Can you imagine? The political constituency you’ve carefully groomed and trained now expects you to actually do your job. The horror.
WaPo:
Republicans grow nervous about losing the Senate amid worries over Trump’s handling of the pandemic
In recent weeks, GOP senators have been forced into a difficult political dance as polling shifts in favor of Democrats: Tout their own response to the coronavirus outbreak without overtly distancing themselves from a president whose management of the crisis is under intense scrutiny but who still holds significant sway with Republican voters.
“It is a bleak picture right now all across the map, to be honest with you,” said one Republican strategist closely involved in Senate races who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss concerns within the party. “This whole conversation is a referendum on Trump, and that is a bad place for Republicans to be. But it’s also not a forever place.”
Honestly, is there anything more indicative of the haphazard, inconsistent and poorly thought out coronavirus approach of the WH than how the VP office is handling a positive test by a staffer?
Self isolation and masks are for the little people.
There are people who carefully catalogue the incremental changes in the political environment. Necessary and correct approach.
Then there are the people who can see where the trajectory is going. They are not wrong, they see what's there.
Then there are the people that deny both. They are to be ignored.
Of course it’s a referendum on Trump. While some people still think they have the luxury of chasing after Biden’s flaws and imperfections (and they are there), most Democrats and independents realize what’s at stake. What’s new is Republicans slowly coming to the realization that that’s the landscape, not the one they invested billions to create. Another point, same WaPo article about nervous Republicans:
A third GOP strategist acknowledged that Colorado, Arizona, Maine and North Carolina had become “incredibly competitive” but said there was little sense yet that Democrats would be able to seriously compete in the next tranche of states that Trump won handily in 2016.
Still, Democrats have benefited from two key developments, said Jessica Taylor, Senate editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report: The emergence of Biden, not Bernie Sanders, as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and emerging evidence that the public does not believe Trump is managing the pandemic effectively….
But Republicans also believe the sinking economy — which on Friday reported a 14.7 percent jobless rate for April — will help determine the fate of incumbent GOP senators come November. Several Senate Republicans have already stressed the need to carefully reopen businesses and other economic activity — warning of the long-term impact to the country if the lockdown continues indefinitely.
“Everyone’s fortunes are tied to the economy,” said a particularly pessimistic Republican official. “It’s going to be a tsunami.”
Whatever you think of Sanders (or Warren or Harris or whoever your quality choice was from a very deep bench), the point is that this was the political argument that was made about Biden (down ballot strength). But the ‘referendum on Trump’ is the most important part. So don’t fall down the rabbit hole of chasing things they want you to chase, which is any number of variants of ‘my candidate would have been better’.
That will have to wait until next time. Eye on the prize, which very much includes SCOTUS. Oh, and medical and economic survival. There’s that, too.
Bill Scher/Politico:
Joe Biden Sucks at Digital Media. So What?
Biden got the nomination because he won the argument. And better gadgetry didn’t save the candidates who lost it.
The path Biden blazed to the nomination — culminating in his Super Tuesday blowout — provided a real-time political science experiment, testing whether grassroots online organizing, paid media or free media is most important for a successful campaign. Sanders was the organizing champ, having built a massive digital operation that cultivated nearly 12 million Twitter followers, almost 2 million small donors and a grassroots army that knocked on 2 million doors. Bloomberg literally owned paid media, drowning out all competitors with more than a half-billion spent on TV, radio and digital ads. (This included paying online influencers to produce ironic memes.)
Then there was Biden. His campaign was nearly broke. His field offices were often desolate, sometimes nonexistent. But between his Saturday night victory in South Carolina and the morning of Super Tuesday, his free media was pure gold.
Media discussion about Donald Trump, coverage of donald Trump is bad…. for Trump.
Harry Enten/CNN:
Biden's lead is the steadiest on record
What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the
average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points.
The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944. That could mean it'll be harder to change the trajectory of the race going forward, though this remains more than close enough that either candidate could easily win…
The bottom line is that while steadiness in the 2020 race so far projects forward to minimal movement from here on out, it doesn't in any way guarantee Biden a win. There's still a range of results possible.
Politico:
The one Republican Senate candidate willing to call out Donald Trump
In a recording obtained by POLITICO, Michigan Senate hopeful John James criticizes the president over his 'shithole countries' remark and other comments.
