So is the race tightening? Probably not, but maybe! Too soon to tell. Not by much.
Here are some thoughts about that.
Christopher Orr:
A quick thread on this line, and ones like it. It's one of the most common themes of the Trump era, and I think one of the most misunderstood.
It is almost always interpreted--and is clearly meant to be interpreted--as "I'd never speak/tweet that way because THOSE ARE BAD THINGS TO SAY, AND I DISAPPROVE OF THEM."
But what if the unspoken 2nd half is often or even usually something closer to "I'd never speak/tweet that way, BUT BOY WOULD I LOVE TO IF I COULD GET AWAY WITH IT."
Quinta Jurecic/WaPo:
Trump thinks everyone breaks the rules. No wonder he does it, too.
The Republican National Convention was a natural place to display this gleeful cynicism
The manic egregiousness of the convention was the natural expression of Trump’s attitude toward governance — an attitude that might be best summed up by the question, Who’s going to stop me? But on another level, it also insists, You’d do the same if you were me. Trump’s political project, and the project of the 2020 Republican convention, lies not only in corroding norms but also in insisting that those norms never existed, that corruption and misbehavior have always been the way of things — and that anyone who says otherwise is, like Trump, a liar.
ABC:
Trump's favorability and perceptions of COVID-19 response stagnate post-convention: POLL
Trump's favorability didn't improve, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.
President Donald Trump's efforts to build his appeal and define his opponent at the Republican National Convention, using pageantry and the White House as the backdrop, had little apparent impact on the electorate's impressions of both him and former Vice President Joe Biden, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.
Trump's week of celebration did not improve his favorability, even among his own base, and the country still remains widely critical of his handling of the major crisis of his presidency: COVID-19.
Perry Bacon Jr/FiveThirtyeight:
Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far.
And at the moment, Biden leads Trump by just over 8 points in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
Why does all of this polling data matter?
Because it suggests that Biden’s electoral prospects and the popularity of Black Lives Matter are not closely linked — at least not so far. Some political analysts have suggested that the decline in support for Black Lives Matter and the increased focus from both Republicans and the media on riots that have accompanied some of the protests of police violence against Black people might boost Trump and hurt Biden. Republicans certainly seem to think so — numerous speakers at the Republican National Convention have condemned the rioting and implied that state and local Democratic leaders are being too lenient toward the protesters, who are generally associated with Black Lives Matter. “Law and order,” meanwhile, was a heavy theme in Vice President Mike Pence’s address at the convention on Wednesday night, including the line, “The hard truth is you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also increasingly fruitless.
More and more, fact-checkers seem to be trying to bail out an ancient, rusty and sinking freighter with the energetic use of measuring cups and thimbles.
“My biggest takeaway of the last four years is probably realizing the extent to which big chunks of America are living in a different universe of news/facts with basically no shared reality,” was how Charlie Warzel, who writes about the information wars for the New York Times, put it last week.
Greg Sargent/Plum Line:
Trump’s parade of desperate lies reveals one big and awful truth
But Trump’s biggest deception of all concerns what he didn’t say and what he didn’t acknowledge. In his telling, the depths of the current coronavirus crisis and the economic disaster it has unleashed simply don’t exist at all.
Trump’s acknowledgment of the existence of the virus essentially treated his handling of it as uniformly a success story, one in which it has largely been defeated.
Coronavirus is, of course, the thing that will decide the election. Not crime and not protests.
Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC News:
It's Biden's to lose (and he still could): State of the race after the conventions
"There's still enough room (for Trump) to thread the needle, which is exactly what happened four years ago," one expert said.
The 2020 election is Joe Biden's to lose as he continues to hold a lead over President Donald Trump coming out of the Democratic and Republican conventions, which mark the start of the fall campaign.
But the future is unknowable. Data has its limits. Surprises happen. The world can change quickly, as anyone who lived through the 2016 election or the first eight months of 2020 knows.
The country remains deeply polarized along a roughly 50-50 partisan split. Biden and Trump allies both agree the outcome will likely be closer than the polls currently suggest as voters increasingly feel the tug of partisan magnets.
Here's what we know and, importantly, what we don't know two months before Nov. 3...
The future is unknowable. Things can change. It’s not over until it’s over. The only poll that counts…
Watch this story:
And
