The maneuvering over COVID-19 stimulus legislation has been going on for months, but as I noted at New York, Nancy Pelosi may have just made the definitive move:

It might be a symbolic gesture designed to placate vulnerable House Democrats who want to say they’ve voted on stimulus legislation recently. Or it might be a gambit designed to tempt the president to break definitively with his congressional allies and get some serious COVID-19 stimulus money out the door before facing voters.

Either way, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is signaling that House Democrats are formalizing a $2.4 trillion version (close to the $2.2 trillion compromise price tag she’s been offering for a good while) of the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act that the House passed way back in May, as Roll Call reports:

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed House committee leaders to put together a more slender coronavirus relief package than the one that previously passed the chamber, in their latest offer in talks with the White House.

“The House could vote on that as-yet-unreleased $2.4 trillion bill as soon as next week if GOP cooperation doesn’t materialize, according to Democratic lawmakers. But Democrats say they’re hoping for renewed talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a compromise agreement that can actually become law.”

There will have to be some nips and tucks, particularly since Pelosi now wants some items not in the HEROES Act (notably targeted aid for airlines and restaurants). But you can be sure it will include the key elements the White House has already signaled it could support — particularly a second round of 160 million $1200 stimulus checks — and some new small business money, along with as much state and local fiscal assistance as Democrats think the market will bear.

Yes, there’s talk of cutting a deal with Congressional Republicans: Number Two House Democrat Steny Hoyer told Forbes he wanted to “get an alternative [bill] sent to the Senate that is a compromise.” But Senate Republicans, having already made their pre-election gesture with the famously meager “skinny stimulus” bill, won’t be interested unless the White House forces enough of them to get on board. It’s all about Trump imagining his signature on those 160 million checks right before Election Day and taking the bait. And if he doesn’t? It’s no big deal for Pelosi, who can have her show vote for the benefit of vulnerable Members and then wait until after November 3 in hopes that Democratic leverage for more stimulus will only go up with a Democratic president and Congress on the way.

Nothing that Republicans said in the wake of the sad news of Justice Ginsburg’s death should have come as a surprise. This moment was a long time coming, as I explained at New York:

Most mainline anti-abortion organizations and politicians had the decency, or at least the self-discipline, not to celebrate openly at the news of Justice Ruth Bader’s Ginsburg’s death on Friday night. For example, the hard-core anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List put out this statement:

“We offer our sincere condolences to Justice Ginsburg’s children, grandchildren, extended family, friends, and colleagues. The prayers of the Susan B. Anthony List team are with her family, as well as for our nation, at this time.”

But that didn’t keep the group’s chair from acknowledging an urgent call to arms in virtually the same breath:

“This is a turning point for the nation in the fight to protect its most vulnerable, the unborn. The pro-life grassroots have full confidence that President Trump, Leader McConnell, Chairman Graham, and every pro-life Senator will move swiftly to fill this vacancy.”

Similarly, Christian-right leader Franklin Graham tweeted, “Pray for the family of SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who passed away today. May God comfort her loved ones.” But he’s mostly focused on preparing for a Washington Prayer March on September 26, where I am sure the upcoming SCOTUS confirmation fight will be on many hearts and minds.

Perhaps the most intellectually baroque anti-abortion argument on the occasion of Justice Ginsburg’s death was from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who suggested depoliticizing the Supreme Court by withdrawing its jurisdiction over such matters as abortion policy:

“[F]or many conservatives the high court eviscerated its own authority decades ago, when it set itself up as the arbiter of America’s major moral controversies, removing from the democratic process not just debates about sex and marriage and school prayer but life and death itself.”

But congressman and current U.S. Senate candidate Doug Collins of Georgia was about as subtle as a hammerhead shark:

“RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended pro-abortion laws. With Donald Trump nominating a replacement that values human life, generations of unborn children have a chance to live.”

Challenged by an Atlanta reporter for his lapse in etiquette in not preceding this attack with some token of respect for Ginsburg and her service to her country, Collins was having none of that:

“’I will never back [down] on life. It’s very personal for me. The truth was about being honest about where we’re going and what the president’s going to do,’ Collins said. ‘Sometimes in life, there’s just polite, and there’s just the truth. That was the truth.’”

