The China Card

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process. 

Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

The strategy could not be clearer: From the Republican lawmakers blanketing Fox News to new ads from President Trump’s super PAC to the biting criticism on Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter feed, the G.O.P. is attempting to divert attention from the administration’s heavily criticized response to the coronavirus by pinning the blame on China.

With the death toll from the pandemic already surpassing 34,000 Americans and unemployment soaring to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election.

Republican senators locked in difficult races are preparing commercials condemning China. Conservatives with future presidential ambitions of their own, like Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, are competing to see who can talk tougher toward the country where the virus first emerged. Party officials are publicly and privately brandishing polling data in hopes Mr. Trump will confront Beijing.

Mr. Trump’s own campaign aides have endorsed the strategy, releasing an attack ad last week depicting Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, as soft on China. The ad relied heavily on images of people of Asian descent, including former Gov. Gary Locke of Washington, who is Chinese-American, and it was widely viewed as fanning the flames of xenophobia.

“Trump has always been successful when he’s had a bogeyman and China is the perfect bogeyman,” said Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican strategist.

But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan — the leader of the party himself.

Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping at a moment when the United States is relying on China’s manufacturers for lifesaving medical supplies, Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.

State Capitals, Polarization, and the Shutdown Conflict

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process. 

Trump’s ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ tweets incite insurrection. That’s illegal. https://t.co/uu42tfIeqJ

— David Laufman (@DavidLaufmanLaw) April 18, 2020

Christopher Cadelago at Politico

Republican legislators in multiple presidential battleground states are amping up pressure on Democratic governors to reopen their economies — clashes that are certain to shape the views of a critical slice of the electorate in November.

Democratic officials across Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota are resisting overtures to roll back public health closures: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers just extended his state’s stay-at-home order despite legal threats from Republicans, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently announced he will veto a GOP bill to expand which businesses are deemed too important to shutter.

The showdowns between emboldened Republican officials and Democratic governors are emerging as an undercard to the fall contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The GOP drumbeat comes as Democrats are seizing on Trump’s uneven handling of the virus to win the presidency and flip several statehouses.

Trump himself is stoking the angst on the right, urging in a Friday tweet to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. Those are among the states where protests of stay-at-home orders issued by Democrats are unfolding. But at the state level, the partisan standoffs are complicated by a tangle of Democratic directives that Republican lawmakers have struggled to unwind.

...
Minnesota is the last state in the country with a divided Legislature: Democrats won a majority in the state House two years ago and need just two seats to win the Senate.

Salvador Hernandez at Buzzfeed:

While thousands of demonstrators swarmed the Michigan State Capitol to protest the governor's stay-at-home order Wednesday — honking horns, waving flags, and bringing traffic to a halt — dozens of Facebook groups were already springing up to organize similar rallies across the country.

"Indiana Citizens Against Excessive Quarantine," "Operation Gridlock Tennessee," and other groups with similar names drew people calling an end to stay-at-home orders, measures that health officials say are essential to stopping the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Protests against the guidelines are being planned across the country. The Michigan Conservative Coalition, the same organization that planned the Lansing protest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday, is helping organizers.

...
Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, the protest has drawn criticism over its links to Betsy DeVos's family.

"I think it's really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president's cabinet to be waging political attacks on any governor," Whitmer said, referring to the education secretary.

The Michigan Freedom Fund was founded by Greg McNeilly, a political adviser to the DeVos family, who has provided financial support to the organization.

...
Meanwhile, more groups organizing protests across the US continue to show up on Facebook. Some have garnered only a handful of supporters, while others have quickly built up hundreds of followers.

"Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine" has garnered more than 48,000 members, while "Minnesotans Against Excessive Quarantine" has more than 17,000.
Both groups have nearly identical descriptions...And while some groups are receiving guidance from Michigan about how to organize their own protests against stay-at-home orders, they too are passing the playbook to other states, urging them to replicate the demonstrations.

 A release from Notre Dame:

If you identify as blue in a red state or red in a blue state, you might not be complying well with advice given by your governor that is meant to keep you healthy during the coronavirus pandemic. Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Economics Kirsten Cornelson and her co-author Boriana Miloucheva of the University of Toronto found that in states with governors who won by close margins, compliance with stay-at-home orders and other health advice is lower among people with the opposite party affiliation.

The researchers surveyed about 1,000 individuals across 12 states using Amazon’s Mturk crowdsourcing platform, and resurveyed about 200 people they initially surveyed in 2019 about political polarization. Cornelson noted that they intentionally used data from states where elections were barely won by the leading party, so that they could compare the response among people in the same party, who lived in similar political environments.

