Month: May 2020

It’s a classic political dirty trick. The robocall advises people the election has been moved to Wednesday, or that they can vote over the phone, or that they don’t need to vote. That last disinformation tactic resulted in Paul Schurick, 2010 campaign manager for former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., being convicted of “of trying to influence votes through fraud, failing to identify the source of the call as required by law and two counts of conspiracy to commit those crimes.”

The tactic is usually deployed by shadowy players who make an effort to distance themselves from the candidate they mean to help. In this year’s disinformation campaign aimed at keeping people from voting by mail, the disreputable player is the candidate. He’s President of the United States and doing it openly using Twitter.

Twitter this week attached fact-check disclaimers to the two Trump tweets above, tacitly branding them false. The move sent Trump into a paroxysm of rage. He threatened a “big action” against social media companies he accuses of silencing conservatives. He is expected to sign an executive order today to remove legal protections from social media companies in the name of free speech. Or free lying, in his case.

….happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

Trump is convinced proposals to encourage voting by mail to save lives during a deadly pandemic will hurt his reelection chances in November. He’s deployed publicly paid White House staff as accessories in spreading his disinformation.

President @realDonaldTrump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud.

This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) May 27, 2020

Team Trump would rather THOSE people stay home or risk sickness or death if they vote:

When @PressSec talks about vote-by-mail fraud, she's got a certain imagine in mind & its not nice little white girls like herself who are away college, or working in DC & need an absentee ballot. HER KIND can be trusted w a remote balloting but those OTHERS will cheat. Its racism https://t.co/L0L226hKie

— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽💡🔭🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) May 28, 2020

This is Trump’s and the White House press secretary’s metamessage:

Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.

We may mock Trump or wager he has no power to bring down legal wrath upon Twitter. But that’s not the point. Trump’s efforts are beyond the decades-old habit of conservatives “working the refs.”

“Even if these threats do not end up coming to fruition, the threats themselves constitute a serious abuse of power,” writes Greg Sargent at the Washington Post’s Plum Line:

The threat of conservative rage via fake claims of “bias” and the threat of state action as retribution are two sides of the same coin: The latter constitutes a deeply corrupt wielding of institutional power in and of itself, and it’s also critical to helping mobilize the former. Such a threat is not somehow rendered meaningless if Trump cannot find a way to follow through.

And this surely works, at least to some degree. This is obvious when you consider how mild and tentative Twitter’s corrective efforts have been. The tweets spreading Trump’s lies about voter fraud remain posted, and he has already posted more such lies that do not yet have any such corrective appended.

To this point, Trump has felt conservative outlets like Fox News may freely distribute false and misleading information. He feels entitled to having access to their privately owned platforms. Only when they begin straying from his preferred narrative does the habitual whiner feel put upon. Now seeing his fortunes fading and him headed for defeat likely taking Republicans with him, conservative outlets are beginning to distance themselves. Trump means to nip that in the bud.

Especially today, Trump needs D.O.U.S.’s.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

There are moments in our history so grim, so heart-rending, that they're forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief. Today is one of those moments. 100,000 lives have now been lost to this virus.

To those hurting, I'm so sorry for your loss. The nation grieves with you. pic.twitter.com/SBBRKV4mPZ

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 27, 2020

NPR reports:

Over the last month Hong Kong has averaged 1 new confirmed coronavirus case a day. Taiwan has reported only 1 case in over the last 3 weeks. The situation is similar in Vietnam. As the number of cases of coronavirus continue to grow globally, there are places that have managed to successfully control COVID-19.

New Zealand’s Triumph

Perhaps the greatest success story is New Zealand, which has stopped local transmission and has a plan to completely eliminate the virus from its territory.

“The lesson is that it can be done,” says Siouxsie Wiles, an associate professor of microbiology in New Zealand. “Obviously, the longer you leave it, and the more cases there are, the harder it becomes. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.”

Wiles heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland. Much of her work focuses on antibiotic resistance and infectious diseases. When the coronavirus hit she got involved in communication efforts in New Zealand to help explain the virus, including a popular cartoon.

But it wasn’t just scientists who led the charge. Wiles — and many other New Zealanders — give much of the credit for their country’s success to the swift and decisive leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in March.

Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand briefs the media on COVID-19. She did not refer to the coronavirus as an invisible enemy but issued a call for New Zealanders to protect each other from the health threat.Mark Mitchell/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

“Our prime minister made the decision that she did not want what was happening in Italy to happen in New Zealand,” says Wiles. In mid-March as cases were exploding in Italy and Spain, Ardern ordered anyone entering New Zealand into quarantine. At that point the country had confirmed just 6 cases. A few days later on March 19, Ardern shutdown travel to the country, essentially banning all foreigners from entering the island nation of 4.8 million.

