Off tomorrow, See you Monday.

Losing ground where surging.......

Polls show Trump is losing ground where the coronavirus is surging

Will the latest Covid-19 wave seal Trump’s fate in the election?

By Julia Belluz

The third — and largest — coronavirus wave is hitting the US just in time for the presidential election, with surges in key Midwestern swing states. Numerous polls suggest voters may be taking their pandemic pain and panic with them to the ballot boxes in these places: President Donald Trump isn’t just down in national polls — he’s faring especially poorly in battlegrounds where infection rates are spiking.

Over the last two weeks, the coronavirus case count in Wisconsin — where Trump won by a single percentage point in 2016 — has jumped 36 percent, to an average of 4,200 new infections per day. And that’s just among the people who’ve been diagnosed. The test positivity rate in the state is a staggering 28 percent, according to Covidexitstrategy.org, and health officials have already had to transform the state fair park into a field hospital to manage the crush of new patients.

The situation is nearly as worrisome in Michigan: Cases there have risen 73 percent in the last two weeks, to 2,600 per day, while the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital has more than doubled since the end of September. It’s another swing state, which Trump won by an even tinier margin of 0.3 percent in 2016.

In these places, and the states around them, the majority of voters apparently prefer Biden. That has mostly been the state of things for some time, but is perhaps even clearer as Election Day approaches. “Biden is doing well everywhere — but his leads are even more solid in places where the coronavirus is hitting the hardest,” said Mike Greenfield, the chief executive officer of Change Research, who has been tracking the impact of the pandemic on voter decision-making.

Consider the recent data:

• According to a pair of Washington Post-ABC News polls, likely voters in Michigan have put Biden ahead of Trump 51 percent to 44 percent, while a Financial Times analysis of RealClearPolitics polling data gives Biden a 7.9 point lead.
• In Wisconsin, the Post-ABC polls favor Biden by a stunning 17 points, and again, the FT finding was more modest — a 6.8-point edge for the Biden. Registered voters also favor Biden in both states, according to the Post-ABC, which found the Democrat is more trusted when it comes to the pandemic response than Trump. There has also been a small recent shift in Biden’s favor in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
• In states that border Wisconsin, including Iowa and Minnesota, Biden is also polling well, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. In Iowa, a RABA Research poll has Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 46 percent; a Gravis Marketing survey has Biden carrying Minnesota by 14 points.

These findings square with Change Research’s analysis. Looking at 110,000 survey responses from a variety of polls between June and October, they found whether a state was experiencing a Covid-19 spike or not moved the election by 3 percentage points on average.

The trend even held for Trump supporters. Overall, voters who favored Trump in 2016 and who are living in states with higher Covid-19 rates are about 50 percent more likely than voters in states where the virus is better controlled to support Biden in 2020, Change Research found.

“We suspect that Biden’s especially strong lead in Wisconsin is the result of people seeing the ineffectiveness of Trump’s policies in that state,” Greenfield said.

We won’t really know the extent to which the spread of Covid-19 in swing states might influence the election until after November 3 — when all the ballots are counted. Voting decisions are complicated, polls can mislead, and we’ll need more data to gauge how much coronavirus motivated decision-making.

At the same time, the pandemic has emerged as a key election issue, one that has deeply affected, and continues to affect, all voters’ lives — how they give birth and say goodbye to loved ones who’ve died, how they work (if they still work), shop for groceries, and whether their kids can go to school or college. Most Americans are somewhat or very worried about both being infected by the virus and virus’s effects on the economy.

“[People in] places that were hit hard or are currently being hit hard are going to be looking to some solutions for their day-to-day problems,” said Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. They “may be looking to find a solution in the other candidate,” he added.

From failing to get Covid-19 testing up and running, to sidelining America’s leading public health agency, to politicizing mask wearing and lying about the danger of the virus, the Trump administration has grossly mishandled the pandemic. And these public health failures don’t even account for the collateral damage from the virus: the stock market is cratering, there are record unemployment claims, people are losing their health insurance and homes, and more Americans are literally going hungry. Rebuilding from the pandemic will take a war-time effort, at a moment when 1,000 Americans are dying each day from the disease.

“It is not surprising to me that voters are recognizing the sheer incompetence of the current administration — some of it deliberate — at this task,” Adalja added.

Days before the election, Trump is still lying about the reality of the pandemic. “We’re rounding the turn,” he said at an October 25 rally in Lumberton, North Carolina. “Our numbers are incredible.”

Biden has cast himself as the candidate who will help America rebuild. There’s no overstating the size of the challenge the former vice president faces in doing that — but he’s the candidate who is owning up to the scale of the problem, said Shannon Monnat, professor and co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University.

“The president has been asking Americans to deny what they see happening right in front of them,” she added. “People are tired. They want to see some leadership and a coordinated national coronavirus response.”

At least 3 dead....

Zeta leaves over 2.3 million customers without power and at least 3 dead after battering Gulf Coast

By Susannah Cullinane, Joe Sutton and Dakin Andone

At least three people have died and more than 2.3 million customers are without power Thursday morning after former Hurricane Zeta hit the Gulf Coast and rushed inland.

Zeta made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 storm Wednesday before weakening to a post-tropical cyclone with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph by Thursday afternoon. But the storm was still packing strong winds as it moved through North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Orangutan at it again.... Sharpie alert!

As of 2 p.m., Zeta was about 25 miles south-southeast of Charlottesville, Virginia, per the NHC. The storm was traveling at 53 mph and was expected to continue a fast northeastward track through Thursday night.

"On the forecast track, the center of Zeta will continue to move across Virginia this afternoon, and emerge over the western Atlantic by this evening," the NHC said.

Louisiana still recovering from earlier storms

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Thursday that Zeta made landfall as an "extremely strong" Category 2 storm, and it was just 1 mile per hour short of qualifying as a Category 3.

The first death attributed to Zeta was reported Wednesday, when a 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line, the Louisiana governor's office said, citing the Orleans Parish coroner.

Around 500,000 people in Louisiana were without power Thursday morning, including two-thirds of New Orleans residents, according to Christina Stephens, the deputy chief of staff for the governor.

Officials asked people to stay off the roads due to downed power lines with possible live wires. There were no reports of significant flooding in the city, according to local officials. But there was coastal flooding and some vessels broke loose from barges, damaging bridges.

The governor's office said the damaged bridges would be inspected to determine whether they are passable.

Power outages also presented problems for polling places, and Edwards said restoring power to those locations was a priority. A task force has been formed to ensure there are alternate polling places for those that remain out of service, the governor said.

Officials in Jefferson and Terrebonne parishes had issued mandatory evacuation orders ahead of the storm for coastal areas and places outside major levees. In New Orleans, voluntary evacuations were called for similar areas.

Zeta was mainly a wind event, Gov. Edwards said. Grand Isle along the Louisiana coast suffered the most damage, he said, but flooding damage was mostly due to storm surge and not rainfall.

Louisiana is still recovering from the damage caused by recent storms, including Hurricanes Laura and Delta. On Thursday, Gov. Edwards said that of the 3,394 residents being sheltered, only 76 evacuated due to Zeta.

Most of the evacuees have been displaced since August from Laura and have been spread among six hotels in New Orleans, the governor's office said.

Edwards said more than 1,500 National Guard members had been activated and more than 5,000 linemen were staged to begin recovery and power restoration efforts Thursday morning.

Millions without power

At least 32.7 million people from the Gulf Coast toward the Carolinas had been under Tropical Storm warnings earlier Thusday morning. The last time metro Atlanta was under such a warning was October 2018 as Hurricane Michael passed over the region.

As Zeta moved inland across the South, it caused substantial power outages across several states. Nearly 2 million utility customers were still without power in the dark in Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama and North Carolina Thursday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.US.

One man was killed in Georgia Thursday morning when a large oak tree fell onto a mobile home in Cherokee County, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, according to Captain Jay Baker of the county sheriff's office.

Officials believe the death to be related to Zeta's high winds, Baker told CNN.

"At about 4 a.m., the wind picked up, trees started falling," he said. "The tree was uprooted."

Three other adults and a child were also in the mobile home at the time, Baker said, but they were uninjured.

In Mississippi, Biloxi resident Leslie Richardson, 58, also died because of Zeta, per Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer. Richardson drowned after he was videotaping the waves at a Biloxi marina, Switzer told CNN.

Richardson and another man were recording the waves when they became surrounded by rising water, Switzer said. Richardson called 911 and both men swam to a tree, where they held on for a while.

Ultimately, Richardson was overtaken by storm surge and drowned, Switzer said. The other man survived.

'Significant' damage seen in southwest Alabama

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency Tuesday. On Wednesday, she asked residents to finish storm preparations quickly and warned that even the central part of the state could see tropical storm winds.