James faces the hurdle of running in Michigan, a swing state where the president’s popularity has ebbed. A recent Fox News poll showed Trump trailing Joe Biden by 8 percentage points and James lagging behind Democratic Sen. Gary Peters by 10 percentage points.
It isn’t that James is better than the rest of the Republicans, it’s that Trump’s position after fighting with “that woman in Michigan” is worse.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Trump wants America to ‘normalize’ coronavirus deaths. It’s the media’s job not to play along.
Then there’s Trump’s latest trope: “We have to be warriors. We can’t keep our country closed down for years.” Rather than encouraging Americans to think in a more nuanced way about how to prevent coronavirus deaths while helping the millions who are suffering financial disaster, the language implies a brutal and necessary tradeoff.
Media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen sees a strategy of normalizing coronavirus as key to Trump’s attempt to save his political skin before November’s presidential election, as he described in a widely-read essay last week:
“The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible,” he wrote.
The media’s role in Trump’s plan-without-a-plan? Well, he’s counting on us to regurgitate and magnify his message — and in doing so, make people begin to shrug off the daily horrors as inevitable. When journalists repeat the rhetoric about the necessity of widespread “reopening” or when they become inured to the continuing death count, they do his work for him.
NY Times:
Anxious About the Virus, Older Voters Grow More Wary of Trump
Surveys show the president’s standing with seniors, the group most vulnerable to the coronavirus, has fallen as he pushes to reopen the country.
But seniors are also the most vulnerable to the global pandemic, and the campaign’s internal polls, people familiar with the numbers said, show Mr. Trump’s support among voters over the age of 65 softening to a concerning degree, as he pushes to reopen the country’s economy at the expense of stopping a virus that puts them at the greatest risk.
A recent Morning Consult poll found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating on the handling of the coronavirus was lower with seniors than with any other group other than young voters. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, in recent polls held a 10-point advantage over Mr. Trump among voters who are 65 and older. A poll commissioned by the campaign showed a similar double-digit gap.
Yesterday’s soccer moms are today’s grandmas, being thrown under the bus by uncaring Republicans.
Science:
Fact-checking Judy Mikovits, the controversial virologist attacking Anthony Fauci in a viral conspiracy video
In a video that has exploded on social media in the past few days, virologist Judy Mikovits claims the new coronavirus is being wrongly blamed for many deaths. She makes head-scratching assertions about the virus—for instance, that it is “activated” by face masks.
Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, of being responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The video claims Mikovits was part of the team that discovered HIV, revolutionized HIV treatment, and was jailed without charges for her scientific positions.
Science fact-checked the video. None of these claims are true. The video is an excerpt from a forthcoming movie Plandemic, which promises to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms have taken down the video because of inaccuracies. It keeps resurfacing, including on the Plandemic website, which, in “an effort to bypass the gatekeepers of free speech,” invites people to download the video and repost it.
Harry Enten/CNN:
A record number hold a strong opinion of Trump
Right now, most voters feel very strongly about Trump. We can see this in polls which ask voters whether they have a strongly favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or strongly unfavorable view of him. If you average polls from late March onward from
Grinnell College/Selzer and Company,
Fox News and
Monmouth University, 27% of voters have a very favorable view of Trump and 42% have a very unfavorable view of him.
All told, 69% of voters have either a strongly favorable or unfavorable view of the President.
That 69% is the
largest at this point in an election cycle since pollsters started asking this type of question in 1980. The previous record was Trump in the 2016 campaign, when 65% of voters had either a very strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Trump. A similar 64% of voters had a strongly favorable or unfavorable view of George W. Bush during his reelection fight in 2004. No other presidential nominee ever hit 55%, which just tells you how historically polarizing Trump is.
Now, compare Trump's numbers to Biden's this year in the same polls. A relatively low (compared to Trump) 46% say they have a strongly favorable or unfavorable opinion of Biden. Broken down, that includes 18% very favorable and 28% very unfavorable.
In other words, voters are 23 points less likely to have a more strongly held position of Biden than they are of Trump. There's considerably more wiggle room to knock Biden down than there is to raise Trump up.
Reinforcing the lead story, a referendum on Trump is a loss for him. Only elevating a third party or making Biden unelectable gives Trump a chance, and as Harry says in the article, no guarantee that works a second time the way it did in 2016.
Then again, this is not 2016. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.