She took to the national airwaves to explain a four-stage lockdown system that New Zealand would use to confront the health crisis. “I’m speaking to all New Zealanders today to give you as much certainty and clarity as we can as we fight COVID-19,” she said in a nationally televised address on March 21.

Ardern called the threat “unprecedented,” but she was calm and reassuring. “Here’s how we’ll know what to do and when,” she said as she laid out plans to shut down schools, most businesses and domestic travel.

Wiles at the University of Auckland says that the prime minister did something quite interesting: “Which was that unlike many other countries, she never put us on a war footing.”

So Ardern’s speeches weren’t about attacking an invisible enemy – as many world leaders would say.

Instead she called on New Zealanders to confront this crisis by protecting their fellow citizens.

“She talked over and over about us being a team of five million and that we all do our part to break these chains of transmission and to eliminate the virus,” Wiles says. “I think that has been one of the really crucial things — everybody knowing how they had to behave and that they were behaving for the good of everybody.”

Wiles heard the prime minister’s calls for everyone to come together so many times that she refers to it as Ardern doing her “united thing.”

New Zealand is now reopening most businesses and is even talking about complete elimination of the coronavirus from its territory.

As of late May New Zealand had had roughly 1,500 cases and fewer than 2 dozen deaths from COVID-19.

Outstanding In Asia

Several nations in Asia have had far larger outbreaks but have also managed to bring the disease under control.

For example, South Korea has reported more than 11,000 cases. In late February and early March South Korea was reporting roughly 750 new cases a day. Now the country is down to on average just a few dozen per day.

Gi-Wook Shin, the head of Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, the most successful countries all did some things similar to New Zealand.

“There are some common threads,” Shin says. One is very swift and effective action by the state against the outbreak.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea all either banned incoming visitors early in the outbreak or placed them in two-week quarantines. South Korea quickly developed its own testing system.

Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region have experience with the central government being involved in business development, particularly technology development. So they know how to harness their manufacturing and research hubs to attack particular problems. Shin says the faith in government in these countries and the experience of having the state lead economic development in the past helped these countries respond faster to the pandemic.

“In those countries in Asia, absolutely, they believe that the state, the central government, is responsible for intervening and then solving this problem,” Shin says.

Another clear trait of the successful responses against COVID-19 is that they’ve all been “apolitical.” The efforts haven’t been framed as coming from one political party or another but rather as efforts for the good of everyone.

The successful Asian countries had national plans and the leaders articulated them to their people.

“If you look at like Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam or maybe even Hong Kong,” Shin says. “The message from the central government was very clear, very straightforward, very coherent and I think very effective.”

Angela Markel’s TV Strategy

Other countries in other parts of the world have also managed for various reasons to tame COVID-19.

Many of the nations in the Caribbean have corralled the virus after it arrived on their shores. Costa Rica, Iceland and Rwanda have also reduced spread to extremely low levels. Mauritius has only reported 2 cases since April.

In Europe, Germany is still dealing with hundreds of cases a day but it brought transmission down faster and with far fewer deaths than most other countries in Europe. On March 18 German Chancellor Angela Merkel did something that she’d never done before while in office. She took to the airwaves and gave a televised national address. The topic: explaining her plan for how to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. “It is serious,” Merkel said of the virus. “Take it seriously.”

Jana Puglierin a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin says Merkel going on TV to give a speech in a crisis was very unusual for her.

“She has never done that in any of the previous crises, not in the migration crisis, not during the Eurozone crisis. So this was really a first for her,” Puglierin says.

As a public speaker, Merkel has a reputation as being cold.

“But in this speech, she really managed to connect with the people,” Puglierin says. Merkel brought Germans on board to fight the outbreak. She told them that the only way to overcome this crisis was for every German to accept it as their own responsibility to reduce the spread of the virus. “She convinced them that this was necessary,” Puglierin says.

Merkel added that since the end of World War II and national reunification, there has been no other challenge that depends as strongly on Germans working together.

“She was very human, very approachable, very transparent and very clear in her message,” Puglierin says. And it also helped that Merkel is a scientist, with a doctorate in quantum chemistry. She understood the science behind the outbreak. “And she has this tremendous gift of explaining everything that is related to that virus in a very clear and understandable way for ordinary citizens.”

So you see, there were different ways countries successfully reduced the incidence of the virus. None of them featured a leader who denied the threat existed for weeks or lied about the country’s preparation or put total nimrods in charge of the logistics and then insisted on a chaotic re-opening without any of the necessary precautions being in place. And, needless to say, not of those countries had a leader who relentlessly promoted unproven drug treatments or publicly direct government scientists to investigate the efficacy of ingesting household clearners to kill the virus.

