2020 Presidential Campaign - It’s on

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SMiLes; 'The Disinfectant Virus King' Has met His Match.
The Rest of Nature of course Without Words That Does NOT 'buy' Lies.

Obviously, New York City has Greatest 'Herd Immunity'; So far, if there
is even such a Thing With this Virus; as only Research Will answer that for sure.

If It does; Around Twenty Percent; as Anti-Body Tests Show is obviously the
Highest Percentage in the Country; by Clear Math of the Highest Concentration of the Virus Infections.

Sixty to Seventy Percent infected by A Virus of a Population Without Vaccines Means Herd Immunity.

Until then the Virus Stalks Human as Easy Prey When Humans Come Close together as Social Animals Do;

Close to 60,000 Deaths in 60 Days With The Stream of Numbers Still coming in the United States.

Take away the Social Distancing and BOOM some places go BOOM With the Virus too.

Ignorance isn't gonna Beat Mother Nature;

And That's A Fact; Unless it wears Human Words.

Every Virus Just Hopes for 'A Real Fool Like' Trump as Leader of a Country
to Anthropomorphize the Resilient of Nature, at least, Against Lies of 'Clowns' With No Love In Their Souls.

We Get What We Vote For; And Some folks Just Are Not Capable of Seeing Through Deepest Shallow Lies;
Or Again, Just Plain Vanilla Ignorance.

The Effect:

What Coming Next;

Actions Or Lack of Actions Brings Consequences; Do or Do Not; Karma, No Escape.

i don't Put Anything past Ignorance; just because It's Literally Impossible for some folks to see it;

Same With Deepest Shallow Lies. If Trump Is Re-Elected It's Only A Reflection of what This Country is Becoming.

This is perhaps your most easily readable long post in many years.

*Herd immunity* seems to be a misnomer, as people can get infected again ??

It seems analogous to saying people have *herd immunity* to the flu virus.

Maybe *herd resistance* is a better term.

President Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden by two points in six battlegrounds states, a new poll has found.

The latest survey by Change Research and CNBC revealed that 47 percent of likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would back the commander-in-chief if an election were held the same day.

By comparison, 45 percent told pollsters they would opt for former Vice President Biden. A further 4 percent said they would back a third-party candidate while 3 percent were unsure who they would back in November.

When the hypothetical ballot was whittled down to a simple head-to-head between Trump and Biden, the president had a three-point lead among battleground state voters.

President Trump's lead over the presumptive Democratic nominee in key swing states came in spite of disapproval over his handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Forty-eight percent of those polled said they either "strongly" or "somewhat" approved of the commander-in-chief's handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, compared to 52 percent who disapproved.

But his approval rating on the issue was still better than that of Congress, with seven-in-ten of the swing state voters telling pollsters they disapproved of Congress' reaction to the pandemic.

Asked who they believed President Trump favored most with his economic responses to the pandemic, half of voters told pollsters that the policies favored the wealthy and big corporations.

A little more than one-in-five (21 percent) said Trump's bailouts favored the middle class and small businesses, while roughly a quarter (24 percent) said they favored both groups equally.

Giving an overall rating of the U.S. economy, 24 percent said it was in either an "excellent" or "good" state. The remaining 76 percent rated it as "not so good" or "poor."

A similar number (71 percent) told pollsters they thought the economy was either "probably" or "definitely" in the midst of a recession.

Asked what they thought of President Trump's general performance in the White House, 49 percent said they approved of the job he was doing while 51 percent disapproved.

Change Research pollsters surveyed 3,544 likely voters across the six battleground states between May 1 and May 3. The poll's margin of error is 1.6 percentage points.

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash has announced that he will not run for president as a third party candidate.

"After much reflection, I've concluded that circumstances don't lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate," he tweeted Saturday.

Amash announced last month that he was exploring a presidential run as a Libertarian Party candidate.
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Amash said the decision to drop out was "difficult," but that he "believes a candidate from outside the old parties, offering a vision of government grounded in liberty and equality, can break through in the right environment."

"Polarization is near an all-time high. Electoral success requires an audience willing to consider alternatives, but both social media and traditional media are dominated by voices strongly averse to the political risks posed by a viable third candidate," he added.

The Libertarian Party, he added, "is well positioned to become a major and consistent contender to win elections at all levels of government."

"I remain invested in helping the party realize these possibilities and look forward to the successes ahead," he said.
The Republican-turned-independent said in early April he was looking "closely" at a bid, after he stopped actively campaigning for his House seat in February while he considered jumping into the presidential race.
He was facing a tough reelection in Michigan's 3rd District. National Republicans were eager to defeat him, and several Republicans have been running for the seat.

