blog 2.4 trump and social media

1. 1.6 million 
2. And instead of trying to persuade voters who live in the states that will decide 2020, he appears to instead be trying to rile up his base (and get their information if he doesn’t already have it). His campaign is using Facebook ads as a way to reinforce the narrative cycle from the White House, Republican lawmakers, and conservative media that impeachment is a political plot against the president by Democrats.
3. His ads, by and large, don’t deal with the substance of the allegations — that he and his administration tried to leverage US foreign policy to convince Ukraine to investigate a personal political rival — and instead push conspiracies. They are a way for the president’s reelection campaign to build voter lists, streamline in potential volunteers and donors, and keep public opinion from swinging too far out of Trump’s favor.
4. $284 million
5. Since running that first ad, Trump’s campaign has spent a small fortune on impeachment ads — nearly 30 percent of his total Facebook ad spend in that time.
6. The vast majority of that ad spending — 90 percent — was aimed at people over the age of 35, with nearly 30 percent of that spending geared toward people 65 and over.
7. What Trump is not doing is focusing impeachment ads — or Facebook ads in general — campaigns such as Trump’s lean heavily into trying to get people who already like him engaged and out to vote, and getting them riled up helps that. And that’s what Facebook’s algorithm is built to do: keep people engaged, often with content that reinforces their views or prompts a strong reaction.
8. Trump’s strategy on impeachment puts pressure on Republicans to hold the line. 
9. He has a vast campaign infrastructure and millions upon millions of dollars behind him. At the end of the third quarter of this year, his campaign had $83 million in cash on hand. The best-funded Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has $33 million.
10. Warren, who called for Trump’s impeachment after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report this spring, is dedicating most of her Facebook impeachment spend to states with a lot of people. She’s list-building. And while her original messaging was around the Mueller report, she is now also running ads on the current impeachment inquiry in Congress- targeting the states Democrats most need to win if they want to defeat him next year: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 

Blog 2.2- Iowa Caucus

1. The dinner — historically the largest gathering of voters in Iowa — marked the beginning of a final push to the caucuses at a moment when support for a number of candidates has seen major shifts. For those who have benefitted from those changes, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the evening provided an opportunity to solidify that momentum; and for candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have seen some erosion of support, the dinner was a chance to reenergize their base and make their cases to voters still undecided.
2. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll from late October found that 29 percent of voters are still undecided on who to choose. And a September Des Moines Register poll found that only about 20 percent of voters know for certain who they will caucus for.
3. Biden entered the race as the presumed frontrunner, and still leads in national polling; the Times/Sienna poll put him in fourth, however, behind Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg (in that order). Buttigieg has seen a large increase in support in recent Iowa polling, including in the Suffolk/USA Today survey, which put him in third.
4. At Friday’s event, Buttigieg worked to visualize that increasing support by filling 12 sections of the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa, which held more than 13,000 attendees this year, according to NBC News. Buttigieg gave an address that worked to cement his position as a centrist in contrast to Warren (in a recent interview, he said the primary would ultimately come down to him and the senator) and that endeavored to link himself to President Barack Obama, who gave an acclaimed address at the event in 2007.
5. Warren, who the Times poll found to be the current frontrunner, sought to remind voters about her ideas, and argued progressive policies were the way to energize voters both during the primary and the general election. And although Warren had released her plan to fund Medicare-for-all Friday following criticism for having previously failed to do so, she focused more on political ideology.
6. Sanders gave his usual stump speech on the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all and was the only top-tier candidate to not attack other opponents, according to the New York Times’ Sydney Ember and Reid J. Epstein. Unlike most of the other candidates, Sanders did not buy any seating for his supporters but instead hosted a watch party for them. He donated the $20,000 in ticket fees to the Iowa Democratic Party. 
7. February 3rd. 

Blog 2.3- Virgina's Election results ...

1. Last week, democrats took control of both state's legislative bodies on Tuesday, and have said they plan to ratify the ERA which would make Virginia the 38th and finial state. 

2. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

3. In the first year after the amendment was passed, 22 states ratified it.  Indiana became the 35th state to ratify the ERA in 1977. Then its momentum stalled. After lying dormant for decades, the ERA has begun to gain momentum in recent years. Nevada ratified it in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and now Virginia appears to be on the cusp of doing so.

4. A 38th state ratifying the ERA wouldn’t be the end of it. It’s 37 years past the deadline Congress set for it to become a constitutional amendment: Congress originally set a 1979 deadline, and when that date hit, the amendment only had 35 ratifications. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but it missed that as well.

5. Congress put a seven-year deadline for ratifying the ERA in 1972. 
6. Virginia got close to ratifying the ERA last year, but the GOP-controlled legislature ultimately rejected it. A House committee refused to take it up, and a Senate panel defeated it 9 to 5. Men cast all of the “no” votes. With Democrats in control, hopes are high that next time around will be different.
7. It’s 37 years past the deadline Congress set for it to become a constitutional amendment: Congress originally set a 1979 deadline, and when that date hit, the amendment only had 35 ratifications. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but it missed that as well. Still, there are some potential workarounds. A 2013 report said Congress could just vote to change the previous deadline.Rep. Jackie Speier and Sen. Ben Cardin introduced legislation in 2017 that would remove the ratification deadline for the ERA. 

8. In 1982, an undergraduate student, Gregory Watson, figured out that the amendment could still be ratified and started what would eventually become a successful grassroots campaign to ratify, in 1992, the 27th Amendment.

Blog 2.1-Impeachment

1. Months after the impeachment, Clinton hadn’t just survived the impeachment process — he had managed to weather it with high approval ratings and the backing of his party.2. For one thing, the case against Clinton hinged on the findings in Starr’s report. By contrast, today’s Democrats didn’t choose to orient their inquiry around findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that examined misconduct by Trump: They are instead building a case against the president in real time, which makes it harder to predict where the public will ultimately land. Also, many Americans saw Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky as a “private matter,” but Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is much more clearly tied to his role as commander-in-chief. So it’s entirely possible that the public will be less forgiving this time.3.  By the time the House of Representatives voted to open an impeachment inquiry against Clinton in October 1998, the allegations against the president had been in the news for months. Clinton had publicly confessed to the affair in August, and in mid-September, Starr delivered his lengthy and salacious report — which included a case for impeaching Clinton — to Congress. By the time this formal announcement came, Clinton was popular and impeachment was not. 4. In mid-August 1998, an ABC News poll found that only 38 percent of Republicans thought Clinton should be impeached and removed from office. But by the time the House had voted to impeach him, about two-thirds of Republicans were on board. The GOP’s attacks, though, didn’t seem to have the effect of boosting overall support for impeachment; if anything, it just resulted in a widening partisan divide.5. It wasn’t always clear that Democrats would stand by Clinton. Some distanced themselves from the president in the lead-up to the midterm elections; others even questioned whether he should resign. The initial vote to refer Starr’s report to the House Judiciary Committee for further investigation passed by an overwhelming margin. And when the House voted a few weeks later to open a formal impeachment inquiry, 31 moderate Democrats were in support. 6. When it was the Senate’s turn to decide whether Clinton should remain in office, only Republicans crossed the aisle, with 10 GOP senators voting to acquit Clinton on at least one of the charges.7. With no committed Republican support so far, it’s very difficult to argue that there aren’t partisan elements to the investigation. And as with the Clinton impeachment, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided about the president’s conduct, which could make it difficult to build a true consensus around impeachment. 8. The Democrats’ inquiry is different, though, in that they don’t have a completed investigation like Starr’s. Democrats had an opportunity to frame an impeachment inquiry around a completed special counsel investigation after the exhaustive findings in Mueller’s report became public, but only moved forward with impeachment after the Ukraine allegations presented a new scandal and an evolving set of facts to pursue. As a result, they may be able to avoid (or at least mitigate) the perception that they were just looking for an excuse to impeach Trump, especially as new evidence continues to emerge.8.  While the allegations against Clinton were personal and moral, the conduct at issue in Trump’s case is much more closely linked to his power as president, which could mean the public will be less inclined to dismiss it as human error.