The Morning Jolt

On the menu today: If President Trump and his campaign have compelling evidence of an election being stolen, the venue for it is a courtroom, not angry tirades on social media or cable news; an update on the vote count; follow-ups on some of the intriguing news items from yesterday; and word of a potential dramatic turn of events overseas.

If You’ve Got Evidence of Election-Related Crimes, It’s Put Up or Shut Up Time

If you’re convinced that the election is being “stolen” through fraudulent votes or the destruction of legitimate ballots, you can post all you want on social media or maybe go on cable news and make accusations. But if you have witnessed a crime in the process of voting or vote-counting, you shouldn’t be trying to build your audience or brand; you should be going to law enforcement. Don’t take it from me, take it from Attorney General William Barr:

In consultation with federal prosecutors at the Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., the District Election Officers in U.S. Attorney’s Offices, FBI officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and FBI special agents serving as Election Crime Coordinators in the FBI’s 56 field offices will be on duty while polls are open to receive complaints from the public.

Election-crime complaints should be directed to the local U.S. Attorney’s Offices or the local FBI office.  A list of U.S. Attorney’s Offices and their telephone numbers can be found at http://www.justice.gov/usao/districts/.  A list of FBI offices and accompanying telephone numbers can be found at www.fbi.gov/contact-us.

Public Integrity Section prosecutors are available to consult and coordinate with the U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the FBI regarding the handling of election-crime allegations.

If “they’re trying to steal an election,” as the president claimed last night — on a scale large enough to overcome five-figure margins in most of these swing states —  the Trump campaign’s lawyers should be describing who is doing what, where, and when, in detail in their lawsuits and requests for injunctions. So far, they’re not doing this.

In Georgia, the Trump campaign argued that Chatham County had improperly counted 53 absentee ballots that arrived after the deadline. The Board of Registrars chairman and supervisor testified all the proper protocol had been followed regarding those ballots in question and time-stamped, indicating they had been submitted before the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day. Superior Court judge James Bass concluded there was no evidence that the county had violated any state election laws.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign filed a suit seeking a halt to the vote count, contending that there weren’t enough poll challengers in place. (Poll challengers are different from poll watchers; poll watchers cannot challenge a person’s eligibility to vote or the actions of an elections inspector, but election challengers can.) Michigan Court of Claims judge Cynthia Stephens rejected the request on several grounds — local election officials had been instructed to allow the poll challengers; the complaint didn’t list specifically which local election officials who had been denied access, or when, or why; and the count was almost complete anyway. The judge called it a “hearsay affidavit.”

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign sought a halt in the count, on the basis that Republicans weren’t being allowed to observe the vote-counting process . . . when in fact they were:

U.S. District Court Judge Paul S. Diamond on Thursday denied the Trump campaign’s request to halt the count in Philadelphia, after a deal was struck to have 60 observers from each party observe the process.

Diamond sighed several times during the hearing and appeared exasperated when the Trump campaign, which claimed all Republican observers were being barred from the count, conceded that they had “a nonzero number of people in the room” where votes were being processed.

Maybe the Trump campaign has excellent lawyers, but right now, they look flailing and amateurish. One intriguing report in the New York Times stated that Jared “Kushner was making calls, looking for what he described as a ‘James Baker-like’ figure who could lead the legal effort to dispute the tabulations in different states, according to a person briefed on the discussions.” A “wartime consigliere” seems like the sort of key role you would want to have nailed down before Election Day, not after.

Do you know how James Baker got to be James Baker? He built up his credibility and stature and reputation as a reliable heavy hitter, respected by both sides, over decades. He worked hard, networked, prioritized maintaining working relationships, didn’t hold grudges, and saw the media as a beast to be fed and cajoled instead of an enemy. That philosophy is almost entirely absent from the Trump administration. If you don’t have time to read the new biography of Baker, read this book review. The only guy who’s even close to this kind of stature in the Trump orbit is Barr. Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie seem happy being pundits. John Bolton left the team.

Rudy Giuliani is making it up as he goes along, declaring at a press conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, “we’ll do a national lawsuit and we’ll really expose the corruption of the Democrat Party.” What is a “national lawsuit”? Who is he going to sue? What’s the charge? What’s the evidence?

Remember, Barr just asked the entire country to report fraud to the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section and to U.S. Attorneys. There are mechanisms to address any and all allegations. “Holding press conferences” and “hyperventilate during Fox News hits” are not among them.

Donald Trump Jr. fumes that “the total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing.” Brad Parscale made a similar complaint. What do they want the Nikki Haleys or Tom Cottons of the world to do? Tweet a lot? Go out and give an angry speech? None of that will change anything involving the vote-counting. If you want to change something — readmit ballots that were rejected, remove ballots you think are fraudulent — you need a judge’s order. If you want a judge to issue an order that changes how the votes are being counted, you have to persuade them with evidence.

If there’s such abundant evidence of manufacturing tens of thousands of votes, or destroying tens of thousands of legitimate votes, stop complaining on social media and put it before a judge.

And if you don’t have the evidence . . . stop going on television and making accusations that you can’t prove.

Where We Are . . .

• North Carolina: Nothing’s changed since yesterday, with Trump ahead by 76,701 votes and Senator Thom Tillis leading by 96,707. The race has not been called because of the roughly 116,000 absentee ballots that remain. The remaining votes — which are statewide, and not concentrated in one partisan-learning area — would have to split astronomically in favor of the Democrats to overtake the Republican lead. If you’re concerned that Elaine Marshall, the North Carolina secretary of state, is a Democrat, know that her office does not have a role in counting the ballots. That is overseen by the N.C. State Board of Elections, which consists of three Democrat and two Republicans. Yesterday, Tillis issued a statement: “As he has said before, Senator Tillis has confidence in the absentee ballot process. He believes every legal vote should be counted, and that when they are, both he and President Trump will carry North Carolina.”

• Arizona: Joe Biden leads by 47,052 votes. Trump needs 57 percent of the outstanding ballots to win.
• Georgia: Joe Biden leads by 917 votes out of 4.9 million cast, with “10,000 absentee ballots remained to be tallied, in addition to a few thousand military, overseas and provisional ballots.”
• Pennsylvania: Donald Trump leads by 18,049 votes, with at least 163,000 mail ballots remained to be counted by midnight.
• Nevada: Joe Biden now leads in Nevada by 11,438 votes, with about 190,000 votes left to be counted.

Follow-Ups

Yesterday I mentioned that the rumor that the use of Sharpie pens or felt-tip markers had invalidated ballots was baseless, with reports from several county officials. The state attorney general of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, investigated as well and declared last night, “Based on correspondence and conversations with Maricopa County officials, we are now confident that the use of Sharpie markers did not result in disenfranchisement for Arizona voters. We appreciate the county’s prompt insight and assurances to address public concerns.” Brnovich is a Republican. If there’s a vast effort that tried to get Republicans to use markers that would invalidate their ballots, he’s not going to avert his eyes or shrug it off.

Also yesterday, I laid out the steps the Republican secretary of state in Georgia was taking to ensure a fair and valid vote count, and added on Twitter, “Ask yourself if the GOP secretary of state would just shrug if there was evidence of fraud or mischief in the vote count.”

A few folks responded on Twitter that “Actually, establishment Republicans would do it in a second to stick it to Trump” and “You’re assuming that because he’s a Republican he would support Trump? For elected officials these days that’s very often not true.” (Notice I didn’t say “support Trump,” I said, “shrug if there was evidence of fraud or mischief in the vote count.” — i.e., not do his job as state attorney general of enforcing election laws.)

If you’re a Trump fan and you don’t trust a Republican Secretary of State’s assessment of whether election laws were followed . . . whom do you trust? Just who’s left?

At some point, in a system of free and fair elections, somebody who is outside your tribe of loyalists has to sign off the process as well. Functioning as a free society requires a lot of people who think differently to work together. If you regard every single person who is not a known and outspoken member of your faction as a likely duplicitous and untrustworthy agent of the enemy, you might as well start looking for the Cigarette-Smoking Man managing the ever-expanding conspiracy working against you.

. . . Remember what I said yesterday about how the GOP’s gains in the House of Representative might bring them eye-poppingly close to a majority? Right now on Politico’s map, the Republicans have 193 seats, and lead in 21 more that have yet to be called. That adds up to 214 seats — just four seats short of a majority.

Sometimes I’m Right, and I Just Don’t Know It Yet

Jim’s wacky predictions for the year 2019, posted back on December 28, 2018: “Vladimir Putin will deny rumors of serious health issues.” By the end of last year, that looked like a wacky prediction that represented an overreaction to persistent but never-verified rumors of Putin secretly having significant health problems.

The New York Post, yesterday: “Vladimir Putin is planning to step down next year as speculation swirls in Russia that the longtime president may have Parkinson’s disease, a report said Thursday.”

ADDENDA: Thanks to everyone who tuned in for the Heritage Foundation event yesterday! I understand it may air on C-SPAN at some point; if that comes to pass, I will let you know.

Also yesterday, I had a chance to chat with our old friend Jonah Goldberg on The Remnant podcast!  Fewer Ted Cruz impressions, more Donald Trump impressions this time.

On the menu today: the state of play in the six states not yet called in the 2020 presidential election: Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Alaska.

Wait, Alaska? What, are they delivering the absentee ballots by dog sled?

What We Know So Far

As of this hour, Joe Biden has won states that have given him 253 electoral votes. If you’re Fox News and you have projected Biden the winner in Arizona, he is at 264 electoral votes. President Trump has won states that have given him 214 electoral votes.

Six states remain uncalled. Alaska is one of them, and everyone expects Trump to win handily.

In North Carolina, Trump is ahead by about 1.5 percent, or 76,701 votes. In the Senate race, Republican incumbent Thom Tillis leads by about 1.8 percent, or 96,689 votes. (Remember all that talk about Tillis being a weak candidate? He won fewer votes than the president so far, but leads by a higher percentage!)

The N.C. State Board of Elections said that “as of Wednesday afternoon, the universe of absentee by-mail ballots that could still be counted is approximately 116,000. . . . The number of absentee ballots ultimately counted will be fewer than 117,000 because some voters will not return their ballots and others voted in person on Election Day.”

If every absentee by-mail ballot is returned, Biden would need to win those ballots by something along the lines of an 83 percent to 17 percent split to overcome Trump’s lead. In the Senate race, Cal Cunningham would need to win those ballots by about a 90 percent to 10 percent split to overcome Tillis’s lead. If fewer ballots are returned, those Democrats would need to win by an even wider margin. In other words, Trump and Tillis have won North Carolina, it’s just a matter of time before it becomes official.

In Nevada — the state that Jon Ralston keeps reminding us matters — Joe Biden leads by six-tenths of a percentage point, or 7,647 votes, with an estimated 86 percent of the vote counted. We should get more returns out of the Sagebrush State today:

Election officials in Nevada’s Clark and Washoe counties, the state’s two largest, said this afternoon neither county would have new election results to report until Thursday morning. . . .

There is no threshold required to request a recount in Nevada. No recount requests are expected until the Nevada secretary of state finishes counting mail ballots received on Election Day and those that arrive over the next week, in addition to provisional ballots.

In Georgia this morning, with 96 percent of the estimated vote in, Trump leads by 18,540 votes, or four-tenths of a percentage point. That Trump lead may disappear in the final batches of votes:

Georgia’s secretary of state said that as of 10:15 p.m., there were about 90,735 ballots left to be counted in the state, including from counties that typically lean Democratic. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said counting the state’s ballots will most likely continue Thursday morning.

Raffensperger is a Republican, and a former state legislator. His office investigated and found 1,000 cases of double voting earlier this year. He is no amateur, and his state is taking extensive precautions:

“Officials in numerous counties are continuing to count ballots, with strong security protocols in place to protect the integrity of our election,” Raffensperger said late Wednesday in a statement. “We have long anticipated — and said publicly — that counting would most likely take place into Wednesday night and perhaps Thursday morning. We’re on pace to accomplish that responsibly, ensuring that the voice of every eligible voter is heard. It’s important to act quickly, but it’s more important to get it right.”

Raffensperger said these security measures are in place to secure the vote and increase public confidence in the electoral process:

• Absentee drop boxes were locked at 7 p.m. Tuesday evening, preventing illegal voting or potential fraud.
• Surveillance cameras monitored drop boxes at all times.
• A state monitor is in the room with Fulton County for all counts and the public is welcome to observe any county as an added layer of transparency.
• A pre-certification audit will provide additional confidence that the votes were accurately counted.

“We’re well aware that with a close presidential election and the possibility of runoffs in some elections that the eyes of the state and the nation are upon Georgia at this time,” Raffensperger said. “We’re as anxious as anyone to see the final results and to start work on certification and planning for our runoff elections. As the work goes on, I want to assure Georgia voters that every legal vote was cast and accurately counted.”

If Biden ends up overtaking Trump’s lead, you’re going to see some frustrated Republicans insisting the state was stolen. Ask yourself if the GOP secretary of state would just shrug if there were legitimate evidence of fraud or mischief in the state’s vote-counting process.

In Arizona, Joe Biden leads by 2.4 percent, or 68,390 votes, with 86 percent of the expected vote in. The Trump campaign is confident that the ballots yet to be counted are mostly from Republican-leaning areas. For example, Yuma County, which Trump is winning by eight percentage points, has 77 percent of its estimated vote counted. (These are estimates because officials don’t know precisely how many absentee ballots will be returned and how many provisional ballots will be verified.) Cochise County, which Trump is winning by 17 percentage points, has 82 percent of its estimated vote counted. And Mohave County, which Trump is winning by 50 percentage points so far (!), has 82 percent of its vote counted as well.

Two of the state’s biggest counties say the “Sharpie” controversy on Election Night is a false rumor. A ballot marked with a Sharpie or felt-tip marker will indeed be counted; those kinds of marker are just discouraged because the ink can bleed through to the other side. The ovals on the back side of the ballot do not align with the ones on the front, so they should not spoil any ballots.

One thing is for certain: The final tally in Arizona will be close. And that decision by Fox News to call the state at 11:20 p.m. Eastern looks wildly premature at this point. Even if Biden wins when the final count is in, that doesn’t make the Fox News call right; the Trump team has a legitimate complaint that projecting a winner in a state that closely contested, with just 73 percent of the vote in, was jumping the gun.

Finally, in Pennsylvania Trump enjoys a lead of 2.6 points, or 164,414 votes — but the sense is that most of the remaining votes to be counted are from Democratic-leaning areas, and in some cases, heavily Democratic leaning areas. While the comments of the likes of Pennsylvania state attorney general Josh Shapiro will undoubtedly stir distrust and suspicion, we knew Democrats in this state were more likely to vote by mail, and Republicans were more likely to vote on Election Day. In most counties, the in-person vote was counted first, building up a solid Trump lead, and then the vote-counters moved on to the absentee ballots, which is why Biden is gaining fast.

Remember my observation in October that there were Trump signs and flags all over Bucks County? Four years ago, Hillary Clinton narrowly won Bucks, 48.4 percent to 47.6 percent, while Libertarian Gary Johnson took 2.5 percent. At this point, Trump is narrowly winning the county, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent, with 85 percent of the estimated vote reporting. But the Philadelphia Inquirer contends the mail ballots will shift it back to Biden: “Biden trails by about 3,000 votes in Bucks County, but if current trends hold, he will have a 20,000-vote edge there after outstanding mail ballots are counted.”

