Month: July 2020

An interesting look at what the Democratic ad makers have found moves the needle against Trump:

Donald Trump wasn’t halfway through his speech in Tulsa, Okla., and Democratic ad makers in Washington and New York were already cutting footage for an air raid on the slumping president.

They didn’t focus on the president’s curious monologue about his difficulties descending a ramp or drinking water at West Point, the small crowd size of the Tulsa event or even his use of the racist term “kung flu.” Instead, the ads zeroed in on Trump’s admission that he urged officials to “slow the [coronavirus] testing down.”

It’s a reflection of a growing consensus among Democrats about what kind of hits on Trump are most likely to persuade swing voters — and which ones won’t. As in 2016, ad makers are focusing on Trump’s character. But unlike four years ago, they are no longer focusing on his character in isolation — rather they are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads yoking his behavior to substantive policy issues surrounding the coronavirus, the economy and the civil unrest since the death of George Floyd.

“You can’t chase the Trump clown car,” said Bradley Beychok, president of the progressive group American Bridge. “Him drinking water and throwing a glass is goofy and may make for a good meme, but it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things … What people care about is this outbreak.”

Until recently, it wasn’t entirely clear what, if anything, worked against Trump. From the moment he announced his presidential campaign five years ago, not even the most incendiary material seemed to cause significant damage. Not calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” not “blood coming out of her wherever,” not “grab them by the p—y” — all of which were featured by Democrats in character-based ads attacking Trump.

By Election Day, most voters didn’t find Trump honest or trustworthy, according to exit polls. But they voted for him anyway. And throughout much of his first term, including his impeachment, Democrats struggled to find an anti-Trump message that gained traction.

In their preparations for 2020, outside Democratic groups spent more than a year surveying voters in swing states by phone and online. They convened in-person focus groups and enlisted voters in swing states to keep diaries of their media consumption.

Multiple outside groups said they began to test their ads more rigorously than in 2016, using online panels to determine how likely an ad was to either change a viewer’s impression of Trump or to change how he or she planned to vote. Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC, alone expects to test more than 500 ads this cycle. Priorities, American Bridge and other outside groups, including organized labor, have been meeting regularly to share internal research and media plans.

“One thing we saw in polling a lot before the coronavirus outbreak is that people didn’t think he was a strong leader or a good leader, they complained about his Twitter,” said Nick Ahamed, analytics director at Priorities USA. “But they had a hard time connecting those character flaws they saw in him with their day-to-day experience.”

Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and recent protests, he said, “really made concrete for people the ways in which his leadership has direct consequences on them and their loved ones … It’s easier to make ads that talk about his leadership than before the outbreak.”

The advertising elements that appear to work, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democrats involved in message research, vary from ad to ad. Using Trump’s own words against him often tests well, as do charts and other graphics, which serve to highlight Trump’s distaste for science. Voters who swung from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2016 — and who regret it — are good messengers. And so is Joe Biden, whose voice is widely considered preferable to that of a professional narrator.Not only does he convey empathy, according to Democrats inside and outside Biden’s campaign, but using Biden’s voice “helps people think about him as president,” said Patrick Bonsignore, Biden’s director of paid media.

But the ad makers’ overarching takeaway from their research was this: While Trump may not be vulnerable on issues of character alone, as he demonstrated in 2016, he is vulnerable when character is tied to his policy record on the economy and health care.

To me, the character stuff should be enough. But I think people who may have had loyalty to the GOP or indies who don’t much like the Democrats either think such complaints are a cheap shot. Tying his grotesque character and personality to results shows why it matters.

I don’t think these people always know what works. Advertising is as much voodoo as science. But this does make sense. Trump’s character is monstrous but people still like him. (I will never understand it and will feel differently about people who do for as long as I live.) So, they have to try to get to them with some other message. This makes sense. I guess you have to explain to people why having a narcissistic ignoramus lead the nation leads to bad outcomes. You’d think that would be self-explanatory but …

An Amanda Marcotte tweet yesterday primed me for thinking about racial euphemisms. “Real Americans,” she notes, was always code for “white people.” Rural white people, especially.

