Battleground Bungle

Poor Donald Trump.  He's long had the ability to travel to election-battleground states that Joe Biden has lacked, but he doesn't seem to get any mileage out of the visits to such states that he's made this month.

In the first full week of May, Trump toured a factory in Arizona making N95 masks to fight COVID-19 while not wearing a mask himself.  As he toured the factory, Guns N' Roses' 1991 cover of Paul McCartney and Wings' "Live and Let Die," the theme song for the James Bond movie of the same name, blared on the loudspeaker.

Biden is ahead of Trump by seven percentage points in Arizona in one poll.

A week later, at a protective-equipment warehouse in Pennsylvania, Trump - again, unmasked - said that testing, a tactic to fight the virus that theoretically could reduce the need for masks, is "overrated."

Biden is ahead of Trump by nine percentage points in Pennsylvania in one poll.

Last week, in Michigan - you already know about this - Trump praised Henry Ford's bloodlines, ignoring the anti-Semitic history of the founder of the car company now run by his great-grandson, the same company now getting rid of fuel-efficient cars in America to push more pickup trucks an monster wagons - after getting into a fight with the state's governor and secretary of state, both women, over mail-in voting.

Biden is ahead of Trump by six percentage points in Michigan in one poll.

This past Wednesday, Trump traveled to Florida to witness the historic launch of the SpaceX rocket ship to send astronauts to the International Space Station.  The launch was called off due to bad weather.  The SpaceX launch was achieved successfully yesterday, and Trump did attend, but getting it right the second time isn't the same thing as getting it right the first time.  Also, Trump used the occasion of the launch to lash out at "anarchists" in the civil-rights protests of the past week.

Biden is ahead of Trump by five percentage points in Florida in one poll.

Oh, this ever-changing world in which we live in . . .. :-D

The Biden Map

With Delaware's governor set to lift the COVID-19-based stay-at-home order this coming Monday (June 1), Joe Biden may finally be a free man, with the ability to make the public campaign appearances he so obviously loves and gets energy from.  But the Biden campaign is still focused on expanding its digital operations, where Trump currently holds an advantage.  Biden is not only looking to hold on to key "battleground" states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and take back the blue firewall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin but also attempt to make inroads in other states Trump won more comfortably than the blue firewall states and also in states where Hillary Clinton had no chance at all - but she went for them anyway.  Biden's electoral battleground map below should explain it.

All of the states in color are states where Biden is ahead or competitive in the polls.  The dark blue states are the states the Democrats won in 2016 - barely, in some cases, as in Minnesota - that Biden hopes to hold onto.  The light blue states are states unsuccessfully targeted by the Democrats in 2016 that Biden hopes to fight more vigorously in.  The lavender states are solidly Republican states where Trump is slipping and where Biden has the outside chance Hillary Clinton thought she had, based on current polling.  Arizona, which is becoming more bipartisan, is no surprise, and Florida isn't either.  But look at Texas, will ya?  Trump is actually beating Biden by only a few points there, which means that Trump is vulnerable in the Lone Star State. And even though it's not targeted on his map, he's only a couple of points behind Trump in Republican Utah - Utah, the Mormon homeland, perhaps the most socially conservative theocracy west of Iran.  Now that's news. 

The diagonal-line states of Maine and Nebraska are targeted for their awarding of only two electoral votes on a statewide winner-take-all basis, the other electoral votes awarded based on who carries which U.S. House district.  Trump will likely win Nebraska's two electors representing the state, of course, but with three House districts each choosing one elector, Biden can possibly pick off one elector in the Democratic-friendly Omaha-based district, as Barack Obama did in 2008.  And I have a feeling that Biden's looking to sweep Maine.

I got this map in an e-mail from the Biden campaign asking for donations.  I'm not giving away campaign secrets here; the Trump campaign is obviously looking at the same map and the same polls.  And I'm sure the Trump campaign recognizes what Biden has to do as much as the Biden campaign folks themselves.

"Every organizer we're able to put to work in these critical battleground states translates to more votes for Joe Biden on Election Day," the Biden campaign explained in its e-mail.  "And we're working on developing innovative ways for organizers to reach out to voters safely, allowing us to champion social distancing standards as long as we need to while not sacrificing any of the groundwork we need to do.  We’re not taking a single vote for granted, so we've got to make sure every voter in every state on this map hears directly from someone on our campaign about Joe's plans for our country."

Biden has his work cut out for him despite his consistent leads in the polls over the past couple of months.  He may have survived Burisma and his son Hunter's involvement in that, and he may have even survived the Tara Reade story (though far too many people seem to believe Reade, including the increasingly insufferable congresswomen known as the Squad), but now he has to deal with doubts among black voters, and Bernie bros still won't give him any quarter (or quarters - 97 percent of Sanders supporters have failed to donate money to the Biden campaign).  However, Biden's overall strategy and his increasingly liberal policy positions (made possible by a pandemic) show that he is taking this campaign far more seriously than one might think.