Back in October, I wrote:

Does this mean Trump is going to win Bucks County? Not necessarily; all of these people who put out yard signs may have supported him four years ago, and he narrowly lost the county then. But whether or not Bucks County is Trump country, the Trump voters there ardently want to demonstrate that it is. And Trump doesn’t need to win Bucks County, he just needs to keep it close and run up his margin in the small towns and rural parts of the state.

Trump won 164,361 votes in Bucks County in 2016. This year, so far, he’s at 170,495 — meaning he’s added 6,000 votes to his total from last time.

Last cycle, 6,165,478 people voted in the presidential race in Pennsylvania. This cycle, the vote count is up to 6,348,708 already. This year, the Green Party candidate wasn’t on the ballot, and the Libertarian nominee declined from 2.38 percent to 1.2 percent so far. Trump expanded his base of support in the Keystone State — but it looks as if Biden got Democrats who stayed home in 2016 to vote for him.

If you had to guess, you would figure Trump wins Alaska, North Carolina, and maybe Arizona. You would figure Biden wins Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and Biden wins the presidency with only a swing state or two to spare — 295 electoral votes to 243 electoral votes. But if Trump regains the lead in the final count in Arizona, and keeps his lead in Georgia, and Pennsylvania . . . that adds up to 279 electoral votes for Trump, 259 electoral votes for Biden.

ADDENDA: Something to keep an eye on in the coming days: Politico has the Republicans at 190 seats in the House right now, and leading in the count so far in another 25 seats . . . which puts them at 215 seats. Remember 218 is the threshold to control the House. Probably the absentees will put the Democrats ahead in some of these . . . but this is a really nice position to be in, if the GOP wants to regain control of the House in 2022.

Today at noon, I’m scheduled to join a Heritage Foundation virtual event: “Post-Election Analysis: What Lies Ahead for America?” along with Kay C. James, Heritage Foundation president; William Bennett, former Education Secretary and Drug Czar; John Yoo, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley and fellow, American Enterprise Institute; and Byron York, chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner. Hope you’ll tune in.

On the menu today: We don’t have a declared winner in the presidential race as of this writing, but last night taught us a lot.

Twelve Big Lessons from Last Night and This Morning

Wow. As of this writing, we don’t have a clear president-elect. You would probably rather be in Joe Biden’s position than President Trump’s position at this hour . . . but Biden doesn’t have it locked up. Here are twelve things we know already:

One: Joe Biden may reach 270 electoral votes, but this election was no comeuppance, rebuke, or vengeance upon Donald Trump. There was no “blue wave.” If Trump loses, it will not be by much, and among the swing states, Trump won Florida, Ohio, Iowa, almost certainly North Carolina, and probably Georgia. At this hour, he still leads the vote count in Pennsylvania. Trump appears to have come very close to winning in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The popular vote, as of this hour, is 50.1 for Biden, 48.2 percent for Trump

Two: The polling was largely wrong. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar is now a superstar and deserves to be. The entire polling industry — to the extent the polling industry survives this — must now grapple with the ramifications of this comment from Cahaly in his interview with Rich:

One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”

Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”

Three: Whether Trump wins or loses, he proved that Republicans — including a Republican who is staunchly opposed to illegal immigration — can win a big chunk of the Latino vote:

The President captured almost half of the group in Florida, up from 35 percent in 2016. Former Vice President Joe Biden earned just over half of the Latino vote in the state, compared to 62% who supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago.

Biden also lost support among Latino voters in Georgia and Ohio, important states to capturing the White House. The former vice president was up only about 16 percentage points in Georgia and about 24 points in Ohio, compared to Clinton’s margin of 40 percentage points and 41 points in Georgia and Ohio, respectively.

Remember those pre-election Jolts and Corner posts about how the Trump campaign was specifically targeting Cuban Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Nicaraguan Americans, and Colombian Americans? News flash, Democrats, Bernie Sanders’s open embrace of the label “socialism” is killing you among these demographics! This is why Trump won Florida by about 112,000 votes in 2016 and he’s on pace to win Florida by 377,000 votes this time. The “socialist” label is a loser, and until Democrats wake up and smell the Cuban coffee on that, they’re going to find themselves dramatically underperforming among group of voters they arrogantly took for granted.

Four: On that above list of swing states, I didn’t mention Texas. I left it off because the Lone Star State is not a swing state, and never should have been considered one. At this hour, with 96 percent of the vote in, Trump won by six percentage points, or 670,000 votes. That’s about half his margin from last time, but . . . that’s still not all that close. Trump has nearly 6 million votes!

The voice who was loudest in insisting that Biden could win Texas is a familiar one:

After skipping the Senate race this year, [Beto] O’Rourke has his eye on the 2022 Texas gubernatorial race, and since ending his presidential campaign he has devoted his efforts to organizing for Biden and Democrats up and down the ballot. “Beto will get credit if Biden wins Texas,” said someone close to him.

This is another case where we feel gaslit. Beto O’Rourke is just some guy! He is not some seer or prophet, the harbinger of a Democratic Party resurrection in Texas. In 2018, he was held aloft by a national media, who wanted to see him as Lone Star Jesus, and Democratic grassroots donors who loathed Ted Cruz with a judgment-skewing obsession. The moment he lost those unparalleled advantages, everybody else saw what we on the Right saw from the beginning.

Five: At this hour, it appears Republicans will retain control of the Senate, but that’s not carved in stone yet. With all precincts reporting, Thom Tillis is ahead by 96,000 votes. I’m as surprised by that result as you are, because we’ve heard so much about Democrat Cal Cunningham’s extensive efforts to reach out to women voters. In Georgia, Republican David Purdue is eight-tenths of a point away from avoiding a runoff; he’s a good four points ahead of Jon Ossoff. In Maine, there’s still a lot of votes to count — they don’t start counting them until the polls close — and Susan Collins is just short of the threshold to avoid “ranked choice voting.” In Michigan, John James is still ahead by a percentage point, with 84 percent of the votes counted. In Montana, Republican Steve Daines is a good seven points ahead of governor Steve Bullock. For the National Republican Senatorial Committee, this was a surprisingly good night.

Six: I was reasonably confident about Lindsey Graham’s chances in South Carolina, and I should have been far more confident. (You were right, Dad!) Jaime Harrison’s bid to be the Great Southern Democratic Hope now looks like a comical flop, and every national political reporter who hyped Harrison should hang his head in shame. At this hour, with 91 percent of the vote, Graham is ahead, 56 percent to 42 percent. The Quinnipiac pollsters said this race was a tie three times. Harrison had more money than he knew what to do with and didn’t even keep it close.

Seven: Speaking of Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Amy McGrath is Alison Lundergan Grimes’s stunt double. Every six years, Democrats talk themselves into the idea that they have a shot at beating Mitch McConnell. And every six years, Cocaine Mitch just steamrolls them. This year, insanely over-optimistic Democrats gave $90 million to Amy McGrath . . . and she lost by more than 20 points. One of the great advantages for the Republican Party in this era is that the Democratic Party’s grassroots are angry, generous, and stupid.

Eight: House Republicans quietly put together a good night. At this hour, the House picked up four seats, none of their vulnerable incumbents lost, only a handful of the 30 or so “toss up” districts went to Democrats, and they picked off a few in the “lean Democrat” pile. (You know, New York Times, Joe Cunningham in South Carolina’s first congressional district probably shouldn’t have been in the “lean Democratic” pile.)

After 2018, Democrats and the media convinced themselves that Nancy Pelosi was no longer an electoral liability for House Democratic candidates. Are you sure about that, guys?

Nine: There weren’t a ton of governors’ races at stake last night, but the Republican Governor’s Association can stride with confidence this morning. They kept every governor’s mansion they were supposed to keep, and in North Carolina, heavy underdog Dan Forest is only down by four points with 95 percent of votes reporting. The Republicans in North Carolina won the lieutenant governor’s race — Republican Mark Robinson will be the state’s first African-American lieutenant governor — and the Democrat leads the state attorney general’s race by a tenth of a percentage point.

Ten: With all precincts reporting, turnout in my home county of Fairfax County is . . . 77.5 percent, which is lower than the 82.5 percent turnout in 2016. That’s not enormously lower, but this is prime territory for Democrats. (The county split, 68 percent for Biden, 27 percent for Trump; four years ago, the county split 62–27 for Hillary Clinton.) If turnout in this heavily Democratic county declined a bit . . . is that an indicator that the talk of Democratic enthusiasm was a little overhyped?

Eleven: For example, doesn’t the fact that Democrats didn’t match their 2016 thresholds in the early vote in North Carolina look like a significant indicator?

Twelve: Throughout the fall, when we noticed Joe Biden had the lightest of light schedules, Biden defenders would insist he was just being responsible in light of the pandemic. Except . . . if you can responsibly and safely do campaign events on Monday and Wednesday, you can responsibly and safely do campaign events on Tuesday and Thursday. Biden’s once-every-two-days schedule didn’t make sense from the perspective of disease control, but did make sense in the context of fatigue, or a deliberate strategy to avoid attention.

If keeping Biden away from the voters was a deliberate strategy, it was probably a terrible mistake.

ADDENDUM: If Democrats think tonight was bad, how much worse would it have been if they nominated Bernie Sanders? Or Elizabeth Warren?

Or Kamala Harris?

Today is Election Day. I’m not going to give you a long song-and-dance about why you should vote or whom you should vote for. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably understand all of that already. You don’t need to vote because your vote will make a difference — in most places and most races, it won’t. You don’t need to vote because without doing so, you’re not allowed to complain — we have a First Amendment, you’re always allowed to complain. You should vote because this is our one form of leverage over those who govern us. This is our authority over their lives instead of the other way around; this is our chance to veto them, if we wish. And remember, all the worst people don’t want you to vote.

On the menu today: looking through Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien’s confident assessment, a couple of things that were supposed to have happened before Election Day that just . . . didn’t, and an event Thursday you won’t want to miss.

The Trump Campaign Lays Out Its Target Turnout Thresholds

Yesterday afternoon, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien laid out, in a series of tweets, what the campaign expects tonight, laying out how he expects Trump to win Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Florida. If Trump wins those states, he will be surpass 270 electoral votes.

Regarding Ohio, Stepien writes, “weeks ago, the partisan makeup of the electorate was [Democrats] +10, today it’s D +0.6. Going into [Election] Day in 2016, the gap was D +2.5. [President] Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 400k net votes.”

Ohio doesn’t have formal registration by party; the state defines a voters’ party ID by which primary that voter voted in last. A few weeks ago, the Associated Press wrote something somewhat misleading about Ohio voters:

Democratic registrations have risen by over a quarter of a million since 2016, to nearly 1.6 million. The number of registered Republicans fell by 120,000 over the same period, with GOP President Donald Trump in the White House — but the party remains the larger of the two, at 1.9 million people.

Most voters in the state, more than 4.5 million people, remain unaffiliated.

This year we had a competitive Democratic presidential primary and an uncontested one on the GOP side; it’s not surprising there would be more interest in voting in the Democratic one, and less interest in voting the Republican one. Any way you slice it, if the Stepien figures are accurate, Ohio looks pretty good for Trump.

But there’s a factor at work in almost all of these states that I ought to address early on, which is whether a registered Republican vote is synonymous with a vote for Trump. Obviously, the vast majority of Republicans will vote for Trump, but some small fraction of registered Republicans will vote for other candidates. In the most recent Civiqs poll of Ohio, self-identified Republicans split 91 percent to 7 percent in favor of Trump . . . while self-identified Democrats split 96 percent to 3 percent in favor of Biden. If equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats vote, Biden would win by a narrow margin.

Regarding North Carolina, Stepien wrote: “Democrats jumped out to a D +32 advantage during absentee-only voting. Today it’s D +5.8.” The Tarheel State has a bunch of registered Democrats who usually vote Republican, so the party ID numbers can be a little misleading. The GOP is steadily gaining ground, but North Carolina still has a half-million more registered Democrats than Republicans. In the early vote, African Americans underperformed a little compared to their share of registered voters, but women, and in particular suburban women, overperformed. How confident Republicans should feel about the early vote in North Carolina should depend upon how confident they are that suburban women stuck with the GOP this year.

Stepien writes of Pennsylvania: “Dems have banked A TON of high propensity voters. We have millions of voters left.” Okay, but that means Republicans really need to get their voters out today. Pennsylvania has 2.4 million votes in already, and when Stepien writes, “Pres. Trump’s E Day margin needs to be significant and we project an Election Day vote-cast margin of over a million votes for President Trump,” this isn’t saying Trump needs a million votes total today. This is saying he thinks Trump’s vote total will be more than a million votes higher than Biden’s total today. That’s a bold prediction.

Keep in mind, Pennsylvania’s vote count is going to be slow, possibly messy, and probably contested in multiple ways. The state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, has already irresponsibly declared: “If all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose.” If you want to make sweeping declarations of victory before the polls open, go head up your state party, and get out of law enforcement. (By the way, did a single Democrat of any stature criticize Shapiro for saying this?)

In Arizona, registered Democrats are ahead of registered Republicans in the early vote by 43,055 votes. Stepien isn’t worried: “Weeks ago the makeup of the electorate was D +11.9, today it’s D +1.2. Reminder: going into [Election] Day in 2016, the gap was D +2.5. President Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 150k net votes.”

Once again, the party affiliation may not be telling the whole story, because apparently Trump has been weak among suburban women in Maricopa County. And a few percentage points of support could make a difference. If 90 percent of registered Republicans who voted support Trump instead of 95 percent, that’s 45,000 votes that aren’t going into Trump’s column.

For most of this cycle, Florida has looked like the swing state that is strongest for Trump — and memories of Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott narrowly winning the 2018 races fuel GOP confidence that the Sunshine State will continue to lean their way. Stepien writes: “Democrats jumped out to a D +18.8 advantage during AB-only voting. Today it’s D +1. Going into Election Day in 2016, the gap was D +1.4. President Trump has a projected Election Day votes cast margin of over 500k net votes.” Four years ago, Trump won by about 1 percent with 9.4 million votes cast, 112,911 votes. Florida has 8.9 million early votes cast, and so turnout will probably at least equal that of four years ago.

Some may wonder whether Stepien didn’t think he needed to offer any statistics about a couple usually red states such as Georgia or Texas, or whether he deliberately omitted them because the outlook is grim.

The fact that Trump held a rally in Georgia Sunday night indicates that the campaign thinks it doesn’t have the Peach State locked up. Like Pennsylvania, this is a state where Trump needs a big turnout of his supporters today:

“Democrats built a lead in early vote and absentee ballots, but they do that every year,” [Jay Walker, a Republican consultant who works on state legislative races in the state] said. That’s been borne out again in early vote analysis this year, with Democrats leading Republicans heading into Election Day.

“We are catching up to them this third week [of early voting] and we [typically] beat them on Election Day, and that’s what we’re seeing.” he said.

But that puts a lot of pressure on Trump to win the Election Day vote handily, carrying “about 58 percent of Election Day voters in order for him to win the state,” said Mark Rountree, a Republican pollster in the state. “From early voting, Biden will have a 6- to 8-point overall lead.”

Texas will almost certainly be much closer than it usually is in presidential elections . . . but maybe that huge surge in early voting isn’t quite as Democratic-leaning as the conventional wisdom would suggest:

Derek Ryan, a Republican consultant and data analyst in Texas, said he models voter data by matching every person who has voted so far this year against a list he maintains of all registered voters, which includes such details as age, gender, location, and in which previous elections each person cast a ballot.

Ryan’s latest report, published Thursday, shows that nearly 30% of people voting early this year have a history of voting in Republican primary elections and about 23% previously voted in Democratic primaries.

