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Saturday, October 17, 2020

Trump says the quiet part out loud: He’s losing


He’s mused out loud about an embarrassing 2020 defeat. He’s acknowledged his severe deficit in key polls. And he’s made naked appeals to the critical voting blocs of suburban women and older adults — two demographics he has struggled to win over.

Just weeks from Election Day, President Donald Trump is saying the quiet part out loud about his own campaign. The president is crisscrossing the country with a packed schedule, flying to some states he won handily in 2016, to deliver a final pitch for a second term — and making no secret of his own shaky standing.

“Could you imagine if I lose?” Trump said Friday evening at a campaign rally in Macon, Ga. “My whole life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, 'I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.' I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country. I don’t know.”

Part of the act is tactical, aides say. Trump thrives on being underestimated, and they point to how the president came from behind in 2016. National polls at the time showed Trump lagging against Hillary Clinton in the weeks leading up to the election, yet he continued his marathon of rallies and latched onto news about Clinton that helped him paint a picture of elites in Washington that boosted his campaign. A similar strategy is in play once more, with the president back on the road and focusing his attention on news about the Biden family’s business dealings alongside allegations of his own unfair treatment.

“He campaigns best when he is counterpunching,” said Bryan Lanza, a lobbyist who worked on Trump's 2016 campaign and transition and remains close to the 2020 campaign. “He’s the running back who runs toward the tackles as opposed to the running back who runs away. We used to say he’s like Rocky Balboa — he waits for his opponent to punch and then he comes back to deliver the knockout blow.”

Trump aides in this case hope the counterpunch can propel him to a better place in the race. Despite trying to project strength and confidence after his bout with the coronavirus, during which he went on supplemental oxygen and was hospitalized for three nights, the president has openly acknowledged just how far he has slipped. A poll released by Morning Consult on Thursday showed Democratic nominee Joe Biden ahead of Trump by 9 percentage points, and leading in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan.

At campaign stops and in interviews, Trump has been openly grappling with the prospect of a loss and — like a TV pundit — articulating why exactly he’s behind.

Although more than half of white women voted for Trump in 2016, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week showed Biden leading Trump by 28 points among suburban women.

So at a rally in the Rust Belt town of Johnstown, Pa., the president aired conversations about the support he has lost from suburban women and continued his pitch to voters who live outside of places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

“Somebody said, ‘I don’t know if the suburban woman likes you.’ I said, ‘Why?’” Trump told a crowd of supporters Tuesday night. “They said, ‘They may not like the way you talk.’ But I’m about law and order. I’m about having you safe.”

“So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me?” Trump asked. “I saved your damn neighborhood.”

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed Trump down by 27 points against Biden with people over the age of 65, another key demographic that fueled his 2016 victory.

So while the president was recovering from Covid-19, he released a special video message aimed at his so-called “favorite people in the word: seniors.”

“I’m a senior,” the 74-year-old said. “I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Maybe you don’t have to tell them, but I’m a senior.”

But the president still managed to step on his own message days later, when he tweeted out a meme mocking Biden — who Trump has suggested is senile — in a nursing home, surrounded by elderly people.

On Friday, he traveled to Fort Myers, Fla., considered a Republican stronghold, to deliver a speech on “Protecting America’s Seniors.”

“Seniors are under threat from a radical-left movement that seeks to destroy the American way of life,” Trump said. “We’re not going to allow it.”

Trump’s messaging — begging for votes, even half-jokingly — carries risks for the president at this stage of the race.

“He’s taking the wrong approach,” said longtime GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “He should be talking about earning their support rather than asking them to give him their support. He should be turning that electoral weakness into a strength.”

Over the past week, Trump has discussed the pressure to beat Biden and the potential embarrassment of losing to someone he has called the “single worst candidate in the history of presidential politics.”

The prospect of a Trump loss “is when he’s at his best,” said a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. “It’s a way to fire up our voters and get out the vote.”

