Month: May 2020

I’m sure Dr. Deborah Birx will wring her hands and tell everyone to wear masks if they can’t social distance but it won’t make any difference. Trumpie wants his Yuge Lovefest and he doesn’t care who he has to kill to get it:

President Donald Trump on Monday morning threatened to move August’s Republican National Convention out of North Carolina unless there are guarantees the state will let everyone attend.

“I love the Great State of North Carolina, so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August. Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed … ..full attendance in the Arena,” he began in a string of four tweets.

Trump added: “In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space.”

In case voters in the swing state might take offense, Trump twice indicated his “love” for the state and its people. Recent polls have shown Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in a tight battle for North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes.

The RNC is scheduled to be held in Charlotte on Aug. 24-27, less than a week after Democrats are set to wrap up their rescheduled convention in Milwaukee.

The tweet amounted to a threat. The GOP convention is expected to draw tens of millions of dollars to North Carolina’s economy, which has been devastated by the coronavirus. Cooper is facing reelection this fall, and his handling of the pandemic — and his ability to bolster the state’s economy — is likely to be a key issue.

Monday morning’s tweets fit with the president’s trend of attacking states governed by Democrats via Twitter over restrictions in those states and requests for federal assistance. Prominent targets in recent weeks have included Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Trump’s remarks amounted to a shift in the party’s posture. Republicans have said they are intent on forging ahead with the convention and have been raising millions of dollars needed to stage the event. The party has set a goal of raising $65 million. The president has remained in touch with top party officials, including Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and has privately said he is determined to hold a convention.

Republicans say they still have time to decide how to proceed: The site build-out for the Charlotte event isn’t slated to begin until mid-July.

Appearing on Fox News later Monday morning, Vice President Mike Pence listed several states the convention could be moved to, including Texas, Georgia, and Florida, Trump’s adopted home state. Those three states all have Republican governors.

“What you’re hearing the president say today is just a very reasonable request of the governor of North Carolina,” Pence said.

“We all want to be in Charlotte, we love North Carolina, but having a sense now is absolutely essential because of the immense preparations that are involved and we look forward to working with Gov. Cooper, getting a swift response, and if need be moving the national convention to a state that is farther along on reopening and can say with confidence that we can gather there.”

Trump‘s tweets come a day after residents of North Carolina defied Cooper’s restrictions to watch auto racing in Alamance County. Press reports indicated that approximately 4,000 people were in attendance. The governor has been permitting a gradual reopening of the state, but gatherings were supposed to be restricted to 10 people indoors or 25 outdoors.

Mecklenberg County, which encompasses Charlotte, has emerged as a hot spot for the virus and the area has been reporting a growing number of cases.

While Republicans are determined to stage an in-person convention, Democrats have said it is likely substantial elements of their confab will be be held online.

He has already said that he can’t stand the idea of social distancing at his rallies. So what he’s demanding is that people come from all over the country, breathe all over each other in close quarters for days on end as if it’s a perfectly normal year —- in the middle of a fucking pandemic.

He cares nothing for his own voters. He just wants his show, no matter what. If he has to spark a second wave of COVID to get it.

On this Memorial Day, Tom Nichols ponders (at The Atlantic) the manly qualities men of his father’s generation valued that are glaringly absent in a commander-in-chief many of them support nonetheless:

I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. (My father’s best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until after the man’s funeral.)

For all the flaws in their model of manliness, they were men, Nichols writes, “who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.”

Nichols catalogs Donald Trump’s failings in familiar details we don’t need to repeat here. His behavior before the world would get him beaten and/or shunned by the sorts we’ll rewatch today sacrificing for their mates and their country in Memorial Day film marathons.

Why then do so many working-class males celebrate a tarted up, stimulant–addicted, imitation aristocrat of a president with none of those qualities, a seven-year-old in a “morbidly obese,” 70-something year-old body?

Trump’s fans excuse him in spite of his pretensions to manliness, Nichols speculates, because Trump is not a man, but a boy, a perpetual preadolescent:

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.

[…]

I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.

Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

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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.

The president just retweeted someone calling the first woman nominee of either major political party in the US “a skank” a few hours after another Scarborough murder allegation on the weekend the country closes in on 100K coronavirus deaths. pic.twitter.com/5H2E63kWOn

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 24, 2020

He had a lot more to say before he went out to the links to enjoy some golf at his privately owned profit making golf club: 

On a weekend when the nation was bracing for the approaching toll of 100,000 lives lost to the coronavirus and honoring the many more people who have died in wars, President Trump amplified a series of demeaning personal attacks from a supporter with a history of racist and sexist online commentary.

