Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate may help Democrats win a majority of the U.S. Senate. This is predicated, of course, on Harris boosting African American voter turnout in key senate races. It could happen.

As Perry Bacon, Jr. writes at FiveThirtyEight:

I don’t want to downplay Harris’s Indian American roots. But Black voters are expected to account for about 13 percent of the expected 2020 electorate, a much bigger share than Asian Americans (5 percent). Black voters are also a particularly sizable and important bloc in key swing states such as Florida (13 percent), Michigan (13 percent), North Carolina (23 percent), Pennsylvania (11 percent) and Wisconsin (5 percent.) I am addressing Harris’s potential appeal to Black voters specifically not because I think Black voters are likely to be particularly energized by a Black woman like Harris, but rather because much of the conversation around the vice presidential selection has implied that picking a Black person will create extra enthusiasm for the ticket with Black voters.

The percentage of Black voting-eligible people who cast ballots was significantly higher in 2008 (65 percent) and 2012 (66 percent), when there was a Black candidate on the ticket, compared to 2004 and 2016 (both around 60 percent) when there was not. Some political science research shows that Black people vote at higher rates when a Black candidate is on the ballot, although that finding is somewhat contested, and that research is about voting for a Black candidate at the top of the ticket, not a white candidate with a Black running mate.

So it’s not a crazy idea that Harris might boost the ticket with Black voters. It has some empirical basis. But I think the stronger case, at least based on what we know right now, is that she won’t have much of an effect in terms of Black voters.

Why not? First of all, while it happened in 2008 and 2012, it’s just really hard for Democrats to get that much more support from Black voters, who even in elections like 2004 or 2016 vote at fairly high rates (significantly higher than Asian American or Hispanic voters) and overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates.

Of course the difference between “a fairly high rate” and a game-changing voter turnout can be as small as 2 percent. Imagine, on the other hand, Black voter turnout, had Biden picked a white running mate. It’s not hard to see how an all-white ticket could dampen Black voter turnout in a year characterized by massive nation-wide protests against racial injustice.

Take a look at the U.S. Senate races map below, nicked from Amber Phillips’s Aug. 7th article, “The most competitive Senate races of 2020” at WaPo’s The Fix. Note that incumbent Democratic Senate candidates in Alabama and Michigan, Sens. Doug Jones and Gary Peters, respectively, are rated “potentially-competitive.”

Does Harris on the ticket help Sens. Jones and Peters? My hunch is that it could help Jones, who owes his election to the voter mobilization efforts of African American women in Alabama. Jones ought to be a bit more optimistic today. If Harris gives the ticket a bump in Michigan, Peters could also benefit, even  though he has an African American Republican opponent. For Peters, much depends on pro-Democratic GOTV in Detroit.

But the greatest benefit Harris may provide in Senate races could be in increasing Black voter turnout in some of the 13 Republican-held seats now rated “potentially-competive.” If Democrats put some extra resources into African American GOTV in Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Houston and Dallas, they may reap a couple of upsets in senate races.

There will be skepticism about Harris’s record as a prosecutor from some Black Lives Matter activists and supporters, some of which will be offset by widening the zone of comfort for voters who like her ‘tough on crime’ record. If Harris can recapture some of the magic of her presidential campaign kick-off, Republican senate candidates will have even more to worry about.

Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator Paul Begala, who served as a political consultant for President Bill Clinton has some strong feelings about Democratic messaging at this political moment. Begala, author of “You’re Fired: The Perfect Guide, writes in “Trump declares war on Social Security, Medicare” at CNN Opinion that Trump’s “executive action suspending collection of payroll taxes hands the Democrats the kind of issue that can sink a candidacy. It is nothing less than a declaration of war on Social Security and Medicare. The payroll tax funds those two vital and beloved programs. When you suspend collection of the revenue that funds those two programs, you endanger their viability. Say it with me, Democrats: Donald Trump wants to gut Medicare and Social Security…this is not his first attempt. His 2021 and 2020 budgets each proposed deep and painful cuts in Social Security and Medicare. How deep? How painful? $2 trillion over ten years, according to the Wall Street Journal. What a coincidence: that’s about how much Trump’s 2017 tax cut for corporate America cost. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s corporate tax cut has a price tag of $1.9 trillion...Democrats can run on this and win. I was so confident of this — even before Trump’s latest attempt to gut Social Security and Medicare, that I devote an entire chapter of my new book (YOU’RE FIRED: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump) to begging Democrats to run on Trump’s attempts to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The title of the chapter is: “This Chapter Will Beat Trump: I Guarantee It.”