No matter that the subtitle for Geoffrey Nunberg’s 2006 book, “Talking Right,” is: “How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.” Real Americans see themselves standing apart from elite city-dwellers not only because of their strange (effete), urban ways, but because skin tones there run darker as well. Urban is often code for non-white. Specifically: black. Never mind that across the Deep South runs a coastal “black belt” left over from slave plantation days.

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1278376139027816449?s=20

Nicholas Kristof brought up another code phrase this morning, “personal responsibility,” in the context of mask-wearing during the coronavirus pandemic. Or not wearing them, as it works out.

Resistance among Real Americans to wearing face coverings to protect one’s neighbors from the virus is now legend. The acting president believes people wear masks not to slow the coronavirus spread but to express disapproval of him. His cultish followersl spout shibboleths like freedom as reasons for refusing to wear masks. Except this one: wearing a mask is a public confession of weak faith in their leader. They’ll risk death first. Theirs and yours.

“Representative Liz Cheney tweeted a photo of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, wearing one, with the hashtag #realmenwearmasks. Good for them!” Kristof writes. (Dick Cheney is from “real” Wyoming!) Even Vice President Mike Pence is slowly coming around.

Kristof continues:

But Trump has resisted. Republicans talk a good game about “personal responsibility,” so it’s time for Trump to display some — and to call on his supporters to wear masks as well. As we celebrate our independence, this is how they can show patriotism, protect the economy and save the lives of their neighbors.

The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, deflects questions about Trump and masks by insisting that mask-wearing is simply a “personal choice.”

No, it’s not. Refusing to wear a mask is no more a “personal choice” than is drinking all evening and then stumbling into your car and heading down the road. In a time of plague, shunning a face mask is like driving drunk, putting everyone in your path in danger.

Given the trajectory of the coronavirus in the United States compared to most other countries on Earth, global neighbors must believe there is a drunk behind the wheel of the country. There were more new COVID-19 cases in Arizona Wednesday than in the entire European Union.

The single state of Arizona is reporting more coronavirus cases per day than the entire European Union. pic.twitter.com/uDyXw0maJl

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) July 2, 2020

Personal responsibility, like “real” Americans, has always been white racial code for “black people” in discussing social programs. Personal responsibility is forever the explanation for why the richest country in the world cannot confront its legacy of systemic racism or for why it fails to match other nations in how it treats the least among us.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968, “The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” Personal freedom for me. Personal responsibility for thee.

David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez of the New York Times examine how this attitude makes the U.S. “exceptional.” Americans work longer hours, make less income, pay more for services, and live shorter lives than citizens in Europe:

The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.

But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.

This is not just about abstractions like “freedom.” The problem is despite the red-white-and-blue rhetoric you will hear this coming weekend, equality remains an abstraction, especially when it comes to distribution of political power. The bulk of Americans have little. Those who have it are not interested in sharing it.

The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.

That makes the U.S. exceptional in many of the wrong ways.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

This virus is acting in unexpected ways:

When pathologist Amy Rapkiewicz began the grim process of opening up the coronavirus dead to learn how their bodies went awry, she found damage to the lungs, kidneys and liver consistent with what doctors had reported for months.

But something was off.

Rapkiewicz, who directs autopsies at NYU Langone Health, noticed that some organs had far too many of a special cell rarely found in those places. She had never seen that before, yet it seemed vaguely familiar. She raced to her history books and — in a eureka moment — found a reference to 1960′s report on a patient with dengue fever.

In dengue, a mosquito-borne tropical disease, she learned, the virus appeared to destroy these cells, which produce platelets, leading to uncontrolled bleeding. The novel coronavirus seemed to amplify their effect, causing dangerous clotting.

She was struck by the parallels: “Covid-19 and dengue sound really different, but the cells that are involved are similar.”

Autopsies have long been a source of breakthroughs in understanding new diseases, from HIV/AIDS and Ebola to Lassa fever — and the medical community is counting on them to do the same for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. With a vaccine probably many months away in even the most optimistic scenarios, autopsies are becoming a critical source of information for research into possible treatments.

When the pandemic hit the United States in late March, many hospital systems were too overwhelmed trying to save lives to spend too much time delving into the secrets of the dead. But by late May and June, the first large batch of reports — from patients ranging in age from 32 to 90 years who died at a half-dozen institutions — were published in quick succession. The investigations have confirmed some of our early hunches of the disease, refuted others — and opened up new mysteries about the pathogen that has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide.