Mr. Trump reposted eight tweets from John K. Stahl, a conservative former political candidate, including attacks on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Stacey Abrams, the black former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who is considered a potential Democratic vice-presidential pick.

Mr. Stahl, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in California’s 52nd District in 2012, has a history of derogatory posts, especially against black women. He has referred online to Senator Kamala Harris of California — who is of Indian and Jamaican descent and is another potential running mate for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — as “Willie’s Ho,” an apparent reference to Willie Brown, the powerful California State Assembly speaker who was her mentor and onetime boyfriend.

Mr. Stahl has called Ms. Abrams “Shamu” and posted racist remarks about Joy Reid, the African-American MSNBC host. “When you’re born butt ugly, changing your hairstyle every day is only going to make you look phonier than you nonsense, pathetic show,” he wrote of Ms. Reid, calling her a “skank.”

Among the posts Mr. Trump retweeted on Saturday, one accused Ms. Pelosi of wearing dentures and drinking “booze on the job.” Another mocked Ms. Abrams’s appearance by saying that she “visited every buffet restaurant in the State” during her unsuccessful campaign for Georgia governor, and that Mr. Biden would be “a racist if he doesn’t pick her” as his running mate.

Mr. Trump also retweeted another post from Mr. Stahl that referred to Mr. Biden as “Malarkey the Racist” and called Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, “HRC the Skank.”

I looked at the replies to the tweets and Trump’s cult enjoyed them very much. A laugh a minute. This is their idea of what a leader should be doing during an unprecedented global crisis.

.

There was no response…

No federalization of the supply chain.

No national testing program.

No national closure and reopening standards.

No effort to lead the global response.

The problem isn’t that Trump’s COVID response has been flawed.

The problem is he’s mounted NO NATIONAL RESPONSE AT ALL.

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) May 24, 2020

Trump can scream about China not alerting the world soon enough but he can’t ever explain away why he’s essentially done nothing since then except whine, pout, blame, lie and otherwise act like a sullen teenager upset that his dad grounded him before the senior trip.

He doesn’t know what to do because even today he remains as clueless about the job of president as he did on the day he was inaugurated. He cannot learn, he doesn’t read, he won’t change and he can’t take any criticism. All the federal government has done is make things worse.

OK, I wrote earlier about the polling showing that Biden’s lead in the presidential race is pretty solid and that we could afford to feel a little bit hopeful about the election in November. Here’s the other side of that coin.

I think we’ve all contemplated the idea that Trump might refuse to accept the results of the election. After all, he said last time that he would only accept the results if he won/ Its not as if he’s been discreet about his thinking.

However, I suspect we all thought it was fairly unlikely unless the vote was super close like it was in Florida 2000. But the pandemic changes the calculation. Trump has shown a willingness to use “emergency” powers to jack his trade policy and build his stupid wall. Are we sure he won’t do it if a second wave of COVID hits during the weeks around the election? I’m not.

Anyway, the New York Times reports on some people doing some disaster planning around this idea:

In October, President Trump declares a state of emergency in major cities in battleground states, like Milwaukee and Detroit, banning polling places from opening.

A week before the election, Attorney General William P. Barr announces a criminal investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

After Mr. Biden wins a narrow Electoral College victory, Mr. Trump refuses to accept the results, won’t leave the White House and declines to allow the Biden transition team customary access to agencies before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Far-fetched conspiracy theories? Not to a group of worst-case scenario planners — mostly Democrats, but some anti-Trump Republicans as well — who have been gaming out various doomsday options for the 2020 presidential election. Outraged by Mr. Trump and fearful that he might try to disrupt the campaign before, during and after Election Day, they are engaged in a process that began in the realm of science fiction but has nudged closer to reality as Mr. Trump and his administration abandon longstanding political norms.

The anxiety has intensified in recent weeks as the president continues to attack the integrity of mail voting and insinuate that the election system is rigged, while his Republican allies ramp up efforts to control who can vote and how. Just last week, Mr. Trump threatened to withhold funding from states that defy his wishes on expanding mail voting, while also amplifying unfounded claims of voter fraud in battleground states.