Instead of focusing on polling, the president has pointed to crowd sizes at his rallies and the number of people lining the street to catch a glimpse of his motorcade.

“Our level of enthusiasm … I believe it’s the highest in the history of elections,” Trump said on Friday in Ocala, Fla. “And his level of enthusiasm,” Trump said of Biden, “is called nonexistent.”

Trump has embraced the underdog label in the final stretch of the election, claiming the system is working against both him and his base of supporters.

He has latched onto the narrative that the game is rigged, and everything from the TV networks to Big Tech is conspiring against him and his MAGA movement.


The president’s list of how he hasn’t gotten a fair shake grows almost daily. Just hours before his town hall with NBC on Thursday night, the president claimed he was being “set up” by the network. He tweeted that his campaign was “not treated fair” by the Commission on Presidential Debates when it chose C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully as the moderator for the then-cancelled second debate.

In speeches this week he has repeatedly grumbled about the effect the coronavirus has had on his economic track record, and has returned, again and again, to complaints about the “deep state” of bureaucrats in the U.S. government, which he says is conspiring against him.

Trump’s advisers have tried to make the president’s closing message more forward-looking by focusing on his ability to restart the economy after the first Covid-19 shutdowns. But the president has turned to relitigating the past election, sowing doubt about mail-in-ballots, criticizing media coverage and blaming Democrats for everything from urban unrest to a lack of progress on stimulus negotiations.

“It shouldn’t be, ‘They targeted me.’ It should be what the future will look like for the American family,” Lanza said of Trump’s final pitch to voters.

But with each grievance the president outlines, Trump is building a case for why outside forces, rather than the candidate himself, is to blame for any loss.

One former senior White House official said even the president contracting the coronavirus and losing a week on the campaign trail could be seen as a messaging “silver lining.”

If he loses, the official said, “Trump has another excuse.”



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Inside Max Rose's de Blasio-hating, f-bombing reelection campaign


STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — To win a seat in Congress, New York Democrat Max Rose had to beat a popular Republican incumbent who’d been in public office for two decades. To keep his seat two years later, Rose has to defeat, for all intents and purposes, the Democratic Party of 2020.

This explains the all-out war Rose has waged against a lineup of liberal targets. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is extremely unpopular on Staten Island, has a record of “woeful failures,” he says. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has perpetuated a “limousine-liberal trope that the military is filled with a bunch of idiots who were duped into” serving.

And, in Rose’s estimation, Democratic Party leaders are preoccupied with pandering to Twitter and MSNBC in an attempt to put “the wealthiest counties in America at psychological ease.” The national party is “right up there with Covid in terms of brand appeal” in his district, he quips.

Rose, a five-and-a-half-feet tall, bald Army veteran, represents a Trump-loving, cop-heavy district. And as some of the loudest voices in his party lurch to the left, his prospects for reelection could hinge on how well he can avoid being tied to the national party through sheer force of personality and plenty of f-bombs.

“The party has to stand for something, it's got to be for something, it’s got to be known for something,” he said in an interview last weekend. “It’s got to be trusted, not just something people turn to when they’re rejecting something else which is — for the entirety of my life, the entirety of my life — what it has been.”

New York’s 11th District, which includes culturally conservative Staten Island and a swath of southern Brooklyn, is at the heart of all the national forces buffeting the 2020 elections. It was hit severely by the pandemic and Congress’ inability to secure another relief package, and it is chock full of current and retired law enforcement officers deeply offended by allegations of widespread police brutality.

Yet while his district is unique, this race is also a broader test of whether Democrats who ran as moderates calling for a new kind of politics can maintain that brand after two years in office.

His Republican opponent, state Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, and her allies are racing to yoke Rose to national and local Democrats, and she’s made public safety her number one campaign issue.



“It’s a referendum on Bill de Blasio and the 'Defund the Police' movement in many ways,” Malliotakis said of her race. “What’s on the ballot, I think, is 'law and order' versus anarchy.”

