The Democratic National Committee has rejected a proposal to host a single-issue debate on the climate crisis, the HuffPost reports.

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, was among those who urged the DNC committee to vote down a climate debate, saying it would be “dangerous territory in the middle of a Democratic primary process.”

That contrasts with what Biden had earlier said earlier this summer: “I’m all in.”

“House Democrats appear increasingly unlikely to secure President Trump’s tax returns before the 2020 presidential election, according to interviews with legal experts and several lawmakers, as resistance from the Trump administration has stymied the party’s efforts to obtain his personal financial records,” the Washington Post reports.

Last month, an anonymous pollster leaked polling saying that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a vulnerability in swing districts. A new Data for Progress/YouGov Blue poll in 42 battleground congressional districts finds Ocasio-Cortez polls roughly as favorably on net as Joe Biden, and more favorably on net than President Trump and Democratic leadership.

In addition, each member of “the Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — has a higher net favorability than President Trump, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and the Republican Party in these battleground districts.

The survey also shows that Sen. Elizabeth Warren had the highest net favorable ratings among the 2020 presidential candidates tested.

A separate Civiqs poll confirmed Warren has the highest favorable rating of any Democrat in the battleground districts. It also found Biden and Ocasio-Cortez have essentially the same favorability in these swing districts.

Joe Biden is out a new ad that emphasizes his ties to former President Barack Obama — and to mark the 11th anniversary of Obama choosing Biden as his running mate.

Alan Abramowitz: “When it comes to ideological identification, Democratic voters are far more divided than Republican voters. Around two-thirds of Republican voters identify as conservative while fewer than half of Democratic voters identify as liberal. Many observers of the current presidential campaign have cited this fact to argue that ideological divisions are a serious potential threat to Democratic unity, especially if the party nominates a strongly liberal candidate.”

“But a closer examination of recent polling data indicates that when it comes to specific policy issues such as abortion, gun control, and health care, Democratic voters are actually considerably less divided than Republican voters. Moreover, these data show that divisions among Democrats based on age, education, and race are much less significant when it comes to policy issues.”

“What makes this all the more important is that policy preferences appear to have a much stronger influence than ideological identification on voters’ broader political outlook including their opinions of President Trump. These findings suggest that the task of uniting Democrats behind the party’s eventual nominee may not be as difficult as some pundits and political observers have suggested.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “It’s been a very long time since a true dark horse — a candidate who really came out of nowhere — won a presidential nomination. But we’ve had a couple of recent winners (John McCain in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004) who looked dead in the water for long periods of the year before the election. And we’ve had other candidates (Rick Santorum in 2012 and Gary Hart way back in 1984) who showed almost no signs of life until right before the Iowa caucuses but then went on to become serious challengers to the eventual winner.”

“I see a lot of pundits out there who want to reach conclusions about at least the structure of this cycle’s nomination struggle, if not proclaim a winner. I’m not averse to doing that when there’s strong evidence, as there was for Hillary Clinton in 2015. But there’s nothing close to that this time, and that means, to me, that we still don’t really have a good idea of where any of this is headed.”