“In the eight to 10 months I’ve been yapping at people about this stuff, the reactions have gone from, ‘Don’t be silly, that won’t happen,’ to an increasing sense of, ‘You know, that could happen,’” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor. Earlier this year, Ms. Brooks convened an informal group of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans to brainstorm about ways the Trump administration could disrupt the election and to think about ways to prevent it.

But the anxiety is hardly limited to outside groups.

Marc Elias, a Washington lawyer who leads the Democratic National Committee’s legal efforts to fight voter suppression measures, said not a day goes by when he doesn’t field a question from senior Democratic officials about whether Mr. Trump could postpone or cancel the election. Prodded by allies to explain why not, Mr. Elias wrote a column on the subject in late March for his website — and it drew more traffic than anything he’d ever published.

But changing the date of the election is not what worries Mr. Elias. The bigger threat in his mind is the possibility that the Trump administration could act in October to make it harder for people to vote in urban centers in battleground states — possibilities, he said, that include declaring a state of emergency, deploying the National Guard or forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people.

Such events could serve to depress or discourage turnout in pockets of the country that reliably vote for Democrats.

“That to me is that frame from which all doomsday scenarios then go,” he said.

To ward off such a scenario, Mr. Elias is engaged in multiple lawsuits aimed at making it easier to cast absentee ballots by mail and making in-person voting more available, either on Election Day or in the preceding weeks.

Mr. Biden, for his part, has suggested more than once that Mr. Trump might try to disrupt or delay the election. And his campaign grew very concerned this month when it was announced that election security briefings, which in past cycles had been delivered to candidates by the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, would now be the province of the director of national intelligence. That post is currently held by John Ratcliffe, a Trump ally who was confirmed to the position on Thursday. Mr. Ratcliffe was among the president’s chief Fox News defenders during the Russia investigation and has been a sharp critic of the F.B.I.

“Since 2016, Donald Trump has shown that he is always ready to sacrifice our basic democratic norms for his personal and political interests,” said Bob Bauer, a Biden senior adviser who is the campaign’s chief lawyer. “We assume he may well resort to any kind of trick, ploy or scheme he can in order to hold onto his presidency. We have built a strong program to plan for and address every possibility to ensure that he does not succeed.”

Mr. Trump has said he expects the election to be held on Nov. 3 as scheduled, and under federal law he does not have the power to unilaterally postpone it. But a recent comment by the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner about whether the election would be held as scheduled — “I’m not sure I can commit one way or another,’’ he said — renewed fears that Mr. Trump would try to move the election, or discredit the balloting process, if he thought he was going to lose.

[…]

Ms. Brooks’s group at Georgetown is not the only one forecasting doomsday scenarios for the election. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to resisting authoritarian government, last year convened the National Task Force on Election Crises, a bipartisan 51-member group that includes Republicans such as Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary. The group is dedicated to envisioning and presenting plans for scenarios that could wreck the 2020 presidential election.

The task force began with 65 possibilities before narrowing the list early this year to eight potential calamities, including natural disasters, a successful foreign hack of voting machines, a major candidate’s challenging the election and seeking to delegitimize the results, and a president who refuses to participate in a peaceful transfer of power.

Among the scenarios they eliminated when making final cuts in January, ironically, was a killer pandemic that ravaged the country and kept people homebound before Election Day. After the coronavirus struck, the group reconstituted to publish pandemic-related recommendations for state governments to follow.

The group also produced a 200-page document, which has not been made public. Several members said they had worked on specific scenarios but had not seen the complete draft. They said that while many of the possibilities envisioned an incumbent president’s using the forces of government to his advantage, the report’s authors had been careful not to make the document explicitly about Mr. Trump.

“We hope there are safeguards in place,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who participated in the task force. “Let’s face it, those safeguards ought to include the Senate of the United States and the Justice Department. There’s reason to be nervous.”

After reading that I was tempted to write something like “I never thought I’d see the day when serious people would be contemplating such things in the United States of America.” But that wouldn’t be true. It was only 20 years ago that a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority decided a presidential election based on a dubious result in the Republican winner’s state which just happened to be run by his own Republican brother. Anyone who protested that was shushed by the media and everyone in politics and told to “get over it.” 9/11 happened just a few months later and that was that.

They have been preparing the ground for years.

Do we have any reason at all, after all we’ve seen from this administration — the acquiescent potted plants known as the GOP establishment, Trump’s corrupt Justice Department and now a pliant Intelligence Community run by an unqualified flunky — to believe it’s impossible that they’ll find some rationale for suppressing the vote or denying their loss in November? It clearly is not.