In an update from his research firm, Ryan said the numbers show “voters who most recently voted in a Republican primary have about a 350,000 vote advantage over voters who most recently voted in a Democratic Primary.”

Ryan’s latest figures show that 16 percent of people who have voted so far have no general or primary election history, and nearly 29 percent have no primary election history, meaning that they have voted in past general elections but not in primaries. Voters who have never voted in a primary election are poised to be the largest group of voters, Ryan found.

The early vote in Texas was 9.7 million people; if 16 percent have no general or primary election history, that is 1.55 million people who have never voted before, at least in Texas. Do you think those people are more likely to be for Trump, or for Biden?

Department of Behind-Schedule October Surprises

Say, it’s getting a little late for that big police roundup of all of those celebrities and politicians that QAnon kept talking about, isn’t it? You don’t think all those rumors turned out to be false, do you?

Another big announcement that was supposed to arrive by Election Day . . . Paul Waldman, September 3: “We now take it as a given that, just before the election, Trump will announce some kind of major development on the pandemic, probably related to a vaccine . . . We also take it as a given that the announcement will be fraudulent, like so many other supposedly dramatic announcements Trump has made on pandemic developments.”

ADDENDA: A few days ago, I participated in the New Hampshire Journal podcast rundown with Andrew Cline and the Boston Globe‘s James Pindell, taking about the national and New Hampshire political landscape; you can check it out here.

On Thursday at noon, I’m scheduled to join a Heritage Foundation virtual event: “Post-Election Analysis: What Lies Ahead for America?” along with Kay C. James, Heritage Foundation president; William Bennett, former Education Secretary and Drug Czar; John Yoo, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley and fellow, American Enterprise Institute; and Byron York, chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner.

The last full day before Election Day, in a chaotic, calamitous year. On the menu today: Downtown stores in America’s biggest cities are boarding up their windows in expectations of Election Night violence, but one Atlantic columnist thinks the home address of the ringleader of the rioters is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; the final prediction on the Electoral College; and the calculation of how dramatically the map changes with just a two-point shift away from Biden and toward Trump.

A Mood of Dread as Election Day Approaches

New York City: “Many businesses in New York City are boarding up their stores in preparation for potential mayhem as Election Day approaches.”

Los Angeles: “From Beverly Hills to Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles, crews have been busy adding plywood and protective fencing in front of businesses and residential complexes.”

Chicago: “In preparation of potential unrest in Chicago leading up to and following Tuesday’s general election, Macy’s State Street has boarded up windows at the iconic location.”

Washington, D.C.: “Despite the wet weather Sunday morning, workers near Black Lives Matter Plaza were busy erecting more plywood barriers over some buildings’ windows. If you didn’t know any better, you could be forgiven if you thought they were prepping for a big storm about to blow into the nation’s capital.”

To Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, the cause of all this is simple and straightforward: “When conservatives celebrated Trump’s election 4 years ago, did they know that in 2020 we would board up shops, prepare for riots and the arrival of militias, game out ways he might steal the election, protest aggressive vote suppression? This is what he has done to America.”

Are downtown stores boarding up their windows because they fear President Trump or his supporters will rampage through the streets? Trump voters do exist in these cities. In 2016, Trump won 769,743 votes in Los Angeles County. He won 494,548 votes in New York City. He won 12,273 votes in the District of Columbia. He won 453,287 votes in Chicago. [Insert a Jussie Smollett “this is MAGA country!” joke about Chicago here.]

But these Trump voters are vastly outnumbered by Democrats, and while it’s likely that you could find at least a handful of Trump voters participating in the urban violence and unrest of earlier this year, it is not MAGA-hat wearing blue-collar whites who have spent the summer and fall running through the cities looting stores. Perhaps Applebaum and those who concur with her would insist that the violence we’ve seen in U.S. cities this year is all the work of “outsiders,” “provocateurs,” and others who disagree with causes of the Left, and who seek to discredit them through violence.

Indeed, there are groups such as the Boogaloo Bois, which the Department of Justice describes as “a loosely-connected group of individuals who espouse violent anti-government sentiments. The term ‘Boogaloo’ itself references an impending second civil war in the United States and is associated with violent uprisings against the government.” They are characterized as “far right” but they are anti-police, seek to overthrow the government, and want to supply weapons to Hamas — views that are not synonyms with “pro-Trump.”

In a new report, Amnesty International concludes that U.S. police forces are doing an insufficient job at protecting anti-police protesters from counter-protesters. The organization contends that in approximately 200 clashes between different groups of protesters, the police did not deploy in sufficient numbers, did not separate groups to deescalate tensions, did not prohibit or prevent threats of violence, or halt acts of violence. It’s almost as if during these clashes, the police were abolished.

Still, no provocateur or outside agitator can succeed if his target audience isn’t receptive to the message and ready or eager to participate in violence. You can send the most effective provocateurs and rabble-rousers in the world to Amish communities or Vatican City or some Buddhist temple, and they’re probably not going to have much success.

If portions of New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles go up in flames Tuesday night, it will not be because the slim minority of Trump voters within the city limits took over the streets. It will be because significant numbers of people — many with left-of-center views, and probably quite a few with no clear articulated political philosophy at all beyond criminal opportunism — chose to smash windows, set fires, and generally behave like rampaging barbarians eager to smash civilization.

We should remember that when the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Title in October, the city’s downtown saw 76 arrests after celebrations turned unruly. When the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series later that month — what a month for that city’s sports teams! — “at least eight people were arrested, multiple officers were injured, a semi-truck was looted and a police vehicle and some businesses were vandalized.” There is no particular political dimension to post-championship riots. Some people just like to loot and vandalize and are just waiting for an excuse. If their candidate loses, they’ll look for something to smash. If their candidate wins, they’ll look for something to smash. If the vote count is close enough to trigger an automatic recount, they’ll look for something to smash.

But acknowledging all of this would mean that some evils in this world cannot be attributed to Donald Trump. Everything in life is much easier when the answer to every question and every problem is the pure evil of your political opponents. It’s a fairly simple formula: When there is right-wing violence, it is the fault of Republicans for inspiring it. When there is left-wing violence, it is the fault of Republicans for provoking it.

The Call

On The Editors, Charlie, Rich, and I went through our possibly mockery-inducing final assessments of the presidential race and key Senate races. (In the latter category, we didn’t weigh in about Michigan, where my heart sees an upset victory for John James, but my head sees incumbent Democrat Gary Peters hanging on.)

I envision Trump carrying Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Florida, and Ohio, although I think Trump’s margins will be below his 2016 margins and well below the usual for a Republican in those states, and it wouldn’t shock me to see Biden eke out a win in any of those. I think Biden wins the “blue wall” states — Wisconsin and Michigan — pretty comfortably, and Pennsylvania, although Pennsylvania will be close and who knows how long the final vote count will be tied up in lawsuits. I think Biden wins Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. I also think Biden wins the congressional district around Omaha, Neb., and the second congressional district in Maine. All of that adds up to 306 electoral votes for Biden, 232 for Trump.

In the Senate races, the GOP starts with 53, picks up Alabama to get to 54, then loses Maine (close, but Susan Collins loses on ranked-choice voting), Colorado (Cory Gardner’s a great candidate running in a tough state in a terrible year, I hope he runs for governor in two years or something), North Carolina (apparently Thom Tillis is hard to reelect without the wind at his back), Arizona (ditto Martha McSally), but keeps the seats in Iowa, Montana, South Carolina, and both Georgia seats. That comes out to a 50-50 tie, which, if my presidential race prediction is right, means Kamala Harris spends the next two years breaking a lot of ties. (This also means that any Democratic senator from a state with a GOP governor will not be selected for a cabinet job.)

I think there’s very little movement in the balance of the House.

My assessment is partially based upon the cumulative and latest polls, partially based on what I’m hearing from plugged-in Republicans, partially based upon what we can gleam from the early vote, and partially gut instincts.

How Wrong Would the Polls Have to Be for Trump to Win Again?

My grim assessment for Trump’s reelection bid comes with the recognition that it wouldn’t take that big a shift from the current polling numbers for the president to reach 270 electoral votes again, and an election repeat of 2016 is quite possible.

I know lots of people like to say, “the polls were wrong” — and in 2016, many pollsters’ final surveys showed Hillary Clinton ahead in states she lost on Election Day. But I think many people forget how much Trump had narrowed the gap in that final week or so in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he was leading in most polls in North Carolina and Florida.

The final RCP average in Michigan in 2016 had Hillary Clinton ahead by 3.6 percentage points, and Trump won by three-tenths of a percentage point — a difference of 3.9 points between those figures.

The final RCP average in Pennsylvania had Clinton ahead by 1.9 percentage points, and Trump won by seven-tenths of a percentage point, for a difference of 2.6 points.

That final RCP average in Florida was Trump leading by two-tenths of a percentage point, and Trump won by 1.2 percentage points, for a difference of one point.

That final RCP average in North Carolina had Trump ahead by one point, and Trump won by 3.7 percentage points, for a difference of 2.7 points.

The most spectacular miss came in Wisconsin, where the final RCP average was Clinton by 6.5 percentage points, and Trump won by seven-tenths of a percentage point, for a difference of 7.2 points.

In those first four key states listed above, Trump did, on average, 2.55 points better than the final RCP numbers. If you throw in Wisconsin, he did 3.48 percentage points better than the RCP numbers.

If you predict Trump performs 2.5 percentage points better than his current numbers in the RCP average, he wins Arizona, Florida, Georgia Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. That gets him to 258 electoral votes.

If you predict Trump performs 3.5 percentage points better than his current numbers in the RCP average, he wins all the states listed above and is within one tenth of a percentage point in Nevada and within a point in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

If Trump performs 4.4 percentage points better than his current numbers in the RCP average, he wins Pennsylvania and Minnesota, and reaches at least 284 electoral votes.

ADDENDUM: On Friday, Mickey and I had the chance to unveil another edition of the pop-culture podcast, where we tackle everything from the old AMC western series Longmire, Kim Kardashian’s big quarantined private-island party, the undefeated Pittsburgh Steelers, when and whether Americans will go back into movie theaters, and at the end, a little talk about the new book. Check it out when your brain is about to explode from all of the election news.

Growing up in New Jersey, we called nights like tonight – where there were expectations for hooliganism — vandalism, breaking windows, and perhaps even arson, “Mischief Night.” In Detroit, they called it “Devil’s Night.” In 2020, Americans just call it “Friday.”

On the menu today: wondering how much we should read into the Biden campaign’s decision to send the candidate to Minnesota and Wisconsin today; the president declares that a steady decline in weekly jobless claims “is boring but it’s really good”; marveling that Texas could possibly be close considering Biden’s stances; and wondering why some people seem so hell-bent on having different deadlines for in-person voting and absentee ballots.

Do Biden’s Late Campaign Stops in Minnesota and Wisconsin Mean Much?

You can read too much into a presidential candidate’s choices for their last few stops on the campaign trail. In 2000, George W. Bush held a rally on the campus of Drew University — apparently my parents were photogenic-enough seasoned citizens to be placed behind Bush in his remarks — raising hopes that the Bush campaign saw New Jersey as competitive. Al Gore won, 56 percent to 40 percent.

In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney made the extra-long trip to Hawaii, and boldly predicted, “On Tuesday, I have a feeling we’re going to surprise a lot of people back on the Mainland. ‘We’re going to carry Hawaii.’” John Kerry won the state, 54 percent to 46 percent; Bush improved upon the usual GOP finish in that state in recent cycles, but he still wasn’t all that close.

After campaigning once every two days for most of the autumn, today, Joe Biden will attend drive-in events in Des Moines, Iowa, then St. Paul, Minn., and then Milwaukee, Wis. — by far his heaviest day of campaigning and a somewhat curious selection of states.

The conventional wisdom among the polls and race-watchers is that Iowa is competitive, but Minnesota is moving out of reach for Trump and Wisconsin isn’t far behind. Biden leads the RCP average by in Minnesota by 4.7 percentage points; for what it’s worth, Trafalgar has Biden ahead by three points. Biden leads the RCP average in Wisconsin by 6.4 percent. Trafalgar has Biden ahead by one.

Is the Biden campaign seeing something that makes them nervous about Minnesota and Wisconsin? Or are they just being cautious after 2016, learning the lessons of Hillary Clinton, and fortifying their “blue wall” in the upper Midwest instead of spending time and money in places such as Texas or Georgia?

A few days ago, Josh Kraushaar wrote of 2016, “Clinton was spending an awful lot of time and resources in traditionally blue battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which pundits had already assumed were reliably Democratic territory. There were clear signs that an upset was brewing.” At first, I thought Kraushaar was misremembering 2016, but after looking over Hillary Clinton’s schedule for the final weeks of the campaign, she did hold several campaign events in those two key states in the final days, after giving those them cursory attention for most of the autumn.

In Michigan, on November 4, 2016, Clinton did an event in Detroit, Mich., and on November 7 she did an event in Grand Rapids. (Keep in mind, Election Day was November 8 that year.) Those were her first campaign in events in Michigan since she attended one in Detroit on October 10, and her most recent event in Michigan before that was held on August 11.

In Pennsylvania, on November 4, Clinton did an event in Pittsburgh. On November 5, 6, and 7, she did events in Philadelphia; and on November 7, she went back to Pittsburgh. But those were her first events since October 22, and her events on that day were the first since October 4.

According to his archived schedule, Tim Kaine did no events in Michigan or Pennsylvania in November. But Kaine did attend five events in Wisconsin in the month of November, which mitigates the “Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin” argument a little bit. Kaine’s last events in Michigan were in Taylor and Warren on October 30, and his last events in Pennsylvania were in Allentown and Newtown on October 26.

(For those who don’t remember, Tim Kaine is a Democratic senator from Virginia who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016. I mention this because it seems he has been somehow erased from everyone’s memories.)

On Monday, Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, and Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff will be all in Pennsylvania. I think we can figure out which state the Biden campaign thinks is the top priority.

‘Weekly Jobless Claims, This Is Boring, but It’s Really Good’

Charlie, Rich, and I are supposed to give our preserved-for-posterity-and-future-embarrassment 2020 election predictions on today’s taping of The Editors. (No matter how wrong I get things in the coming days, I will note that I was predicting Biden would win the nomination through most of 2019 and the early months, when most people thought his campaign was sputtering. Also, remember who was writing “probably the single most frightening aspect is the possibility that either the Chinese government is still guessing at how far the virus has spread, or that they’re not being honest about the risk,” back on January 30.)

Right now, I think the prospects for the Trump reelection campaign don’t look good. This is partially because of circumstances, and partially because the president himself doesn’t seem all that interested in making the case for a second term. Yesterday morning, the Trump campaign got just about the biggest gift imaginable — U.S. gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 33.1 percent in the third quarter, the highest rate ever, roughly double the next-biggest jump, in 1950. The U.S. economy is not completely back from the depths of the pandemic, but it remains Trump’s strongest issue.

But on the campaign trail in Tampa yesterday afternoon, Trump confessed that good economic news doesn’t excite him much. “Weekly jobless claims, this is boring but it’s really good, just hit a seven-month low.” The strongest argument for his reelection bores him. Apparently everyone he talks to is encouraging him to talk more about the economy, and Trump is convinced he knows better:

I get a call from all the experts, right? Guys that ran for president six, seven, eight times. Never got past the first round, but they’re calling me up, “Sir, you shouldn’t be speaking about Hunter. You shouldn’t be saying bad things about Biden because nobody cares.” I disagree. Maybe that’s why I’m here and they’re not. But they say, ” Talk about your economic success. Talk about 33.1%, the greatest in history.” Now, look, if I do, I mean, how many times can I say it? I’ll say it five or six times during the speech. 33.1.

