Meet the Supporters Trump Has Lost – The New York Times

By Claire Cain Miller, Kevin Quealy and Nate Cohn

• July 1, 2020Updated 11:36 a.m. ET
• • 227

“For some, the disenchantment started almost as soon as Donald J. Trump took office. For others, his handling of the coronavirus and social unrest turned them away. For all of them, it’s highly unlikely they will vote for him again.

These voters, who backed Mr. Trump in 2016 but say there’s “not really any chance” they will this year, represent just 2 percent of all registered voters in the six states most likely to decide the presidency, according to New York Times/Siena College polls. But they help explain why the president faces a significant deficit nationwide and in the battleground states.

“I think if he weren’t such an appalling human being, he would make a great president, because I think what this country needs is somebody who isn’t a politician,” said Judith Goines, 53, a finance executive at a home building company in Fayetteville, N.C. “But obviously with the coronavirus and the social unrest we’re dealing with, that’s where you need a politician, somebody with a little bit more couth.”

“. . . .  How ‘Not Again’ Trump Voters Are Different From Other 2016 Trump Voters

About 6 percent of voters in battleground states who said they backed President Trump in 2016 said there was “not really any chance” they would do so in 2020. Here’s how these voters compare: . . . . “

Poll Shows Trump Dragging Down G.O.P. Senate Candidates – The New York Times

By Jonathan Martin and Matt Stevens

• June 25, 2020
• • 329

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s erratic performance in office and his deteriorating standing in the polls is posing a grave threat to his party’s Senate majority, imperiling incumbents in crucial swing states and undermining Republican prospects in one of the few states they had hoped to gain a seat, according to a new poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.

Senator Martha McSally of Arizona, a Republican, trails her Democratic opponent, Mark Kelly, by nine percentage points while Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is behind his Democratic rival, Cal Cunningham, by three. Both incumbents are polling below 40 percent despite having recently aired a barrage of television advertisements.

In Michigan, which Senate Republicans viewed as one of their few opportunities to go on the offensive this year, Senator Gary Peters, a first-term Democrat, is up by 10 percentage points over John James, who is one of the G.O.P.’s most prized recruits.”

Gretchen Whitmer: A Governor on Her Own, With Everything at Stake – By Jonathan Mahler – The New York Times

By Jonathan Mahler

• June 25, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
• • 26

“Gretchen Whitmer first heard the word “coronavirus” over the 2019 Christmas holidays from her younger sister, who a decade earlier contracted H1N1. Whitmer, just a year into office and preoccupied with her agenda for 2020, barely registered it. She was in a hurry to push forward on some of her campaign promises, like introducing an array of new education programs and repairing Michigan’s badly potholed roads. The state’s Republican lawmakers had blocked her at nearly every turn, but now, with the economy in Michigan and America booming, Whitmer had a plan to make an end-run around the Legislature by issuing $3.5 billion in bonds to help fund her projects. January was going to be about building political momentum for that effort and gearing up for a presidential election in which Michigan, where Donald Trump won by just 10,704 votes in 2016, was again going to be an important battleground state. Whitmer was tapped to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s annual State of the Union address on Feb. 4.

As the governor began moving ahead with her agenda, though, the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, was watching the gathering storm with growing concern. Potentially infected travelers were arriving daily in Michigan, but the Centers for Disease Control was not providing her with the support she needed to adequately detect and contain the virus. On Feb. 27, Khaldun briefed the governor and her staff on the epidemic in a conference room adjacent to her office. She said that she was convinced the coronavirus had already come to Michigan; she just couldn’t prove it. Khaldun reminded Whitmer and her staff that there was no vaccine for this virus, that it was highly contagious and that it was much more deadly than the flu. In order to prevent a widespread outbreak, she said, it would almost certainly be necessary to take some pretty extreme measures, like banning large group gatherings and maybe even ordering certain businesses to close temporarily.

A brief silence fell over the room. One of Whitmer’s aides spoke.

“This could be disastrous to the economy,” he said.

Poll Shows Trump Dragging Down G.O.P. Senate Candidates – The New York Times

By Jonathan Martin and Matt Stevens

• June 25, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
• • 68

NYT Upshot/Siena College poll

of registered voters in Arizona

Arizona Senate

47%

Kelly

38%

McSally

16%

Other

“Other” includes those who would vote for another candidate, would not vote or did not know. Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 650 registered voters in Arizona from June 17 to June 22.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s erratic performance in office and his deteriorating standing in the polls is posing a grave threat to his party’s Senate majority, imperiling incumbents in crucial swing states and undermining Republican prospects in one of the few states they had hoped to gain a seat, according to a new poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.

Senator Martha McSally of Arizona, a Republican, trails her Democratic opponent, Mark Kelly, by nine percentage points while Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is behind his Democratic rival, Cal Cunningham, by three. Both incumbents are polling below 40 percent despite having recently aired a barrage of television advertisements.

