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Post by Admin on May 22, 2020 19:05:51 GMT
On Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump said the quiet part loud in a tweet where he attacked Fox News for “doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get re-elected on November 3rd.” Hours later, the network gave him a new thing to get angry about. Fox’s latest poll finds Trump trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by a robust 8 points nationwide. It’s enough to put Biden ahead even considering the 3-point margin of error, and a significant swing from last month, when Fox’s polling had the race tied. Trump’s eroding standing versus Biden in the poll of 1,207 registered voters conducted May 17 to 20 correlates with a decline in approval of his handling of the coronavirus, which according to the Fox poll stands at 43 percent, an 8 percent decrease from March and April. A separate ABC News/Ipsos poll out Friday morning finds approval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus hitting a new low of 39 percent.
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Post by Admin on May 27, 2020 19:25:22 GMT
Earlier this month, Trump declared that “Transition to Greatness” is a phrase we’re going to hear a lot about because he’s decided it’s the perfect reelection slogan. (I’ll turn to Biden in a minute.)
As the former chief media adviser to three presidential campaigns (two for George W. Bush, one for John McCain), I pay attention to these things. And I am among the many who give credit to Trump for coining—or, at least, repurposing—the Reaganesque phrase “Make America Great Again.” As a campaign theme it was ideal for Trump in 2016. Simple but clear. Loaded with meaning. Fundamentally, his message to voters was: Due to reasons mostly beyond your control (immigration, technology, globalization), America has left you behind. I’ll take you back to a country you recognize, a country in which you’ll prosper.
Like it or not, Trump’s sound bite conveyed that he had a compelling reason for running—something Hillary Clinton failed to come up with, even after thinking about it far longer than Trump, and having run, and lost, once before. Her slogan “Stronger Together” didn’t express why she was in the hunt—or who she was campaigning as. Political analysts Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes said as much when slamming her 2016 announcement speech in their book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign: “There was no overarching narrative explaining her candidacy…. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”
Recent history is filled with presidential campaign themes about the future. Bill Clinton declared he would “Build a Bridge to the 21st Century.” Barack Obama promised, during the middle of an economic meltdown, that he’d provide the “Change We Need” for the challenges ahead. But Trump ran for president during a unique era, one in which more voters liked the idea of moving backward—toward a familiar and comforting past.
It was no surprise, then, when Trump announced that his reelection-campaign theme would be “Keep America Great.” On brand. Direct but sort of meta. He was saying that he’d made America great. And he’d keep it that way. And to underscore the point, the campaign mantra became “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”
So, count me among the perplexed that Trump, who clearly considers himself a marketing genius, suddenly announced on May 8 that he was changing his theme to “Transition to Greatness.” He described his decision this way: “It’s a great term. Just came out at this meeting. That’s right. It came out by accident. It was a statement and it came out and you can’t get a better one. We can go to Madison Avenue and get the best, the greatest geniuses in the world to come up with a slogan but that’s the slogan we’re going to use. Transition to Greatness.”
I believe that any bipartisan parsing of the statement would conclude that its basic meaning is: We are not currently great. But we are going to get there at some point. We are on a general trajectory toward greatness. The implication is that we are not currently great, even though Trump promised us we would be. Moreover, even though Trump had promised to keep America great, he was now saying we’re not even going to do that because we aren’t, in fact, great yet. Instead, he is saying: We’re going to transition to all the greatness he’d been promising during the last election. We just have to wait for it. It’s a bit like Trump’s coronavirus policy: We’re fine…Let me be clear: We’re not fine, but we’re going be fine very soon…Oops, hang with me on this, it’s gonna be quite a while till we’re fine.
