LA Times:
Trump has slipped among key groups that backed him in 2016
Trump’s decline among parts of his 2016 base is a chief finding so far from the USC Dornsife Daybreak Poll, which tracked voter preferences daily four years ago and is doing so again this year. Overall, Trump has lost support from about 9% of voters who backed him in 2016, the poll finds.
The poll shows no major shift in the race during the last two weeks, belying much speculation that the back-to-back national political conventions and violence in Portland, Ore., and Kenosha, Wis., might have changed what has been an unusually stable contest.
During the Democratic convention, Biden gained 2 percentage points and Trump lost 2 points; Trump then regained some of that ground during his convention, a week-by-week comparison of the poll’s tracking shows.
The net result is a Biden lead of 11 points, 52% to 41%, in the poll’s latest results as of Monday, after the Republican convention. A rolling average of results over the last week has been virtually the same, 53% to 41%.
"Among people who did not vote in 2016, because they either chose not to or weren’t old enough, Biden leads 52% to 34%."
The quality polls are coming! Later today, Monmouth poll in PA. MULaw in WI on Sept 9. The new Ann Selzer (Biden +8) and Suffolk (Biden +7) polls are just out, though. Also, Ipsos out today with Biden +7, identical to last poll. (No bounce in support for Trump as Americans see pandemic, not crime, as top issue: Reuters/Ipsos poll).
Michelle Goldberg/NY Times:
Biden Condemned Violence. Why Won’t Trump?
Only one candidate incites his supporters to mayhem.
When Elizabeth Neumann went to work in counterterrorism in Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, she thought she’d be focused on Islamic extremism, as she was in George W. Bush’s administration. But as the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at D.H.S., she soon realized that she had to take the threat of white-supremacist terrorism seriously.
“It was probably 2018 when we started to realize that this was not just a blip, that Charlottesville wasn’t just a blip,” she told me.
Even as she and her colleagues worked to understand how domestic white supremacists were being emboldened, there was a series of shocking attacks, including the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018. Europeans working in counterterrorism told their American allies that the threat of right-wing extremism was eclipsing that of returning Islamic State fighters.
“They were talking to us going: ‘Hey, you guys are the exporters here. You need to do something about this,’” said Neumann.
Want to talk MA? Peter Canellos/Politico:
The Unlikely Kennedy Who Ended the Kennedy Dynasty
In losing his Senate race, Joe Kennedy III has freed his family from a political burden it has struggled to escape.
Ron Brownstein/CNN:
Biden's GOP endorsements show the cracks in Trump's coalition
Joe Biden is attracting more crossover endorsements from prominent members of the opposing party than any other presidential candidate from either side in decades. That doesn't guarantee the former vice president victory in November, but history suggests it could signal a lasting break in the Republican coalition that provides new opportunities to Democrats for years to come.
The public support for Biden
significantly exceeds the number of Republicans who officially endorsed Hillary Clinton against
Donald Trump in 2016. In recent decades, experts say, only Bill Clinton in his winning campaign of 1992 and Ronald Reagan in his 1980 landslide attracted anything approaching this level of support from leading members of the opposite party's coalition. But probably no presidential candidate has entirely matched Biden's level of crossover endorsements since Richard Nixon's 49-state landslide reelection in 1972 was boosted by the massive "Democrats for Nixon" operation headed by John Connally, the former Democratic governor of Texas and Lyndon B. Johnson protégé.
Max Boot/WaPo:
This isn’t an administration. It’s an ongoing criminal conspiracy.
In the past, I would have argued for leaving Trump alone after he steps down so as to end our “long national nightmare.” But now I am convinced that Trump’s wrongdoing is so pervasive and brazen that he must be prosecuted to uphold the rule of law and deter even greater lawbreaking by future presidents. If elected, President Biden should appoint a special counsel of unimpeachable integrity — a widely respected former U.S. attorney or federal judge — with a wide-ranging mandate to investigate Trump and his administration. That prosecutor should finally summon Trump to testify orally under oath or assert his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination — something Mueller never did. If Trump did testify, it would almost certainly result in perjury charges.
Military Times:
Trump’s popularity slips in latest Military Times poll — and more troops say they’ll vote for Biden
The results, collected before the political conventions earlier this month, appear to undercut claims from the president that his support among military members is strong thanks to big defense budget increases in recent years and promised moves to draw down troops from overseas conflict zones.
But the Military Times Polls, surveying active-duty troops in partnership with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, have seen a steady drop in troops’ opinion of the commander in chief since his election four years ago.
In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. Questions in the poll had a margin of error of up to 2 percent.
Among all survey participants, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapprove of Trump’s time in office.
Brian Beutler/Crooked:
The Media Fails Its Biggest Trump 2020 Test
Still, it was at least true that Clinton used a personal email server to do work, and there at least were multiple investigations of that setup, so most of those stories about her emails were pegged to something real.
The same can not be said of any 2020 campaign stories premised on the idea that Donald Trump is running a “law and order” campaign for re-election or the assumption that Trump’s “law and order” message is a problem for Joe Biden.
Muriel Ponder/USA Today:
Postal Service worker: Dismantled mail processing machines is only our latest burden
The Postal Service gave me a job that serves Americans all over the country. It is something to be proud of. But now it is in danger.
The Postal Service in which I take such pride has been charged to do almost impossible tasks in ways that no other business in the country has been required to do. In 2006, the Postal Service was singled out by the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), as the only government agency or business in history required to fund the health care costs post-retirement for every employee for the next 75 years, and do it all in an immediate 10-year window.
Jason Johnson/the grio:
How do we reconcile Black Panther without our King Chadwick Boseman?
Finally, let’s be honest: Disney, ABC and Marvel aren’t going to leave a billion-dollar franchise on the table. There will be a Black Panther sequel, and it will be the most sought after role in the history of Hollywood. Which, in and of itself will empower Black actors in ways we’ve never seen before. A new Black face will take on the awesome responsibility of not just the Black Panther role, but Chadwick Boseman’s legacy of activism, charity and dignity.
Boseman’s death has hit all of us hard. Someone told me that explaining to his kids that “Black Panther was dead” was almost as hard as telling them about George Floyd, and I can believe it. As a man around Boseman’s age, between him and Kobe Bryant passing earlier this year, I feel like mortality is smacking me in the face (I called my doctor on Monday for a cancer screening. Bless you, Chadwick.)
As low as I feel about his passing, I’m encouraged by the doors this will open for some other deserving actor. I’m encouraged by just now learning that this man battled cancer, still got married, filmed six movies, and mentored kids all before passing on at the age of 43.
Wakanda Forever meant the stories of Wakanda would go on forever, and that includes T’Challa, even as we mourn the passing of our first and forever king.
