• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 22, 2020

The good news -- or, depending how you look at it, bad news -- for the Presidential campaign trail, is most Americans haven't exactly been paying attention to the 2020 race. That's because they've been preoccupied by a far more immediate crisis -- the one that could kill them in the near term. Those are the findings of the latest installment of Pew Research Center's polls on Americans' news consumption habits, which finds the COVID-19 pandemic has -- not surprisingly -- dominated the news cycle.

But it's actually bad news for the incumbent candidate, because whether Americans do so explicitly or implicitly, they're probably associating the health crisis with him.

That's probably why the candidate, his campaign team, and his Republican party supporters are creating new distractions -- you know, "Obamagate," Mike Flynn's "unmasking," etc. -- and are threatening new Congressional hearings in an attempt to spin the news cycle in another direction.

Meanwhile, some unusual surrogates continue to draw Americans' attention in the opposite direction, emphasizing how bad a job the incumbent is doing. And this week, they chose to draw some attention toward the job his campaign manager has been doing, mostly in enriching himself.

The Lincoln Project, the group of Conservative Republican political operatives who recently launched the "Mourning In America" campaign, this week broke "GOP Cribs," a spot focusing on Trump Pence 2020 campaign manager Brad Pasquale's wealth and lavish lifestyle, implying it's coming at the expense of his campaign client (see video below).