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      in US Politics

      Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Just be honest | Torsten Bell

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      There are so many elections this year but how to go about winning them? Labour has a sub-optimal, but impressively consistent strategy: waiting (usually a decade and a half in opposition).It’s paying off again with huge swings to them in last week’s two byelections. But this approach requires patience and most parties around the world are less keen on waiting that long. So they spend a lot of time and money trying to win, which means election adverts. In the US, TV ads are centre stage. In the UK, those are largely banned (even GB News is meant to be providing news when Tory MPs interview each other) but online ads are big business.Those involved in politics have very strong views about the kind of ads that work. They absolutely have to be positive about your offer. Or negative about your ghastly opponent. It’s imperative they’re about issues, not personalities. Or the opposite. The only problem with those election gurus’ certainties? Different kinds of ads work at different times and places. So found research with access to an intriguing data source: experiments conducted by campaign teams during 2018 and 2020 US elections to test ad options before choosing which to air; 617 ads were tested in 146 survey experiments.Researchers showed that quality matters – it’s not unusual for an advert to be 50% more or less persuasive than average. But one kind is not generally more persuasive and the type of ads that worked in 2018 didn’t have the same effect in 2020.So, if you’re trying to get yourself elected, my advice is to base your campaign on the evidence, not just your hunch. See it as good practice. After all, we’d ideally run the country that way. More

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      in Elections

      Paramount Lays Off Hundreds of Workers

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      The company, which is moving away from traditional TV, lost more than $1 billion last year at its streaming division.Paramount, the owner of TV networks like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, is laying off hundreds of employees, cutting costs as it continues its painful transition away from traditional television.About 3 percent of the company’s roughly 24,500 employees will be affected by the layoffs, according to a person familiar with the cuts, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive corporate information.Bob Bakish, Paramount’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees that the cuts were part of a bid to “return the company to earnings growth.”“While I realize these changes are in no way easy, as I said last month, I am confident this is the right decision for our future,” Mr. Bakish wrote. “These adjustments will help enable us to build on our momentum and execute our strategic vision for the year ahead — and I firmly believe we have much to be excited about.”Paramount is at a crossroads. The company’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is considering selling her stake in the company, a deal that could bring decades of family ownership to an end. Skydance, the media company that helped produce Paramount franchises like “Top Gun” and “Mission Impossible,” has expressed interest, but no deal has yet materialized.Like all its peers in traditional media, Paramount has struggled to keep pace with Netflix as streaming services supplant traditional TV and moviegoing. The company’s biggest streaming service, Paramount+, has not yet become profitable, putting a drag on the company’s profits. Paramount’s streaming division, which also includes the ad-supported service Pluto TV, lost more than $1 billion last year.Though viewership of Paramount’s cable networks is in decline, parts of its TV business remain resilient. Paramount’s CBS network, which broadcast the Super Bowl on Sunday, generated record ratings for the game, which saw the Kansas City Chief defeat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime. About 123.4 million people watched the game, according to Nielsen, up from 115.1 million the year before. More

