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One Year From Election, Trump Trails Biden but Leads Warren in Battlegrounds
Signs that the president’s advantage in the Electoral College has persisted or even increased since 2016.
By Nate Cohn
Despite low national approval ratings and the specter of impeachment, President Trump remains highly competitive in the battleground states likeliest to decide his re-election, according to a set of new surveys from The New York Times Upshot and Siena College.
How Trump fares among registered voters
Trumpvs.
Biden
Sanders
Warren
Michigan(n=501)
Even
Sanders +2
Trump +6
Pennsylvania(661)
Biden +3
Sanders +1
Even
Wisconsin(651)
Biden +3
Sanders +2
Even
Florida(650)
Biden +2
Trump +1
Trump +4
Arizona(652)
Biden +5
Trump +1
Warren +2
North Carolina(651)
Trump +2
Trump +3
Trump +3
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 3,766 registered voters from Oct. 13 to Oct. 26.
Across the six closest states that went Republican in 2016, he trails Joe Biden by an average of two points among registered voters but stays within the margin of error.
Mr. Trump leads Elizabeth Warren by two points among registered voters, the same margin as his win over Hillary Clinton in these states three years ago.
Sunday, November 03, 2019
To Beat Trump, Focus on His Corruption
“Given the severity of Trump’s misbehavior — turning American foreign policy into an opposition-research arm of his campaign — Democrats had no choice but to start an impeachment inquiry. Yet they need to remember that impeachment is an inherently political process, not a technocratic legal matter. It will fail if it does not persuade more Americans of Trump’s unfitness for office. It will succeed only if he is not president on Jan. 21, 2021.
And it is far more likely to succeed if Democrats can connect it in voters’ minds to a larger argument about the substance of Trump’s presidency.
The most promising version of that argument revolves around corruption: The Ukraine quid pro quo matters because it shows how Trump has reneged on his promise to fight for ordinary Americans and is using the power of the presidency to benefit himself. As Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, says: “This man is not working for you. He is working to put his own interests first. And he is endangering the country to do it.”
Corruption is one of the public’s top worries, surveys show. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last year, people ranked the economy as the country’s most important issue, and No. 2 was “reducing the influence of special interests and corruption in Washington.” It’s a cross-partisan concern too, spanning Democrats, Republicans and independents.
The corruption argument can appeal to the swing voters who helped elect Barack Obama in 2012, flipped to Trump in 2016 and flipped back to Democrats in 2018. And despite wishful thinking by some progressives, winning swing voters — rather than simply motivating the base — will again be crucial in 2020. “You have to build a bridge for people to walk across,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist, referring to Trump’s 2016 supporters. “If you say the guy is a reprobate and a sleaze and all of that, it’s harder for people who voted for him to walk across that bridge.”
Casting Trump as a reprobate is tempting because, well, he is. He is a “pathological liar,” as Ted Cruz said during the 2016 Republican primaries, as well as a “con artist” (Marco Rubio’s description) and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” (Lindsey Graham’s). Mick Mulvaney, then a Republican congressman, had the simplest summary: “He’s a terrible human being.”
But none of these descriptions has proved to be an effective political tactic against Trump. He easily defeated all the other Republican candidates who called him nasty names, and Mulvaney now serves Trump as the acting White House chief of staff...”
Department of Justice releases Mueller documents to BuzzFeed News
In an interview, Rick Gates says Manafort suggested Ukraine hacked the 2016 DNC
The US Department of Justice on Saturday released 500 pages of interview summaries and emails related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailing Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, after a court battle with BuzzFeed News.
The documents, some of which were posted online by the website, include summaries of FBI interviews with Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chair, and Steve Bannon, a former presidential adviser.
The documents also include email correspondence between Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and a “proposal to obtain” and analyze emails belonging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which was sent to Bannon by a conservative activist.
Beginning to mine the documents, BuzzFeed cited an April 2018 interview in which Gates “told investigators that after the campaign learned the [Democratic National Committee] had been hacked, [then campaign chair Paul] Manafort pushed the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had orchestrated the attack”.
US intelligence agencies agree that the DNC was hacked by Russia in 2016, as part of its election interference effort, leading to the release of internal emails damaging to the party during the presidential election.
The conspiracy theory that the attack was really by Ukraine is now part of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether Trump sought to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals.
An infamous 25 July call between Trump and Ukrainian president Vlodymyr Zelenskiy is at the heart of impeachment proceedings.
According to a published – and contested – White House version of the call, Trump brought up the Ukraine conspiracy theory.