Collins is locked in an intense competition with appointed Republican senator Kelly Loeffler, characterized by mutual efforts to out-Trump each other (Loeffler just ran an ad suggesting she is “more conservative than Attila the Hun”).

In the fever swamps of Christian-right opinion, commenters were far less diplomatic about Ginsburg’s death, expressing a blasphemy-risking willingness to credit God Almighty for smiting Ginsburg and giving Trump the opportunity to ban abortion. Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch has a good example:

“A group of ‘prayer warriors’ associated with the pro-Trump ‘prophetic’ network POTUS Shield is celebrating the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an answer to prayer and a miraculous ‘move of God’ to allow President Donald Trump to name a third Supreme Court justice in his first term. Trump-supporting religious-right supporters have often prayed for God to ‘remove”’Supreme Court justices to give Trump the ability to name justices to the court who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“POTUS Shield founder Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign adviser, prophesied early in Trump’s presidency that God would give Trump three Supreme Court justices in his first term. Amedia has also been talking for months about a ‘prophetic’ dream he had in which he saw Trump sinking into a swamp until God reached down and with his thumb and forefinger plucked Trump out by the head, flinging him in the air. Amedia predicted this divine intervention would take place in September, and on Sunday, he called Ginsburg’s death ‘the first breath’ of the prophesied ‘blast’ that God has in store. ‘The blast has just begun,’ Amedia exulted….”

What all these opponents of legalized abortion have in common is that they don’t give a damn about the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans blocking Merrick Garland in 2016 and rushing through a Trump nominee this year. Indeed, they would be in the streets protesting furiously if Mitch McConnell or Trump hesitated a moment before taking advantage of this opportunity to “save the babies.” This is holy war, and the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation fight is Armageddon. And even if their own interest in the topic is limited, nearly all Republican members of Congress have signed on to the reserves in this battle by taking a position opposing abortion rights and accepting the loyal support of those who are avid to turn back the clock for good.

As different attitudes towards the pandemic lead Rs and Ds in different directions in terms of campaign tactics, I wrote up the debate at New York:

Back in the 1990s, when disciples of James Carville dominated the ranks of Democratic campaign professionals, you could always get a big rise out of any of them by suggesting they should deploy more yard signs and billboards. Their contempt for such old-school tools was near-complete, as was their faith in a concise, poll-tested message conveyed heavily on TV. You saw an echo of this contrast in partisan preference in 2012, when Barack Obama’s data-hip team quietly mocked the conservative pundits aflutter over Mitt Romney’s yard-sign advantage.

Now even in the 1990s, Democrats didn’t completely eschew hard-core, visible campaign methods, as anyone who has ever heard a sound truck in an urban neighborhood conducting aptly named “knock and drag” get-out-the-vote operations can attest. Indeed, as partisan polarization has reduced the number of persuadable swing voters, such occasionally noisy mobilization efforts have become more important in both parties.

But this year the COVID-19 pandemic has understandably led Biden-Harris strategists to rely on more remote mobilization techniques, at least so far. And the contrast with the extremely visible advocates of MAGA, who are far less inhibited by public-health guidance, is making some Democrats nervous, as Time’s Charlotte Alter discovered in Michigan:

“This year, 83-year-old former Chrysler employee [Don Sabbe] says he’ll definitely vote for Joe Biden, but he’s getting concerned about Biden’s campaign here in Michigan.

“’I can’t even find a sign,’ Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say ‘No More Bullsh-t’ and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. ‘I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.’

“The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online.”

Hilariously, when Alter asked one Biden campaign staffer how many people they had on the ground in Michigan, she was asked in turn: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground’?”

By contrast, for all its alleged social-media savvy and its heavy TV presence, the Trump-Pence campaign is very physically in-your-face, from the raucous live rallies the president loves so much to the boat parades and the huge flags and signs and every other campaign resource of the 1950s. The MAGA folk may choose to ignore polls because they allegedly miss “shy Trump voters.” But “shy” is not the word that comes to mind when you encounter bellowing red-hatted fans of the president eager to show their lack of political correctness.

