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2020 Presidential Election -- Biden v Trump: Sleepy Joe vs Dopey Don [Results begin on page 409]

Patrick Bateman

By Patrick Bateman
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Bama Chick
Bama Chick

I am so thrilled tonight! I spoke with my mom and asked her how my dad was taking the election. She said after every network declared Biden the winner, he turned off Fox News and said “Well, glad t

HenryJames
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Thatguy
Thatguy

This was my experience in Galveston County, except for one thing. I came in and presented my ID to the geriatric at the front who printed out my pin number. I took my pin number to a table where two B

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13,050

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I checked out the events page for the campaign, and Trump has Pence in Pennsylvania this week stumping as well as Eric. The two events are in person. Also spending quite a bit of time in Michigan this week as well. Trump is speaking live in Freeland, Michigan on Thursday, the same day Eric is in PA.

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MonkeyDoughnut

MonkeyDoughnut 10,356

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11 hours ago, Voldemort86 said:

I’m not sure if this is really true or not, but I hope it is.

Trump has stoked the left into voting by mail as if he knows there will be more problems getting them to actually send them in on time and filled in correctly...

Early vote, don't mail in vote. Have it count sooner rather than later. We don't need election month.

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ruitxn

ruitxn 298

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20 hours ago, Calihorn said:

Torres barely won in 2018 right?

Small was behind on Election Day voting. Some local media called Harrell victory.  Small was winner after MIV was counted.  Of course R’s still call it election fraud.  Same two running this year.

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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1 hour ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Early vote, don't mail in vote. Have it count sooner rather than later. We don't need election month.

This.  I like my Texas to have Truck Month, Toyotathon, and early voting week.  

Although for safety reasons, county clerks should send out texts with real time updates on times when lines are short at poll locations.  First few days are gonna be smothered.  As will last few days.  That middle week should step up to offset that with tech tools and updates from election officials.  

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,426

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/politics/trump-election-campaign-fundraising.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

 

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Money was supposed to have been one of the great advantages of incumbency for President Trump, much as it was for President Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004. After getting outspent in 2016, Mr. Trump filed for re-election on the day of his inauguration — earlier than any other modern president — betting that the head start would deliver him a decisive financial advantage this year.

 

Quote

It seemed to have worked. His rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was relatively broke when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee this spring, and Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee had a nearly $200 million cash advantage. 

 

 

Quote

Five months later, Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election, according to Republican officials briefed on the matter.

 

Spoiler

Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager, liked to call Mr. Trump’s re-election war machine an “unstoppable juggernaut.” But interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the R.N.C. developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Since Bill Stepien replaced Mr. Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.

Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well-paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous, well-appointed office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.

Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchase was for Super Bowl ads that cost $11 million — more than the campaign has spent on TV in some top battleground states — a vanity splurge that allowed Mr. Trump to match the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg’s buy for the big game. 

There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Mr. Trump and leak his remarks. 

Some people familiar with the expenses noted that Mr. Parscale had a car and driver, an unusual expense for a campaign manager. Mr. Trump has told people gleefully that Mr. Stepien took a pay cut when the president gave him the job.

Critics of the campaign’s management say the lavish spending was ineffective: Mr. Trump enters the fall trailing in most national and battleground state polls, and Mr. Biden has surpassed him as a fund-raising powerhouse, after posting a record-setting haul of nearly $365 million in August. The Trump campaign has not revealed its August fund-raising figure.

“If you spend $800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question ‘What was the game plan?’” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small pro-Trump super PAC, and who accused Mr. Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.” 

“I think a lot of money was spent when voters weren’t paying attention,” he added.

Mr. Parscale, who is still a senior adviser on the campaign, said in an interview that the Trump operation invested heavily in attracting donors to erase the large advantage that Democrats had built digitally after the Obama years. “We closed that gap,” he said, crediting early spending as “the only reason Republicans are even close” in terms of online fund-raising.

“I ran the campaign the same way I did in 2016, which also included all of the marketing, strategy and expenses under the very close eye of the family,” said Mr. Parscale, who was the digital director, not the campaign manager, in 2016. “No decision was made without their approval.” 

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has overseen the campaign from his position as a senior White House aide, had posed for a Fortune magazine cover as the person who ran the 2016 campaign soon after the election.

“Any spending arrangements with the R.N.C. since 2016 were in partnership with Ronna McDaniel,” Mr. Parscale said, referring to the party chairwoman, “who I consider a strategic partner and friend.”

Nicholas Everhart, a Republican strategist who owns a firm specializing in placing political ads, said the $800 million spent so far shows the “peril of starting a re-election campaign just weeks after winning.”