In Michigan, which Senate Republicans viewed as one of their few opportunities to go on the offensive this year, Senator Gary Peters, a first-term Democrat, is up by 10 percentage points over John James, who is one of the G.O.P.’s most prized recruits.

NYT Upshot/Siena College poll

of registered voters in Michigan

Michigan Senate

41%

Peters

31%

James

29%

Other

“Other” includes those who would vote for another candidate, would not vote or did not know. Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 610 registered voters in Michigan from June 17 to June 22.

The poll showed that the same voters who are fleeing the president — highly educated white Americans, many of them once-reliable Republicans — are providing an advantage to Democratic Senate candidates. Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus and his bombastic response to protests over racial justice have made him an underdog against Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, who led the president by 14 percentage points nationally in the Times poll.

How Joe Biden Is Catching Up to the Trump Money ‘Juggernaut’ – By Shane Goldmacher – The New York Times

By Shane Goldmacher

• June 23, 2020Updated 10:07 a.m. ET
• • 18

“Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will hold his first event of the 2020 campaign with former President Barack Obama on Tuesday, and more than 120,000 people have already paid to attend, according to the Biden campaign, raising more than $4 million.

The joint appearance will be the biggest grass-roots fund-raiser of the cycle for the Democratic Party, serving not just as a coming-out party for the former running mates but also as something of a punctuation mark on Mr. Biden’s arrival as a financial force in his own right.

In May, for the first time, Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee outraised President Trump and the Republican Party, $80.8 million to $74 million, and receipts are on pace to surge even higher in June. Mr. Biden’s online fund-raising so far this month has already surpassed May’s $34.4 million total, according to people familiar with the matter. Now, some party officials see $100 million as an achievable goal for June.

“May is the floor for June,” declared Tom Perez, the chairman of the D.N.C., who, along with senior campaign officials, declined to comment on the potential to reach $100 million.

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The outpouring of cash has allowed Mr. Biden to sharply cut into the enormous financial advantage that Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee built in the lead-up to 2020, shaving tens of millions of dollars off what had been a $187 million edge entering April. Since the beginning of March, Mr. Biden and the D.N.C. have banked more than $100 million.

Freed by Court Ruling, Republicans Step Up Effort to Patrol Voting – By Michael Wines – The New York Times

By Michael Wines

• May 18, 2020
• • 685

“WASHINGTON — Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.

Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Trump but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Mr. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.”

Woman who accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault now claims Trump supporters paid her to lie | Salon.com

This article originally appeared on Raw Story

“A woman who had accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault now claims she was paid to lie about the public health expert by a pair of President Donald Trump’s supporters.

The woman says right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl and his frequent accomplice Jack Burkman persuaded her to cast Fauci as the assailant using details from an actual sexual assault she survived just after high school, and they paid her to do it, reported Reason.

“The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” said Diana Andrade in an email to the website. “[They also] had me do something like this . . . back in January.”

Andrade said she decided to abandon her claims and try to record incriminating evidence against the pair after Wohl asked her to find another woman to accuse Fauci of sexual assault — as they’ve done to former special counsel Robert Mueller and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman on the nine-minute, 35-second call. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.” ”

Source: Woman who accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault now claims Trump supporters paid her to lie | Salon.com

Opinion | Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Straight Out of His Old Populist Playbook – By Thomas B. Edsall – The New York Times

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

• April 22, 2020
• • 848

Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

“President Trump has chosen his pandemic re-election strategy. He is set on unifying and reinvigorating the groups that were crucial to his 2016 victory: racially resentful whites, evangelical Christians, gun activists, anti-vaxxers and wealthy conservatives.

Tying his re-election to the growing anti-lockdown movement, Trump is encouraging a resurgence of what Ed Kilgore, in New York magazine, calls “the angry anti-government strain of right-wing political activity that broke out in the tea-party movement” — a movement now focused on ending the virus-imposed restrictions on many aspects of American life.

Jeremy Menchik, a political scientist at Boston University, argues in a lengthy Twitter thread that

these protests have something for everyone: small-business, concerns for the working class, anti-elitism for resentful rural whites, fetishism of guns for NRA, dislike of government for traditional conservatives. It’s a crosscutting issue even amid a pandemic.

Menchik makes the point that anti-quarantine protests

will distract the electorate. If the election is a fight between Trump vs governors who refuse to open their economies, Trump doesn’t have to defend his record on Covid-19. He’s an advocate for liberty!

Studies of the 2009-10 Tea Party movement, Menchik writes, suggest that “continued protests will boost conservative turnout in Nov 2020.” The protests

will help frame the 2020 election as a choice between the pro-open economy Trump versus the Washington insider #BeijingBiden who is complicit in China’s efforts to hurt working class Americans.

