Trump still has a 90% approval among Republicans.

[Drunken Irishman]

13. Pelosi is right and wrong...

It's not about the 90% of Republicans who support him. It's about the voters who, for whatever reason, didn't vote or voted third party in 2016. Those voters are still susceptible to Trump's ability and character. These are the same voters who thought, for some god-awful reason, he would be tamed by the presidency or would be handicapped from doing any harm.

Now they know better.

Just focusing on the policies is what got us Trump in the first place. Hillary ran one of the most substantive, policy-driven campaigns in American history and still lost because, at the end of the day, people only heard the attacks, whether it was about locking her up or otherwise.

Case in point: the 2016 debates. Trump was off the rail crazy and Hillary generally stuck to ideas and policy. It didn't do a damn good for her campaign, though. What people heard was Trump lobbing bombastic accusation after another and it overwhelmed to the point it drowned out Hillary's policy-driven answers. Where Hillary REALLY landed her hits was when she went after Trump's character - specifically as it tied to Russia. Her line about him being Putin's puppet landed more than any other line of her's in that debate. It flustered Trump. He came back with a silly, "you're the puppet" but she backed off, went back into policy, and that was that.

We need to do both. We need to address policy but also go hard at Trump's character. We CANNOT treat this like a typical general election. The Democrats ran a typical presidential campaign in 2016 and have nothing to show for it. 2020 won't be any different. They've got to get nasty because Trump will be nasty and just focusing on policy cedes all the zingers and one-liners to him and he then dominates the airways.