Democrats fight to fund the Postal Service, as Chicago becomes the latest city to decide students shouldn’t return for in-person classes. It’s Thursday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- Democrats and Republicans continue to disagree over whether to fully reinstate the enhanced unemployment benefits that expired at the end of last month, and over how much aid to send to state and local governments.
- These are the largest — but certainly not the only — disagreements standing in the way of a deal on a new coronavirus relief package.
- And here’s another: Democrats are insisting that the stimulus bill must include additional funding for the Postal Service, which has been experiencing delays across the country after its Trump-appointed director, Louis DeJoy, instituted cutbacks amid the virus crisis.
- Democrats and voting advocates have expressed concern that President Trump could be trying to undermine the mail system to complicate mail-in voting, which will be crucial to a safe election in November.
- Democrats have called for $3.6 billion in the aid package to ensure a secure and safe election, which would include broader mail balloting, but Republicans are opposing such funding.
- Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said yesterday that the government must resolve the recent delays in mail delivery “in a way that allows mail to be delivered on time for the election and for the necessities that people need.”
- If Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on something soon, Trump is considering using executive orders to give Americans “additional relief” even without a bill, he told reporters yesterday evening.
- He floated the possibility of issuing “a term-limited suspension of the payroll tax,” as well as “executive actions to provide protections against eviction” and some extension of the additional unemployment relief.
- In a presidential campaign, nothing says “climactic” like a party convention. So maybe nothing spells “anticlimactic” quite like moving your party gala onto Zoom.
- But that’s what the Democratic Party did yesterday, announcing that no national officials would attend the quadrennial festivities in Milwaukee this month. Not Barack Obama, not Nancy Pelosi, not even the expected nominee, Joe Biden. Even national voting delegates have been instructed to attend virtually.
- Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, will be there, as will some Wisconsin Democratic officials, who will speak at the Milwaukee convention center. But otherwise, speeches will be delivered by video address.
- “From the very beginning of this pandemic, we put the health and safety of the American people first,” Perez said. “That’s the kind of steady and responsible leadership America deserves.”
- Historically, party conventions tend to result in a multiple-percentage-point bounce for a candidate’s poll numbers, so switching to a scaled-down, mostly virtual gathering would seem like a liability for Democrats.
- But so far, with the public holding a broadly unfavorable view of Trump and of his handling of the coronavirus crisis, Biden hasn’t needed to grab the spotlight in order to maintain a sizable polling lead.
- When it comes to the Republican convention, officials haven’t committed to keeping national figures away. The G.O.P.’s gathering is still scheduled to take place in Charlotte, N.C., this month, and the planning of the convention has been subject to plenty of virus-related complications too.
- Late last month, Trump abruptly called off plans to move some events to Florida, saying, “We won’t do a big, crowded convention, per se — it’s not the right time for that.” He and his advisers are working up ideas on how to deliver a forceful speech despite the mitigating circumstances — possibly from a remote location.
- Trump’s campaign announced yesterday that it had raked in $165 million in July in conjunction with the Republican National Committee, regaining its fund-raising lead after two months in which the Biden campaign and the D.N.C. came out on top. Biden’s team said it had pulled in $140 million in July.
- In both cases, the totals were far greater than for the campaigns four years ago, when neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton broke $90 million in July, reflecting the ballooning costs of campaigns in a Citizens United-era political world and the unusual energy surrounding the 2020 race.
- Biden’s camp also announced yesterday that it had bought a whopping $280 million in ads across TV and digital platforms, by far the biggest single purchase of the year by either campaign.
- It was a reminder of how much Biden’s financial fortunes have changed since the primary campaign, when he struggled to match the fund-raising totals of his Democratic rivals.
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- Chicago officials said yesterday that the city’s public schools would begin the fall semester remotely, after Mayor Lori Lightfoot acquiesced to pressure from teachers and parents.
- This leaves New York City as the only major school system in the country that will try to hold in-person classes when school reopens next month. Twenty of the 25 biggest school districts in the country have now committed to going fully remote, at least at the start of the semester.
- In Chicago, the virus has been spreading more rapidly in the weeks since Lightfoot announced a plan to bring students back on a hybrid basis, keeping classes socially distanced by having students attend two days a week. Over the past few days, more than 250 new cases have been confirmed in the city each day.
- In some districts where schools have already resumed in-person classes, infections have quickly spread. Some schools have had to shut down temporarily to prevent further outbreaks.
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 | | Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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Dr. Deborah Birx, left, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Kayleigh McEnany, the press secretary, looked on yesterday as President Trump spoke in the Oval Office. |
Iowa flipped from blue to red in 2016. Will it switch back? |
Iowa is a swing state: Before backing Donald Trump in 2016, it voted twice for Barack Obama. |
But it’s also heavily white and disproportionately rural, seeming to make it especially well-suited to Trump’s brand of Republicanism. Four years ago, he beat Hillary Clinton there by nearly double digits. |
If he can’t win there this year, he’ll be in a very tough bind in the larger and more diverse swing states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, that he will probably need to carry to edge Biden. |
The state’s closely watched Senate race, between the Republican incumbent, Joni Ernst, and her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, is also locked in a statistical tie. |
In both the presidential contest and the Senate one, the Republican was supported by 48 percent of registered voters, and the Democrat by 45 percent. |
Across the 13 Iowa counties where the vote was closest in 2016, Biden held an edge of seven percentage points, according to the Monmouth poll. Greenfield led Ernst by nine points in these swing areas. |
Monmouth researchers sought to simulate two versions of the electorate: one in which turnout runs higher than in 2016, driven by this year’s uncommon levels of voter interest — and another in which turnout drops, presumably because of the complications of voting during a health crisis. |
There was no significant difference between the outcomes: In the high-turnout scenario, Trump won 48 percent of likely voters to Biden’s 46 percent. In the lower-turnout situation, it was an even split at 47 percent. |
Iowa’s secretary of state plans to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. In Monmouth’s poll, four in 10 voters indicated that they planned to cast a ballot by mail, which would put this year’s absentee voting roughly on par with the past two presidential elections: In both, just over 40 percent of Iowans voted by mail before Election Day. |
Reflecting national trends, it was Iowa Democrats who were far more likely than Republicans to say they planned to vote by mail; 61 percent of Democratic voters said so, compared with just 19 percent of Republican voters. |
A majority of Republicans, and roughly a quarter of independents, said they were very worried that conducting the election mostly by mail would lead to voter fraud, according to the poll. Hardly any Democrats felt this way: just 7 percent. |
In related news, the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed an executive order yesterday that will allow as many as 60,000 Iowans with felony convictions to re-register to vote. The only way for former felons to regain their voting rights in Iowa had been by petitioning the governor’s office individually. |
Because of policies that have led to the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, roughly 10 percent of the state’s Black residents had been disqualified from voting under the previous policy, according to state estimates. |
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