So there a lot of news overnight (but too fresh for pundits), so I’m just gonna catch you up:
WaPo:
Trump administration in standoff with Manhattan U.S. attorney who investigated the president’s associates
Thing is, though, Geoffrey Berman is not going anywhere. And there you have it.
And now for our regularly scheduled Abbreviated Pundit Round-up…
The Hill:
Contact tracing, essential to fight against coronavirus, hits roadblocks
Public health workers are trying to break the chains of COVID-19 transmission by reaching out to people who have tested positive for the disease and asking them to both self-isolate for two weeks and provide a list of people they had contact with 48 hours before becoming sick, who will, in turn, also get a call.
But in the age of robocalls and scams, so-called contact tracers are having a difficult time getting people to answer their phones or return missed calls.
Governors and public health officials in recent days have pleaded with the public to answer their phones if they get a call from the health department.
Matt K Lewis/ Daily Beast:
With These Two Scotus Rulings, The Last Justifications for Backing Trump Just Went Bye-Bye
He didn’t build the wall. The economy is a wreck. And now his judges are legislating from the bench. Republicans, your last excuse just went out the window.
This week’s landmark LGBT decision was authored by Gorsuch, a Trump appointee. And although a George W. Bush appointee, Chief Justice John Roberts, led the DACA ruling, his decision was based on the White House having botched its reasons for the DACA decision. This is not a good look for a president who is already getting trounced in the polls.
Stung by the court’s decisions, Trump is hoping to cast himself as their victim and make the 2020 election about appointing even more conservative judges. But conservative voters might just as easily conclude that the effort is futile—that the conservative legal movement was a failure.
It’s working its way into punditry to acknowledge the trouncing.
The Hill:
GOP fears Biden's low-key campaign is paying off
Biden has, for the most part, kept a low profile throughout the coronavirus pandemic and weeks of demonstrations for racial justice across the country. Over that time, Biden has built up a healthy lead in the polls and emerged as the heavy favorite for now to be the next president.
Meanwhile, Republicans have watched with growing alarm as President Trump’s polling numbers have fallen to frightening new lows for an incumbent.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson with my favorite counterintuitive take:
Trump's presidency is in a tailspin. His reelection may survive it.
The hidden tectonics of the racial awakening after the death of George Floyd may well change the conventional politics of race. But the mostly White, conservative half of the country most susceptible to Trump's tirades against taking a knee in the NFL, calls for respect for the flag and "law and order," and coded warnings that the US should preserve its heritage, "not tear it down," hasn't necessarily spoken yet.
Trump is a backlash politician; his initial election was a reaction to the cultural, racial and political change many Americans perceived in the Obama presidency. Recent Supreme Court defeats could give the evangelical section of his base motivation for one last, decisive battle to create a generational conservative majority in a Trump second term. If there is one president who can harness a culture war with demagoguery to save his own political skin, it would be the incumbent.
Remember how well the Battle of Lafayette Square went for Trump? Collinson doesn’t.
Isaac J Bailey/Nieman Reports:
Will This Racial Reckoning Finally Force Newsrooms to Listen to Every Staffer’s Voice?
To some, it’s the end of objectivity; to others, it’s long overdue. In the end, it’s about making journalism better
Journalists of color took to Twitter to tell stories from inside the industry they’ve long felt compelled to silently endure.
The trend has disturbed many journalists who have a traditional view of our craft. I’ve even seen some describe it as a moral panic and the end of objectivity or journalism itself.
I don’t agree with them. It’s a long overdue corrective and one of the healthiest movements to occur within our industry in a long time. It will answer whether editors, supervisors, and executives actually believe diversity is an invaluable, indispensable journalistic tool or whether talk of it has long been little more than window dressing to make us look better on spreadsheets and in comparison to other industries we frequently scold for not being diverse enough. It means they’ll be forced to answer why our industry has never been able to achieve its diversity goals; is more likely to spill barrels of ink to report on brown-skinned terrorists than white ones; has so frequently associated crime with dark skin; and treats women politicians more harshly than men.
Harry Enten/CNN:
Joe Biden may win more than 400 electoral votes, but there's a long way to go
Biden could win the largest landslide for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 -- or he could lose to President Donald Trump.
For Biden to score a huge win, very little needs to change. Biden is ahead by 10 points in an average of live interview polls nationally. The largest Democratic win in the last 56 years was Bill Clinton's 9-point win in 1996.
More impressively, Biden isn't that far from taking more than 400 electoral votes. Let's assume Biden wins all the electoral votes Hillary Clinton did four years ago (232), as polls indicate. One or more recent polls put him up as well in
Arizona (11 electoral votes),
Florida (29 electoral votes),
Georgia (16 electoral votes),
Michigan (16 electoral votes),
North Carolina (15 electoral votes),
Ohio (18 electoral votes),
Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and
Wisconsin (10 electoral votes).
If Biden wins all of these states, he gets to just south of 370 electoral votes.
Add on
Iowa (6 electoral votes) and
Texas (38 electoral votes), where Biden was down just a point in two high quality polls released in June, and he gets more than 400 electoral votes. That would beat Clinton's 379 electoral votes in 1996 as the largest since Johnson's 486 electoral vote win in 1964.
Indeed, forecast models based on a slew of indicators (such as one
put together by University of Alabama student Jack Kersting) have Biden earning more than 400 electoral votes within its 95% confidence interval.
Yet, models such as these also have Biden getting only about 200 electoral votes as a plausible scenario too.
I’m not looking for predictions of a blowout, I just want blowout considered in the plausible scenarios. We got a pandemic raging and why is everything suddenly going to change? Is Trump magically going to become competent?
Amy Walter/Cook Report:
New 2020 Electoral College Ratings
With just under five months until the election, President Trump is a severe underdog for re-election. Polls show that voters do not trust him to handle the two most pressing issues of the day — the coronavirus pandemic and race relations — which has helped drive his job approval to 41 percent. National polling averages show him losing to Joe Biden by 9 points.
And, with every tweet, he only digs himself further into this hole.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Six Observations From This Week in Politics
As the 2020 election draws closer, here’s what to keep an eye on.
President Donald Trump returns to the rally circuit. Boris Heersink and Jordan Carr Peterson at the Monkey Cage have researched Trump’s 2016 rallies, and found that, at least when it comes to campaign donations, they “do indeed mobilize his supporters.” However, the rallies “also counter-mobilize support for his opponent. Crucially, this counter-effect is bigger.” Whether that applies to turning out voters, and whether the 2016 results will hold up in 2020, is anyone’s guess. On the plus side, Trump’s campaign is certainly collecting a lot of information from strong supporters. On the down side, the odds of an unfortunate headline are pretty good for a politician who doesn’t stick to a script.
CNN:
How Trump plans to turn around his losing campaign
Aides have recently encouraged Trump to stop talking about race and focus more on his record on job creation. Few around him believe Trump is able to rise to the occasion the current moment calls for.
"We are beyond the point of looking presidential," said one person involved with the campaign.
Still, while the Trump campaign may be floundering, it's far from flailing. An incumbent president carries myriad advantages, and Trump has proven particularly resilient amidst an endless stream of controversy and crisis.
"Traditional rules of politics have never applied to Donald Trump. We'll see if they do this time," said a senior Iowa Republican official who speaks frequently to the President's team. "Counting him out would be malpractice for Democrats."
You can't say this enough: the Trump campaign is made up of stupid people. They really think the pandemic is over and they won't have any more problems in places like OK, FL, AZ, they don't have to wear masks, etc and there will be no consequences.
Drs. Fauci and Birx have advised against the Tulsa rally and were, of course, ignored. That’s why you don’t see them in public.