Asma Khalid explains “How This Conservative Florida County Became A Surprise 2020 Battleground” at npr.org: “Duval County, a traditionally conservative area in Florida’s northeast corner along the Atlantic Ocean, hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since Jimmy Carter in 1976. But in recent presidential elections, it’s begun tilting more toward the Democratic Party. In 2016, Trump won Duval County by 1.5 percentage points — one of his slimmest margins in the state…Pollsters, political scientists and party leaders all agree the county’s changing landscape is largely due to demographics and grassroots organizing. Stronger turnout among the county’s relatively large Black population combined with an influx of college-educated transplants has turned this once-reliable red county into a contested political battleground in a must-win state for Trump…In the late 1960s, Duval County and the city of Jacksonville merged into one entity, creating a large sprawling city that feels like an overgrown suburb. Trump has struggled in recent polling with suburban voters nationwide, and the same trend seems evident in Duval…Beyond demographics, activists point to the work that progressive groups like Indivisible and the New Florida Majority have been doing on the ground. Traditionally, after a midterm, the state party packs up and goes home, but after the 2018 elections, half a dozen Democratic staffers stayed on the ground to prepare for the presidential race.”

Khalid continues: “Data from the Florida Chamber of Commerce finds the two states where most Duval transplants have arrived from in recent years are New York and Pennsylvania. The assumption is these outsiders are bringing their more liberal politics to the South. Voter registration data seems to somewhat align with this theory…But the shift is not tied solely to new college-educated voters moving into the area. The new chair of the Democratic Party elected last year is a 28-year-old Black man, the youngest leader in the local party’s history. The average age in Duval is younger than many other Florida counties, and young voters tend to be more liberal…At the same time, there are some Republicans who have grown disenchanted with the president. While this frustration will not necessarily translate into votes for Biden, it has become one factor in Duval’s changing landscape…In Duval County, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans, but the GOP still usually wins elections. Jacksonville has a Republican mayor. The GOP has a majority on the city council as well. But in 2018, Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor, won Duval County — a first since the 1980s…”Arguably the single most important county in the single most important state in the most important election in a century is Duval County,” said Dean Black, the GOP county chair.”

Chris Cillizza weighs in on “The *final* Joe Biden VP rankings” at CNN Politics, and noting that “these picks are based on conversations with knowledgeable sources, reporting and just some educated guesswork.” Cillizza’s short list rankings are as follows at present: 1. Sen. Kamala Harris 2. Foprmer  UN ambassador Susan Rice 3. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer 4. Sen. Tammy Duckworth and Rep. Karen Bass. Regarding his bet on Harris, Cillizza writes, “She has the best combination of skills: She’s a charismatic candidate and debater who has been vetted on the national stage and would be a historic pick as the first African American and Indian American candidate on a national ticket…Does she have drawbacks? Yes. (Who doesn’t?) Her record as attorney general in California is ripe for the picking (as The New York Times noted Sunday morning). And her performance as a candidate in her own right — after an initial burst of promise — is worrisome…But net it all out, and Harris still makes the most sense for Biden.”

Amy Walter shares some thoughts concerning “What Biden Really Needs From a VP Pick” at The Cook Political Report: “At this moment of racial reckoning, it would be riskier for Biden not to choose a woman of color as his Vice President. The choice of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Sen. Elizabeth Warren feels like the political equivalent of ‘not reading the room.’…Given Biden’s age, his VP pick will also get more attention than usual from voters. After all, it’s not inconceivable that this person will be asked to step in to take over the most stressful job in the world. This isn’t the time for outsiders. Someone who understands how Washington works — and has been a part of it — is a plus…The four most-oft mentioned Black women; former UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Reps. Val Demings and Karen Bass and Sen. Kamala Harris, all have Washington experience. But, none of them have been tested and vetted the way Harris has. She didn’t run a flawless campaign. But, she has experience on the presidential stage that the others don’t. She’s not a household name, but she is familiar. And, while she doesn’t have the depth of White House experience as Rice, she has notably less baggage.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr. urges former Vice President Biden to accept the challenge presented by Trump’s ludicrous-on-so-many-levels charge that, if elected, Biden would “hurt God.” As Dionne writes in his syndicated Washington Post column, “Never has a politician accorded his opponent so much power. Last week, President Trump said that if former vice president Joe Biden won the White House, he would “hurt God.”..Wow! What supernatural chops! Trump did not specify how exactly a mere mortal could “hurt” the Almighty, but he warns Biden would create a world of “no religion, no anything.”…“He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy,” said Trump. Yes, energy sources are now polarized between red and blue, and the Supreme Being is part of it…Here’s the good news: Trump’s truly idiotic language and Biden’s own faith open new opportunities to push back against forms of religious warfare that have done grave damage both to religion and to our politics. Trump’s theology-free theology and his reduction of God to a political consultant’s role offer Biden, and progressives more generally, a large opening for reconciliation. Think of it as a Providential moment.”

