Among all the zillion and one stories about how the 2020 election would turn out if it were held today (important note, it will not be held for 15 months), you may have seen one that must have been especially alarming to President Donald Trump, for two reasons.
Reason one: It showed Joe Biden, the current leading Democratic candidate, clobbering Trump in several states that Trump has to win to have a chance of winning a second term.
In several states that Trump either carried in 2016 or lost narrowly but hoped to pick up in 2020, the poll showed Biden currently polling ahead of Trump, in many cases by a wide margin, including in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
For example, in crucial swing state Ohio, which Trump won in 2016 by a surprisingly large 8 percentage points, the poll showed Trump trailing Biden by 1. In North Carolina, which Trump won by 4 points in 2016, it showed Biden leading by 8. Georgia: Trump won by 5; the poll showed him trailing Biden by 6. In Iowa, which Trump won by 10, the poll showed Biden ahead by 9.
To make this even tougher reading for Trump, the leaked poll numbers came from a pollster working for his own re-election campaign.
(Here’s a link to one of many stories about the leaked numbers.)
Trump took prompt, immediate action to rectify the situation.
It’s true that the stated reason for firing the pollsters was for allowing the results to leak into public view. They were meant to be for internal campaign use only. (One can be forgiven for suspecting that if the polls had shown Trump doing better, he wouldn’t have minded the leak, or would have leaked them himself.)
Of local interest, I’ll mention one more number from the leaked poll, although it doesn’t cover a state that Trump carried in 2016.
Trump lost our own dear state of Minnesota, but only by 1.5 percentage points, which shocked a lot of people. I have argued previously — based on several factors, including the blue wave that swept across Minnesota in 2018 — that Minnesota is nonetheless not a swing state heading into 2020. The secret internal Trump campaign poll showed that if the election were held today, Biden would clobber Trump in Minnesota by 14 points.
I wouldn’t attach any more importance to these numbers as predictive of any election still a year and a half away than to any others. Trump and his allies at home and abroad shocked the world in 2016 and may do so again. But the next time Trump claims, as he surely will, that everything looks great for him heading into the re-election campaign, please note, and don’t be shocked by this: He’s lying.
I do appreciate the frankness, acknowledging our President is a liar. He lies every minute of every day, compulsively, even when he doesn’t need to lie. The truth just isn’t good enough for Trump. No one has embodied the old adage, “If his lips are moving, he’s lying.”, more so than Trump.
“He lies every minute of everyday “
How appropriate that the comments were kicked off with a lie, a lie about lying?
Politico published a story on June 27th, titled “John Roberts Just Called Out the Trump Administration for Lying”. The subject is the census citizenship question. If you read the decision, there is no charge of lying.
“But the next time Trump claims, as he surely will, that everything looks great for him heading into the re-election campaign, please note, and don’t be shocked by this: He’s lying.”
Was he lying when he claimed that things looked great for him heading into the 2016 election? No, but you thought so.
His opinion on how he looked can’t be categorized as truth or lie. It is an opinion.
However, if it makes you feel good to go back to 2016 to find a comment by Trump that isn’t an out and out lie, well, have at it Steve.
Candidate Trump promised to lower the corporate and personal income tax rates.
You may not like the tax cuts, but he said it and then he did it.
Candidate Trump also promised to eliminate the national debt in eight years. How’s that going?
[Cue the tired old “if you like your doctor . . .” line.]
While that one is a whopper, eight year’s of Obama added $9 trillion (with a “T”) to America’s debt. Trump inherited Obama’s budget for the first year of his Presidency. If Trump completes his eight without addressing the issue, I will criticize him too.
He has started to “address” the issue. The national debt is now at $22 trillion, up about 10% since Obama left office. His plans for his second term would add another $9 trillion.
Or by “address” did you not mean “ignore the issue entirely?”
I see that you have conceded that there will be a second term.
Having his first year charged to the Obama budget, we only have one year of history. Clearly enough history for you to extrapolate, but not for me. History should be written in retrospect.
“I see that you have conceded that there will be a second term.”
I see that you don’t understand the subjunctive mood.
“Having his first year charged to the Obama budget, we only have one year of history. Clearly enough history for you to extrapolate, but not for me. History should be written in retrospect.”
So Trump’s real plan for eliminating the national debt includes first increasing it to record levels? That makes about as much sense as anything else Trump-related.
So, Trump inherits Obama’s debt/defecit budget, and you expect him to turn it around with his very first budget? If that was your expectation, you probably should not have voted for him.