Crucially, Menchik argues,

Continued protests will help Trump rebuild his coalition of 2016. Scholars of digital social movements emphasize a logic of connective action not collective action; where personalized content sharing across media networks enables coalition building.

Casting the coronavirus epidemic as a wedge issue, Trump is playing both ends against the middle, in an attempt to veil his own inconsistencies.    . . . “

David Lindsay:

Here are the top comments after this article, which, like the article,  are also amazing.

David Potenziani

Durham, NCApril 22

Times Pick

Mr. Edsall ably documents the fact that Trump is clever but not smart. He’s clever by driving wedges between groups and connecting his disparate supporters in the hope to flip a few states. If he were smart, he would have stepped up with leadership showing (feigned) sincerity, calm, and empathy for the plight of the American people, marshaling the resources to get testing on its feet, and driving forward for effective treatment and the promised land of a vaccine. He would have won. Maybe bigly. But all is not good in the land of Trump. The latest polls show erosion of support by seniors. GOP governors are breaking ranks with the leaders of their party. Most Americans fear the virus and want protection. Trump’s approach is purely political when a vastly different solution is needed. The lack of leadership will leave all areas in the lurch. Because COVID-19 respects no one, the epidemic will ravage every farm, hamlet, village, and town—everywhere. This was a challenge of leadership. Trump has failed. Tragically.

35 Replies907 Recommended

John commented April 22

J

John

Cleveland HeightsApril 22

Times Pick

In addition to the groups described as comprising his coalition, Trump pulled together a number of single-issue voters who were willing to hold their noses regarding their general dislike for the man: anti-choice, anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Palestinian, etc. I hope that this pandemic has revealed that character matters. This is a guy who insisted on placing his name on stimulus checks as a decoration, a guy who lies shamelessly and gives himself a 10/10 for his performance on every issue, the kind of person who, if a character on a TV show, everyone would laugh at and find completely despicable and to be dismissed. I hope that these single-issue voters will come to their senses and see that Trump is not presidential material. Biden, despite his flaws, has a basic sense of right and wrong that one could appeal to. It would matter to Biden whether a given course of action was right or not. Trump completely lacks that. He does not even understand that. His desire to win at all costs and his lack of character are now completely laid bare. He has got to go.

24 Replies574 Recommended

alan haigh commented April 22

A

alan haigh

carmel, nyApril 22

Thank you pundits. Without your guidance Trump’s tactics would have seemed like love of America and the desire to lift the lot of working Americans to me. Every single Trump briefing on the pandemic has revealed such utter incompetence- such a complete inability to marshal a simple paragraph of information that if the voters bring him within a mile of another term, I suppose we will have the government we deserve. Cuomo’s detailed briefings provide a perfect contrast, revealing a thorough grasp of the data and what the consequences are for regular people. Night and day. Grammar school and graduate school. How can Trump be a champion for anyone who successfully graduated high school?

7 Replies495 Recommended

Joel Sanders commented April 22

J

Joel Sanders

Montgomery, ALApril 22

It’s interesting that the anti-shutdown protestors see themselves as, once again, giving the middle finger to the coastal elites but are actually being duped by conservative elites.

5 Replies415 Recommended

Tony Pious commented April 22

T

Tony Pious

SFBAApril 22

Times Pick

Conservative working class whites fail to understand what wealthy conservative whites have always known. Government per se is not the enemy; government is merely the tool of the real enemy — Big Capital. That the Kochs and Mercers and DeVos’s of the world can fund astroturf campaigns and hoodwink blue colar whites into acting against their own interests is bald evidence of the primacy of money in American politics. What credulous working class whites fail to understand is that COVID-19 is a far greater threat to them than to the shadowy squintillionaires who bankroll their protests. So while they are coughing and hacking their way to an early grave the Kochs and Mercers and DeVos’s of the world are secure in the knowledge that their squintillions will isolate them from the havoc they wreak.

20 Replies409 Recommended

Stephen Csiszar commented April 22

S

Stephen Csiszar

Carthage NCApril 22

@David Potenziani He cannot even be bothered to pretend to feign sincerity, or anything else he lacks, like everything. He can however, continue endlessly to talk about himself. TV game show host making life-and-death decisions for hundreds of millions. Oh America.

329 Recommended

Mike N commented April 22

M

Mike N

RochesterApril 22

Our country is divided now into two camps but it isn’t even about ideology anymore. It comes down to one thing: those susceptible to the con, and those who aren’t. It’s not about ideology; it’s about gullibility.

24 Replies328 Recommended

Opinion | Elizabeth Warren: What Congress Must Do About Coronavirus – The New York Times

By Elizabeth Warren

Ms. Warren is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a former presidential candidate.