So, here we are.

As I’ve said before, I think Trump’s new crusade against Vote by Mail is mostly to provide an excuse to contest the election results in case he doesn’t win rather than a real attempt to stop it. After all, there’s every reason to believe that in the battleground states, he may benefit by them. So if he wins he’ll just forget all about the mail-in situation and happily accept the results.

Ed Kilgore has some interesting analysis of how this might shake out:

It’s not always a good idea to take seriously, much less literally, many of Donald Trump’s Twitter rants. But his campaign against voting by mail is becoming more, not less, intense and shows every sign of becoming a major MAGA election-year message.

[…]

Trump is now regularly claiming that voting by mail is inherently illegitimate, except for grudging exceptions for people who can’t make it to the polls. So, presumably, states that allow for no-excuse voting by mail in November are holding “substantially fraudulent” elections. That’s 34 states who do so by law (including battleground states Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), 11 more that so far are waiving excuse requirements this pandemic year (including New Hampshire), and another that may be forced to do so by a lawsuit (Texas).

So in a very real sense, unless Trump backs off his claims that voting by mail means a “rigged election,” he’s letting us know that he and his supporters will be justified in challenging any adverse results in states that allow this terrible practice to take place.

A group of 30 political scientists who recently met to look at scary post-election scenarios explained exactly how a vote-by-mail contest might play out, as Louis Jacobson noted at Cook Political Report:

On Election Night, the Republicans have the lead in a key battleground state, but that lead is erased due to late-counted ballots favoring the Democrats. The participants looked at a scenario where this happened in Michigan. This state already has a modestly high level of mail balloting and expects to have significantly more this fall due to the pandemic. (Notice how these scenarios all revolve around the critical battleground states?)

President Donald Trump could tweet that the initial count was sufficient and that mail ballots — an election method he’s already inveighed against repeatedly — are illegitimate and thus shouldn’t be counted. 

In Michigan, Democrats occupy the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, but the GOP controls both legislative chambers. Michigan Republicans could back Trump’s position and decide to submit their own slate of (Republican) electors, bucking the slate that is officially certified by the Democratic officeholders.

If that seems implausible to you, remember how House Republican leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy proclaimed in 2018 there was something fishy in late-counted mail and provisional ballots that enabled Democrats to overtake Republicans after Election Night in California House districts. There were no formal challenges because, (a) there was not a scintilla of evidence anything improper was going on (young and minority voters who lean Democratic are more likely than others to send in mail ballots late or to cast ballots deemed provisional because of some superficial flaw, and Democrats simply took greater advantage of changes in election procedures), and (b) the GOP lost the House by far more seats than those flipped in California.

In a close presidential election where one or two states may well determine the outcome in the Electoral College, crying “fraud” could have much more serious consequences. And yes, a Republican-controlled state legislature might claim for itself the right to name electors in a “disputed” popular-vote scenario; that very nearly happened in Florida in 2000 until the U.S. Supreme Court decided to intervene and award the presidency to George W. Bush.

Kilgore goes on to cite some examples that lead to trouble in the fall and concludes:

In a fair and rational world, we’d decide the presidency in a national popular-vote election under uniform national procedures and with Congress making available resources for efficient voting and counting and for the prevention and detection of actual fraud, such as it is. Trump and his party, however, not only support maintenance of the Electoral College forever but support and oppose state election decisions strictly based on who might benefit. It creates the situation where any relatively close election will be contested by those who have been told it has already been “rigged.” Even if chaos does not ensue, confidence in democracy will be seriously undermined, paving the way for God knows what.

There is no doubt in my mind that Trump will contest the election if he loses and if he ends up leaving office anyway will use his martyrdom to bilk his cult for everything they’ve got. In fact, he may actually prefer the latter outcome.

In case you didn’t see the entire video of that awful execution in Minneapolis, I urge you to force yourself to watch it.

Bear witness:

The four officers involved have been fired. The mayor is requesting that the DA indict the officer who ground his knee into Floyd’s neck, even continuing for four minutes after the man was clearly unconscious.

The Minneapolis police responded by attacking protesters who gathered last night:

Minneapolis police used tear gas and reportedly rubber bullets against protesters Tuesday evening as demonstrators gathered and marched in memory of and demanding justice for George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in police custody Monday shortly after officers pinned him to the ground by the neck. 