“A presidential campaign costs a lot of money to run,” Mr. Everhart said. “In essence, the campaign has been spending nonstop for almost four years straight.”

Reining in the budget

At the top of the whiteboard in Mr. Stepien’s office are the latest numbers on the campaign budget, and Mr. Stepien has instituted a number of changes since he was promoted from deputy campaign manager. A proposal to spend $50 million in costs related to coalitions groups was cast aside. An idea to spend $3 million for a NASCAR car bearing Mr. Trump’s name was discarded. 

The number of staff members allowed to travel to events has been pared back to avoid what one senior campaign official described as “sponsoring vacations.” 

Trips aboard Air Force One, popular because they enable aides to get face time with the president — but which have to be compensated by the campaign — have been slashed. 

“The most important thing I do every day is pay attention to the budget,” Mr. Stepien said in a brief interview. He declined to discuss budget specifics but said the campaign had enough funds to win.

Most visibly, the Trump campaign slashed its television spending in August, mostly abandoning the airwaves during the party conventions. In the last two weeks of the month, Mr. Biden’s campaign spent $35.9 million on television ads, compared with $4.8 million for Mr. Trump, according to data from Advertising Analytics.

“We held on to cash to make sure that we’ll have the firepower that we need” for the fall, said Jason Miller, a senior strategist for Mr. Trump, who contended that airing ads during the conventions would prove a waste for Mr. Biden. “We want to make sure that we’re saving it for when it really matters, when it’s going to move the needle.”

Mr. Miller defended spending money on television ads earlier this spring and summer, calling it a “tough” decision necessary to keep Mr. Trump competitive as the nation suffered through a pandemic and what he described as a “temporary economic shutdown.” 

“We had to claw our way back,” he said. 

support an investigation into the postmaster general, whom he called ‘a very honest guy.’

One of the reasons Mr. Biden was able to wipe away Mr. Trump’s early cash edge was that he sharply contained costs with a minimalistic campaign during the worst months of the pandemic. Trump officials derisively dismissed it as his “basement” strategy, but from that basement Mr. Biden fully embraced Zoom fund-raisers, with top donors asked to give as much as $720,000.

These virtual events typically took less than 90 minutes of the candidate’s time, could raise millions of dollars and cost almost nothing. Mr. Trump has almost entirely refused to hold such fund-raisers. Aides say he doesn’t like them.

Door-knocking to win over voters

There is some disagreement in the extended Trump operation about the depth of any potential cash-on-hand shortage. Some officials believe that plenty more money will come in during the last two months from online donors and that cutting back on TV advertising in August was shortsighted. The campaign announced a combined $76 million haul with the party during the four days of the Republican convention.

But others said the campaign had expected the low-dollar fund-raising to continue at the same pace, and were also counting on a significant number of $5,600 checks, the limit for direct campaign giving, that didn’t materialize; that was in part because they rely on in-person events, which was more difficult with the virus. 

Some party officials defended the early spending as a prudent investment, including money devoted to the expansive ground operation and an online network of donors that was setting fund-raising records. The G.O.P. has more than 2,000 staff members across 100 offices and claims that volunteers knock on one million doors per week; the Biden campaign has forgone door-knocking so far during the pandemic.

“The Biden campaign is hoarding money and hoping that fall TV ads help put them over the edge,” said Richard Walters, chief of staff for the R.N.C. “But when a state comes down to 10,700 votes like Michigan did in 2016, we think that direct voter contact — those millions of door knocks and phone calls we make each week — is going to be critical.”

The Trump campaign has undertaken its own financial review of spending under Mr. Parscale. Among the first changes implemented was shutting down an ad campaign that had used Mr. Parscale’s personal social media accounts to deliver pro-Trump ads. More than $800,000 had been poured into boosting Mr. Parscale’s Facebook and Instagram pages; those ads ceased the day after he was removed as campaign manager.

Mr. Parscale said the Facebook page was “not my idea” and the “family’s direct approval” had been sought on the program.

“I built an unprecedented infrastructure with the Republican Party under this family’s leadership since 2016,” Mr. Parscale said in a statement to The Times. “I am proud of my achievements.”

Some Trump-pleasing expenditures

Some campaign spending choices appear devised, at least in part, to satisfy Mr. Trump himself, including the Super Bowl ads, which were purchased as part of an advertising arms race with Mr. Bloomberg, who soon afterward dropped out of the Democratic primary. The two ads cost more than the Trump campaign spent combined on local television through the end of July in four battleground states: Wisconsin ($3.9 million), Michigan ($3.6 million), Iowa ($2 million) and Minnesota ($1.3 million).

