Posted on 10/23/2020 5:38:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
Are both presidential candidates trying to lose? Or at least pursuing campaign strategies which put them at grave risk of defeat?
In nearly four years, Donald Trump has made little effort to win over the 50 percent-plus of voters who didn't support him in 2016. Having proved that he could win the presidency without a plurality of the popular vote, he has ignored the possibility that he could govern more effectively if he were reelected with an absolute majority.
You can see the results as Trump supporters scan the polling data for encouraging information. They quickly pass over the national polls showing him trailing by 7.7 percent, according to a RealClearPolitics average of recent polls. They focus instead on the chart showing him running slightly better against Joe Biden in the battleground states than he was against Hillary Clinton two to three weeks out in 2016.
If these numbers prove as much off the mark as in 2016, Trump could win a second term with 270-plus electoral votes. But that conclusion requires a lot of assumptions. Past polling hasn't leaned consistently toward one party, and pollsters tend to compensate -- often overcompensate -- for apparent past mistakes.
Astonishingly, Trump has failed to emphasize his two signature 2016 issues: immigration and trade. He can claim that his new trade agreements and economic policies have produced income and wealth gains disproportionately favoring low-wage workers -- something administrations of both parties have failed to achieve for a generation.
And he can argue that his immigration policies -- and the cooperation he has successfully wrested from Mexico -- have prevented the surge of unskilled illegal immigrants which could easily resume the minute the networks call the election for Joe Biden.
Biden has a different strategy, with risks of its own. With a solid lead in the polls, and with COVID-19 providing a rationale for laying low, he's running out the clock. On nearly half the days in September, his staffers announced an early lid. Sometimes, he'd generate no news after 9:00 a.m. He took three days off this week for debate preparation. He and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris have taken almost no questions from reporters, almost all of whom seem determined not to ask anything that might hurt his chances.
Biden has answered which flavor milkshake he ordered but has refused to say whether he, like many other Democrats, would support packing the Supreme Court. He chewed out the one reporter who asked him about his son Hunter's business deals. Harris, similarly, keeps out of question range. ABC's Jonathan Karl notes that she's taken more questions from the cast of "The Avengers" than from the traveling press.
Obviously, the Biden-Harris ticket is deflecting attention away from the radical policies that Biden has endorsed -- and which almost everyone in the press corps favors. After 40 years of opposing government-paid abortions, he now backs them. He's likely to use regulations to reduce fracking, which has reduced gas prices and carbon emissions. His tax increases threaten to stymie economic recovery.
There's one problem with this strategy: If something does rock the boat, it could tip it over. A bad debate performance, a sudden brain freeze or an unanticipated negative story could capsize the campaign. Efforts to help the Biden campaign, such as Twitter's and Facebook's attempts to conceal the New York Post's Hunter Biden story, could boomerang and catch voters' attention.
And he can argue that his immigration policies -- and the cooperation he has successfully wrested from Mexico -- have prevented the surge of unskilled illegal immigrants which could easily resume the minute the networks call the election for Joe Biden.
Biden has a different strategy, with risks of its own. With a solid lead in the polls, and with COVID-19 providing a rationale for laying low, he's running out the clock. On nearly half the days in September, his staffers announced an early lid. Sometimes, he'd generate no news after 9:00 a.m. He took three days off this week for debate preparation. He and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris have taken almost no questions from reporters, almost all of whom seem determined not to ask anything that might hurt his chances.
Biden has answered which flavor milkshake he ordered but has refused to say whether he, like many other Democrats, would support packing the Supreme Court. He chewed out the one reporter who asked him about his son Hunter's business deals. Harris, similarly, keeps out of question range. ABC's Jonathan Karl notes that she's taken more questions from the cast of "The Avengers" than from the traveling press.
Obviously, the Biden-Harris ticket is deflecting attention away from the radical policies that Biden has endorsed -- and which almost everyone in the press corps favors. After 40 years of opposing government-paid abortions, he now backs them. He's likely to use regulations to reduce fracking, which has reduced gas prices and carbon emissions. His tax increases threaten to stymie economic recovery.
There's one problem with this strategy: If something does rock the boat, it could tip it over. A bad debate performance, a sudden brain freeze or an unanticipated negative story could capsize the campaign. Efforts to help the Biden campaign, such as Twitter's and Facebook's attempts to conceal the New York Post's Hunter Biden story, could boomerang and catch voters' attention.
Barone and Luntz both said Romney would win
It's in every campaign speech. Unsurprisingly the author doesn't watch those.
I haven’t heard of any 2016 Trump voters walking away but I have heard of people moving to support Trump this time around.
Barone used to be good. Now he channels Captain Obvious with some of this stuff.
I have. I was speaking with a former elected official here in Houston who lives in one of those “senior-living” condos, and she says many of her neighbors are switching from Trump to Biden over health care, of all things.
It doesn’t make much sense to me that someone would vote for a guy who promised to repeal ObamaCare in 2016 and then vote for Biden over health care, but there it is. She was correct, however, when she pointed out that Republicans, from Trump on down, have no coherent message on health care and seem to be abandoning the field to Democrats on an issue that is at or near the top for a huge number of voters. The bare contention that “we will protect people with pre-existing conditions” is nonsensical and doesn’t cut it.
She suggested that Republican candidates need to quickly get on one page when it comes to messaging, and do a national series of ads attacking Democrat health care ideas—particularly pointing out how socialist health care systems ration care to the elderly.
This makes little sense unless they think Trump wants to gut Medicare. Hopefully they watched the debate where Trump killed Beijing Biden on the health care issue.
Excellent comment. I’ve been saying for awhile now the first 2 years of Trump’s presidency when we held the House, the Senate, and the White House would have been a great time to keep the “repeal and replace Obamacare” promise. The repeal happened. The replacement with a cost-cutting free market alternative never did. The GOP missed an easy shot at persuading swing voters that they care about working people. I don’t think they ever had a plan. I think they just repealed Obamacare and hoped we would forget about the “replace” part of their campaign promises.
>>She suggested that Republican candidates need to quickly get on one page when it comes to messaging, and do a national series of ads attacking Democrat health care ideas—particularly pointing out how socialist health care systems ration care to the elderly.
Then she is am idiot if she is living in a retirement community, knowing Democrats will ration her healthcare, and voting for Biden anyway.
Second sentence. That's as far as I got, I could take no more. Mr. Barone is entitled to his opinion, skewed as it is, but to even suggest that Trump isn't trying to be everyone's President, and winning people to his side, by restoring our economy and make Americans proud to be American (again!), is ludicrous.
She isn’t voting for Biden. She says her neighbors are voting for Biden.
And of course they’re idiots. That doesn’t mean Trump and other Republicans don’t need their votes.
I think the problem is that a lot of Republicans know, deep down, that there is only one correct, but unpopular, answer as far as the federal government is concerned: Regulating health insurance and medical care is the business of state governments, not the federal government. Too many Republicans are too afraid to actually lead by taking an unpopular position.
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