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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2019 17:43:31 GMT
President Trump's retweet calling to extend his term by two years was made in jest, according to White House officials and other people close to the president. White House aides told The Washington Post that the president has not privately discussed extending his term, which would violate the Constitution, and that the tweet was not serious. Trump on Sunday retweeted Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., who suggested that Trump's term be extended by two years "for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup," alluding to the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference. Trump also tweeted Sunday that "they have stolen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back." The tweets come as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she was worried that Trump would challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election if he lost the White House.  White House spokesman Hogan Gidley responded to the president's tweets by calling out Democrats' reaction to Attorney General William Barr's conclusions on the Mueller investigation. |
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2019 6:17:28 GMT
Donald Trump could win a second term in the White House, Sir Kim Darroch told Downing Street, saying there is a 'credible path' for him to sweep to victory in next year's Presidential election.  In a leaked diplomatic cable sent on June 20, the Ambassador reported how two days earlier the President had 'electrified' an audience of 20,000 supporters in Orlando, Florida, at a huge rally to launch his re-election campaign. A senior British diplomat was in the Amway Center, an indoor sports stadium, to witness the event and report back to Sir Kim.  The Ambassador told London that while the President had not offered any new policies, 'the crowd could not have been happier'. 'The atmosphere was unique – somewhere between a major sporting event (where only the home team fans are in the crowd) and a mega-church. Indeed the event kicked off with prayers from a pastor who asked God to 'tear down' opposition to the President.' Sir Kim said the audience was a 'sea of the now iconic red MAGA [Make American Great Again] caps. The crowd looked almost exclusively white, with a pretty even mix of men and women, young and old: there were families in every stand. For some, attending had meant a long wait in 30C heat and humidity.' Sir Kim predicted that the President's campaign strategy will be to 'go with what he knows best' and appeal to his core supporters. He noted how the enthusiasm of his 'die-hard fans' is undiminished after two-and-a-half years in the Oval Office. In comments that could anger the White House, Sir Kim reported that: 'As is standard at these rallies, the language was incendiary, and a mix of fact and fiction – hard to reconcile with [Vice President Mike] Pence's remarks about governing for all Americans.' A key difference between when Trump last ran for President in 2016 is that the machinery of the Republican Party is 'four-square behind him', Sir Kim said. Sir Kim said the President still faces hurdles – including the prospect of the Democrats picking a candidate more popular than the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, who fought the last election. He also said Trump cannot afford to lose much support and stressed that the President has made no meaningful efforts to 'diversify his base'. 'All that said, there is still a credible path for Trump – but so much rides on who the Democrats choose in July 2020.' |
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Post by Admin on Aug 2, 2019 17:55:37 GMT
After President Trump mentioned 2016 rival Hillary Clinton at a reelection campaign rally in Cincinnati, the crowd broke into a chant of "lock her up."
Trump mentioned his former opponent and her use of the term "deplorable" to describe a segment of Trump supporters.
"Do you remember when Hillary used the word 'deplorable'?" he said. "Deplorable was not a good day for Hillary. Crooked Hillary. She is a crooked one," he said, adding, "She is crooked."
After this, the crowd began to chant "lock her up," a refrain that supporters of the president commonly used during the 2016 election.
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Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2019 20:26:24 GMT
Former South Carolina Congressman Mark Sanford says he's running for president, making him the latest Republican to attempt a long-shot bid against President Trump in the 2020 GOP primary.  Sanford, who was also South Carolina's governor, made the announcement on Fox News Sunday. He called for a "conversation about what it means to be a Republican" and criticized Trump over adding to the national debt. Sanford lost reelection to the House in 2018 when the president endorsed his primary challenger, who narrowly lost to a Democrat in the general election. "I think that the Republican Party has lost its way on what were traditional benchmarks to what the party had been about," Sanford said in an interview with NPR's All Things Considered. "... I think the Republican Party has profound problems ahead given the change in demographics and given the tone that [voters] see coming out of the White House," he added. Sanford joins former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh as Republican challengers to Trump. All three have little chance of winning. But, it seems, that isn't their only goal. "Every time a president has had an opponent within their own party ... that president has gone on to lose the general election," Weld said in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. |
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Post by Admin on Sept 18, 2019 17:53:39 GMT
 Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin looked at the probability of “inversions” in presidential elections, where the popular-vote winner loses the electoral vote. These inversions happened in 2000 and 2016 and twice in the 1800s, meaning that the candidate with the most votes has lost 8 percent of the time in the last 200 years. Using statistical models that predicted an inversion in the 2000 and 2016 races, the researchers found that the probability of the popular vote winner losing the electoral vote is about 40 percent in races decided by 1 percent (about 1.3 million votes) and roughly 30 percent in races decided by 2 percent (2.6 million votes) or less. But these probabilities are “not symmetric across political parties,” the researchers say. Over the past 30 to 60 years, this asymmetry has favored Republicans. The statistical models used in the research predict that in the event of an inversion, “the probability that it will be won by a Republican ranges from 69 percent to 93 percent.” “But conditional on a narrow popular vote loss for Democrats, modern Democratic candidates have had about a 35% chance winning the Presidency via inversion,” the researchers wrote, meaning that Republicans have a 65 percent chance of winning all future narrowly decided elections. “If elections continue to remain close,” as they have in recent races, the researchers wrote, “inversions will occur with substantially higher frequency” than they have in the past. The researchers pointed to the Electoral College system and the high concentration of Democratic votes in blue states as the driving force behind this trend. “Democrats have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins,” the researchers explained, creating an asymmetry in the winner-take-all Electoral College system that favors Republicans. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton won California by about 3.5 million votes while losing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by less than 80,000 votes combined. “Feasible policy changes — including awarding each state’s Electoral College ballots proportionally between parties rather than awarding all to the state winner — could substantially reduce inversion probabilities, though not in close elections,” the researchers concluded. Michael Geruso, who led the research, told HuffPost that only scrapping the Electoral College system, rather than reforming it, would eliminate the growing chance of inversions in presidential races. “The only change that would cause the Electoral College to always elect the winner of the national popular vote would be to change the system to have a national popular vote,” he said. Another researcher, Dean Spears, told the outlet that the paper shows that Trump’s 2016 win was not a fluke, and the chances of a repeat are only increasing. “I think a lot of people think that there was something special or improbable about the 2016 election. That with the politics of these times, 2016 was somehow a fluke. One of the important things that we learned is that that’s not true,” he said. “Not because it was unlikely, it was an inversion because an inversion is likely in a close election.” |
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