Rose ousted GOP Rep. Dan Donovan, the popular former district attorney, by 6 points in 2018 in a win that few in his party saw coming. “They thought there was a correlation between electoral success and good looks,” Rose joked.

Last cycle, he ran a populist campaign against both parties. And he's again rooted his bid on a “country over party” platform, warning that Malliotakis blindly follows the GOP — even when the party's policies harm New York.

Rose staged a fiery press conference last weekend with two state legislators at the boardwalk to excoriate President Donald Trump and Congress for failing to secure a pandemic relief package, berating Democrats and Republicans for their "games, partisan bills, temper tantrums" that string Americans "along in an unnecessary, dangerous and destructive political game."

His tirades against both parties — he refers to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a "legislative sociopath"— resonate with some voters.

Handing out masks last Saturday morning at a Mid-Island Shop & Stop supermarket, Rose was accosted by a man railing on de Blasio and the two-party system. “Trump doesn’t belong there. Biden doesn’t belong there. One party. Common sense. No more Democrats, no more Republicans,” he screamed.

“You speak the truth!” Rose yelled back.

“Run for f---ing mayor right now. Right f---ing now. Get down there and go,” the man bellowed, as Rose dropped to the ground and did push-ups at his feet. (Rose later said he was not interested in running for mayor next year.)

"Rejecting politics as usual is something that young people really respond to," said state Sen. Diane Savino, a Staten Islander who, before 2018, was part of a breakaway faction of Democrats who aligned with Republicans in Albany to give the GOP control of the state legislative chamber.

Staten Islanders insist they are motivated by personality far more than party. It was the only seat in the country that backed John McCain for president in 2008 but President Barack Obama four years later in an election held the week after Hurricane Sandy. But voters here swung hard for Trump in 2016, handing him a 10-point victory.

“It’s a gut feeling that some people have that he’s authentic, consistent, a fighter, looking to upend the system,” Rose said of Trump’s win. “There’s no need to say something negative about him in this analysis,” other than that he hasn’t kept “the vast majority of the promises he made.” But Trump’s election is the “indictment of the Democratic Party” and a sign of “a massive loss of trust,” he said.

Rose’s gripes with the Democratic Party are well-known. He thinks it lacks a bold populist platform that could appeal to those outside of the coastal elites, and that its rhetoric drips with condescension. He railed against Ocasio-Cortez for opposing Amazon’s proposed Queens warehouse as “an ideological statement” that hurt New York and for introducing a bill to ban military recruitment on video game platforms.

“I don’t see anyone doing a bill to ban the recruitment of corporate lawyers and investment bankers on our Ivy League campuses,” he complained.

Rose, 33, seems to be banking on eliciting the same gut feeling in voters as Trump did. And perhaps that his brash personal style can combat the caricature of the anti-police radical that Republicans are making him out to be.

But some have tried to cast him an opportunist, a Park Slope liberal who moved to Staten Island shortly before his 2018 run. And they predict his bravado will come across as contrived.

“We don’t talk like that. Every third word out of our mouths is not an f-bomb. You know?” said Brendan Lantry, the chairman of the Staten Island GOP. “It just perpetuates this negative view of Staten Island when he’s constantly cursing in magazines and newspapers.”

Polling from both parties shows a tight race, and GOP operatives are hopeful about the salience of the "Defund the Police" hits they are deploying. Congressional Leadership Fund, a top GOP super PAC that's invested millions in TV ads, says they've seen a sharp drop in Rose's image rating in their polling after advertising on the issue. (The group is running an ad in which one resident calls Rose "a f---ing liar," with the swear word bleeped for TV.)

But Democrats are vastly outspending Republicans on TV. Rose and his allies have aired nearly $11 million worth of ads, compared to just $4.5 million for the GOP, according to media buying data.

