Political scientist Michael McDonald has tracked that more than 80,000 people have already returned their ballots by mail, mostly in North Carolina.
These totals will start to climb quickly as Virginia, Minnesota, South Dakota and Wyoming also begin early voting today.
Have you made your plan to vote?
A new New York Times/Siena poll of key U.S. Senate races:
A new EPIC/MRA poll:
Jonathan Bernstein: “Donald Trump is lucky that presidential elections aren’t decided by televised town-hall meetings. If they were, after his effort on ABC on Tuesday and Joe Biden’s on CNN Thursday, Trump would be lucky to clear 100 electoral votes. It’s not that Biden was all that great — he was fine, but nothing special. It’s that Trump was that bad, and in ways that made his opponent look even better.”
“The secret of these events, in which candidates answer questions directly from voters, is that they’re easy. For one thing, voters tend to ask policy questions, not process ones, and they’re usually pretty straightforward — what are you going to do about such-and-such? Normal politicians can easily anticipate the topics, and usually have a prepared riff or a five-point plan to address them. Biden did some of that Thursday night. He’s not great at it, not nearly as strong as (for example) Senator Elizabeth Warren is. But he’s good enough. And he’s usually excellent at taking advantage of the other opportunity the format provides, which is to show the ability to connect with voters and empathize with them.”
“Trump is barely able to do either of these things. He did manage to demonstrate empathy a couple of times on Tuesday, but unfortunately in one case he misunderstood the questioner and thought that her mother had died from the pandemic when in fact she had died of cancer. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. It’s not just that he didn’t get emotional. He didn’t seem to be listening to the questions.”
Dave Wasserman: “Watching this town hall, I’m seeing a Biden who’s actually a bit sharper/crisper than he was in the early Democratic debates. It’s almost as if he might have been out of practice early on, rather than out of it.“
“President Trump and Joe Biden are bringing their campaigns to Minnesota on the same day the state kicks off early voting, making the state among the first in the nation to cast ballots in the November election,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
Michael Schmidt has an interesting story in his new book about the scramble to learn what was in John Bolton’s unpublished book during the impeachment of President Trump, Axios reports.
Writes Schmidt: “I received a call from a man I had never heard of. He said that several years earlier he had sat next to my father on a train and he had followed my work. The man said that he worked as a private investigator of sorts in the Washington area and he had been trying to figure out what Bolton had written in his book.”
He continued: “A friend had told him at a Rotary Club meeting that Bolton was taking sections of his book and sending them out to friends to review and comment on.The friends were then mailing them back to him, and he was throwing them in his trash. Bolton had apparently done this because he did not want to create an electronic record of his correspondences. The man said that he had been scouting Bolton’s wife’s office and their house on the nights he put his trash out. After Bolton moved the trash onto the street, he went through it. … He said Thursday morning was trash pickup day in Bolton’s neighborhood.”
Mary Trump shared a surefire way for Joe Biden to get under the skin of her uncle, President Trump, during the 2020 presidential debates, the HuffPost reports.
Said Ms. Trump: “First of all, and I mean this sincerely, I hope Vice President Biden refers to Donald as Donald just because that’s an easy way to get under his skin and nobody’s disrespected the office as much as Donald has, so he doesn’t deserve the cover of the respect of the office of the presidency.”
She added: “Even if it feels rude, even if it feels like he’s interrupting, it’s too important for us to sit on ceremony here.”
Mike Bloomberg’s $100 million Florida blitz begins today and will continue “wall to wall” in all 10 TV markets through Election Day, Axios reports.
“Bloomberg thinks that Joe Biden putting away Florida is the most feasible way to head off the national chaos we could have if the outcome of Trump v. Biden remained uncertain long after Election Day.”
Said one Bloomberg adviser: “If Biden wins Florida, it’s much harder for Trump to falsely claim victory on election night.”
“Attorney General William Barr has become one of Donald Trump’s most potent sources of campaign ammunition and political cover less than 50 days before the president faces voters, a most unconventional role for the nation’s top law enforcement officer,” Bloomberg reports.
“Adding to concern that he’s cast aside any notion of Justice Department independence, Barr has hurled himself and his agency into the middle of the most controversial issues that Trump and his campaign see as vital to winning re-election on Nov. 3.”
For members: What Drives Bill Barr.
A searing new ad suggests Joe Biden believes President Trump is suddenly vulnerable with military voters.
Mike Allen: “The Biden campaign argues that reports of Trump privately disparaging service members have broken through with everyday people who don’t follow, or don’t care about, other Trump scandals.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll found 73% had heard the reports that Trump called fallen U.S. soldiers “losers” and “suckers.”
Politico: “An evenly split Senate would make life grueling for whoever is president next year. Any one senator could determine the fate of critical nominations or key pieces of the party’s legislative agenda. And in an era of already deep polarization, it could lead to even worse gridlock, as inconceivable as that sounds.”
New York Times: “Not counting Maryland, where Air Force One is based, or states where he has properties (New York, New Jersey, Florida and Virginia), Mr. Trump has spent about four times as many days visiting states that supported him in 2016 as he has in those that voted against him.”
New New York Times/Siena polls:
New EPIC/MRA poll:
New Morning Consult poll:
Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville (R) struggled to explain his position on questions surrounding the Voting Rights Act and had difficulty describing the law, according to audio obtained by HuffPost.
Said Tuberville: “You know, the thing about the Voting Rights Act it’s, you know ― there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it? I think it’s important that everything we do we keep secure. We keep an eye on it. It’s run by our government. And it’s run to the, to the point that we, it’s got structure to it. It’s like education. I mean, it’s got to have structure. Now for some reason, we look at things to change, to think we’re gonna make it better, but we better do a lot of work on it before we make a change.”
Daniel Dale fact checks Joe Biden at the CNN town hall this evening:
“Biden is wrong that Trump held the Bible upside down at St. John’s church. (This has become a weirdly widespread belief, but it’s incorrect.) And Trump didn’t go to the church and then to the White House bunker, as Biden suggested; he went to the bunker three days prior.”
Susan Glasser spoke with Olivia Troye, the former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, who said she was voting for Joe Biden because of President Trump’s bungled coronavirus pandemic response.
“In the end, this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye: she is young, only forty-three years old, with a long career ahead of her, and she was willing to put it all on the line publicly, whereas people like Mattis and Kelly were not… Troye, with much more to lose—and with none of the stature of a former member of Congress or a former Marine general—had much more courage than all of them.”
“Republican Party megadonors are racing to bail out President Donald Trump’s cash-strapped reelection campaign, with a newly formed super PAC pouring a further $25 million into battleground states,” Politico reports.
“Trump — who went dark for part of August and has since cancelled advertising in key states — is being outspent more than 2-to-1 by Biden this week.”
“It’s so unworthy of a president. It’s beyond despicable. It’s soulless. It’s almost unspeakable in the middle of the pandemic to try to divide the country on a political basis when Covid-19 is really bipartisan.”
— Former Gov. Tom Ridge (R), quoted by the New York Times, on President Trump saying the coronavirus death toll from the coronavirus was actually not so bad “if you take out the blue states.”
“Eric Trump, the president’s son, said that he is willing to be questioned by New York state investigators examining the Trump Organization’s financial practices — but not until after Election Day,” the Washington Post reports.
“Investigators from the New York Attorney General’s office have been seeking to interview Eric Trump since May, as part of an 18-month-long investigation into allegations that the Trump Organization improperly manipulated the value of its properties to obtain loans and tax benefits. Eric Trump worked on some of the key properties.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.