BuzzFeed filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking all documents related to the investigation by Mueller, a former FBI director, and a lawsuit to get access to the documents.
Mueller filed his report in March and it was released, with redactions, in April. He did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow but did lay out multiple instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president himself.
Trump’s apparent reprieve was shortlived and Mueller’s work continues to dog his presidency.
Earlier this month, a judge ordered the justice department to give the House unredacted portions of grand jury testimony from Mueller’s investigation, a victory for Democrats who want the material for the impeachment inquiry.
Why Trump’s Impeachment Might Be Different Than Clinton’s
In the fall of 1998, it seemed like President Clinton was in trouble. An investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr had uncovered an affair between the president and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. And after months of denials, Clinton finally admitted to having had “an inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky, which was then recounted in graphic detail in the report Starr sent to Congress. The affair and the president’s attempts to hide it were quickly denounced by Republicans and Democrats alike. In a speech on the Senate floor, then-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman said Clinton’s conduct was “disgraceful” and “immoral.” Just a few weeks later, the House voted to open an impeachment inquiry, with the support of 31 Democrats.
Months later, though, Clinton hadn’t just survived the impeachment process — he had managed to weather it with high approval ratings and the backing of his party. Despite bipartisan rumblings of displeasure with the president as the inquiry took off, public support never really coalesced behind impeachment, and the effort was ultimately perceived by many as a partisan attack by House Republicans bent on taking down a political opponent.
So as the Democrats plunge forward with their impeachment inquiry, Clinton’s failed impeachment looms as a cautionary tale. After all, no Republicans at this point have come out in support of an impeachment inquiry, which means Democrats will arguably have even more work to do to convince the public that the allegations against President Trump aren’t merely political. And although support for impeachment is on the upswing, it’s hard to predict if that will last — or if public opinion will just ossify along familiar partisan lines, as it did during Clinton’s impeachment.
It’s tempting to think of Trump’s impeachment as a sequel of sorts, but there are already signs that what’s happening today could unfold quite differently. For one thing, the case against Clinton hinged on the findings in Starr’s report. By contrast, today’s Democrats didn’t choose to orient their inquiry around findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that examined misconduct by Trump: They are instead building a case against the president in real time, which makes it harder to predict where the public will ultimately land.
And although there’s still a significant risk that the investigation will be perceived as partisan, the nature of the allegations against Trump are quite different. Many Americans saw Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky as a “private matter,” but Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is much more clearly tied to his role as commander-in-chief. So it’s entirely possible that the public will be less forgiving this time.
At that moment, support for impeachment seemed like it might be on the upswing. A Gallup poll conducted in mid-October, just after the House voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry, found that 48 percent of the public supported the decision to hold hearings. But as the chart below shows, support for impeachment didn’t continue to tick upward. In mid-December, when the House voted to impeach Clinton on two counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, just about 40 percent of the public continued to think he should be impeached — and the same was true in February, when the Senate voted to acquit him.
This didn’t stop Republicans from raking Clinton over the coals in the lead-up to the 1998 midterm elections, though. That’s perhaps because there was one segment of the public that did see an uptick in support for impeachment — Republican voters. In mid-August 1998, an ABC News poll found that only 38 percent of Republicans thought Clinton should be impeached and removed from office. But by the time the House had voted to impeach him, about two-thirds of Republicans were on board. The GOP’s attacks, though, didn’t seem to have the effect of boosting overall support for impeachment; if anything, it just resulted in a widening partisan divide.
Clinton’s presidential approval ratings were also high when the scandal started to unravel, and they remained remarkably undented throughout the impeachment process. Approval of his job performance had been hovering between 60 and 70 percent through most of 1998, and with the exception of a small dip around the time the Starr report was released in September, they stayed above 60 percent. In fact, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of presidential approval, Clinton’s approval ratings hit 67 percent at the end of December 1998, just after he was impeached by the House. It was among the highest job approval ratings he received at any point in his administration.
There were other signs, too, that the public didn’t think Clinton should be removed from office. Republicans’ efforts to impeach Clinton appeared to be dramatically backfiring in real time — after running a slew of ads attacking Clinton in the lead-up to the midterms, they lost seats and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had been one of Clinton’s loudest critics, resigned the speakership.
That electoral loss has been woven, over the years, into a cautionary fable about the costs of impeachment without broad public support. But, of course, Clinton himself didn’t emerge unscathed — Americans generally disapproved of his handling of the scandal and questioned his integrity, and those sentiments may have hurt Democrats in the 2000 election. So while it’s difficult to evaluate whether the Republicans or the Democrats paid more of a price in the long term, the impeachment process clearly left a mark on both.
