Good morning. Tune in for a special 9 a.m. show revisiting this eventful political week. I’ll cohost with Angela Davis.
Republicans holding their national convention shared yesterday’s news cycle with Democratic President Joe Biden and his continued struggles. Pressure continued to build on Biden to exit the race amid signs his party could be in danger of a shellacking. California Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the Trump impeachment case prosecutors, added his name to the list of elected Democrats calling for Biden to step aside. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that two-thirds of “average Democrats” also want a new candidate. Democratic National Committee leaders set the process in motion for a virtual rollcall to nominate a candidate, which could send Biden a lifeline but that also faces pushback within the party. Today marks three weeks since the disastrous debate that kickstarted the Democratic Party alarm.
To make matters worse, Biden left the campaign trail in Nevada yesterday after testing positive for COVID-19. It’s not the first time he’s had the respiratory virus, but it comes at an awful time as the 81-year-old president’s health and vitality are under the microscope. Biden headed to Delaware to recuperate.
At the Republican National Convention, it was JD Vance’s time in the spotlight. The newly nominated vice presidential candidate running with Donald Trump traced his rise from poverty to a presidential ticket. He presented himself as a messenger of the working class and “forgotten” towns, which will be his task going forward. One of the arguments Republicans have made for Vance is he can sell the party’s message of economic populism in more places, as Mark Zdechlik explores. That includes parts of Minnesota, although Vance didn’t add the state to his frequent mentions of places higher on the campaign battleground list — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Minnesota Republicans sense the wind at their backs as they prepare to leave Milwaukee and try to put their state in Donald Trump’s column. Trump speaks tonight to close out the convention. Zdechlik reports on the themes that GOP delegates are taking from the convention and hope to put into action. All week, GOP officials and delegates lodged a full-throated attack on Democrats on issues ranging from the economy to public safety to border security. Democrats who traveled to Wisconsin to lodge their rebuttal, meanwhile, called Republican policies too extreme. Trump’s pollster and key advisers spent the week reinforcing their case that they can flip Minnesota, which hasn’t gone for a Republican since President Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide.
Before the day’s developments, Biden allies had hoped to change the subject. They gave a preview of proposals the president would call for to change the way U.S. Supreme Court justices govern themselves. Under the yet-final proposal, there would be term limits and an ethics code. Both are big issues on the political left because of worries about decisions and the political independence of the conservative-led court.
Closer to home, the makeup of the Minnesota Racing Commission is a hot topic. MinnPost’s Peter Callaghan has more on two new additions to the horse track regulatory board that have inflamed tensions between those operations and tribal casinos. The first meeting since two appointees with tribal leadership experience landed on the commission was somewhat icy. | 