Another Trump-pleasing expense: more than $1 million in ads aired in the Washington, D.C., media market, a region that is not likely to be competitive in the fall but where the president, a famously voracious television consumer, resides.

Mr. Trump, who once joked he could be the first candidate to make money running for president, has steered, along with the Republican Party, about $4 million into the Trump family businesses since 2019: hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Trump’s private club at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, lavish donor retreats at Trump hotels, office space in Trump Tower, and thousands of dollars at the steakhouse in Mr. Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel.

Many of the specifics of Mr. Trump’s spending are opaque; since 2017, the campaign and the R.N.C. have routed $227 million through a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials. That firm, American Made Media Consultants, has been used to place television and digital ads and was the subject of a recent Federal Election Commission complaint arguing it was used to disguise the final destination of spending, which has included paychecks to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the partners of Mr. Trump’s two adult sons.

Millions more followed to firms tied to R.N.C. and Trump-linked officials, including more than $39 million to two firms, Parscale Strategy LLC and Giles-Parscale, controlled by Mr. Parscale since the beginning of 2017.

Mr. Parscale said that he had “no ownership or financial interest in A.M.M.C.” and that he had “negotiated a contract with the family for 1 percent of digital ad spend and after becoming campaign manager took no percentage.”

‘You have to spend money to make money’

There is little question that Mr. Parscale helped the Trump campaign construct an unparalleled Republican operation to lure small donors online. He directed a years-along, nine-figure investment in digital ads and list-building that appears to have largely paid for itself. Some of the president’s advisers believe it will continue to pay great dividends in the final weeks, pointing to the $165 million raised by the president and his party in July — more than any month in the 2016 race. 

“You have to spend money to make money,” explained Mr. Walters, the R.N.C. chief of staff. “We have had a big increase in revenue because of early investments we made in online fund-raising and direct mail.”

Still, the costs of the G.O.P. money operation have been enormous.

Since 2019, Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared committees have spent $145 million on costs related to direct mail, almost $42 million on digital list acquisition and rentals (to expand their list of email addresses) and tens of millions more in online advertising for new donors.

Just procuring the Trump paraphernalia that supporters buy costs a lot. Two firms that make campaign swag were paid more than $30 million combined since 2019.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, the party has taken a spare-no-expense approach to donor maintenance, with the R.N.C. spending more than $6 million in “donor mementos.” The spending has gone to stationary shops, the White House Historical Association ($538,000) and the Hershey Company, the chocolate-maker ($337,000), which cover costs for items such as the White House-branded M&Ms given away by administrations of both parties.

Mr. Trump has also accumulated many costs that are unusual for a presidential re-election.

Republicans, for instance, have been saddled with extra legal costs, more than $21 million since 2019, resulting from the many investigations into Mr. Trump and, eventually, his impeachment trial. The R.N.C. also paid a large legal bill of $666,667.66 to Reuters News & Media at the end of June. Both Reuters and the R.N.C. declined to discuss the payment. It was labeled “legal proceedings — IP resolution,” suggesting it was related to a potential litigation over intellectual property.

There have been other squandered costs driven by Mr. Trump’s sometimes mercurial desires. He switched his convention plans twice, incurring many expenses along the way. In July, for instance, the R.N.C. made a $325,000 payment to the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island near Jacksonville for the convention there that never happened. The party is not expected to get that money back.

 

 

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ConferenceRoom

ConferenceRoom 6,146

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10 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/politics/trump-election-campaign-fundraising.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager, liked to call Mr. Trump’s re-election war machine an “unstoppable juggernaut.” But interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the R.N.C. developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Since Bill Stepien replaced Mr. Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.

Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well-paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous, well-appointed office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.

Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchase was for Super Bowl ads that cost $11 million — more than the campaign has spent on TV in some top battleground states — a vanity splurge that allowed Mr. Trump to match the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg’s buy for the big game. 

There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Mr. Trump and leak his remarks. 

Some people familiar with the expenses noted that Mr. Parscale had a car and driver, an unusual expense for a campaign manager. Mr. Trump has told people gleefully that Mr. Stepien took a pay cut when the president gave him the job.

Critics of the campaign’s management say the lavish spending was ineffective: Mr. Trump enters the fall trailing in most national and battleground state polls, and Mr. Biden has surpassed him as a fund-raising powerhouse, after posting a record-setting haul of nearly $365 million in August. The Trump campaign has not revealed its August fund-raising figure.

“If you spend $800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question ‘What was the game plan?’” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small pro-Trump super PAC, and who accused Mr. Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.” 