Among the most important findings, consistent across several studies, is confirmation the virus appears to attack the lungs the most ferociously. They also found the pathogen in parts of the brain, kidneys, liver, gastrointestinal tract and spleen and in the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, as some had previously suspected. Researchers also found widespread clotting in many organs.

But the brain and heart yielded surprises.

“It’s about what we are not seeing,” said Mary Fowkes, an associate professor of pathology who is part of a team at Mount Sinai Health that has performed autopsies on 67 covid-19 patients.

Given widespread reports about neurological symptoms related to the coronavirus, Fowkes said, she expected to find virus or inflammation — or both — in the brain. But there was very little. When it comes to the heart, many physicians warned for months about a cardiac complication they suspected was myocarditis, an inflammation or hardening of the heart muscle walls — but autopsy investigators were stunned that they could find no evidence of the condition.

Another unexpected finding, pathologists said, is that oxygen deprivation of the brain and the formation of blood clots may start early in the disease process. That could have major implications for how people with covid-19 are treated at home, even if they never need to be hospitalized.

The early findings come as new U.S. infections have overtaken even the catastrophic days of April, amid what some critics say is a premature easing of social distancing restrictions in some states, mainly in the South and West. A new modeling study has estimated that about 22 percent of the population — or 1.7 billion people worldwide, including 72 million in the United States — may be vulnerable to severe illness if infected with the virus. According to the analysis published this month in Lancet Global Health, about 4 percent of those people would require hospitalization — underscoring the stakes as autopsy investigators continue their hunt for clues.

The article goes on to describe in detail all the ways in which this virus affects the lungs, heart and brain if you’re into that sort of thing. This is the understanding of the disease that may yield some treatments that could save a lot of lives.

Or, you could follow the president’s advice and drink some bleach. Your choice.

This was a caption at the Washington Post today: “Trump backers hope anger at John Roberts will boost campaign.” And as I read it, I realized that I’d never seen a headline — and never will see a headline — that reads anything like “Biden backers hope anger at John Roberts will boost campaign.” And yet, you can bet that I’m not the only liberal/progressive out there who is throughly disgusted by Roberts’ voting record (with rare exceptions) as well as Gorsuch’s, Thomas’s, Alito’s, and Kavanaugh’s.

Why is that? Partly because Democrats don’t usually make a big deal about the Supreme Court during campaigns. But there’s more to it.

For some reason, major media outlets find it not newsworthy to report liberal/progressive dismay at the state this country is in unless people take to the streets. And even then, our concerns are under-reported unless crowds are immense — and even then, not always (I remember millions marching around the world against the Iraq War and that Sunday, not a single mention on the talk shows).

Jesus Christ. This would be pathetic and sad if it weren’t for the fact that this monster is killing people:

#cognitivemalfunction https://t.co/y4540XC3vc

— digby (@digby56) July 1, 2020

The very stable genius says the virus will just “go away.” His people agree with him and they are going out in to the population, breathing all over people and getting exposed, killing themselves, their loved ones, health care workers and perfect strangers.

This is outrageous.

Duh:

President Donald Trump’s campaign has been trying to paint Joe Biden as a stooge for the far left. A new poll shows why it’s not working.

Only 17 percent of registered voters perceive the former vice president as more liberal than most Democrats, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult survey, while nearly two-thirds see him as in line with or more conservative than the party at large. The survey also found that a larger proportion of the electorate views Biden as moderate (23 percent) than sees Trump that way (9 percent).

The findings underscore the difficulty of turning Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, into an unacceptable choice for independent and suburban voters by tying him to the most progressive figures in the Democratic Party. After eight years as vice president and dozens more as a split-the-difference senator, Biden has a well-formed reputation among many voters.

Trump is still trying. At his first rally since the coronavirus outbreak began, the president cast Biden as a “helpless puppet of the radical left” and misleadingly claimed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spearheading Biden’s environmental policy.

