domingo, 26 de julho de 2020

Biden holds daunting lead over Trump as US election enters final stretch / Biden's path to the White House could hit a dead end on Facebook



Biden holds daunting lead over Trump as US election enters final stretch

US elections 2020
With 100 days to go, polls show the president languishing as the pandemic takes its toll. But analysts expect surprises

Lauren Gambino
Lauren Gambino in Washington
@laurenegambino
Sun 26 Jul 2020 08.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 26 Jul 2020 13.11 BST

A poll this month showed Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden 55%-40% among registered voters as ratings for his handling of the coronavirus crisis have plummeted.

One hundred days before the presidential election, Joe Biden has built a commanding and enduring lead over Donald Trump, whose path to victory has narrowed considerably in the months since the coronavirus pandemic began.

The president’s fortunes appear increasingly tied to the trajectory of a public health crisis he has failed to contain, with the death toll past 145,000 and the economy in turmoil.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month showed Biden far ahead of Trump, 55% to 40% among registered voters. That contrasted with March, when Biden and Trump were locked in a near tie as the virus was just beginning to spread.

The same poll found Trump’s approval ratings had crumbled to 39%, roughly the same share of the electorate that approved of his response to the outbreak while 60% disapproved. Especially troubling for the president are a new spate of polls that suggest he is losing his edge on the economy, formerly Biden’s greatest vulnerability.

“It is very hard to envision a scenario where you can make an argument for the president’s re-election if unemployment is well over 10% and there’s no sign that the pandemic is under control,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who was an adviser for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“The political environment and the economic situation could look very different 100 days from now, but if the election were held today, it is very likely that the former vice-president would win – and pretty substantially.”

Surveys show Biden ahead in a clutch of battleground states that secured Trump’s victory in 2016, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. A Quinnipiac University poll of Florida, seen as crucial for Trump, found Biden up by 13 points.

Biden’s campaign is now eyeing an expanded electoral map that could also deliver control of the Senate, challenging Trump in traditionally Republican states like Arizona, where the president has consistently led in statewide polls, as well as in conservative strongholds like Texas, where a new Quinnipiac poll found the candidates neck-and-neck.

Trump has dismissed polling that shows him losing as “fake”, adamant that he defied Beltway prognosticators in 2016 and is poised to do it again. “I’m not losing,” he insisted during a recent Fox News Sunday interview, when presented with the network’s latest poll showing him trailing Biden by eight points.

Political strategists caution that much can – and almost certainly will – change in the coming months, especially in a race shaped so profoundly by the pandemic. There is a general expectation the contest will be closely fought, as presidential elections have been for decades in a deeply polarized climate.

At the same time, widespread uncertainty hangs over the security and administration of an election again threatened by foreign interference and disinformation. The pandemic has raised new concerns about voting procedures, amid Trump’s escalating attacks on mail-in ballots and unprecedented efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the result in November.

Trump’s prospects likely hinge on his ability to persuade Americans he deserves a second term. Yet he remains almost-singularly focused on rallying a loyal but shrinking core of supporters. In recent weeks, he has sought to stoke white fear and cultural backlash with an aggressive response to anti-racism protests, a defense of Confederate monuments and a dark Fourth of July speech in which he claimed children are being taught to “hate” America.

The approach worked in 2016, but the nation has changed, transformed by the pandemic, economic crisis and a growing racial justice movement ignited by the death of George Floyd.

“Trump’s problem is that he wants to run a campaign like it’s 2016, but he’s been the guy in charge for the last four years,” said Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota.

Heitkamp believes Trump’s re-election chances are bound up with his economic approval rating. Once a bright spot for the president, voter dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy has risen ominously as the outbreak worsened in many parts of the country.

Without a strong economy to preside over, she said Trump “doesn’t have a theory of the case for his re-election.”

In recent weeks, the president has tried to draw attention to criticisms of Biden and frame the election as a choice between a political outsider and an establishment insider. But Trump is no longer the insurgent of 2016. He is the president, amid a historic crisis that a majority of Americans say he has mishandled.

Even his supporters view November as a referendum on his presidency. Among Trump voters, 72% said re-electing him was most important to them in this election, the Washington Post-ABC News poll found. Among Biden voters, 67% said it was most important to defeat the president.

There are signs the president is beginning to grasp the severity of the challenges facing him. After weeks of dismissing surges in infections, hospitalizations and deaths across the south and west as the last “embers” of a pandemic that had been largely curbed, Trump abruptly changed his posture.