The National Weather Service in Mobile, Alabama, said early Thursday on Facebook that it had received reports from local officials of "significant to MAJOR damage" in Clarke County, about 80 miles north of Mobile.

"Structural damage. Ambulance building destroyed. Windows blown in several homes & businesses. Numerous trees on homes & cars. Communications & internet out," it posted.

Before turning its path toward the US coast, Zeta struck the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico on Monday night as a Category 1 hurricane.

Zeta is the 27th storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, one shy of tying the record for the most storms in a season. There were 28 storms in 2005, including 15 hurricanes.

Excess Covid-19 deaths

Senators ask HHS, CDC about 'highly alarming' excess Covid-19 deaths

By Maggie Fox

Three Democratic US senators have asked the US Health and Human Services Secretary and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director to explain what they're doing to investigate a "highly alarming" excess of deaths in the United States, above and beyond the more than 200,000 fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19.

"Newly released CDC data reveal that 'an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, with 198,081 (66%) excess deaths attributed to Covid-19.' These are highly alarming data, revealing that, in addition to the horrific toll known from Covid-19 in the United States, over 100,000 more fatalities may have been directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic," Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Tina Smith wrote.

"This new accounting of excess fatalities is particularly disturbing because it comes as President Trump continues to downplay the toll of the pandemic with a series of blustering falsehoods about the about the disease "affect[ing] virtually nobody" as he attempts to distract the nation from his failed response to the pandemic."

Some of the gaps can be explained by weaknesses in data collection, they wrote in the letter, addressed to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield. But they also point to gaps in care.

"Throughout the public health emergency, President Trump has repeatedly lied to the American people in an effort to downplay the severity of the pandemic, including by falsely repeating that the Covid-19 pandemic has been more deadly in Europe than in the United States," they wrote.

"Regardless of the President's ignorance, his shamelessness, or his serial falsehoods, HHS and CDC have a duty to safeguard the public health and should be taking steps to more fully understand the excess mortality rate and curb rising mortality caused directly or associated with Covid-19. "

They asked HHS and the CDC to answer questions including what specific data CDC and HHS are collecting on the excess mortality rate in the United States since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and what the agencies understand to be the reasons for the excess mortality rate.

"Please provide a summary of all detailed data available on the excess mortality rate in 2020, including any unpublished information on the excess mortality rate over time, the excess mortality rate by location, the excess mortality rate by age, race and ethnicity, the excess mortality rate among individuals with preexisting conditions, and the specific causes of the excess mortality rate," they added.

Pennsylvania mail-in ballot rules

Supreme Court won't expedite latest GOP challenge to Pennsylvania mail-in ballot rules

By Ariane de Vogue

The US Supreme Court is leaving in place for now a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court decision that allowed the counting of ballots received up to three days after the election, even if there is no legible postmark.

The justices on Wednesday denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to review the decision on an accelerated basis.

The court later on Wednesday allowed the counting of ballots in North Carolina received up to nine days after the election as long as the ballots are postmarked by Election Day.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the consideration of either motion.

The court's public information officer said that Barrett did not participate because of the need for a "prompt resolution" and because she had not had the time to fully review the filings. Democrats have been pressing the new justice to recuse herself from cases involving the election.

Pennsylvania is a critical state for both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

The order was issued with no noted dissents, but in a statement accompanying the order, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said that it was too close to the election for the justices to step in.

"I reluctantly conclude that there is simply not enough time at this late date to decide the question before the election," Alito said, but he left open the possibility that the court could still hear the case on a shortened schedule after the election. The state attorney general's office said county boards will segregate all ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day until 5 p.m. on November 6, Alito noted.

Alito made clear that he was highly skeptical of the ruling by Pennsylvania's high court. He said the question had "national importance' and that there is a "strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution."

Justin Clark, deputy campaign manager and senior counsel to the Trump campaign, said that the court "deferred the important issue in this case -- whether state courts can change the times, places and manners of elections contrary to the rules adopted by the state legislature -- until after November 3rd."

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro emphasized that the court's action means voters know the rules.

"We applaud the Court's decision to slow down, get to regular order, and let Pennsylvania have an election. Now we must vote and take time to count all eligible ballots," Shapiro said in a statement. "The denial of expedited review is good for Pennsylvania voters, who will not have the rules changed on them on the eve of the election without proper review. We know this fight may not be over and we are prepared."

This is the second time the court has considered the Pennsylvania issue.

Back on October 19, the justices deadlocked 4-4 on an emergency stay request, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals to allow the extension pending appeal. It would have taken five justices to grant the Republicans' request.

Knowing that Barrett would soon be confirmed to the bench, the lawyers for the state GOP returned to the Supreme Court late last week and asked the justices to formally take up the case, put it on an accelerated schedule and decide the case without oral arguments before Election Day.

They argued that the justices needed to review the case on an accelerated schedule because of the "imminence of the general election in which millions of Pennsylvanians will cast their votes." They said that the state Supreme Court was wrong to order a three-day extension and that the decision was "incompatible" with the General Assembly's clear legislative intent.

AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled as Vanity Fair's latest cover star

Oscar Holland

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been unveiled as Vanity Fair's latest cover star, less than a week before she concludes her bid for reelection in New York's 14th congressional district.

The cover image -- and a series of additional pictures for the magazine's December issue -- was taken by Tyler Mitchell, who famously became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue.

In an accompanying interview, Ocasio-Cortez discussed the pressures of the job and her political ambitions, while appearing to downplay reports about friction between her and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She also offered further details about her high-profile exchange with Rep. Ted Yoho, which saw the Republican politician apologize for verbally accosting her on the steps of the Capitol.

According to Vanity Fair contributor, journalist Michelle Ruiz, the New York congresswoman recounted telling Yoho the next day: "You do that to me again, I won't be so nice next time."

Ocasio-Cortez also used the interview to reveal threats to her safety made since she became the youngest woman ever to serve in congress. The 31-year-old said that her home address had been published online and that authorities had reported death plots against her.

"I used to wake up in the morning and literally get a stack of pictures that were forwarded by Capitol police or FBI," she is quoted as saying. "Like, 'These are the people who want to kill you today.'

"There have been many times, especially in the first six months, where I felt like I couldn't do this, like I didn't know if I was going to be able to run for reelection," she added. "There was a time where the volume of threats had gotten so high that I didn't even know if I was going to live to my next term."

Beyond politics, the in-depth interview sees Ocasio-Cortez discussing her decision to buy a French bulldog and wondering whether to "freeze my eggs." In an accompanying video, she revealed her daily routine, from having peanut butter on her toast in the morning to unplugging with reality TV before bed.

Designer outfits

One of the industry's most in-demand names since his historic Vogue shoot with Beyoncé in 2018, Mitchell is known for his dreamy take on fashion photography. In July, he published the series "I Can Make You Feel Good," which showed "what a Black utopia looks like or could look like," he wrote in the accompanying book.

"I make very little distinction between my commissioned and my personal works, using them both as an opportunity to create this utopian universe," the Georgia-born photographer wrote.

Mitchell's photos show Ocasio-Cortez posing in a range of outfits, including shoes by Christian Louboutin, a dress by Wales Bonner and suits by Loewe, Carolina Herrera and Christopher John Rogers. Another image shows a photo shoot taking place on the streets of the Bronx, where Ocasio-Cortez grew up.

Photographer Tyler Mitchell captures the joys of being young and Black in America

Describing her as a "beauty influencer," Ruiz's article says that Ocasio-Cortez's "squad" -- the name given to the quartet formed with fellow Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley -- has used lipstick as "a show of strength" in the House.

The New York congresswoman told Vanity Fair that she had intentionally worn a bold shade of red lipstick ahead of her now-viral response to Yoho in Congress, whereby she challenged him for sexism and, allegedly, calling her a "f**king bitch" (an accusation he denied, while nonetheless apologizing for the "abrupt manner of the conversation").

"(Pressley) was like, 'That's when I knew she didn't come to play,'" Ocasio-Cortez is quoted as saying. "I had a little war paint on that day, for sure."

Sealed his fate with women.....

With 'husbands' remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women

Opinion by Kara Alaimo

As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work." The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.

Before this rally, women were already fleeing from Trump -- in CNN's pre-election polls, Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.

Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names. But previously, I argued when he called prominent women "nasty," for example, that he was a misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.

A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.

Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.

Of course, Trump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others). Unmarried women are more than a quarter of the country's population, according to the Women's Voices Women Vote Action Fund.

His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks -- that's reserved for how divorced they are from the reality of what American women are really going through. Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center.

This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women, according to the International Monetary Fund, while moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic. Of course, these resume gaps will be devastating to the careers of the women who have lost or left their jobs. According to a 2020 study, Americans with the most employment gaps earn salaries that are 40% lower later on.

