Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Politico reports that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is poised to launch “a massive negative ad campaign against Joe Biden,” investing more than $10 million on “a national advertising blitz” targeting the Democratic candidate who’s ahead in the polls.
* Trump said this morning that he would make coronavirus testing available to Biden, though the motivation was hardly magnanimity. “I would love to see him get out of the basement so he can speak,” the president said in reference to his rival. “Every time he talks it’s like a good thing.”
* In Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate Democratic primary, the latest Emerson College/7 News poll found Rep. Joe Kennedy with a 16-point lead over incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, though a related poll from UMass-Lowell put Kennedy’s lead at just two points.
* While Republican officials, including Trump, are determined not to change their schedule for the party’s national political convention in Charlotte, local officials are less optimistic. “I think it’s very clear it may not be possible to host a convention as planned,” Edmund Driggs, a Republican member of the Charlotte City Council, told the New York Times. At least for now, the event is slated to begin on Aug. 24.
* Biden told WFTV in Orlando that Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) is “one of a group of close to a dozen really qualified and talented women who are, are on the list” of possible vice presidential contenders. Demings’ national profile got a significant boost earlier this year when she served as an impeachment manager in Trump’s impeachment trial. * While Trump sparked an international controversy when he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Biden recently explained how he’d approach the issue if elected: “The move shouldn’t have happened in the context as it did, it should happen in the context of a larger deal to help us achieve important concessions for peace in the process. But now that is done, I would not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv.” * And the Washington Post this week took a closer look at the upcoming congressional special election in California’s 25th district, formerly represented by Democrat Katie Hill, which is getting quite messy, in part because of the pandemic.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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