Sarah Owermohle and Dan Diamond at Politico:
Ousted federal vaccine expert Rick Bright seized Washington’s spotlight for hours on Thursday, warning mask-clad lawmakers that the Trump administration had failed to prepare for the Covid-19 outbreak and actively misled Americans on its response.
Bright’s testimony represented a critical moment in the virus crisis: He’s the first federal health official to publicly criticize the Trump administration so harshly, and in such detail, given his prominent position in the biomedical world.
Trump defenders were nowhere to be found in the House hearing room because they declined to send someone, giving Bright hours of air time and a news cycle’s worth of headlines.
“I believe Americans need to be told the truth,” Bright testified in a hastily convened House subcommittee hearing — armed with a canister of Lysol wipes and seated next to an attorney. “And I believe that the best scientific advice and guidance was not being conveyed to the American public” in the early days of the pandemic.
Bright’s quotes could easily end up in campaign ads or attacks from Joe Biden, which is why Trump has tried to portray Bright as a disgruntled outgoing employee.
Bright — who alleges that he was abruptly removed as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in April because he opposed political pressures linked to malaria drugs — is the first official to actively undermine the president’s claims that the administration has done a “great job” handling the response.
From his prepared testimony:
In my position as BARDA Director, I led portions of a coordinated response; development of vaccines, drugs and diagnostics. In January of this year, I pushed for our government to obtain virus samples from China and to secure more funding for BARDA to be able to get started quickly on the development of critical medical countermeasures. HHS leadership was dismissive about my dire predictions about what I assumed would be a broader outbreak and the pressing need to act, and were therefore unwilling to act with the urgency that the situation required. Understanding that the United States had a critical shortage of necessary supplies and PPE to deal with a pandemic, in January, February and March, 2020, I pushed HHS to ramp up US production of masks, respirators and other critical supplies, such as medicine, syringes and swabs. Again, my
urgency was dismissed and I was cut out of key high-level meetings to combat COVID-19. When I was nevertheless able to convey these urgent concerns by speaking directly with a senior White House advisor and with members of Congress who better understood the urgency to act, I faced hostility and marginalization from HHS officials. And finally, when I resisted efforts to promote and enable broad access to an unproven drug, chloroquine, to the American people without transparent information on the potential health risks, I was removed from BARDA.
While I am unfortunately no longer leading BARDA, I am an expert in these areas and
fully understand the grave risks we are facing. I continue to believe that we must act urgently to effectively combat this deadly disease. Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities. While it is terrifying to acknowledge the extent of the challenge that we currently confront, the undeniable fact is there will be a resurgence of the COVID19 this fall, greatly compounding the challenges of seasonal influenza and putting an unprecedented strain on our health care system. Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history
In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.
Ed Kilgore at New York:
Initial returns in the special election in California’s 25th Congressional District (held to fill the seat of Democratic Representative Katie Hill, who resigned after a sex scandal) showed Republican Mike Garcia with a solid 12-point lead over Democrat Christy Smith (the two candidates will face each other again in November for a full House term). But none of the major election-analysis services called the race until Smith decided to concede Wednesday afternoon, because a large but unknown quantity of mail ballots were (and are) still out; indeed, many were probably postmarked on election day and won’t be received until later in the week. In 2018, in California as a whole, 43 percent of the votes ultimately cast were not in the morning-after tabulations, and the proportion of mail ballots in this special election (for which all registered voters were sent a mail ballot due to an executive order from Governor Gavin Newsom) could be even higher. Democrats almost always do better in late mail-ballot returns. Garcia didn’t claim victory until after Smith conceded, either.
But that didn’t deter one interested observer from making the call at 5:58 AM:
He was right about Wisconsin, an unsurprising result in a Congressional district he carried by 20 points in 2016 (Tiffany won by 14 points). But he clearly jumped the gun on the California race, and that’s a troubling sign for November. In much of the country, a spike in voting by mail is going to slow returns, and if the presidential race is as close as we think it will be, there may be a lot of states where the outcome leans one way on election night — but without enough votes being counted to make an accurate call. If the president of the United States is out there calling states for himself on Election Night — and almost certainly alleging fraud if he later falls behind — you could have a recipe for a contested presidential election and possibly civil unrest.