But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence. Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes. The mass departure of women could deprive organizations of this critical mass, which will make it even harder for our economy to recover. It's astonishing that a president who claims to be a successful businessman doesn't recognize this.

Yet while Trump may not understand that the way to help struggling women -- and his floundering campaign -- isn't by focusing on men, his remarks do help women understand the president even better. They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.

Charged for allegedly stabbing store security guard....

Sisters charged for allegedly stabbing store security guard 27 times after he told them to wear a mask

By Lauren M. Johnson and Kay Jones

Two sisters are being held on attempted first-degree murder charges in Illinois for allegedly stabbing a store security guard after being told they needed to wear a mask and use hand sanitizer.

The sisters entered a retail store and got into a verbal altercation with the victim, a 32-year-old man who was working as a security guard, Chicago Police said.

The Cook County State's Attorney's Office said the man had told the sisters they had to wear a mask and use hand sanitizer.

Their argument became physical when Jessica Hill, 21, pulled out a knife and stabbed him in his back, neck, and arms 27 times, according to the criminal complaint.

Her sister, 18-year-old Jayla Hill, held the victim down by his hair while the attack occurred, according to the complaint.

Police said the victim is in stable condition.

Both women were taken to the hospital immediately after the incident for minor lacerations and charged with attempted first-degree murder, according to police.

Jail records show they are currently being held without bond.

Their next court hearing is scheduled for November 4, according to jail records. It is unclear who is representing them at this time.

This is happily living under a rock looks like...

Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler says she is 'not familiar' with Access Hollywood tape

By Manu Raju, Alex Rogers

Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia said Wednesday she is "not familiar" with President Donald Trump's widely reported comments boasting about sexually assaulting women that came to light during the 2016 campaign.

Loeffler, who is in a tight Senate race, has campaigned on her alliance with Trump, touting that she has voted with the President 100% of the time.

Loeffler told CNN on Wednesday that there are "no" issues in which she disagrees with the President. When Doug Richards, a reporter for NBC's Atlanta affiliated television station, asked if she disagreed with Trump's comments about sexually assaulting women, Loeffler sidestepped the question, saying she agreed with Trump's approach "since Day One to put America First."

When Richards pressed, Loeffler asked what the reporter was referencing. Richards said Trump's statements about "personally sexually assaulting women."

Loeffler responded, "I'm not familiar with that."

In 2016, The Washington Post reported that Trump told the Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he kisses women without their permission, and could get away with it because he was a celebrity. "Grab them by the p---y," Trump said. "You can do anything."

The comments altered the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. After Trump won, the Women's March on Washington featured countless women in "pussyhats" -- pink, cat-eared knit hats, which referred to Trump's boast and attempted to reappropriate the word "in a positive way.

Loeffler said she was unfamiliar with the President's comments, to which, a CNN reporter said Richards was referring to what Trump said on Access Hollywood. But Loeffler again declined to put any distance between herself and Trump, and instead attacked the Democratic presidential candidate.

"This President is fighting for America," she said. "That's what I'm fighting for -- to make sure that every American has their chance to live the American dream and against the socialist policies that Joe Biden is espousing every day."

In December 2019, Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Loeffler to fill the seat of Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired for health reasons. Loeffler is now running in a special election to serve the rest of the term, in which all candidates face each other on the same ballot.

She faces Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins and Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, among other candidates. If no one surpasses 50% of the vote, the race will turn to a two-person runoff election in January.

We’re seeing the same thing, but stupider....

“We’re Seeing the Same Thing, But Stupider”—8 Reporters Discuss the Final Anxiety-Riddled Sprint

The Mother Jones Podcast went live for a special election week show.

MOLLY SCHWARTZ

Mother Jones Podcast host Jamilah King was joined by eight reporters from across the Mother Jones newsrooms last night for a special live taping of the award-winning weekly podcast. They gathered to discuss the key issues and latest election news as the country heads into the final week of voting before November 3.

The first half of the show focused on the election itself: What are the polls saying? What has the energy been like in each campaign? On election night, are there certain states that are the most important ones to watch? Despite Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s current lead in the polls, DC Bureau Chief David Corn cautioned that nothing should be taken for granted. 

“Trump has made a bet that he can get every angry white guy Republican who’s not on a ventilator to vote for him this year. He’s not gaining votes in any category, yet still he remains competitive,” Corn told Jamilah King. “There are people who look at Donald Trump and say, yeah, I want that. Versus other Americans who look aghast at his 200,000 plus lives [lost], his handling of the coronavirus, and his bigotry, his racism, misogyny, you know the list.”

Senior Reporter Tim Murphy is our resident political historian, who can go into detail describing some obscure 19th-century election. Reflecting on the similarities and differences between the presidential races in 2016 and 2020, Murphy explained how Trump’s campaign tactics feel eerily familiar.

“It’s a really weird kind of déjà vu where we’re seeing the same thing, but stupider,” said Murphy. “The Trump campaign is trying to recreate the exact same playbook against a much different opposition.”

One basic difference between 2016 and 2020 is the way that the progressive left has coalesced around Joe Biden’s candidacy, even as the former vice president has positioned himself as the moderate candidate. DC-based reporter Kara Voght covers progressive politics and noted, “People who sat out 2016 because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton will not make that mistake again.” Indeed, now it seems as if “everyone is holding hands and walking through the door together to get Joe Biden elected.” 

But that all depends on whether they are able to vote at all and have their votes counted. Voting rights Senior Reporter Ari Berman was quick to point out the impact that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation could have on the election.

“The Supreme Court’s affecting the election as we speak,” said Berman, referring to the Supreme Court’s 5–3 decision to uphold Wisconsin’s voting laws, meaning that ballots that are postmarked by election day but counted after will be discounted. He imagined that this newly configured Supreme Court “will try to roll back virtually all voting rights protections.” 

So there’s an overview of the politics of this election, but what about what’s at stake for the country? The second half focused on some of the big issues like immigration, COVID-19, racial justice, health care, disinformation campaigns, and white supremacy. DC-based reporter Nathalie Baptiste, who covers racial justice, summed up her top takeaway from Donald Trump’s first four years: “No matter what it is that Trump is doing and saying, there’s a 99 percent chance that it’s actually just racism.” 

World-Altering Event

The Other World-Altering Event Happening Next Week

Since you didn’t have enough to worry about already.

REBECCA LEBER

An important date is coming up. On November 4, the day after the election, the United States will earn a dubious distinction: It will become the only country in the world to formally exit the Paris agreement. In the historic global climate change deal, struck in 2015, 189 countries agreed on nonbinding domestic targets to keep global temperatures well below a disastrous 2 degrees Celsius. 

The Paris deal marked a breakthrough in that it encouraged rapidly growing nations like China and India to take action to combat climate change alongside United States and Europe, historically the world’s largest sources of emissions. Rather than set universal emissions cuts, it allowed each nation to determine their contributions. The countries’ initial pledges were considered a starting point—the expectation was that everyone would return to the negotiating table in 2020 with more ambitious cuts to carbon pollution.

In 2017, President Trump, surprising no one, announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the agreement.  There was a silver lining: Instead of inspiring a complete unraveling of the plan, his threat had the opposite effect—no country exited the agreement, and in fact 38 more countries have joined since 2017.

Yet the future stability of the Paris deal still depends heavily on whether the United States stays in. Trump allies like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have hinted they may also exit. November 2020 was supposed to be a pivotal month when countries returned to the negotiating table to evaluate their progress and make new goals. COVID-19 delayed the annual international climate meeting until 2021, but even in the chaos of the pandemic, other major economies have ramped up their climate ambitions. China recently announced its goal to be carbon neutral by 2060. India has raised its goal to install 450 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030, double its goal it set in Paris for 175 gigawatts in 2022. And the European Union just officially adopted a net-zero carbon pollution target for 2050 as binding law. 

Since his 2017 announcement, Trump has been repeating two dangerous lies about US participation in the deal: His first lie was that the agreement would come at immense cost to Americans while other major polluters would contribute nothing; his second was that the United States has already exited the accord. “The Paris Accord, I took us out because we were going to have to spend trillions of dollars and we were treated very unfairly,” Trump said in the extensive climate section of the debate.

About that: First of all, Trump didn’t actually withdraw—rather, the United States will be in the Paris deal until November 4 because of a required three-year waiting period. Second, it’s absurd to imagine that the United States, as the biggest and richest polluter somehow got shortchanged in the agreement. This isn’t the United States bending to the will of the United Nations; instead, the United States basically guided the terms of the agreement. The cost Trump is ostensibly alluding to—President Obama’s pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund for developing nations—is to help other nations cut pollution and fight climate impacts. Those investments would undoubtedly help the United States, as well: As we’ve seen this year, from hurricanes to western wildfires, the United States is not immune to experiencing  climate crises at home.

