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You are here: Home / Archives for 2020 Campaign

Bush Wrote In Condoleeza Rice on His 2020 Ballot

April 22, 2021 at 9:51 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Former President George W. Bush told People magazine that he wrote in former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for president in the 2020 election.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Rural Whites Stayed Home for Georgia Runoffs

April 22, 2021 at 8:48 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“A new analysis of demographic data from Georgia’s November and January elections confirms a larger decline in white rural turnout led to Democrats flipping both U.S. Senate seats, one of the biggest challenges the GOP must tackle ahead of 2022,” Georgia Public Broadcasting reports.

“The data illustrate Republicans will have to work to motivate their rural base to trust the election system and return to the fold — and there are signs Georgia’s new 98-page election law could do the trick.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Top Nevada Republican Found No Evidence of Voter Fraud

April 22, 2021 at 8:09 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (R) told the state Republican Party on Wednesday that an investigation had found no “evidentiary support” for its allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, CNN reports.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Lin Wood Still Trying to Overturn Election

April 20, 2021 at 1:30 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood told Newsweek that he “sometimes works up to 20 hours a day as part of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

GOP Base Continues to Seethe Over Trump’s Defeat

April 20, 2021 at 6:41 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “In Cobb County, the archetype of the GOP’s suburban erosion, Republican activists over the weekend were still re-litigating former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud while drafting resolutions to rebuke the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and other Republican officials for their unwillingness to overturn Trump’s loss. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has been all but excommunicated.”

“The once dominant Georgia GOP might be in meltdown in the suburbs, but the rank and file remains obsessed with Trump and the perceived wrongs of the last election.”

Republicans will have a tough time winning back the suburbs if they can’t move past the 2020 election.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Why Democrats Should Contest Every Race

April 16, 2021 at 10:30 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race… That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.”

“The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed.”

Howard Dean is smiling somewhere.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

YouTube Gave Republicans Edge with Latinos

April 15, 2021 at 5:57 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Axios: “Republicans and conservative groups made inroads via YouTube in 2020 with low-information Latino voters often ignored by Democrats, a deep new analysis of U.S. voters shows.”

“The research found that 64% of registered Latino voters — and 74% of Hispanic voters in Florida — got election information from YouTube.”

“Republicans, organically and through official campaigns, created quick, shareable YouTube bilingual videos that appeared as newscasts, to attack Joe Biden and promote Trump’s economic plans. Democrats did not match the intensity.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Technology

Sara Gideon Had More Than $11 Million Left

April 15, 2021 at 4:39 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Sara Gideon (D), who lost her challenge to Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) last November, still had $11.5 million in her campaign account on March 31, according to FEC filings.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign Tagged With: ME-Sen

The 2021 Cook Partisan Voter Index

April 15, 2021 at 8:32 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Cook Political Report introduced the post-2020 edition of the Partisan Voter Index for all 50 states and 435 congressional districts.

Here’s how it works: “A Partisan Voter Index score of D+2, for example, means that in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, that district performed an average of two points more Democratic than the nation did as a whole, while an R+4 means the district performed four points more Republican.”

Last year saw a slight increase in the number of swing districts as former Republican suburban seats moved left and midwestern Democratic seats moved right.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

There Was No White Working Class Surge for Trump

April 14, 2021 at 3:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Monkey Cage: “To study voters, we define the working class as people without a college degree — which many journalists focus on — who are in the bottom half of the household income distribution — since many Americans who don’t finish college still go on to earn high salaries.”

“If we define the working class this way, there’s no real evidence the Trump era changed the demographic makeup of GOP voters.”

“The biggest single-year increase in the White working-class’s share of GOP voters came in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s nominee. Since Romney, the share of White working-class people among GOP voters hasn’t budged.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Trends

John Boehner Still Voted for Trump

April 13, 2021 at 9:25 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Despite former Speaker John Boehner’s scorching criticisms of Donald Trump in his new book, Boehner told Time that he voted for Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Said Boehner: “I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does.”

Boehner’s coddling of the Tea Party laid the groundwork for Trump, so this should be no surprise.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Democratic Pollsters Admit ‘Major Errors’ In 2020

April 13, 2021 at 7:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Politico: “In an unusual move, five of the party’s biggest polling firms have spent the past few months working together to explore what went wrong last year and how it can be fixed. It’s part of an effort to understand why — despite data showing Joe Biden well ahead of former President Donald Trump, and Democrats poised to increase their House majority — the party won the presidency, the Senate and House by extremely narrow margins.”

Said one pollster: “Twenty-twenty was an ‘Oh, s—‘ moment for all of us. And I think that we all kinda quickly came to the point that we need to set our egos aside. We need to get this right.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Polling

Trump Campaign Boosted by Unsuspecting State GOPs

April 11, 2021 at 7:19 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Federal regulators are probing financial reporting discrepancies stemming from an effort to funnel $75 million through state Republican parties to the national GOP effort to reelect Donald Trump,” Axios reports.

“It’s not clear mechanically how such large transfers could have taken place without explicit buy-in from state parties ostensibly responsible for them.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign, Campaign Finance

Latinas Drove Trump’s Gains With Hispanic Voters

April 8, 2021 at 10:38 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Eric Levitz: “Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters were apparent in preelection polling (even if the magnitude of those gains was not). In October, the New York Times entertained the theory that Hispanic men were driving this trend, as Trump appealed to their ‘machismo culture.’ And on one level, the election results are consistent with that hypothesis: In absolute terms, Trump performed better with Latinos than Latinas.”

“But Equis’s polling suggests that between 2016 and 2020, Trump gained far more ground with Hispanic women.”

Of course, this is also more evidence that making it harder for infrequent voters to vote can hurt Republicans.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Biden Didn’t Bring Back the Obama-Trump Voter

April 7, 2021 at 4:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

David Hopkins: “The idea of Joe Biden as a depolarizing figure, someone who aimed to transcend rather than exacerbate the nation’s political divisions, was both a dominant rhetorical theme of his campaign and a major strategic premise behind his nomination. In particular, Biden was supposed to be uniquely appealing to the type of white, older, modestly-educated, socially traditionalist voter who had wandered away from the Democratic Party sometime between Barack Obama’s first victory and Hillary Clinton’s last defeat.”

“In the end, that didn’t happen.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

Most Republicans Still Think Election Was Stolen

April 5, 2021 at 6:37 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds about half of Republicans believe the January 6 Capitol siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Donald Trump look bad.”

Also, 60% of Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024.

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

How Trump Fleeced His Own Supporters

April 3, 2021 at 1:20 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

New York Times: “Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election. Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.”

“As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a ‘money bomb,’ that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.”

“The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

How Trump Made Inroads with Latino Voters

April 2, 2021 at 7:41 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“A new analysis of U.S. voters suggests — counterintuitively — that the coronavirus pandemic may have helped drive former President Donald Trump’s surprising increase in support from Latinos last November,” Axios reports.

“By shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact of shutdowns, the virus gave conservative and low-information Latino voters a permission structure to back Trump even if they shunned him in 2016.”

Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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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