Apparently, the cops came loaded for bear and escalated quickly. If you didn’t know better you’d think they were upset about their four brothers being fired and decided to exact some punishment:

Amanda Marcotte has more at Salon:

[P]olice in these situations didn’t show up in full riot gear. They didn’t shoot tear gas at anyone. When protesters pounded on the doors and got right in cops’ faces, officers just stood there stoically, unwilling to do harm to these particular citizens, who were almost all white and big fans of Donald Trump. 

No doubt liberals are in danger of letting conservatives drag them into a nitpicky, line-by-line debate over what constitutes “peaceful protest” and who started what in Minneapolis. But there’s no reason to get into that. 

The bigger picture is clear: The police showed up in Minneapolis looking for a fight and were ready to use even the slimmest excuses in order to unleash violence on protesters who weren’t armed and didn’t injure anyone. (And some of whom were literally children.) But in Ohio and Michigan and other places, anti-lockdown protesters literally showed up to threaten politicians with an implicit message of violence by performing their paramilitary cosplay — and police did nothing. 

And this is the real point, with which I totally agree:

To be clear, I’m glad the police didn’t do anything to the jackasses who showed up to protest the lockdowns. I’m against gratuitous police violence being inflicted on anyone. What’s relevant here is that the police reaction to the Trumpist protesters proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that law enforcement officials are being dishonest when they claim they need to bring down the hammer of violence on Black Lives Matter protesters. If cops can stand by calmly while men with guns scream in their faces, they sure as hell don’t have to tear-gas a crowd of peaceful protesters just because somebody broke a window.

Exactly.

And keep in mind that the gun-toting miscreants whining about government authority were insisting their right to get a haircut was more important than protecting the lives of their fellow Americans who were dying by the tens of thousands from an unprecedented deadly pandemic.

In Minneapolis, those who came out into the streets were protesting the summary execution of a man in the middle of the street by an agent of the state.

You tell me which citizens are the true patriots who are protecting our liberty in all this.

You tell me which ones are truly “pro-life.”

During the presidential campaign of 1988, “Saturday Night Live’s” Dana Carvey played then-Vice President George H.W. Bush as a lovable oddball and Jon Lovitz portrayed Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis as an emotionally detached technocrat, musing out loud during a debate, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

Even though it was a comedy sketch, that line has been thrown in Democrats’ faces ever since as an example of their arrogant elitism and failure to understand Real America. Don’t you know that the average voter wants a president they can have a beer with, not some egghead know-it-all?

The criticism is a bum rap. Democrats spent years trying desperately to appeal to all those Real Americans. They did everything they could to appeal to the “NASCAR Dads” and “Waitress Moms.” They spent tons of money, time and energy reaching out to the long-lost “Reagan Democrats,” to little avail. Bill Clinton won both times with a plurality (and might not have won at all without Ross Perot in the race). It wasn’t until Barack Obama put together a different coalition that the Democrats finally gained a governing majority.

But if there was ever a time that Democrats legitimately bought into that Lovitz punchline it was in 2016. Donald Trump’s surreal candidacy was so over-the-top that it seemed impossible that anyone could “lose to this guy,” much less the highly prepared and super-qualified Hillary Clinton. It was unthinkable that such a man could become president of the United States.

We all know how that turned out — and the result was a serious loss of confidence among Democratic voters. It’s unlikely any of them will say “I can’t believe we’re losing to this guy” without knocking on wood ever again.

From what we can gather in this weird, truncated primary season, voters ended up choosing Joe Biden because they made the judgment that he was the best bet to beat Donald Trump. Desperate to put an end to Trump’s manic reign, they picked a highly familiar mainstream white man, in the hope that they could cover their bases and avoid as much backlash as possible.

So naturally, after all the years of tut-tutting at Democrats for allegedly looking down their noses at the working men and women of the heartland, pundits and pollsters are now accusing them of giving Donald Trump and his ecstatic followers too much credit for being the voices of Real America. “Don’t be so paranoid!” they say. “Democrats won back the House in 2018 in a big blue wave! Trump is behind in the polls by six points! Stop worrying — it’s over!”

I suppose they have a point about the polling. According to the latest analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten, Biden leads Trump at this stage of the campaign by significantly more than Hillary Clinton did at the same time in 2016. But you cannot blame people for wondering how in the world Donald Trump can even be within spitting distance of re-election after all that’s happened these last three-plus years.

He still is. And Democrats’ fear that he’ll find some way to pull it off again is scoffed at as a sign of their own delusion — a form of Trump-era PTSD that attributes to him some kind of supernatural ability that he doesn’t have.

The truth is that Democrats aren’t paranoid about Trump winning again because they think he is a political savant. They’re paranoid because the system is failing.

