Bernie Sanders’ suspension of his presidential campaign this week made Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and gave the former vice president a significant advantage.
He’ll need it.
Despite his continued, deep unpopularity with a large swath of the American public, President Trump still has a decent shot at reelection. Trump, who won an improbable upset four years ago, remains a slight underdog this time around, but no more than that.
Newsletter
Get our Essential Politics newsletter
The latest news, analysis and insights from our bureau chiefs in Sacramento and D.C.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
With the primary race now more or less officially out of the way and election day a bit under seven months in the future, let’s take a look at where the race stands.
Trump’s one big thing
For a brief moment — not much more than two weeks — Trump enjoyed a small uptick in his standing with the public as he began to grapple with the enormity of the coronavirus crisis.
That bump — much smaller than the “rally round” effect that previous presidents have enjoyed in major crises — has already begun to fade, according to several polls this week. Trump’s job approval ratings have begun to level off and, in some polls, drop back down to where they were before the crisis hit, belying the fears by some Democrats that the attention given to his daily briefings would give him a further boost.
The drop underscores a key fact about Trump’s presidency: Although he generates chaos around him, Trump’s levels of support and opposition are models of consistency. Since the start of modern polling some three generations ago, no president has ever demonstrated such stability in his job approval ratings.
In Trump’s case, it’s stability at a low level, of course. Unlike every other president in modern times, Trump has never received the approval of more than about 45% of the public. But he’s also seldom gotten less than about 40% (his low point came during the effort to repeal Obamacare in the summer of his first year).
For more than three years, as one controversy after another swirled around Trump, a lot of Democrats have wondered whether the latest one would be the key to unlock the president’s hold on his supporters. By now, it’s long past time to drop that idea.
Some of Trump’s voters may love who he is, but the vast majority support him out of a more powerful emotion — fear of the other side, “negative partisanship,” as political scientists call it.
Trump’s no genius as a political strategist — his ploys fall flat as often as they succeed — but he did have one great insight: As the country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, a large share of white Americans, especially those outside of the major cities and without college degrees, have grown ever more fearful of change.
That fear — aimed at immigrants, black people, liberals, city dwellers — provided a powerful organizing principle for politics, which Trump seized early on. From the earliest moments of his campaign, with his claims about Mexican rapists, he has stoked it and played to it.
Now, with the economy in shambles and a pandemic in the land, he’s once again positioning himself as the strong-willed, tough-minded defender of his part of America against an external threat. That type of fear-based campaign sufficed to win a narrow victory in 2016; four years later, it remains a tough challenge for Democrats to overcome.
Biden’s challenge
In national, head-to-head matchups, Biden has maintained a fairly steady 5- or 6-point lead over Trump for most of the past five months.
That’s a significant advantage: Trump has already made a major effort to darken the public’s view of Biden, enough that he willingly courted impeachment by trying to enlist the government of Ukraine in his anti-Biden effort. So far, he has little to show for his efforts.
Both Biden and Trump head into the general election campaign with more favorable images than either Hillary Clinton orTrump had four years ago at this point. That matters a lot because last time Trump won in large part by taking a big majority of the voters who disliked both candidates. This time around, that’s a much smaller group, at least so far.
And although Biden’s lead over Trump isn’t as large now as it was a year ago, the fact that it’s held steady for months suggests limits on Trump’s ability to make the public think worse of the former vice president.
But as Al Gore andClinton can both testify, winning the national popular vote doesn’t make a person president; the electoral college goes by state.
In the ideal world, we’d have a constant raft of high quality polls of battleground states; that’s not going to happen.
In the absence of that, national polls do provide useful information. Trump lost the popular vote by just slightly more than 2 percentage points in 2016, but because Democrats have such a large concentration of voters in states like California and New York, that 2-point national win translated into extremely narrow losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
It’s fair to assume that Biden will need to beat Trump by more than 2 points nationwide to be confident of winning those states this time around. It’s also fair to say that if Trump loses by 5 or 6 points, he won’t win. The key states are slightly more favorable to a Republican than the country as a whole, but not 6 points more favorable.
More than 2, less than 6 — that spread in the polls is pretty much the ground on which the campaign will be fought from now until election day.
Trump will seek to heighten tensions between his rural, white, Christian base and the rest of the country in the hope of ginning up the largest possible turnout of his supporters.
Some of Sanders’ backers had urged the Democrats to follow a mirror-image strategy of moving sharply to the left to try to maximize turnout of their younger, nonwhite, urban base.
Biden has made clear that’s not the route he plans to take. As Janet Hook wrote, he will try to unify the party. In practice, that means doing two things. On the one side, he’ll try to reassure blue-collar, white voters in states like Pennsylvania, where he was born and has long campaigned, that he remains the same, nonthreatening “middle-class Joe” they long supported. On the other, he’ll seek to promise enough change to motivate the young, black and Latino voters he’ll also need to win.
As a first step in that direction, Biden on Thursday announced two new policies that modified ideas pushed by Sanders. As Hook wrote, one would make Medicare available to people at age 60, rather than the current 65. The other would forgive some college debt.
The balancing act for Biden is a tricky one, but the potential payoff is large. If he pulls it off, Biden not only will win, he’ll have a broader, potentially more stable, majority than Trump has achieved.
Enjoying this newsletter? Consider subscribing to the Los Angeles Times
Who gets to vote?
The next few weeks seem likely to feature a major fight over how to carry out the November election in the midst of a pandemic. Democrats want to expand mail-in balloting; Trump and his GOP allies are fine with mail-in ballots for groups that tend to support them — senior citizens in Florida, for example — but have dug in against wider use.
The Wisconsin vote, as Mark Barabak and Tyrone Beason wrote, featured hours-long waits at polling places in Milwaukee, fueling Democratic charges that the GOP has tried to suppress voting by black Americans. The election also saw record numbers of mail-in ballots, in both Democratic and Republican strongholds.
At stake in the election, overshadowing the Democratic primary, was a state Supreme Court seat hotly contested between a Trump-endorsed conservative and a liberal with Democratic backing.
Under a court order, Wisconsin officials have to count mail-in ballots that arrive by Monday, so long as they were post-marked by April 7, the day of the election. Voters who applied for a mail-in ballot but didn’t get it by election day — a circumstance that hit thousands of people — had to brave voting in person.
We’ll find out Monday who won.
In the meantime, the fight over expanding mail-in ballots nationwide will play out in Congress where Republicans want more money to bail out small businesses, and Democrats are holding out for additional priorities of their own, as Jennifer Haberkorn wrote.
The issue for Democrats is how much of a priority to place on mail ballots as opposed to other needs, including money for state and local governments, expanded aid for hospitals and broader availability of SNAP and other types of food aid.
The Wild West of medical supplies
The federal government has refused to try to control the distribution of masks, gowns and other protective equipment, leaving states to do battle for coronavirus gear in a market driven by chaos and fear, Anna Phillips, Del Wilber and Jenny Zou wrote. Prices have soared to levels as much as 10 times above those of pre-crisis levels, and there’s almost no transparency into who’s getting rich as a result.
With tens of millions of taxpayer dollars at stake, the scramble to get enough gear to protect doctors, nurses and first responders from the virus seems ripe for eventual scandal.
In Sacramento, as John Myers wrote, lawmakers are demanding more information from Gov. Gavin Newsom about his plan to spend almost $1 billion to buy N95 respirators and surgical masks for the state.
As Noam Levey and Del Wilber wrote, the federal government’s stockpile of protective equipment is exhausted, and many questions remain about how those supplies were distributed and to what extent politics drove the decisions.
While all that unfolds, new data suggest that social-distancing efforts may be working, and the U.S. coronavirus death toll may not be as high as feared, Noah Bierman wrote.
Lasting impact
The coronavirus crisis is already changing medical care in the U.S., Levey wrote. Thousands of primary-care medical practices are facing financial ruin because patients are avoiding doctors’ offices.
That’s accelerated a move by insurance companies and Medicare away from traditional fee-for-service payments, in which doctors get paid separately for each visit and procedure. Instead, they’re experimenting with paying doctors a fixed amount for each patient in their practice, an approach that a lot of healthcare experts have advocated for years.
“I’m a little amazed,” Shawn Martin, vice president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told Levey. “The sense of urgency and financial instability brought on by the crisis has accelerated ideas that we have been noodling on for years.”
On another front, the crisis has given the administration an opening to enforce tough anti-immigration policies of the sort long advocated by Trump’s aide, Stephen Miller.
As Molly O’Toole wrote, the Border Patrol, citing coronavirus, has expelled 10,000 migrants in less than three weeks, effectively short-circuiting laws designed to give people a right to claim asylum or other forms of protection in the U.S.
Supreme Court on hold
The Supreme Court has delayed arguments in cases the justices were scheduled to hear this month. Trump may benefit, David Savage wrote. One major case on the docket involves efforts to force him to turn over his tax returns to investigators. The longer it’s delayed, the better Trump’s chances of avoiding any disclosure until after the November election.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.
The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.
“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”
The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.
“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”
The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.
“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.
Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.
Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.
“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”
A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.
If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.
The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.
As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.
Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.
“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.
The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.
___
Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
___
Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.
NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.
The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — In a Cypriot National Guard camp, Ukrainians are being trained on how to identify, locate and dispose of landmines and other unexploded munitions that litter huge swaths of their country, killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children.
Analysts say Ukraine is among the countries that are the most affected by landmines and discarded explosives, as a result of Russia’s ongoing war.
According to U.N. figures, some 399 people have been killed and 915 wounded from landmines and other munitions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, equal to the number of casualties reported from 2014-2021. More than 1 in 10 of those casualties have been children.
The economic impact is costing billions to the Ukrainian economy. Landmines and other munitions are preventing the sowing of 5 million hectares, or 10%, of the country’s agricultural land.
Cyprus stepped up to offer its facilities as part of the European Union’s Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine. So far, almost 100 Ukrainian armed forces personnel have taken part in three training cycles over the last two years, said Cyprus Foreign Ministry spokesperson Theodoros Gotsis.
“We are committed to continuing this support for as long as it takes,” Gotsis told the Associated Press, adding that the Cyprus government has covered the 250,000 euro ($262,600) training cost.
Cyprus opted to offer such training owing to its own landmine issues dating back five decades when the island nation was ethnically divided when Turkey invaded following a coup that sought union with Greece. The United Nations has removed some 27,000 landmines from a buffer zone that cuts across the island, but minefields remain on either side. The Cypriot government says it has disposed of all anti-personnel mines in line with its obligations under an international treaty that bans the use of such munitions.
In Cyprus, Ukrainians undergo rigorous theoretical and practical training over a five-week Basic Demining and Clearance course that includes instruction on distinguishing and safely handling landmines and other explosive munitions, such as rockets, 155 mm artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells.
Theoretical training uses inert munitions identical to the actual explosives.
Most of the course is comprised of hands-on training focusing on the on-site destruction of unexploded munitions using explosives, the chief training officer told the Associated Press. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to disclose his identity for security reasons.
“They’re trained on ordnance disposal using real explosives,” the officer said. “That will be the trainees’ primary task when they return.”
Cypriot officials said the Ukrainian trainees did not want to be either interviewed or photographed.
Defusing discarded munitions or landmines in areas where explosive charges can’t be used — for instance, near a hospital — is not part of this course because that’s the task of highly trained teams of disposal experts whose training can last as long as eight months, the officer said.
Trainees, divided into groups of eight, are taught how to operate metal detectors and other tools for detecting munitions like prodders — long, thin rods which are used to gently probe beneath the ground’s surface in search of landmines and other explosive ordnance.
Another tool is a feeler, a rod that’s used to detect booby-trapped munitions. There are many ways to booby-trap such munitions, unlike landmines which require direct pressure to detonate.
“Booby-trapped munitions are a widespread phenomenon in Ukraine,” the chief training officer explained.
Training, primarily conducted by experts from other European Union countries, takes place both in forested and urban areas at different army camps and follows strict safety protocols.
The short, intense training period keeps the Ukrainians focused.
“You see the interest they show during instruction: they ask questions, they want to know what mistakes they’ve made and the correct way of doing it,” the officer said.
Humanitarian data and analysis group ACAPS said in a Jan. 2024 report that 174,000 sq. kilometers (67,182 sq. miles) or nearly 29% of Ukraine’s territory needs to be surveyed for landmines and other explosive ordnance.
More than 10 million people are said to live in areas where demining action is needed.
Since 2022, Russian forces have used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines, which target people. Russia never signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel mines, but the use of such mines is nonetheless considered a violation of its obligations under international law.
Russia also uses 13 types of anti-tank mines.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in its 2023 Landmine Monitor report that Ukrainian government forces may have also used antipersonnel landmines in contravention of the Mine Ban Treaty in and around the city of Izium during 2022, when the city was under Russian control.