Joe Biden threw down the gauntlet in the Lone Star state Tuesday, dropping his first campaign ad of the general election in Texas on TV and online.
Go Joe
Turn Texas Purple
VoteBlue!
Amid rising Covid cases in Texas…
RethugniCON Senator Cornyn Claims he does not know if kids get + transmit Covid!
RethugniCON Senator Cruz is fighting in Twitter to defend WH PressSec and does NOT wear face mask during air travel!
Hey Texas
These RethugniCONS will get you sick or killed
VOTE ALL RethugniCONS OUT!
Focus on Florida, NC and maybe AZ. Texas, from what I’ve read, is very expensive to compete in, and if you’ve won FL, AZ, and NC, and can lock down the old blue wall of PA, WI, MI and MN, you’re done. You don’t get extra points for hitting 400 EVs, but you get massive negative points for getting below 270.
My guess is that the more traditional swing states is where their focus is. However, they’re getting a lot of free attention with this kind of ad buy and I’m sure Anus Tangerinus is running out of poo to fling at his minions over these stories.
I’d be OK with letting the GOP shoot themselves silly in states like TX, AZ and FL thru convention season, then reassessing.
"A 538 poll amalgamation shows Trump currently holding a minuscule, .1 percent…
… lead."
Even running ads in Texas does two things: 1) it gets free press probably worth more than the ad buy itself, because holy shit, Biden is competitive in freaking TEXAS?, and 2) it forces the GOP to respond with expensive ads themselves in a state they probably didn’t think they needed to spend money on. I read yesterday 13% of their Facebook ad budget was now targeting Texas?
adding, dv01 already got there on Point #1.
The ad is brilliant b/c it’s not a political ad. It’s a PSA.
Biden needs to not only win the Presidency, but make sure we win (and have workable majorities in) Congress too. Otherwise, we’ll have the post-2010 Obama Presidency with the GOP sabotaging Biden and them regaining power in 2024.
Ads in red states helps with turnout for these down ballot races.
Whoever came up with the line, “This virus is tough, but Texas is tougher” deserves a raise.
Thank you @tena!!!
the point is to establish a mandate if possible – and to force Trump to spend money (and time) in Texas that he would rather be spending elsewhere.
But the campaign has to be nimble. The Clinton campaign failed to response properly when the Comey “october surprise” happened. Before Comey, Clinton was a lock, and her schedule put her in states that she didn’t need to win – but that would establish a mandate. The campaign was so bloated and sclerotic that changing plans was like turning around an aircraft carrier – and when the polls started showing that Trump was within the margin of error in states that Clinton was taking for granted, the campaign “stayed the course” for far too long.
While I agree that making the Rs defend Texas pulls money from other places, let’s get serious here. Let’s not try spreading the map into places like TX and AZ and forget about winning WI, MN and MI like we did four years ago.
I do not mind if Joe spends some small amount of money advertising in Texas. If nothing else, it helps keep Orange Julius Caesar playing defense in a state where he should not have to play at all. But there is no pathway to victory that does not first include some combination of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Focus on the fundamentals first. And I say that as someone who thinks Texas has a 50-50 chance of swinging for Biden in November.
I’m mildly obsessed with Texas this political cycle. I’ve looked at the polling and I see some trends:
Trump looks to be tapped out with white voters. Trump is underperforming Cruz among Latino voters. Biden has improved over Beto on Latino voter margin. Biden is at +37 to +40 among Latinos. Beto was +29. What Biden has to do is get to where Beto was among whites, 34%, and he walks away with a 2-4 point win.
For Trump, his white voter percentage ranges from 60% to 68%, but he can’t get to 70%. If Trump is at 68% among whites, it’s a coin flip with Trump favored to win by 1.5%. His chances go down at 67% or below. Conversely, Biden’s chances to win grow.
The other thing is to make sure the electorate is filled with Dem favorable voters. Most polls show only the likely voters, which is a good model to use since TX has a very real non-voter problem. However, every poll released this year is more GOP favorable than the actual 2018 exits in terms of racial composition and the percentage of independents in the surveys. Yet, Biden has led in as many polls as Trump since June 1. That sort of tells us that if Biden manages to get an electorate that looks like the 2018 electorate (or better?!) that he should be considered a slight favorite to win the state.
Cornyn is a liar. This is from last week.
"As COVID-19 cases rise precipitously, Texas is reinstating safety mandates for child care centers that had been repealed in mid-June.
"The newest emergency rules, published Thursday, include requiring child care centers to check temperatures of staff and students each day, have parents drop students off outside and not serve family style meals. State health officials said the immediate adoption of the rules was necessary to prevent “imminent peril to the public health, safety, and welfare of the state.”
“For the first time, state officials are also mandating that child care centers comply with the current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which advises child care providers to consider a number of social distancing and screening methods.”
The reason Abbott backtracked was over 1,500 cases with at least 400 of the being children in about 3 weeks of relaxed rules.
Go Joe! Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
“He’s not just delusional. He is not just narcissistic. Trump’s behavior with the coronavirus pandemic is intentional. He is malevolent. He is a first-degree mass murderer.”
If it’s a binary choice, I couldn’t agree more. But I’m not sure it’s a binary. Trump won in 2016 by razor-thin margins in three states. If less than 28 people per every Texas- Stadium-size crowd in MI, Wi, and PA, haven’t decided Trump was a mistake, it’s all lost no matter. Any sane metric suggests that this is Biden’s–and ours–to lose. Running up the score–thoroughly pummeling Trumpism in the EC–has to be a good thing and the more the merrier. And, to the extent that a 50-state push to GOTV helps also defeat Republicans from dog catcher to Senator, this will help immensely going forward, especially with upcoming redistricting.
And yet, Cruz had no problem wearing a mask when he committed the Zodiac Killings.