Trump is signaling he plans to let thousands of his own voters die in a second wave:

President Trump acknowledged Thursday that there could be a second wave of the coronavirus epidemic later this year, but flatly stated he wouldn’t let any further outbreaks shutter the economy again.

“People say that’s a very distinct possibility,” Trump said when asked a possible second wave while in Michigan. “It’s standard. And, we’re going put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country.”

Trump’s comments came as he was touring a Ford Motor Co. plant outside of Detroit that has converted its automobile manufacturing facility into one making ventilators. During a speech at the plant, the president praised Ford workers for their efforts to produce thousands of ventilators during the pandemic.

“The global pandemic proves once and for all that for America to be a strong nation, America needs to be a manufacturing nation,” Trump said. “I’m fighting to bring back our jobs from China and many other countries.”

Conservative radio host Buck Sexton said Trump had told this to him during a White House interview Wednesday, saying, “We will not do a lockdown for the second wave that is likely to come in the winter.”

During his speech, the president also lashed out at China for its role in the coronavirus pandemic.

“It came in from China and it should have been stopped in China,” he said.

As we know, the President doesn’t have the power to “close” or “open” the country. The orders come from the Governors and Mayors. But Trump can lead his followers to defy the orders as he’s doing now with the mask-wearing and social distancing. So it will be a huge battle if (when) it happens.

It’s going to be quite an election season, isn’t it?

This piece by CNN’s Harry Enten takes a look at the presidential campaign polls and offers some hope for the fall. I would never say that anyone should be complacent. After all, they cheat. But we can feel a little bit better for this weekend anyway:

Poll of the week: A new national Fox News poll finds former Vice President Joe Biden with a 48% to 40% lead over President Donald Trump.

The average of all polls taken at least partially this week have Biden up by a 48% to 41% margin.What’s the point: Almost any time I explain that Biden’s leading Trump, someone will inevitably bring up “but what about 2016.” That’s why this week marks an important milestone for the Biden campaign.

It’s one of the first times during the election year that Biden was clearly running ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 pace in the matchup against Trump.

Four years ago, Trump closed the national gap quickly with Clinton as he was vanquishing Republican rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich from the presidential race. Clinton’s average lead shrank from 10 points during the first half of April to 6 points in the second half in April to 4 points in the first half in May to a mere 1 point in polls completed four years ago between May 16-May 23.

In terms of individual high quality polls, you needn’t look further than Fox News. Clinton trailed Trump by 3 points in a Fox News poll out four years ago between May 16-May 23. Now, Biden’s up 8 points in that same poll.

Indeed, Clinton was also down in a high quality live telephone ABC News/Washington Post poll four years ago completed between May 16-May 23.Biden notably hasn’t trailed in a single live interview poll this entire year.

Although Clinton would regain some of her advantage in June 2016, the fact that the race became so close at this point four years ago was an indication that the electorate was somewhat unsettled. It showed that under the right circumstances, Clinton could lose nationally, or, at the very least, that Trump could come close enough nationally to win in the electoral college.

Biden’s lead, of course, is the steadiest of all time. His lead has never fallen to just a point or anywhere close. It’s been consistently at or right around 6 points, as it was this week. If you were to create a 95% confidence interval around the individual 2016 and 2020 polls, the 2016 race was about 1.5 times as volatile up to this point.

But it’s not just the margin that is important to examine. Look at the vote percentages.The reason Biden’s lead is so wide compared to Clinton’s is that he’s running a little more than 5 points ahead of where Clinton was in terms of vote percentage. Biden is at slightly greater than 48%, while Clinton was a little less than 43%.

Even when Clinton’s lead widened in June, she never got to 48% in the polls. She had to pick up a lot more late-deciding voters for her lead to feel secure than Biden will likely need to.

But get a load of this:

Interestingly, Trump’s actually pulling about the same percentage of the vote in the polls as he was in late May 2016. Without rounding, he’s running only about 0.4 points worse.

I will never, ever understand it. I can only assume that tens of millions of Americans are just as arrogant, narcissistic and dumb as Trump himself and will never admit they were wrong.

Enten goes on to examine the third party vote in 2016 which doesn’t really exists this time and points out that a significant third party vote usually reflects a greater uncertainty and allows the major party candidates to pick up some voters as time goes on and their candidacies flame out.

