We build a sentence-level political discourse classifier using existing human expert annotated corpora of political manifestos from the Manifestos Project (Volkens et al., 2020a) and applying them to a corpus of COVID-19 Press Briefings (Chatsiou, 2020). We use manually annotated political manifestos as training data to train a local topic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier; then apply it to the COVID-19Press Briefings Corpus to automatically classify sentences in the test corpus. We report on a series of experiments with CNN trained on top of pre-trained embeddings for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that CNN combined with transformers like BERT outperforms CNN combined with other embeddings (Word2Vec, Glove, ELMo) and that it is possible to use a pre-trained classifier to conduct automatic classification on different political texts without additional training.