Trump, of course, hates bad news about himself of any kind. It doesn’t fit with his carefully constructed, deeply delusional self-image, which shatters like glass if anything true and negative gets out.
You are quite right about Minnesota not being a “swing state,” Mr. Black. We are basically a “blue state.” Trump made inroads here in ’16, mostly because of the solid support Bernie Sanders had over Clinton in the DFL Caucus, and the bad feeling about the “Clinton fix” by the DNC.
Nu?
The only thing that Trump had going for him was the economy, and that’s starting to look shaky. I suppose that it’s a good sign that at least on some level he’s aware of his unpopularity. Reality calling Trump!
Trump fired his pollsters because their data showed him behind and they released the data. Next up homemade data by Trump. Why, because he can’t handle reality. Trump doesn’t realize what he says doesn’t matter because he has zero credibility across the world. What is Trumps next step, the New York Courts and prison.
Apparently not allowed to think for themselves, Trump followers have been told not to believe any polls that show Trump trailing Democrats. In Trump follower fashion they will likely do that. It is the old head in the sand political campaigning. Trump kicks off his 2020 campaign today. I wonder how is that any different than the last two years? His campaign has never ended so he could do the work for all the people of America. Trump has the campaigning part down pat, it is doing the work part he fails miserably at.
The problem with these numbers is that these are pre negative campaign. The public hasn’t yet been properly cooked. And my fear is that the polling numbers for Democrats are much more vulnerable to the inevitable beat down than Trump’s, about whom there is virtually nothing negative left to say.
On Monday June 17th, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) on Instagram livestream:
“The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps.”
That is what a lying politician sounds like. Sadly, that won’t be called out for what it is by MinnPost.
Do you know what a “concentration camp” is? Hint: they’re not necessarily places where extermination is carried out.
I see that you are willing to stand by AOC and her trivialization of The Holocaust; duly noted.
I have heard that she will be facing primary election challengers in 2020. Being the gift that she is, I hope she can keep her seat.
Duly noted that you still don’t know what a “concentration camp” is. According to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, “The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”
The origin of the English term “concentration camp” dates back to the Boer Wars in South Africa. President Roosevelt referred to the camps used to hold Japanese Americans during World War II as “concentration camps.”
The opinions of Holocaust scholars on this issue is not unanimous, so you don’t need to Google to find contrary opinions. Instead, I will refer you to Andrea Pitzer’s book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. I will also refer you to comments by Waitman Wade Beorn and Federico Finchelstein.
You are right only to the extent that calling them ‘concentration camps’ is an exaggeration. And if you read the whole history, the initial camps were not murder camps, but they were a start on that path.
However, they are similar to the Nisei Japanese (Japanese Americans born in the United States) internment camps used by the United States on the West Coast during WWII.
Historians who have studied the Shoah have concurred that the US is now running concentration camps. Andrea Pitzer, an author who has written a comprehensive history of concentration camps, gave a detailed interview with Esquire on the subject.
What historians? Source?
Invoking “Never Again” is a reference to The Holocaust.
The term “concentration camp” was first used by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902, in which the British took control of the Afrikaner states in southern Africa. British troops rounded up Afrikaner women and children and “concentrated” them in these camps as part of a scorched earth policy that aimed to deny the Afrikaner troops both supplies and civilian support.
There was no deliberate program of extermination, but many prisoners died due to poor living conditions.
Mass murder is not a precondition for calling an institution a concentration camp.
Well, I remember the pollsters, most of them, had Hillary winning no problem, by similar numbers. Pollsters can’t count the millions of people who voted for Trump but aren’t about to tell anybody. For those millions, Joe Biden represents everything – corporatist globalization undermining nation state and citizen sovereignty, unchecked illegal immigration, banker favoritism, general liberal condescension – that Hillary represented.
The pollsters were right — she did win.
They predicted accurately how people would vote.
The problem was the EC.
She did win?
Because a baseball team gets the most hits, homeruns, and strikeouts, it doesn’t mean that they win. That is not how the game is decided. Everyone knows it.
Most people also know that an election is not a baseball game.
Some people can relate to an analogy when they are otherwise unable to grasp a concept.
Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election of 2016. There it is straight up, yet again.
Paul,
The founders set the electoral college so states like Virginia couldn’t come to control the Federal government. Today it works so that states with primarily urban voters do not come to lord over more rural states. That is the state of play, Hillary and her people should have known that, but they were so self-assured that she deserved to win, that they didn’t bother, and so they lost rather badly even though she received more votes.
