Cnn Projection: Crist Will Win Democratic Nomination For Florida Governor And Face Desantis In November
Rep. Charlie Crist will win the Democratic nomination for Florida governor, CNN projects, and face incumbent Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in November.
Crist defeated Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in the primary. He is a former Republican governor of the Sunshine State who switched parties and now serves in Congress as a Democrat.
Crist was elected governor as a Republican in 2006, and then ran for Senate as an independent in 2010, losing to Republican Marco Rubio. Crist then ran for governor in 2014 as a Democrat and lost to now-Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican. Crist won his House seat as a Democrat in 2016.
Abortion emerged as a major issue in the Democratic primary, with Frieds campaign attacking Crists record on the issue and Crist responding with a TV ad. The two Democrats spent much of the race taking shots at DeSantis.
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Who Won The Presidential Debates
Donald Trump and Joe Biden went head-to-head in two live TV debates.
The first, on 29 September, was a chaotic affair, with Mr Trump’s combative approach stamping out any chance of a real debate.
A CBS News/YouGov poll taken straight afterwards suggested it was a good night for Mr Biden.
Of those who watched, 48% said Mr Biden was the winner while 41% went for Mr Trump – a similar split to national polling averages. Nearly 70% of people said the debate made them feel “annoyed”.
In the second debate, on 22 October, organisers introduced a mute button to help police the arguments.
But it was a much more restrained President Trump on show and there was a much greater focus on the policies of the two candidates.
While that seemed to help Mr Trump somewhat, snap polls still suggested viewers thought Mr Biden’s performance was more impressive.
A CNN poll found 53% of viewers thought the Democrat had done a better job in the debate, while 39% went with Mr Trump.
A YouGov snap poll was similar, with 54% saying Mr Biden had won compared to 35% for the president.
So while Mr Trump put in a better performance, it’s unlikely to have been enough to change the balance of the race on its own.
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Morris told The Post Tuesday the January 6th commission hearings will backfire massively.
There is a fiddling-while-Rome-burns quality to the hearings. Much ado and much distraction about nothing. The more attention the issue draws, the more it becomes apparent that the Democrats are not talking about the concerns that bedevil the average person high prices and inflation at the pump, he said.
Morris likened the Democrats obsession with Trump and the Jan. 6 protests to Republicans in Congress moving to impeach President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which hurt the GOP in the 1998 midterm elections because voters thought they made a mountain out of a molehill.
The book also was written before the Supreme Court rulings that tossed out restrictions on concealed guns, overturned the federal right to abortion and scrapped executive power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on power plants without congressional approval, which could galvanize Democrats to go to the polls.
I do not think any of this terms Supreme Court rulings will have an adverse effect on Trumps chances or those of the Republicans in 22 or 24, he said.
The abortion decision has the most potential impact but, since state laws remain in force, the impact is largely theoretical and when people see how it works out theyll see that very little has really changed.
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Here’s How We’ll Help You Figure Out If Trump Will Win
This is the first in a set of monthly check-ins we’ll publish as we approach the 2020 US election.
If 2020 has taught us nothing else, it’s that news events can upend our expectations and assumptions about the presidential race overnight.
So we’ll tackle this one month at a time, assessing Trump’s chances of being re-elected against some key metrics that the experts are watching closely to figure out that answer themselves.
There are three indicators we’ll be watching every month the strength of the US economy, national polling averages and the coronavirus pandemic.
They’re based on our conversations with three experts who have decades of experience predicting the outcomes of US presidential elections Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics, Charles Stewart, founding director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab and Allan Lichtman, who co-developed the Keys to the White House system of predicting American presidential elections.
These three indicators aren’t the only things that will determine if Trump will win in 2020 , but they’re some of the most important that’ll help you get a handle on where the race is at a glance.
In this first edition, we’ll explain why each is important, and where they stand as of July 2020.
Starting with
Pivot Counties In The 2020 Presidential Election
Pivot Counties are the 206 counties nationwide Ballotpedia identified as having voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections and Donald Trump in 2016. Media and political observers sometimes refer to these counties as swing counties.
There were:
- 181 Retained Pivot Counties across 32 states: Trump won these counties with a median margin of victory of 13.2 percentage points.
- 25 Boomerang Pivot Counties across 16 states: Biden won these counties with a median margin of victory of 3.4 percentage points.
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Trump Needs Another Batch Of Electoral Votes From Contests Where Biden Has Bigger Leads To Put Him Over The Top
If all those states where Biden leads by about 1 to 3 points do end up flipping to Trump but Biden wins everywhere polls show him up by more this is what the map would look like. Trump is still 11 electoral votes short of victory.
So a generalized polling error of 3 points wouldnt be enough for Trump. He also needs to come up with 11 electoral votes from places where Bidens lead is bigger.
