Sunday, July 19, 2020

“It’s all about coronavirus”

...the survey is the fifth consecutive high-quality national poll — those conducted by live phone interviewers — to show Biden ahead of Trump by 10 points or more.

“Of the nine such polls conducted since the second half of June, Biden has led Trump by double digits in seven of them.

“The surveys conducted over the past month put Biden in an enviable, even historic position. He has a greater advantage over the incumbent going into the final few months of the campaign than any challenger since Bill Clinton, who seized the lead in the summer of 1992 after third-party candidate Ross Perot dropped out.”
...
Prior to the release of the ABC News/Washington Post poll Sunday morning, Biden held a 9-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average — a little lower than the live-caller polls suggest, mostly because of the inclusion of a GOP-friendler result from the automated firm Rasmussen Reports.

Still, that 9-point lead puts Biden in unusually commanding territory for a challenger. Only two challengers at this stage of the campaign — John Kerry in 2004 and Michael Dukakis in 1988, who was running against an incumbent vice president — ended up losing, and each held a smaller lead than Biden’s...

...Biden’s advantage well outstrips the lead Hillary Clinton had at this point in the 2016 race, when she led Trump by 3 points in the RealClearPolitics average. Clinton’s lead would briefly top out at an 8-point lead in early August, and then again crest to 7 points in the immediate aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” video in October.

Biden is also much closer to earning majority support than Clinton at this point before the last presidential election. As of July 19, 2016, Clinton was only at 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, well short of Biden's 49 percent — and that Biden number is before the ABC News/Washington Post poll with him at 54 percent was added to the average.

Trump’s campaign has disputed the results of public polling, arguing that Trump runs stronger against a “defined” Biden in their internal tests.

But the Trump campaign’s efforts to define Biden with a bombardment of negative advertising, especially in the battleground states, has yet to dent the former vice president.

... Biden is in fact becoming more defined — but it isn’t helping Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump’s favorable ratings are in the tank...

It’s all about coronavirus (emphasis in original)
...
...don’t confuse enthusiasm for a candidate for enthusiasm about voting. Other data suggests Biden’s voters are as motivated as Trump’s — they just aren’t getting their motivation from their candidate.

https://www.politico.com/

X-2 immediately got me off suggesting the Biden campaign be uni-messaging on COVID-19. Now this has turned my head again. I have watched parts of Biden's last two speeches. Now, if you were uni-messaging and gave any speech especially right now--well, obviously, you know what I think the speech should be on. But when I watched and listened there was a poster on the podium for both speeches: "BUILD BACK BETTER". What? I thought. My immediate reaction was that the Biden campaign was minimizing the virus because 1) The virus' toll would have been bad if Obama or Biden or whomever your exemplar of good, competent government may be and they didn't want to make asses of themselves as Trump did by promising they could make it "disappear." Or 2) They were playing a difficult-to-fathom long game at the expense of digging Trump's grave deeper now. That is, they assume that by the time President Biden takes over we will be over the virus, we'll have a vaccine or something and so are flipping the coin to the reverse side of the crisis, the economy. Whatever their reasoning I will tell you it struck me that they were minimizing the virus' toll. That sums up my instant reaction. And that's fucked up. Your messaging, whatever it is, should not be leaving your auditors with the impression you are minimizing the carnage. That is not real, that is not empathetic, that is, in fact, what TRUMP IS DOING! When I had a chance to think about it over a few days I thought that the campaign was jumping to the reverse of the two-headed coin because if they uni-messaged on the virus, the only responsible thing to say that you would do "better" is to reimpose the lockdowns that Trump and the GOP governors lifted too quickly. That would further harm the economy and the Biden campaign didn't want to make that suggestion. "Hi, I'm Joe Biden, I'm the Democrat, and guess what, I'm going to raise your taxes!" I thought, that's why the Biden campaign doesn't want to uni-message on the virus, that's why they skipped the part of the virus and went to "BUILD BACK BETTER."

But the Biden campaign is so cautious (And I admit my default is aggression to a fault). And, look, I understand their caution, I immediately agreed with X-2 that the campaign should keep doin' what it's doin', "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and so I interlineated the uni-messaging post. But the public has been more sensible on this than Trump (not hard, THAT!); the public has consistently, in every poll, said that they wanted to "flatten the curve" first, even if that meant being out of work longer. They AGREE they need their taxes raised, to complete that analogy. And, we need some straight talk from our president. We need our president to at least align himself with Dr. Fauci. I think (but I am not sure!) that Biden should level with the American people: "Trump fucked this up. You know that, I know that. Now, I am going to inherit this shitshow. We, I and the American people together, are going to flatten this goddamned curve until it's a goddamned pancake. And we are going to do whatever it takes--including LOCKDOWNS!--to do that! And if any of you "LIBERATORS" want to tough it out with Bunker Boy, Make. My. Day....As I was saying about my aggressive impulsive. Ah-hem. Seriously, the better angel of my soul says to level with the American people. -OR-You could play the virus/economy FDR cautious. Hoover invited FDR in! Said, come, I will meet with you. Tell me how you would do it. We'll do it together. FDR, in my view rightly, rejected that invitation as a Trojan Horse. So okay, I get that Biden doesn't want to offer his own solution. Is it still okay if we beat Trump like a pinata with the number of dead? With Trump's incompetent handling? With his predictions? Or, is that just not the Democrats' "cup of tea"? It seems to me that if you are going to have Biden speak at all he should only be talking about the virus and Trump's clear, criminal, culpability (See next post headline for more on that.). To have Biden talking about phase two seemed to me instantly and still seems somewhat to me to be tin-eared.