Daniel Bush at PBS:
The most vulnerable Republican incumbents are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Martha McSally of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. All four races are rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.
Recent polls show the Democratic challenger leading by a narrow margin in Maine and North Carolina. Mark Kelly, the astronaut and husband of former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, has a comfortable lead over McSally in Arizona, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper has opened up a double-digit lead over Gardner in Colorado.
“At this point, I think it’s closer than we would like to see,” Loraine Pellegrino, the former president of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women, said of the state’s Senate race. Democrats are “fielding a very formidable candidate and [McSally] is going to have to work hard. That’s the reality.”.
....
Republicans acknowledged that the pandemic changed the dynamics of the 2020 election cycle.
“If the economy continues to crater, I think that presents serious problems for the president,” said Michael McAdams, the press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm.
In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm. Our next book will explain 2020. As of early May, the signs are negative for the GOP
E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post:
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.
In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.
Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.
“I will never forgive myself if I lose it,” Hickenlooper told me, “and I will do everything in my power, I will work as hard as humanly possible, to make sure that I win this, just because I feel in my bones that our democracy has been so weakened by this relentless partisanship, the constant division.”
And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”
Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”
If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.
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.
At WP, Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports on Trump's self-destructive reaction to The Lincoln Project's "Mourning in America."
The group’s ad, called “Mourning in America,” criticizes Trump’s handling of the pandemic, focusing on the skyrocketing unemployment rate and death toll. “If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?” asks the narrator.
After the group spent just $10,000 to produce the commercial and $5,000 to run it in the Washington market on Fox News, the ad went viral. On Thursday, Joe Biden’s campaign released a new ad with a similar message and tone.
Within days, the Lincoln Project received about $2 million from 25,000 new donors — money it is now using to air the spot in three battleground states, super-PAC officials said.
“We were trying to reach one person. It was $5,000 well spent,” said John Weaver, a strategist for then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign who also worked on Sen. John McCain’s White House bids in 2000 and 2008. “The ad was great. It spoke the truth. But sometimes, you have to be lucky, too.”
At LAT, Reed Galen talked to Seema Mehta:
“It’s one of these things where you work hard, and you have an idea, and sometimes it all comes to fruition,” he said. “I would be lying if I said it does not seem surreal to be sitting in bed and watching the president of the United States trash you and your friends and spell your name wrong.”
It was the most attention the Lincoln Project had received. The political action committee was formed by a small group of Republican strategists with ties to politicians such as former President George W. Bush, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Several have ties to California. They have endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president....
They had a relatively small budget and are largely unknown by the general public, though their anti-Trump efforts have garnered some headlines.
Trump’s tweets launched them into a new stratosphere. Their videos typically receive several hundred thousand views; “Mourning in America” has been watched by more than 16 million people. Between Nov. 5 and March 31, the group raised under $2.6 million; in less than a week since the ad’s debut, they raised more than $2 million. The group plans to use the money to air the ad in Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio this week.
https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1257348720988913666?s=20
“From our perspective, half a million views was pretty good for a bunch of guys on a pirate ship, doing all the work themselves,” Galen said. But now, “it’s taken on a life of its own. That’s the thing he did, frankly. He gets you from the Twitterverse to the real world. People who otherwise may not have heard of us for days, weeks, or ever now know we exist. And it benefits us.
At The Washingtonian, Rick Wilson talks to Jane Recker:
The moment we saw Trump besmirching and befouling the Lincoln Memorial for his campaign interview, we knew we were going to launch this ad. We took a classic Republican trope — the Reagan “Morning in America” ad — and inverted it. “Morning in America” was so powerful in 1984 because it captured what was really happening in the country. It wasn’t Reagan trying to convince people the economy was good, they felt it, they knew it, they believed it.