Amash was first elected to represent Michigan's 3rd Congressional District in the 2010 tea party wave.
The Michigan congressman is the son of a Syrian immigrant mother and a Palestinian refugee father. Before entering Congress, he worked as a lawyer for his family's business and served a term from 2008-2010 in the Michigan state house.
Over the years, Amash has been consistently willing to take controversial votes according to his view of limited government, often being one of the only House members to vote against legislation with broad bipartisan support, such as an anti-lynching bill in February.

In 2015, Amash was one of the founding members of the House Freedom Caucus, an influential group of hardline conservatives that clashed with House Republican leadership and pushed for a more open legislative process and curtailed federal spending.

He came into the national spotlight last May when he announced his support for impeaching President Donald Trump over the findings in former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was the first and only House Republican to support impeachment, eventually voting for both articles of impeachment against the President as an independent late last year.

Amash has repeatedly told reporters he would only run for president if he believes there is a path to victory. In March 2019, he told CNN he never stops thinking about possibilities like running for president "because there is a big problem with the current two-party system we have, and someone has to shake it up."

It was congresswoman Pat Schroeder, Democrat from Colorado, who labeled Ronald Reagan the “Teflon” president in a fit of exasperation in August 1983. What frustrated Schroeder was that nothing “stuck” to Reagan — not the recession, not his misadventures in Lebanon, not his seeming detachment from his own administration. Reagan’s job approval had plunged to a low of 35 percent at the beginning of that year, but his numbers were rising and his personal favorability remained high. “He is just the master of ceremonies at someone else’s dinner,” she said.

Ironically, the one thing that did stick to Reagan was Schroeder’s nickname. The phrase was so catchy that writers applied it to mobsters (“Teflon Don” John Gotti) and to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Teflon presidents, gangsters, candidates — we have had them all. What we have not experienced until now is a Teflon campaign.

Between March 11, when the coronavirus prompted the NBA to suspend its season, and May 14, some 84,000 Americans died of coronavirus, more than 36 million lost their jobs, and Congress appropriated $3.6 trillion in new spending. It is not foolish to suppose that these world-shaking events would affect the presidential election. On the contrary: One would expect a dramatic swing toward either the incumbent or the challenger. But look at the polls. Not only has there been no big shift. There has been no shift.

On March 11, Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 7 points in the RealClearPolitics average. On May 14, he led Trump by 5 points. “Biden’s advantage,” says Harry Enten of CNN, “is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944.” He has never been behind. His share of the vote has been impervious to external events.

Neither good nor bad news has an effect. Bernie Sanders ended his campaign on April 8 and endorsed Biden on April 13. Biden received no bump from this display of party unity. Tara Reade accused Biden of sexual assault on March 25, and Biden did not respond directly to the allegation until May 1. His margin over Trump did not shrink. It remained the same.

Why? The incidents of this election cycle are not the reason. Epidemics, depressions, and sex scandals have happened before. What is distinct are the candidates. One in particular.

If this race has been the steadiest in memory, it is because public opinion of the incumbent has been the most consistent in memory. “Trump’s approval rating has the least variation of any post-World War II president,” notes Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight. Whatever is in the headlines matters less than one’s view of the president. And he is a subject on which most people’s views are ironclad.

When the crisis began, Trump’s approval rating was 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. On May 14, it is 46 percent. A social and economic calamity befell the country, and Trump’s approval ticked up. Not enough for him to win, necessarily. But enough to keep him in contention.

Americans feel more strongly about Trump, either for or against, than about any other candidate since polling began. His supporters give his approval ratings a floor, and his detractors give his ratings a ceiling. There is not a lot of room in between.

For years, Trump voters have said that they are willing to overlook his faults because they believe the stakes in his victory and success are so high. Heard from less often have been Trump’s opponents, who are so desperate to see him gone that they dismiss the failings and vulnerabilities of whoever happens to be challenging him at the moment.

Recently the feminist author Linda Hirshman wrote in the New York Times that she believes Tara Reade’s story but will vote for Joe Biden anyway. “Better to just own up to what you are doing,” she wrote. “Sacrificing Ms. Reade for the good of the many.” Hirshman is the mirror-image of the Trump supporter who, as the president once said, would not be bothered if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. Intensifying tribalism makes this election a nonstick surface.

What gives Biden the upper hand is that there are more people who feel negatively than positively about Donald Trump. What gives Trump a chance is the uneven distribution of these people across the country. That was the case before coronavirus. It is still the case today.

Watching the numbers hardly budge over these past months, I have sometimes wondered what could move them. War? Spiritual revival? Space aliens? Don’t think so. Throw anything at it. Nothing adheres to this Teflon campaign.