Democrats still don’t seem to get it, they still are not offering anything to rural people or working-poor, so they are likely to continue to lose the presidency and the Senate. They would rather blame Russia than look within at Dem ideology: saying that she actually won, as an example of not learning from their mistakes.
It’s undemocratic for rural votes to count more than other votes. The EC is an insult to democracy.
Listen, you Hillary people simply have to stop claiming that she won the election, she didn’t. Hillary Clinton is NOT our president, if she’d won the election she’d be in the White House instead of Trump. The EC isn’t some new fangled deal we cooked up the summer of 2016. If anyone in the world should have known that a popular vote would NOT get them into the WH it was Hillary Clinton and her team. They failed, she lost, end of story. If Democrats don’t want to lose again, they need to stop pretending they won the last time. The “winner” of an US presidential election is the one that walks into the White House after the votes are counted… why do we have to keep pointing this out?
In Federalist No. 10, arguably the most important of the 85 articles, Madison discusses the means of preventing the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College is one of the means. It is a good thing for those of us that live in cities and states regarded by the majority as fly-over.
You’re only partly correct. Federalist 10 was written by James Madison, and it is one of themost important articles. It does not, however, have anything to do with the selection of the President (Federalist 69, written by Alexander Hamilton, if you were wondering).
Federalist 10’s discussion of the protection of minority rights says that that protection will come from a diversity of factions in a united government, but doesn’t mention any institutional protections.
Why would an article written to persuade the people of New York to ratify the Constitution concern itself about the “rights” of smaller states?
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-reason-for-the-electoral-college/
“ASK FACTCHECK
The Reason for the Electoral College”
Excerpt:
“The reason that the Constitution calls for this extra layer, rather than just providing for the direct election of the president, is that most of the nation’s founders were actually rather afraid of democracy. James Madison worried about what he called “factions,” which he defined as groups of citizens who have a common interest in some proposal that would either violate the rights of other citizens or would harm the nation as a whole. Madison’s fear – which Alexis de Tocqueville later dubbed “the tyranny of the majority” – was that a faction could grow to encompass more than 50 percent of the population, at which point it could “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” Madison has a solution for tyranny of the majority: “A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”
I acknowledge that I am handicapped by the fact that I have read the Federalist Papers myself, without outside help.
You have clearly indicated that you won’t take it on my authority that Fedaralist 10 supports the idea of the EC.
As I said, I have read the Federalist Papers, all by myself. I can figure out what they say.
Likewise, we have both read the 2nd Amendment, and we are in agreement on the meaning. Nothing further to discuss.
The problem is that pollsters don’t weight voters. Voters who live in some states matter than voters who live in other states. We threw away the votes of the three million voters who gave Hillary her majority. If there votes don’t count in determining the outcome of presidential elections, why are we polling them?
Hiram,
Under your scenario, city voters would come to dominate presidential elections, their votes “mattering” more than rural votes, in which case really only a few cities would come to control who becomes president. It is the same if you weight the Senate by population, a few regions would dominate the Senate.
As it is, Dems won the Presidency with Obama in 2008 because he was so very appealing, and won by ten million votes. But throughout his presidency, Dems lost ground all over the country, because in part they believed that Obama would be hope and change. But for a lot of Americans, hope evaporated and nothing much changed. Hillary may have won 3 million more votes, but she bet on the city, called rural and working people deplorables, so she won the city but lost the states. If Dems continue to act like the Urban matters more than the Rural, and corporations matter more than working people, they could continue to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college.
All votes should count the same (one person: one vote, as opposed to one dollar: one vote).
If the only issue is urban vs. rural interests and more people live in urban areas, then that should decide the election. However, usually there is more the one issue involved in a election.
The 2016 election was historically bizarre elections. Both major Parties fielded historically unpopular candidates and from polling or statistical perspective it’s very difficult to predict who will win an unpopularity contest. This is why it’s so alarming that so many Democrats seem to instinctively want to try it again with Biden. It’s as if they think they’re running HRC again to prove they were “right” in 2016.
Pollsters do try capture likely voters and balance then according districts and electoral college maps etc. The thing killed Nate Silver’s predictions in 2016 technically, was the undecided voters. You simply could not have predicted that election without knowing who the undecided’s would break for, and Silver guessed wrong.
There are a bunch of other problems with the modeling and methodology that guys like Silver do when it comes to probability and predictive acuity as well. Basically 538 sometimes claims to do able to do some things with numbers that they can’t actually do with the numbers they use, but that’s another story.