He would rather talk about Hunter Biden, and make comments such as, “I saw a Schiff the other day, two days ago, watermelon, he looks like a watermelon head.”

Maybe you love the president of the United States calling one of his critics in Congress “a watermelon head.” If you do, I suspect you were going to vote for Trump anyway.

There are swaths of voters out there who like Trump’s policies but abhor his personality. Even with a second term at stake, Trump refused to alter his public persona one iota.

From all indications, the state of Texas will be close, in a race that pits an incumbent Republican president against a Democratic challenger who lost the state twice as vice president, who is pledging to “transition from the oil industry,” declares no one “needs” an AR-15, promises to enact federal buybacks of high-capacity magazines, promises a 100-day deportation moratorium, and promises to cease border-fencing construction and replacement. And the state is close to tied. That’s how bad Trump’s flaws are. By any traditional measure, Biden should be at least ten points down and maybe closer to 20 points.

You can argue that voters in Texas and the rest of the country should care more about the policies and less about Trump’s Twitter tirades, his insistence that the pandemic will disappear someday soon, his instinctive suspicion of the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, his juvenile name-calling, and general lack of decorum and respect for the office. But whether or not you think voters should care less about these things, they care. This is not something new. This phenomenon has been visible and obvious since the first day of the Trump presidency. Apparently, everyone around the president can see it. Apparently, almost everyone around him who is pulling for him to win is begging him to just try to be a little more professional, a little more presidential, a little more focused on what voters are worried about, and a little less focused on what interests him the most on cable news. And he just won’t do it — at all.

You can’t save a man who doesn’t want to save himself.

ADDENDUM: Quite a few readers liked this Corner post, and some people didn’t. To the critics, I would ask, what do you want the deadline for turning in a ballot to be? The first Tuesday in November? The first Thursday? Friday or Saturday?

Whatever day you determine to be a reasonable and fair deadline, let’s make that day Election Day. Because you guys seem hell-bent on having one deadline for in-person voting and a later deadline for absentee voting, and that is a system that invites shenanigans in close races.

On the menu today: The op-ed page of the New York Times made the deliberate decision to hoodwink America about the identity of “Anonymous”; the sense of guilt that pervades legacy media — a very apt label; and wondering whether or not we will even see long lines on Election Day with early voting being so massive so far.

Anonymous . . . Turned Out to Be a Guy Who Was Pretty Anonymous

“Anonymous,” the unnamed Trump administration official who claimed in an infamous New York Times op-ed that he was secretly trying to “thwart” Trump’s policies, turned out to be . . . Miles Taylor, a former policy adviser and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson, and eventually chief of staff in the department, although not until after the op-ed was published.

This revelation shouldn’t be a huge deal, and yet it feels like it just broke something important. It feels like the editors of the New York Times chose to play a massive prank on us. They watched the fervent Washington speculation that it was Mike Pence, James Mattis, Jared Kushner, Victoria Coates, and all along they knew it was . . . just some guy. We’ve seen other people conspire to try to pull off hoaxes and stir up frenzies and use the media to do it . . . but this time, one of the biggest voices in the media decided to facilitate the erroneous perception.

I speculated it was Jon Huntsman, ambassador to Russia, many times. I was wrong — wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry, Governor/Ambassador. You seemed like the most incongruous figure in the Trump administration, but from all available evidence, you served professionally and with dignity. I should not have casually suggested you would behave like this weasel.

The New York Times op-ed editors’ decision to keep Taylor anonymous, and describing him, not all that accurately, as “a senior official in the Trump administration,” deliberately created a misleading impression that the author was a much more prominent, much more influential figure than he was. (“Senior”? By my count, he was 30 when the op-ed was published; he was in college when Obama was inaugurated.)

The op-ed appears to have wildly exaggerated what Taylor saw, heard, and did. Did cabinet officials really sit around, discussing invoking the 25th Amendment with Miles Taylor? How much would Taylor be involved in policy regarding Russia?

If the Times wanted to write a news article reporting that a policy adviser to the DHS secretary or a deputy chief of staff had a scathingly low opinion of the president . . . the story would run on, what, page A8? A16? (Those with long memories are probably remembering David Stockman, who was at least OMB director.) By no stretch of the imagination is it a shock when someone at that rank thinks the big boss is an incompetent buffoon.

And if you think your boss is not merely a buffoon but is hurting the country with his policies, the right thing to do is quit and find another job. You don’t stay and try to secretly throw sand in the gears. You’re not a spy or saboteur, working behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. (For starters, no saboteur working against the Nazis wrote an op-ed in Le Figaro entitled, “I am a part of the Resistance inside Hitler’s War Machine.” If you are part of a secret plan, a key element of the plan is keeping it secret.)

Taylor chose to apply for that job and to take that job. No one dragged him, kicking and screaming, to advise on homeland-security policy. Taylor wanted to be a hero of The Resistance while still cashing an administration paycheck.

Perhaps the most perfectly ironic statement in this whole mess came from Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, who declared back in August, “People should stop paying attention to ‘Anonymous’ and focus on the Trump officials who are willing to put themselves out there publicly like Miles Taylor.” This is like saying we should be paying less attention to Batman and more attention to Bruce Wayne.

In his op-ed, Taylor said he was “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” It seems fair to ask . . . was he really? Because it sounds like one of the big issues on Taylor’s plate was the child-separation policy at the border, an approach that even some staunch conservatives find morally unacceptable.

In his public identity, Taylor said he helped enact a policy he thought was immoral, and wished he hadn’t. “People like me should have done more; looking back, I wish I had laid my body on the train tracks and said, ‘we can’t implement this.’”

Taylor signed on to help the Trump administration, told the New York Times he was secretly trying to stop the Trump administration, and then helped enact one of its most controversial policies. Wait, whose side was he really on, again?

The Old Media World Had Its Underappreciated Strengths

Would the New York Times of a generation ago have chosen to enable a 30-year-old deputy chief of staff’s dream of being misperceived as a top-tier big shot? Probably not. But there are a lot of “legacy” media institutions that are relying upon the stature and reputations of their old selves in this messier, angrier, more financially pressured post-Millennium age — and in the process, they’ve squandered whatever authority they inherited from the previous generation. They’re now writing checks that their past credibility can’t cover.

The Times isn’t much of a “gray lady” at this point. The Pentagon Papers were published almost a half century ago, and it’s not the newspaper of record, featuring the likes of A. M. Rosenthal and R. W. Apple and William Safire anymore. The Washington Post isn’t the paper of David Broder and Robert Novak and Howard Kurtz; CNN isn’t the network of Bernard Shaw and Jim Clancy and Crossfire anymore; and NBC News isn’t the channel of John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, and Tim Russert anymore.

After each Republican presidency, the people who work in these once widely revered institutions concluded that what they perceive to be bad things — Clarence Thomas’s confirmation, the Republican Revolution of 1994, the Iraq War, the rise of the Tea Party movement — wouldn’t have happened if they had been tougher on the GOP. Members of big media institutions blame themselves for policy decisions and outcomes they abhor and conclude that the way to prevent bad things is to shoehorn the news into a simpler narrative — Democrats good, Republicans bad.

Four years ago, we lived through these folks’ greatest miscalculation. When Donald Trump appeared on the scene, really running for president this time, the Jeff Zuckers and Phil Griffins of the world thought they could pull off a perfect bait-and-switch: build up Trump during the primary, and then once he had the nomination, stop the soft-focus can-you-believe-this-guy amused tone and shift the focus to Trump’s myriad epic flaws, ensuring Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide. But they never expected enough of the electorate would ignore the shift in coverage, and Trump would get just enough votes in just enough states to win.

Why do the media hammer Trump every day, on issues where he deserves it and issues where it’s kind of silly or irrelevant? Why did they need to treat the tax cuts, the slaying of Qassim Soleimani, and the Supreme Court nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as monstrous crimes? Because on some level, they belatedly realized they’re the Dr. Frankensteins who created this monster.

Now major media institutions try to persuade the public that Trump is a racist, ignorant, power-hungry monster. But racist monsters don’t get invited to host Saturday Night Live, joke around with Jimmy Fallon, get profiled by Barbara Walters, sit and chat with Larry King about every conceivable topic, and call in or hang out with Joe and Mika all the time, to say nothing of hosting a prime-time reality show for years. Racist monsters don’t get Bill and Hillary Clinton to attend their wedding. Why did Americans think Donald Trump was a fascinating, shrewd, decisive, larger-than-life leader when he descended that escalator in 2015? Because the media and most of America’s economic and political elites treated him as if he was one for about three decades before he ran for president.

It’s almost comical. Almost every time the media try to shoehorn the news into fitting a narrative, it backfires. They generate a lot of short-lived, intense flurries of attention for causes such as “abolish ICE” or “Medicare for All” or “abolish the police” or impeaching Trump or “Trump is stealing our mailboxes,” but they tend to burn like Roman candles — brightly but fading quickly.

When Miles Taylor showed up at the New York Times’ metaphorical door, offering an op-ed revealing the existence of “the Resistance inside the Trump administration,” the editors could have and should have said, “Talk to our news reporters. They’ll see whether what you’re saying checks out and they’ll decide whether it’s news. At first glance, the deputy chief of staff to the DHS secretary being deeply disgruntled by the president’s approach to the job is not, by itself, a huge deal.”

But instead, the editors who agreed to work with Taylor saw it as a way to “get” Trump. They tweaked the facts to create a more dramatic narrative. And putting a narrative over truth in order to “get Trump” . . . is ironically, how you get Trump.

Will We See Long Lines on Tuesday?

As of this morning, 77.4 million Americans have cast ballots. A bit more than 136.6 million people voted in 2016, so we are at 56 percent of the total vote last cycle.

Early voting ends in most states two days before Election Day; polling place workers need a day or two to wrap up all early voting activities and prepare for the expected influx on Election Day. The irony is . . . with so many Americans voting early, maybe there won’t be such an influx on Tuesday!

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, here’s a detailed dive into Trump’s share of the vote compared to the GOP Senate candidate in every state that had a Senate race in 2016. Trump could lose and still have a major impact on how the Republican Party defines itself moving forward. But if Trump’s share of the vote is less than that of the Senate candidates — as he did in 23 of 33 states last cycle — Republicans will fairly ask, “Wait, why should we be more like the guy who wins fewer votes than that allegedly boring, old-style Republicanism”? (“Senate Republican candidate” and “non-Trump-y traditional Republican” aren’t quite synonyms, but it seems safe to conclude that the Toomeys, Grassleys, Portmans, and Thunes of the world do not have the kinds of larger-than-life personas that would fit in with professional wrestling telecast.)

On the menu today: everything you need to know about Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, not necessarily in that order, and a good summary of where to find more of a writer who probably seems overexposed already.

As noted, the easiest path to victory for Trump comes down to four swing states: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and in most cases, a Trump win in the state comes down to keeping it close in a few key suburban counties and then maximizing the margin in the redder, more rural counties.

The Keystone State — the Keystone to the Whole Presidential Election

I try to pay attention to the Philadelphia suburbs, particularly Bucks County, with good reason. The conventional wisdom about statewide races in Pennsylvania is that Democrats win the cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Republicans win most of the “T” in between those cities, and the race comes down to those suburbs. And that’s still more or less true. Back in 2016, Delaware, Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks counties collectively cast 742,226 votes for Hillary Clinton, and 553,873 votes for Trump, giving Clinton a margin of 188,000 votes in the suburbs.

But I was recently reminded by a GOP consultant with a lot of wins under his belt that Western Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, had a lot of pro-Trump counties where Trump ran up big margins and evened up the statewide totals. He won Westmoreland County by almost 57,000 votes, Butler County by almost 36,000 votes, Washington County by about 25,000 votes, Beaver County by 16,000 votes, and Armstrong County by about the same amount. Those counties gave Trump a roughly 150,000 vote margin, putting him back in contention for the rest of the state.

Also, once you get beyond the Philadelphia suburbs, into those counties with smaller cities, Trump ran up big, crucial margins. Trump won York County by 60,000 votes, Lancaster County by almost 47,000 votes, and Berks County by 18,000 votes.

The popular perception is that Hillary Clinton lost a lot of swing states such as Pennsylvania because turnout in the big cities was down, particularly among African Americans. That may be the case in other states, but it doesn’t really tell the story in the Keystone State. Philadelphia’s turnout wasn’t that much lower. In 2012, 66 percent of registered voters in Philadelphia cast a ballot; in 2016, it was 64 percent. In 2012, Barack Obama won 588,806 votes in the City of Brotherly Love. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 584,025.

If you had to point to the one issue most likely to generate contentious legal fights, it is the Pennsylvania supreme court’s ruling that ballots could be accepted and counted if they arrived after Election Day, even if they didn’t have a postmark indicating they had been mailed by Election Day. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court split, 4–4, allowing the state court’s rule to remain in place. Chief Justice John Roberts and his three liberal colleagues voted in favor of the Pennsylvania court ruling.

But now, with Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Court, it is likely some Pennsylvania Republicans or the Trump campaign will try to get the Supreme Court to take another crack at it. A similar issue came up in Wisconsin, where the state requires an absentee ballot to arrive by Election Day to be counted. A federal judge ruled that that was unfair in light of the pandemic and extended the deadline to November 9. On Monday night, the Supreme Court ruled 5–3 to reverse the judge’s extension of the deadline. John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh all wrote separately to “emphasize that federal courts should not be making last-minute changes to state election rules.”

One more wrinkle to the complicated situation in Pennsylvania. Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh and is the second-most populous county in the state, accidentally sent out 29,000 copies of the wrong ballot to voters earlier this month, giving people ballots for races in other districts. The county is sending out replacement ballots. But if someone sends back the incorrect ballot and doesn’t send back the correct one, should it count? Should it only count for the races in their district? If someone sends back both the incorrect one and the correct one, will any accidentally get double counted?

Today Nate Silver writes that Joe Biden can win the presidential election even if he loses Pennsylvania, offering a scenario where Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, and perhaps most importantly, Arizona.

Mind the Gender Gap in the Grand Canyon State

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, has the distinction of being the only county with more than a million residents that Donald Trump won in 2016. Four years earlier, Mitt Romney won the county by 148,000 votes; Trump won it by 44,000 votes. Two years later, Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema beat Republican Martha McSally in this county by 60,000 votes. What’s more, if a candidate loses Maricopa County, there just aren’t many other places in the state to make up the margin; 61 percent of Arizonans live in Maricopa County.

In 2016, across the state, Trump narrowly carried white, college-educated women over Hillary Clinton, 48 percent to 46 percent. Two years later, Arizona’s white, college-educated women picked Sinema over McSally, 56 percent to 44 percent. To have a shot at winning Arizona, Trump has to keep it close among white, college-educated women, and it’s a similar story in the Senate race. Then Trump and McSally have get every vote they can among friendlier demographics such as blue-collar men, both white and Latino.

Florida, the Land of Trump Boat Parades

Speaking of those potential ugly recount battles in Pennsylvania, plugged-in Republicans think Florida will see the kinds of problems in Palm Beach and Broward counties that they saw in 2018, when the closely contested governor and Senate races came down to five-digit margins out of more than 8 million votes cast.

(An interesting observation: Miami-Dade County is the county that traditionally has the most votes for Democratic candidates. It’s just south of Palm Beach and Broward counties, and yet . . . Miami-Dade County rarely has slow counts or significant issues. Their recount in 2018 was fairly quick, with few controversies or objections from Republicans. It’s not that every urban, heavily Democratic jurisdiction has vote-counting problems; Palm Beach and Broward are just particularly bad at this.)