In the same way some were shocked at the election result in 2016, it feels like there are a lot of Trump fans this time around who would be left absolutely stunned if he didn't romp to victory very easily

he fundamental proposition before Democratic primary voters in 2020 was not what America’s pundit class seems to have wanted it to be. Voters were not deciding what the Democratic Party would look like. They were not determining what the party’s value proposition would be. Nor were they rendering a verdict on the trajectory of its ideological evolution. Voters were asked to choose between two fundamentally distinct electoral strategies.

One approach, represented by Joe Biden, was to reconstitute as much of Barack Obama’s coalition as possible and take back the Obama-supporting states Donald Trump won in 2016. The other, to which Bernie Sanders subscribed, involved sacrificing that coalition in favor of a hypothetical one that would remake the electoral map. Voters resoundingly rejected that proposition, but the implications associated with that choice are far-reaching. If his strategy is to work, Biden will have to conduct a campaign that will be hard for the progressive wing of his party to stomach.

An analysis conducted by the political scientist John Sides and written up by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira for the Washington Post frames the matter rather starkly. To be successful in November, Biden will need to target the 9 percent of voters—about 6 million Americans—who cast a ballot for Barack Obama in 2012 but were transformed into Trump voters by 2016.

When it comes to pocketbook issues, these voters certainly qualify as progressives—at least, in theory. A majority would support increasing taxes on incomes above than $600,000 annually, making college tuition a debt-free proposition, and creating a federal mandate guaranteeing Americans a job. The structural, organizational, and prudential impediments to realizing this wish list should reassure conservative voters that policies like these aren’t likely to materialize within a President Biden’s first 100 days (if ever).

Even more reassuring, this is, by and large, where these voters’ progressive sympathies end.

Fewer than half of Obama-Trump voters support Medicare-for-all. A plurality opposes family-based chain migration in favor of a more merit-based system. They believe the federal government should provide vouchers to families so they can opt out of the public-school system. These voters oppose reparations for slavery. They insist that there are only two genders. They oppose blanket firearm bans. Nearly eight-in-ten believe the federal government should promote “traditional family values.” A full 60 percent think the Ten Commandments should be displayed in public spaces like schools and courthouses.

Progressives would be mistaken for thinking that Biden would be pandering by courting this constituency. The progressive ascendancy within the Democratic Party seems likely in the long-run. There is, however, precious little evidence that this is a dominant faction within the party as it is currently constituted. For all the coverage of the Democratic “Squad,” the four freshmen congresswomen who captured the press’s attention after the 2018 elections were the survivors of what was otherwise a rout for the Democratic Party’s left flank. Biden’s victory only provides more evidence that the progressive program’s appeal is far narrower than this faction’s stranglehold on the nation’s center-left airwaves would lead you to believe.

Accordingly, progressives are in despair. At least, that’s the impression Politico’s Alex Thompson was left with after a recent survey of the landscape on the left. This faction is currently lobbying for a consolation prize in the form of a progressive vice-presidential pick—an effort that includes both incentives and veiled threats. But if Sides’ data is accurate, Biden would be foolish to acquiesce to their demands.

It could be argued that the left’s anguish is premature. Joe Biden has not campaigned on a vision that competes in a substantive way with what his progressive colleagues are offering. Their time will come soon enough. For now, though, the Democratic Party’s task is only to avoid scaring prospective Democratic voters—that means avoiding commitments to the radical reformation of American society. Such a project would be anxiety-producing enough in a time of tranquility, to say nothing of this present period of pandemic-induced anxiety and tumult.

This dynamic will generate a lot of frustration within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, but progressives’ capacity to swallow their pride may mean the difference between a moral victory and a real one. By November, most within their ranks won’t find that a hard choice to make.

Possibly a strange question, but considering the unusual way the presidential election is decided, do the polling companies focus on "popular" vote as a metric for their predictions, or are there some that delve further and try to anticipate/predict electoral college votes based on each state's results in the "popular vote" polling?

After 2016, it would be interesting (if this is done) to see how each party is progressing on the likelihood of winning this year, rather than who is winning the popularity contest. The changes over time to this would also be intersting to watch.

It depends on the polling company. There are a number of organizations that poll just particular states or break it down by states.

if biden foolishly chooses another white conservative guy, trump is gonna win a LANDSLIDE. the progressives will NOT vote for biden if he doesn't at least throw them a bone. they will stay home and let this country finish destroying itself.

you could honestly erase "campaign" and it would still be accurate. can't believe some people still call this controversial but ANYONE who bleeds from the eye, can't carry a sentence even when they're reading from a script and has to limit their rally presence for seven minutes... cannot have much life and vigor left in them