“It’s clear that we should’ve been spending the last four years doing more,” says Jake Schmidt, an expert on international climate negotiations and senior advisor to the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. Yet in spite of Trump’s hostility toward the Paris agreement, the United States has made some progress over the last four years. The Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown-led group America’s Pledge estimated that emissions reduction goals made by cities, states, and companies could cut US emissions by a third by 2030.

Still, the world is a long way off from meeting its commitments in Paris. Carbon pollution has temporarily fallen during the COVID crisis, but the economic recovery will matter more for whether the world is still on its worst-case, business-as-usual path. It would be easy for a Biden administration to rejoin the Paris deal in January, but they would have much more work to do to repair relationships and trust in American leadership. And he has even more to do on the domestic front to repair Trump’s war on climate science. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration removed a chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after he asked climate-skeptic political appointees to adhere to the agency’s scientific integrity policy.

“It’s hard when you have the world’s largest market and a major global player either sitting on the sidelines,” says Schmidt. “Or in Trump’s case, doing everything he can to pull things backward.”

Endless Plastic Waste

Hygiene Theater at Restaurants Is Creating Endless Plastic Waste

CDC guidance says eateries should use disposable dishes and cutlery—but most experts think reusables are just fine.

REBECCA LEBER

Andrea Reusing, a James Beard Award–winning chef, has dozens of decisions to make about how to keep her employees and customers safe when she reopens the patio of Lantern, her popular Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant. One item on her worry list: guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that encourages restaurants to use disposable dishes and cutlery to cut down on germ exposure. She cringes at the thought of all those utensils, dishes, napkins, and tablecloths flooding the landfill. Her industry has always faced a “big packaging nightmare,” Reusing says, but now, “it’s painful.”

Just how painful is hard to say—it’s not clear exactly how many restaurants have switched to disposables. But extrapolating from pre-pandemic studies of California restaurants, a midsize restaurant with 30 seats went through 17,800 disposable cups and utensils in a year. Multiply that by 520,000—the number of US restaurants that the consulting firm McKinsey estimates survived the COVID-19 shutdowns—and you get more than 9 billion pieces of trash in one year. And bursting landfills aren’t the only problem: The uptick in plastic restaurant waste, advocates point out, will be especially acute in Black and Brown communities. Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, explains that cities tend to route garbage trucks through these neighborhoods, adding more diesel fumes to already high levels of air pollution. “Every ton of waste we’re not recycling or we’re not diverting from landfills and incinerators comes through our communities,” he says.

“I would encourage people to remember where the virus is really coming from, and it’s coming from other people,”

Plastic companies argue that all the waste and pollution are worth it when you consider the benefits. The industry has spent months claiming its products are a stealth hero of the pandemic. “Single-use plastics can literally be the difference between life and death,” Plastics Industry Association president Tony Radoszewski said in a statement in March. His group has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to issue an official declaration that single-­use plastics like grocery bags and coffee cups are safer than their reusable counterparts. The CDC gave that claim a big boost in May, when it published its guidance recommending that restaurants use disposables.

If using throwaway dishes and forks were to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, we could certainly live with a temporary uptick in plastic waste. The problem is, there is absolutely no evidence that disposables are safer. The CDC itself has admitted that surfaces aren’t especially risky—the virus is “thought to spread mainly from person-to-person,” its website says. What’s more, restaurants already must comply with rigorous food safety protocols, including regular handwashing, surface disinfecting, and high-­temperature dishwashing.

Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University food scientist who specializes in microbial risks, says that catching the virus from reusables at a restaurant is theoretically possible but highly unlikely. For someone to face exposure, the silverware or dishes would have to be handled by someone infected, improperly washed, and then passed to another server or a customer—who would then have to touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. “I would encourage people to remember where the virus is really coming from, and it’s coming from other people,” he says. When I asked the CDC for the studies it based its restaurant guidance on, it didn’t respond.

Environmentalists are also bothered by this lack of evidence. In May, a group called the Clean Seas Lobbying Coalition sent a letter to California’s governor asking him to issue clear recommendations that disposables do not provide any greater protection against COVID-19. The letter accused the plastic and petrochemical sector of “trying to influence CDC guidelines for reopening food establishments in their favor.” Gov. Gavin Newsom never responded, but in part because of environmental concerns, California’s Department of Public Health openly defied the CDC recommendations. In May, the agency issued guidelines that said restaurants’ reusable utensils and plates can be safely washed or sanitized.

North Carolina’s health department has kept quiet on the subject, leaving Andrea Reusing worried that restaurants’ embrace of disposables could set a bad precedent. “It probably seems cheaper to get people to eat with a plastic fork, and it feels like maybe people are getting used to food trucks and fast-casual,” she says. But Reu­sing has decided to use Lantern’s regular ceramic dishes and silverware when the restaurant reopens. “It might make people feel better to eat off of something disposable,” she says. “But it’s more for symbolic comfort than anything else.” 

No surprise...

QAnon is Supposed to Be All About Protecting Kids. Its Primary Enabler Appears to Have Hosted Child Porn Domains.

Archives document Jim Watkins’ links to domains suggestive of underage sexual material.

AJ VICENS and ALI BRELAND

One dark irony of QAnon has always been that the conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump is waging a war on a cabal of elite liberal pedophiles, rose to prominence on 8chan, an imageboard where users swapped child pornography.

But that irony may have a darker, deeper layer: Mother Jones has uncovered that Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and its successor site, 8kun, controls a company that hosted scores of domains whose names suggest they are connected to child pornography.

While Mother Jones did not visit the domains because of strict laws related to viewing child sex abuse material, internet registration and hosting data suggest at a minimum that Watkins profited from domains with names explicitly related to pedophilia—the very thing that QAnon followers say that they’re motivated to end. The domains’ names include terms such as “preteen,” “schoolgirl,” and “child” alongside graphic terms for genitalia and words like “rape” and “love.” It’s unclear what, if anything, is currently being served at the domains. However, an analysis of metadata collected years ago from one by archive.org shows dozens of filenames and links containing highly suggestive terms, including “xxxpreteen,” “children,” and sexual references to girls aged 12 to 15. 

Some of the domains date back to the late 1990s and may no longer be active, while others currently resolve to IP addresses controlled by Watkins’ company, N.T. Technology, according to records compiled by Farsight Security, a cybersecurity company that archives historical routing data detailing relationships among domain names, IP addresses, name servers, and other digital assets.

Watkins, who some experts believe has an active role in maintaining the QAnon account on 8kun, dismissed Mother Jones‘ questions about the domains as “an attempt to smear [his] name and print something awful,” offering varying explanations why they were on N.T. Technology’s servers. “We’re not child pornographers, and we don’t host child pornography, and we don’t condone that,” he insisted.

A group of anti-Q researchers that includes Aubrey Cottle, a founder of the activist hacker collective Anonymous, brought Watkins’ connection to the domains to Mother Jones’ attention. Another researcher, who asked not to be named to avoid harassment from Watkins supporters, reviewed the historical domain and routing information at Mother Jones’ request and agreed the records showed that N.T. Technology “hosted many domains with CP [child pornography] themed names over an extended period of time.”

Using a combination of open-source and commercially available data, the researcher confirmed that the domains pointed to IP addresses registered to N.T. Technology, and that the IP addresses were routed to the company’s network while the explicit domains were active.

One domain created in 1998 and hosted by N.T. Technology, which bills itself as “a powerhouse in the internet world, [s]upporting some of the largest sites on Earth,” lists Watkins as its administrator and names a separate holding company he owns, Is It Wet Yet Inc., as the administration organization. According to historical domain and web archive records, the domain has, over the years, been associated with dozens of subdomains—more specific and focused offshoots of the main domain—whose names combine terms like “preteen,” “kidnap,” and “rape.” They include a comprehensive system of subdomains referencing age ranges as young as 10. When asked about the specific domain, Watkins said “I have really no idea about” it.

Nevada records show N.T. Technology was formed in 1998. Just last week, following a story from information security journalist Brian Krebs noting the company’s corporate registration had lapsed, the state’s records were updated, listing Watkins as both the company’s president and director.

Fredrick Brennan founded 8chan, but turned over control of the imageboard to Watkins in 2016. They later had a public split over the site’s direction. Brennan told Mother Jones that he would not be surprised if “Jim was involved in pedophile sites going back that far given his attitude towards the problem on 8chan,” explaining that Watkins “would always find something more important to do” when Brennan proposed deploying machine learning tools to block child sexual abuse material from the board. Watkins dismissed Brennan’s claims, saying that “what we do with machine learning is private.”