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      in Elections

      Steve Bannon hawks disinformation to support Trump as legal troubles mount

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      The far-right strategist and Donald Trump loyalist Steve Bannon is again playing an influential role in the propaganda circles around the former US president as he bids to return to the White House, even as Bannon faces a barrage of legal problems.The conspiratorial Bannon, who spearheaded part of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as chief White House strategist in the first half of 2017, is waiting to see if a federal appeals court overturns his obstruction of Congress conviction. He also faces other legal problems from New York fraud charges, former lawyers and potentially other fronts.But at the same time he is pushing a tidal wave of election disinformation on his War Room podcast to help Trump win the presidency again and promote a Maga-heavy policy agenda as Trump and his allies plot out authoritarian-style plans for a second presidency.Ex-justice department prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans say Bannon’s odds of winning his obstruction of Congress appeal are long, and foresee more legal headaches ahead for the pugnacious Make America Great Again guru, while analysts warn that by spreading election falsehoods and other misinformation he endangers democracy.At present, the biggest legal threat confronting Bannon is his two-count federal conviction and a four-month jail sentence for defying a House panel subpoena for documents and testimony concerning the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.Last fall, Bannon appealed his contempt of Congress conviction for refusing the House subpoena, citing executive privilege and advice from a lawyer, even though he had long left the administration and the matters covered by the subpoena.Separately, Bannon is slated to be tried in May on New York charges of fraud and money laundering involving his key role in a private “We Build the Wall” Mexico venture that bilked thousands of investors out of about $25m, a scheme in which three Bannon associates have been convicted.Bannon last month sought to dismiss the charges, which alleged in part that $1m of the funds were improperly diverted to Bannon and a top associate, but Manhattan prosecutors wrote in a court filing that his argument “bears little resemblance to reality”.The charges by the Manhattan district attorney against Bannon, an alleged architect of the scheme to raise private funds for Trump’s abortive Mexico wall, mirror earlier ones from federal prosecutors against Bannon that Trump pardoned him for the night before leaving office.Experts say more legal scrutiny of Bannon could come on other fronts. The exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a Bannon ally and benefactor who last year was charged by federal prosecutors in a billion-dollar fraud case, was charged again in January for running a “criminal enterprise” that bilked Chinese American dissidents out of tens of millions of dollars.Guo allegedly promoted a cryptocurrency scam, propaganda and other businesses, plus financing a lavish lifestyle including purchasing a yacht, on which Bannon in 2020 was arrested on the federal Mexico wall project charges.Among the businesses linked to Guo in the superseding indictment was the conservative social media platform Gettr, which he helped finance and launch in 2021 and which Bannon’s War Room has profited from. Guo is slated to be tried in April.Bannon’s War Room podcast has reaped tens of thousands of dollars a month in ads from Gettr, according to a source familiar with its operations and news reports.War Room, which regularly hosts staunch Trump allies such as the congresswoman Elise Stefanik and the My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, last year was named the top promoter among political podcasts of misinformation about elections, Covid-19 and other issues, according to a Brookings Institution study.Unfazed, Bannon told the New York Times his top ranking was a “badge of honor … What they call disinformation or misinformation we consider the truth.”A key figure in promoting the January 6 Save America rally, Bannon proved prescient shortly before the insurrection on his War Room podcast when he said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”.Former justice department prosecutors and members of both parties say Bannon’s legal woes are mounting.“Like former president Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s sketchy business and political activities seem to be a magnet for criminal prosecutions and investigations,” said Paul Pelletier, an ex-acting chief of the Department of Justice’s fraud section.“With his criminal ‘Build the Wall’ fraud trial looming and his criminal contempt of Congress long-shot appeal pending, it appears Bannon’s penchant for associating with and profiting from unsavory characters and his own schemes will keep him busy fending off financial fraud investigations for the foreseeable future.“Bannon’s business and financial ties with Guo should certainly attract rigorous scrutiny,” he added.View image in fullscreenOther justice department alumni concur Bannon faces big legal headaches.“Bannon is nothing more than a garden variety fraudster,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “He had the benefit of a patron in the White House who rewarded his loyalty and protected him.” But with Trump gone, “he is now going to pay the price.“His appeal will not succeed and his criminal trial in New York will result in conviction. Only a Trump victory in November can save him from the federal [obstruction] case and even that won’t suffice to save him in New York.”Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the various criminal charges he faces, and his attorney Harlan Protass did not respond to calls for comment.Still, the ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent noted: “It’s absurd and nonsensical for Bannon to think he was protected by executive privilege for events that occurred when he was not a White House employee.”The Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a key member of the House panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s role in it, said: “Bannon seems to have been deeply enmeshed in the planning of the disruption of the peaceful transfer of power and the seizing of the presidency for Donald Trump.”Raskin noted: “Bannon is the intellectual ringleader of the Maga circus … In fact, he fancies himself not just the philosopher of white Christian nationalism in our country but the political strategist for allied autocrats and theocrats all over the world.”In that role, Bannon’s War Room podcast has loomed large, making him an influential figure in promoting Trump and Maga world views including falsehoods about the 2020 election and Covid-19.Bannon’s personal account shows he has nearly 7 million followers and on Gettr, where War Room is one of the most popular shows, more than 800,000 followers.Bannon’s close Gettr ties are underscored by his frequent mention of the platform on War Room. Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow in emerging technologies and AI who led its podcast research, said that Gettr was referenced, often multiple times, in more than 60% of more than 1,000 episodes reviewed.Trump allies who were on War Room multiple times last year included Stefanik, Lindell and the ex-justice department assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, with whom Trump plotted to promote fake electors in several states that Biden won.Bannon has touted Clark, an unindicted co-conspirator in the special counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment of Trump over his attempts to subvert the election results, as attorney general if the former president wins another term. Clark was also indicted along with Trump and 17 others by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s win in Georgia.“Bannon’s War Room stands out – with claims about votes being switched by Dominion machines to Sharpies being used to disenfranchise voters to the Covid-19 virus being a plot to deny Trump a second term, among many, many others,” Wirtschafter said.While Bannon’s War Room keeps pushing Maga misinformation, the bombastic strategist faces other financial and legal woes.Robert Costello, a former Bannon lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s pardon of the strategist, filed a claim against him last year for $480,000 in monies owed. Costello and his firm won a summary judgment from New York’s supreme court to obtain payment, but Bannon, with Protass’s help, is fighting the ruling.Interestingly, Protass in a court filing last month wrote that an effort by Costello’s firm to access Bannon’s bank account and depose him “poses a significant risk of compromising” his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination with fraud charges against him pending in New York.Regarding Bannon’s upcoming Mexico wall fraud trial, Raskin said: “Given that three associates of Bannon have been convicted of the conduct charged in these events, it has to be a serious threat to Bannon too.”Bannon’s multiple legal problems do not surprise Raskin. “He has adopted the persona of bad boy lawlessness. Like Trump, Bannon considers himself way beyond the reach of the law.” More