The Trump Bump to Trump Slump

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process.  Trump got a small bump early in the crisis, but it would bound to go away, and it has.

David Brady and Brett Parker at RCP:

Consider the work of Richard Brody on the rally effect. Brody’s “elite opinion leader” model predicts that a lasting rally occurs only when opinion leaders refrain from critical commentary on the crisis -- that is, they lay off the president. As of late, however, the media, the opposing party, and opinion leaders generally have hardly been shy about criticizing the president’s response to the coronavirus crisis. Consequently, we should expect Trump’s approval rating resurgence to evaporate relatively quickly. 

YouGov surveys show that it did.

Unsurprisingly, Republican approval of Trump remained relatively constant. Democratic ratings, however, declined five percentage points on COVID-19 (and one percentage point overall). Liberal and moderate-to-conservative Democrats were responsible for much of this decrease.  Liberal Democrats dropped their approval by eight points on the crisis and six points on overall job performance; more moderate Democrats stayed even on their overall evaluations but dropped six percentage point on the crisis measurement. The largest drop, though, was among independents, who went from majority approval to majority disapproval of Trump in a single week, falling at least 15 points on both measures of approval.

From Pew:

President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak – especially his response to initial reports of coronavirus cases overseas – is widely criticized. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say Trump was too slow to take major steps to address the threat to the United States when cases of the disease were first reported in other countries.

Opinions about Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus – as well as concerns about whether state governments will act too quickly or slowly in easing restrictions – are deeply divided along partisan lines. These attitudes stand in stark contrast to the assessments of how CDC officials and state and local officials are addressing the outbreak, which are largely positive among members of both parties.

Democrats are largely united in their concerns over state governments easing bans on public activity; 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say their greater concern is that governments will lift these restrictions too quickly. Yet

Republicans and Republican leaners are evenly divided. About half (51%) say their bigger concern is that state governments will act too quickly while slightly fewer (46%) worry more that restrictions on public movement will not be lifted quickly enough.
The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted April 7 to 12 among 4,917 U.S. adults on the American Trends Panel, finds that Republicans also are divided in opinions about whether it is acceptable for elected officials to criticize the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The YouTube Gap

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  Social media platforms are a big part of the story.

Kevin Roose at NYT:

Mr. Biden’s biggest problem is structural. Most of our online political communication takes place on internet platforms that are designed to amplify content that provokes strong emotional reactions, often by reinforcing tribal identities. Mr. Trump’s unfiltered, combative style is a natural fit for the hyperpolarized audiences on Facebook and Twitter, whereas Mr. Biden’s more conciliatory, healer-in-chief approach can render him invisible on platforms where conflict equals clicks.

...
YouTube, where progressives have only recently started competing for attention with an extensive network of popular right-wing creators, is particularly thorny territory for a centrist pragmatist like Mr. Biden. The platform’s left-wing commentariat, often referred to as “LeftTube” or “BreadTube,” mostly seems to consist of young Sanders supporters who see Mr. Biden as an establishment phony. Video compilations of Mr. Biden’s verbal gaffes, with titles like “17 Minutes of Joe’s Melting Brain,” have gotten millions of views over all.

Alex Thompson at Politico:

The 2020 presidential campaign’s transition to a mostly digital experience, with the nation on lockdown, has spotlighted a long-term progressive deficit on YouTube that some concerned Democrats compare to the right’s command of talk radio. The country’s leading video platform is also one of its largest search engines (after Google) and a key battlefield in campaigns’ fight to reach new voters and earn free media attention.

While Democratic campaigns and groups spend heavily on advertising on YouTube, they lag in organic content, with dozens of conservative and right-wing figures like Ben Shapiro, Mark Dice and Paul Joseph Watson and more official-sounding channels like Prager University cultivating enormous followings not yet matched by equivalents on the left.

That’s what led Biden to a live-streamed “family town hall” last Sunday night with a trio of YouTube family vloggers who have a combined 3.8 million subscribers. The Biden campaign’s renewed efforts amid the pandemic have come with growing pains: The former vice president awkwardly started off by telling them, “You have really great podcasts,” and the vloggers didn’t post videos about the event on their own channels, restricting Biden to his smaller subscriber base of just 21,500. The Biden campaign told POLITICO that "those who participated are amplifying the event on their own channels" but did not respond when asked for examples.

Still, the Biden’s campaign knows YouTube “is an essential platform for us,” one adviser said.

