In the grand American tradition of sticking to Republican leaders during crises of the party’s making, voters appear inclined to trust President Trump’s handling of the growing covid-19 pandemic over Joe Biden, the prospective Democratic nominee for president.
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday, voters would much prefer former President Obama to handle the covid-19 crisis, so they haven’t completely lost their minds. However, a plurality of voters believe that Trump is better suited to handle covid-19 than Biden.
From Politico:
By an 8-point margin, more voters picked Trump (44 percent) as a better leader during the crisis than Biden (36 percent), though voters were split evenly in the survey when asked whom they would trust to handle the issue.
But at the same time, they don’t believe Trump has done enough:
…the poll shows an uptick in the percentage of voters who say the Trump administration hasn’t done enough to combat the coronavirus. In the new poll, 50 percent say the administration hasn’t done enough, up 7 points over the past three weeks. Only 38 percent of voters say the administration is doing the right amount, while 4 percent say it is doing too much.
So let’s see: Americans are increasingly losing their faith in Trump to lead them through a horror show, which has led to over 5,400 deaths nationally, thanks, in part, to a lack of preparedness on the federal level–but they’re also more likely to believe that his shit leadership would be better than Biden’s. Okay, got it, good. Great. Fantastic.
If this trend continues, we’re even more fucked than we thought we were.
While progressives mourn the end of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, some former Hillary Clinton staffers were ready to party it the fuck up. At least, they were going to on a big ol’ Zoom call Wednesday afternoon, until it was abruptly canceled a couple of hours later.
Buzzfeed News reports that dozens of former Clinton staffers received an email that read “Invitation: Bye, bye Bernard (HFA celebration toast).” The email went on to say, “He’s finally gone (again!). Join for a celebratory toast if you can! And yes, you can loop :).” The Zoom chat was later renamed to be a touch less gloating: “HFA end of primary celebration toast.”
From Buzzfeed:
The Democratic operatives who lived through 2016 joke, somewhat bitterly, about the primary that never ended — a one-on-one race between two candidates, and campaign teams, who didn’t particularly respect or like one another.
[…]
The latest, last gasp of animosity took the form of a 4 p.m. video call in the middle of a pandemic that has turned would-be private toasts and impromptu early afternoon drinks into open calendar invites and Zoom conference calls.
The invite, which made the rounds among groups of friends who worked for Clinton in 2016, spanned a fraction of the “Hillary for America” team, known internally as HFA — an operation that numbered thousands of people by the end of the 2016 race. The organizer of the Zoom call encouraged friends and former colleagues to “loop” in others.
I, too, love to cheer the end of a campaign based on making sure everyone had health insurance!
In all seriousness, primaries are full of petty bullshit. This was just another morsel of it before pivoting to general election mode.
- In GET ME OFF THIS FUCKING PLANET news, an intelligence report warned of novel coronavirus comeback in November 2019. [ABC]
- Cash strapped National Rifle Association laid off 60 employees. [Politico]
- It turns out that relying on corporations to generously create supplies necessary to fight coronavirus isn’t the genius idea the Trump administration billed it as, because people keep fucking up. [Wall Street Journal]
- Covid-19 is making its way through rural America. [New York Times]
- The stock market went up after Sanders dropped out of the primary race. [NBC]
- Melania Trump emerged from her hidey hole: