May I respectfully point out that just as there is no Trump pivot, there is no Biden hubris that suddenly is going to appear in the last 48 hours after Dem fretting for 4 years, and no complacency, either.
Win or lose, the Biden campaign is executing a plan, including an OH visit.
Ben Ginsberg/WaPo:
My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump
President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.
This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.
Here’s how things stand: the polls say we are ahead. I mean, really ahead.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Trump losing support where it hurts the most
The Republican Party has struggled in the suburbs during Trump’s presidency, but it’s his recent slippage with white working-class voters that has Republicans alarmed.
Data from the pre-election Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a large-sample political survey administered to more than 70,000 respondents between Sept. 29 and Oct. 27, illustrates the precariousness of Trump’s situation. The poll predictably finds that Trump’s support has collapsed with college-educated white voters—his 3-point deficit against Hillary Clinton in 2016 has turned into a 22-point chasm against Joe Biden. It was Trump’s struggles with white-collar voters that allowed Democrats to win back the House in the 2018 midterms; the vast majority of their 40 pickups came in suburban districts.
But the latest survey also finds smaller slippage among blue-collar white voters, whose strong support for Trump allowed him to shock the political world in 2016. Trump won white voters without a college degree by 27 points in 2016, 61 to 34 percent. The pre-election CCES survey finds Trump outperforming Biden with those voters by 19 points, 57 to 38 percent. That’s still a sizable margin, but Trump can’t afford any defections from the voters who made up the core of his support in 2016.
Trump campaign sees a narrow path to victory in final days – and senses another upset
Trump’s campaign is especially concerned that the upper-Midwest states that supported him in 2016 will shift back toward Democrats. They scheduled rallies in the three days before Election Day in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida.
GOP pollster Neil Newhouse, a co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, said that the Trump campaign has “no other choice” but to spend the final weekend in multiple states a day.
“They need to spend the time in the states that are the tipping-point states, and there are other states that are on the bubble that they really can’t spend as much time in. They’ve got to basically depend on their ground game to pull them through there,” Newhouse said.
“And that’s why the president is spending time in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin. Those are states that they need to turn in order to win,” he said.
Jon Ralston/Nevada Independent:
If you look at the math below, it already was very difficult for Trump. Now he has less of a chance to win than he does of getting a gaming license in Nevada.
I don't know how much more mail will be returned before Tuesday, nor do I know how many ballots will be rejected (the rate so far shows it doesn’t change the lead very much). But the dice are cast, and they look like snake eyes for the GOP.
More than 400,000 ballots have been cast by mail in Clark County and more than 775,000 overall. The number of votes left for Election Day continues to dwindle, and the chances of an overwhelming GOP turnout to turn this around becomes less and less likely.
More later, but the math is just not there for Trump.
Molly Jong-Fast/Vogue:
I'm Still Reeling From 2016. Am I Now Allowed to Hope Again?
But it’s not just the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic that’s so exhausting. The president’s baseline nuttiness is just crushing. I’m so tired of the chaos. Every single day is a Saturday night massacre in Trumpworld. It’s Watergate every single week. It’s the Teapot Dome every two hours. I’m so tired of looking at my phone and finding out that the president has done another insane thing to capture the news cycle. We’re no longer Trump’s constituents; we’re his hostages.
Biden’s lead is double what Clinton’s was.
‘A whole lot of hurt’: Fauci warns of covid-19 surge, offers blunt assessment of Trump’s response
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Fauci, a leading member of the government’s coronavirus response, said the United States needed to make an “abrupt change” in public health practices and behaviors. He said the country could surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day and predicted rising deaths in the coming weeks. He spoke as the nation set a new daily record Friday with more than 98,000 cases. As hospitalizations increase, deaths are also ticking up, with more than 1,000 reported Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total to more than 230,000 since the start of the pandemic, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post.
March to Alamance polls ends with police using pepper-spray on protesters, children
Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and Graham police pepper-sprayed people — including a 5-year-old girl and other children — who were participating in the “I Am Change” march to the polls on Saturday afternoon.
A racially diverse group of about 200 people walked with a police escort from Wayman’s Chapel AME Church to Court Square, where they held a rally encouraging people to vote. The event was organized by Rev. Greg Drumwright, a Burlington native who leads the the Citadel Church in Greensboro, according to his website.
At least three politicians participated in some parts of the event: the current mayor of Burlington, Ian Baltutis; Democratic candidate for county commissioner Dreama Caldwell; and Democratic school board candidate Seneca Rodgers.
Garrett M Graff/Wired:
Donald Trump Is Attacking the Very Core of America
Cold War planners realized that, in the event of nuclear holocaust, they should preserve America’s essence. Trump has spent four years laying bombs on it.Early on, there were the months of “fire and fury” threats with North Korea—including the January 2018 false incoming missile alarm in Hawaii—that made nuclear war seem real and possible for a generation of Americans who had never been subjected to “duck and cover” drills in elementary school. More recently, these last few weeks have brought to the fore swirling questions about presidential succession and the 25th Amendment as Covid-19 sidelined entire ranks of US government leaders.
Yet, more than any one incident, the most troubling aspect to me of Donald Trump’s presidency is his ongoing assault on what doomsday planners during the Cold War eventually determined to be the heart of the United States.
The rise and evolution of nuclear weapons forced government planners, in decade after decade of secret plans known as “continuity of government,” to wrestle with how the US would weather a nuclear Armageddon that could come within hours and, later, even minutes. There were hard choices about who would be saved and what would be rebuilt afterward. Determining how you “preserve” America in a catastrophe quickly became a rather existential and almost spiritual conversation: What was “America”? Was the United States made manifest in its president? In the three branches of government? What did you need to save in order to establish not just the continuity of leadership but the continuity of a country?
The answer turned out to be the most fascinating insight into American government I’ve ever found. America, planners realized, was first and foremost an idea. The president can die, Congress could be lost, our temples of democracy in DC might crumble, but as long as the idea that is America lives, America itself lives.
Source: Daily Kos
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