“I think a lot of money was spent when voters weren’t paying attention,” he added.

Mr. Parscale, who is still a senior adviser on the campaign, said in an interview that the Trump operation invested heavily in attracting donors to erase the large advantage that Democrats had built digitally after the Obama years. “We closed that gap,” he said, crediting early spending as “the only reason Republicans are even close” in terms of online fund-raising.

“I ran the campaign the same way I did in 2016, which also included all of the marketing, strategy and expenses under the very close eye of the family,” said Mr. Parscale, who was the digital director, not the campaign manager, in 2016. “No decision was made without their approval.” 

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has overseen the campaign from his position as a senior White House aide, had posed for a Fortune magazine cover as the person who ran the 2016 campaign soon after the election.

“Any spending arrangements with the R.N.C. since 2016 were in partnership with Ronna McDaniel,” Mr. Parscale said, referring to the party chairwoman, “who I consider a strategic partner and friend.”

Nicholas Everhart, a Republican strategist who owns a firm specializing in placing political ads, said the $800 million spent so far shows the “peril of starting a re-election campaign just weeks after winning.”

“A presidential campaign costs a lot of money to run,” Mr. Everhart said. “In essence, the campaign has been spending nonstop for almost four years straight.”

Reining in the budget

At the top of the whiteboard in Mr. Stepien’s office are the latest numbers on the campaign budget, and Mr. Stepien has instituted a number of changes since he was promoted from deputy campaign manager. A proposal to spend $50 million in costs related to coalitions groups was cast aside. An idea to spend $3 million for a NASCAR car bearing Mr. Trump’s name was discarded. 

The number of staff members allowed to travel to events has been pared back to avoid what one senior campaign official described as “sponsoring vacations.” 

Trips aboard Air Force One, popular because they enable aides to get face time with the president — but which have to be compensated by the campaign — have been slashed. 

“The most important thing I do every day is pay attention to the budget,” Mr. Stepien said in a brief interview. He declined to discuss budget specifics but said the campaign had enough funds to win.

Most visibly, the Trump campaign slashed its television spending in August, mostly abandoning the airwaves during the party conventions. In the last two weeks of the month, Mr. Biden’s campaign spent $35.9 million on television ads, compared with $4.8 million for Mr. Trump, according to data from Advertising Analytics.

“We held on to cash to make sure that we’ll have the firepower that we need” for the fall, said Jason Miller, a senior strategist for Mr. Trump, who contended that airing ads during the conventions would prove a waste for Mr. Biden. “We want to make sure that we’re saving it for when it really matters, when it’s going to move the needle.”

Mr. Miller defended spending money on television ads earlier this spring and summer, calling it a “tough” decision necessary to keep Mr. Trump competitive as the nation suffered through a pandemic and what he described as a “temporary economic shutdown.” 

“We had to claw our way back,” he said. 

support an investigation into the postmaster general, whom he called ‘a very honest guy.’

One of the reasons Mr. Biden was able to wipe away Mr. Trump’s early cash edge was that he sharply contained costs with a minimalistic campaign during the worst months of the pandemic. Trump officials derisively dismissed it as his “basement” strategy, but from that basement Mr. Biden fully embraced Zoom fund-raisers, with top donors asked to give as much as $720,000.

These virtual events typically took less than 90 minutes of the candidate’s time, could raise millions of dollars and cost almost nothing. Mr. Trump has almost entirely refused to hold such fund-raisers. Aides say he doesn’t like them.

Door-knocking to win over voters

There is some disagreement in the extended Trump operation about the depth of any potential cash-on-hand shortage. Some officials believe that plenty more money will come in during the last two months from online donors and that cutting back on TV advertising in August was shortsighted. The campaign announced a combined $76 million haul with the party during the four days of the Republican convention.

But others said the campaign had expected the low-dollar fund-raising to continue at the same pace, and were also counting on a significant number of $5,600 checks, the limit for direct campaign giving, that didn’t materialize; that was in part because they rely on in-person events, which was more difficult with the virus. 

Some party officials defended the early spending as a prudent investment, including money devoted to the expansive ground operation and an online network of donors that was setting fund-raising records. The G.O.P. has more than 2,000 staff members across 100 offices and claims that volunteers knock on one million doors per week; the Biden campaign has forgone door-knocking so far during the pandemic.

“The Biden campaign is hoarding money and hoping that fall TV ads help put them over the edge,” said Richard Walters, chief of staff for the R.N.C. “But when a state comes down to 10,700 votes like Michigan did in 2016, we think that direct voter contact — those millions of door knocks and phone calls we make each week — is going to be critical.”