He has encouraged Americans to wear face masks – which he had long resisted – and resumed the White House coronavirus news conference.

On Thursday, Trump announced that the Republican convention in Jacksonville, Florida, would be cancelled, citing the threat of the virus, which is ravaging the state. Democrats have also scrapped plans for a traditional convention, moving their event largely online.

Since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee in April, Biden has run a relatively low-key campaign from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, improving his standing in the race even as he shrunk from the national spotlight.

Despite a contentious primary, the party has largely united behind him while his campaign has ramped up fundraising, narrowing the president’s once-vast cash advantage.

Biden is also buoyed by polls showing him carrying women by a historic margin and building a lead with independents and moderates. Since Trump’s election, white suburban women have fled the Republican party, joining with women of color to help Democrats regain the House in 2018. In recent weeks, Trump has attacked Biden on such turf, issuing blunt appeals to the “Suburban Housewives of America”.

As in 2016, both candidates are widely disliked, a reflection of deep polarization and the disenchantment many Americans feel. That year, voters who disliked both candidates swung hard for Trump. Four years later, polling suggests voters who don’t like their options – the so-called “haters” – strongly prefer Biden.

Perhaps even more worrisome for Trump is an erosion of support among older voters, who are disproportionately vulnerable to the pandemic. Retaining his dominance with such Americans, who tend to turn out at higher rates and are overly represented in swing states, is critical.

There are risks for Biden, too, particularly as the race intensifies.

Trump supporters are far more enthusiastic and committed to voting than are supporters of Biden. And Democrats worry particularly about support from black, Hispanic and young voters, who are crucial to building a winning coalition.

“Who he picks for VP is going to tell us a lot about not only what his vision is but it’s going to tell us the direction of the Democratic party,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, describing it as the “most significant” decision Biden will make in the next 100 days.

Biden has vowed to name a woman, but Brown believes choosing a black woman would “meet the moment”.

“We’re in the midst of a highly racially polarized environment,” she said. “Black people are, quite frankly, fed up. People are not going to be OK with politics as usual.”

Few count Trump out. If the pandemic abates and the economy rebounds, he could benefit. A national disaster or a supreme court vacancy could shift the dynamics of the race. The Trump campaign’s massive ad campaign to define Biden as weak and ineffectual could begin to resonate.

“This race is far from over,” said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to Trump. “The president has proved that he can come back from behind before.”

Yet after years of bending reality to his political will, Trump has seemingly accepted that he cannot will the coronavirus away.

Ian Sams, a Democratic strategist and adviser to Navigator Research, a left-leaning polling firm which tracks public opinion on the coronavirus, has closely monitored the relationship between approval of the president’s handling of the pandemic and judgements of the candidates.

Most voters view the 2020 election “through the prism of the pandemic”, said Sams, who previously worked on Kamala Harris’s campaign for the Democratic nomination and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“Unless something fundamentally changes – and we have 100 days so anything can happen – the handling of the pandemic is going to be the central question in voters’ minds when they step into the voting booth in November.”


Biden's path to the White House could hit a dead end on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg’s autocratic nature and fear of anti-trust legislation might see him plump for Trump in the race for president

Carole Cadwalladr: If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention

John Naughton
Sun 26 Jul 2020 10.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 26 Jul 2020 12.41 BST

Way back in June, I wrote a column under the headline: “One man stands between Joe Biden and the US presidency – Mark Zuckerberg”. Trump, flailing against the pandemic at the time, was trailing Biden in the polls, just as at the same point in 2016 he had been trailing Hillary Clinton. And yet we know what happened that November: Trump’s team made inspired use of Facebook’s targeting engine to suppress Democratic turnout in key states – and it worked. What is perhaps less well known is that Facebook offered to “embed” employees for free in the campaign offices of both candidates to help them use the platform effectively. Clinton’s campaign refused the offer. Trump’s crowd accepted, and Facebook employees helped his campaign craft the messages that may have clinched the election.

So here we are in 2020, 100 days from the presidential election. Trump is still trailing Biden. But his base support has remained solid. So the point I made in June still stands: if he is to win a second term, Facebook will be his only hope – which is why his campaign is betting the ranch on it. And if Facebook were suddenly to decide that it would not allow its platform to be used by either campaign in the period from now until 3 November, Trump would be a one-term president, free to spend even more time with his golf buggy – and perhaps his lawyers.