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      in US Politics

      When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

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      I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More

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      in US Politics

      Dismay as Mehdi Hasan’s MSNBC and Peacock news show cancelled

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      The cable TV channel MSNBC and its sister network NBC’s Peacock streaming service is cancelling the weekend news show The Mehdi Hasan Show, with its eponymous outspoken host, people familiar with the decision have told the news website Semafor.The host and journalist Mehdi Hasan will instead become an on-camera analyst and guest host, the outlet reported on Thursday. The Peacock original show will be replaced by an additional hour of Ayman, the news program hosted by Ayman Mohyeldin.Staff were made aware of the news on Thursday morning, according to Semafor.The show, which was broadcast live on Sundays at 8pm US eastern time, covered national politics, current affairs and global news.The show’s reported cancellation sent shockwaves through his fanbase.The prominent human rights attorney Noura Erakat called the show “an oasis on air and more needed than ever”.Hasan was known for inviting guests on to his show and engaging with them in a fierce debate, often fact-checking and correcting them in real time. His line of questioning was often direct and unrelenting, refusing to let his guest avoid giving an answer.Some of his past guests included the former national security adviser John Bolton, whom he questioned about his vehement support for the Iraq war, launched by then president George W Bush in 2003, despite it resulting in an overwhelming number of civilian deaths.In September, Hasan interviewed the 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whom he questioned about his position against affirmative action in US higher education, despite being a recipient of a scholarship for immigrants and their children.More recently, Hasan has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s bombardment and military assault of Gaza after the state declared war on the Palestinian territory’s controlling militant group, following Hamas’s mass murder attack on southern Israel on 7 October. Earlier in November, he interviewed Mark Regev, senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former ambassador to the UK, questioning Regev firmly on the high Palestinian civilian death toll, the Palestinian children that were killed by the Israeli military and and related matters.Hasan asked: “They’re people your government has killed. You’ve killed children. You accept that, right? Or do you deny that?”To which Regev replied: “No, I do not.”Along with Mohyeldin and NBC’s Ali Velshi, Hasan was among the few Muslim anchors in American television.Before what is reportedly the official cancellation of the Mehdi Hasan show, NBC faced criticism for temporarily taking these Muslim anchors off of the air in the midst of the war in Gaza. Although one of Hasan’s scheduled Thursday night episodes did not air, plans were scrapped for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in for the host Joy Reid on her show, and Alicia Menendez filled in for Ali Velshi, NBC denied reports it was sidelining Muslim voices and that the move was purely coincidence.Hasan, a Briton of Indian-descent, moved to the US in 2015. He became a US citizen in 2020. Previously, Hasan was a senior columnist at the Intercept, a regular contributor to the Guardian and a presenter for Al Jazeera English.Hasan is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. There, he memorably debated the subject of Islam and defended that it was a peaceful religion. The video, posted on the Oxford Union YouTube channel has over 10m views.Neither Hasan nor NBC immediately responded to a request for comment. More