Out of the big four swing states we’re discussing, Florida seems like the easiest for Trump to keep in his column. The president just narrowly pulled ahead in the RealClearPolitics average, and both Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott overperformed their late polling two years ago. Polling indicates that the Cuban-American community, which had started to drift away from the GOP, is coming back with a vengeance, and they’re bringing Venezuelan Americans, Nicaraguan Americans, and Colombian Americans with them. Trump may not win the overall Latino vote, because Democrats are trying to maximize turnout among the Puerto Rican community — a demographic that grew in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The right Republican can win votes among Florida’s Puerto Ricans — Rick Scott courted them consistently, and they may have made the difference in his race in 2018 — but Trump may not be the right Republican.

The state’s reputation for wackiness — “Florida Man” — means Trump’s nontraditional style doesn’t cause as much friction as in, say, Virginia or Connecticut. As one consultant put it to me, “The issues for Trump that cause problems in other states aren’t really an issue in Florida. His brashness? Floridians are used to it. He’s on his third wife? Floridians have seen that. He’s a condo salesman? Floridians run into them all the time.”

Are North Carolina’s Black Voters Just Not That Enthused about Joe Biden?

One note to add about yesterday’s Corner post about North Carolina: The early vote among the state’s blacks is down a bit from 2016 so far, which is a slightly ominous sign for Joe Biden, Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, and other Democrats.

This is not a dramatic drop; if 61,559 blacks vote in the final four days of early voting, then the turnout will match the level of four years ago. But in the circumstances of this ongoing pandemic, with much higher levels of interest in early voting across all demographics, the level of black turnout remaining about the same as 2016 would still be something of a bad sign. Four years ago, a total of about 3.14 million North Carolinians used absentee voting. So far this year, 3.4 million North Carolinians have voted early, and they can continue to do so until Saturday. You would think the number of blacks voting early would be increasing, proportional to the rest of the state, and so far, it isn’t.

Democrats are more encouraged by the fact that the number of young North Carolinians voting early has skyrocketed. Eleven days before Election Day in 2016, 88,600 voters from ages 18 to 29 had cast ballots. By the same time this year, 331,900 voters in this demographic had cast ballots.

In 2016, North Carolina blacks chose Clinton over Trump, 89 percent to 8 percent. The margin among young voters that year still favored the Democrat, but by not nearly as wide a margin, 58 percent to 36 percent. A recent SurveyUSA poll measured young voters a little more broadly — ages 18 to 34 — but it showed Biden ahead, 53 percent to 44 percent, among this demographic.

In 2016, Trump won the state by 173,315 votes. If, compared to four years ago, the share of the electorate that is black is down by a few percentage points, and the of the electorate that is young is up by a few percentage points, Democrats are effectively trading a demographic they won 11 to 1 for a demographic they won 1.6 to 1 or, if SurveyUSA is correct, 1.2 to 1. Joe Biden had better hope he’s doing significantly better among other demographics if he wants to win the Tarheel State.

ADDENDUM: I noticed Kevin Williamson has a good summary of where to find his work at the end of his weekly newsletter, “The Tuesday.” (If you need help figuring out which day it comes out, you’re probably also curious about when they tape Saturday Night Live.)

You can buy my forthcoming novel, Hunting Four Horsemen, here. It is a thriller about the very real-life potential of engineering viruses to target particular genes, featuring a small Central Intelligence Agency team that tries to obscure its often-lethal work by hiding within the Byzantine organizational structure of the U.S. intelligence community. Hunting Four Horsemen is a sequel to 2019’s Between Two Scorpions, which envisioned terrorists trying to tear up America’s social fabric through paranoia-inducing attacks and trying to get Americans to see every stranger as a potential deadly threat and avoid contact with anyone outside their household. Good thing that idea remained fictional, huh?

My Amazon page is here, with links to my satirical novel about the federal bureaucracy, The Weed Agency, and my nonfiction book co-written with Cam Edwards about growing up, getting married, and having children, Heavy Lifting.

My National Review archive can be found here.

You can listen to the Three Martini Lunch podcast with Greg Corombos here, the pop-culture-focused Jim and Mickey Show here, and for those who need more suffering in their lives, I periodically talk about the Jets with Scott Mason here.

To subscribe to National Review, which you really should do, go here.

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Election Day is one week away. Can you believe it? On the menu today: contemplating what would be different, and what would be the same, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired in 2013 instead of staying on the Court until her death earlier this year; a couple of flubbed words on the campaign trail; yes, people really are announcing Senate bids . . . for the 2022 cycle; and Mike Bloomberg procrastinates.

What If Ruth Bader Ginsburg Had Retired in 2013?

Back in July 2013, President Barack Obama had lunch with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 80, the Supreme Court’s oldest justice, and a cancer patient. Imagine if instead of vaguely alluding to the midterm elections, and subtly hinting Ginsburg should retire, Obama had been direct: “My party is probably going to get thrashed in the upcoming elections, we’re going to lose our majority in the Senate, and I will be unlikely to appoint a like-minded successor to you on the Court. If you really care about preserving our mutual vision for America and its values, you need to retire sometime this year or next year.”

In this alternate universe, Ginsburg retires sometime in 2013, when the U.S. Senate has 53 Democrats and two independents who vote with the Democrats in Bernie Sanders and Angus King. (From June until October in 2013, Jeffrey Chiesa was the Chris Christie-appointed Republican senator from New Jersey.) Patrick Leahy is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

With Ginsburg retiring, Obama selects Diane Wood, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who had been the runner-up to Elena Kagan several years earlier, and interviewed at the White House during the two previous vacancies. A few Democrats worry about her age, 63, but she has no scandals, is fully qualified, and her confirmation hearings run smoothly. Wood is confirmed by a vote along the lines of that of Kagan, 63-37.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires to a comfortable life as a much sought-after speaker and guest lecturer at law schools. Meanwhile, on the Supreme Court, Wood doesn’t vote any differently than Ginsburg did in our timeline. All of the unanimous votes and 5-4 decisions since 2013 would remain the same.

In this alternate vision of history, Antonin Scalia would still pass away in his sleep February 12, 2016. Obama would still nominate Merrick Garland, and the Senate GOP would still refuse to hold a hearing or vote on him. Or perhaps, with Obama having already appointed three justices, there would be a broader recognition that Garland replacing Scalia would create an “Obama Court” and that three was enough. (President Richard Nixon nominated four justices who were confirmed, and Dwight Eisenhower nominated five who were confirmed.) The 2016 election would play out as it did . . . and Donald Trump would win, replace Scalia with Neil Gorsuch, and the Court would reach the same decisions, with the same balance, it has for the past four years.

In this scenario, one of the two biggest changes on American life is that Ginsburg never turns into a political and pop-culture icon. She remains a much-respected jurist and a celebrity in legal circles, but no one ever makes the RBG-themed action figures, apparel, pins, Christmas ornaments, T-shirts, earrings, or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg board game. Liberals are never consumed with fears about her health, we would never see soft-focus news articles about her personal trainer and workout routines, and no one would ever market, “Please Don’t Die, RBG” coffee mugs.

The other big effect is that on September 18 of this year, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would die a retired justice and never set up the nomination fight we’ve seen over the past six weeks. Amy Coney Barrett would not have been confirmed yesterday. The Supreme Court would remain split 5 to 4 to the right, although there are plenty of grassroots Republicans who would argue, considering John Roberts’s record, it should really be considered 4-1-4. There is always a justice perceived to be the swing vote — first Sandra Day O’Connor, then Anthony Kennedy.

Did this nomination fight have an effect on the presidential race? The presidential-race polling hasn’t shown any dramatic movement, but Barrett is a fairly popular nominee, with support among Democrats and independents growing. The Democratic effort to paint Barrett as an extremist, with the constant comparison to the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, went nowhere. This is one of the more popular decisions President Trump has made in a while, and it ended in an indisputable win. The Atlantic characterizes Barrett’s confirmation as a “Hail Mary Touchdown.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty observes:

Some of Barrett’s opponents and critics hate the idea of her being in ‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.’ But, the individual justices don’t own their seats. And Ginsburg’s jurisprudence does not define the seat. Remember that Ginsburg filled a vacancy left by Byron White. And for those keeping score ideologically, Byron White was a dissent in the ruling in Roe versus Wade. If liberals can say that they have ‘lost’ a seat, conservatives may just as well say that this is a seat that “reclaimed,” rather than a true advance.

Look, Senator, the Coronavirus Death Toll Is Bad, but It’s Not That Bad

Presidential candidates give a lot of speeches, they speak off the cuff a lot, and that means they’ll make mistakes. I’m fascinated by those who insist that Biden’s recent “four more years of George, uh, George, uh, he, uh, are going to find ourselves in position where if uh Trump gets elected uh we are going to be uh, going to be in a different world” means he must have meant George Lopez, and not George Bush. Biden may have been on verbal autopilot and started saying his previous epitome of all darkness and malevolence in the universe, George W. Bush, instead of Trump. This, by itself, doesn’t mean Biden is going senile. There’s no evidence Biden thinks he’s running against the son of a president and the man who invaded Iraq. But it fits a pattern of Biden flubbing his words — declaring that he has put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter-fraud organization in the history of American politics” — and it’s the sort of thing that people will notice in an almost 78-year-old potential president. What did everyone think was happening when Saturday Night Live had Woody Harrelson impersonating Biden and declaring, “I’m always one second away from calling Cory Booker ‘Barack’”?

Over at RedState, Sister Toldjah notices that twice Kamala Harris has lamented that “an epidemic that has taken the lives of over 220 million Americans in just the last several months.” Presumably, Harris meant 220,000. No one thinks Harris is senile; she just isn’t paying attention to what she’s saying, mixes up two numbers, and asserts that two-thirds of all Americans have died since spring.

Barack Obama didn’t think there were 57 states. He meant to say 47 and said “fifty-seven” states. It’s just funny because “how many states are there?” is the sort of easy question they ask when they fear you’ve suffered a concussion.

They Seem to Start Earlier Every Cycle

Yesterday I noted that a former Wisconsin state assembly leader filed papers to run against Ron Johnson in 2022.

Former Brighton, Ala., mayor Brandaun Dean has filed papers to run for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring.

ADDENDUM: Hey, remember when Mike Bloomberg was going to spend a bazillion dollars to help elect Joe Biden?

The New York Times reports that “Bloomberg is funding a last-minute spending blitz to bolster former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Texas and Ohio, directing millions toward television advertising in two red states that have shifted away from President Trump in the general election.” Bloomberg will spend $15 million “to air intensive ad campaigns in all television markets in both states.”

In Ohio, 2.1 million have already turned in ballots.

In Texas, 7.3 million have already voted.

“Mike can get it done . . .” at the last minute, apparently. Just how many voters out there haven’t voted, will vote, are still undecided, and will be swayed by TV ads in the next few days?

On the menu today: walking through President Trump’s not-so-implausible route to 270 electoral votes, state by state, and taking a look at the gubernatorial races this year — where GOP candidates from deep red states to a few blue ones are polling considerably ahead of Trump this cycle; and how the country just missed the sight of former Maine senator Olympia Snowe moving into the White House.

Trump Has a Route to 270 Electoral Votes

Right now, the most confident Trump fans are overestimating the likelihood he wins another term, while the most confident Biden fans are drastically underestimating how just a handful of cases of Biden underperforming in his polls — the way Hillary Clinton did — could bring Donald Trump to a second term.

It’s easy to forget that Trump won with 306 electoral votes four years ago — two of his electors were faithless — and thus he can give away 36 electoral votes and hit the critical threshold of 270. He doesn’t need to win Wisconsin. He doesn’t need to win Michigan. He could lose both of those states and Iowa, and still finish above 270 electoral votes.

The first step for Trump is that he can’t lose any of those states he won comfortably in 2016. This starts with Texas. The Dallas Morning News poll unveiled Sunday showed Biden ahead by three percentage points. That poll is an outlier compared to other polls in the past few months, although Quinnipiac showed a tie. Obviously, if Biden wins Texas, it’s game over. Keep in mind, the early vote in Texas has been huge — more than 7.1 million votes, as of this writing; overall, 8.9 million Texans voted in the presidential race in 2016.

“States Trump won comfortably in 2016” also includes Iowa, Ohio, and Georgia. Last cycle Trump won Iowa by almost ten percentage points; the polling this year, in aggregate, has Biden ahead by a hair. It’s a similar story in Ohio, where Trump won by eight points last cycle, and the polling this year, in aggregate, has Trump ahead by a hair. In Georgia, Trump won by five points last cycle, and the polling this year, in aggregate, has Biden ahead by a hair. The new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of likely voters released this morning showed Biden at 47 percent and Trump at 46 percent, within the survey’s margin of error of four percentage points.

If you give Trump all the deep-red states, and all of these states listed above, this gets him to 203 electoral votes.

Then Trump needs to win Arizona, maybe the most intriguing state of the cycle. Between the number of retirees, the importance of border issues, and high-profile surrogates such as former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, Arizona may be perceived as redder and more pro-Trump than it is. Trump won this state by just 3.5 points last cycle.

The conventional narrative is that this is a red state gradually turning purple. In the midterms, Senator Kyrsten Sinema won a hard-fought Senate race, Katie Hobbs won the secretary of state race, the Democrats flipped a U.S. House seat, and Democrats gained four seats in the state House. But the state GOP didn’t completely collapse; incumbent Republican governor Doug Ducey won reelection by 14 points, and Republicans held the state attorney general and state treasurer jobs reasonably comfortably. Whether Arizona stays red or turns blue this autumn, fair questions will be asked about whether Arizona is shifting away from Republicans overall or whether Arizona is shifting away from Trump specifically. Right now, Joe Biden enjoys a small lead in Arizona polling, but Trump is gaining ground. Trump is scheduled to appear in the state on Wednesday at rallies in Bullhead City and Goodyear.

With Arizona and the states listed above, Trump reaches 214 electoral votes.

Then Trump needs to win his home state of Florida. (He changed his voter registration to the Sunshine State in 2019.) Trump only won Florida by a bit more than a percentage point, but Florida’s a big state that had 75 percent turnout — so that one percentage point was 112,911 votes — far too large a sum for the Clinton camp to plausibly contest afterwards.

Aggregate polling currently gives Biden a small lead in Florida, but it’s narrowing as well. The fact that Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis overperformed their final polls in Florida ought to prevent Democrats from celebrating too early.

With Florida and the states listed above, Trump reaches 243 electoral votes.

Then Trump needs to win North Carolina, which seems to be remembered as being closer than it was four years ago — Trump won, 49.8 percent to 46.1 percent, or 173,315 votes. Whether you included the minor-party candidates or not, Trump outperformed his final polling average by a few points. Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average, Biden is ahead by 1.8 points.

If Trump wins North Carolina and the states listed above, he reaches 258 electoral votes — just twelve short of winning another term.

Around here, we should note that Trump is probably going to lose the congressional district that includes Omaha in Nebraska, meaning he will probably win four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes and Biden will win one. (Trump is doing a rally in Omaha at 8:30 p.m. local time tomorrow night.) In Maine, the limited polling in the state’s larger and more rural second congressional district is split pretty widely depending upon the pollster — either Biden has a modest lead or Trump has a fairly large one.

Trump needs to win at least one of those big three upper midwestern states that he won narrowly four years ago — Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

My first thought was that from what I can see, Pennsylvania is the lowest-hanging fruit, and perhaps the key to the whole election. On the FiveThirtyEight doodad that allows you to pick the winner of a swing state and see how that affects the rest of the states, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, he has a 73 percent chance of winning a second term. If Biden wins Pennsylvania, Trump has a 3 percent chance of winning a second term.

