I spoke to TIME‘s Molly Ball about the politics of school re-openings and the President’s decision to wade into the fray.

Trump has squandered an opportunity to tap parents’ frustration, says GOP strategist Liam Donovan. “There’s a nonpolitical sense among working parents of all kinds that they can’t send their kids back to school soon enough,” Donovan says, “but the President has bigfooted it, and not in a thoughtful way.” As usual, Trump has polarized the debate. The result may be angry parents flooding local school-board meetings this fall to yell at one another about mask requirements.

Read the full piece here.

I also had Molly on the podcast to discuss the issue along with her new book, PELOSI.

Listen here.

I spoke to Morning Consult‘s Eli Yokley about the voters who dislike both candidates and how they compare to last time.

“I view these gains as addition by subtraction for Biden,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican consultant and former finance strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Many of the voters with unfavorable views of both Clinton and Trump were conservatives who disliked him because they were bearish on his chances, Donovan said, but that changed once he won.

“Having consolidated the low-hanging fruit,” he said, “the remnant is bound to be skeptical of Trump, unpersuaded by the mere fact of his win, and more open to Biden as a non-Hillary alternative.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Sam Stein of the Daily Beast about the down-ballot dynamic in the 2020 Senate races and messaging around the pandemic.

The down-ballot Republican Senate candidates seem aware of those risks. In their ads—many of which were released before the most recent jobs report—they often acknowledge the economic hole the country is facing before spotlighting their efforts to help pull their states out of it. In a spot she released earlier this month, Collins called the current situation an “economic crisis” and touted the work she’s done to expand small business loans. In an ad he put out earlier this month, Gardner described the current landscape as “America’s fragile environment” before going through a list of bills he’s helped pass. And in his most recent spot, Tillis explicitly noted that one million North Carolinians are out of work.

“You absolutely need to be careful not to spike the football in the second quarter of the pandemic, with five months and several jobs reports left to go,” said Liam Donovan, a veteran of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “If people need to be convinced of how great things are, the recovery probably hasn’t caught up to them yet, so effective messaging has to be more circumspect.”

Read the full piece here.