At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was up by 3, with a volatile electorate. This year, things look more stable, with Joe Biden maintaining his lead nationally and state by state. This is not a surprise, as the states and national polls correlate (pro tip: stop dismissing national polls!), though small leads are no guarantee of victory.
Geoffrey Skelley/FiveThirtyEight:
Are Older Voters Turning Away From Trump?
The most startling shift, though, is among voters age 65 and older. Four years ago, Trump bested Hillary Clinton by 13 points, 55 percent to 42 percent, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 60,000 voters organized by Harvard University and administered by YouGov. But now Biden narrowly leads Trump 48 percent to 47 percent, based on an average of 48 national polls that included that age group.1 If those figures hold until November, they would represent a seismic shift in the voting behavior of America’s oldest voters.
The last Democratic nominee who won voters 65 and older was Al Gore in 2000, according to national exit poll data. But at the time, that was the trend. Older Americans — those who came of age during the Great Depression and New Deal era, a period in which the Democratic Party was dominant — were disproportionately Democratic-leaning in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And political science has found evidence that party loyalties developed at a young age can persist over the course of a person’s life.
Ok, Boomer. Really, ok.
Here’s your state polling roundup for those who can’t bring themselves to look at national polls.
Those who argued that Joe Biden was a “safer” bet in November—meaning that disaffected indies and older moderate Democrats were more comfortable with him—appear to have been correct, at least until now (of course, there’s always questions about individual polls, but the trend is clear).
A legitimate counterpoint argument is that, well, thanks to the pandemic and economic depression, anyone can beat Trump. That’s not how it looked a few months ago, and not one I agree with as Trump still has a narrow path to victory. However, it’s an argument I don’t mind listening to because of its implications.
Biden’s lead is super stable, too.
USA Today:
Democrats outline election plan to make health care their top issue amid coronavirus
The campaign arms for Democrats, from the presidential contest and Congressional races to state legislatures and gubernatorial elections, have centered their focus on a single issue they believe will lead them to victory in November: health care.
While Democrats have consistently focused on health care as a key issue in the fall elections, coronavirus has upped the stakes and thrust the topic even more so into the spotlight as more than 1.5 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 90,000 have died from it.
In a six-page memo shared with USA TODAY, the Democratic National Committee — along with campaign arms for Senate Democrats, House Democrats, Democratic governors, Democratic attorneys general and Democratic state legislatures — outlined a top-to-bottom effort to highlight health care in races across the country in addition to GOP-led efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act
Andy Slavitt and Mark McClellan/USA Today:
Health leaders: We stuck together to #StayHome, now we can start together to #OpenSafely
We don’t believe we need to wait until there is zero risk. Many states are already beginning to reopen and this must happen in the safest way possible.
Still growing, contagious and lethal
COVID-19 is still spreading, but at a steadier rate. While it is shrinking in places like New York, it is still growing rapidly in some areas where there had been fewer cases. The virus is still equally contagious. The virus is still lethal to many. The virus still spreads through unsuspecting asymptomatic people. Some places are especially hard hit: nursing homes, meatpacking plants, prisons, detention centers, public housing, and the communities around them as people move in and out. People are still dying at an alarming rate, and that will continue unless we follow the path like the one outlined by Dr. Deborah Birx at the White House: a steady, gated reopening that avoids accelerated growth in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Long, good read. And another long, good read from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication:
Climate Change in the American Mind: April 2020
- A record-tying 73% of Americans think global warming is happening. Only one in ten Americans (10%) think global warming is not happening. Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it isn’t by a ratio of about 7 to 1.
- A record-high 54% of Americans are “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is happening. By contrast, only 6% are “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is not happening.
- A record-tying 62% of Americans understand that global warming is mostly human-caused. By contrast, about three in ten (29%) think it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment.
- More than half of Americans (56%) understand that most scientists think global warming is happening. However, only about one in five (21%) understand how strong the level of consensus among scientists is (i.e., that more than 90% of climate scientists think human-caused global warming is happening).
- Two in three Americans (66%) say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming. One in four (26%) are “very worried” about it.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Republicans are serious about voter suppression. Here’s how to stop them.
Voter suppression is at the very heart of Republican electoral strategy, and, as the New York Times reports Monday, they plan to go all-out in November:
The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and President Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.
The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.
“Voters deemed suspicious” by the GOP is a category that includes black people, Latinos, students, black people, and also black people.
The attempts to intimidate voters on Election Day are best understood as the culmination of a lengthy effort to make voting as cumbersome and difficult as possible for people whom the GOP deems to be the wrong kind of voter. While you can sometimes remove people outright from the voter rolls (and voter purges are a key component in the voter suppression arsenal), you don’t necessarily have to make it impossible for people to vote, as long as you make it hard.
Texas Observer:
Is Texas Inflating Its COVID-19 Testing Numbers by Including Antibody Tests?
The state health department is including some antibody test results in its case totals, potentially clouding information on the current spread of the virus.
It’s unclear what portion of the state’s case counts so far are based on antibody tests, but the co-mingling of the two types of tests raises questions about the validity of the state’s data, which has influenced efforts, largely by Republican government officials, to quickly reopen the state’s economy.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
By order of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp: The day after Thursday is now Sunday
Only in Brian Kemp’s Georgia is the first Thursday in May followed immediately by the last Sunday in April. And only in President Trump’s America would we have the producers of such flimflam leading the reopening of our national economy.
The governor’s office apologized for what state Rep. Scott Holcomb, an Atlanta Democrat, properly called a “cuckoo” presentation of data. But as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted, it was the third such “error” in as many weeks involving sloppy counting of cases, deaths and other measures tracking covid-19. Another official state chart continues to show cases dropping dramatically over 14 days, with an asterisk explaining that “confirmed cases over the last 14 days may not be accounted for due to illnesses yet to be reported or test results may still be pending.”