Heres the next tier of competitive states, per FiveThirtyEights polling averages on October 28:
- Minnesota : Biden +9.1
The clearest opportunity for a clean win for Trump is in Pennsylvania which is the closest of these states and has the most electoral votes of them.
Trump, of course, won Pennsylvania last time. But polls in 2016 didnt show him behind by as much as he is now.
If Trump loses Pennsylvania, his path to victory is more challenging. Nevada is polling almost as close as Pennsylvania, but its a small state with just six electoral votes at stake, so Trump would need to win somewhere else as well to get the 11 electoral votes he needs.
Winning just Michigan would get Trump over the top, but Bidens poll lead is 8.3 percentage points there. Winning just Wisconsin or just Minnesota would get Trump to 269 electoral votes, but if he doesnt win Nebraskas Second District as well, then the election would be tied at 269-269 and would be decided by the House of Representatives.
A Closer Look At State Judges Votes Favoring Trumps Claims
Intermediate appellate courts
All six votes that state intermediate appellate court judges cast for Trump came from Republican-affiliated judges, five of them on Pennsylvanias Commonwealth Court, one of that states two intermediate appellate courts. Most were dissenting votes, but in one dispositive rulingTrump v. Boockvar, Nov. 12, 2020the then-president of that court, sitting alone, set aside a small number of votes based on flawed guidance regarding a deadline for verifying voter identification. This is apparently the one frequently cited Trump litigation victory.
State supreme courts
Twenty-one of the 27 Trump-favorable votes came from dissents on the seven-member supreme courts of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania10 cases in all. Trump lost all 10. All but one were split decisionsfive of the 10 were four-to-threelargely but not exclusively along party-affiliation lines. Democratic-identified justices cast 35 of the 49 votes against Trump, Republican-identified justices cast 20 of the 21 pro-Trump votes.
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Can We Trust The Polls
Can we believe the polls this time?
It’s easy to dismiss the polls by saying they got it wrong in 2016 and President Trump frequently does exactly that. But it’s not entirely true.
Most national polls did have Hillary Clinton ahead by a few percentage points, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong, since she won three million more votes than her rival.
Pollsters did have some problems in 2016 – notably a failure to properly represent voters without a college degree – meaning Mr Trump’s advantage in some key battleground states wasn’t spotted until late in the race, if at all. Most polling companies have corrected this now.
But this year there’s even more uncertainty than normal due to the coronavirus pandemic and the effect it’s having on both the economy and how people will vote in November, so all polls should be read with some scepticism.
‘america Is In A Very Fragile Position’
Earlier, outside town, a pickup truck had kicked up dust plumes, rising as high as a barn, and a sign, just off route 69, said: “Vote – remove every Democrat.”
Johnson does not think Democrats should be in charge: “With there being questions in the election, it makes me question everything they stand for.”
He raises calves like his father did – and the way he hopes his two-year-old son, Monroe, will someday – and fears Democrats will sabotage the cattle industry.
“With all the rules that the Biden presidency wants to enforce on us, it makes me wonder – is my lifestyle going to be a viable one for my son, as it was for my dad, and to me?” he says.
Their wariness of the electoral process could lead to a deeper divide in the US, with some believing in the Biden White House and others rejecting it.
“America is in a very fragile position,” says Edward Foley, an election law scholar at Ohio State University in Columbus. He describes mistrust of the electoral process as “a real challenge to the very premise of the system”.
Foley recalls another moment in history when a battle broke out over an election. In 2000, the Republican candidate, George W Bush, won Florida, and its electoral votes, by a narrow 537 votes, clinching the election. Supporters of his Democratic rival, Al Gore, were distraught.
Today, however, Trump and his allies have cast serious doubt on Biden’s victory.
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What May Be Ahead
Clashes over the judicial response to Trumps claims may be part of upcoming judicial elections, including efforts to seat more judges who would be receptive to fraud claims. An October 2021 Wall Street Journal editorial supporting a Republican candidate for an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat argued, After Pennsylvanias 2020 election mess, the state Supreme Court needs an injection of judicial restraint.
By a rough count, about half of the 43 state supreme court justices who considered Trumps post-election claims are slated to appear before voters by 2026years likely covering the next presidential election and post-election litigation. Candidates will be free, under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court , to tell voters how they view judges roles in election disputes and their views of the 2020 litigation.
Election volitivity could be enhanced if Trump, unlike during the recent litigation cycle, injects himself into campaigns to unseat judges who rejected, or express skepticism about, election fraud claims.
In short, although Trump clearly lost the 2020 election litigation battle, he received more judicial support than generally realized. That and other factors may suggest rosier prospects for him in court battles over the 2024 election.
