota next week in a tour of Midwestern battleground states that could be critical in the 2020 election.
Biden’s campaign released no other details Thursday about the Sept. 18 visit to Minnesota, his first as a Democratic nominee for president.
The trip by the former vice president follows that of his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, who campaigned in Minnesota on Wednesday. Continue reading.
WASHINGTON – Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) recently alerted one of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s main election campaign advisory firms that it had been targeted by suspected Russian state-backed hackers, according to three people briefed on the matter.
The hacking attempts targeted staff at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with Biden and other prominent Democrats, over the past two months, the sources said.
A person familiar with SKDK’s response to the attempts said the hackers failed to gain access to the firm’s networks. “They are well-defended, so there has been no breach,” the person said. Continue reading.
The Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committees with the Republican National Committee raised over $210 million in August, they announced Wednesday.
Why it matters: Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised $364.5 million in the same period, dwarfing Trump’s total fundraising haul by over $150 million. It is believed to be the most ever raised by a presidential candidate in a single month.
What they’re saying: “Democrats pulled out all the stops in an attempt to boost Joe Biden’s campaign this month,” the Trump campaign and the RNC said in a statement. Continue reading.