The 2016 election itself was a dubious outcome not because of the Electoral College, although there’s certainly an argument to be made that it’s fundamentally undemocratic. It was dubious because even though Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin, the final result was affected both by the last-minute actions of FBI director James Comey and the Russian government’s plot to help Donald Trump. Perhaps neither of those things were decisive but they were substantial deviations from the norm and nothing has been done to stop those kinds of things from happening again.

If anything, it appears that special counsel John Durham’s “investigation of the investigation” is a much more elaborate attempt to influence the 2020 election than anything Comey could have devised. And all the Intelligence services assure us that Russian agents are hard at work trying to sabotage our democracy once again.

But it’s much more than that. Most Americans were taught in school that our government is a carefully devised system of checks and balances. No president could ever get away with open corruption or abuse of power because he would be held accountable by Congress and the courts. We can now see that this is really just a myth held together by a set of rickety norms and practices that are only as good as the people who respect them. Republicans no longer respect them.

Democrats have seen this president get away with massive corruption, incompetence, nepotism and criminal behavior. A highly respected special counsel found ample evidence that Trump went to great lengths to obstruct justice and his attorney general exonerated him with novel theories about presidential power. And after all that was revealed, the president saw his supposed exoneration as a green light to further abuse his power, leaving the Congress no choice but to impeach him. He was spared conviction by the shell of an institution once known as the Republican Party.

At every step of the way, the Republicans in Congress have backed Trump, giving him permission to purge the government of anyone he believes is disloyal and reward his most sycophantic admirers. That has led to the greatest government failure in modern memory. Faced with a global health crisis of unprecedented scope, America’s hollowed-out federal government, led by this vain and shallow man, was unable to respond. The most technologically advanced nation on earth has the highest number of deaths in the world, and counting.

Yet Trump maintains the loyalty of his base and continues to have the full force of the Republican Party behind him. His cruel pettiness and narcissism only makes them cling to him all the more.

Now Democrats are supposed to feel confident that Biden’s six-point lead in the polls means that everything is going to be just fine? Nothing is going to be fine. The series of events I’ve just described — along with the hundreds of atrocities I don’t have room to mention — aren’t just about Trump. They are illustrations of a failing country that has been in a weakened state for a long time.

Let’s hope that the system is still strong enough to produce a free fair election and that Trump is uncharacteristically willing to accept defeat in a somewhat dignified manner. Keep your fingers crossed that his supporters will follow that lead. But don’t feel ashamed of losing sleep for fear that somehow he’s going to win — or that we wind up with some disputed result in which he tries to cling to power.

If the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that there is no “normal” anymore. Your worries are entirely rational. We’re in uncharted territory.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Eric Boehlert’s Press Run was especially good this week, discussing how the media feels the need to elevate campaign flaps in order to “balance out” the daily Trump atrocities:

Joe Biden created unwanted headlines for his campaign on Friday when he appeared on “The Breakfast Club” and, responding to a question from the show’s co-host, Charlamagne tha God, announced, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Biden apologized within hours, saying his comments were “much too cavalier,” in terms of speaking for black voters.

On Sunday, the New York Times produced Day Three coverage of the minor story. By contrast, over that same three-day window Trump denounced his former, hand-picked Attorney General as not being “mentally qualified” for the job, accused a cable news host of murder, retweeted a fat-shaming message aimed at Biden’s possible vice presidential running mate, and shared a tweet that derided Hillary Clinton as a “skank.” Also, during the previous week, Trump accused former President Barack Obama of being a criminal. Yet the Biden “gaffe” coverage generated more media attention and pundit chatter over the weekend. (“Biden” and “black” were mentioned together nearly 200 times on cable news since Friday.)

What could possibly explain that kind of drastic imbalance during a presidential election season? And more importantly, is the campaign press rooting for Trump?

By rooting for Trump, I don’t mean journalists and news organizations want him to serve four more years. Rather, are news outlets hoping Trump keeps the race close so the election story will generate clicks and ratings through November? Remember, almost every presidential contest since 1996 has been closely contested, and the Beltway press wants to keep it that way, even though Biden has opened up a sizeable and consistent polling lead as the coronavirus pandemic continues to do lasting damage to Trump’s presidency.

Here’s the dirty little secret about 2020 campaign coverage: Prior to Covid-19, major news outlets had already dedicated huge amounts of resources to the election and set aside vast amounts of coverage for this election cycle. (Campaign seasons are indeed big business for the news media.) But now that White House campaign doesn’t really exist. There are no rallies, neither candidate is barnstorming the country, and might not for months. News outlets still need Biden coverage, though. So his slight misstep on Friday got completely blown out of proportion because news organizations have a shortage of Biden stories.