As of this writing, Biden is ahead in the RealClearPolitics average in Pennsylvania by 5.1 percentage points. But this is a complicated state, with many Pennsylvanians casting ballots by mail for the first time; without the “security envelope,” the ballot will not be counted.

Biden is ahead in the RealClearPolitics average in Michigan by 7.8 percentage points.

But then again, maybe Wisconsin is the lowest-hanging fruit. Biden is ahead in the RealClearPolitics average in Wisconsin by 4.6 percentage points; the most recent Susquehanna survey had the race a tie.

If Trump wins Pennsylvania and the states listed above, he reaches 278 electoral votes, past the 270 threshold. If Trump wins Wisconsin and the states listed above, he reaches 268 electoral votes — and then those lone electoral votes in Nebraska and Maine suddenly have huge significance!

Trump is scheduled to do three events in Pennsylvania today, in Lancaster, Johnstown, and Martinsburg; he heads to Lansing, Mich., and West Salem, Wis., Tuesday.

There are a few other states that are worth watching. Nevada has been pretty blue most cycles, but a few Democrats are worried about whether the unions will be able to effectively do their usual get-out-the-vote operations. There’s been a lot of attention on Minnesota, but Biden’s lead has been in the five- to seven-point range since late September. Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia have now slipped out of the broadest definition of a “swing state.”

Keep in mind, if the polling is accurate, Biden is going to win, and win big. If the final vote matches all of those small leads in polling aggregates, Biden is finishing with something in the neighborhood of 350 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, in the Gubernatorial Races . . .

A few paragraphs back, I asked whether Arizona was shifting away from Republicans overall or whether Arizona was shifting away from Trump specifically. There’s one other useful measuring stick for measuring voters’ views on Republicans in general vs. the president and the current crop of Republicans in Washington: the governors’ races.

Fewer governors are up for reelection in presidential years than in midterms, but there are a handful, and they may give us some indication of how a Republican performs when that candidate is not so closely associated with President Trump. The most ominous indicator is in North Carolina, where the presidential race and Senate race are neck and neck, while Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest just isn’t making incumbent Democrat Roy Cooper sweat at all.

Washington is a heavily Democratic-leaning state, where GOP wins are few and far between, but notice that Republican gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp is running a good four to nine points ahead of Trump in that state.

Beyond that, Republicans candidates are looking strong in the mostly red states electing governors this year. In Montana, Representative Greg Gianforte is enjoying a consistent lead that is about the same as Trump’s lead over Biden. Mike Parson, who took over in Missouri after Eric Greitens resigned, is looking solid, and maybe a few points ahead of Trump.

Polling in Indiana has been sparse, but the latest Survey USA poll put incumbent Republican Eric Holcomb ahead by 30 points, while Trump is ahead of Biden, 49 percent to 42 percent.

In West Virginia, incumbent governor Jim Justice switched to the Republican Party, and he’s on the path to win by a margin in the high teens — perhaps a little higher, or a little lower, than the president’s likely margin over Biden.

In Utah, Republican gubernatorial candidate Spencer Cox is on pace to win by 24 to 33 points, while Trump is on pace to win by ten to 18 points.

Perhaps the most significant differences come in New England. In New Hampshire, where Trump trails Biden badly, incumbent Republican Chris Sununu is way ahead of Democratic challenger Dan Feltes. In Vermont, where Trump may not crack 35 percent, incumbent GOP governor Phil Scott leads the NPR poll, with 55 percent to 24 percent for Democrat progressive David Zuckerman.

Add it all up, and we see quite a few Republican governors overperforming Trump in the polls. Perhaps Trump indeed wins votes that few other Republican candidates could win, among blue-collar workers. But probably also he loses votes that few other Republican candidates could lose among suburbanites.

A lot of Democrats, and some of the self-identified Never Trumpers, believe that Trump will be a millstone around the necks of Republican candidates for a long time to come. Nothing is written in stone yet, but GOP governors and gubernatorial candidates appear to be demonstrating that it is possible to develop a political identity separate from Trump and, in many states, win significantly more votes. And if Republican candidates for non-federal offices can cultivate an identity distinct from Trump now . . . why would it be harder in 2022 or 2024?

ADDENDUM: This morning, The New Yorker runs the first excerpt from former president Barack Obama’s forthcoming memoirs, revealing just how thoroughly he wanted Maine GOP senator Olympia Snowe to support the Affordable Care Act: ‘Tell Olympia she can write the whole damn bill!’ I said to Nancy-Ann as she was leaving for one such meeting. ‘We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Tell her if she votes for the bill she can have the White House — Michelle and I will move to an apartment!’” Snowe voted “no” in December 2009.

This week felt like a month. On the menu today: After President Trump asked, “Would you close down the oil industry?” Biden responded, “I have a transition from the old industry, yes,” and now Biden’s campaign insists the candidate didn’t mean it. Biden also insisted that he “never said I oppose fracking,” which is contradicted by many of Biden’s past statements. It was that kind of a debate, wrapping up that kind of a week. Also, Operation Warp Speed’s chief adviser, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, offers a really encouraging timeline for vaccine distribution.

 Joe Biden: ‘I Have a Transition from the Old [Oil] Industry, Yes’

After the catastrophic failure of the much-hyped “Battleground Texas” project by Democrats in 2014, Lone Star State Republicans could be forgiven for thinking their opposition would never get their act together.

The first tiny rattle in the engine came in 2016, when Donald Trump won the state by “only” nine percentage points. Because we’re talking about such a huge state, that amounts to more than 800,000 votes. But it was a somewhat smaller margin than preceding cycles. Mitt Romney had won the state by 1.2 million votes, and John McCain won by about 950,000 votes.

And then in 2018, Beto O’Rourke came respectably close in the Senate race against Ted Cruz, Republicans swept all the statewide offices again, but incumbents who usually won by wide margins, like Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and state attorney general Ken Paxton, won by just a handful of percentage points. Democrats picked up two U.S. House seats, two state senate seats, and a dozen state House seats. Suddenly the Democrats’ dreams of winning the state were unlikely, but no longer laughable.

Heading into 2020, some Democrats started to believe that this was the year. A few polls here and there put Joe Biden ahead in Texas, and when Trump led, it was rarely by more than four or five points. Trump largely alienates suburbanites, and Texas has a lot of suburbs. Those allegedly boring college-educated minivan-driving soccer moms and white-collar dads used to be the bread and butter of the Republican Party. Trump had started to enjoy better polls, and the formula at FiveThirtyEight suggested Biden’s chances had never been better than one in three.

And then during last night’s debate, Joe Biden said this:

TRUMP: Would you close down the oil industry?

BIDEN: By the way, I have a transition from the old industry, yes.

TRUMP: Oh, that’s a big statement.

BIDEN: I will transition. It is a big statement.

TRUMP: That’s a big statement.

BIDEN: Because I would stop.

KRISTEN WELKER: Why would you do that?

BIDEN: Because the oil industry pollutes, significantly.

TRUMP: Oh, I see. Okay.

BIDEN: Here’s the deal-

TRUMP: That’s a big statement.

The Biden campaign is insisting Biden only meant he would transition away from federal subsidies to the oil industry, not away from the use of oil entirely. In their defense, after the above exchange, Biden did focus on “subsidies,” but only after saying, “it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”

BIDEN: Well, if you let me finish the statement, because it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time, and I’d stopped giving to the oil industry, I’d stop giving them federal subsidies. You won’t get federal subsidies to the gas, oh, excuse me to solar and wind.

TRUMP: Yeah.

BIDEN: Why are we giving it to oil industry?

When Biden says “subsidies,” you may be picturing the U.S. government handing a check to oil companies. What he means are provisions in the tax code that allow companies to deduct a majority of the costs incurred from drilling new wells domestically, percentage depletion that works akin to depreciation in assets, tax credits for reducing carbon emissions, and a 2004 reduction in the corporate tax rate. When Biden says he’s going to “stop giving them federal subsidies,” what he means is that he wants to repeal previous changes to the tax code that were designed to increase domestic energy production.

Biden kept going, making comments that indicate he wants the oil industry to disappear in the next 15 years: “He takes everything out of context, but the point is, look, we have to move toward net zero emissions. The first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production, by 2050 totally.”

It will be quite difficult for any Democrat to win the state of Texas while calling for the entire U.S. oil industry to be phased out within a decade and a half. The pandemic has generated record layoffs, but the industry still employs 162,000 Texans in drilling and oil-field services, and those jobs pay 40 percent more than the median job.

The desire to phase out the oil industry is also not likely to be a winner in certain corners of Pennsylvania, where, as of 2019, nearly 18,000 people are employed in oil and petroleum production.

The related topic of fracking returned, and Biden insisted that not only does he not want to ban fracking, but that he never said he opposed fracking, which is a lie:

BIDEN: I never said I oppose fracking.

TRUMP: You said it on tape.

BIDEN: Show the tape, put it on your website.

TRUMP: I’ll put it on.

BIDEN: Put it on the website. The fact of the matter is he’s flat lying.

WELKER: Would you rule out about banning fracking?

BIDEN: I do rule out banning fracking because the answer we need, we need other industries to transition, to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025. What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money in doing it, but it’s a transition to that.

In the July 2019 debate, Biden was asked about fracking by CNN’s Dana Bash:

BASH: Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Just to clarify, would there be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?

BIDEN: No, we would — we would work it out. [Biden makes a hand gesture, suggesting pushing something out or away.] We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either — any fossil fuel.

In Biden’s final debate with Bernie Sanders in March, the former vice president said:

SANDERS: I’m talking about stopping fracking, as soon as we possibly can. I’m talking about telling the fossil fuel industry that they are going to stop destroying this planet. No ifs, buts and maybes about it. I’m talking about speaking-

BIDEN: So am I.

And then later in that debate:

SANDERS: You cannot continue, as I understand Joe believes, to continue fracking, correct me if I’m wrong. What we need to do right now is bringing the world together, tell the fossil fuel industry that we are going to move aggressively to win solar, sustainable energies and energy efficiency.

TAPPER: Thank you, senator.

BIDEN: No more, no new fracking.

Between this and the various times Biden has told environmentalist protesters or supporters that he wants to “end fossil fuels,” “get rid of fossil fuels,” “phase out fossil fuel production,” and “ban fossil fuel exports,” there is a pattern that whenever Biden is challenged on being insufficiently committed to the green agenda, he insists he agrees with his critic. And then when called out for those comments, Biden insists he never said what he said.

Joe Biden’s true energy policy is that he agrees with whomever is in front of him, whether it’s a hardcore green activist or an oil-field worker who wants to keep making good wages to support his family. Biden wants it both ways because he wants both votes, and he is adamant that no decision he reaches will ever disappoint either side. If he is elected, energy policy in the Biden administration would be a jump ball, depending upon who gets appointed to those key positions of Secretary of Energy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the commissioners on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, etc.

Also note that Kamala Harris, who would take over if Biden could not complete his term, completely supports banning fracking, propose the “cooperative managed decline of fossil fuel production,” and backs the Green New Deal.

Apocalyptic Joe

I do worry that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic will get worse as the winter months arrive. People will spend more time indoors, increasing their close contact, and if infected, spread it to others in their household. People are going to have a tough time resisting getting together with relatives for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The good news is that your odds of surviving an infection are better than ever: “Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.”

Meanwhile, Operation Warp Speed’s chief adviser, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, told ABC News this week that “It’s not a certainty, but the plan — and I feel pretty confident — should make it such that by June, everybody could have been immunized in the U.S.” What’s more, “Moderna and Pfizer are likely to be the first to apply for emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, possibly as soon as November or December. If a vaccine is authorized before the end of the year, Slaoui said approximately 20 to 40 million doses of it will be stockpiled and ready for distribution for a limited population.”

First doses for the most vulnerable by the end of the year, and everybody’s safe by June. The end is in sight, people. Between the improved treatments and the pace of vaccine development, we’re almost through with this thing; we just need to be smart and careful for the next few months.

But last night, Biden went well beyond any measure of reasonable wariness and declared, “The expectation is we’ll have another 200,000 Americans dead between now and the end of the year.” As of last night, there were 70 days left in this year. That comes out to 2,857 deaths per day, every day, from now until January 1. Our daily rate of deaths has been around 1,000 — generally below it — since late August. If we lost 900 souls a day for the rest of the year, that would add up to 63,000 additional deaths.

The truth is bad enough, there’s no need for Biden to veer into the dire scaremongering. (Right now in the comments section, some regular readers are stunned that I, of all writers, could find someone else’s assessment to be fearmongering.)

ADDENDUM: My colleagues David Harsanyi and Kyle Smith have more on some really glaring lies by Biden — “not one person with private insurance would lose their health insurance under my plan, or did they under Obamacare,” “there is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business” — and it overall reinforces what Democrats would prefer to not notice. Biden just blurts out the first thing that comes to mind, regardless of its accuracy, as much as Trump does, and either can’t remember or doesn’t care what the actual truth is.

On the menu today: a deep look at Latinos, who might be the last of the swing voters in our heavily polarized political environment; Joe Biden wants a blue-ribbon commission to give him recommendations about the federal judiciary; a pretender and a contender for the title of Great Southern Democratic Hope; and a note of thanks.

In 2020, Latinos Are Perhaps the Last of the Swing Voters

Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette makes a sharp observation: “This was supposed to be The Latino Election. Even more so than 2016, which was supposed to be The Latino Election — but never was. Latinos were supposed to get top billing. Yet that never happened. Immigration is off the agenda, since neither Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden seems eager to discuss it.”

It’s not that the two major candidates never discussed immigration; it’s that other hugely consequential issues squeezed immigration out of the spotlight. The coronavirus pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime menace, as is the related economic downturn. This year’s national convulsions over issues of race, crime, police brutality, and order in our cities is also impossible to ignore. If the virus in Wuhan had not escaped out into the broader population, the entire course of 2020 might have been different, and we might be in the middle of a presidential campaign that focused as much on immigration as the previous one did.

Whether or not Navarrette thinks Trump and Biden are eager to discuss the topic of immigration, does anyone have any questions or doubts about where President Trump stands on immigration issues after four years in office? If Trump wanted to make a deal on the Dreamers, it would have happened by now. We don’t have a “big, beautiful wall,” paid for by Mexico, but we have 371 miles of replaced or new border fencing. Trump made asylum rules stricter and increased Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

Similarly, Biden may not spend a lot of time talking about his immigration plans — with all of those early lids, he’s not spending a lot of time talking about much of anything — but his plans are there for anyone who bothers to look. A path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants, instant restoration of DACA, a moratorium on deportations in his first 100 days, cease the current replacement of border fencing, protect sensitive locations from immigration enforcement actions, expand the supply of temporary workers, and allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigration.

As far as we can tell from public-opinion polls, there are at least two groups of Latinos that are gravitating towards Trump. The first is Cuban Americans, and if Trump wins Florida again, he will probably have this group to thank. Not only do 59 percent of South Florida Cuban Americans say they will vote for Trump, they support him across the board on a variety of issues. At least 55 percent of South Florida Cuban Americans support Trump on immigration, race relations, national protests, health care, Cuba policy, China policy, and the COVID-19 crisis. Among this demographic, 80 percent approve of how Trump is handling the economy.