In other words, Trump had more wiggle room four years ago to pick up ground. And, in fact, Trump won on the strength of his support among voters who decided in the last month.

He points out that more voters are already saying they’re willing to vote for Biden than they ever were for Clinton. (A sad comment, but oh well.) If Biden can keep the voters he has over the rest of the campaign it’s looking somewhat hopeful.

Trump, of course, will blame his loss, if he suffers one, on the pandemic, mail in vote cheating, the Chinese , whatever. But this will belie his lies:

Even when the economy was rolling the guy couldn’t get above 45% approval rating. He barely peaked at 46% when the whole world got hit by a crisis which is almost always a moment a majority rallies around the leader.

He may still win. As I said, they cheat. But he has never had enough support to win legitimately.

The New York Times this morning marks roughly 100,000 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus pandemic as states reopen for business.

From just west of the Mississippi comes this news from Missouri:

A hairstylist from Missouri potentially exposed more than 90 customers and colleagues to coronavirus after going to work for a week with symptoms of the disease, officials have warned.

Health officials in Springfield, 200 miles southwest of St Louis, issued a warning advising people that they may been exposed to Covid19 if they visited Great Clips salon between 12 May and last Wednesday.

They said the stylist, who has not been named, had tested positive for coronavirus and was thought to have become infected while travelling.

“The individual and their clients were wearing face coverings. The 84 clients potentially directly exposed will be notified by the health department and be offered testing, as will seven coworkers,” the Springfield-Greene County health department said in a statement.

Elsewhere in Missouri this Memorial Day weekend, it’s PAR-TAY time:

As the U.S. death toll from COVID nears 100,000, this is how people spent Saturday at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. pic.twitter.com/EBZKCQjRKf

— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) May 24, 2020

No covid concerns at the lake of the ozarks😳 #loto pic.twitter.com/Yrb4UNM64u

— Scott Pasmore (@scottpasmoretv) May 24, 2020

Hey, it is party time in Texas, too:

ICYMI: Video shows large crowds not social distancing along Comal River in New Braunfels. https://t.co/XAqDx8mztD

— CBS Austin (@cbsaustin) May 23, 2020

And on the Gulf coast:

Plenty of people packed beaches in Pensacola and Dauphin Island on Saturday to kick off the Memorial Day weekend, even with coronavirus restrictions in place.

Take a look at some of @DavidGrunfeld's photos from the day here:https://t.co/PALObUW3ip

— NOLA.com (@NOLAnews) May 24, 2020

Even as the number of deaths in North Carolina trends down, the head of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services on Saturday reported “a notable and concerning increase” in novel coronavirus cases. The state recorded the “highest one-day COVID-19 cases reported with 1,107 additional cases” just as the state opened its restaurants to indoor dining under Phase 2 of the governor’s plan. Masks are not required.

Here in the Cesspool of Sin, the tourists are back:

And so, this bit from “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” a comedy album by Firesign Theater (1968), keeps replaying in my head. “Beat the Reaper” is a game show in which contestants must diagnose diseases with which they’ve been injected. Our protagonist has lost after contracting “the plague.” As the plague sweeps the city, a cab radio plays:

… in a massive traffic tie-up as the death rate continues to soar. And now let’s go to the river’s edge and Charles B. Smith. 

Ed, it’s an amazing scene here. Like lemmings, the crowds are waiting on the shore, torches blazing, as the long line of shrouded funeral rafts drift lazily into view, great black candles flickering at helm and stern. The excitement is contagious … and so are the Black Cross volunteers as they pass from family to family, pausing now and again to touch a child’s head. I wish I could … but I can’t. So long, Ed.

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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.

Axios reports:

President Trump’s declining support among older voters since the coronavirus took hold is well documented, but new data offers a clearer understanding of why that’s happening — and how it could impact the November election.

The big picture: Among the 65+ crowd, it’s women driving the exodus. Joe Biden’s appeal with senior men climbed during his surprise comeback to be the presumed Democratic nominee, but not necessarily at Trump’s expense — and new polling suggests it may be ebbing in any case.

• The coronavirus matters, but so does health care policy overall.

By the numbers: A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows Biden leading Trump by 22 points among female voters 65+, while Trump leads Biden by 11 points among older men. That’s what gets Biden to a 10-point overall lead over the president among seniors.