“I just don’t see suburban voters buying in on that,” said Ryan Costello, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. “We just had a Democratic primary campaign where everybody on the left attacked Biden. That’s still fresh in people’s minds, in addition to the fact that over the past 30-plus years he was in the Senate and vice president, I don’t think anyone mistook him for being a leading, confrontational progressive.”

There is at least one cause for hope for Trump in the poll: Forty-one percent of voters agreed with the statement that Biden is “more liberal than me,” and 20 percent didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter, meaning that they may be persuadable.

But roughly the same percentage of voters said they didn’t know or had no opinion on whether Trump was more liberal or conservative than them. And four months from the general election, it is clear Trump’s attempts to label Biden as a pawn for the left wing have largely been unsuccessful so far.

People aren’t stupid and they know he’s not a left-winger. But Trump isn’t completely off base in his assessment.

Biden is smack in the mainstream of the Democratic party. (For a lot of us that’s part of the problem.) But the party has moved substantially to left over the past 20 years and as it’s moved, he’s moved with it. In other words, the mainstream is more liberal than it used to be.

Biden has always gone with the flow. When it moved right, he did too. Now that it’s moving left, he’s going that way. I can’t say that’s a particularly inspiring form of “leadership” but it’s not the worst form either. He is at least responsive to the people which is at the heart of democratic governance. But he’s not going to pave the way to major progress on his own. The people are going to have to demand it.

I don’t think people really understand this about him and simply accept him as the moderate old white guy, compared to the lefty old white guy he just beat in the primary. Trump can’t run against him as if he’s Bernie Sanders and his attempt to paint him as suffering from dementia isn’t going to stick either, particularly since he sounds fine and Trump himself seems to be more addled than ever. Good old Joe isn’t a hippie. Never was, never will be.

Trump is rightly being blamed by the voters in swing states for his monumental failure to deal with the coronavirus. I would guess that these results are mirrored in all but the reddest of Trump states:

Voters in six key 2020 election states have little good to say about how President Donald Trump is handling the coronavirus as the pandemic tears through the country, according to a new CNBC/Change Research poll. 

As cases spike in pockets of the South and West after states reopened their economies, likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin believe Trump shoulders much of the blame, the survey released Wednesday found. 

When asked to select two people or groups most responsible for the recent increase in hospitalizations, 35% said the president — the largest share among the answers. Trump was followed by “people not wearing masks” at 34%, “states reopening their economies too soon” at 32% and “people not social distancing” at 29%. 

The poll suggests many voters think Trump plays a role in the policies and behaviors that have contributed to the flood of infections. A majority of respondents, 55%, said they agree that the president is urging states to restart their economies too quickly in order to boost his reelection prospects, while 45% disagree. 

The survey found only 43% of voters agree that Trump is setting a good example and providing accurate information about proper Covid-19 precautions. Another 57% disagree. Trump has drawn backlash for not wearing a face covering in public, a practice his administration says can help to slow infections. 

Shocking that 43% think this crude ignoramus is setting a good example, truly shocking.

The poll, taken from Friday to Sunday, surveyed 3,729 likely voters in the six states and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points. 

Along with a wave of other recent surveys, it shows Trump has significant ground to make up before November if he wants to win a second term. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads the incumbent by a 50% to 44% margin across the swing states, wider than the 48% to 45% edge he held in a poll taken two weeks earlier. 

Here’s the current state of the race in individual states, according to the CNBC/Change Research poll:

• Arizona: Biden 51%, Trump 44% 
• Florida: Biden 50%, Trump 45%
• Michigan: Biden 48%, Trump 43% 
• North Carolina: Biden 51%, Trump 44%
• Pennsylvania: Biden 50%, Trump 44% 
• Wisconsin: Biden 51%, Trump 43% 

The survey also shows challenges for Republicans running in Senate races in Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina. Democrats need to win those seats — two of which are held by the GOP and one by Democrats — and a handful of others to flip control of the Senate. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the chamber, and keeping it would help them stifle Democratic priorities if Biden wins the White House and his party holds the House. 