The second demographic of Latinos that is shifting in support of Trump is Venezuelan Americans. “Venezuelan support is a small, new prize in Florida, a presidential battleground with 14 million votes up for grabs, that is often decided by the slimmest of margins. About 238,000 Venezuelans live in the Sunshine State, and some 67,000 were naturalized citizens as of 2018, according the U.S. Census. A recent University of North Florida poll estimated that 55,000 of them are eligible voters — and nearly 7 out of 10 support Trump over Democrat Joe Biden.”

One wonders if Venezuelan Americans will be more energized about the president in the aftermath of the report that Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany and former acting director of national intelligence, met with an ally of Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro in an attempt to “facilitate a peaceful transition of power.” On September 17, Grenell met near Mexico City with Jorge Rodríguez, a former Venezuelan vice president and close ally of Maduro. Obviously, whatever incentives the administration laid out to encourage Maduro to step down, it wasn’t enough.

A potential third group of Latinos who are warming up to Trump are Nicaraguan Americans, although there’s less concrete evidence of this shift: “Eduardo Gamarra, who directs the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University, said that based on polling conducted among Central Americans, he believes that more Nicaraguans support Trump today than in 2016. It’s a trend that runs parallel to that seen in Cubans and Cuban-Americans, he noted, who supported Barack Obama in 2012 in record numbers, but in 2020, favor President Trump. In focus groups of Nicaraguans, especially after President Daniel Ortega’s 2018 crackdown, Gamarra also noted more support for the American president than before.”

What do immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have in common? Almost all of them have experienced life under Communist or socialist dictators. For a while now, conservatives have speculated that Bernie Sanders and his supporters openly embracing the “socialist” label would spur those who had firsthand experience with socialist regimes to run away from the Democratic Party.

The Floridian Nicaraguan-American community that supports Biden is quick to emphasize its anti-Communist stance. According to the Miami Herald, “Along with signs saying ‘Nicaraguans with Biden’ and portraits of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most common car decorations for the caravan were signs that proclaimed attendees were ‘100% anti-comunista.’ The caravan drew a cross-section of voters: second-generation Nicaraguan-Americans who were first-time voters along with older Nicaraguan immigrants who moved to South Florida in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as part of the wave of immigration sparked by the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s rise to power.”

Navarrette’s Post piece continues, “For his part, Biden never launched a ground game with Latinos. He was too busy trying to make peace with African Americans, many of whom were leery of a tough-on-crime politician who built a career protecting White folks from Black folks and wrote the law that fueled mass incarceration. The best Biden had to offer Latinos was to greet a gathering a few weeks ago by holding up a phone and playing Justin Bieber singing the Spanish-language love song ‘Despacito.’”

(On paper, a Biden presidency should obliterate wokeness as a social movement once and for all. If Democrats want to argue that Biden is somewhat less tin-eared, dated, condescending, and insensitive — “you ain’t black,” “are you a junkie?” “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent” — fine, but let’s all acknowledge that Biden is only marginally more sensitive on race and ethnicity than Trump. For a guy who’s supposedly this endless fountain of empathy, Biden keeps blurting out things that would get less powerful and famous Americans fired, canceled, or given a stern warning from their employer’s human-resources department. On paper, the double standard from the Woke Left should destroy the notion that a single racially insensitive or controversial comment should be a career-ender in American life. But it’s more likely that a Biden presidency would demonstrate that the Woke Left has an unending willingness to accept double standards.)

This morning, I began by wondering just how many swing voters were left. Who could still be struggling to decide? These two major party candidates are the ultimate known quantities. Trump might be erratic, but there’s little reason to think four more years of Trump would be dramatically different. And Biden has literally been in public office longer than the average American has been alive.

But Latinos might be the last of the swing voters. They’re splitting two to one in favor of Biden, but Trump doesn’t need to win this demographic to win another term, he just needs to not get blown out. David Leonhardt of the New York Times observes the gender gap within this group is considerable: “Among Latina women, Biden leads Trump by a whopping 34 percentage points (59 percent to 25 percent). Among Latino men, Biden’s lead is only eight points (47 percent to 39 percent). These patterns are similar across both Latino college graduates and those without a degree.”

And elsewhere in the Times, Jennifer Medina observes that “what has alienated so many older, female and suburban voters is a key part of Mr. Trump’s appeal to these men, interviews with dozens of Mexican-American men supporting Mr. Trump shows: To them, the macho allure of Mr. Trump is undeniable. He is forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

Biden: What We Need Is a Blue-Ribbon National Commission!

In an interview with 60 Minutes’ Norah O’Donnell, Joe Biden sort-of kind-of offers a further explanation on court-packing:

JOE BIDEN:  If elected, what I will do is I’ll put together a national commission of bipartisan commission of scholars, constitutional scholars, Democrats, Republicans, liberal/conservative. And I will — ask them to over 180 days come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack- the way in which it’s being handled and it’s not about court packing. There’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated and I’ve looked to see what recommendations that commission might make.

NORAH O’DONNELL: So, you’re telling us you’re going to study this issue about whether to pack the court?

JOE BIDEN: No, whether– there’s a number of alternatives that are– go well beyond packing.

NORAH O’DONNELL: This is a live ball?

JOE BIDEN: Oh, it is a live ball. No, it is a live ball. We’re going to have to do that. And you’re going to find there’s a lot of conservative constitutional scholars who are saying it as well. The last thing we need to do is turn the Supreme Court into just a political football, whoever has the most votes gets whatever they want. Presidents come and go. Supreme Court justices stay for generations.

If Biden thinks he’s going to find “a lot of conservative constitutional scholars” who endorse expanding the size of the Supreme Court, he really has gone senile.

The “blue-ribbon commission” is a standard Washington maneuver to do something that is not all that popular. You gather a bunch of respected retired old-timers from both parties, hold some public hearings, let their staff write up a detailed report that few people will actually read, allow them to propose the controversial idea, and then lawmakers get to support it, saying that the controversial idea has been endorsed by the blue-ribbon commission as necessary.

The Great Democratic Southern Hopes

In case you missed it yesterday, I usually enjoy mocking the wild hype-to-performance ratios of each election cycle’s “Great Democratic Southern Hopes” — the Alison Lundergan Grimeses, the Michelle Nunns, the Beto O’Rourkes. You’ve probably read those glowing profile pieces in the national political press, gushing about how this year, the Democrats have found a winner who is going to shock everyone in this or that red state. (I called O’Rourke the king of the Great Democratic Southern Hopes, and perhaps Wendy Davis should be considered the queen.)

This year we’ve got another who fits the wildly overhyped label in Kentucky’s Amy McGrath. But we should recognize that a little further south and east, there’s a genuine Great Democratic Southern Hope in Senate candidate Jaime Harrison. Harrison might not win, but he’s uncomfortably close in what is arguably the most Republican state in the country.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to everyone who ordered Hunting Four Horsemen yesterday. Several of you will be contacted shortly about receiving an inscribed copy of Between Two Scorpions.

On the menu today: Why those ominous predictions that we won’t know who won the 2020 presidential election for days, or perhaps weeks after Election Day may not pan out; some back-and-forth decision-making from the Trump campaign; and a special request.

Your State May Already Be Counting Your Vote!

You may have heard it could be a while before all the votes are counted after Election Day. That . . . may not turn out to be the case. At least three of the most pivotal states in the presidential race are already tabulating the early votes.

Thirteen states allow election officials to begin counting absentee or mail-in ballots before Election Day, and those states include Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. In fact, if you had to pick a half-dozen states that could determine the outcome of the presidential election, those three would make just about everyone’s list.

In Arizona, just under 900,000 people have already voted, and state law permitted counting to begin yesterday, October 20. The law is the same in North Carolina, where more than 1.8 million people already voted. In Florida, where more than 3 million people (!) already voted, state law allowed counting to begin October 12.

In Texas, certain large localities are allowed to start a little early. The statute reads, “when the polls open on Election Day; in a jurisdiction with more than 100,000 people, counting can begin at the end of the early voting by personal appearance period.” The early voting period in Texas ends October 30.

Other states allow similar processing of the ballots, readying them for counting, but not actual counting. Under Nevada law: “Not earlier than 4 working days before the election, the county clerk shall deliver the ballots to the absent ballot central counting board to be processed and prepared for counting pursuant to the procedures established by the Secretary of State to ensure the confidentiality of the prepared ballots until after the polls have closed.” In Nevada, more than 264,000 people have voted so far.

In Ohio, where 1.2 million people have already voted, the statute permits “scanning the absent voter’s ballot by automatic tabulating equipment, if the equipment used by the board of elections permits an absent voter’s ballot to be scanned without tabulating or counting the votes on the ballots scanned.”

In many states, registered Democrats are returning absentee ballots in higher numbers than registered Republicans, and in polls, self-identified Democrats are expressing much greater interest in voting by mail or voting early than self-identified Republicans. If the early vote is mostly Democrats, and the Election Day turnout is mostly Republicans, this will have two effects on early perceptions of who is “winning.”

First, the early “waves” of tallies may well look like a Democratic landslide, if counting begins with the previously tabulated early votes. Then, as the Election Day tallies are added, the numbers will gradually (or perhaps not-so-gradually) shift towards Republicans.

Second, organizations that conduct on-the-ground interviews for exit polls may find their numbers point to a Republican landslide.

With the head start, and the potentially lower total number of ballots cast on Election Day because of all of the early votes, states such as Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina should be able to count their votes relatively quickly. (We can probably throw in Ohio, too.) And if we know who won those key states, along with the roughly 35 to 40 states that aren’t that competitive, we will have a good sense of which candidate is closer to 270 electoral votes.

With all of that said, several other key states do not allow officials to start counting ballots until Election Day, including Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Some states have specific times written into the statute. In Georgia (1.6 million early votes so far), Pennsylvania (just over 1 million early votes so far), and Wisconsin (915,000 early votes so far), officials are not allowed to start counting ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. In Maine and New Hampshire, no counting begins until the polls close.

News organizations are more cautious about declaring winners than they used to be; you may recall the television networks forgetting that Florida has two time zones and calling the state for Al Gore while voters were still casting ballots in the Panhandle. Looking back four years ago, the Associated Press called Ohio for Trump at 10:36 p.m. eastern, Florida at 10:50 p.m., and North Carolina at 11:11 p.m. It’s easy to forget now, but the AP didn’t call Arizona for the president until two days later.

Four years ago, with fewer early votes to count, the AP called Georgia at 11:33 p.m., Iowa two minutes after midnight, Pennsylvania at 1:35 a.m., and Wisconsin at 2:29 p.m., triggering the AP flash that Trump had just been elected the 45th President of the United States. Michigan was so close — 10,704 votes, or less than a quarter of a percentage point — that Trump wasn’t certified the winner for three weeks.

Pennsylvania is likely to be the really thorny one this year, as that state previously had strict rules about absentee voting, which means many Pennsylvanians will be voting by mail for the first time. The fear is that significant numbers of voters will turn in their ballots “naked” — that is, without the required secrecy envelope — and, in accordance with state law, those ballots won’t be counted. In past Pennsylvania elections, about 5 percent of voters didn’t use the secrecy envelope and their ballots were disqualified. One of the reasons you can’t write off Trump’s chances of winning the state is that if more Democrats vote by mail, it’s likely more Democrats will forget to use the secrecy envelope. Republicans who are voting in-person on Election Day won’t face that issue.

As of this morning, the Keystone State has 1,028,431 returned ballots — 749,016 from registered Democrats, 190,668 from registered Republicans. If you assume 5 percent, across the board, don’t use the security envelopes, that means 37,451 Pennsylvania Democrats think they cast a legal ballot but didn’t, while only 9,534 Pennsylvania Republicans think they cast a legal ballot but didn’t.

The thing is, even if you imagine a scenario where Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin take forever to count their ballots . . . if the quicker-counting states break solidly in favor of one candidate, Biden can reach 270 electoral votes, or Trump can be knocking on the door of that threshold.

I could go through a lot of scenarios in the Electoral College map, but the general gist is, if Biden wins Florida and its 29 electoral votes, he has a lot of ways to each 270. If he wins Ohio and its 18 electoral votes, he has almost as many ways. North Carolina has 15 electoral votes, and Arizona has eleven, and not winning either or both of them would greatly complicate Trump’s path to 270.

If Trump wins Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, and you give him the rest of the traditional red states, that puts the president at around 237 electoral votes (I say “around” because we can argue about Nebraska’s Second Congressional District and Maine’s Second Congressional District.) The president’s fate would be in the hands of the slow-counting states. If Georgia and Iowa come in red, Trump is at 259 electoral votes — and his reelection would depend upon winning one of the big three from last cycle, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

Just What Is the Game Plan Here?

Pretty soon, the arguments about whether there was a method to the madness will be resolved.

Tomorrow night, Americans will watch the second and perhaps final presidential debate of the 2020 election. If Trump wants to debate Joe Biden, then he should go debate Joe Biden. If he doesn’t want to debate Biden, then he shouldn’t. If the president is confident that he can mop the floor with him, and that his opponent is a drooling imbecile, Trump should be itching for any and all opportunities to draw that contrast before as may viewers as possible.

Thus, it didn’t make much sense for Trump to withdraw from the second debate, objecting that the debate will be held virtually, and then complain that the Biden camp won’t agree to their offer to hold the debate on another date. If Trump can beat Biden in a debate on stage, he can beat him when they are in separate television studios. He can complain about the moderator and the debate commission aren’t being fair and refuse to participate, or he can get out there and make the case for a second term. The moment the Trump campaign refused to do the virtual-only debate, they gave their counterparts an escape hatch to avoid a third debate entirely.

Last week, Trump counter-programmed Biden’s town hall on ABC with his own event on NBC and its cable affiliates, apparently convinced he would garner much higher ratings and effectively win the night in lieu of a debate. And then Biden actually attracted a slightly higher audience, 14.1 million total viewers on ABC alone, while Trump brought in 13.5 million across NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC combined. By comparison, 73 million people watched part of the first Trump-Biden debate.

If President Trump wants to be interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, then he should do the interview. If he doesn’t want to do the interview, then he shouldn’t do it. But it doesn’t make sense to grant Stahl the interview, and then apparently storm away after 45 minutes, and then tweet about her not wearing a mask and threaten to release the interview himself.

No doubt, someone out there will assure us this is another signature display of three-dimensional or four-dimensional chess, and that the few remaining undecided voters out there were just waiting for a leader to take a bold stand against the longstanding national menace that is Leslie Stahl.

Meanwhile the president’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee worked together to raise more than $1.5 billion this cycle and only had $251 million in the bank at the start of September. Does this look like a campaign that spent more than a billion? Does it feel like Brad Parscale’s “Death Star” juggernaut campaign is fully operational?

ADDENDUM: If you’ve preordered Hunting Four Horsemen already, thank you. If you haven’t . . . today is a good day to do it.

If you pre-order a copy and tweet me a screenshot of your preorder to @jimgeraghty, I will select at least one winner and send you a copy of Between Two Scorpions, inscribed however you like. If you’ve already got a copy, you can give an inscribed copy for a friend. (The holidays are coming!) Or you may keep the inscribed one for yourself and give your other copy away. It’s your life, make your own decisions. And I may pick more than one winner!

I can’t get into all of the details because I don’t really understand all of the details, but apparently some high mucky-mucks at Amazon are considering something about Hunting Four Horsemen tomorrow, which means the preorder numbers today will be really important. I understand Between Two Scorpions will be a “Kindle Unlimited Feature Book” next month, which helps bring it to a wider audience. (If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you get access to more than a million titles, current issues of magazines, unlimited audiobooks, etc.) If you’ve been thinking about preordering — and we’re talking a couple of bucks here — today is a terrific day to do it!

As Bartles and James used to say: “Thank you for your support.”