• “There is a big gender gap among seniors in the matchup, just as there is among all registered voters,” says poll director Doug Schwartz. “Older women really like Joe Biden, and they really don’t like Donald Trump.” 
• Since February, Quinnipiac data also shows Biden has increased his lead over Trump with independent 65+ voters, from seven to 20 points.

Between the lines: The seeds were planted years ago. Biden has led Trump with seniors in theoretical matchups dating back to 2015. Trump’s prospects with seniors have depended to a large degree on the alternative.

• The 65+ vote helped put Trump over the top in 2016. Those voters made up more than a fourth of the electorate and went for Trump over Hillary Clinton, 53% to 44%, the Pew Research Center found.
• Biden has a +12-point favorability standing among seniors; at the same point in the cycle four years ago, Clinton’s favorability with seniors was running a deficit of -13, per Quinnipiac.
• A Monmouth University poll out last week shows another strength Biden has over Clinton: He’s winning voters who don’t like either of the major party nominees by more than 40 percentage points. In 2016, Clinton lost them to Trump by 17 percentage points.
• Republicans have won seniors by 5-12 percentage points since the 2000 election, but Trump’s margin of victory with them in ’16 was roughly half of what Romney earned the cycle before — and the lowest for any GOP nominee in nearly two decades.
• But the coronavirus does look to be hurting Trump with seniors. A recent Morning Consult poll showed Trump dropped 20 percentage points in a month in how seniors view his handling of the crisis.

Get a load of this weak sauce from the Republicans:

The other side: “Just like anyone else, senior citizens see President Trump leading the nation during the coronavirus response,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in response to these findings. “Seniors also care about who can restore the economy, who will stand up to China, and who will put America first in every decision.”

• “They care about a strong military, looking after veterans, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. President Trump wins on all those issues and Joe Biden’s record is abysmal.”

Seniors know which party will look after veterans and protecting Social Security and Medicare Trump’s blathering notwithstanding …

What’s next: AARP will conduct battleground polling later this year to understand what’s motivating seniors, says Nancy LeaMond, the group’s executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer.

• The coronavirus has elevated members’ concerns about nursing home safety and demands for more transparency and protections for patients as well as tax relief for family caregivers.
• In 2016, she says, candidate Trump had said “very clearly he wasn’t going to cut Social Security, he wasn’t going to cut Medicare.”
• But by 2018, “It was very clear that the senior vote was kind of up for grabs. The older voter voted to put Donald Trump in the White House, and then in 2018 the older voter moved towards the Democrats. I don’t think it’s a direct referendum. But it was very interesting.”

Don’t forget: According to the 2020 Almanac of American Politics, many of the most important swing states (Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida) have at least slightly larger shares of 65 and older residents than the national average.

• States like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are also among the hardest hit by the coronavirus.

Apparently, senior women don’t hear Trump’s “I love the seniors” and think he has their best interest at heart.

I can’t imagine why:

“If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old. Almost dead…

There was a false study done where they gave it to very sick people, extremely sick people, people that were ready to die. It was given by obviously not friends of the administration.” 

You can easily imagine him making the argument for Soylent Green.

I still can't get over him talking about his voters this way. https://t.co/srVBRDeFDV

— digby (@digby56) May 23, 2020

This one too… He is just totally insensitive to people with COVID and everyone who cares about them. https://t.co/N6064aOFCe

— digby (@digby56) May 23, 2020

If you haven’t seen these women doing Trump you’ve missed a fantastic new way of looking at his lunacy:

@kyscottt

ur doing great sweetie ##antibiotics ##covid19 ##covid ##quarantine ##intheclub ##drunkwords ##trump

♬ original sound – iampeterchao

How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020

Cuomo gets it too:

@NYGovCuomo talking about his daughter’s boyfriend @andrewcuomo pic.twitter.com/B2VyzMM87o

— Maria DeCotis (@MariaDeCotis) May 1, 2020

The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse analyzed this hugely popular online COVID phenomenon:

Kylie Scott, a social worker turned film student, was dutifully obeying stay-at-home orders in California when she caught a clip of the president riffing on antibiotics and coronavirus. On TikTok, where lip-syncing is a popular pastime, somebody had mimed the president’s monologue as if he were a clueless substitute teacher, forced to lecture on a subject he knew nothing about. But to Scott, the president’s speech seemed like something much more basic: the 3 a.m. ramblings of a drunk girl in a club.