At the same time, news outlets have too much Trump coverage, since he functions as a human fire hose, relentlessly pumping out false claims and misinformation under the guise of news. Trump’s weekend behavior, which resembled a public panic attack, gets downplayed, as Biden’s gaffe gets treated as big news. That way the coverage of Biden and Trump appears equal because the press is being balanced covering both candidates.

And then there’s the type of campaign coverage that actively pumps up Trump’s electoral chances. “Trump has a real shot of winning,” announced a CNN piece last week. After acknowledging that Biden leads in virtually every national poll taken this year, and most key swing state polls, CNN stressed, “Biden may be favored, but this race is far from over.”

Whenever I read analysis like that I can’t help thinking it’s an effort by campaign journalists to tap into Democratic anxieties about Trump, in hopes of ginning online traffic and TV ratings. It’s hard to imagine that if a Democratic incumbent were overseeing a failed pandemic response, with the country suffering staggering losses that include 100,000 deaths and 40 million lost jobs, the Beltway press would be scrambling to find electoral rays of hope for the Democratic candidate.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza last week stressed Trump can win in November because he “gets stuff done,” which seems like a bizarre argument to make with 40 million Americans suddenly out of work. Cillizza never mentioned that stunning number, only that the pandemic had “significantly weakened” Trump’s economic case for re-election.

It’s curious that the last time a Democratic incumbent president ran for re-election, the common media narrative was, ‘He might lose.’ Today, Trump’s running for re-election and the common media narrative is, ‘He might win.’ Both play off Democratic fears.

Fact: Arizona has voted Republican in eleven of the last twelve presidential elections. Yet Trump hasn’t lead there since early last winter. That would be like if Biden were trailing in the deep blue state of Massachusetts.

Caveat: I don’t know who’s going to win and my point here is not to suggest that the press must announce Trump’s defeat months in advance. Based on decades of modern campaign coverage, journalists take polling into account in terms of framing the unfolding race, and the person who trails in virtually every poll, as Trump currently does, is tagged as the candidate who faces a stiff uphill challenge.

I can hear the media chorus today: Polls suggested Trump would lose in 2016, which means 2020 could be just like 2016, so we shouldn’t pay attention to the polls.

Not true. In late May of 2016, according to all the national polls posted at RealClearPolitics, Trump was tied with Hillary Clinton. Today, according to the same RCP tabulation, Trump trails Biden by six points. Note that Trump leads in just one of the last 55 national polls taken, dating back to mid-February, or just two percent of all polls. Four years ago, during that same stretch from mid-February to mid-May, Trump led in 6 of 37 polls taken, 16 percent of all polls. Also, we’ve been through a national election cycle since 2016, and Democrats won the 2018 midterm cycle in a rout, just as the polling suggested they would.

Covering the 2020 campaign, the press should make sure they don’t put their thumb on the scale for Trump in hopes of marketing a close race

Let’s hope so …

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“Forgery in progress” reads the Minneapolis police report of the Memorial Day call that ended in George Floyd’s death. It is not clear from early reports whether the allegation of a grocery store employee that Floyd, a large black man, was attempting to pass a forged check had any merit. It is not clear from reports whether the alleged check was forged or real or even existed. What instigated the original call has been lost in the shuffle because what is real is George Floyd is dead from his interaction with white Minneapolis police that followed.

A ten-minute bystander video of the incident shows officers pinning Floyd to the ground. One officer has his knee on Floyd’s neck as he pleads “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!” By the end, Floyd lies motionless, the knee still on his neck. The police allege Floyd “physically resisted officers.” That, however, is not on the video that went viral.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Houston native, was a security guard at Conga Latin Bistro in Minneapolis where he had worked for five years. His employer and landlord, Jovanni Thunstrom, last saw him a week before when he came top pay rent.

“The way he died, he was begging for his life,” said Thunstrom, “I just hope he gets some justice. … I just don’t understand.”

The Hennepin County medical examiner has not determined the cause of death, although the video suggests asphyxiation by mechanical compression of the chest likely contributed. The four officers involved have been fired. Investigations by state and federal authorities are underway.

Protests involving vandalism of police vehicles and police responding with flash grenades and tear gas followed last night.

RAW VIDEO: Protesters inside Minneapolis Police's 3rd Precinct parking lot smashing squad cars, before officers show up and fire flash grenades inside to get them to disperse. WARNING: This video contains violence and strong language. READ MORE: https://t.co/HZTamsXTCN pic.twitter.com/Cktz07ftSg

— WCCO | CBS News Minnesota (@WCCO) May 27, 2020

Christian Cooper was in New York’s Central Park on Memorial Day for birdwatching. The Harvard-educated, Audubon Society member asked a woman who had let her dog run off-leash among the plantings to comply with park postings that dogs be leashed in that area of The Ramble. When she refused, he began filming her from a distance and things escalated. The woman threatened to call the police, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”

She did.