While knocking doors last weekend in the Westerleigh neighborhood, a swing area, Malliotakis touted her “support of all the NYPD unions” and her plan to “stop people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the socialist squad.” The literature she hands out while canvassing warns that Rose supports ending bail and closing Rikers Island, the city jail in the East River.

Like Rose, Malliotakis — who was thumped by de Blasio in the 2017 mayoral race by 38 percentage points, though she carried Staten Island by a wide margin — was also easily recognized. While knocking doors here last weekend, a group of 10-year-old boys rode by on bicycles.

“Wait, is that Nicole Malliotakis?” one boy called to her. “I see you on all the YouTube ads! I don’t believe them, trust me.” Then they invited her to a block party around the corner where she was greeted with cheers from the crowd and filmed a TikTok video with the kids.


Malliotakis claims Rose ran on a vow to be bipartisan but votes consistently with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including on impeaching Trump last year. In response to Rose’s claims she won’t break with her party, Malliotakis notes she spoke out against Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military and to restrict travel from some Muslim countries. "I'm my own person," she said.

The candidates have grown increasingly contentious discussing Rose’s attendance at a summer march for racial justice, where he was photographed next to protesters holding signs that called for defunding the police.

“That was a defining moment. People were really upset, and rightfully so,” Malliotakis said. “The fact that he saw those signs and proceeded to march with them is disrespectful to the police. Period.”

Rose opposes defunding the police and says the New York Police Department should pay its officers more than any other police force in the country. And, he counters, the June march was a peaceful protest, organized by Young Leaders of Staten Island in coordination with the NYPD.

“Look at what she is doing to the leaders of that march,” he said, describing them as kids looking to improve their communities. “She’s positioning them as rioters, as looters, as criminals, as violent people, saying Max Rose marched with them. You realize how f---ing dangerous that is? And these are people that she will represent if she becomes a member of Congress. It’s just wrong.”

"The truth of the matter is I’m going to win irrespective of what they do," Rose said. "So I just feel bad for the Republican Party and the ways in which they’re wasting their money. It is sad."



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Biden town hall draws nearly 1 million more viewers than Trump

The Nielsel numbers don’t include live streams to cell phones and other devices.

Joe Biden’s live town hall with ABC News Thursday night was watched by nearly one million more television viewers than those who tuned-in for President Donad Trump’s event. 

According to Nielsen ratings, Biden’s 90-minute discussion averaged 14.1 million viewers, compared to 13.5 million for Trump’s town hall on NBC, The Washington Post reports.

The primetime town halls were scheduled after Trump pulled out of the presidential debate once it was switched to a virtual format following his positive COVID-19 diagnosis. 

Read More: Diddy says he’s launching ‘Black political party,’ endorses Biden

The Nielsel numbers don’t include live streams to cell phones and other devices, but when it comes to the two networks’ YouTube channels, Biden’s town hall received 507,445 viewers compared to Trump’s 153,660, according to Newsweek.

theGRIO previously reported… At his town hall event Thursday night, Biden was asked by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if it was a mistake to support the controversial 1994 crime bill, and he replied, “Yes, it was. But here’s where the mistake came. The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally.” 

Biden noted that while the federal government lowered mandatory minimums and a statute he called “same crime, same time,” those elements applied mostly to federal offenses. States retained their own sentencing power and ability to build more prisons, which they did.

Read More: Joe Biden calls crime bill a ‘mistake’ during town hall

The former vice president said the ’94 crime bill was created after a spike in crime in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Biden also explained that, at the time, the crime bill was supported by the Congressional Black Caucus and Black mayors across the nation. However, he said, “things have changed drastically,” noting that violent crime has dropped dramatically, and racial justice issues in America are different now than at that period.

He now contends that no one should serve time in prison for drug possession, and the country instead should be funding rehabilitation centers.

Biden’s The Vice President and the People town hall is ABC’s most-watched prime-time telecast since the Oscars in February, according to the report.

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