Though press reports documenting 8chan’s notorious and toxic environment noted that child pornography continued to be found there, in a phone call, Watkins said that 8chan “had a lot of problems” with child sexual abuse content when he acquired the site, but claimed it was removed under him as “it became one of the strictest websites on the internet.”

Watkins is listed as administrator of a domain with subdomains named for terms including “preteen,” “kidnap,” and “rape.”

Beyond owning the company that hosted them, Watkins said he has no direct link to any of the domains, despite his companies’ email and his name showing up on registrations for several of them. “There’s probably 30 or 40,000 domain names associated with my name. Very few of them I have had anything to do with,” he said. Watkins speculated that he “would have been arrested long ago,” if he were involved in distributing child porn.

When asked about a particular domain in the batch with a name suggesting it hosted child sex abuse material, Watkins claimed he had deleted it “15 to 20 years ago” when it came to his attention. He said the domains with names suggestive of child pornography had no content when hosted by his company, but had been established for domain squatting, a practice where the domains’ owners would profit once they found willing buyers for URLs referencing things like children’s underwear and the sexual abuse of minors. In a subsequent conversation, he suggested the subdomains were created as part of a common turn-of- the-century search engine optimization tactic. 

Watkins claimed not to know the domain whose metadata showed it hosting child sex abuse-related filenames and links, and said that if the domain actually hosted such material the domain itself would have been removed. “If there was ever a problem we removed and deleted and reported,” he said. Watkins said that he did not vet clients nor take action to determine whether they used his services to commit illegal acts unless it was brought to his attention: “It’s about the most un-American thing I can imagine, sir. That’s what the Soviets would be doing, or the communist Chinese. And we don’t have Soviets anymore. We defeated them.”

The now 56-year-old Watkins has a long connection to pornography stretching back to a site he founded in the mid 90s as the industry was transitioning online. By 2001, Watkins’s work as a US Army helicopter repairman took him to the Philippines, where he expanded from porn sites into web services, hosting adult sites targeting consumers evading Japanese obscenity laws, according to a 2016 Splinter story. He has said he chose N.T. Technology’s innocuous name to provide cover for credit card charges that might be questioned by his customers’ wives. 

The QAnon conspiracy theory began on 4chan, a site Watkins had no role in running, eventually migrating to 8chan in 2017. 8chan was ultimately shut down in August of 2019 when its domain hosting and cybersecurity providers dropped it after several far-right wing shooters used the site to disseminate their manifestos. Watkins provided Q a place to continue posting by restarting and rebranding the imageboard as 8Kun, vowing to moderate child porn and other illegal content more strictly.

QAnon’s sprawl and constant evolution can make it difficult to follow. It started with a poster on 4chan who claimed to be a member of the federal government with high-level “Q” security clearance. Posts from Q dropped cryptic breadcrumbs that purportedly shed light on a pedophile ring being run by liberal elites. The conspiracy, which holds that Donald Trump is secretly battling this cabal despite opposition from the so-called “deep state,” has found ardent supporters among the president’s base.

Watkins’ precise role in QAnon is murky. At a minimum, he is widely recognized as having played an instrumental part in giving the movement a platform where it could flourish as he has publicly encouraged the conspiracy. When he was subpoenaed to testify before Congress, he wore a “Q” pin. Just weeks ago, he was a featured speaker at a QAnon conference in Phoenix. In addition to running QAnon’s home on 8kun, the fact-checking site Logically.ai reported this month that Watkins appears to be playing a role in facilitating online QAnon community hubs elsewhere.

Brennan, 8chan’s original founder, has suggested Watkins’ involvement goes deeper, positing he took advantage of his power as the owner of 8kun to essentially hijack the account that claims to be Q. Other researchers and journalists have raised the possibility that Watkins has some involvement or knowledge of who runs the account. Watkins has denied that claim, or having acted as Q.

Even if he has no direct relationship to the QAnon account, as an active supporter of Q and the movement’s host, Watkins is an inextricable sustainer of a conspiracy that has falsely branded political opponents and innocent bystanders as pedophiles—despite his own apparent role in profiting from words that appeal to the real thing.

There is no court, it is just a bunch of political hacks....

Supreme Court lays out path to help Trump win a contested race

Greg Stohr

The Supreme Court's conservatives started carving a path that could let President Donald Trump win a contested election, issuing a far-reaching set of opinions just as Amy Coney Barrett was getting Senate confirmation to provide what could be a crucial additional vote.

In a 5-3 decision released minutes before the Senate vote Monday night, the court rejected Democratic calls to reinstate a six-day extension for the receipt of mail ballots in Wisconsin, a hotly contested state that is experiencing a surge of covid-19 cases. The Supreme Court as a whole gave no explanation for the decision.

The outcome was bad enough for Democrats, but an opinion by Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh bordered on catastrophic. Kavanaugh suggested sympathy for Trump's unsubstantiated contentions that votes received after Election Day would be tainted by fraud, warning that "charges of a rigged election could explode" if late-arriving ballots change the perceived outcome.

Most states "want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election," Kavanaugh wrote. "And those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter."

Although Trump is trailing Democrat Joe Biden in national polls, the race is tighter in Wisconsin and other swing states that will determine who wins and are the focus of the two campaigns. Two other pivotal states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are awaiting Supreme Court action in cases raising similar issues.

Kavanaugh's vote -- and those of fellow Trump appointees Barrett and Neil Gorsuch -- could be crucial in any post-election dispute. With Chief Justice John Roberts showing less willingness to second-guess state election decisions, Trump could need the support of all three of his appointed justices to overturn election results that seem to favor Biden.

All three Democratic appointees dissented Monday night. Writing for the group, Justice Elena Kagan blasted Kavanaugh's word choice, as well as his reasoning.

"There are no results to 'flip' until all valid votes are counted," Kagan wrote for herself and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. "And nothing could be more suspicious or improper than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night."

The court's decision Monday means ballots must be received by Election Day to count in Wisconsin. Democrats were seeking to revive an extension that had been ordered by a federal trial judge because of the covid-19 outbreak and then blocked by an appeals court.

Kagan said the worsening pandemic in Wisconsin means that without the extension voters would have to "opt between braving the polls, with all the risk that entails, and losing their right to vote." Kavanaugh countered that the high court order wouldn't disenfranchise any voter who had adequately planned ahead.

The dueling opinions, however, went well beyond the Wisconsin circumstances. Kavanaugh embraced a legal theory that could let Republican-controlled state legislatures override results certified by Democratic officials. That argument, developed by three conservative justices in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, says the Supreme Court should intervene in a presidential election dispute even when a state court is interpreting its own laws.

Citing that opinion, Kavanaugh pointed to a constitutional provision that says state legislatures get to determine how electors are appointed to the electoral college, the body that formally selects the U.S. president.

"The text of the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws," Kavanaugh wrote. He was one of three current justices, including Roberts and Barrett, who worked as lawyers for Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 election fight.

Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan all have Republican-controlled legislatures and Democratic governors, creating the possibility those states could send dueling slates of electors to the electoral college in the event of a disputed election.

Kavanaugh's opinion doesn't necessarily mean he would invalidate votes that arrive after Election Day in states where extensions are in place, said Edward Foley, director of the election law program at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

"There's a due process principle, at least that's recognized by lower courts," Foley said. "You're not supposed to change rules governing elections after ballots have been cast. That might come into play."

The Kavanaugh opinion nonetheless left many liberals alarmed at the growing possibility of a replay of Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court and stopped ballot recounts that might have led to Democrat Al Gore's election.

Kavanaugh "signaled that at least some of the conservative justices are willing to stop both state and federal courts, and state agencies, from easing voting restrictions and fixing voting problems when doing so deviates from the wishes of the state legislature," said Rick Hasen, a election-law expert who teaches at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

Gorsuch expressed views similar to Kavanaugh's, if in less detail. "The Constitution provides that state legislatures -- not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials -- bear primary responsibility for setting election rules," Gorsuch wrote in an opinion Kavanaugh joined.

Kavanaugh's and Gorsuch's opinions distinguished them from Roberts. Although Roberts joined the majority in the Wisconsin case, he wrote his own opinion to explain why he previously voted to allow an extra three days for ballots to arrive in Pennsylvania. The court split 4-4 in that case last week, leaving the extension intact for the time being.

Roberts said the difference was that the Pennsylvania case involved a state court applying its own constitution.

"Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin," he wrote Monday.

Pennsylvania Republicans have now filed a new request to block the extension, aiming to take advantage of Barrett's arrival on the court.

Barrett, who began work as a justice Tuesday after taking the second of two required oaths, could now be positioned to cast the deciding vote in a 2020 version of Bush v. Gore. The dynamic "is putting Justice Barrett on the spot to make that decision," Foley said.

