Mark Cuban Says He Won’t Run for President: Campaign Update

(Bloomberg) -- Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said Thursday that he would not run for president, something he apparently was thinking of doing.

In an interview on “The Axe Files” podcast, Cuban said that last month he commissioned a pollster to gauge his prospects as an independent candidate against President Donald Trump and presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

But the pollster said that while Cuban drew a lot of independent support, he was “only able to get up to 25%” of the vote, so he dropped the idea.

Cuban joins fellow billionaire and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, independent Representative Justin Amash and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura among potential presidential candidates who didn’t end up running, not to mention 27 Democrats and three Republicans who ran unsuccessfully.

He toyed with the idea of running for president in 2016 before endorsing Hillary Clinton.

DNC Vows Some Sort of Convention in Milwaukee (4:31 p.m.)

In one form or another, the Democratic National Convention is on track to be held in Milwaukee with safety measures in place, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Thursday.

In an interview on SiriusXM’s The Joe Madison Show, Perez said the convention team was still planning on having an in-person event in August despite the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“We’ve given our convention team the flexibility to understand what the situation is on the ground, and then build out a convention that will again, highlight our values, highlight our nominee, highlight our historic vice-presidential nominee, whoever she is, but also to make sure that we are safe first and foremost,” Perez said.

But Perez stressed that safety measures would be implemented to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, though he did not specify what they would be. “We’re not going to put the people of Milwaukee, or our delegates, in harm’s way.”

The news comes days after President Donald Trump declared he did not want to hold the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, as planned after the state’s governor said the full contingent of delegates, officials, media and hangers-on would not be allowed to gather indoors.

“It’s not an either-or -- you either have a full convention or you have a virtual convention,” Perez added. “There are gradations in between.” -- Emma Kinery

Trump Gets Poor Marks on Handling Coronavirus (1:18 p.m.)

A growing majority of Americans give President Donald Trump poor marks on handling the coronavirus pandemic in a new poll.

In a recent survey from the Monmouth University Poll, 56% of adults said he was doing a bad job responding to the outbreak, while 42% said he was doing a good job.

Those numbers have steadily declined for Trump, who had 50% in surveys from the same pollster saying he was doing a good job in March, 46% in April and 42% in May.

Respondents were even less satisfied with Congress, with 52% saying it has done a bad job and 35% saying it has done a good job. That number has also eroded from March, when 42% said Congress had done a good job.

The survey of 807 adults across the country was conducted from May 28 to June 1. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. -- Ryan Teague Beckwith

COMING UP

Primaries are coming up next week in the U.S. Virgin Islands, West Virginia and Georgia. The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for the week beginning Aug. 17, while the Republicans are slated to meet a week later, beginning on Aug. 24.

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