Charlie Cook offers this observation at The Cook Political Report: “The data suggest though that the tolerance that voters had for Trump’s unconventional style may have ended with his handling—or mishandling—of the pandemic, and the killing of George Floyd, and subsequent nationwide demonstrations. It appears that among those outside his base, his credibility has taken a beating, his judgement and motives suspect. Trump’s ability to draw support beyond his base was predicated on keeping an economic tailwind that looks unlike to exist by November…The issue of reopening the economy brings all of these to a head. Last month, the ABC/Washington Post poll asked, “What do you think is more important—trying to control the spread of the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, or trying to restart the economy, even if it hurts efforts to control the spread of the virus?” Just 33 percent chose Trump’s oft-stated course of restarting the economy as soon as possible, while 63 percent chose the former option. In fact, 52 percent responded to a follow-up question by saying they strongly agree with the option that suggests controlling the virus, twice as many as the 26 percent who strongly wanted to reopen the economy. On one of the most important and consequential policy choices one can imagine, a large majority took the opposite view of the president. That suggests big problems.”

Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystall Ball: “We rank the top dozen Senate seats in order of their likelihood of flipping. Of the 12, 10 are held by Republicans, underscoring the amount of defense that the GOP will need to play in order to hold their majority…We have two Senate rating changes, one in favor of each party…Overall, the battle for the Senate is close, although we would probably rather be the Democrats than the Republicans at the moment. The reason is basically that, of the three decisive Toss-ups in our ratings, we would probably pick the Democrats in at least two of them right now: both Maine and North Carolina are closer to Leans Democratic than Leans Republican. If Democrats win those, as well as Arizona and Colorado (while losing Alabama), they would forge a 50-50 tie, with what they hope is a Democratic vice president breaking ties…Beyond these top races, the Democrats also have better second-tier targets than the Republicans: namely, the regular race in Georgia as well as Montana. We were prepared to add Kansas to that list, too, but Roger Marshall seems to have spared the GOP that additional headache.”

Kondik’s updated Senate map:

Democrats who are focusing all of their hopes on November 3rd need to recalibrate. Read “With early-voting states in mind, Trump campaign resets” by Nicole Sganga at cbsnews.com. As Sganga writes, “In Arizona, a whopping three-quarters of the electorate voted before Election Day in 2016, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, with a greater influx anticipated this year amid the coronavirus pandemic…”I know a lot of people look at the election countdown clock on our wall: it says 91 days,” Stepien told Fox News, Monday. “But ballots will be in the hands of North Carolina voters in 33 days.”…And while North Carolina is the first state to send out absentee ballots beginning on September 4, Georgia follows soon after on September 15, with Florida on September 24. Early voting begins in Arizona the first week of October…According to “Fair Fight,” a voting rights group established by former Georgia minority leader Stacey Abrams following her gubernatorial defeat, Georgia is now home to over 750,000 new voters who were not registered and eligible to vote in 2018…In the 2016 election, over 2.7 million registered voters — 28.7% of the state’s turnout — cast their ballot by mail in Florida.” Democrats  must make their supporters more aware that the presidential election begins next month in a number of key states, and mobilize their voters to bank their votes as early as possible to minimize the mess on November 3rd.