As a Trump supporter, I hope Biden is the democrat nominee. Seriously. He looks to be Hillary redux without the vim and vigor. Old Joe spoke to a throng of 200 in Iowa the other day. Tweeted today that the first thing he would do as president would be to eliminate your tax cut. While Trump prepares to launch his campaign in front of thousands of screaming supporters, there isn’t anyone among the democrat hopefuls who could attract a similar audience. Yup. Four more years.
Was that the tax cut that produced one dollar of return for every 20 dollars of tax cut?, the same one that skewed to the top 1%?
PA, MI, OH and WI are dead to Trump: no hope based on what he promised and what he delivered to blue collar workers. Fake plant resurrections, fake resurrected coal. Good night Donald…
President Warren will be well received by these folks.
Sanders make Trump rallies looks like a neighborhood book club on a regular basis. But I agree with Dennis, I think Biden would be the best candidate for Republicans.
I would hope that any organization or company that experiences a breach of trust with a service provider would fire them. Why would you continue with them? I wouldn’t even trust their research. How can you be certain with their information gathering and analysis when they are leaking information.
Bear in mind that candidate Trump owned about a 1% share 500 days before the 2016 election; in a field of seventeen, he wasn’t in the top ten.
Trump and breach of trust. So much irony in your comment.
Yes, the irony is that any reasonable person or organization would fire a pollster who leaked confidential information, yet Trump is criticized for doing it. Ironic.
Trump is not a “reasonable person.”
Is there a point? Is there a reason the pollster should not be fired?
I seek strictly to avoid engaging in Whataboutism, but in this case I can’t help but observe that Trump, our employee, on more than one occasion has disclosed our confidential intelligence information to foreign, and hostile, interests.
I agree that if his pollster violated a contractual obligation to protect data, Trump has grounds to fire him. But in conjunction with his respectful tendering of his own resignation to his own employer, us.
As with the pollster, that is for the employer (us) to decide.
We can impeach him or choose a new President in 2020. That is how it works.
The problem is that it has the smell of the old practice of blaming the messenger bearing bad news. Trump always needs someone else to blame for his failings, such as a basic unpopularity.
It smells of sound business practice.
Nobody cares about polls pitting an incumbent against potential opponents 500 days from the election. The polls can’t even get it right on Election Day. 500 days out, Trump had 1% support; today he is President.
Steve,
Trump isn’t being criticized for firing pollsters, he’s being criticized for lying and tell his staff to lie… again. The point is that Trump and his people were claiming that these polls didn’t exist. I don’t think anyone cares what pollsters Trump hires or fires, it’s the fact that he’s lying again that’s got people’s attention.
It is fairly common to deny the substance of leaked information. Should you trust a company that is willing to leak information to leak accurate information? The source of leaked information may have an agenda, a reason to create a picture with their own crayon colors.
This is a fine example of the expansion of the definition of the word lie. It even now includes opinions. If you don’t share the President’s opinion, he is lying.
If ALL of the voters who still believe much of anything that Trump and his staff say, Trump will almost certainly lose the election. People won’t vote for him no matter what the polls (much less his own internal polls) claim. To the extent that Trump disconnects himself from reality his simply hastens his own demise.
The only significant aspect of this story is that yet again is reveals the rampant and pervasive dishonesty of this criminal regime. Trump and his entire cabinet were lying flat out when claimed that these polls didn’t exist. You literally cannot believe anything this president or his staff say, they will lie about anything no matter how important OR trivial.
More worrisome for Trump should be that his approval ratings have pretty much cratered in even his best states, since he took office, with no uptick in sight. Morning Consult has interesting data, here: https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/ Improving this after 2+ years of lawless disgrace will be a miracle. But I suppose you never know.
However, his base has not grown, at all. Its highly doubtful he’ll get more votes than what he received in 2016 when he lost the popular vote against a candidate with such a terrible brand, a bad campaign, terrible messaging, and was the subject of a 20+ year propaganda campaign against her. Actually, given the 30+ times DT mentioned HRC’s name in his greatest hits gaslighting event last night, she’s still the subject of so much bombast and b.s.
In 2016 Trump beat the only candidate he wouldn’t lose to. And HRC lost to the only candidate she should have beat.
Steve, well said.
“The opinions of Holocaust scholars on this issue is not unanimous”
I am aware of the fact, even without google.
The detainment facilities at our southern border does not fit the definition that you quoted from the Holocaust Museum.
AOC invoking the words “Never Again” links her statements regarding concentration camps to The Holocaust.