The Trump campaign has undertaken its own financial review of spending under Mr. Parscale. Among the first changes implemented was shutting down an ad campaign that had used Mr. Parscale’s personal social media accounts to deliver pro-Trump ads. More than $800,000 had been poured into boosting Mr. Parscale’s Facebook and Instagram pages; those ads ceased the day after he was removed as campaign manager.

Mr. Parscale said the Facebook page was “not my idea” and the “family’s direct approval” had been sought on the program.

“I built an unprecedented infrastructure with the Republican Party under this family’s leadership since 2016,” Mr. Parscale said in a statement to The Times. “I am proud of my achievements.”

Some Trump-pleasing expenditures

Some campaign spending choices appear devised, at least in part, to satisfy Mr. Trump himself, including the Super Bowl ads, which were purchased as part of an advertising arms race with Mr. Bloomberg, who soon afterward dropped out of the Democratic primary. The two ads cost more than the Trump campaign spent combined on local television through the end of July in four battleground states: Wisconsin ($3.9 million), Michigan ($3.6 million), Iowa ($2 million) and Minnesota ($1.3 million).

Another Trump-pleasing expense: more than $1 million in ads aired in the Washington, D.C., media market, a region that is not likely to be competitive in the fall but where the president, a famously voracious television consumer, resides.

Mr. Trump, who once joked he could be the first candidate to make money running for president, has steered, along with the Republican Party, about $4 million into the Trump family businesses since 2019: hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Trump’s private club at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, lavish donor retreats at Trump hotels, office space in Trump Tower, and thousands of dollars at the steakhouse in Mr. Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel.

Many of the specifics of Mr. Trump’s spending are opaque; since 2017, the campaign and the R.N.C. have routed $227 million through a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials. That firm, American Made Media Consultants, has been used to place television and digital ads and was the subject of a recent Federal Election Commission complaint arguing it was used to disguise the final destination of spending, which has included paychecks to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the partners of Mr. Trump’s two adult sons.

Millions more followed to firms tied to R.N.C. and Trump-linked officials, including more than $39 million to two firms, Parscale Strategy LLC and Giles-Parscale, controlled by Mr. Parscale since the beginning of 2017.

Mr. Parscale said that he had “no ownership or financial interest in A.M.M.C.” and that he had “negotiated a contract with the family for 1 percent of digital ad spend and after becoming campaign manager took no percentage.”

‘You have to spend money to make money’

There is little question that Mr. Parscale helped the Trump campaign construct an unparalleled Republican operation to lure small donors online. He directed a years-along, nine-figure investment in digital ads and list-building that appears to have largely paid for itself. Some of the president’s advisers believe it will continue to pay great dividends in the final weeks, pointing to the $165 million raised by the president and his party in July — more than any month in the 2016 race. 

“You have to spend money to make money,” explained Mr. Walters, the R.N.C. chief of staff. “We have had a big increase in revenue because of early investments we made in online fund-raising and direct mail.”

Still, the costs of the G.O.P. money operation have been enormous.

Since 2019, Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared committees have spent $145 million on costs related to direct mail, almost $42 million on digital list acquisition and rentals (to expand their list of email addresses) and tens of millions more in online advertising for new donors.

Just procuring the Trump paraphernalia that supporters buy costs a lot. Two firms that make campaign swag were paid more than $30 million combined since 2019.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, the party has taken a spare-no-expense approach to donor maintenance, with the R.N.C. spending more than $6 million in “donor mementos.” The spending has gone to stationary shops, the White House Historical Association ($538,000) and the Hershey Company, the chocolate-maker ($337,000), which cover costs for items such as the White House-branded M&Ms given away by administrations of both parties.

Mr. Trump has also accumulated many costs that are unusual for a presidential re-election.

Republicans, for instance, have been saddled with extra legal costs, more than $21 million since 2019, resulting from the many investigations into Mr. Trump and, eventually, his impeachment trial. The R.N.C. also paid a large legal bill of $666,667.66 to Reuters News & Media at the end of June. Both Reuters and the R.N.C. declined to discuss the payment. It was labeled “legal proceedings — IP resolution,” suggesting it was related to a potential litigation over intellectual property.

There have been other squandered costs driven by Mr. Trump’s sometimes mercurial desires. He switched his convention plans twice, incurring many expenses along the way. In July, for instance, the R.N.C. made a $325,000 payment to the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island near Jacksonville for the convention there that never happened. The party is not expected to get that money back.