Although Democrats have called on Barrett to disqualify herself from Trump-related election cases, she has given no indication she will do so.

The Ghoul of IC 2118

Inspired by the halloween season, this telescopic portrait captures a cosmic cloud with a scary visage. The interstellar scene lies within the dusty expanse of reflection nebula IC 2118 in the constellation Orion. IC 2118 is about 800 light-years from your neighborhood, close to bright bluish star Rigel at the foot of Orion. Often identified as the Witch Head nebula for its appearance in a wider field of view it now rises before the witching hour though. With spiky stars for eyes, the ghoulish apparition identified here seems to extend an arm toward Orion's hot supergiant star. The source of illumination for IC 2118, Rigel is just beyond this frame at the upper left.

Sample Stowage

OSIRIS-REx In the Midst of Sample Stowage

Yesterday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully placed the spacecraft’s sample collector head into its Sample Return Capsule (SRC). The first image shows the collector head hovering over the SRC after the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm moved it into the proper position for capture. The second image shows the collector head secured onto the capture ring in the SRC. Both images were captured by the StowCam camera.

Today, after the head was seated into the SRC’s capture ring, the spacecraft performed a “backout check,” which commanded the TAGSAM arm to back out of the capsule. This maneuver is designed to tug on the collector head and ensure that the latches – which keep the collector head in place – are well secured. Following the test, the mission team received telemetry confirming that the head is properly secured in the SRC.

Before the sampler head can be sealed into the SRC, two mechanical parts on the TAGSAM arm must first be disconnected – these are the tube that carried the nitrogen gas to the TAGSAM head during sample collection and the TAGSAM arm itself. Over the next several hours, the mission team will command the spacecraft to cut the tube and separate the collector head from the TAGSAM arm. Once the team confirms these activities have executed as planned, they will command the spacecraft to seal the SRC.

StowCam, a color imager, is one of three cameras comprising TAGCAMS (the Touch-and-Go Camera System), which is part of OSIRIS-REx’s guidance, navigation, and control system. TAGCAMS was designed, built and tested by Malin Space Science Systems; Lockheed Martin integrated TAGCAMS to the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and operates TAGCAMS.

Push to flip the Senate

Biden makes late push to flip the Senate

The Democratic nominee is hitting Georgia and Iowa this week, while Jill Biden campaigned with the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine.

By JAMES ARKIN and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

Joe Biden hammered throughout the primary that he was Democrats’ best bet to not only beat Donald Trump, but flip the Senate and return his party to broader power in Washington. Now, in the final week of the election, Biden is throwing his weight into that pitch.

He campaigned in Georgia on Tuesday with Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the top Democrats running in the rapidly changing state’s dual Senate races. Meanwhile, his wife, Jill Biden, was in Maine stumping with Sara Gideon, the party’s candidate facing longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins. And on Friday, Biden will make his first stop in Iowa since the state’s ill-fated caucuses, where the dead-heat Senate race has become the second most expensive in the country — and Biden and Trump are locked in a tight race themselves.

Biden still hasn’t campaigned with every Democratic Senate hopeful, even in the swing states where the party is competitive at both levels. But his stops in Georgia and Iowa — the type of states where Biden once said his liberal primary opponents would struggle and force down-ballot Democrats to answer uncomfortable policy questions — underscore how Biden has been an asset in Democrats’ fight to flip the Senate.

The appearances also show how important Georgia and Iowa have become in 2020. Neither state is a key to Biden’s main paths to defeating Trump in the Electoral College, but wins in either state would dramatically boost Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate. Winning both states would likely guarantee it.

“He's coming to Georgia because he can win and these Senate races are absolutely in play,” said Sarah Riggs Amico, Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 2018. “If we win both of these Senate seats in Georgia, it's almost mathematically impossible for Mitch McConnell to remain majority leader.”

Biden made the pitch directly in Atlanta at a drive-in rally featuring 365 cars and nearly 800 people, after Ossoff and Warnock had both already addressed the crowd.

“I can’t tell you how important it is that we flip the United States Senate. There's no state more consequential than Georgia in that fight,” the former vice president and 36-year Senate veteran said.

Biden’s camp said this spring that it would keep as many options as possible on the table as it sought 270 electoral votes, and the campaign stressed again this week that Biden’s trips are scheduled with winning the presidency chiefly in mind, not just making excursions to boost Senate hopefuls.

“If we didn’t think we were competing in Georgia we wouldn’t be sending Joe Biden there a week before the election,” one adviser said.

But they acknowledged that the Senate races did play into the late trips to Georgia and other surrogate travel over the final week before Election Day. “It’s always been on our mind and it’s always been something that we have factored in,” the adviser said.

Biden’s campaign schedule — which has remained limited out of both caution and confidence — has focused most heavily on Pennsylvania, but he’s also traveled to Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina, all of which also have competitive Senate races. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters appeared with Biden at a rally this month, but Cal Cunningham in North Carolina and Mark Kelly in Arizona didn’t join events in those states.

As Biden faced challenges from the left in the presidential primary, he argued repeatedly that he would have the most appeal and create the best conditions for down-ballot Democrats in tough states and districts. Most Democrats in competitive races have rejected "Medicare for All" in favor of a public health insurance option and support other measures fighting climate change instead of the "Green New Deal," aligning them more closely with Biden.

Georgia and Iowa weren’t considered to be part of Democrats’ likeliest paths back to a Senate majority after 2018. Georgia has two races, but the state’s runoff rule requiring a majority of the vote to win makes it a taller hurdle than some other states. The campaign between Ossoff and GOP Sen. David Perdue is highly competitive, and Warnock is likely to finish first in the special election before likely heading to a Jan. 5 runoff.

Stewart Boss, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the fact that these states were battlegrounds showed Democrats are "in a strong position firmly on offense in the closing days."

Biden didn’t mention the Republican contenders in the special election in his remarks, but he jabbed at Perdue for his mispronunciation of Sen. Kamala Harris’ name at a Trump rally a few weeks ago, telling the endangered Republican that it’s “gotta stop.”

John Burke, a spokesperson for Perdue, said in a statement that Biden has “spent nearly five decades in government and has absolutely nothing to show for it,” and said Perdue was proud of his work with Trump for the state.

Iowa has seen steady investment from Democrats, and party nominee Theresa Greenfield has consistently polled even with GOP Sen. Joni Ernst since the Democratic primary early in the summer. Biden’s standing in the state Barack Obama carried twice before Trump’s 2016 win has been a major boost.

“The fact that he is coming here just emphasizes the fact that this is a critical Senate race and that this is a state that he has a good shot of winning,” said Scott Brennan, a former state Democratic Party chair. “Six months ago we would have laughed at that and now we think he has a real shot here.”

Greenfield said it was “exciting” that Biden was coming to Iowa, according to audio of her remarks, saying it suggests the state is a true battleground. But she is on an RV tour this week and it wasn’t clear as of Tuesday whether she would join Biden’s campaign event.

Meanwhile, Ernst joined Trump at a campaign rally across the border Tuesday night in Omaha, Neb., where the local media market includes parts of southwestern Iowa. Ernst's campaign also hit Greenfield by saying Biden's visit showed she "stands with the liberal policies" he's running on.

Doug Gross, a veteran Republican operative in Iowa, said the top of ticket and Senate races were tied together and both sides would get a boost of attention from the visits. But Trump has visited the state several times, and this is Biden’s first foray.

“It’s a twofer for him,” Gross said. “He's helping himself with six electoral votes that otherwise wouldn't be play, and potentially getting himself a majority in the Senate, so that's a smart move.”

Biden isn’t broadly seen as a bogeyman for moderate voters, and his image is featured far less often in Senate TV ads than progressive Democrats. But Republicans still hope to get some juice out of tying candidates together.

“Biden has joined Chuck Schumer in calling for radical change by way of eliminating the filibuster and packing the court with liberal justices,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Candidates loath to answer for the threats will now have no choice but to confront it head on.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are tying Trump and Republican senators together. At her event with Jill Biden in Maine, Gideon said Trump has been “enabled and emboldened” by the GOP Senate and Collins.

"With a blue Senate, Joe is going to be able to do so much more to get our country back on track,” Jill Biden said, calling Maine “critical.”

Annie Clark, a spokesperson for Collins' campaign, in a statement criticized Gideon for not doing enough in the legislature on Covid-19 response, accusing her of having been “inexcusably on the sidelines” to campaign.

While Maine and Iowa have been core Senate races for both parties for months, Warnock, in a brief interview, said Biden’s trip to Georgia was evidence that “the folks at the national level are responding to what's going on here on the ground.”

Biden himself marveled at the competitive nature of the state in his remarks.

“We win Georgia, we win everything,” Biden said.