It sounds like you don’t know much about these camps. How many people have died in them so far? How many children have died? Is it illegal to seek asylum in the US?
“AOC invoking the words “Never Again” links her statements regarding concentration camps to The Holocaust.”
Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome has been identified in more and more places around the US.
Asking questions is less enlightening than answering them. Certainly people die in detention, as they do in any large group. Cruise ships are equipped with a morgue. It is necessary not because cruise companies kill people, but because they house large groups of people.
I find AOC delightful; socialism in America needs a poster child.
You’re trivializing the deaths of migrants in ICE custody. You’re also patronizing yet another female politician.
Welcome to the Age of Trump, America!
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/border-arrests-increase-may-1509572
“Border arrests rose to nearly 133K in May as surge continues”
Even if they all left their home country healthy, traveled a great distance under difficult conditions healthy, statistics indicate that zero deaths in detention is unlikely. Understanding the math is not trivialization of the lives lost.
If I criticized someone it is for their position or statement on an issue, regardless of race or gender. When race or gender are the only remaining defenses, then those are the ones offered, no support required.
“Understanding the math is not trivialization of the lives lost.”
Brushing deaths off as “inevitable,” and comparing them to the fact that people die on cruise ships, is trivializing them. Ignoring the fact that many of these deaths were likely preventable if ICE had been operating that it was supposed to is no better. I guess it’s easy to be callous about these people, isn’t it?
Likewise, it is demeaning to refer to a member of Congress as “delightful” and a “poster child.” It’s all of a piece with referring to female office holders by their first names only.
“Hillary for President 2016” read the yard signs in my neighborhood. I still see the bumper stickers.
It seems she wasn’t offended to be called and known her first name.
Team Hillary, as they called themselves, spent $768 million on her bid for the presidency. She outspent Trump by about a two to one margin. Look at her signs and her advertising, a brand built on her first name. To me it appeared that she was trying to create distance from her husband’s name. She is kind of like Cher, people refer to her as Hillary.
“AOC invoking the words “Never Again” links her statements regarding concentration camps to The Holocaust.”
Your point? Dude, “Never Again” means that we prevent it from ever happening AGAIN. It doesn’t mean we wait until it’s actually happening AGAIN so we call it another Holocaust. These ARE concentration camps, the point in calling them out NOW is to prevent them from turning into death camps. You understand that if we until these camps fit YOUR definition of a concentration camp… we will have failed. This isn’t a semantic debate, these are real people in real concentration camps.
“Obama Asks for $3.7 Billion to Aid Border”
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/us/obama-seeks-billions-for-children-immigration-crisis.html
Excerpt: “The president said he needed the money to set up new detention facilities, conduct more aerial surveillance and hire immigration judges and Border Patrol agents to respond to the flood of 52,000 children.”
Sounds like a crisis. When Trump becomes President, Democrats claim that the crisis is manufactured and then make an abrupt U-turn on that spurious position. Detention centers, once termed detention centers, now are called concentration camps. Just semantics.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/449214-dems-make-u-turn-on-calling-border-a-manufactured-crisis
“Democrats have done a U-turn on their claim from earlier this year that President Trump’s concern about illegal immigration at the southern border was a “manufactured crisis.” Democrats now acknowledge there is a genuine humanitarian crisis and are preparing to pass legislation that would provide as much as $4.5 billion in federal aid to address the surge of migrants from Central America.”
Steve, we’re not playing a debate game here. You can pivot to a different discussion when point is shot down if you want to, but that’s not going impress anyone. So saying: “well OK, so they ARE concentration camps but the Democrats started it” doesn’t track. Whatever problem Obama faced or created depending on how you want to characterize it, Trump has quadrupled. Trump took whatever problem you want to claim existed and turned it into a crime against humanity. And by the way, logically, if you claim that Obama’s policy was “bad”, you can’t claim that Trump’s continuation of THAT policy, much less an expansion of that policy… is “good”. If it was wrong when Obama did it, it must also wrong when Trump does it. Conversely, if “right” when Trump does it, it must have been right when Obama did it. You can’t praise Trump without praising Obama, or condemn Obama without also condemning Trump.
If you read my comment, you will see no criticism of President Obama’s billions spent on border security, including “detention centers”. That is what they were called under the last president. Now, the same thing is a concentration camp. It is politically charged rhetoric, which can just be dismissed as semantics. Word are important, words are powerful, words have meaning. The First Amendment is first for a reason. I commend Minnpost for providing this public forum for discussion and debate.