Show an ad over header. AMP  

Inside Biden's edge: Trump hasn't expanded his base

31 August 2020
 Dan Ackermann

The Cook Political Report's Amy Walter shows, in a piece that's well worth your time, that President Trump is trailing "not because he's losing his 2016 base, but because he has never expanded beyond it."

By the numbers: Walter dug into the most recent national poll from the Pew Research Center (7/27-8/2) and compared it with their post-election poll in 2016 that uses official voting records.

  • Whereas Trump has roughly held his share of the vote across all segments of the electorate, Joe Biden is performing significantly better than Hillary Clinton with nearly every demographic group.

Between the lines: The article has a nifty tool you can play around with to compare Biden's performance against Trump across key demographic groups to Clinton's performance against Trump in 2016.

  • Walter's analysis shows that Biden performs better than Clinton among older voters, younger voters, white voters, college and non-college educated voters, men, women, Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Clinton, meanwhile, was slightly stronger with Black and Hispanic voters.

The bottom line: Many of these new votes are coming from people who voted third-party in 2016.

  • "According to the Pew July survey, voters who didn't support either major party candidate last election are now breaking decidedly for Biden — 55 percent to 39 percent.
  • 'This group of non-Trump/non-Clinton voters doesn't get the attention of Obama-Trump voters or suburban moms, but they are a not-insignificant portion of the electorate."

What's next: Trump's competitiveness "will come down to whether he can deepen his base," Walter writes. "That means turning out a higher percentage of his base vote and hoping that Biden and Democrats fail to meet that same level of enthusiasm with their core constituencies.”

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

Section2

Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.