In choosing a different approach, the Biden campaign is practicing what he preaches in the way of responsible behavior during a pandemic. The candidate’s representatives say they are compensating for the lack of sound and fury in other ways, according to Alter:

“Biden’s Michigan team says its campaign is significantly bigger than Clinton’s and may be the largest program in the state’s history. The campaign says it reached out to 1.4 million voters during the Democratic convention and the weekend that followed, with 500 digital-organizing events and 10,000 volunteer signups. In the week before Labor Day, the campaign sent 500,000 texts to Michigan voters — one every half-second. It has just replaced the trappings of a traditional ground game — volunteers knocking on doors, distributing literature, and so forth — with a digital field operation.”

The question is whether there’s something about the loud-and-proud Trump effort that is somehow contagious, or that helps build enthusiasm and willingness to vote in a tangible way. Looking at it conversely, does a field operation without physical voter contact forfeit something essential?

“Democrats are used to measuring their strength by their ground game, and without physical boots on the ground, the effect can be unsettling. It brings up uncomfortable questions about whether a ‘digital field’ operation can really replace a ‘traditional field’ operation without something being lost. Sure, it sounds like digital field organizing should work. But does it actually? Nobody knows, because it’s never been tried on this scale before.”

The polls look good for Biden in Michigan, but they looked good for Clinton in 2016, too — though fewer of them were being taken. If nothing else, though, perhaps the dominant physical presence of the Trump campaign and its supporters will help prevent the kind of Democratic overconfidence that may have done in HRC.

I decided to compare Biden’s poll position to those of the Democratic nominees in the last four elections, and wrote up the results at New York:

Fifty days from Election Day (November 3), Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling averages nationally by 7.4 percent (50.5 to 43.1). He’s led every day of the last year, by margins ranging from 11.8 percent on September 17, 2019, to 4 percent on January 24, 2020.

Biden’s current lead is the largest a candidate has held at the 50-day mark in any of the last four presidential election cycles. In 2004 George W. Bush led John Kerry by 5.7 percent; he would ultimately win by 2.4 percent. In 2008 John McCain actually led Barack Obama by 1.3 percent; he would eventually lose by 7.3 percent. In 2012 Obama led Mitt Romney by 2.8 percent 50 days out; his actual margin was 3.9 percent. And in 2016 Clinton was up 1.3 percent 50 days out; her final popular-vote margin was 2.1 percent.

Those hoping for a late Trump surge to victory might take heart from Obama’s 8.6 percent turnaround in the last 50 days of the 2008 race. But there were some very different circumstances that year. Obama had led for most of the general election campaign before McCain got a sizable post-convention bounce. And some big bad events helped Obama turn it back around against the candidate of the party in power: Exactly 50 days from Election Day, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, triggering a global financial crisis. Nine days later, the first Katie Couric interview with McCain running mate Sarah Palin was aired, which had a big negative effect on Palin’s once-formidable popularity. And the day after that, Obama ran circles around his opponent during the White House summit on the financial crisis hosted by George W. Bush.

It is possible Trump will get those kind of late breaks, but unlike Obama in 2008, he’s now the incumbent president with a consistent “very unfavorable” rating in the polls hovering at or just under 50 percent. Heavy early voting this year means that with each passing day the slice of the electorate (with an already-low undecided vote) that could be “turned around” by a Trump surge is shrinking. And Biden’s polling lead is enhanced by the fact that most national pollsters have already completed the “switchover” to a likely voter screen that often benefits Republican candidates.

While Trump partisans trash the national polls as inaccurate “like they were in 2016” (they actually weren’t), and mindlessly claim his manifest greatness will generate a landslide win, his best hope remains an Electoral College advantage that could again give him a narrow win despite a popular-vote deficit. From state polls and what we can infer from regional trends, Trump might well pull off an upset if he gets Biden’s national lead down to around three points.

But again: Trump hasn’t been within three points of Biden in the RCP national polling averages even once in the past year. So it might take something exceptional to make that happen now.