Hands Off U.S. Politics

A Post-Trump Challenge: Getting Foreign Leaders’ Hands Off U.S. Politics

Donald Trump hasn’t just personalized foreign policy—he’s let rivals get used to playing politics in the U.S. If Biden wins, he’ll need to put the genie back in the bottle.

By THANASSIS CAMBANIS and MICHAEL WAHID HANNA

If Joe Biden wins the presidency, his foreign policy to-do list is going to be vast: reengage with the global community on China and the pandemic, restart nuclear talks and reassure NATO, to say nothing of refocusing America’s sprawling military commitments.

But there’s one issue that hasn’t been on the radar—almost more an issue of style than substance, but critical nonetheless to restoring some lost stature to American diplomacy.

Like a house guest who starts to act like a rent-paying roommate, Washington’s partners overseas, especially in the Middle East, have grown far too comfortable taking inappropriate partisan stands in American politics.

The old adage holds that American domestic politics supposedly stop at the water’s edge, meaning that partisan disputes are waged in Washington, but not abroad. American administrations of all stripes have generally worked to remind foreign governments—friends as well as enemies—not to try to play America’s parties and personalities against each other. International relations are supposed to be serious business conducted between national governments, and not personal deals forged by individuals in power.

While the actual practice of foreign policy has often fallen short of that mythologized past, both parties have acknowledged the importance of the norm even when failing to respect it.

Middle Eastern leaders had begun eroding those norms before the election of President Donald Trump. Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu decisively sundered the institutional basis of the U.S.-Israel relationship, visiting Congress at the invitation of Republicans in an explicit affront to President Barack Obama. Israel, along with oil monarchies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, publicly undermined the Iran nuclear deal, encouraging Americans to oppose the deal on party lines.

Since Trump’s election, however, overt partisanship by foreign powers has risen to new levels. Leaders in Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates openly worry about the setbacks they might face if they lose the special status they’ve been granted by Trump. Saudi’s de facto leader has steered Saudi investments into swing states to encourage votes for Trump. Israel and the United Arab Emirates have lobbied hard—and successfully—to make Iran policy a partisan domestic issue in the U.S., rather than a bipartisan matter of national security.

Disturbingly, foreign leaders have started to treat their partnerships with the United States as a personal relationship with the man at the top and his family—no surprise for a batch of unabashedly authoritarian leaders.

In the short term, this corrosive approach has paid off richly for friendly authoritarians. Personal flattery to Trump and a transactional, partisan approach to U.S. politics has given American partners in the Middle East a green light to undertake previously inconceivable actions. Dictators like Egypt’s Abdul Fattah al-Sisi have gotten a free pass while imposing unprecedented violent repression on their citizens. When Sisi was reelected in 2018 in a fundamentally flawed and unfair process that saw him capture 97 percent of the vote, Trump didn’t rap his knuckles for subverting democracy; instead he heartily congratulated Sisi on the win.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have continued to buy big on the U.S. weapons market, embracing Trump and spending freely at his family businesses, and have delivered a conveniently timed thaw in relations with Israel. In exchange, Trump has continued to support the two oil powers’ destructive war in Yemen (compounding Obama’s initial mistake of greenlighting the Saudi-led campaign—a bad policy decision, but not the product of a handshake deal between strongmen). He has shielded Saudi’s de facto leader from any consequence for targeting dissidents, including the murder of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi—even bragging to Bob Woodward that he had “saved his ass,” and explaining further that he “was able to get Congress to leave him alone” and “get them to stop.”

That same personalized approach to diplomacy has been a hallmark of Jared Kushner’s dealings in the Middle East, with U.S. officials having expressed concern about his private text messages with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, functioning with no oversight or input from the formal institutional channels of diplomatic engagement.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has been repaid for lining up with Trump and Republicans by achieving everything on his wish list; the U.S. has shed even the slightest pretense of being an honest broker, siding with the Israeli right to cut off aid to Palestinians, abandon the peace process, approve irreversible settlements on occupied Palestinian territory and move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Other authoritarians around the world have taken note. Trump admirers like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philipines, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil appreciate the short-term benefits of approaching their partnership as an alliance with strongman Don rather than with the U.S. government. Duterte escaped censure or sanctions for his burgeoning authoritarianism and murderous drug war, because his endorsement from the man at the top of a U.S. government staunchly opposed to Duterte’s policies.

If Biden wins, he’ll arrive in office to find a series of counterparts now accustomed to this personal, partisan style, and will need to brush them back, quickly and decisively.

Biden would have a few tools at his disposal to do this. Publicly, his State Department could name and shame the most egregious violators of international diplomatic norms. The U.S. government should not be afraid to embarrass leaders in Israel, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who have cheapened what are, after all, a national and not a personal asset—the strategic historical partnerships between states.

Some of the most troublesome leaders are rightly afraid that they’ll lose if and when the United States undergoes a larger review of problematic partnerships. Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia almost certainly will experience a long-range downgrade in the status of their special relationships if Biden undertakes a levelheaded policy review. Israel would cease to enjoy a green light for unfettered settlement expansion. And Europe’s most dictatorial leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, would lose American support in his bullying campaign against what he calls “loopy liberals.”

Government-government contacts at the level where the real work of a partnership gets done can be postponed or slow-rolled for six months or a year, to give American partners some time to remember their priorities—and their manners. Arms deliveries can be delayed. Diplomats can deliver the message that comity is expected in public and private.

But the U.S. will also have to get its own house in order. The door to foreign partisanship was opened by hyperpartisan Americans. A reassertion of discipline on America’s international relations requires a reimposition of sanity at home—Americans can disagree about how much to back Israel’s right-wing government, or the Saudi bombing of Yemen, but they should be condemned when they invite foreign governments to join partisan forces in American domestic political disputes, whether in Congress or in elections.

Domestically, Biden might have to play a little hardball on this front: There are plenty of American politicians and interest groups that have poisoned the well with bad-faith venom around questions of the national interest, and he’ll need to find ways to marginalize them unless they’re willing to rejoin a genuine political dialogue.

These toxic trends were already underway before 2016, with an increasing number of foreign policy issues being decided along party lines. But Trump has crossed a line with an approach to deal-making that is intensely political and personal. His signature foreign policies are directly tied to his personal fortunes, political and sometimes financial, and he scoffs at the expertise of his own administration. Nuclear experts were terrified by the lack of preparation or strategy that went into Trump’s personal diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Policy professionals won’t always agree on the best way to pursue American security and interests abroad. But it’s conceivable that we can return to a practice of forging consensus on national security policy and ratifying international treaties, keeping foreign leaders out of politics, even when they seem to offer a tactical advantage to one side or another. Foreign policy can, and should, transcend an individual presidency—a view the United States has held throughout most of its history. We will all be safer when it does once again.

Sinks 3.5%

S&P 500 sinks 3.5% as surging virus cases lead to shutdowns

The selling in U.S. markets followed broad declines in Europe.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 943 points Wednesday as surging coronavirus cases forced more shutdown measures in Europe and raised fears of more restrictions in the U.S.

The S&P 500 slid 3.5%, its third straight loss and its biggest drop since June. The benchmark index is already down 5.6% this week, on track for its biggest weekly decline since March. That's when the market was in the midst of selling off as strict lockdowns around the world choked the economy into recession.

Investors are growing increasingly anxious that the economy will lose momentum should more shutdowns be imposed just as prospects for more economic support from Washington have dwindled as Election Day nears.

“Many people had come to believe we were at least stable, and now we’re having a second uptick, which throws potential GDP and everything else up in the air,” said Randy Frederick, vice president of trading & derivatives at Charles Schwab. ”I did not expect this level of volatility or this degree of a sell-off.”

The S&P 500 lost 119.65 points to 3,271.03. The Dow lost 943.24 points, or 3.4%, to 26,519.95. The Nasdaq composite slumped 426.48 points, or 3.7%, to 11,004.87. The selling was widespread, and 96% of stocks in the S&P 500 fell.

The selling in U.S. markets followed broad declines in Europe, where the French president announced tough measures to slow the virus’ spread and German officials agreed to impose a four-week partial lockdown. The measures may not be as stringent as the shutdown orders that swept the world early this year, but the worry is they could still hit the already weakened global economy.

Coronavirus counts are also climbing at a troubling rate in much of the United States, and the number of deaths and hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are on the rise. Even if the most restrictive lockdowns don’t return, investors worry that the worsening pandemic could scare away customers of businesses regardless and sap away their profits.

Crude oil tumbled on worries that an economy already weakened by the virus would consume even less energy and allow excess supplies to build higher. Benchmark U.S. crude dropped 5.7% to $37.39 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, fell 5.4% to $39.12 per barrel.

Instead, investors headed into the safety of U.S. government bonds. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 0.77% from 0.79% late Tuesday. It was as high as 0.87% last week.

