Month: May 2020

There have been many rumors in recent weeks that the Trump campaign is starting to disintegrate. This is not surprising. All you have to do is read Trump’s Twitter feed to see that the president does not like bad news and he will kill any messenger who brings it to him. Lately, there has been a whole lot of bad campaign news.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has been getting so angry at the decaying poll numbers that he yelled at campaign manager Brad Parscale and threatened to sue him during a heated phone call. (Parscale reportedly replied, “I love you too,” and flew up to Washingon right away to mend fences.)

Indeed, the polls have not been looking good for Trump, but then they haven’t looked very good his entire term. An impeached president whose approval rating has always hovered around 42% doesn’t have a lot of room for error to begin with. Now that he’s shown what a disastrous leader he is in a crisis, there very little prospect that it’s going to improve.

Naturally, Trump blames his campaign operatives for this because he will never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Parscale has been just a bit too high-profile recently, even getting celebrity treatment from the New York Times, which is the sort of thing that makes the boss very angry. He doesn’t like to share the spotlight, particularly with someone who seems to be making buckets of money while working for him.

The Never Trumper PAC known as The Lincoln Project yanked Trump’s chain with that information this week, running another one of its ads pointedly designed to get under the president’s thin skin.

This is just another example that @realDonaldTrump is the worst manager America has ever seen. Don, you got conned … by your IT guy. pic.twitter.com/ssO5CERqBu

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 20, 2020

Parscale really isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, not that Trump would know the difference. His most memorable message so far in this campaign is this:

For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc.

In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time. pic.twitter.com/aJgCNfx1m0

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) May 7, 2020

Setting aside the macabre tastelessness of calling your campaign operation the “Death Star” while your candidate is recklessly mismanaging a runaway epidemic that has killed close to 100,000 of his own people, even as a pop-culture reference it’s absurdly off-base. Does Parscale know that things didn’t end well for the Death Star?

Parscale has cultivated a close relationship with Jared Kushner, the son Trump never had, so he’s probably safe. But you never know with Trump. His 2016 campaign cycled through a number of campaign operatives, some of whom are now either in prison or awaiting sentencing. There have been whispers that Trump might bring back Corey Lewandowski or Steve Bannon, but Javanka never cared for either of them so they’re probably off the table. If things get really desperate, I suppose he can always pardon Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and bring them back on board.

The sad fact is that Trump’s options are limited. While the entire Republican establishment has not just capitulated to Trump but now eagerly supports him, it’s interesting to note that so many high-profile GOP campaign strategists have gone the other way. There simply aren’t very many experienced people Trump can call for help.

But there is one guy: Karl Rove, the man they used to call “Bush’s Brain,” whom George W. Bush affectionately dubbed “Turd Blossom.” Rove has backed away from active campaigning in recent years, preferring to drop his pearls of wisdom on Fox News and advise the dark-money super PAC American Crossroads, which he founded back in 2010. But reports this week suggest that despite Trump’s antipathy for the Bush family, Turd Blossom may be back in the saddle, advising Trump on how to salvage those swing states he sees slipping away.

According to NBC News, Rove has been quietly worming his way into the campaign for some time:

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has consulted Rove since the 2018 midterm elections, per three people familiar with the discussions. Before the pandemic, Rove had advised the Trump campaign it could be modeled, in some ways, after the Bush 2004 re-election race.

Of course he did. He certainly wouldn’t want to remind anyone of his total meltdown on Fox News on election night in 2012, when he refused to accept that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost Ohio, and with it the election, insisting that his own numbers were more reliable. Romney’s family had to call and tell Rove to back down so the candidate could concede with some measure of dignity.

In fact, Rove is a perfect addition to the Trump team. For all his reputation as a “data guy” and number-cruncher, he’s really just an old-fashioned Republican character assassin. The New York Times has reported that Rove had a recent meeting with Trump and warned him “that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging [Joe] Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.” That’s the kind of tactic in which Rove specializes.