 

 

They might have a point regarding door knocking in places like Wisconsin. Biden cannot let the swing states fall by the wayside again. He's been spending time in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the last week, and Harris was in Wisconsin this weekend, but they need to have a ground team going hard as well. 

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12,271

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Posted
55 minutes ago, Voldemort86 said:

Trumpkins favorite poll Rasmussen gave them some mixed results today.

 

on one hand, it says Trumps approval is 51-49, but it also said Trump is trailing Biden in Wisconsin by 8

That kinda makes zero sense but whatever. Rasmussen gonna.. Eh...whatever.

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UTGrad98

UTGrad98 2,281

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Posted
33 minutes ago, Bama Llama said:

And of those that register how many will actually fucking VOTE!?

Very few.

When Sandy Hook happened, I thought for sure there would be some type of significant change to our gun control laws. Didnt even move the needle.

You would think this election, with this president, more people than ever would vote. I doubt they will. Most will be too busy, others will forget, and the 18-29 yo will find an excuse not to. Those who normally vote will vote and those who dont will continue to be feasted on by those who do. Same song different verse. I hope Im wrong but I dont think I am.

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MonkeyDoughnut

MonkeyDoughnut 10,356

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Posted
15 hours ago, Voldemort86 said:

The bigger question is how many are they actually registering to vote?

Because Texas doesn’t have online voter registration, it wasn’t immediately clear how many of those contacted were actually able to register, but party spokesman Abhi Rahman told Forbes the number could be in the “thousands.” 

 

Sadly, doesn't sound like that many.   I'm of the thinking that it's not that too few people are registered to vote, its that too many idiots are registered to vote.

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The Dog

The Dog 44,138

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Posted
15 hours ago, Voldemort86 said:

Trumpkins favorite poll Rasmussen gave them some mixed results today.

 

on one hand, it says Trumps approval is 51-49, but it also said Trump is trailing Biden in Wisconsin by 8

Rasmussen's approval poll has always been kind of wonky and Nate Silver (among others) has called them out for it.

Their state polling has been pretty much in line with everyone else's with an outlier here and there - which is what you should see. 

And remember that Scott Rasmussen isn't there anymore - "RMC Reports" is the one he's running now. 

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SubliminalHorn

SubliminalHorn 6,811

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15 hours ago, Voldemort86 said:

The bigger question is how many are they actually registering to vote?

Well of course the republicans make it difficult to even register. Having to print out a form and mail it in. I don’t even have a printer, but we expect unregistered, likely low income citizens to have a printer and mail it off? It’s almost as if republicans don’t want more people voting 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,426

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But they have the Death Star.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-08/trump-weighs-putting-up-to-100-million-of-his-cash-into-race

 

Quote

President Donald Trump has discussed spending as much as $100 million of his own money on his re-election campaign, if necessary, to beat Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.

The billionaire president has talked about the idea with multiple people, though he hasn’t yet committed to any self-funding, according to people briefed on internal deliberations. Though Trump personally contributed $66 million to his 2016 campaign, it would be unprecedented for an incumbent president to put his own money toward winning a second term.

 

Quote

Trump has sought advice about whether he should self-fund as he scrutinizes heavy spending by his team earlier this year that failed to push him ahead of the former vice president in the polls. In addition, Biden’s campaign and associated Democratic entities have recently raised more than Trump and his allies.

Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, declined to say whether there’s been any consideration of using the president’s personal fortune to help fund his re-election effort.

 

 

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honolulu horn

honolulu horn 6,165

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12 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

But they have the Death Star.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-08/trump-weighs-putting-up-to-100-million-of-his-cash-into-race

 

 

 

 

Just like he promised he fund his first campaign entirely by himself. Ah, the good old days, when his lies were mostly about his finances. 

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Tuco

Tuco 5,077

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15 hours ago, ConferenceRoom said:

They might have a point regarding door knocking in places like Wisconsin. Biden cannot let the swing states fall by the wayside again. He's been spending time in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the last week, and Harris was in Wisconsin this weekend, but they need to have a ground team going hard as well. 

I don't think Biden can let states fall by the wayside, but it would be running against brand for Biden to start up door to door canvassing, while campaigning on a policy of taking the outbreak seriously.  Trump could go out, knock door to door, kiss people on the lips, and grab them by their pussies, and no one would say shit, because it is completely in line with what we know about him.  Biden cannot.  It would mean one of two things: 1) he is only pretending to be concerned about the virus, or 2) he is willing to risk the lives of his volunteers and voters to win.  

It's a disadvantage, and phone banking is an inadequate replacement, but I don't see what alternative he has. 