If you put out a message that doesn’t ring true, the ad doesn’t work. Trump put out a spot earlier in the week about the American comeback. I didn’t have to put it in front of a focus group to know that, unless they were a hardcore Trump supporter, people would look at it and go, “that’s not the America I’m living in. I’m living in an America where we have Great Depression unemployment levels, where by the end of this month close to 100,000 people will be dead of a disease we could have mitigated.” And so we captured that cultural moment [in “Mourning in America”]. That’s why it upset Trump so much: He knows this is what America is really feeling and thinking right now.
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.
Toluse Olorunnipa at The Washington Post:
President Trump in recent weeks has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak.
His administration has sidelined or replaced officials not seen as loyal, rebuffed congressional requests for testimony, dismissed jarring statistics and models, praised states for reopening without meeting White House guidelines and, briefly, pushed to disband a task force created to combat the virus and communicate about the public health crisis.
Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain.
Jason Dearen at AP:
The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.
The files also show that after the AP reported Thursday that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval.
The trove of emails show the nation’s top public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spending weeks working on guidance to help the country deal with a public health emergency, only to see their work quashed by political appointees with little explanation.
The document, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen. It included detailed “decision trees,” or flow charts aimed at helping local leaders navigate the difficult decision of whether to reopen or remain closed.
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.
Zach Montellaro at Politico:
Justice Democrats, the hub for insurgent Democrats, has joined the rank of super PACs. On Friday, the group’s PAC filed a notice with the Federal Elections Commission announcing that it intends to become a so-called Carey Committee (which is also known as a hybrid PAC) — effectively forming a super PAC in addition to their already active PAC.
The move is the latest example of the party’s liberal wing embracing the fundraising strategies that have been scorned by some on the left. (A spokesperson for the Justice Democrats did not respond to a voicemail or email left by Score on Sunday asking to talk about the group’s plans.) A group of top aides to Sanders’ presidential bid announced last week that they were forming a super PAC of their own to convince Sanders’ supporters to back Biden. Chuck Rocha, another Sanders aide, also formed his own super PAC, called Nuestro PAC, that aims to mobilize Latino voters.
Rocha poked at that underlying tension among some progressives who are wary of super PACs in a video he posted to Twitter over the weekend. “Just because Nuestro PAC is a quote-unquote super PAC, we ain’t taking no money from corporations. We ain't going out to work for none of these assholes I hate all my life,” Rocha said in the video. “We are literally going to the movement and trying to raise money to go out and get more Latinos to vote.”
The devil will be in the details (and the FEC reports) with these new groups. Sanders actually had over $700,000 worth of super PAC support during the primaries — but it was from Vote Nurses Values PAC, which has been funded by a nurses’ union and didn’t draw anywhere near the same kind of ire that other outside groups drew. Also worth remembering is Our Revolution, the Sanders-founded dark money nonprofit group. To try to fend off charges of hypocrisy, the group had voluntarily released the name of donors who gave over $250 — but not the exact dollar amount, which is less than the level of disclosure for super PACs. (The group said its largest donor gave $25,000.)
Anna Massoglia and Karl Evers-Hillstrom at Open Secrets:
After lying low for several election cycles, influential Republican super PAC American Crossroads is jumping into the 2020 presidential election to back President Donald Trump.
American Crossroads recently reported spending nearly $367,000 to support Trump in a 13-state text messaging campaign. The group placed its biggest bet of more than $89,000 in Florida, where presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is polling slightly ahead of Trump.
The super PAC’s early investment indicates that Trump’s reelection bid may find support from outside groups that didn’t back his 2016 run. American Crossroads spent $91 million to support Mitt Romney and oppose President Barack Obama in 2012. But it spent just $135,000 to oppose Hillary Clinton in 2016 and spent nothing to support Trump.