Rove first came to national attention as George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2000. According to James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” Rove was personally behind one of the most scurrilous episodes in GOP campaign history. He allegedly came up with the infamous push poll used in South Carolina to undermine support for Sen. John McCain with outright racist innuendo: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

But then, Rove was a Lee Atwater protégé, so what else would one expect?

Crudely tearing down the opponent isn’t the only way in which Rove is particularly suited to be a Trump adviser. He was always exalted among the Beltway press for his supposed genius in figuring out that you should attack your opponents on their perceived strengths. For instance, the Bush campaign attacked John Kerry over his Vietnam War record in the 2004 election, when that was considered Kerry’s ace in the hole. In reality, Rove was always projecting his own candidate’s weaknesses onto his opponent. In that election, Bush had had to contend with the fact that he had started a useless war in Iraq and had himself dodged the draft, so the campaign’s best recourse was to make Kerry look like a liar and a coward.

I hardly have to tell you how Trumpian that is. If Rove can get Trump to actually listen to him — which he probably won’t, since Trump won’t listen to anyone — it could be a formidable partnership.

Karl Rove won elections through the clever manipulation of the media with lots of talk about “the math,” the supposed inevitability of Republican victory and his own inflated mystique. In that regard, he mirrors Parscale, the high-living Trump campaign manager who has snookered the press into believing he’s a high-tech genius possessed of secret knowledge and endless resources. Both of them managed to slip their clients into a first term with a dubious Electoral College victory and a popular-vote defeat. It remains to be seen if Parscale can replicate Rove’s second-term victory in 2004, in which Bush won the popular vote, but almost lost the Electoral College.

Bush’s Brain and Trump’s ego are going to ride Brad Parscale’s Death Star into November. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy flight.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

The Republican party in 2012 was all like:

“VOTE-BY-MAIL APPLICATION ENCLOSED”

“You can repeal Obamacare, from the comfort of your own home.”

(Parties could not mail applications at the time, IIRC. Will update.)

Sample language and a postcard “for you and one for another eligible family member.”

“Apply to vote by mail today.”

But the Republican president in 2020 is all like:

And even more like:

What a difference a criminal incumbent makes.

Former Illinois Republican congressman and conservative talk radio host Joe Walsh in 2016 was all like:

And 2020 Joe Walsh is all like vote for Joe Biden:

I’m angry.

I’m scared, confused, frustrated, worried, and nervous. But, mostly, I’m just really angry. Another week of horrible unemployment numbers, with almost 3 million Americans filing first-time jobless claims last week, the 8th straight one with that number in the millions. In total, 36.5 million jobless claims have been filed nationwide in the past eight weeks.

Though stunning, that number surely undercounts the total. That is 36 million jobs lost, erasing the 22 million jobs created in the past 10 years. Yes, the Trump administration has presided over the loss of the entirety of American job creation for the past decade. That number includes manufacturers, farmers, wait staff, firefighters, construction workers, and teachers. Their jobs are just gone.

As an afterthought, Walsh writes, “Right now, we are projected to hit over 140,000 dead in the U.S. by early August.”

But enough about the dead and dying. Let’s talk about what’s really important: “an economic catastrophe in this country that could be worse than the Great Depression.” Now that’s bad.

“We have one president, and he really has only one job: To defend us from enemies both foreign and domestic,” Walsh laments. And Trump couldn’t do the job against this “big-ass enemy.”

So Walsh has gotten religion of a sort. He admits he made a mistake in 2016. This time, he’s all in behind “a decent, compassionate, experienced, and competent man,” former Vice President Joe Biden. Walsh urges readers to vote this fall for “an honorable president.”

Still, what makes the coronavirus such a big-ass enemy? The loss of jobs, the economy, livelihoods, and small businesses. Oh yeah, and “tens of thousands of lives would have been saved” if Trump had gotten off his ass. But really, if he hadn’t been such a slug, “our economy would not have taken such a big hit [and] we would be on a much faster track to getting back to normal.” Meaning back to serving The Market (bless its holy name).