“There is an African American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog,” she pleads into the phone, dragging her cocker spaniel by the collar as it struggles for air. She grows more hysterical with each repetition, “Please send the cops immediately.” When she re-leashed her dog, Cooper said “thank you,” stopped recording and left.

The race or sex of the Minneapolis grocery clerk is not clear from reporting. The woman with the dog is white. We know because Christian Cooper posted the video of his encounter on Facebook. News reports indicate Amy Cooper (no relation) has been fired from her investment firm job and surrendered her rescue dog. She has since apologized for her behavior. The Central Park Civic Association has called for her to be banned from the park.

Eliza Orlins, her Washington Post byline says, is a public defender and Democratic candidate for Manhattan district attorney. She writes that the Central Park park scenario is a familiar one:

As a public defender in Manhattan for more than a decade, I have represented many people in similar situations. Most of their stories have followed a similar pattern:

A white person calls the police on a black man. The police arrive and take the side of his white accuser, refusing to believe his version of events. He is arrested and arraigned. An outrageous bail amount is set. His family can’t afford to buy his freedom. He gets sent to Rikers Island, where he sits for days, months or sometimes years.

Eventually, his case is resolved in some way — either because the charges are dismissed or because he decides to plead guilty to a lesser charge. In the meantime, he may have lost his job, his home, his children or some combination of the three.

In Christian Cooper’s case, none of these happened.

In cases I’ve taken to trial, the district attorney has offered recordings of “hysterical 911 calls” as evidence of my clients’ guilt, urging the jury to “just listen to the fear in her voice,” saying, “You can tell she can sense a threat,” and asking questions such as, “Why would she lie?” All too often, it works.

Usually, there’s no video. On Monday, there was. You can hear “the fear” in the voice of the woman who called the police on Cooper, too.

Bird-watcher Christian Cooper walked away. Dog-walker Amy Cooper lost her job.

Floyd died. The four officers lost their jobs. We don’t know what happened to the grocery clerk or if the Minneapolis 911 call was supportable or, like the Central Park incident, hysterical.

Christian Cooper told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (way to many Coopers in this tale):

“I think her apology is sincere,” Cooper told CNN’s Don Lemon Tuesday night. “I’m not sure that in that apology she recognizes that while she may not be or consider herself a racist, that particular act was definitely racist.”

“And the fact that that was her recourse at that moment — granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation — you know, maybe a moment of spectacularly poor judgment. But she went there and had this racist act that she did.”

That is, Amy Cooper weaponized white privilege to threaten a black man with death-by-cop for having the temerity to ask her to abide by park rules. Too often, police oblige. That’s why death-by-cop is an expression at all. That is why Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, and too many others to list here are dead.

This system is not simply broken. It works just as designed, says Orlins, “protecting the wealthy, connected, powerful and white, while disenfranchising already-marginalized communities of color.”

Orlins concludes:

There are two different sets of rules in our criminal legal system. White Americans live every day with the privilege of knowing that they can call 911 and get help. For poor people and people of color, calling for help when in danger presents a new set of risks — including the risk that they won’t be believed by police or that they’ll be charged with falsely reporting a crime.

Or face what amounts to extrajudicial execution.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

These people won’t protect their own lives. Few masks. No social distancing.
I have family, friends and work colleagues in North Carolina. I worry about their health. I don’t know how to protect them from deadly public health failures and mistakes made by Trump and others in their state. What can I do to help them?

After I saw the photos  from this event I wrote letters to the local reporters in North Carolina who covered the non-mask wearing, non-social distancing observing fans at the opening of Ace Speedway in North Carolina on May 23rd.

Here is a version of the letter I sent to reporters in North Carolina: Jeff Mills, Winston Salem Journal and Andrew Carter, The Raleigh Observer. They covered the non-mask wearing, non-social distancing observing fans at the opening of Ace Speedway in North Carolina on May 23rd. I thought they could understand and reach them in ways I could not.

To: Jeff Mills, Winston Salem Journal
Fr: Spocko
Re: Will you follow up on your Ace Speedway story?

Hi Jeff:

I’m following up on your Winston Salem Journal story at Ace Speedway on May 23rd. ( or News Observer story) I saw the photos. Few masks. 100’s of people close together. Will you be doing a follow up?

You might have seen photos and news reports about the Lake of the Ozarks pool parties. It led St. Louis County Executive Sam Page to issue a statement on Tuesday telling residents of his county that, if they were at the Lake party this past weekend, they should self-quarantine.”

