Wisconsin: Jay Schroeder And Amy Loudenbeck
Unlike in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, in Wisconsin the secretary of state does not oversee elections. That responsibility belongs to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the bipartisan state agency created by Republicans.
Schroeder and Loudenbeck, however, have both called for the dismantling of the commission.
Both candidates have instead called for the secretary of states office to oversee and administer elections. In Wisconsin, that office has not had responsibility for elections since 1974. Changing that would require approval by the Republican-controlled Legislature and the governor. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has said he would not approve such changes, but he is up for re-election this fall, and all of his Republican opponents have vowed to abolish the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Other state Republicans have also aggressively criticized the agency following Bidens 2020 win in the state.
While Trump has not made an endorsement in the states Republican primary, hes been heavily involved in persuading other Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin to continue investigating the results of the 2020 election.
In an interview with NBC News, Schroeder, who was the Republican nominee for secretary of state in 2018, wouldnt acknowledge whether Biden won the state in 2020. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by 20,600 votes.
I wouldnt have signed off on the results, he said.
There would have to be proof, he said.
Explainer: What Election Deniers Could Do In 2024 If They Win Us November Midterms
Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano attends a rally held by former U.S. President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 3, 2022. ?REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo
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All back former President Donald Trump’s false claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Voting rights groups and many Democrats worry that if the candidates win their races in these midterm elections, they will be in key positions to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
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THE BIG THREE: ARIZONA, MICHIGAN AND PENNSYLVANIA
In most states the secretary of state oversees elections and certifies the presidential election result, while the governor certifies the winning candidate’s slate of presidential electors, who in the American election system are the mechanism for determining which candidate won a state.
Individual states send these elector votes, which represent the popular vote, to the U.S. Congress for certification, a vital step before a new president can be sworn in. It was that certification ceremony that Trump supporters disrupted during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Biden narrowly won these three battlegrounds in 2020.
In a May email to supporters, Finchem said that if he had been Arizona’s secretary of state in 2020, we would have won. Plain and simple.
Dem Senate Hopeful Attends Biden Event After Suggesting Prez Step Aside In 2024
If the next presidential election were held today, former President Donald Trump would defeat President Biden by six percentage points and Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points, according to a new poll.
The 45th president would unseat Biden by a 47% to 41% margin, according to the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll published by The Hill. However, 12% of voters are undecided.
Harris going up against Trump would produce an even worse result for Democrats 49% would vote for the former president compared to 38% for the veep.
Neither Trump nor Biden has officially thrown his hat into the 2024 ring, but both have hinted that they would run again.
The truth is I ran twice, I won twice and I just did better the second time. And now, we just might have to do it again, Trump told supporters at a rally in Georgia Saturday night.
Biden said last week that he would be very fortunate to face Trump again in 2024.
The next election, Id be very fortunate if I had that same man running against me, the president said during a news conference in Brussels on Thursday after meeting with NATO allies about the Ukraine invasion.
Biden defeated Trump in 2020 with 306 Electoral College votes to Trumps 232, winning the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won the popular vote count by more than 7 million.
If Biden, 79, and Trump, 75, opt not to run again, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the favorite to carry the GOP standard.
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John Hickenlooper Steve Bullock
Some Democrats will be tempted to look beyond the Beltway for a savior. Thus the appeal of a certain type of pragmatic governor.
John Hickenlooper, in his second term as Colorado governor, has built a solid economic record there while also instituting tough gun control laws and overseeing the smooth introduction of legalized marijuana. Hes also evinced a willingness for bipartisanship that has served him well in purple Colorado. Hes an offbeat enough character that its possible to see him catching fire.
Steve Bullock is a second-term governor in deep-red Montana, and hed cast himself as someone whod help Democrats broaden their electoral map beyond the coasts. Its not a bad sales pitch. But Mr. Bullock isnt much of a salesman. One joke making the rounds about him goes that if you close your eyes while hes speaking, you hear Evan Bayh.
National Polls Show Lower White And Older Support For Trump
Exit polls released by the national election consortium Edison Research allow for national- and state-level comparisons with those from 2016. Figure 1 shows the shifts in Democratic minus Republican voter margins for racial groups.