• April 8, 2020
• • 1135

Senator Elizabeth Warren.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Listen to This Opinion Essay

Audio Recording by Audm,  To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

“Congress has passed three coronavirus packages aimed at providing immediate relief to families, workers, hospitals and small businesses, but with more than 12,000 dead and 10 million out of work, the scale of this tragedy demands we do much more — much faster.

Communities across the country are entering a critical stage. Illnesses are mounting and our health system is stretched to the brink. Early data shows people of color are infected and dying at disproportionately high rates. Unemployment is approaching Depression-era levels. No clear end is in sight for social distancing. The next round of policymaking must squarely address these hard realities — not with a few new nibbles, but with the kind of broad, direct action needed to save lives and save our economy.

Containing the health crisis must be our first priority. I have outlined immediate steps to accomplish a federal surge in testing capacity. In addition to using the powers under the recently invoked Defense Production Act, we must act now to have the government manufacture or contract for the manufacture of critical supplies when markets fail to do so — to produce tests, personal protective equipment, drugs in shortage and any future vaccines and treatments that our scientists develop — not in the thousands, but in the tens of millions. This will ensure swift production and build a stopgap against shortfalls moving forward. We must also use public programs to provide health care free for all who don’t otherwise have it.

As workers lose their jobs, small businesses close and household incomes plummet, we must extend economic relief beyond cash payments to families and individuals. This includes suspending consumer debt collection, enacting a universal national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, stopping water and utility shut-offs, providing as much broad student loan debt cancellation as possible and finding money to keep child care providers afloat. With older Americans and those with underlying health conditions among the most vulnerable, we must also increase monthly Social Security and disability benefits.”

Opinion | What America Needs Next: A Biden National Unity Cabinet – By Thomas L. Friedman – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• April 7, 2020
• • 1827

Joe Biden would take a different approach to governing than President Trump.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

“In the last Democratic debate, Joe Biden declared that he would nominate a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. That felt right at the time. But times have changed. Biden needs to go much, much further: At the Democratic convention he needs to name not just his vice president, but his entire cabinet. And it needs to be a totally different kind of cabinet — a national unity cabinet — from Democrats on the Bernie Sanders left to Republicans on the Mitt Romney right. Why?

Because while most people are playing nice right now managing this virus, the wreckage, pain and anger it will leave behind will require megadoses of solidarity and healing from the top.

And even if we get to the other side of this crisis by January, there are going to be a set of wrenching debates around who got bailed out and who didn’t and around how much civil liberty we should sacrifice to track and quarantine Covid-19 carriers until there is a vaccine. If handled on a partisan basis, those issues will rip our country apart.

In short, if this isn’t the time to leave behind the hyperpartisanship that has made it nearly impossible for us to do anything big and hard for two decades, then when?

Considering all the people who have come together in this crisis to tend to neighbors, contribute to hospitals, share scarce resources and learn from one another how to combat Covid-19, would it be asking too much for our political system to mirror the best in us rather than to continue to exacerbate the worst? Americans today deserve the government they need more than ever. It has literally become a matter of life and death.

Biden, because he doesn’t run anything right now, has had a hard time demonstrating leadership. The one giant contrast that he could draw with President Trump, though, is the approach he would take to governing.

Americans are not focused on this now — but they will be. And when they are, Biden needs to show that he isn’t running to be president of the 48 percent (or less), as Trump is; he’s not trying to suppress the vote, as Trump is; he’s not running to squeak by in the Electoral College, as Trump is. He needs to show he’s running to be a majority president, a unity president — but not just unity for unity’s sake, but unity of purpose based on a set of shared values for rebuilding America.

Biden should enlist people ready to embrace these values:

1) They have to believe in science — and not just around the coronavirus but around climate change, which is the next train coming at us.

2) If they were in power during this crisis, they have to have led their city, state or business in a way that took the science of this epidemic seriously from the start and cared for those under them.”

David Lindsay: This not my favorite Friedman piece. Pete Buttigieg was my choice for VP. I think saying the VP has to be female, was Biden’s first really big mistake. He mentions three women, but they are unknowns to most of us. We know that Buttigieg can speak, and think like a president.

The comments are interesting, and here is my favorite so far:

Drew

San Jose, Costa RicaApril 7

Times Pick

A good start but a few adjustments are needed. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is far the best person for Ambassador to the UN. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should stay put for now. And perhaps Andrew Yang should be Secretary of Energy over Karsner. But the big flaw in this line-up, there has to be some role for Sen. Sanders. Something important. Some office with real authority. Something worthy of the man. Not sure what it could be but for certain VP Biden must bring in Sanders in a visible way, address his concerns and gain his cooperation. The appearance of exclusion was Secretary Clinton’s biggest mistake.

25 Replies653 Recommended