“‘LeftTube’ has two problems: One is volume and the other is content, neither of which it seems close to solving on its own,” said Stefan Smith, the former online engagement director for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. If the party doesn’t ensure that organic YouTube content is getting attention “in addition to paid digital [advertising], then we are in trouble.”
...
While Facebook has earned more scrutiny for its impact on U.S. politics, American adults report using YouTube more than any other online platform, with 73 percent saying they use it, according to Pew Research Center’s 2018 and 2019 surveys on social media use. It is even more popular with 18 to 29 year olds, with over 90 percent of that cohort saying they use the site — even higher rates than Instagram and Snapchat.

And it’s not just cat videos. Half of YouTube users said the site was “very” or “somewhat” important for helping them understand things happening in the world, according to another Pew survey from 2018, making the site’s potential influence on electoral politics clear.

McConnell Enabled Russian Interference

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.   The update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Jane Mayer at The New Yorker:

As the intelligence community grew increasingly convinced that Russia had engaged in cyber sabotage, Obama struggled to get bipartisan support from the top four congressional leaders: McConnell; Paul Ryan, then the Republican Speaker of the House; Nancy Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat in the House; and Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader. Finally, after Labor Day, Obama convened an Oval Office meeting during which he urged the four leaders to put out a joint statement alerting election officials across the country to the extraordinary foreign threat. According to Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, Ryan, Pelosi, and Reid agreed to work together, but “McConnell said nothing.” The former official said, “It took weeks to get the letter.”

A previously unseen log of the private correspondence among the four leaders’ staffs shows that McConnell edited the draft, refusing to accept any of the others’ proposed changes. He was dead set against designating U.S. voting systems as “critical infrastructure” or urging election officials to seek assistance from the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, he insisted on leaving election security entirely to non-federal officials. The final statement was so muddled that a Reid aide argued, “FWIW, I’d rather do no letter at all.” Another Reid aide replied, “Me, too. But we apparently have no choice.” Finally, on September 28th, the others signed off on the McConnell draft. Instead of identifying Russia, or a foreign threat, it merely mentioned “malefactors” seeking to “disrupt the administration of our elections.” It was so indecipherable that neither the public nor election officials learned until well after the election that Russia had targeted voting systems in all fifty states. Reid told me, “The letter was nothing like what Obama wanted. It was very, very weak.”

“I don’t know for sure why he did it,” Rice said. “But my guess, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, is that he thought” calling out Russia “would be detrimental to Trump—so he delayed and deflected. It’s disgraceful.” Rice noted that after the election McConnell continued to resist numerous bipartisan calls to safeguard election security. Only after critics began mocking him as Moscow Mitch did he finally agree, last September, to support major expenditures on it. The nickname provoked the usually unflappable McConnell; he issued a response denouncing it as “McCarthyism.”

Last year, Dana Milbank wrote:

Not three hours after Mueller finished testifying, Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went to the Senate floor to request unanimous consent to pass legislation requiring presidential campaigns to report to the FBI any offers of assistance from agents of foreign governments.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) was there to represent her leader’s interests. “I object,” she said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) attempted to move a bill that would require campaigns to report to the FBI contributions by foreign nationals.

“I object,” said Hyde-Smith.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tried to force action on bipartisan legislation, written with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and supported by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), protecting lawmakers from foreign cyberattacks. “The majority leader, our colleague from Kentucky, must stop blocking this common-sense legislation and allow this body to better defend itself against foreign hackers,” he said.

“I object,” repeated Hyde-Smith.

The next day, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the minority leader, asked for the Senate to pass the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, already passed by the House, that would direct $600 million in election assistance to states and require backup paper ballots.

McConnell himself responded this time, reading from a statement, his chin melting into his chest, his trademark thin smile on his lips. “It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia,” he said. “Therefore, I object.” McConnell also objected to another attempt by Blumenthal to pass his bill.

Pleaded Schumer: “I would suggest to my friend the majority leader: If he doesn’t like this bill, let’s put another bill on the floor and debate it.”

But McConnell has blocked all such attempts, including:

A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.

A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.

A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.

A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cybercrimes.

McConnell has prevented them all from being considered — over and over again. This is the same McConnell who, in the summer of 2016, when briefed by the CIA along with other congressional leaders on Russia’s electoral attacks, questioned the validity of the intelligence and forced a watering down of a warning letter to state officials about the threat, omitting any mention of Russia.

A Good Day for Democrats

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   The Democratic nomination contest has now ended.

