| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. To win re-election, President Donald Trump is going to have to do something that no incumbent has done before, at least not in the polling era. He'll have to change the basic conditions of the election. I don't mean better campaign tactics, advertising strategies or debate performances. The basic conditions. The good news? Unprecedented things happen in virtually every presidential election, and the events of 2020 are unusual enough that significant swings in public opinion can't be ruled out. The bad news? Trump doesn't seem to be focused on doing anything that could help him out of his trouble, and the unusual circumstances of this cycle could just as easily harm him further.
Trump's current approval numbers (as calculated by FiveThirtyEight) continue to grow more dismal by the month. His approval rating has gone from 45.8% on April 1, to 43.3% at the beginning of May, to 42.9% in early June, to 40.7% over the Fourth of July weekend. His disapproval has climbed steadily, from 49.7% on April 1 to 55.9% now. That's a whopping 15.2 points underwater, and there's just no way that a president is going to be re-elected with a solid majority thinking he has failed in office. Recent elected presidents break down roughly into three groups. Rounding them off, the three easy winners were quite popular at this point in their terms: Richard Nixon had a net approval rating of +26, Ronald Reagan was at +16 and Bill Clinton at +14. Then there are two winners who had hotly contested races: Barack Obama at +2 and George W. Bush at -3. Trump, at -15, is in the group no president wants to be in, with George H.W. Bush (-18) and Jimmy Carter (-26). The big problem for Trump is that no elected president in the modern era has improved dramatically between this point and the election. The closest he might have as a model is Harry Truman, but polling was so infrequent in 1948 that we really don't know when Truman's comeback began or how large it was. And Truman's disapproval rating never hit 50% during the election year; in fact, only George H.W. Bush and Carter topped 55% disapproval during the election year. (If you don't like approval polls, see a similar conclusion from CNN's Harry Enten based on horse-race surveys.) The point is that Trump needs to do something different for this to be a close election. And it needs to be something that will change the minds of a chunk of people who think he's been a failure. Talking about statues and other supposed carnage isn't going to do the trick. Nor is any other tactic Trump has used during the three and a half years of his presidency. That's easy to predict, since we know that he was unpopular even when basic fundamentals such as the economy were pretty good. Doing more of the same except louder isn't going to produce different results. The only way Trump likely has a chance is to somehow stop the spread of the pandemic and do it quickly enough that the economy can start to recover. And the only way he can do that is to actually start doing the job he was hired to do instead of making excuses and trying to pick fights with more than half the nation. There's a good chance it's too late anyway. But maybe instead of spending most of his time trying to convince everyone how horrible the nation is after three and a half years of his presidency, he could try to convince people that he's working hard to improve things. 1. Patrick Schmidt and Margaret Moran at the Monkey Cage on the future of independent executive-branch agencies. 2. Catherine Rampell on Trump opposing free speech. She offers 11 examples, but she missed a big one: Trump has often said various candidates should not be allowed to run for president, and has frequently said that his political opponents should be locked up. 3. Jordan Weissmann on the June jobs report. 4. Nicholas Rasmussen and Ryan Goodman on the intelligence community working to cover up for Trump. 5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen on the NBA and the pandemic economy. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
♯⊗⋮ 2020 Noticias del Gran Mundo Película Completa En Línea released 2020. story: Cinco años después del fin de la Guerra Civil estadounid...
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