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ConferenceRoom

ConferenceRoom 6,146

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19 minutes ago, Tuco said:

I don't think Biden can let states fall by the wayside, but it would be running against brand for Biden to start up door to door canvassing, while campaigning on a policy of taking the outbreak seriously.  Trump could go out, knock door to door, kiss people on the lips, and grab them by their pussies, and no one would say shit, because it is completely in line with what we know about him.  Biden cannot.  It would mean one of two things: 1) he is only pretending to be concerned about the virus, or 2) he is willing to risk the lives of his volunteers and voters to win.  

It's a disadvantage, and phone banking is an inadequate replacement, but I don't see what alternative he has. 

Yeah, it's tough, but I believe there's a safe way to cover ground without being hypocritical. I saw Ihlan Omar do it during her primary race  - masked canvassers standing back however many feet, no contact, etc. The run up to this election was always going to be a shit show and to add a fucking pandemic on top of it...well....Thanks, Trump. 

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honolulu horn

honolulu horn 6,165

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46 minutes ago, Tuco said:

I don't think Biden can let states fall by the wayside, but it would be running against brand for Biden to start up door to door canvassing, while campaigning on a policy of taking the outbreak seriously.  Trump could go out, knock door to door, kiss people on the lips, and grab them by their pussies, and no one would say shit, because it is completely in line with what we know about him.  Biden cannot.  It would mean one of two things: 1) he is only pretending to be concerned about the virus, or 2) he is willing to risk the lives of his volunteers and voters to win.  

It's a disadvantage, and phone banking is an inadequate replacement, but I don't see what alternative he has. 

Disagree -- there are safe ways to canvas in person. Like ConferenceRoom suggests -- masked, keeping distance, etc. He needs to get that going. 

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Red Five

Red Five 40,885

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It's funny, states where Biden has big leads are sort of nationally considered toss-ups (Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin), and states where they're running pretty even, or Biden has a slight edge, are still considered Trump states (Texas, Ohio, Georgia). It's like everyone is expecting the polling to be 5-10 points off in Trump's favor in every state. 

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BradInATX

BradInATX 9,208

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15 minutes ago, Red Five said:

It's funny, states where Biden has big leads are sort of nationally considered toss-ups (Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin), and states where they're running pretty even, or Biden has a slight edge, are still considered Trump states (Texas, Ohio, Georgia). It's like everyone is expecting the polling to be 5-10 points off in Trump's favor in every state. 

 

I don't care if Biden is polling +30 points in Florida, I'll never trust that son of a bitch state ever again.

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Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19,148

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54 minutes ago, Red Five said:

It's funny, states where Biden has big leads are sort of nationally considered toss-ups (Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin), and states where they're running pretty even, or Biden has a slight edge, are still considered Trump states (Texas, Ohio, Georgia). It's like everyone is expecting the polling to be 5-10 points off in Trump's favor in every state. 

I think what is going on there is people are mentally adding 5 or 6 to Trump as a means of saying- if this is going to be a race, it will be because Trump... and fill in the blanks from there. It's not interesting to look at Texas and put much emotional energy into figuring out what's going on there when it has absolutely zero chance of being the tipping point state. 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,426

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https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/09/08/swing-states-michigan-409051

 

Quote

President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by a total of just 10,704 votes out of some 4.7 million cast, a lightning-in-a-bottle victory over a fatally flawed opponent.

Four years later, Trump’s already-microscopic margin for error has disappeared, and his supporters in the state privately question how much longer he will contest Michigan.

 

Quote

To understand this, consider the three demographic groups that dominate Michigan elections: Black voters in the big cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Flint; college-educated whites in the wealthy suburbs of southeast Michigan; and non-college-educated whites in working-class suburbs, exurbs and rural areas across the state.

In 2016, every conceivable thing that could have broken Trump’s way, with regard to these three groups, did. Black turnout was astonishingly depressed. White college graduates held their noses and voted for him at higher rates than elsewhere. And working-class whites rejected the Democratic ticket in numbers never before seen. It was, to use a bad cliché, a perfect storm — a perfect storm that was barely enough to get Trump across the finish line.

 

Quote

The question that shadowed Trump’s election was whether these were one-time occurrences — the byproduct of a freak election featuring two reviled candidates — or the beginning of a trend.

Consider the mythologized white working-class. Ubiquitous throughout the state, from the hardscrabble towns of the Upper Peninsula to the culturally conservative neighborhoods of Macomb County, these modern-day “Reagan Democrats” have seen their jobs and communities decimated by outsourcing and automation. Many believed they found a champion in Trump.

