“Locking down doesn’t work! If it did, those two states would be doing better than Texas. Fauci said today that he’s concerned about states like Texas that skipped over certain things. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! We haven’t skipped over anything. The only thing I’m skipping over is listening to him… He has been wrong every time on every issue. I don’t need his advice anymore.”
— Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), on Fox News.
“Hundreds of officials who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush are set to endorse Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden, people involved in the effort said, the latest Republican-led group coming out to oppose the re-election of Donald Trump,” Reuters reports.
“The officials, who include Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration, have formed a political action committee – 43 Alumni for Biden – to support the former vice president in his Nov. 3 race.”
President Trump claimed that reports about suspected Russian bounties on coalition forces in Afghanistan were a “hoax” meant to damage him politically.
Said Trump: “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited New York Times has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!”
David Wasserman: “When President Trump took office in January 2017, there were 241 Republicans in the House. Since then, 115 (48%) have either retired, resigned, been defeated or are retiring in 2020.”
Lauren Boebert’s (R) unexpected primary victory last night in Colorado “will probably lead Democrats to put more emphasis on the race to try to snatch a Republican seat. The winner of the Democratic primary was Diane Mitsch Bush (D), a former State House member who lost to Mr. Tipton in 2018,” the New York Times reports.
“Democrats immediately went on the attack against Ms. Boebert on Tuesday night for her refusal to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, which holds that ‘deep state’ traitors are plotting against Donald Trump.”
Said Boebert last month of QAnon: “I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values, and that’s what I am for.”
“Senility is becoming an overt line of attack for the first time in a modern U.S. presidential campaign,” Axios reports.
“As President Trump ramps up insinuations that his general election rival is doddering, Joe Biden turned the tables on Tuesday, saying Trump ‘doesn’t seem to be cognitively aware of what’s going on’ with his own briefings about Russia and U.S. service members.”
“President Trump’s campaign has been trying to paint Joe Biden as a stooge for the far left. A new poll shows why it’s not working,” Politico reports.
“Only 17% of registered voters perceive the former vice president as more liberal than most Democrats, according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey, while nearly two-thirds see him as in line with or more conservative than the party at large. The survey also found that a larger proportion of the electorate views Biden as moderate (23%) than see Trump that way (9%).”
“Oklahoma voters on Tuesday narrowly approved a ballot measure to extend Medicaid to tens of thousands of poor adults, making their state the first to expand government-backed health insurance during the pandemic,” Politico reports.
Jonathan Bernstein: “This will leave only 13 states that have failed to adopt it. Obamacare is only moderately popular, but the Medicaid expansion is simply a great deal for states, and most importantly it’s a one-way street: No state that has accepted it has since revoked it. So the most likely outcome is that, eventually, Wisconsin and North Carolina and Florida and even Texas will have some combination of circumstances that make it happen. And once they’ve added the expansion, the change will likely stick.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds President Trump’s approval rate at 39% to 59%.
The poll found sinking voter optimism as well, with only a quarter of voters responding that the country is headed in the right direction, while 75 percent said things had “pretty seriously” gotten off on the wrong track — a record high for the Trump presidency.
President Trump falsely accused Joe Biden of pre-screening questions at a press conference Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware.
But two reporters at the press conference who spoke to the Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity said the campaign had not pre-screened questions.
President Trump threatened to veto the defense authorization bill—unless a requirement in it to rename U.S. military bases that honor Confederate leaders is dropped, CNN reports.
The legislation funds the Pentagon and is often one of the few pieces of legislation that Congress can be counted on to pass each year in order to fund the country’s military operations.
Associated Press: “They didn’t like it when then-candidate Donald Trump criticized John McCain for being captured in combat. They were angrier when Trump, as commander in chief, abandoned Kurdish allies in the Middle East. And they were upset again last month when he threatened to deploy troops against American protesters.”
“Trump’s relationship with the nation’s military community has been frequently strained. But just four months before the November election, reports that he either ignored, or was unaware of, a Russian plot to kill U.S. troops could intensify the tension and create new political risks.”
Rep. Scott Tipton, a solid conservative, 5-term incumbent, endorsed by President Trump, has conceded in Tuesday’s Republican primary to Lauren Boebert, CBS Denver reports.
Colorado Sun: “Boebert ran a campaign bashing Tipton for not being conservative enough and claiming she was the more Trump-friendly candidate despite the president’s repeated support of the congressman.”
“The Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee has called Colorado’s 3rd District a pickup opportunity, but hasn’t invested money there to back up that declaration… Now, with Tipton apparently out of the way, the DCCC was signaling Tuesday night that they are ready to step in.”
New York Times: “More than 47,000 coronavirus cases were announced across the United States on Tuesday, the most of any day of the pandemic. Officials in eight states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — also announced single-day highs.”
“The number of new cases in the United States has shot up by 80 percent in the past two weeks.”
John Hickenlooper (D) overcame a rocky month to defeat Andrew Romanoff (D) in a Democratic U.S. Senate primary, setting the stage for a November faceoff with Sen. Cory Gardner (R), the Denver Post reports.
“Michael Glassner, the man who organizes President Trump’s rallies, has been ‘reassigned,’ and Trump’s 2016 Arizona chair Jeff DeWit will join the campaign as chief operating officer to oversee the final stretch to election day,” Axios reports.
“Jared Kushner engineered these moves. Glassner, a Trump campaign original dating back to 2015, has been told he will now be handling the campaign’s various lawsuits.”
Politico: “Criticizing Trump is not new for Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican. But she has increasingly called out Trump over his foreign policy decisions and leadership during the coronavirus crisis — a risky move in today’s GOP, where any break with Trump can fuel a primary challenge or nasty Twitter tirade from the president.”
“But Cheney’s found a balancing act that few Republicans have been able to achieve. And as the prospect of a post-Trump GOP begins to come into view, her relative independence from the president could position her for another rapid rise in party leadership.”
Politico: “Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and counselor to the president Hope Hicks are among the aides arguing against these regular sessions because they want to keep the White House focused on the path forward and the nascent economic recovery — without scaring too much of the country about a virus resurgence when infections are rising at different paces in different regions.”
“Other senior aides, as well as Vice President Mike Pence and his team, believe keeping Americans up-to-date about the nature of the outbreak is critical as the death toll rises. More than 126,000 people have perished in the U.S. due to the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the government’s own experts are warning of serious trouble ahead.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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