Matthew 6:21 [KJV]: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Now, maybe Walsh has found his soul and maybe not. If his support for Biden moves some votes, terrific. He may think “Donald Trump has blood on his hands,” but here he still focuses foremost on damage Trump has done to the economy.

That suggests Trump may not yet be beyond redemption with guys like Walsh. The acting president pledged on Thursday, “we are not closing our country” should a second wave of coronavirus infections hit later this year. Paul Krugman believes Trump and his party have decided “thousands of Americans must die for the Dow.” Seeing the economy recover at all before November is Trump’s reelection Hail Mary. Trump, Walsh, and others of their … persuasion … have announced with a klaxon just where their hearts are. With the treasure.

The self-anointed party of values has its values pretty clearly fucked up.

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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.

He's a big believer in "blood and soil." https://t.co/gYQUwJy56H

— digby (@digby56) May 21, 2020

Remember this?

Just in case anyone’s wondering why he can’t stop dividing the country with racist rants like last night’s gross comments in Alabama stoking his white supremacist base:

LA Times: For months the political press has been grappling with the greased-pig problem that is Donald Trump, trying to pin down the Republican front-runner as he defies establishment expectations and rejects basic standards of decorum. Much of the time I devoted to my Trump biography was consumed with the same activity: I spent countless hours fact-checking the torrent of slippery claims he made during our interviews. Even more difficult was divining the source of his sense of entitlement.

As campaign reporters are now coming to realize, Trump is not concerned with anyone’s dignity, even his own, and will readily deploy lies and distortions when they serve as applause lines. None of the Trump claims checked by Politifact has turned out to be absolutely true by its standards, while 30 have been judged false or, worse, “pants on fire” statements. Yet Trump refuses to correct himself and, instead, ups the ante. Recently he tweeted race-baiting false statistics that appeared to have originated from a neo-Nazi source.

Like history’s monarchs, Trump believes that the qualities that make him successful are in-born.

Some who try to understand why Trump would do such things might wonder if he’s a deeply wounded, insecure soul compensating with narcissistic bluster. This diagnosis doesn’t fit the Trump who answered my questions for many hours, nor does it match the conclusion reached by his second wife, Marla Maples. “He’s a king,” said Maples when I interviewed her. “I mean truly. He is. He’s a king. He really is a ruler of the world, as he sees it.”

Maples suspects that Trump was a royal figure in some past life. More likely he acquired his reverse noblesse oblige by training from his father who, according to Trump biographer Harry Hurt III, raised young Donald to become “a killer” and told him “you are king.” His mother was so enchanted by royalty that Trump keenly remembers the hours she spent watching the TV broadcast of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

His sense of entitlement has been affirmed throughout his life. In 1987, at a party marking the publication of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” boxing promoter Don King turned to the crowd and proclaimed the arrival of Trump and his then-wife Ivana by saying, “Here’s the king and the queen!” A few years later, when he appeared at an event at one of his Atlantic City casinos, an announcer bellowed, “Let’s hear it for the king!” — and Trump burst through a large paper screen. When he visited the humble village of his Scottish ancestors he told his relatives that because of his TV show “The Apprentice,” he was American royalty. “If you get ratings, you’re king, like me. I’m a king. If you don’t get ratings, you’re thrown off the air like a dog.”

Like history’s monarchs, Trump believes that the qualities that make him successful are in-born. He once said he possesses a genetic “gift” for real estate development.

“I’m a big believer in natural ability,” Trump told me during a discussion about his leadership traits, which he said came from a natural sense of how human relations work. “If Obama had that psychology, Putin wouldn’t be eating his lunch. He doesn’t have that psychology and he never will because it’s not in his DNA.” Later in this discussion, Trump said: “I believe in being prepared and all that stuff. But in many respects, the most important thing is an innate ability.”

Perhaps Trump’s conviction that DNA — not life experience — is everything explains why he proudly claims that he’s “basically the same” today as when he was a boy. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” he said. “The temperament is not that different.”

