RNC Convention Chief Joins Melania Trump’s Team: Campaign Update

(Bloomberg) -- First Lady Melania Trump announced Monday that Marcia Lee Kelly, chief executive of the 2020 Republican National Convention Committee, would be joining her staff as a senior adviser.

Kelly, who will be designated a special government employee, will continue her work on the Aug. 24 convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in addition to duties at the White House, according to RNC spokesman Steve Guest. The appointment formalizes the role for Kelly, who has been advising the first lady in recent months.

Melania Trump’s office also announced that Emma Doyle, who worked under former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, would be moving to work in the East Wing as the deputy chief of staff for policy. She’ll serve under former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was replaced with Kayleigh McEnany shortly after Mark Meadows, the former North Carolina congressman, took over as White House chief of staff.

Pence To Visit Crucial Swing State of Wisconsin (12:20 p.m.)

Vice President Mike Pence is headed to the crucial swing state of Wisconsin Tuesday to highlight the production of ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic.

Pence will tour the GE Healthcare manufacturing facility in Madison, meet with employees and participate in a roundtable discussion, the White House said.

Wisconsin, which Trump won by less than 1% of the vote in 2016, has been one of the states where protests have arisen over Democratic Governor Tony Evers’s plan to extend the state’s stay-at-home order until May 26. The handling of the outbreak has increasingly become a partisan issue.

Pence’s trip also comes on the heels of the April 7 primary, when state Republicans refused to extend vote-by-mail or absentee voting deadlines, prompting people to gather at polling places to cast their votes. -- Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou

Biden Pitches Vote-by-Mail to Supporters (10:44 a.m.)

President Donald Trump has turned vote-by-mail into another hot-button issue and now Joe Biden is taking advantage.

While Trump has railed against mail-in voting in recent days, arguing that it hurts Republican candidates, Biden has used the issue to energize his base as well.

The Biden campaign cited the recent Wisconsin primary to ask supporters to sign a petition demanding “expanded options” to vote safely -- a common campaign tactic to vacuum up email addresses and other information.

“We cannot allow what happened in Wisconsin -- where voters waited in line for hours and risked their health to vote in-person -- to happen again,” the campaign wrote in one email.

For now, there is only a slight partisan divide over vote-by-mail. A Reuters poll in early April found that 79% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans supported a requirement to allow mail-in ballots if the coronavirus is still a problem in the November election. -- Ryan Teague Beckwith

Coming up:

Wyoming’s primary will be April 17, with mail-in only ballots. Puerto Rico’s primary is tentatively rescheduled for April 26. Ohio will hold an absentee-only primary on April 28. Both Guam and Kansas have in-person voting scheduled for May 2.

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