Good morning. Today’s Morning Jolt will try really, really hard to skip over juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin. On the menu today: The Commission on Presidential Debates decrees that the microphones will be muted for candidates during the opponent’s time, the huge divide between the politically engaged and the politically unengaged, a series of thanks, and Greg Corombos and I get metaphorically stuck in a walk-in freezer.

In Thursday’s Debate, the Microphones Will Be Muted

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that “President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will have their microphones muted during Thursday’s presidential debate to ensure each candidate can get his points across uninterrupted.”

Even before this latest decision, Trump’s campaign manager was calling them the “Biden Debate Commission,” and earlier this month, former GOP nominee Bob Dole contended, “The Commission on Presidential Debates is supposedly bipartisan with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. I know all of the Republicans and most are friends of mine. I am concerned that none of them support Donald Trump. A biased debate commission is unfair.”

You may recall Frank Fahrenkopf, chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, insisting that moderator Steve Scully’s Twitter account was hacked; days later, Scully admitted his account had not been hacked.

In an era where every old respected institution in American life seems to be crumbling before our eyes, the Commission on Presidential Debates is strangely impregnable. No one elected them. Few Americans know them. Even most political junkies couldn’t name who’s on the commission. And yet, they more or less decree the rules for the presidential debate every four years, and other than Trump, no candidate really wants to cross them. When wildly popular podcasting star Joe Rogan proposed hosting a debate on his program — no audience, going on for hours, just the two candidates and the host, few major figures in the political firmament took it seriously. (Trump said he was game.)

There is no equivalently powerful institution that manages the primary debates, and thus we’ve seen a lot more debates in primary season.

Back in the 2008 cycle, the Democratic Party had 26 presidential debates and “forums” where multiple candidates appeared. That cycle the Republicans had 21; four years later, Republicans had another 20. The respective party committees didn’t want to have so many debates and forums where the candidates appeared on the same stage, one after another, but for a while neither the campaigns, nor the television networks, nor the sponsoring organizations cared. Lesser-known candidates needed every opportunity they could get, and the networks liked the ratings. Eventually the party committee was able to restore a bit of its own authority, threatening to sanction candidates who participated in “unauthorized” debates, and limiting the process to just six primary debates — a move that many Bernie Sanders fans interpreted as an attempt to help Hillary Clinton. This cycle, Democrats had “only” eleven debates.

In the past few cycles, primary debates have multiplied like rabbits, while the general-election debates have remained pretty much the same: three presidential debates, one vice-presidential debate, with one of the evenings featuring a “town hall” style questions from “ordinary Americans” who allegedly are not pulling for one candidate or another. The moderators are usually news anchors well into distinguished careers. The only time an independent or minor-party candidate has been invited was H. Ross Perot and Admiral James Stockdale in 1992.

The questions are usually predictable and generic, the answers have usually been focus-group-tested to the point of terminal blandness. As I noted earlier this year, “many voters and members of the media seem to think caring about a problem — or more specifically, appearing to care about a problem — is the same as having a workable plan to solve a problem. They mistake the destination for the path.” The moderators rarely follow up or press hard for details. No one breaks out the calculators to make sure the proposed numbers add up.

Would Joe Rogan help create a more edifying and interesting debate? Lawrence Wright? Tim Ferriss? Arthur Brooks? How about Fed chairman Jerome Powell? How about retired generals or diplomats asking about the military and geopolitical problems they see lurking on the horizon? They used to have panels of three or four journalists asking questions, why not multiple questioners? How about the commissioner of the Social Security Administration giving a quick update on the latest numbers, and then asking the candidates how they intend to address the future shortfall?

The Commission on Presidential Debates keeps the debates this way the because the candidates largely want them to be this way — safe, predictable, barely scratching the surface of complicated problems and complex topics.

Please note we are halfway through the Jolt and have not yet made any juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin.

The Most Annoying Partisan You Know Is Not Necessarily Representative

Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan teach political science at Stony Brook University, and in today’s New York Times, they argue that the biggest divide in America is not between the left and the right, but between the tuned-in and the tuned-out:

What’s really fascinating is that tuned-in Democrats worry about different topics than tuned-out Democrats, and the same phenomenon is at work among tuned-in and tuned-out Republicans.

On a number of other issues, we found that Americans fall much less neatly into partisan camps. For example, Democrats and Republicans who don’t follow politics closely believe that low hourly wages are one of the most important problems facing the country. But for hard partisans, the issue barely registers.

Partisan Republicans were most likely to say drug abuse was the most important problem facing the country. But less-attentive Republicans ranked it second to last, and they were also concerned about the deficit and divisions between Democrats and Republicans.

Among Democrats, the political junkies think the influence of wealthy donors and interest groups is an urgent problems. But less-attentive Democrats are 25 percentage points more likely to name moral decline as an important problem facing the country — a problem partisan Democrats never even mention.

A wiser and sharper political figure could come up with a way to capitalize on that. If you were an ambitious Democrat, you might focus your public remarks on “moral decline,” and not only give less-engaged Democrats a reason to get excited, you might turn some heads among the Republicans, too. The quasi-populist tone of the likes of Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley would lend itself well to a focus on increasing hourly wages as an explicit goal of economic policy.

The authors also note, “This gap between the politically indifferent and hard, loud partisans exacerbates the perception of a hopeless division in American politics because it is the partisans who define what it means to engage in politics. When a Democrat imagines a Republican, she is not imagining a co-worker who mostly posts cat pictures and happens to vote differently; she is more likely imagining a co-worker she had to mute on Facebook because the Trump posts became too hard to bear.”

We are nearly through the Jolt and have not yet made any juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin.

ADDENDA: If you missed yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, the ten-year anniversary of the show, you missed the equivalent of an old sitcom where Greg and I accidentally get stuck in a walk-in freezer and reminisce about all of our greatest hits over the past decade: our pitch for an HGTV show called Greg and Jim Have No Strong Feelings about Interior Decorating, William F. Buckley’s presence at the 2004 National Conservative Writer Draft, our attack ads the week of the Bears-Jets game, and of course, Disney’s CTU.

. . . Thanks to everyone who preordered Hunting Four Horsemen yesterday. I am humbled by your faith that it is worth reading. Then again, if you’re not sure, Between Two Scorpions is just $3.99 on Kindle, and if you like that, you’ll probably like the next one.

. . . Okay. Let’s just say that you were writing a satirical novel. You create a character who’s a well-known legal analyst on a cable-news network and who writes for The New Yorker, married, and who has an affair that results in some pretty sordid personal drama with his colleagues. Your legal analyst gets dragged into court to pay child support. But somehow all this mess doesn’t really interfere with his thriving television journalism career.

And then you write that during a Zoom call with New Yorker magazine colleagues, this legal analyst . . . seems to get bored and take matters into his own hands, so to speak, while everyone else on the call can see what he’s doing. Imagine that in a one-liner that strains credulity, your imaginary legal analyst declares, “I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” as if the real problem was the audio quality.

If you wrote all that, wouldn’t some editor at the publisher conclude, “naming that character ‘Toobin,’ is a little on-the-nose, don’t you think?”

On the menu today: Robert Reich and other Democrats yearn for a post-Trump “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”; a Republican pollster lays out why he thinks Trump has a much better chance to win reelection than the conventional wisdom suggests; and a pair of very special announcements.

Democrats Haven’t Thought Through a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ Have They?

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich garnered some attention this weekend for a tweet calling for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to be established “when this nightmare is over” — presumably he means after Trump is defeated in the upcoming election and when Joe Biden is president. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes made similar comments earlier this month.  

This isn’t Reich being short-tempered or flying off the handle in a moment of passion; some on the left have been calling for this idea for years. In May 2018, Kevin Baker wrote an extremely lengthy cover piece in The New Republic calling for one after the Trump era, but at least he acknowledged that the election of a president who drove one side of the aisle crazy with outrage was not the traditional situation that required this kind of commission:

I don’t mean to claim that what has gone on here since the election of Donald Trump approaches what most of those other nations that used truth and reconciliation commissions have endured. The first such effort, initiated by President Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina in 1983 — one earlier attempt, in Bolivia in 1982, was shut down before it was completed and another one, in Uganda in 1974, was overseen by Idi Amin; I’m not counting either — was created to soothe the still-raw wounds of a military dictatorship and “Dirty War” that disappeared some 30,000 people. Since then, at least 42 other nations have tried similar means of getting past the past, and the crimes they have confronted have usually been even more horrific and wide-reaching: the genocides in Rwanda and East Timor; the reign of the white supremacist, apartheid regime in South Africa; Soviet-imposed communism in East Germany; the slaughters perpetrated in Haiti after the overthrow of Aristide, in the Yugoslavian civil wars, and by Mobutu, Kabila, and so many others in the Congo; the atrocities committed by U.S.-backed, enabled, and even encouraged regimes in Brazil, South Korea, Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Uruguay.

If the first point you have to concede is that this is nowhere near the sort of circumstance that requires a truth and reconciliation commission, then you don’t really need a truth and reconciliation commission.

I suspect many of those currently calling for an American Trump-era Truth and Reconciliation Commission know South Africa had an institution by that name, but don’t know many of the details. For starters, “reconciliation” necessarily includes a widespread acceptance, however begrudging, of those believed to have committed significant wrongs, even violent crimes. South Africa’s TRC aimed for restorative justice, not retributive justice, which left quite a few victims of the system believing that some perpetrators escaped true accountability. South Africa’s commission “received 7,112 amnesty applications. Amnesty was granted in 849 cases and refused in 5,392 cases, while other applications were withdrawn.” The U.S. Institute of Peace concluded that “few trials were actually held. Several high-level members of the former police were convicted for the attempted murder of Reverend Frank Chikane in 1989. The trial of former minister of defense Magnus Malan and nineteen others ended in acquittal.” The commission called for reparations for victims of the Apartheid state, but only 21,000 people received the payments. South Africa’s TRC was called a “gold standard for how a divided society with a violent past might work through that past and move forward,” and maybe it really did represent the best possible option in one of the worst possible situations. But that didn’t mean everyone went home satisfied.

In the “Trump Presidency Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that Reich envisions, does Stephen Miller get prosecuted — crimes to be determined later — but a less-controversial cabinet member like Rick Perry gets a pass? Attorney General Barr would surely be a top target, too. Does Brett Kavanaugh become a target of the commission? Do administration members who criticized Trump after leaving their positions get a pass, or are they targets of investigation for enabling the president early on? Does Kayleigh McEnany make the cut, or did she sign on too late?

Is the Democratic Party’s agenda truly to see all of their opponents during this presidency locked up in jail, all in the name of upholding the law and protecting human rights?

You may recall that after Barack Obama became president, some Democrats wanted prosecutions of his predecessor and Bush administration officials for alleged “war crimes,” the CIA’s rendition programs, etc. Even before he was sworn in, President-elect Obama indicated he had no real interest in that: “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. . . . And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.” Obama recognized that he could extract vengeance upon the preceding administration, or he could get his agenda passed, but not both. This outraged quite a few folks on the left, who had convinced themselves that the Bush administration policies ranked among the greatest crimes in human history.

If elected, Joe Biden will face a similar choice. He can set out to put the preceding administration behind bars — and watch Trump make the O. J. Simpson trial look quiet, obscure, and dignified — or he can focus on enacting the policies he wants passed by a Congress that will still probably be closely divided. But Biden can’t have both.

Finally, there is a separate, less partisan proposal we will need to consider soon. At some point, hopefully early next year, the coronavirus pandemic will be over. And just as the 9/11 Commission offered valuable insights into how our country was not prepared for those abominable terrorist attacks, we will need to study how we could have been more prepared for this pandemic. “It’s Trump’s fault!” is not enough (or all that illuminating or accurate, really). We have tough questions to face about how much we can trust the Chinese government, how economically entangled we want to be with that country, why the first warnings of the virus spurred accusations of xenophobia, why the medical advice on masks changed so quickly and how to avoid exacerbating public confusion and skepticism, whether the sweeping lockdowns did any good or represented a panicked overreach, why the first tests from the CDC didn’t work, why certain contagious patients were sent to retirement homes, etc. A bipartisan commission of respected experts, with no partisan axes to grind, would be genuinely useful.

Proposals such as the one from Robert Reich add to public cynicism about bipartisan commissions, suggesting that they’re a fig leaf for one side’s vindictive agenda.

The Interview That Every Poll-Skeptic Has Been Waiting to Read

Over on the home page, Rich interviews Robert Cahaly, founder and senior strategist of the Trafalgar Group. In the interview, Cahaly lays out the single most compelling argument of how the polls could be significantly off-base this cycle:

One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”

Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”

According to Cahaly, most polls are more than 25 questions. He keeps it between seven and nine, so respondents can answer in a matter of minutes.

The Bored-American community is important, but they’re not necessarily a majority.

ADDENDUM: Special announcement No. 1. . . . For everyone who’s asked, “when are you going to write a sequel to your thriller, Between Two Scorpions?” . . . it’s now available for preorder: Hunting Four Horsemen.

I spent much of autumn 2019 writing out a completely separate idea for the sequel, revolving around a long-lost diary full of Cold War secrets — real-world, little-known secrets, like the CIA’s work with the Dalai Lama in the 1950s and 1960s. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the stakes of that story just didn’t seem high enough, when the world outside our windows was facing a crisis on this scale. And I started to think about what the world will be like, once this virus is in our rear-view mirror . . .

In Hunting Four Horsemen, the coronavirus pandemic is finally over, and a bruised, wary world is trying to return to something resembling normal — including the CIA’s Katrina Leonidivna and her Dangerous Clique team, tracking down a rogue Iranian spy with ties to the now-mostly-forgotten Atarsa terrorist group. But that spy reveals a terrifying new threat: someone calling himself “Hell-Summoner” has approached Tehran — and other rogue regimes — offering to sell them a virus that can be engineered to target any particular genetic sequence.

Katrina, Alec, and the rest of the team learn, to their horror, that the technology to engineer a virus that only infects particular people is very real and if used, could launch a cataclysmic new era of biological warfare. The hunt to find Hell-Summoner is on, at a breakneck pace, from flooded ancient tunnels to an old Nazi fortress to an island of diseased monkeys to a tower of skulls to a lake rumored to turn people to stone — up against ruthless Russian mercenaries, cutthroat Serbian war criminals, cruel animal smugglers, and every other extremist who would want to turn a virus into an unstoppable, invisible and precise weapon of war.

For the team, the stakes have never been higher — the barn door is already open, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse are already riding. For Katrina, Alec Flanagan, Ward Rutledge, Raquel Holtz and the rest, this mission is win or die trying — with that second option unnervingly likely.

Ready for something really chilling? The scenario I envisioned in this novel, of someone offering a rogue state a biological weapon that would only target particular genetic groups . . . already happened in real life. In the mid 1980s, someone — no one ever determined who — approached the South African defense attaché in London and offered to engineer bacteria that would only target and kill “pigmented people.” The South African government researched it and determined the science was plausible . . . but never followed up, or so they say, because they thought it might be a trap by a hostile foreign-intelligence service.

I am far from a perfect writer, but if you check the Amazon reviews for Between Two Scorpions, you’ll see readers by and large received what I wanted to give them —  pop-culture-literate wisecracking protagonists, settings in bizarre and unique corners of the world, villains who are convinced they’re the real heroes of the story and building a better world, glimpses of long-forgotten chapters of world history, and the occasional observation about who we are and the world we live in.

Special announcement No. 2. . . . Can you believe that as of today, Greg Corombos and I have been taping the Three Martini Lunch podcast for ten years?