his presidential campaign and as president. In a July 2018 campaign rally, he said that "The Democratic Party sounds too good so I don't want to use that, OK?" He added, "I call it the Democrat Party. It sounds better rhetorically." At a September 2018 rally he suggested that "When you see 'Democratic Party,' it's wrong. There's no name, 'Democratic Party.'" At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019, he stated he liked to say, "the 'Democrat Party,' because it doesn't sound good. But that's all the more reason I use it, because it doesn't." During the first White House Coronavirus Task Force press conference, he advanced this usage with, "... governors including Democratic—or Democrat, as I call them—governors—which is actually the correct term." During the 2020 United States presidential election, a conservative advocacy group created the website "Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden", in an apparent attempt to respond to Republican Voters Against Trump. According to The Daily Beast, the former found only one registered Democrat for its testimonies by September 2020; The Daily Beast opined that the name of the organization is a clue that its founders were unfamiliar with how registered Democrats refer to themselves. Deliberate usage of the term as an epithet accelerated in the late 2010s and 2020s. Media organizations According to Media Matters for America, the "ungrammatical" and "partisan" use of the phrase Democrat Party has "echoed Republicans" with its use in the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. NPR directed its staff in 2010 to use the adjective Democratic rather than Democrat. According to Ron Elving, NPR's senior Washington editor, it was the organization's policy to call parties by the name that they use to refer to themselves, saying: "We should not refer to Democrat ideas or Democrat votes. Any deviation from that by NPR reporters on air or online should be corrected". Responses In the mid-1950s, members of the Democratic National Committee proposed using "Publican Party" instead of "Republican Party". The committee failed to accept the proposal, "explaining that Republican is the name by which our opponents' product is known and mistrusted". Sherman Yellen suggested "The Republicants" as suitably comparable in terms of negative connotation in an April 29, 2007, Huffington Post column. On the February 26, 2009 edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, California Republican Representative Darrell Issa referred to "a Democrat Congress".