Looking back at something I wrote at the beginning of the election cycle about the strategic battleground, I revisited the key question at New York:

Soon after the 2018 midterms, I reviewed the evidence about where Democrats made gains and suggested it still wasn’t clear which strategy the party should adopt in trying to recover from the 2016 loss to Trump:

“The two most obvious regional strategies for Democrats are to win back the heartland/Rust Belt (depending on how you think about them) states that Trump narrowly carried despite a strong history of going the other way: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. There are two similar additional states that Obama carried twice: Iowa and Ohio.

“At the other end of the spectrum are Sun Belt states that were already quite close (Florida and North Carolina) or that have recently been trending Democratic (Arizona, Georgia, and Texas) at varying rates.”

The midterm numbers didn’t really indicate one path or the other:

“In the end, the Democratic presidential strategy for ejecting Trump in 2020 will follow the polls — hopefully better and more frequent polls than those taken by the Clinton campaign in those heartland states that ultimately cost them the election of 2016 — and perceived opportunities.”

So here we are less than two months away from Election Day, and with early voting beginning almost immediately, and the best strategic path is still unclear. According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump nationally by 7.5 percent. If Biden maintains that sort of lead through Election Day, then the Electoral College will take care of itself and the Democrat will win very comfortably across the range of battleground states in both competitive parts of the country.

But if the national race tightens, the battleground situation gets much more complicated. Again using FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Biden’s currently trailing in Georgia and Texas, and has a lead under 2 percent in Florida and North Carolina. Of the realistic Sun Belt targets for Democrats, Biden has a robust lead only in Nevada (6.4 percent), which Democrats carried in 2016, and Arizona (4.7 percent).

In the competitive Rust Belt states, Biden’s national lead is matched only by his advantage in Wisconsin (7.5 percent). He has a decent cushion as well in Michigan (6.6 percent) and Minnesota (6.2 percent), and a slimmer one in Pennsylvania (4.1 percent). He’s trailing, however, in Ohio and Iowa, which means they probably become winnable only in the midst of a big Biden victory.

So all in all it looks like a Rust Belt strategy makes the most sense for Biden, right? Ron Brownstein suggests that could be the case:

“Exactly eight weeks before Election Day, Biden has strong opportunities to recapture states that President Donald Trump won in 2016 both in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt. But public and private polls consistently show that Biden is running slightly better in the former group of battlegrounds — centered on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — than the latter, which include North Carolina, Florida and Arizona …

“[Biden’s] potential to improve on Hillary Clinton’s showing with older and blue-collar Whites means that even if he falls short in some or all of the Sun Belt states that many in the party see as its long-term future, he could still reach 270 Electoral College votes by recapturing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three big Rust Belt states that Trump dislodged from the Democrats’ ‘blue wall.'”

It’s easy to forget that — despite the blue trends in the Sun Belt and the red trends in the Rust Belt — Trump did better in the former in 2016, notes Brownstein:

“Trump and the Republican Party have demonstrably lost ground across both regions. But because Trump began with less margin for error in the Rust Belt states, the consequences of that erosion have been more severe for him there than in the Sun Belt.”

One big obstacle to a Biden Sun Belt strategy is the relatively high resistance of white voters — both college-educated and noncollege-educated — to Democrats in the South, which is probably the combined effect of high levels of Evangelical conservative religious affiliation and racial polarization in states with large minority populations.

Polling aside, there are reasons Team Biden might want a selective Sun Belt strategy in the home stretch. Florida, in particular, is a state Trump barely carried in 2016 and can really not afford to lose this year. But the current situation in the Sunshine State offers a reminder that it’s not just Democrats who are capable of geographic targeting. Trump is remaining competitive in Florida in no small part because he is doing extremely well among Cuban Americans and other Latinos concentrated in south Florida. These voters may have been the most important targets of all that endless and redundant socialist-bashing at the Republican National Convention.

It’s entirely possible that Trump simply cannot be reelected this year (legitimately, anyway) thanks to his poor handling of COVID-19, the collapse of his “greatest economy ever,” and accumulated public disgust with his character and personality. And it’s also possible that nothing the campaigns do will significantly affect the results in individual states. But at the margins, small things could make a big difference in a crazy-close election. The odds are high that if it is crazy-close, we’ll again be looking at the Rust Belt states that shocked the world in 2016.