While whites continued to favor the Republican candidate in 2020as they have in every presidential election since 1968it is notable that this margin was reduced from 20% to 17% nationally. At the same time, the Democratic margins for each of the major nonwhite groups was somewhat reduced. The Black Democratic marginwhile still high, at 75%was the lowest in a presidential election since 2004. The Latino or Hispanic and Asian American Democratic margins of 33% and 27% were the lowest since the 2004 and 2008 elections, respectively. These shifts do not apply to all states, and are not applicable to most battleground states where voters of color were crucial to Bidens win
It is clear that white voting blocs start at different levels of Democratic or Republican support. In fact, there was a modest decline in Republican support in a key Trump base: white men without college educations. This group showed a reduced Republican advantage from 48% to a still sizeable 42% between 2016 and 2020.
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Voting Patterns In The 2020 Election
The 2020 election featured continuity in the voting patterns of major demographic and political groups in the population, but there were a few important shifts. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016 as Democrats made gains among men and Republicans made gains among women. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won men by 11 percentage points while Hillary Clinton won women by 15 points . In the 2018 election, Democrats substantially narrowed the gap with men while maintaining an 18-point lead among women. In the 2020 election, men again divided nearly evenly , while Bidens advantage narrowed to 11 points among women .
Similarly, as Biden increased his level of support among White men in the 2020 election relative to Clintons in 2016, Trump gained among White women, which had the effect of further narrowing the gender gap among White voters. In 2016, Trump won White men by 30 points . That gap narrowed to a 17-point margin for Trump in 2020 . White women, a group sometimes categorized as swing voters and who broke nearly evenly in 2016 , favored him in 2020 .
Biden received the support of 92% of Black voters, nearly the same as Clinton received in 2016 and Democratic candidates for the U.S. House received in 2018.
Party and ideology
Age and generation
Geography
Religion
White non-evangelical Protestants voted for Trump over Biden by a 14-point margin , while Black Protestants were an overwhelmingly Democratic group .
The Idea That Trumps Big Lie Is Hurting Himself Is A Convenient Myth
From time to time, a point of view will make its way from the mouths of official sources to the ears of reporters often enough that it takes on the status of official fact. One such claim you have probably come across is the belief that Donald Trump is sabotaging his own campaign by obsessing over the 2020 election.
Trump remains fixated on the stolen 2020 election notes an aside in Jonathan Swans harrowing report on Trumps plans to impose political discipline on the bureaucracy: He cannot stop talking about it, no matter how many allies advise him it would serve his political interests to move on. This notion often lurks in the background of political reporting on the Republican Party. Those Republicans who support Trump but are one step away from his inner circle find the scene that unfolded Tuesday night to be counterproductive, reports one typical passage in Politico. At a time when the ex-president could be focused on propelling the Republican Party toward the upcoming elections, Trump is still anchored down by conspiracies and anger over losing the last one.
You can already see this argument taking shape in the prospective Republican nominating contest. An aide to Mike Pence tells the Washington Post that the former veep would likely make the point that Trump is the only person who lost to Biden. For Trump to concede this point to admit to being a loser would be devastating to his candidacy. Thats why he cant concede it.
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The Party Needs To Stop Obsessing Over Moderate Swing Voters
The Democratic Party should stop focusing all of its attention on the small slice of white, Obama-Trump voters and do more to galvanize its young, diverse base, argues Melanye Price, a professor of political science at Prairie View A& M University in Texas, in The Times. Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats must appeal to the center, but an increasingly popular theory has emerged on the left tested in practice by progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter, who beat more conservative incumbents in 2018 that the party doesnt need to make such compromises if it can expand its pool of voters.
Ms. Price writes that by next November, seven million young people of color will have turned 18 since the 2016 election. These young, more progressive Americans could help the Democrats win in 2020, she writes, but not if the party ignores what they want by continuing to cater only to white swing voters:
Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress, and three political scientists, Jesse H. Rhodes, Brian F. Schaffner and Bernard L. Fraga, agree that the Democratic Partys focus on swing voters has come at the expense of other constituencies. Their analysis shows that while 9 percent of Obama 2012 voters went for Mr. Trump in 2016, 7 percent more than four million people stayed home, and 3 percent voted for a third-party candidate.
Abolish Machines End Mail Ballots Restrict Voting
Arizona’s Lake and Finchem, Michigan’s Karamo and Pennsylvania’s Mastriano all belong to a group founded in 2021 called the America First Secretary of State Coalition.
With extensive powers to potentially rewrite election rules, especially with the support of their Republican-controlled state legislatures, all four have signed on to the stated goals of the secretary of state coalition, which include: eliminating vote by mail, using just paper ballots, and restricting voting solely to Election Day, thus ending early voting.
