We are 91 days out from election day on November 3. Days left before an election are like minutes left on your cell phone battery: The fewer there are the faster they seem to go.
We won't go into the dreadful position Donald Trump's campaign finds itself. Suffice it to say Trump is trailing Joe Biden in the national polls, and in most of the battleground state polls. Not only that, but states like Texas are way closer than they should be.
What we are going to discuss in class today (masks on, socially distanced) is what is going on with the campaign committees and with the campaigns for the House and Senate.
There are more than two national political committees: In addition to the Republican and Democratic National Committees, there are committees focused on elected Republican or Democratic Members of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, Governors, and state Attorneys General.
At this point in the cycle each of those committees are meeting with their leadership and the staff to determine which campaigns they can afford to keep funding and which they have to cut loose.
There is never enough money to fully fund every campaign and this political triage has to be performed.
The day this meeting takes place is torture.
The political staffs have been with these campaigns since they convinced a perfectly happy person to run for the office. They've helped them do everything from finding office space, to putting together a finance operation, to hiring the staff.
They've done what ever field staffer has vowed never to do again: Fall in love with a campaign.
And now, they've got to get on the phone and tell that campaign they're being cut adrift. What they're really saying is: We have determined you have no chance to win and you've wasted two years of your life, as well as the lives of your spouse, your family, your friends, and your supporters.
Sorry. Bye.
District-by-district, state-by-state, office-by-office the national committees cull the herd to better focus their resources for the final sprint.
Some years - I believe this is one of them - one or more of the committees have to cut their candidate for President loose.
In 1996 President Bill Clinton was running for re-election against Senator Bob Dole. There was nothing not to like about Bob Dole. Except it was clear he had no chance against Clinton. Ross Perot was in the race as well and got about eight percent of the votes, but he wasn't our problem.
The GOP had just taken control of the U.S. House two years previous in the Gingrich Revolution and we were very concerned that a Clinton landslide would provide long enough coattails for the Democrats to regain a majority.
We devised a series of three ads for Republican Congressional candidates to use, the third of which was: "Don't give Bill Clinton a blank check" by giving the Ds control of the House.
This was political hyperbole because Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate as well and, in the end picked up two seats to increase their majority to 55-45 in spite of an easy Clinton victory.
In 2020, the non-Presidential focus is on the U.S. Senate. The House campaign committees are pretending they are in a fight to the finish, but with a 32-seat Dem majority, there is almost no chance that the Rs can take control.
However, the GOP's majority, 53-47, in the Senate is up for grabs. And there is a growing - or sinking - feeling that the Senate races are too closely tied to the fortunes of the Presidential race and a Biden landslide will drag enough Democratic U.S. Senate candidates across the line to win the net three seats necessary to take control (with the D Vice President breaking ties).
I am not for this. In that position I stand alone in my family, but I believe one-party control in Washington is absolute power which, to quote Lord Acton among others, "corrupts absolutely."
The Republican Senate campaign committee is, however covertly, looking for ways to have their most vulnerable incumbents distance themselves from the President without making too big a deal of it.
Although the data have grown whiskers, the Pew Research Center, in a 2014 study, estimated that about eight-in-ten likely voters would vote a straight-party ticket that fall.
That was a mid-term election, and the gravitational pull of a Presidential election at the top of the ticket will only strengthen that straight-ticket likelihood. But, unless Trump can reverse the current polling, the Republican Senate campaign committee will have to help their candidates break free of him.
As someone once said: Politics ain't beanbag.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the 1996 election and to that Pew study on ticket-splitters.
The Mullfoto today: During and after Hurricane Isaias, lookin' out my back door.
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