For Facebook read Zuckerberg, for Facebook is not just a corporate extension of its founder’s personality, but his personal plaything. I can’t think of any other tech founder who has retained such an iron grip on his creation through his ownership of a special class of shares, which give him total control. The passage in the company’s SEC filing detailing this makes for surreal reading. It says that Zuckerberg “has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support.”

Such a concentration of power in the hands of a single individual would be a concern in any enterprise, but in a global company that effectively controls and mediates much of the world’s public sphere it is distinctly creepy. This impression is reinforced vividly whenever Zuckerberg has to make a public appearance, especially when he has to wear a suit – as he did when appearing before US Congress in April 2018. On such occasions he can look like a tailor’s dummy, a man whose sense of humour has been surgically removed at birth.

This caricature, wrote Evan Osnos in an absorbing New Yorker profile, is that of an automaton with little regard for the human dimensions of his work. “The truth is something else: he decided long ago that no historical change is painless. Like [the emperor] Augustus, he is at peace with his trade-offs. Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale. His life thus far has convinced him that he can solve ‘problem after problem after problem’, no matter the howling from the public it may cause.”

People who have dealt or worked with Zuckerberg come away with different images of him, but all seem to agree that he’s some kind of hyper-rationalist. When he encounters a theory that doesn’t accord with his own, says Osnos, who spent some time with him, “he finds a seam of disagreement – a fact, a methodology, a premise – and hammers at it. It’s an effective technique for winning arguments, but one that makes it difficult to introduce new information. Over time, some former colleagues say, his deputies have begun to filter out bad news from presentations before it reaches him.”

One of the great puzzles about Zuckerberg is how such an apparently bright individual can apparently be so ignorant about how cultures and societies work. In February 2017, for example, he published a 5,500-word manifesto on Building Global Community. It began: “History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers – from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

“Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global – like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses – like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.”

There’s lots more in that vacuous vein. The solution to the world’s troubles, it seemed, was to have everyone in the world as a member of Facebook’s “community” (a favourite Zuckerberg term). When I showed this essay to a colleague who teaches politics (and who was hitherto blissfully unaware of Zuckerberg) he read it with growing incredulity. “If a first-year undergraduate had submitted this,” he remarked, “I’d have sent him home.” The thought that the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful corporations could write such piffle seemed astounding to him.

It is. But we are where we are. And there is another, contemporary dimension to the puzzle, namely that the company Zuckerberg controls seems to have the power to influence people’s behaviour in politically relevant ways. We have empirical evidence for this. In 2014, for example, a massive experiment on 689,000 Facebook users showed that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. And in the 2010 mid-term elections in the US, a campaign by Facebook to increase voter turnout, carried out by researchers who ran an experiment involving 61 million users, reckoned that 340,000 extra people turned out to vote because of a single election-day Facebook message.

In themselves, these experiments may seem innocuous (though the “emotional contagion” study raised some ethical concerns). After all, encouraging people to go out and vote is an admirable thing to do. The real significance of the experiments, though, was their indication that Facebook had the capacity to influence people’s behaviour and emotions in ways that could conceivably have a political impact. Which leads to the question of whether Facebook could, if its corporate interests required it, put a thumb on the electoral scales in marginal seats.

Even in the hyper-polarised world of contemporary US politics, that seems unlikely. But that hasn’t stopped people scrutinising Zuckerberg’s recent utterances and behaviour in relation to Trump. When Twitter took the unprecedented step of labelling some of the president’s more incendiary tweets, and Trump threatened to revoke the immunity offered to social media platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, who should turn up on the president’s favourite news channel but Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “private companies shouldn’t be the arbiters of truth”? And then there were the two visits Zuckerberg paid to the White House in September and October last year. No smoke without fire, and all that.

These might simply be signs of a corporate boss trying to stay out of trouble with the government of the day. But it still raises an intriguing question: is it conceivable that Zuckerberg might prefer a Trump victory to a Biden one? The answer might depend on whom Biden picks as his running mate. If he were to choose Elizabeth Warren, for example, my guess is that Facebook’s ad-targeting system and expertise would be at Trump’s disposal, possibly at a discount. Why? In a leaked recording of an internal Facebook discussion, Zuckerberg described Warren’s policy proposals on antitrust as “an existential threat” to his company. And, as General de Gaulle famously observed of nations, tech companies have no friends, only interests. Zuckerberg understands that as well as anyone. And it will govern his decisions in the next few months.

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