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Trumps Judicial Campaign To Upend The 2020 Election: A Failure But Not A Wipe
One sign of a healthy democracy is a judiciary that applies the law independently, even in cases involving powerful partisan interests. When President Donald Trump tried to enlist the courts in his campaign to overturn the results of the election, state and federal judges applied the law as they understood it. They did so despite Trumpshistory of lashing out at judges who crossed him during his 2016 campaign and later.
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Pressure On State And Local Officials
As the Trump campaign’s lawsuits were repeatedly rejected in court, Trump personally communicated with Republican local and state officials in at least three states, including state legislators, attorneys general, and governors who had supported him in the general election and continued to support him. He pressured them to overturn the election results in their states by recounting votes, throwing out certain votes, or getting the state legislature to replace the elected Democratic slate of Electoral College members with a Republican slate of electors chosen by the legislature. In late November, he personally phoned Republican members of two county electoral boards in Michigan, trying to get them to reverse their certification of the result in their county. He then invited members of the Michigan state legislature to the White House, where they declined his suggestion that they choose a new slate of electors. He repeatedly spoke to the Republican governor of Georgia and the secretary of state, demanding that they reverse their state’s election results, threatening them with political retaliation when they did not, strongly criticizing them in speeches and tweets, and demanding that the governor resign.
The Claim: President Donald Trump Won The 2020 Election
Weeks after the bitterly fought presidential race ended with the naming of Joe Biden as the projected winner over President Donald Trump, some are still claiming a victor can not yet be named.
President Trump won and the world is starting to see! Fight on Patriots to #Victory! a Nov. 29 reads. The user who made the post did not respond to USA TODAYs request for comment.
That same claim has been promoted by the president himself, who has not yet conceded the election to Biden.
NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION! Trump tweeted Nov. 29, along with a video of his supporters.
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‘blue Wall’ Rebuilt With Suburban Votes
Trump suggested throughout his campaign that Biden would “destroy the beautiful suburbs,” but it turned out many suburbanites disagreed.
Biden won back a number of crucial Midwest states that Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 largely thanks to suburban voters. The cluster of historically Democrat-won states, dubbed the blue wall, include three of the five major battleground states this election cycle.
“We saw a consistent pattern across the country, in both close states and states that weren’t so close, that Biden made significant strides compared to Clinton’s performance four years ago in suburbs, predominantly affluent suburbs, of major metro areas,” Wasserman said.
In Wisconsin, the divide between the state’s rural and urban populations was defined, as 42 Wisconsin counties, many small and rural, cast more ballots for Trump than in 2016. Biden won Wisconsin by bolstering support in the populous suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison, despite average turnout in the cities themselves. Biden erased Trump’s entire 2016 margin in Wisconsin in just the counties surrounding Milwaukee, Wasserman said.
That same divide made Michigan competitive. Biden made gains in counties like Kent, where Grand Rapids is located, and the Detroit metropolitan area, though he underperformed Clinton in the city of Detroit. Trump improved his margins statewide, but not enough to surpass Bidens lead.
Fact check:Biden won popular, Electoral College votes in several battleground states
Uae Cancels All Western Sanctions On Iranian Russian And Venezuelan Oil
Biden has performed better than Clinton but has not been able to do enough to secure a clear victory. Now, by election night Bidens tally stood at 238, but numbers simply dont add up for him and the 270-mark remains elusive.
The only two states which Biden seems to be grabbing from here are Nevada and Wisconsin with six and ten electors respectively. In Nevada, sixty-seven per cent reporting has happened till now. Though Biden does enjoy a lead of little more than two per cent over Trump in Nevada, fortunes might still swing the US Presidents way when rest of the votes are counted.
On the other hand, Wisconsin is witnessing a tight contest. 95 per cent reporting has happened till now, but Biden is leading by a small margin.
But for Trump, there are a number of other options. The US Presidents tally currently stands at 213 electors and can add up as many as 70 more, cruising past the 270-mark required for re-election as the President of the United States of America. Trump is leading in five states- North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Trump is winning comfortably in North Carolina with 15 electors, and Georgia with 16 electors. 94 per cent reporting has taken place in both these states, and Trump is leading in both of them. These two states are likely to give Trump another 31 electors.
As such the mystery behind US Presidential polls seems to be coming to an end and it seems that it is going to be a second term for Trump with a handsome lead.
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Talking Transitions: Perspectives For First
This three-hour event investigated a key moment in every presidency
The Miller Center joined the Partnership for Pubic Services Center for Presidential Transition to explore safe and effective presidential transition to first-term and second-term administrations. The event featured perspectives on transition planning, managing transitions during crises, and the complexities of shifting from campaigning to governing. Appearing were experts such as Joshua Bolten, Andy Card, Denis McDonough, Mack McLarty, Stephen Hadley, Lisa Monaco, John Podesta, Barbara Perry, Melody Barnes, Alexis Herman, Valerie Jarrett, Karen Hughes, and Margaret Spellings.