A measure of fear in the stock market touched its highest level since June, when the market suddenly tumbled amid concerns that a “second wave” of coronavirus infections had arrived. The VIX measures how much volatility investors expect from the S&P 500, and it climbed 20.8% Wednesday.

Even the continued parade of better-than-expected reports on corporate profits for the summer failed to shift the momentum.

Microsoft, the second-biggest company in the S&P 500, reported stronger profit and revenue for its latest quarter than expected. That’s typically good for a stock, but Microsoft nevertheless slumped 5%. It gave a forecast for the current quarter that was relatively in line with Wall Street forecasts, but analysts noted some caveats in it.

UPS fell 8.8% after also reporting better-than-expected earnings, though it said the outlook for its business is too cloudy due to the pandemic to offer any forecasts for its revenue or profits in the current quarter.

Companies broadly have not been getting as big a pop in their stock prices as they typically do after reporting healthier-than-expected profits. Analysts say that suggests good news on profits has already been built into stock prices and that the market’s focus is elsewhere.

Investors' hopes that Congress and the White House could soon offer more big support for the economy as it struggles through the pandemic have largely faded. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have continued their talks, but investors see little chance of a deal happening before Election Day next week.

Economists say the economy likely needs such aid after the expiration of the last round of supplemental unemployment benefits and other stimulus approved by Washington earlier this year.

Uncertainty about the upcoming presidential election has also been pushing markets around.

“The market never likes uncertainty," said Stephanie Roth, portfolio macro analyst at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. "People are just taking profits ahead of the election, to some extent.”

The race seems be getting tighter than it was just a few weeks ago, said Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group. “It has markets somewhat unnerved that the prospects of a contested election are back in the mix,” he said.

Cox said he expects more calm in the markets in November after the election passes and some of the uncertainty over a new aid package fades.

“Aid is coming regardless. There’ll be no political motivation to hold it back after the election,” he said. “There’s plenty of desire to get money out to people so I think it will happen one way or another in November.”

50 percent problem

Trump confronts his 50 percent problem

The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary efforts to suppress the vote.

By DAVID SIDERS and ZACH MONTELLARO

Donald Trump won the presidency with 46 percent of the popular vote. His approval rating, according to Gallup, has never hit 50 percent. He remains under 50 percent in national polling averages.

The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map — a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximize Trump’s chances of winning a contest in which he’s all but certain to earn less than 50 percent of the vote.

In Philadelphia, his campaign is videotaping voters as they return ballots. In Nevada, it’s suing to force elections officials in Nevada’s Democratic-heavy Clark County to more rigorously examine ballot signatures for discrepancies that could disqualify them. The Trump campaign has sued to prevent the expanded use of ballot drop boxes in Ohio, sought to shoot down an attempt to expand absentee ballot access in New Hampshire and tried to intervene against a lawsuit brought by members of the Navajo Nation in Arizona which sought to allow ballots received from reservations after Election Day because of mail delays. And that’s just a few of its efforts.

Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump.

“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”

Potter, who now heads the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, added, “It puzzles me … I’ve never worked for a Republican candidate who thought it was a good idea to make it hard for people to vote.”

For Trump, however, the math makes sense. In 2016, he won Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — five of this year’s most important swing states — with under 50 percent of the vote. In two others, Georgia and North Carolina, he captured exactly half the votes. Having failed to expand his base beyond a committed — and sizable — core in his first term, the president stands to gain from a diminished turnout, particularly among voters of color.

Elections have long been marred by legal and illegal forms of voter suppression. But the coronavirus — and Trump’s baseless warnings about widespread voter fraud — shifted a once-ancillary feature of campaigns into overdrive. Democrats pushed to ease voting rules amid the pandemic, and Trump pushed back.

It wasn’t just in court, either. For more than three decades, the Republican National Committee had been hamstrung by a consent decree limiting the RNC’s ability challenge voters’ qualifications at the polls, after the committee was accused of efforts to discourage African Americans from voting. After the order was lifted in 2018, Trump and the RNC began assembling a massive poll-watching operation. And Trump is heavily invested in its success.

Outraged after a court in Pennsylvania rejected litigation to allow poll watchers at satellite elections offices, Trump wrote on Twitter late Sunday night, “How terrible is this? We are just seeking a fair vote count. This can only lead to very bad things. Bad intentions much??? Disgraceful!!!”

On Tuesday morning, he tweeted, “Philadelpiha [sic] MUST HAVE POLLWATCHERS!”

The RNC and the Trump campaign bristle at the idea that they are engaging in voter suppression or that there are strategic motivations behind their actions. They frame it as resistance to a Democratic assault on election integrity.

By May — fully six months before Election Day — the Trump campaign and the RNC had committed at least $20 million to legal efforts they cast as necessary to maintain voting safeguards and an orderly election.

Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy, called it “the height of hypocrisy that Democrats call our election transparency efforts ‘voter suppression’ — they’re the ones who scared voters away from the polls for months.”

Courts have been resistant to Republicans' claims about voter fraud in cases to restrict voting, if not outright rejecting them. But Republicans have found victories in rolling back Democratic-initiated changes on two principles: That federal courts should not change election laws close to the election — also known as the Purcell Principle — and, increasingly, that the judiciary should defer to state legislatures.

Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reinstate a lower court's order that extended the ballot return deadline in the battleground state of Wisconsin, meaning ballots would be due by Election Day.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said “trying to make voting harder during a pandemic is pretty tough to justify,” suggesting instead that “the Trump wing of the party thinks keeping the electorate smaller helps Trump.”

The effect is often to disadvantage Democratic-leaning constituencies. In swing state Florida, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature slapped additional restrictions on felons trying to register to vote after voters in 2018 approved a measure designed to restore most felons’ voting rights.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott limited ballot drop-off sites to one in each county, a measure with outsized effects on the most heavily populated — and more Democratic — areas like Harris County, which includes Houston.

And then there is what’s coming on Election Day. Following Trump’s call in his first debate with Biden for “my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” some far-right groups have said they will be out monitoring polls. Last week in Minnesota, a company that had been recruiting former Special Operations members to guard polling places backed off after the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, opened an investigation.

Recruiting volunteers for his Election Day operations, Trump calls what he’s building an “Army for Trump.”

“They’re open about it,” said Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012 and who is now working against Trump’s reelection. “They’re not even pretending not to rely on voter suppression.”

Every politician understands the benefit of his or her opponents’ supporters turning out in lower numbers. But Trump is the rare candidate who has openly expressed the value of addition by subtraction. Shortly after the 2016 election, Trump acknowledged in a private meeting that lower Black turnout that year benefited him, saying “it was great.”

Trump’s public comments about the electoral system in the years since have been no more encouraging for voting rights activists. He has repeatedly asserted that voter fraud is rampant and that the election will be “rigged,” despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. That is significant because there is evidence that lowering trust in the electoral system itself depresses turnout.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a nationally recognized elections lawyer who has represented past Republican presidential nominees, said it is Trump’s language that makes his approach to voting unique.

“What’s different about this election is the president’s rhetoric,” he said. “We’ve never had a president who has said our elections are fraudulent or rigged, and based on all the years I was doing Election Day operations, there’s just no proof to support that.”

Ginsberg said, “The real problem is that fraud and suppression has become part of each party’s get out the vote operation,” noting that such rhetoric could be an animating factor for the bases of each party, but could depress turnout among low propensity voters.

It is not clear that the GOP’s efforts to reduce turnout will work. Early votes have surged past 75 million, according to the United States Elections Project, and Democrats have used concerns about voter suppression as a tool to motivate voters.

Still, Democrats remain wary of the possible effects of Trump’s efforts to shrink the electorate in his favor. In a memo circulating among Democrats late last week, one party strategist described Trump’s narrow path to an Electoral College victory as relying on “a surge in support from voters who skipped 2016 and the midterms and a substantial relative depression in Democratic turnout.” Among reasons for concern, the strategist said, “the scale and scope of the Trump campaign’s unprecedented voter suppression activities.”

“It’s the only way they can win or at least come close to winning,” said Andrew Feldman, a Democratic strategist in Washington. “We’ve seen them continuously try legal means — however unfair or grotesque the legal means are — that are nothing short of voter suppression.”

While Republicans are trying to limit ballot access, Democrats are in an equally furious effort to expand it — and to answer Trump’s poll-watching effort with a counterforce of their own. And Republicans say Democrats brought many of this year’s legal fights on themselves.

“Democrats in a lot of states tried to change the rules that governed an election 90 days before an election,” said Trainer.

Poll watchers, he said, “will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule breaking is called out — and if fouls are called, we’ll go to court to enforce the laws, as rightfully written by state legislatures, to protect every voter’s right to vote.”