Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a each day political evaluation of the 2020 elections primarily based on reporting by New York Occasions j
Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a each day political evaluation of the 2020 elections primarily based on reporting by New York Occasions journalists.
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The place issues stand
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In a name with President Trump yesterday, governors raised issues in regards to the restricted availability of coronavirus check kits. However he wasn’t notably receptive. When Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana and a Democratic candidate for the Senate, informed Trump that his state was on the verge of working out of assessments, Trump replied that he had not “heard about testing being an issue.” The New York Occasions and different information shops have repeatedly confirmed that many nervous Individuals who’ve signs of the virus are struggling to get examined. Trump has lately taken to highlighting the truth that the US has examined extra individuals than some other nation — although it doesn’t have practically the very best testing fee per capita.
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There’s one thing of a Democratic magnificence contest enjoying out between Joe Biden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, regardless of the obvious needs of the blokes concerned. And Trump would like to preserve it going. In an interview with Fox Information, he gave the impression to be goading Cuomo into an unbelievable last-minute problem to Biden for the presidential nomination. “If he’s going to run, that’s nice, I’ve identified Andrew for a very long time,” Trump mentioned. “I feel he’d be a greater candidate than Sleepy Joe.” With the presidential race overshadowed by coronavirus protection, the concept Cuomo may tackle Biden has turn into the closest that many individuals’s minds get nowadays to interested by the nomination combat.
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Certainly, in his each day remarks to reporters on Monday, Cuomo appeared to show his consideration from New York to the nation at giant. “You see this virus transfer throughout the state, you see the virus transfer throughout this nation,” he mentioned. “There isn’t a American who’s resistant to this virus. I don’t care when you reside in Kansas, I don’t care when you reside in Texas.” Biden’s few latest tv appearances, in the meantime, have earned combined critiques. He has typically minimize himself off or provided complicated statements, as Fox Information has zealously reported.
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Along with endangering well being professionals, the coronavirus and its results are falling particularly onerous on the poorest Individuals, notably these in cities. In neighborhoods the place many well being care and repair trade employees reside, the compulsory use of public transportation places a disproportionate quantity in danger: A Occasions evaluation discovered that whereas public transit use has fallen drastically in hard-hit New York Metropolis, it has tended to stay at larger ranges in a few of the least rich areas, with heavy concentrations of nonwhite residents.
President Trump inspected a coronavirus testing equipment throughout Monday’s briefing on the White Home.
Biden trails Trump badly in fund-raising. And now’s a tricky time to catch up.
Plenty of us have loads of time to be on the cellphone nowadays. Biden — who’s holed up in Delaware — isn’t any exception. And, as Shane Goldmacher reports in a just-published article, Biden “is working the phones with top donors while cloistered” at home.
He’s seeking to make up ground after a grueling primary season in which he failed to match the fund-raising levels of most major rivals. And Trump, who’s waiting for him in the general election, has vastly more cash on hand than Biden.
We spoke to Shane about the difficulties of asking people for contributions during a pandemic, and how Biden’s fund-raising team is trying to meet the moment.
Take us back to early to mid-March: Where was the Biden campaign, just before the coronavirus ground everything to a halt? Unless I’m mistaken, Biden had a lot of momentum but he did not exactly have the most impressive fund-raising operation of 2020. Did he think he was on the cusp of a financial breakthrough before the virus hit?
What does the average day look like right now for Biden? You mention in your article that he’s doing a lot of fund-raising calls, and we haven’t been seeing him on TV nearly as much as Trump or even, say, Cuomo. Would you say calls to donors are his highest priority now?
The Biden campaign has been mum on his fund-raising since March 15, but donations to all Democrats on ActBlue have really slowed in the past two weeks, as I report in today’s article. And while Biden has not been on TV as much as Trump, his campaign did recently install a studio in his home and he has regularly made news media appearances: an MSNBC hit on Monday, “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a CNN virtual town hall last week. He has been calling donors, too. I wouldn’t say that’s his highest priority, but his status as the prohibitive favorite to be the Democratic nominee means all the donors to his old rivals are now available to him.
It’s got to be a tough time to call someone — even a wealthy person — and ask for money. Are people still making these calls?
Some are. Some aren’t. I spoke with multiple fund-raisers who said they had other priorities now, whether philanthropic or personal or their own businesses. But others said that what they saw as Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak had made the need to remove him even clearer, and that money was still flowing in.
You point out in the article that Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are sitting on about 10 times as much cash as Biden and the Democrats. How did the G.O.P. gain such a big advantage this year? And a follow-up: Do Trump’s fund-raising tactics seem better positioned than Biden’s to bear results in a quarantine?
The short answer is time. Trump started stashing away money for his re-election in 2017, and he and the party have taken advantage of rules that let him raise funds in far bigger chunks with shared committees with the Republican National Committee. Biden, who’s not yet the Democratic nominee, does not have such a joint committee. It’s hard to say who is better positioned going forward — there has never been a simultaneous pandemic and an economic downturn in modern times — but Trump no doubt begins with a huge financial head start.
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