On the same topic, Jason Lemon writes in “Early Voting Starts Next Month in Battlegrounds Fla., Mich., N.C. and Pa.—And Biden Leads Trump in All 4” at Newsweek: “Absentee and mail-in-voting will begin in the key battleground states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania next month, and President Donald Trump trails presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in each state, according to recent polls…Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania—swing states that voted for former Democratic President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 before turning red for Trump in 2016—will begin sending out mail-in ballots before the end of September. In North Carolina, ballots will start being mailed out as early as September 4…Meanwhile, the current polling averages by RealClearPolitics shows Biden ahead of Trump by more than 4 points in each state. Trump trails his Democratic rival by an average of 6.2 points in Florida, 7.8 points in Michigan, 4.5 points in North Carolina and 6 points in Pennsylvania.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. eplains why “Missouri shows us a lot about health care.” As Dionne writes, “No matter how hard they tried, Republican politicians and their allies could not stop Missouri’s voters from expanding access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act…They tried to rig the timing of the referendum by forcing the vote during a relatively low-turnout primary on Tuesday rather than in November. That failed. They played on racial prejudice and nativism by falsely claiming a yes vote would mean “illegal immigrants flooding Missouri hospitals . . . while we pay for it!” That failed, too…And so did Missouri this week become the sixth state since 2017 — five of them staunchly Republican — where voters took the decision on the expansion of health coverage out of the hands of recalcitrant conservative politicians…In joining Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Maine, the place known as the “Show Me State” showed the electoral power of access to health care and the danger to President Trump and Republicans of their ongoing efforts to repeal Obamacare.”

Dionne continues “The 53 percent to 47 percent victory to extend health coverage to well over 200,000 Missourians was built on large margins in the Democratic cities of St. Louis and Kansas City. But what should disturb Republicans is that, in suburban areas, including places they had carried in the past, voters supported the referendum or opposed it by much smaller margins than the GOP is accustomed to winning…Jason Hancock, the Kansas City Star’s lead political reporter, noted that largely suburban Platte County, which narrowly supported Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in 2018, gave 61 percent of its ballots to the Medicaid expansion. And while rural Republican counties around the state voted no, the margins against the Medicaid referendum were smaller there than Trump’s advantage over Hillary Clinton in 2016…All but 12 states — eight of them in the old Confederacy — have now expanded Medicaid. And the evidence is strong that if their voters were given the chance, they, too, would decide for expansion. In May, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health Tracking Poll found that in the states that had not accepted Obamacare’s Medicaid offer (which then included Missouri and Oklahoma), 66 percent favored expansion. “Even in red areas of red states, there is some support for expanding Medicaid,” said Liz Hamel, KFF’s director of public opinion and survey research, noting that the May survey found 37 percent of Republicans favoring the step.”

David Wasserman warns at The Cook Political Report, “Trailing Joe Biden in polls, President Trump is attacking mail-in voting as a potential source of illegal Democratic votes on a near-daily basis. But the biggest risk of a pandemic-induced crush of mail-in votes isn’t fraud, an extraordinarily rare occurrence in American elections…The real danger is a perfect catastrophe of administrative overload, postal delays and voter error that could lead to millions of absentee ballots not counting. And this year, unlike the past, those ballots are likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic…Trump’s denigration of mail-in voting, as well as differing attitudes about the seriousness of COVID-19, are poised to blow open an unprecedented partisan divide between votes cast by mail and those cast on Election Day. A July ABC/Washington Post poll found that a majority of Democrats (51 percent to 46 percent) plan to vote by mail this November, while nearly four in five Republicans (79 percent to 20 percent) still plan to vote in person…So far in North Carolina, November absentee ballot requests by registered Democrats are up 702 percent over 2016 levels but up just 48 percent among Republicans, according to data compiled by Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College…The problem for Democrats? Absentee ballots are rejected at higher rates than those cast in person. And academic studies have shown that younger voters and voters of color, some of Democrats’ most reliable voters, are much more likely to cast mail ballots that are rejected and less likely to take steps to “cure” their ballots if election officials flag them for signature problems.”

Also at The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook writes, “So now we await Biden’s decision on his veep candidate. It is still my belief that running mates are rarely of any import in the outcome of a presidential election. You have to go back 60 years to John Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Johnson, which undoubtedly helped bring Texas into the Democratic column in a very close race. This election is hardly likely to turn on who Biden chooses. Indeed, it may not turn particularly on Biden himself; this election is pretty clearly a referendum on the incumbent and about little else. While it is true that a running mate is more likely to hurt than help, despite all of the hoopla it rarely matters at all, at least electorally…Yet given Biden’s age and the fact that he may not run for a second term in 2024, his pick is enormously important in a governing sense and in terms of the intermediate future of his party. The choice might well give the Democrats an ideological, generational, and stylistic shove in one direction or the other. After all, the last four sitting vice presidents who sought their party’s presidential nomination all won that nomination.”