He is pretending it isn’t happening. Here’s what he tweeting about today:

I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (of all people!) Amendment, which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2020

Say what you will about the Trump administration, I don’t think you can accuse it of being unusually secretive. Or if it is, then Donald Trump’s White House officials are extraordinarily bad at it. There are leaks from any White House but this presidency has set records. From the very beginning, the palace intrigue has been splashed all over the media, from stories about “Javanka” versus Steve Bannon to the ongoing feuds and turf wars among the staff and stories about Trump’s rages, panics and weird obsessions.

Trump has complained about the leaks and even unleashed his henchmen on the case from time to time. But when you think about it, it’s quite odd that he hasn’t made a bigger stink. At least, it seems that way until you reflect on the persistent rumors that Trump himself is the leaker-in-chief. Since he sees the presidency as a reality show and worries more about his TV ratings than his poll numbers, it makes perfect sense. Much of the drama of this administration has been perpetrated by the man himself. If the job of president were to be a tabloid celebrity, which seems to be how Trump understands it, he’d be right that he was the greatest president ever.

Unfortunately, that isn’t actually the job description and whether Trump knows this or not, the long list of tell-all books and the nonstop whispers, rumors and leaks have revealed to the world just how enormously incompetent and destructive his tenure has been. The ongoing corruption is unprecedented. The results of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment hearings should have been enough to cast him out of office long before now. It is hard to imagine that anything could shock us at this late date.

And yet there is always more. As the country becomes swallowed up by a raging epidemic and the resulting economic disaster, the president has apparently decided to pretend that’s no longer happening and is instead focusing intently on statues and protesters in hopes of stoking the culture war to a fever pitch. The picture he’s presenting to voters right now is of a man who is sitting in a dark room fulminating on his Twitter feed as the nation collapses around him.

Meanwhile, the leaks out of the administration have turned into a tsunami and they are anything but tabloid gossip. This is serious business from the national security side of the administration. I wrote about the Russian bounty story on Monday, but it’s only gotten more stunning since then, mainly because of the risk that the leakers are taking in getting this information out to the public. It is obvious that Trump was briefed in some form or another, likely more than once, that the Russian government was offering Taliban fighters money to kill American troops. Whether he ignored these reports, didn’t understand them or just didn’t care remains unknown. But the news has clearly shaken the firmament of the Republican establishment in a way we haven’t seen before.

But another story bubbled up this week that is just as striking and comes from another cascade of leaks, this time concentrated in the White House. CNN’s Carl Bernstein has reported on Trump’s phone calls to foreign leaders during his tenure, apparently having spoken to high-level sources who either listened in on the calls or read the subsequent readouts circulated within the administration. (Salon’s Roger Sollenberger recapped the article here. )

Again, just when you thought things couldn’t be worse, it turns out that that they are. It’s not that Trump is substantially different when he speaks to foreign leaders than he is during his press avails or campaign rallies. It’s that he isn’t. According to Bernstein’s reporting, the president treats foreign leaders exactly the same the way he treats the media and his domestic political rivals. He bullies the allies, kisses up to the adversaries and seems to have a particular problem with women leaders, which is entirely predictable. But calling German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid” to her face is odious even by his standards, especially since Merkel holds a doctorate in quantum chemistry and speaks several languages, while Trump is barely literate.

The manner in which he has conducted himself on the world stage has not been hidden, and the disdain in which he’s held by other world leaders is also widely known. Remember this caught-on-tape moment:

.@JustinTrudeau, @EmmanuelMacron, @BorisJohnson and other VIPs shared a few words at a Buckingham Palace reception Tuesday. No one mentions @realDonaldTrump by name, but they seem to be discussing his lengthy impromptu press conferences from earlier in the day. (Video: Host Pool) pic.twitter.com/dVgj48rpOP

— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) December 3, 2019

They were talking about his obscenely inappropriate announcement, or perhaps infomercial, touting his Trump National Doral golf resort as the proposed location for the 2020 G7 meeting.

Trump is obviously seen as a clown. But he’s also seen as an easy mark. Bernstein writes that Trump’s chiefs of staff and national security officials were “flabbergasted” by his solicitous behavior toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and quotes two high-level officials who say that Trump achieved nothing of substance in his dealings with Putin and was so unschooled in the subject that he elevated Russia back to the level of a major power: “He’s given Russia a lifeline — because there is no doubt that they’re a declining power … He’s playing with something he doesn’t understand and he’s giving them power that they would use [aggressively].”

