Trouble Ahead...

If I'm the Trump Campaign team (and the Hat Trick actually knows one of them from my days as a DC lobbyist...) this can't be good, even if it's June.  As this NPR story shows, Ohio and Florida as "Toss-Ups" and Texas "Leaning Republican" tells you all you need to know.

Lots can happen and the theme of 2020 seems to be whenever something really crazy happens, 2020 says "hold my beer"...but Texas has been an especially solid Republican state having last voted for the Democratic nominee in 1976.  Florida is more of an outlier, sometimes going Republican (1980, 1984, 1988, 1992) and sometimes going Democratic (1996, 2008, 2012) and sometimes having a major identity complex (2000!).  Ohio has also been more changeable, going Republican in years when a Reagan or Bush was the Republican nominee, Democratic in the rest until 2016 when it went for Trump.  President Trump also won Florida in 2016 and absolutely needs to win the state (as well as Ohio) to win re-election in 2020.  Again, the electoral environment can change (look at Hillary Clinton's polls in June of 2016) but the current polling in these three states do not express confidence in the re-election chances of President Trump.

Changes...

This photo to the right was taken last week at 5:00pm EDT from the airport where I work.  It's not a huge facility, but it has a respectable amount of traffic in normal times, and experienced some significant growth this past year with the entry of air carriers such as Frontier and Allegiant.  March, the height of "Season" in Florida (October/November - late April when all the Snowbirds come to visit) saw a booming business by all airlines that suddenly came crashing down with the entry of Coronavirus and its seriousness.  5:00pm never looked this back in March but this was the site last week...not one passenger visible and none of the ticket counters manned.  The last departure of the day had been at 3:30pm, and two flights would be arriving in the late evening. Needless to say, times have changed and it's going to be a long time before my airport sees anything like it saw this past winter.