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      in US Politics

      Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark

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      Major US news outlets devoted significantly less time and space to covering Donald Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” this month than they did in a similar period in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a new study has found.Findings by the progressive watchdog Media Matters included 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s remark than Trump’s by the “Big Three” broadcast networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the first week after the remark was made; and print reports among the top five circulating newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today) in which mention of Clinton’s remark outnumbered Trump’s 29-1 in the same period.“Coverage decisions like these … shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles,” wrote Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow.Media Matters describes itself as “a web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.It has recently made headlines by highlighting far-right content on X, prompting advertisers to withdraw, an effort now the subject of a lawsuit from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.Clinton’s “deplorables” remark was a famous feature of the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Trump.In September that year, the Democrat told a New York audience: “To be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later but is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, dominating polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, he told supporters he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.Biden joined pundits and historians in pointing out how authoritarian leaders have called opponents “vermin”, Adolf Hitler prominently among them.Acknowledging such comparisons and warnings, Gertz wrote: “The former president … added that those forces want ‘to destroy America and to destroy the American dream’ and that ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within’.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By contrast, the right weaponised Clinton’s relatively mundane ‘basket of deplorables’ comment … [though] she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include ‘people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change’, adding: ‘Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.’”The new Media Matters research, Gertz said, illustrated how major news outlets responded to “weaponisation” of Clinton’s remark, “rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark with coverage.“By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as ‘vermin’, continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary.”According to the research, ABC, CBS and NBC spent 54 minutes on the “deplorables” remark in the first week after it was uttered (making 1,662 mentions of it) but only three minutes (through 191 mentions) on the “vermin” remark in the same period.The only print article in the five main papers to consider the “vermin” remark was published by the Washington Post. In 2016, it ran nine print articles on the “deplorables” comment in the first week after it was made, Media Matters said.Gertz said: “When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely US presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump interview an ‘insult to Hispanic community’, ex-Univision head says

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      A former president of Univision condemned the Spanish-language US television network’s recent interview with Donald Trump as “propaganda” and an “insult to the Hispanic community”.“To call the Trump [interview] an interview is mistaken,” Joaquin Blaya told MSNBC. “It was not an interview as we understand [it] in the United States. It was basically a one-hour propaganda open space for former president Trump to say whatever he wanted to say.”The friendly interview was filmed at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago home. Lingering controversy ensued, including a call from John Leguizamo, the actor and sometime Daily Show host, for a Univision boycott.Amid revelations that Univision canceled both ads bought by President Joe Biden (after announcing a surprise policy change) as well as an interview in which a White House official was scheduled to respond, a top network anchor resigned.Speaking to the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday, Blaya lamented “a drastic change for what have been the standards of Univision”.“When I created the Univision network news [in the 1980s], [it was] built on the principles of American broadcasting journalism, the ABC, CBS, NBC … we were trying to basically create a Spanish but American network,” Blaya said.“And I say that because there’s a big difference from our association in those days with the news that we’re seeing coming from Mexico.”Univision recently came under the control of Grupo Televisa, a Mexican company. In his interview, Trump, who famously clashed with the Univision anchor Jorge Ramos during the 2016 election, said of the new owners: “They like me.”Last week, Blaya told the Washington Post that the Univision interview failed to preserve a standard “separation of business and news”.“What I saw there was batting practice, someone dropping balls for him to hit out of the park,” Blaya said. “I think it was an embarrassment.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats but dominates Republican primary polling, amid mounting warnings of the fascistic tone of his rhetoric.Speaking to MSNBC, Blaya said favourable Univision coverage of Trump’s anti-immigration views was “a real insult to the Hispanic community of this country”.He added: “And for those who understand the business, there is no doubt that in doing what they did, [it] had to be a corporate decision. That is not a decision that the local news director or the local general manager would have taken on [their] own.”According to the Post, the interview was “arranged with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner”, who was also a senior White House adviser for the ex-president.The Post said the interview was also “attended by a trio of senior executives at Univision’s parent company”.Latino voters have long leaned Democratic. This week, however, the polling firm Morning Consult noted that “Trump is gaining ground among key voter segments including Black, Hispanic and young Americans.” More