The Daily Beast says Trump campaign officials spend a lot of time “convincing Trump that the electoral landscape and polling deficits he faces aren’t as dire as he’s been hearing.”
Said a White House official: “This helps keep the president from flying into a rage as much as he otherwise would.”
In the characterization of one source close to the president, a chunk of the re-election team focuses on proving to the president that his “dumpster-fire numbers” aren’t as bad as they seem, or reinforcing Trump’s conviction that pollsters get it wrong “all the time.”
A new Yahoo! News/YouGov poll finds 52% of Americans think President Trump is a racist, while only 34% said no — an 18 point spread.
A whopping 54% rated Trump either a “failure” or “below average” president.
“These aren’t my voters.” — President Trump, quoted by NBC News, repeatedly dismissing protesters in discussions with aides about how to respond over nearly three weeks of unrest.
Harry Enten: “Biden is earning a historic amount of support from female voters for a presidential nominee when examining polling over the last 70 years.”
“Biden is leading among female registered voters by 59% to 35%, a 25-point margin when the numbers aren’t rounded. That’s a significant increase from his 19-point advantage earlier this year and the 14-point lead Hillary Clinton had in the final 2016 preelection polls of registered voters. Clinton had a 13-point edge with likely female voters.”
“Joe Biden’s search for a running mate is entering a second round of vetting for a dwindling list of potential vice presidential nominees, with several black women in strong contention,” the AP reports.
“Democrats with knowledge of the process said Biden’s search committee has narrowed the choices to as few as six serious contenders after initial interviews. Those still in contention include Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California, as well as Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser.”
“Advisers have also looked closely at Florida Rep. Val Demings and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, both of whom are black, and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Latina.”
New York Times: “The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.”
“Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.”
“Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.”
“Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), who became a target of conservatives after officiating a same-sex wedding last year, was ousted Saturday by GOP voters in a drive-thru district convention,” Politico reports.
“Convention-goers picked Bob Good, a former county supervisor who ran to Riggleman’s right, especially on social issues, to be the party’s nominee in the general election.”
“Despite massive problems at the voting booth, Democratic turnout in Georgia’s primaries skyrocketed — with three times as many votes cast in the Senate primary as in 2016,” NBC News reports.
Said political scientist Alan Abramowitz: “The bottom line is that, despite all of the problems at the polls on Tuesday, it appears that there was a big increase in turnout over 2018, especially on the Democratic side.”
Associated Press: Georgia poll worker describes “overwhelming” chaos.
“The Biden campaign won’t rely on the tech and ad agency with close ties to Mike Bloomberg to run its digital operation in 2020,” Axios reports.
“Hawkfish billed itself as the digital savior for the Democratic Party in 2020, a plug-and-play technology that could go toe-to-toe with Team Trump. But the flashy-yet-unproven NYC-based agency lost its luster when Bloomberg underperformed in the presidential primaries after spending $1 billion.”
President Trump announced he was moving his rally in Tulsa from June 19th — Juneteenth, which marks the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Texas and read the Emancipation Proclamation announcing that slaves had been freed — to June 20th “out of respect for this Holiday, and in observance of this important occasion and all that it represents.”
He also claimed more than 200,000 people are interested in attending.
Dr. Bruce Dart, the Tulsa City-County Health Department’s director, told Tulsa World he wishes the campaign rally for President Trump on June 20 would be pushed back to a later date.
Dart said Tulsa is seeing a “significant increase in our case trends” that makes a large gathering like the rally dangerous for not only attendees, but the president himself.
Said Dart: “I think it’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic. I’m concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event, and I’m also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well.”
“Advisers to President Trump are pushing him to dismiss his campaign manager Brad Parscale, arguing he lacks the political instincts to lead the team to a second term in the White House,” the New York Post reports.
Said one longtime adviser: “People within his inner circle continue to question Brad’s ability to bring the campaign down the home stretch because of his inexperience. There’s no strategy, there’s no messaging.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gushes in a new ad that Joe Biden is “as good a man as God ever created” — while President Trump is a “xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.”
The ad will run on Fox News in the Charlotte and Greenville markets, reaching both South Carolina and the swing state of North Carolina, the HuffPost reports.
It will also air on Fox News in Washington, D.C.
Detroit Free Press: “Polls suggest President Trump’s reelection campaign is in deep trouble in Michigan, as it appears to be across a handful of key states he won in 2016, with women increasingly rejecting him and previous levels of support among older voters and voters without college degrees lagging.”
Politico: “There are 51 candidates running for Congress who have promoted the messages of Q — a mysterious internet figure who drops digital ‘crumbs’ about a secret war Trump is waging against a cabal of pedophile political elites in Washington. And on Tuesday, seven of them emerged in congressional Republican primaries. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, is favored to eventually end up in Congress.”
“The loosely connected cohort that follows Q, known as QAnon, exists in a symbiotic relationship with the president, and sees Trump as an almost messianic figure. Q has prophesied an upcoming event dubbed ‘The Storm,’ when Trump will reveal the mass arrest — and potentially even the mass execution — of the Washington figures responsible for everything from a worldwide child sex ring to murdering a Democratic National Committee staffer. Meanwhile, Trump has flirted right back, inviting one of QAnon’s top promoters to pose with him in the Oval Office, and retweeting over 130 tweets that directly reference QAnon-related claims.”
Joe Biden’s campaign says President Trump’s effort to campaign on an improving economy is a “desperate scheme” that ignores how his handling of the coronavirus pandemic contributed to the economic downturn, Bloomberg reports.
Biden team argues that Trump “bungled” the crisis and that there are “two major flaws” in his efforts to spin current economic conditions: Trump’s “failed leadership” and his lack of a plan beyond urging businesses to reopen.
A new Des Moines Register poll finds Theresa Greenfield (D) leading Sen. Joni Ernst (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 46% to 43%. Said pollster Ann Selzer: “This is definitely a competitive race.”
“Former governor John Hickenlooper’s ethics woes have unsettled a Colorado Senate race that Democrats consider one of their best chances of flipping a Republican-held seat, with the quirky brewery owner’s reputation taking a hit with voters within days of the state’s primary,” the Washington Post reports.
“The two-term governor and former Denver mayor is on the defensive after the Independent Ethics Commission found he violated a state gift ban in 2018 when he accepted a ride in a Maserati limousine at a conference in Turin, Italy, and traveled on a private jet owned by a home builder to Connecticut for the commissioning of the USS Colorado submarine.”
“Amy McGrath is a national Democratic icon for her bid to take out Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader and reviled figure on the left, raising tens of millions of dollars to fuel her campaign,” Politico reports..
“But McConnell isn’t the opponent McGrath, a former fight pilot, is sweating most right now. Instead, it’s her rival in the June 23 Democratic primary: Charles Booker, a state lawmaker who was virtually ignored for months but now has all the momentum in the closing days of the election.”
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