News

Trump takes underdog role in campaign against Biden
By Jonathan Easley
The Hill, Published 05/06/2020

Trump’s allies acknowledge that they face an uphill climb, with polls showing Biden leading nationally and in key battleground states. If the economy does not prove to be as resilient as Trump claims, the election is all but lost, campaign insiders say.

But Republicans believe Trump may have bottomed out amid the pandemic and there will be opportunities to sell an economic recovery and to damage Biden, who has kept a low profile since the coronavirus outbreak first hit.

“The polling right now doesn’t look great, but we’re seeing a snapshot taken at the most stressful moment of COVID-19 plus economic shutdown,” said Chris Wilson, a Republican pollster and president of WPA Intelligence.

Wilson said the president’s team knows it needs to get the economy going but added that opening it up won’t guarantee activity. As for Biden, he said there are negatives there, but the twin economic and health crises create a difficult environment for the president.

“Joe Biden has enough negatives that the Trump team will have no problem finding one that works,” he said, “but the political environment needs to be there for Biden’s negatives to swing the race.”

Read the full article here.

With fewer offerings for fun, how will Las Vegas lure visitors amid pandemic?
By Bailey Schulz
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Published 05/05/2020

“It may take some time for the fly-in market to return at a good pace, partially because of capacity constraints and how comfortable people are ready to return to air travel.”

Predictive modeling from WPA Intelligence backs this up.

The conservative research, data science and tech firm found the week of April 6, roughly 10.1 million people in California — about 26 percent of adults — would visit Las Vegas “within a few weeks or a month,” while 11.1 million would wait and eventually visit “within a few months.” Other ready-to-travel states include Texas and Utah.

Meanwhile, a vast majority of fly-in states show fewer than 5 percent of adults would be comfortable traveling to Las Vegas in the near future.

“There’s no indication that these numbers increase without some sort of massive communication effort to explain that Las Vegas is safe and open for business again,” said Christopher Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence.

Read the full article here.

Trump campaign coaxing votes from Sanders populists while telling the Left it’s OK to hate Biden
By W. James Antle III
Washington Examiner, Published 04/16/2020

Democrats believe they can avoid a repeat this time around because of Trump’s incumbency and how early Sanders backed Biden. Sanders was still running against Clinton at this time in 2016, just as she was still running against Barack Obama at this point in 2008. And some Republicans are also skeptical. “We haven’t seen the same effects in our 2020 battleground polling,” warned GOP pollster Chris Wilson. “Only a handful (1-3%) of Bernie voters vote Trump in a Trump/Biden ballot.”

“It looks like a big chunk of [Sanders’s] 2016 vote was an anti-Hillary protest vote, and that explains the 2016 Bernie/Trump vote,” Wilson added.

Read the full article here.

Democrats say dump Biden for Cuomo: Poll gives New York governor 12-point lead over presumptive nominee
By Emily Larsen
Washington Examiner, Published 04/10/2020

A nationwide poll found that 56% of likely Democratic voters said that they would like Cuomo to be the Democratic presidential nominee rather than Biden, while 44% said that the former vice president should be the nominee.

Club for Growth PAC, a conservative group that generally supports Republicans, sponsored that poll, and WPA Intelligence conducted it. The online survey was conducted among 1,000 likely voters from April 3-6, and the results for the Democratic sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8%.

Read the full article here.