 

Spoiler

Just as important, many could not stomach voting for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Whether it was her husband’s record on trade, her perceived condescension toward working people or her personal controversies, Clinton repelled these voters: She won just 31 percent of whites without a college degree, the lowest share ever recorded in Michigan exit polling.

Joe Biden doesn’t figure to dramatically improve on Clinton’s performance. The Democratic Party has become too disconnected from many of these voters on a cultural level — attitudes on guns, religion, law enforcement and other issues simply do not align. That said, Republicans here are skeptical that Trump can squeeze any more juice out of this base. Part of the reason, they say, is that Biden just does not alienate these voters the way Clinton did. The March 10 primary was instructive in this regard: Whereas Clinton lost working-class whites to Bernie Sanders by 11 points in 2016, Biden beat Sanders by 14 points with that group in 2020, a 25-point swing.

The consensus expectation is that Biden outperforms Clinton narrowly, enough to dent Trump’s margins with the biggest voting bloc in the state. (Non-college whites were 44 percent of Michigan’s electorate in 2016.) As Ben Frantz, president of UAW Local # 652 in Lansing, said, “A lot of these guys I know who turned on the Democrats last time around, they weren’t so much voting for Trump; they were voting against Hillary.”

The affluent suburbs outside of Detroit provide the flip side of the great realignment: If blue-collar workers have steadily bled away from the Democratic Party, white-collar workers are now fleeing the GOP at a comparable rate.

In 2016, Trump won college-educated whites in Michigan by 8 points, according to exit polling, more than double the national margin of 3 points. The sprawling, upscale suburb of Oakland County, offered a good indication why. Despite huge numbers of voters who were uncomfortable with both candidates, a huge chunk of Republican professionals stuck to party affiliation and voted Trump. The result: He lost Oakland County by an acceptable 8 points, a spread identical to Mitt Romney’s defeat there four years earlier.

Fast forward to 2020. Nobody here thinks Oakland County will be decided by single digits again. The 2018 governor’s race saw a 17-point Democratic rout in the county; the U.S. Senate race that same year was decided by 14 points. The Democratic freshmen who represent the county in Congress, Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin, ran two of the most competitive races in the country in 2018; two years later, Stevens is a virtual lock for reelection and Slotkin is heavily favored.

The trend among college-educated suburbanites is also visible in adjacent Livingston County, a longtime GOP stronghold. Turnout in the March 10 Democratic presidential primary jumped 56 percent from four years earlier, a reflection both of the changing demographics — more and more affluent, two-income households are taking root in Livingston County — and the shifting allegiances of voters who have traditionally leaned right.

“What scares Republicans is the change in Livingston,” said John Sellek, a local GOP strategist. “It’s a high-growth area, and that growth is coming from suburbanites who aren’t sure they identify as Republicans anymore.”

Black voters, particularly those in Detroit, are the critical piece of the puzzle. Clinton underperformed Obama’s 2012 campaign by more than 76,000 votes in Wayne County alone — seven times her statewide margin of defeat. It was more of the same in cities across the state: Clinton’s drop-off from Obama, which did not produce any corresponding spike in support for Trump, owes simply to diminished Black turnout. Local activists complain that the national Democratic Party ignored their advice and took their help for granted, failing to galvanize voters who were waiting to be turned out. This was a curse on Clinton’s campaign across the industrial Midwest, but nowhere was the sting felt more harshly than in Michigan.

There is no guarantee that Biden leaps over the exceptionally low bar set by Clinton. But he will almost certainly clear it, due to structural changes in Michigan’s election system. Two years ago, the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved a new law approving no-excuse absentee voting, allowing anyone to vote by mail or by depositing their ballot at a clerk’s office. Democrats and Republicans alike expect that this new standard will turn low-propensity voters into medium-propensity voters, and medium-propensity voters into high-propensity voters.

The first evidence of its impact came in the August primary election. A record-shattering 2.5 million voters cast ballots in the August primary election, and the double-digit percentage increase in Wayne County turnout over the previous record was a reflection of Black voters capitalizing on the new system. The mystery isn’t whether Black turnout ticks up in November; it’s whether it explodes. The answer will depend largely on disillusioned younger Black voters who have little faith in either party.

“It’s not a question of them voting for Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Tenisha Yancey. “It’s a question of them not voting at all.”

Add it all up — Trump’s ceiling with the white working-class, the exodus of suburbanites away from the GOP, and a near-certain turnout jump among Black voters — and the state of the race in Michigan looks grim for Trump. The three dynamics that all broke his way in 2016 now all appear to be breaking against him, and with voters in the state soon receiving their absentee ballots, the president’s allies on the ground expect he could concede Michigan sooner rather than later.

 

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