2020 Campaign - June
A June 2019 Quinnipiac poll showed Biden easily defeating Trump in a 2020 matchup by a margin of 53 to 40%. Sanders, Harris, Warren, Buttigieg and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker also came out ahead against the president in head-to-head matchups. The Republicans and Trump want to make the Democrats overconfident. If they are overconfident, they are more likely to nominate a candidate who is well to the left, pleasing the Democratic activists but nearly guaranteeing a defeat in November of 2020.
A University of California Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll showed Warren moving into second place in California behind Biden. The former vice president leads in the state with 22%, followed by Warren at 18% and Sanders at 17%. Home state favorite Harris has dropped to 13%, down from 17% in the previous poll.
Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the coronavirus.
Donald Trump launched his comeback rally 20 June 2020 by defining the upcoming election as a stark choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism. City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign, for its part, declared that it had received over a million ticket requests.
But his intended show of political force amid a pandemic featured thousands of empty seats and new coronavirus cases on his own campaign staff. A spokesperson for the Tulsa Fire Department noted that the number of scanned tickets logged for the event at the 19,000 capacity BOK Center was “just under 6,200”, cited by Fox News.
In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to address an overflow space outdoors. When Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” about a third of the seats at his indoor rally were empty. Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” But the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful, and Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.
The US president also tried to explain away the crowd size, blaming it on the media who he said warned people: "Don't go, don't come, don't do anything," while insisting that the protesters outside were "doing bad things", though the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful. "We begin our campaign," Trump thundered. "The silent majority is stronger than ever before." Just moments before Trump's speech, his son, Eric, also addressed the crowd, describing the anti-racism protesters across the US as "animals".
Trump's re-election team dismissed claims that a social media campaign by young Tik-Tok users and K-Pop fans was behind the low turnout for his “comeback” Tulsa rally. But the denial is being taken less seriously than the original prank. Trump 2020 campaign has denied the manipulation claim, with campaign director Brad Parscale noting: "Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don't know what they're talking about or how our rallies work."
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