He has been similarly taken advantage of by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, working in concert with Russia, managed to completely outmaneuver Trump on the Syrian civil war:

Two sources described the President as woefully uninformed about the history of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East generally, and said he was often caught off guard, and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal terms in nuanced policy discussion with Erdogan. “Erdogan took him to the cleaners,” said one of the sources.

These sources told Bernstein that Trump was often “delusional” in his dealings with foreign leaders, and did not become more “skillful or competent” as time went on. He refuses to listen to experts or really to anyone, except those, like his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who fawn over him, telling him how terrific he is. These high-level White House aides came to believe at some point that “the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Well, yes.

These are major leaks of highly guarded conversations, obviously by people who were close to Trump, and we rightly wonder why in the world they didn’t speak out before. But consider the fact that we’ve had all those other shocking insider accounts of this administration and it has made no difference. Republican officials have been unmoved by all of them. In fact, major figures in the party have enabled him every step of the way, and it’s not as if they didn’t know what was on John Kelly’s or Rex Tillerson’s minds when they left the White House. And as long as a circle of political loyalists protected Trump, he obviously wasn’t going to change and wasn’t going to go anywhere.

So, no — it probably wouldn’t have mattered if these people had stepped up and told the truth earlier. But maybe it will matter now. Trump is proving himself incapable of handling the gravest crisis of his presidency and his polling numbers are dismal. If these people who come forward now can deliver the coup de grâce, perhaps it was all for the best.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

The acting president’s poll numbers are down. Way down. Down in rumors of his party ditching him for another candidate down. Down in his telling Sean Hannity that Joe Biden might wind up president next year “because some people don’t love me, maybe.”

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes explain at The Atlantic that Donald Trump “Season 4 just doesn’t have the zest and sparkle of the previous seasons.” Ratings have fallen through the floor, poor thing.

But it is no time to celebrate. Something else has fallen through the floor this season: voter registrations.

Five Thirty-eight reported on June 26:

Poll after poll showed a high level of enthusiasm for voting in the general election in 2020, and in the beginning of the year, voter registration surged to match that excitement. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. New registrations have fallen off a cliff.

The enthusiasm is there, says David Becker, the executive director and founder of Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). But the registrations are not.

“Every piece of data we had looked at with regard to enthusiasm about engaging in this presidential election cycle indicated that we had to be prepared for the highest-turnout presidential election that almost anyone living had ever seen,” Becker said, “which makes the decline in March and especially April all the more striking.”

Old North State Politics grabbed my attention two weeks earlier when Dr. Michael Bitzer announced a “precipitous drop in NC voter registration” since March. COVID-19 has significantly depressed new registrations here.

The trends could certainly reverse themselves. Assuming the track of the pandemic does. That … is not looking likely.

Currently, about 40 states allow online voter registration. The online system works for people already holding state-issued driver’s licenses or identification cards and uses the signature on file with the DMV for verification. North Carolina added this option for the first time as of March. But few know about it, especially people of voting age and unregistered. Don’t expect any GOP-controlled legislature to allocate funds to mailings promoting online registration. Growing the electoral choir is not their game plan.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) today announced it will invest up to $30 million in a nonpartisan, nonprofit voter outreach organizations in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. The program’s goal is to “increase voter registration and participation among people of color.”

Now, try finding them.

Ordinarily at this time in the cycle, volunteers would be out in the streets with clipboards registering voters. At campaign rallies. At outdoor concerts. At street festivals. On downtown street corners on weekends. At all kinds of public events not happening this year because of the contagion and that may not happen by the fall. The SPLC and its partners could try registering people at black churches. But only at everyone’s peril.

Even in normal times, voter registration efforts by volunteers is haphazard, a matter of chance and sweat. The unregistered are on no campaign’s radar because they are not registered. They are not likely voters, therefore not high-priority for targeting in get-out-the-vote efforts. They are not identified by party. They have no contact information in the parties’ voter databases. This makes them all but invisible to activists trying to engage them in the election process. And just when the acting president and his party seem on the ropes new registrants could be key to Democrats winning races this fall up and down the ballot.

Getting around that little problem is consuming me.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.