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Democrats scored a significant victory in Wisconsin on Monday night when a liberal challenger upset a Trump-backed incumbent to win a State Supreme Court seat, a down-ballot race that illustrated strong turnout and vote-by-mail efforts in a presidential battleground state.

The victory, by upward of 120,000 votes as of Monday night, came as a shock to Republicans and Democrats alike in Wisconsin, where contests for president, governor and the state’s high court in the last four years have all been decided by about 30,000 votes or less. It followed weeks of Democratic anger over Republicans’ insistence on holding elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Wisconsin’s map on Monday night looked like a dream general election result for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee — stronger than typical for Democrats in the suburbs and a respectable showing among the state’s blue-collar white voters in rural counties. But officials from both parties cautioned against overinterpreting the Supreme Court results, given the bizarre circumstances surrounding the high court race.

The challenger for the court seat, Jill Karofsky, ousted the conservative incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, in a contest with broad potential implications for voting rights in Wisconsin’s November general election. Justice Kelly became just the second incumbent State Supreme Court justice to be ousted at the polls since 1967. President Trump had boasted that his endorsement of Justice Kelly had unnerved Democrats in the state.

Bernie endorsed Biden:




Transcript:

Joe Biden: (03:25)
We all have to know the clock is ticking. We don’t have a moment to waste in combating the climate crisis. It’s existential threat to us. In short, we need to build a fair, more inclusive and more resilient America. And with that in mind, I’d like to welcome to this conversational a leader who shares those values and has been an outspoken advocate for that vision for a long time. My friend, Senator Bernie Sanders. Bernie, welcome.

Bernie Sanders: (03:55)
Joe, thank you very much for your remarks and thank you for welcoming me to your livestream here. As you’ve indicated, we are living in an unbelievably unprecedented moment. You and I were chatting a few months ago, not in a million years would we have believed that we would be talking to each other in our respective homes, that we could not do rallies, that we could not get out of the house. We would not have believed that we’d be looking not only at a pandemic, which as you indicated has taken over 20,000 lives in our country. Half a million people infected but has cost us 16 million jobs and that’s probably a conservative number. The real number is probably higher than that. So, we are in a terrible moment, an unprecedented moment. And I know we share the understanding that we’ve got to go forward right now and out of this in an unprecedented way to address the terrible pain that so many of our fellow Americans are feeling.

So today I am asking all Americans, I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse to make certain that we defeat somebody who I believe, and I’m just speaking just for myself now, is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.

Trump carried Arizona in 2016.  Predictive Insights reports that Biden is leading there:

As Arizona residents endure a stay-at-home order and thousands of people suffer from coronavirus, President Donald Trump continues to fall in a head-to-head matchup with former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden has expanded his lead over Trump in the April edition of OHPI’s Arizona Public Opinion Pulse (AZPOP), now leading the president 52 to 43 with 5 percent of voters undecided.

Additional Reasons Why Biden Won and Sanders Lost

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Why did Biden win and Bernie lose?

One reason was the decline of caucuses:

Sanders was really hurt by March/April caucus states switching to higher turnout primaries. Change in the Sanders vote in each (W = he won anyway):

CO: 59% -> 37% (W)
ME: 64% -> 33%
MN: 62% -> 30%
UT: 73% -> 36% (W)
ID: 78% -> 42%
WA: 78% -> 37%
AK: 80% -> 45%

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) April 13, 2020

Another was Biden's appeal to older voters.  People over 40, who backed Biden, turn out in greater numbers than the younger voters who supported Sadners.

Brian Arbour at The Hill:

While Biden won his party’s nomination on the strength of his fellow senior citizens and with voters over the age of 50, Sanders was the clear winner among more than just college students , as many outlets reported.

My examination of voting patterns in this year’s Democratic primaries shows the real break between Sanders and Biden is not at college graduation, but at age 40.

Data from the Fox News Voter Analysis/AP Votecast of Super Tuesday found that Sanders finished first among voters between the ages of 30 and 39, with 43 percent of the vote. Among those in their 40s, Sanders only won 31 percent of the vote.

This pattern continued in the remaining contests that voted in March. Sanders won 60 percent of the votes among thirty-somethings in Arizona, but only 39 percent of those in their 40s; a 21 percent difference. There were similar large differences between the views of those ages 30 to 39 and those 40 to 49 in Missouri (59 percent to 38 percent), Illinois (54 percent to 35 percent) and Florida (45 percent to 24 percent). The numbers show those 40 and up were much less likely to vote for Sanders.