Some Democrats were unhappy with Clinton, but not enough to support impeachment
It wasn’t always clear that Democrats would stand by Clinton. Some distanced themselves from the president in the lead-up to the midterm elections; others even questioned whether he should resign. The initial vote to refer Starr’s report to the House Judiciary Committee for further investigation passed by an overwhelming margin. And when the House voted a few weeks later to open a formal impeachment inquiry, 31 moderate Democrats were in support. “Many Democrats were angry and frustrated that their leader had lied to them,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “That softened them to the idea of at least having an investigation.”
But after a fairly brief period, the House was divided once again into familiar partisan camps. By the time the House voted on the articles of impeachment against Clinton just five Democrats voted to impeach the president. And when it was the Senate’s turn to decide whether Clinton should remain in office, only Republicans crossed the aisle, with 10 GOP senators voting to acquit Clinton on at least one of the charges.
Why did Democrats fall in line behind Clinton? The Republicans’ aggressive pursuit of impeachment — even in the absence of a clear public consensus — may have pushed Democrats to close ranks. “A significant number of Democrats thought there should be some consequence for Clinton’s behavior, like a formal censure vote,” said Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at Columbia University and the coauthor of “Impeachment: A Handbook.” “But when it became clear that the Republicans were just going for impeachment, they became much more defensive.”
Clinton also did damage control of his own. After first trying to quickly move past the scandal, he delivered an extravagant apology for his conducton the day Starr’s report was released, saying he had “sinned” and “repented.” That apparent contrition may have helped some Democrats rally around him, although others remained angry with him throughout the process. As late as February, Sen. Dianne Feinstein — who months earlier had said her confidence in Clinton’s credibility was “shattered” by the revelation of the affair — pushed for a bipartisan vote in the Senate to censure Clinton. But as upset as Democrats might have been with Clinton for having the affair, or for trying to conceal it, they continued to support the president, bolstered by the fact that public opinion was largely on their side.
“By the end, very few Democrats, even if they disliked Clinton, were willing to say his behavior was worthy of impeachment,” Zelizer said. “And many Republicans in the Senate had the same misgivings.”
It’s dangerous to draw too many parallels between what happened then and what’s occurring in Congress now. For one thing, the Democrats are still in the early stages of their inquiry. But experts told me that there are some lessons for today’s Democrats in the story of Clinton’s impeachment.
First, there is the risk that, like the Republicans in Clinton’s impeachment, the Democrats’ investigation into Trump could be seen primarily as an attack on a political adversary. Starr’s investigation was seen as politically motivated, and the Republicans relied almost entirely on his findings, without trying to marshal evidence of their own. “This was a process that was perceived as partisan and rushed, with very few hearings and no revelation more shocking than the fact that the president had lied,” Zelizer said. And when House Republicans pressed ahead — even after it was clear from public opinion polls and the results of the 1998 midterms that much of the public just wasn’t convinced by their arguments — it only reinforced the perception that their true motivation was to hurt Clinton.
Some of these risks are obviously present for Democrats today. With no committed Republican support so far, it’s very difficult to argue that there aren’t partisan elements to the investigation. And as with the Clinton impeachment, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided about the president’s conduct, which could make it difficult to build a true consensus around impeachment.
The Democrats’ inquiry is different, though, in that they don’t have a completed investigation like Starr’s. Democrats had an opportunity to frame an impeachment inquiry around a completed special counsel investigation after the exhaustive findings in Mueller’s report became public, but only moved forward with impeachment after the Ukraine allegations presented a new scandal and an evolving set of facts to pursue. As a result, they may be able to avoid (or at least mitigate) the perception that they were just looking for an excuse to impeach Trump, especially as new evidence continues to emerge.
And while the allegations against Clinton were personal and moral, the conduct at issue in Trump’s case is much more closely linked to his power as president, which could mean the public will be less inclined to dismiss it as human error. “With Clinton I think a lot of people looked at themselves in a mirror and said, ‘You know, I’d lie about my affair too,’” said Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University. “Pressuring a foreign power to investigate a political adversary is a lot less relatable.”
It’s too early to say whether any of these parallels will hold true. But while the risks are certainly there, the Democrats are still building their case. And they also have this history as a guide — which means they may be able to avoid some of their predecessors’ mistakes, rather than repeating them.
Trumpvs.
Biden
Sanders
Warren
