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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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I dunno – I think this election will be much closer than it seems now. Biden appears to be running a campaign on hollow phrasing that he hopes works well with “middle” voters, using a lot of symbolism and little substance, similar to Clinton, but the base is not energized. So it will be interesting to see if these moderate conservatives break for Biden if the liberal base (meaning those for Palestine equal civil rights and other issues I think Bernie spoke for) sits this out. I thought Clinton would lose, I don’t think Biden was the best candidate against a republican using all of hitler’s propaganda tricks straight from mein kampf… but we will see, the experts always seems to know better than the people on the receiving in.
I think whether the ‘base’ is ‘energized’ depends on how you ask the question. If you ask the traditional question designed to figure out how fired up people are about the candidate, I can imagine there might be some softness, although I also think that Biden’s ‘base’ is a little different from the usual Democratic one being a bit older and more conservative.
But if you ask are people fired up to go vote and vote Trump out, I think enthusiasm is off the charts. This is reflected in the relative fundraising numbers — Trump is running out of cash, Biden is hauling it in at record numbers.
Florida is of course a special case. Biden seems to be doing worse than normal with Hispanic voters, but much better than normal with white voters, especially older ones. My go-to guru on Florida electoral politics is Steve Schale and he says this:
According to official counts, Trump seems to have raised 2x as much as Biden:
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/20/858347477/money-tracker-how-much-trump-and-biden-have-raised-in-the-2020-election
Yes, but they raised and spent most of it already. And in recent fundraising, Biden is clearly outpacing Trump, and appears to be ahead on cash on hand — and ad spending.
See NYT, How Trump’s Billion-Dollar Campaign Lost Its Cash Advantage: Five months ago, President Trump’s re-election campaign had a huge financial edge over Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s. The Times conducted an extensive review of how the Trump team spent lavishly to show how that advantage evaporated.
Plus, Biden is spending more than Trump on ads now in battleground states (which suggests the Trump campaign is short on funds).
according to NBC News:
If only Trump would patent his secret hair growth formula, he would generate enough capital to fund his campaign and solve the issue of Social Security at the same time.
Now that’s what I call a twofer-term President.