Academic research popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2002 essay “The Talent Myth” demonstrates that achievement depends more on dedication and experience than in-bred ability. But this message is lost on many well-to-do Americans who, researchers have found, believe their wealth affirms their innate superiority. The better-off are also more inclined to believe that “people get what they are entitled to have.”

Trump has handed down his sense of entitlement to the next generation. His son Donald Jr. told me: “Like him, I’m a big believer in race-horse theory. He’s an incredibly accomplished guy, my mother’s incredibly accomplished, she’s an Olympian, so I’d like to believe genetically I’m predisposed to [be] better than average.”

The notion that Donald Jr.’s mother, Ivana Trump, was an Olympic skier in 1972 persists even though her country, Czechoslovakia, fielded no team. Her son not only believes the tall tale, he’s convinced that it affirms his own superiority. “I’m in the high percentile on the bell curve,” he said. He then added that his father’s abilities are even greater. “That’s what separates him from everyone I know.”

The racehorse theory of human development explains Trump’s belief in his suitability for political leadership, despite the fact that he has never held office. He’s absolutely convinced that America’s problems will be solved by his God-given management skills, bankruptcies notwithstanding. You are either born with superior qualities — the right DNA — or you are not. And people get what they deserve. In his case, that includes the White House.

“I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”

If you are looking for a short, entertaining explainer of this Susan Rice “unmasking” email flap, I recommend this one from Tim Miller of the Bulwark. It’s a really stupid pseudo-scandal but what do we expect?

I thought this part about how the right is dealing with the act that there’s nothing there was quite interesting:

The same people who tried to help the administration fabricate this scandal in the first place remain undaunted by the fact that the email release debunks their own conspiracy theory. Instead, they’re steaming full speed ahead as if nothing had happened. For instance, the Federalist summarizes the email as proof that Flynn was “personally targeted” in the meeting. That’s a tough case to make, since the email shows the opposite. So the Federalist piece references neither Obama requesting the investigation be done “by the book” nor the sentence where Obama specifically suggests that nothing should change unless he is briefed again.

Ted Cruz took the Federalist article and ran with it, tweeting that the leak proves that there was “ongoing spying” of the incoming POTUS directed by President Obama. Even though there is no discussion of spying in the email. Or even in the Federalist article.

It’s like a game of Infowars telephone.

A twitter troll helpfully translated for me what Cruz was probably alleging here: It turns out some people are under the impression that intelligence officials listening to a call with a Russian agent is “spying.” You know whose calls to Russian agents are spied on, particularly in the weeks following an attack on our elections? Everyone’s! It doesn’t matter your politics, race, or creed. Surely you would imagine someone who used to be . . . checks notes . . . director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for Barack Obama would be aware that these calls may be monitored!

Meanwhile Lyin’ Ted is trying to stay on his bully’s good side by pretending that this SOP email is akin to Obama planting bugs in Flynn’s shoe like he’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State. It’s complete bullshit and Ted knows it. But this way he gets a presidential pat on the head, and Trump can use him to advance the perverse lie he is fabricating to try to rectify his flagging political fortunes.

So what we have here is further confirmation that there is a real scandal related to #Obamagate and the scandal is the Trump administration trying to weaponize America’s foreign policy and intelligence agencies to gain advantage in a presidential election…again.

The only encouraging bit is the realization that if By-The-Book Gate is the best these gubers have got, then it turns out that they’re as incompetent as they are corrupt.

Well yeah. I only wish I could be sure that there are enough Americans out there who will see through it to make it possible for these people to spend more time with their families in 2021.

You can believe him or you can believe your lying eyes:

Trump told reporters he wore a mask in the "back area" of the Ford plant. Here's a photo of him in the back area of the Ford plant without a mask. pic.twitter.com/aAR6Sxljgz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2020

Update: TMZ published a picture of Trump wearing a mask briefly at the plant.

Per the COVID-10 project at Johns Hopkins:

COVID-19 ALERT LEVELS Resolve to Save Lives released a color-coded COVID-19 alert system to signify the risk of transmission in communities and recommend appropriate levels of individual precautions. Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the US CDC, likened this system to wildfire risk level signs on hiking trails or ocean hazard flags on beaches; it is up to individuals reading these signs to understand the risk level around them and act accordingly.