So that’s what she turned it into. Scott threw on a sparkly top, grabbed a bar glass, and spent 30 minutes learning to lip-sync the president’s address — “The germ has gotten so brilliant” — before recording her reinterpretation and throwing it on TikTok, where it promptly gained more than a million views.

If you’ve had an extra hour or ninety to stare at a screen in the past two months, you might have seen one of Scott’s videos. The settings change, from bar crawl to birthday toast to Uber ride, but her character remains the same: Scott is a runny-mascara’d hot mess who is definitely going to borrow your purse and then puke in it. She just happens to be delivering the monologues of the president of the United States. “I’m not splicing anything together,” Scott says. “They’re all full sound bites that he’s said directly.”

It wouldn’t be accurate to classify Scott’s work as impersonations. There is no donning of orange wigs; this isn’t Alec Baldwin slinking his voice down half an octave to inhabit the correct vocal range. This is Scott sprawled in the back seat of a ride-share, waving around a slice of pizza as she pontificates in Trump’s actual voice. Comedians have long complained that Trump is difficult to parody: He says things that are weirder than what any writers’ room could come up with, with a delivery that’s practically beyond exaggeration. Lip-sync remixers like Scott have found a way to revive presidential satire by simply keeping the word vomit and changing everything else.

Sarah Cooper is another master of this method. Wearing her own street clothes and in her own Brooklyn apartment, she’s filmed a whole series, including “How to Medical” — using Trump’s comments about injecting disinfectant to kill the virus — and “How to Obamagate.” Already an author and working comedian, her Twitter following has grown from 60,000 to 600,000; when I talked with her on the phone this week, she said she’d been “taking meetings,” one of those Hollywood terms that often means somebody powerful wants to make you into somebody famous.

But in the beginning, her first video came from a simple premise: what would it look like if she, a 35-year-old black woman, spoke with the blustering confidence of the president? “The more I get into impersonation, the less funny it becomes,” says Cooper. “I’m trying to present the words as me, Sarah Cooper, as earnestly as possible.” The effectiveness of her videos comes from the vast chasm between her identity and Donald Trump’s.

“He is an older, rich white guy, in a suit, at a podium, with a presidential seal, and people standing behind him, nodding. All of these things mess with your head and make you think that what he says must make sense,” Cooper says. “I’m taking that setting away and putting those words into the mouth of someone who is much more low status and low power.” Stripped of the suit, the podium and the seal, she says, “you focus more on the words. And focus just on how ridiculous those words are.”

Cooper’s performance isn’t only about Donald Trump. It’s also about context and pageantry play a role in how authority is vested. When she points out the president’s preposterous statements, she’s also making the point that certain kinds of people’s preposterous statements are assumed to be smart — a twist on Nixon’s infamous claim, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

When an aging man in a suit says it from behind a presidential seal, and an entourage of high-powered officials react with stoic deference, that means it is not crazy.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Cooper and Scott are both women (Cooper doesn’t either: “This doesn’t work as well when men do it,” she says). Some of the sharpest political commentary on TikTok involves women impersonating male politicians — witness Maria DeCotis as New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — a trend carried over from television. “Saturday Night Live’s” smartest casting decision of the 2016 election wasn’t Baldwin as Trump. It was Melissa McCarthy as former press secretary Sean Spicer, throwing red-faced tantrums and plowing her motorized lectern through the White House pressroom.

[…]

McCarthy’s performance didn’t invent Spicer’s absurdity. “[It] didn’t highlight anything weak — that is to say, in Trump translation, ‘feminine’ — about Spicer,” wrote Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. “She didn’t mince around or giggle or bat her eyes. Rather, she played Spicer as a bruised, bloviating alpha male. . . . From the start of the sketch, her gender was beside the point, neither provocation nor distraction.”

I disagree with only that last bit. McCarthy’s gender was absolutely part of the point, and it was a provocation. Not to Sean Spicer, but to the rest of us. A male cast member would have been mocking Spicer personally. McCarthy’s casting mocked the whole “bruised, bloviating” system of alpha-maleness that made Sean Spicer a credible figure to begin with.

In other words, it’s not that the drunk girl in the club sounds like Donald Trump, it’s that Donald Trump sounds like the drunk girl in the club. If you can’t tell which statements were made by the leader of a country, and which were made by a lush on her fifth vodka soda, then why should anyone bother listening to that man on the podium?

These women have it exactly right. If you see his words coming out of the mouths of young women you can see the insanity so, so clearly. I wonder why?