Democrats accuse Republicans of crafting restrictions that diminish the clout of Black and other minorities who tend to vote for Democrats. Republican say they want to stamp out fraud although there is no evidence of widespread voting fraud in U.S. elections.
Lake, Finchem, Karamo and Mastriano also support ending the use of vote tabulation machines and replacing them with hand counts.
“I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via the secretary of state,” Mastriano declared during a March radio interview.
Lake, in Arizona, has appeared at events wielding a sledgehammer, which she says should be used on what she claims are fraudulent counting machines that tipped votes to Biden in 2020.
Voting experts say such moves will effectively disenfranchise millions of voters, especially low-income residents who lack the means to get to polls and who rely on mail-in voting and early voting.
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The Former President Remains A Potent Force In Republican Politics
- Losing Support: Nearly half of G.O.P. voters prefer someone other than Donald J. Trump for president in 2024, a Times/Siena College poll showed.
- Trump-Pence Split: An emerging rivalry between Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, his former vice president, reveals Republicans enduring divisions.
For Mr. Trump, bleeding that amount of Republican support would represent a sharp increase compared with the already troubling level of the partys vote he shed during his last race.
In 2020, 9 percent of Republicans voted for someone other than Mr. Trump, while Mr. Biden lost just 4 percent of Democrats, according to AP VoteCast, a large study of the 2020 electorate by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press.
Kenneth Abreu, a 62-year-old pharmaceutical executive from Pennsylvania, said he had voted Republican for three decades but would support Mr. Biden instead of voting again for Mr. Trump.
Unlike all these other people who believe every word he says, Im done, Mr. Abreu said. All the garbage hes been talking about, the lies, Jan. 6, the whole thing I just lost all respect for him.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Dwayne Johnson Oprah Winfrey
David Axelrod, Mr. Obamas political guru, likes to say that voters usually seek the remedy, not the replica of the incumbent. When you consider how much political logic has been turned on its head, perhaps Democrats will nominate a Trumpian figure of their own. Enter the Rock, who inspired the formation of a political action committee to support his presidential aspirations after he announced his intention to run for the White House .
Or what about Oprah Winfrey? Shes dipped her toe into politics before, backing Mr. Obama during the 2008 Democratic primaries. And after the conservative columnist John Podhoretz recently her the Democrats best hope in 2020 , Ms. Winfrey seemed open to the idea. She tweeted the article with the message to Mr. Podhoretz: Thanks for your vote of confidence!
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What Will It Take To Beat Trump In 2020
Despite his brash style, US presidents average approval ratings have steadily ticked up
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both campaigned for, and won, the White House on the watchword hope. What watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?
My suggestion: Soap.
Nearly three years into Donald Trumps presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse. It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled. Soiled by a president who, delivered a two-hour rant at a rally in Michigan the night he was impeached.
Who described his shakedown of Ukraine as perfect. Who extolled the worlds cruellest tyrant as someone who wrote me beautiful letters. We fell in love. Who abandoned vulnerable allies in Syria, then opted to maintain troops in the country only for oil. Who, barely a year before the El Paso massacre, demonised illegal immigrants who pour into and infest our country.
The list goes on, and most everyone feels it. In June, the Pew Research Centre published a survey on how the country sees the state of public discourse. The most striking finding: A 59 per cent majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says.
These numbers should devastate Trumps chances of reelection. But they dont, for three reasons.
Sanders Warren And Booker Also Beat Trump In Hypothetical 2020 Matchups
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Former Vice President Joe Biden would beat President Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2020 presidential race, a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling says.
Mr Biden who was active on the 2016 campaign trail supporting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would blow Mr Trump out of the water, beating him by 14 points in a hypothetical head-to-head race, the poll shows.
Hes not the only one, either. Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran a strong campaign against Ms Clinton for the Democratic nomination, would be the President by 13 points. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, and Cory Booker would also beat Mr Trump in hypothetical matchups, according to the poll.
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We Still Have Lots Of Time Before 2020
Election day for the 2020 election is still long ways off. It’s 1293 days to be exact. Trump knows that if he wants to win his re-election bid, he has to accomplish at least one major campaign promise. As loyal as his followers have been, if he doesn’t get anything done, he will have a lot of explaining to do if he wants to to be re-elected.President Trump promised he would get something “major” accomplished in the first 100 days.
So far, all he’s achieved a slew of executive orders.
Ted Cruz Trending
President Trump promised he would get something “major” accomplished in the first 100 days. So far, all he’s accomplished a slew of executive orders. It’s day number 92, so the POTUS only has a few days before his first 100 days are up.