This system includes four levels ranging from “new normal” to “high alert,” with corresponding measures that communities and individuals can take at each level to mitigate transmission risk. COVID Exit Strategy, a collaborative COVID-19 data visualization website, has incorporated live data into the Resolve to Save Lives system to make a state-by-state alert system, including metrics for 3 key areas: disease situation, healthcare systems, and disease control. Notably, every US state is evaluated as High Alert as of today, even as all states begin to ease social distancing measures.

There’s a lot at the link, but this is the new “alert system” they’ve come up with, backed by a whole bunch of details for public health experts to do. The following is about masks:

Access Hollywood got it all on tape.

Trump is making a big deal about vote by mail, insisting that it’s rife with fraud. It isn’t, of course. Many states have been providing this option for some time and some even do it entirely by mail now.

But whatever. My personal feeling is that he’s just setting up the “fraud” excuse in case he loses. He knows he can’t stop states from doing vote by mail. If he wins, he’ll just do what he did last time and say that he won in spite of a huge number of fraudulent Democratic votes. In fact, it was really a landslide!

Yesterday he said that voting in person is an “honor” and that the only people who should be allowed to vote absentee should be those who are sick or are not going to be in the state on election day.

I guess he doesn’t remember this:

I’d guess he forgot to register and so his absentee ballot wasn’t counted. Some Republicans would say people like him should be charged with voter fraud.

But by his reasoning he should never have been allowed to vote that year at all. He didn’t have an excuse for voting absentee. He just didn’t turn up on the rolls.

The New York Times reported today on Trump’s insistence that the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately warn him about the coronavirus pandemic. Even if true, it shouldn’t have made a difference. All you had to do was read the papers. And his own public health experts were running around with their hair on fire. He just didn’t want to hear it.

In fact, he doesn’t want to read anything or hear anything that doesn’t apply directly to what people are saying about him. It is literally all he cares about:

Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.

The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.

Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.

Working to keep Mr. Trump’s interest exhausted and burned out his first briefer, Ted Gistaro, two former officials said. Mr. Gistaro did not always know what to expect and would sometimes have to brief an erratic and angry president upset over news reports, the officials said.

My personal belief is that he’s just too dumb to understand anything remotely complicated. Just listen to his extremely limited vocabulary.

This article suggests that it’s really a consequence of his personality disorder:

Last month, The Washington Post reported that President Trump ignored “more than a dozen” intelligence briefings in January and February warning him of the coronavirus. They were in the President’s Daily Brief, which the president doesn’t read.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote a memo in January warning of “a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil.” Trump said he didn’t see it because “Peter sends a lot of memos,” none of which he reads.

[…]

Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, speculated that Trump has never read a single book in his adult life, not even a book about him or “by” him, of which there are 17. Trump pretends to have written more books than he pretends to have read.

[…]

When Megyn Kelly asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, “I read passages. I read areas. I’ll read chapters. I don’t have the time.” Trump didn’t have time to read the last book he read.

Reading — even about oneself — requires focus, and Trump has none. “It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes,” Schwartz said.

Trump’s non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn’t write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. “I get bored too easily,” he says. “My attention span is short.”

Trump’s former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He’s rich, handsome, and popular — that’s what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.

Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He’s too dumb to know he’s ignorant, and he’s too narcissistic to care.

As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and “reinforces what you know,” whereas the written word “collects information we don’t memorize.” The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.

I think this is correct about Trump. It’s why he is so dependent on Fox News and OAN. And why he famously said that he never trusted market research or that he “already” knew everything he needed to know before he became president.

Anyway:

Trump, putative author of three books with “think” in the title, doesn’t like to think. He doesn’t even think about himself — his favorite subject — much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That’s why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding.

Reading doesn’t necessarily make you a good president — James Buchanan, America’s second-worst president, was well-read — but not reading is sure to make you a bad one. In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” Trump’s personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.

