As you are aware of by now, my thesis and theory of the case about this election is that Trump is unpopular, his numbers don’t rise, the pandemic is the story of the election, Trump was not the favorite even before the pandemic started, and he’s done nothing to help himself since.
Given that, I never accepted that tightening was inevitable. In fact, in 1980 with an unpopular incumbent, the challenger widened the lead after the debate that showed he was acceptable.
Every election is different, but the point is that tightening is not an inevitability and never was.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Republicans ditching Trump as their Senate prospects worsen
GOP officials are preparing for a Democratic blowout, and they are furiously trying to salvage red-state races in the homestretch.
Here’s the clearest sign that Democrats hold a clear advantage in their efforts to retake the Senate: Embattled Republican senators, most of whom proudly embraced Donald Trump through thick and thin, are suddenly running away from the president as he craters in the polls. The growing GOP panic, even among red-state senators, is a telltale sign that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell feels his majority slipping away.
CNN:
Biden is ahead. Democrats are still stressed
Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump nationally and is running ahead or even with him in most swing state polls. He is besting Trump on just about every question atop voters' minds, from the coronavirus and health care to "law and order."
And yet, for many Democrats a constant anxiety -- that somehow seems to spike with each dose of good news -- persists.
Four years on from Trump's stunning victory, the psychic wounds of Hillary Clinton's loss remains fresh. When a flurry of new polls were released this week that showed Biden's advantage widening, the collective reaction from liberals, especially among the highly engaged online crowd, ranged from a shrug to near indignation.
Amy Cooter:
Here's a thread about one of the questions I'm getting that, because of the answer's complexity, isn't reflecting as well as I would like in some of the journalistic write-ups, so I'm going to address it some here:
Why is Michigan such a militia hotspot?
In my view, there are several likely factors for this, and I'll try to put the Twitter version of them here
1. Michigan has tended to be one of the most racially segregated states in the US, such that both race and racial threat are very present and noticeable ingredients in many places. Perceptions of Detroit as "crime ridden," with all the racial stereotypes wrapped up there
also play a role in a lot of white folks' perception of racial issues in that whole state.
This might mean some white men in particular are more likely to join militias because of what they see as a real and ever-present threat--crime *or* race here.
John Harwood/CNN:
Trump's war on Obamacare is coming back to bite him
Americans don't yet know whether doctors have protected President Donald Trump from the effects of Covid-19. They do know his gold-standard care is beyond their reach.
And that moves to center stage an issue beyond the Trump administration's fumbling response to
coronavirus: the President still wants to eliminate his predecessor's signature
Affordable Care Act.
Three years after the late Sen. John McCain turned thumbs down on the effort to repeal Obamacare in Congress, Trump offers a three-part health care pitch:
- Part 1: he has all but eliminated Obamacare already.
- Part 2: His cheaper alternative preserves Obamacare's most popular features.
- Part 3: as a result, a Supreme Court decision to erase the entire law would represent "a big win" for the country.
Unfortunately for Trump, voters have seen that parts one and two are both false. And that makes part three a dangerous pre-existing condition for Trump and other Republican candidates during the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign
Sidney Blumenthal/Guardian:
Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle
Graham has climbed the greasy pole within the Senate, to a position that historically has been rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure. He succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48 years before he died at 100. From Graham’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the defense of Trump, to unmask the dastardly conspiracy of “Obamagate” and to handle the confirmation of a justice on the supreme court, to pack it with a conservative majority for a generation to come. But just at this consummate moment of his career, events have conspired to dissolve his facade and expose his flagrant hypocrisy. His presumed strength has turned into his vulnerability. Worse, in Washington, where the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the genial star of the comedy club, he has become an object of ridicule.
In British political discourse, a figure like Graham would be described with the seemingly enigmatic phrase of “reverse ferret”, applied to a politician who takes a dramatic and often contorted U-turn. According to the classic work Lying, by Sissela Bok, the word “hypocrisy” has its origins in Greek theater, as the slanted reply of an actor to the action on the stage. “Its present meaning is: the assumption of a false appearance of virtue or goodness, with dissimulation of real characters or inclinations.” The hypocrite deceives in order to be perceived as virtuous. His dishonesty is in the service of an image of honesty.
Molly Jong-Fast/Vogue:
When Joe Biden Spoke of Hunter’s Struggles With Addiction, He Also Spoke of My Own
When I look at Hunter Biden, I see myself.
I did enormous quantities of cocaine in my teens, eventually getting sober at 19. But when I read that 2019 New Yorker profile on Hunter, asking whether the complicated personal life of Joe Biden’s only surviving son could jeopardize his father’s election chances, I related to every relapse, every hospitalization. As an addict and alcoholic, I know that sobriety could slip through my fingers the moment I take a drink. Sobriety is, after all, just a reprieve from addiction, and the moment I let go of it, the moment I submit to my disease, I don’t know when I’ll be able to get my sobriety back. It could take years of painful struggles. It could blow up my family and my career.
Ed Yong/Atlantic:
What Strength Really Means When You’re Sick
The metaphors that Trump and others use when talking about COVID-19 are making the pandemic worse.
On Monday, as President Donald Trump left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted a doctored clip of the president tackling and punching the wrestler and WWE CEO Vince McMahon. In the edited version, McMahon’s face has been replaced with a picture of a virus. “COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump!” Loeffler wrote.
Similar sentiments, trumpeting Trump’s strength and fighting spirit, have poured forth since he tested positive for COVID-19. “#TrumpStrong,” Twitter users wrote. “Our president is strong and will beat the virus,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “He’s a fighter,” said former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. He has the “strength and stamina” of someone decades younger, said a urologist.
Such rhetoric is not unique to Trump. In the Western world, bouts of illness are regularly described as “battles.” Viruses and other pathogens are “enemies” to be “beaten.” Patients are encouraged to “be strong” and praised for being “fighters.” “It’s so embedded in our nature to give encouragement in that way,” says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University, “but it’s language that we try not to use in health care.”
Equating disease with warfare, and recovery with strength, means that death and disability are linked to failure and weakness. That “does such a disservice to all of the families who have lost loved ones, or who are facing long-term consequences,” says Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. Like so much else about the pandemic, the strength-centered rhetoric confuses more than it clarifies, and reveals more about America’s values than the disease currently plaguing it.
Dr Eleanor Janega:
On Masculinity and Disease
As we have discussed at length before, medieval (and indeed any pre-germ theory) conceptions of health and the body were very different to how we tend to think about them now. Medieval conceptions of health, like those of the ancients, and indeed those of most everyone in Europe up until the nineteenth century hinged on ideas of the humors. We aren’t going to go through all of that again, because I have already written on it (over and over and over again), but suffice to say the idea was that bodies have a balance of the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow, bile, and phlegm) which need to be kept in balance for an individual to be healthy.
The Bulwark:
Trump’s Captain Queeg Crackup
Yesterday’s bonkers behavior—from his paranoid tweets to his f-bomb on Rush Limbaugh’s show to his bizarre pseudo-checkup on Fox—show he has gone utterly around the bend.
As evidence of their captain’s mental fragility accumulates, his officers fear that he may crack under pressure. But after resolving to report his behaviors to a higher authority, they temporize.
The crisis comes—a deadly typhoon in the Pacific. Inevitably, Queeg’s panicky misjudgments threaten to capsize the Caine. In extremis the captain’s second-in-command, supported by his fellow officers, displaces him to save the ship.
Over the last 24 hours, Trump’s statements provide an uncanny parallel to the behaviors which moved Queeg’s officers to consider turning him in. The difference is that, for a president, there are no higher authorities. There is only the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.