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Post by Admin on May 27, 2020 21:32:20 GMT
And my verdict is that “Transition to Greatness” is, at the very least, confusing. But it is problematic, even more so, because it runs counter to the narrative Trump successfully pushed in 2016. He’s pushing, instead, a lot of snake oil: He hasn’t delivered the greatness yet, but try him again and he’ll deliver it next time. Which brings me to Joe Biden, who chose not to run in 2016, even though, in hindsight, he might have given Hillary Clinton a good run for the nomination. Biden has repeatedly talked of “transition,” of being a transitional figure. “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said during an online fundraiser with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. “My job is…to bring the Mayor Petes of the world into this administration…and even if they don’t come in, their ideas come into the administration.” He is using the same term but is focusing on another meaning of the word, and incorporating it in an entirely different context. Remember Donald Trump’s pronouncement at the 2016 Republican National Convention that “I alone can fix it”? Well, Biden seems to be suggesting just the opposite. He appears to recognize that the challenges of the presidency require a lot more than one person. They require an A-team, as opposed to the ad hoc pickup squads that Trump has put on the field. They require people, like Biden, with experience in governing. Especially now. Biden’s message is, We, together, can fix this mess. Biden’s message also addresses the elephant in the room: his age. Without pointedly admitting it is an issue or a problem, he is reassuring voters that in the event that something should happen to him, he’ll be surrounded by experienced and well-qualified people, of all ages, so that a beat won’t be missed and the machine will continue to hum. And that his team, his vice president first and foremost, has “got this.” The big pitfall for Biden is that while it may be a good idea, politically and practically, to bring in the Democratic farm team, it’s a process argument not a message. And while “I’m Not Trump” may work as a placeholder message during the worst of the pandemic, it’s not enough to excite voters to turn out for Biden in numbers sufficient to ensure victory in November. What’s more, he’s starting to embrace very bold (and to many moderates, alienating) ideas from his primary opponents. Those stances may make progressives happy but might turn off voters who had helped him win the primary—or consider him for the general election because he was a reassuring choice. So who is this Traditional, Transitional Joe going to be? The progressive choice or the safe choice? In truth, neither candidate’s use of the word or the concept suits this moment. What America needs is real leadership, competence, and proven economic and medical reassurance—in the here and now. Trump’s use of the word, however, has more downside for him than it does for Biden. I can only imagine the gnashing of teeth that accompanied Trump’s mid-campaign-season audible to switch to “Transition to Greatness.” Sure, it made sense that he was acknowledging how the pandemic had altered things (from, say, Great to Not So Great). And that the campaign should adapt. But his proposed solution might actually create openings for Biden to jump in and say, Transition to greatness? Why wait? I’ll deliver day one. I’ve done it before.
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Post by Admin on Jun 27, 2020 5:30:46 GMT
Sean Hannity would never intentionally ask President Trump a difficult question. But he would ask Trump an easy question that Trump found difficult to answer. It happened Thursday during a Wisconsin town hall when the Fox News host teed Trump up to rattle off a list of all the marginalized people he plans to harm in a potential second term. Instead, Trump garbled out an unintelligible answer that a very charitable interpreter would explain as: “I have experience now, so I would know better than to do things like hire John Bolton, who sucks.”
Trump’s words are even more striking in written form.
Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an — a very important meaning.
I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, ‘This is great. But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. It wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”
You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.
At another point in the sit-down with Hannity, Trump said Joe Biden “can’t speak.”
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Post by Admin on Aug 9, 2020 7:18:37 GMT
There's little doubt that former Vice President Joe Biden has the upperhand against President Donald Trump at this point. Biden has led in poll after poll nationally and in almost every poll in the core six battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
Yet, while Biden has maintained advantage, Trump has one thing going for him: His position is no longer deteriorating. A look at the polls shows that even as coronavirus cases and deaths rise, Trump remains within striking distancing of Biden. An Iowa poll out Wednesday from Monmouth University makes the point well. Trump comes in with 48% to Biden's 45%, a 3-point margin and a result within the poll's margin of error. Trump won Iowa by more than 9 points in 2016. That equates to a 6-point swing toward Biden from the 2016 result, which is good for the Democrat. However, that's not better (and perhaps a touch worse) than you would have seen earlier this summer.
A Des Moines Register poll from the state in early June gave Trump 44% to Biden's 43%, another result within the margin of error. This poll, however, was a swing of 8 points from the 2016 result. When you look at the average state poll that called cellphones, you see no sign that Trump is doing worse than in the early summer. In the average state poll in June, Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton's margin by 8 points. The margin was 8 points since July as well. This would translate to a 10-point Biden lead nationally.
Biden was ahead of Trump by 11 points in the average national poll that calls cell phones in June. The margin was exactly the same in July. Likewise, the average of all the other polls was an 8-point Biden advantage in June and an 8-point Biden edge in July. Poll aggregators that take into account all of the data actually have Trump cutting his deficit from around 10 points to somewhere closer to 7 to 9 points. That's better than where Biden was before June, but less than his peak.
Wednesday, August 5 General Election: Trump vs. Biden The Hill/HarrisX Biden 43, Trump 40 Biden +3 General Election: Trump vs. Biden Rasmussen Reports Biden 48, Trump 45 Biden +3 General Election: Trump vs. Biden Economist/YouGov Biden 49, Trump 40 Biden +9 Iowa: Trump vs. Biden Monmouth* Trump 48, Biden 46 Trump +2 Hawaii: Trump vs. Biden HNN/Civil Beat Biden 56, Trump 29 Biden +27
Friday, August 7 Texas: Trump vs. Biden Trafalgar Group (R)* Trump 49, Biden 43 Trump +6 Michigan: Trump vs. Biden EPIC-MRA* Biden 51, Trump 40 Biden +11 Utah: Trump vs. Biden Deseret News/Hinckley Inst.* Trump 50, Biden 31 Trump +19
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