One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it’s pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to “know a lot about helicopters” and to “know South Korea better than anybody,” right before he got the population of Seoul wrong. “I know windmills very much,” he said in December. “I’ve studied it better than anybody.”

The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America’s system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word “apprentice,” environmental impact statements, “the power of Facebook,” “offense and defense,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and “things.”

None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren’t so deadly.

Sadly, I think his ignorance is one of the things that makes his cult love him. They often remark that he says exactly what they are thinking. And he’s a billionaire! And President! And he says they are the real elites!

In other words, he validates them.

16 years ago today, Donald Trump gave one of the most inspiring commencement speeches ever. pic.twitter.com/wj97qQ4T4N

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 21, 2020

LOL!

“Do you think Trump can win?”

One after another nervous Democrat asked that as Nov. 8, 2016 approached. No, I reassured them. Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have been a mess viewed from our redoubt, but a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster. As crazy as Americans can be, they were not that crazy.

Then I greeted voters outside a nearby polling place on Election Day. A smiling woman wearing a thick, black shawl in seventy-degree weather offered Republican voters a list of “pro-life, pro-Israel, constitution and liberty” candidates. Occasionally, she raised her arms and talked to the cloudless sky.

With that in mind, a new, economy-based election model from Oxford Economics this far out from Nov. 3 is not looking favorable for her god-king. The unemployment rate could be above 13%. CNN Business reports:

The model, which uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast election results, predicts that Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote. That’s a sharp reversal from the model’s pre-crisis prediction that Trump would win about 55% of the vote. And it would be the worst performance for an incumbent in a century.

“It would take nothing short of an economic miracle for pocketbooks to favor Trump,” Oxford Economics wrote in the report, adding that the economy will be a “nearly insurmountable obstacle for Trump come November.”

The last time a major-party presidential candidate garnered less than 40% of the vote was 1972. George McGovern’s 37.5% was a point less than Barry Goldwater earned in 1964.

With the economy this fall still “in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression,” another Oxford model based on state results predicts Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina flip to Democrats for a final electoral vote tally of 328 to 210. “The economy would still be in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression,” the Oxford Economics report says. Yet, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2016 had fallen from Great Recession levels to 4.7%.

Regular readers will appreciate that I have a jaundiced eye when it comes to predicting human behavior based on the economy. Consider Talks To The Sky.

Perhaps a better gauge of voter behavior will be voters’ gut reaction to “American carnage.” Losing a loved one, a pastor, or friends to a deadly pandemic made worse by the inaction of a “president” hopelessly out of his depth may cut more deeply even than economic pain.

Columbia University researchers estimate that moving even a week sooner to impose social distancing measures might have saved an additional 36,000 Americans their lives. Starting two weeks sooner could have saved 54,000 lives by the end of May, a reduction of 83%.

Two weeks is less time than Trump dithered while assuring Americans the novel coronavirus was no worse than the flu and boasting his China travel ban had stopped it. In fact, COVID-19 was already here and spreading fast.

The New York Times puts just a few names and stories alongside the numbers:

Rushia Stephens, a music teacher who had become a county court records technician in an Atlanta suburb, collapsed on her bedroom floor, unable to breathe, and died on March 19. Adolph Mendez, a businessman in New Braunfels, Texas, was confined to his own bedroom as his terrified family tended to him until he died on March 26. Richard Walts, a retired firefighter in Oklahoma, was ferried to a hospital in an ambulance and died two weeks later, on April 3.

Mr. Mendez’s widow, Angela Mendez, said she still couldn’t say for sure whether action should have been taken earlier. It didn’t matter now anyway, not for her husband.

“They probably could have had earlier a better way to not let this pandemic go that far,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma are traditionally “red” states. They are likely to become less red as the death count mounts. Trump’s ignoring his own experts’ advice and insisting states reopen their economies in the absence of 14 days of declining COVID-19 cases may bite harder than economic losses and missing a few more dinners out. Economic losses can be recovered. Losing a loved one is forever.

Aaaaand it’s #reopen season for America’s mass shooters.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.