Will the Alamance County executive do the same? I’d call them but I’m just a blogger. You might get an answer.

I sent out a tweet with these attached photos from Robert Willett of News Observer and Walt Unks at Winston Salem Journal

I could do a story about the politics behind the pressure to get the venue permission to open, the lack of enforcement of the Phase 2 guidelines, the failure to prepare to trace anyone if someone infected is found to have attended. I would write it in about 21 days. But I’m an outsider and nobody cares what some liberal in SF thinks.

You spoke to several people for the story. If there is a spike in cases, it would be great if you spoke to the family of the sick or dead whose illness was traced to that outbreak (which will be difficult, but IS possible) and the doctors, nurses and EMTs that had to deal with the sick.

(BTW, the photographer Walt Unks did the story about firefighters honoring healthcare workers at Clemmons Medical Center, Kernersville Medical Center and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center on April 20th. I’d lover to hear from them about the non-mask wearing attendees at the Ace Speedway.

I’d like to hear what the people who made the event happen have to say. People like Robert Turner, the co-owner of the track, his son and Sheriff Terry Johnson.

Then I’d like to hear from people you quoted who attended without wearing a mask or social distancing. People like Dave Magbee, 59, who made the short drive from Burlington. Kelly Britt, a retired postal worker from Charlotte and Bobby Nifong of Winston-Salem.

I’m especially interested in hearing from the people in the photos with children:

I’d like to hear from these men and the mothers of these children.  Its become clear to me that some men view people like me who wear masks and take precautions as liberal scolds who are eager to say “I told you so!” when people get sick and die.

What you can do, that I can’t, is to get back to these men and women with evidence of the consequences of people actively refusing to wear masks and practice social distancing.

BTW, I see that North Carolina has a tracking program called NC DETECT (The North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool -PDF file) It’s a statewide, electronic, real-time public health surveillance system. You might want to talk to NCDHHS about how it was used to track illnesses after the Ace Speedway event. 

I’m guessing you spoke to more people who didn’t wear masks at the event, but their quotes didn’t make the story.  I’d like to hear from them after they hear about an outbreak. Would they still attend? Would they wear a mask? If not, why not? I ask this because of the tendency of certain men to “double down” on their mistakes when shown the proof.

I know men who would rather accept the death of 10’s thousands of others, even members of their own family, than admit they were wrong.  

Apparently for some people a disease is only real when it happens to people just like them or their family. Maybe if people in their community said “I went to Ace Speedway, I didn’t wear a mask and someone in MY family got sick and died. PLEASE wear a mask!” they would be listened to

I would also like to hear from the race car drivers. If they were to say. ‘I love to see fans in the stands, but it’s too dangerous. We’ll try this again after a vaccine. For now we’ll race on TV with empty stands.” That would be a good way to show they support the guidelines that save the lives of their fans, rather than just the wallets of the owners.

Finally, one of the reasons that I’m writing you is that you know the people in your community. I don’t. You clearly tried to be respectful of the people in your story. You might know how to reach them in a way a Vulcan blogger in SF, in a bright blue liberal  state can’t.

Here’s the deal, I have family, friends and work colleagues in NC and I worry about their health. I don’t know how to protect them from deadly public health mistakes made by others in their state.

You might know how to reach your readers where they live and keep them alive. Please try.

Thank you.
Live Long And Prosper
Spocko

@spockosbrain
P.S. Here is my most recent post on the need for masks. Want To Reopen Retail? Everyone Must Wear Masks

I’ve been reading the research on mask wearing and it’s compelling.  When I wear a mask it’s not “virtue signaling” I’m not doing it to piss off Donald Trump. I don’t do it to be politically correct. I do it to save my life and the lives of others.  If you aren’t already please, please, PLEASE wear a mask when you are covering these events.

New info from 538 about attitudes toward the coronavirus:

As you can see in the chart above, the share of Americans who are either “somewhat” or “very” concerned about infection has risen steadily since the virus began rapidly spreading in the U.S. in March.

But economic concerns, at least at the moment, seem to be worrying more Americans, as the impact of the virus on the economy has been staggering so far. In late March, millions of workers filed for unemployment each week — many times more than previous record highs — and as you can see in the next chart, the share of Americans who are “very” concerned about the economy grew dramatically in the second half of the month, as cities and states began to shut down nonessential businesses.

However:

When you break down that last one, it shows the usual partisan divide. But according to this only 82% of Repubicans have approved of his response from the beginning.

The election in November was always going to be a referendum on Trump’s first term. Even before the pandemic his record was abominable. The man was impeached for god’s sake. But now there’s a body count. And it is very, very high and climbing.