“Since the World Health Organization declared an official pandemic on March 11, 37 states plus Washington, D.C., have held statewide primaries¹for president or state-level office,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight. “And while those that have gone poorlyhave tended to grab the headlines, there have been success stories too. Ultimately, it’s been hard to assess how well our democracy has adapted to the pandemic. So here’s a snapshot of all 38 statewide elections since the pandemic started and what macro trends we’ve been able to observe so far…First, most states — and almost all those that actually made an effort to do so — were wildly successful at getting people to vote by mail (or at least vote before election day). In 24 out of 35 states for which we have this data, a majority of ballots were cast absentee.² In addition, every state but one³made more use of absentee ballots than it did in the equivalent election in 2016.⁴ Considering what a massive logistical undertaking it is to switch to a predominantly mail election, this is an impressive achievement by election officials. (Of course, as we’ll cover below, it didn’t always go off without a hitch.)”

“Unsurprisingly,” Rakich continues, “states that mailed every voter a ballot saw the highest share of their votes cast absentee, although it’s hard to definitively say that was the reason, as these states also offered few polling places — or, in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, no polling places at all…However, other ways of encouraging mail voting had more mixed results. For instance, in the states that just mailed voters absentee-ballot applications or instructions for how to apply for an absentee ballot, there was anywhere from 45 percent absentee participation in Delaware to 84 percent in Nebraska. (But don’t read too much into the 100 percent absentee rates in Idaho and North Dakota — they, too, eliminated in-person voting.)…What we do know is the states that did not mail voters anything to nudge them toward voting absentee (such as Illinois, with 9 percent absentee participation, and Oklahoma, with 14 percent absentee participation) tended to have the lowest shares of absentee voters, and the smallest increases from 2016. The same was true of states like Louisiana and Texas, which still required voters to provide an excuse to vote absentee. A notable exception was Wisconsin, where 75 percent of votes were cast absentee despite nothing being mailed to them. Most likely, the intense news coverage predicting doom and gloom for Wisconsin’s primary caused Wisconsinites to heed the state government’s advice and request absentee ballots; both Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns also encouraged their supporters to vote by mail.”

“There’s an important caveat here,” Rakich continues, “though: Just because the coronavirus did not lower turnout overall does not mean it didn’t disenfranchise individual voters. We know that at least some voters were unable to vote because of the pandemic…The coronavirus has put American democracy to the test — and by our reckoning, election officials have made big strides in a short period of time. But a lot of work must still be done…So where does this leave us headed into November? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, it is worth keeping in mind how states handled their primaries. But on the other hand, don’t assume a state that performed competently in the primary will do so in the general, or the inverse. They may, but the general election is also a very different beast — and, with that higher turnout, one that is much more difficult to tame. States may also learn from a bad experience during the primary and resolve to do things differently in the fall; they may have more or less funding available for November than they did for the primary, and they may tweak rules surrounding absentee-ballot or in-person voting access. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what the 2020 general election will look like — and how each state will fare.”

Domenico Montanaro reports in “2020 Electoral Map Ratings: Trump Slides, Biden Advantage Expands Over 270 Votes” at npr.org that “It’s hard to believe that the hole President Trump dug for himself could get deeper, but it has…A record and widening majority of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing when it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic; he gets poor scores on race relations; he’s seen a suburban erosion despite efforts to win over suburban voters with fear; and all that has led to a worsened outlook for Trump against Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential election…As a result, in the past month and a half, the latest NPR analysis of the Electoral College has several states shifting in Biden’s favor, and now has a 297-170 advantage over Trump with exactly three months to go until Election Day…Here are our changes:

Colorado from Lean D to Likely D
Florida from Toss Up to Lean D
New Hampshire from Toss Up to Lean D
Nevada from Toss Up to Lean D
Pennsylvania from Toss Up to Lean D
Georgia from Lean R to Toss up.”

At Newsweek, David H. Freedman warns that “The pandemic has in fact driven up voter interest in mail-ins on both sides—but it may be too late to make the adjustment. Setting up a mail-in ballot system efficient enough to handle a large percentage of a state’s voters takes years, says Kathleen Hale, an Auburn University political scientist and election expert who works with officials throughout the country to help ensure elections go smoothly. Nevertheless, in response to the pandemic, dozens of states, including New York, have tried to vastly expand their mail-in capabilities—from supplementary absentee ballots to universal access—virtually overnight. They could face serious problems with the distribution, collection and counting of those ballots, says Hale, author of “How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections.” “There’s substantial risk in trying to change the system on the fly,” she says.”

Freedman continues, “Twelve states passed legislation since March making it easier to vote by mail, but battleground states have drawn the most scrutiny. Small shifts in voting in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina could swing 15 or more electoral votes one way or the other. The Texas governor and its Republican legislative majority have fought to block any expansion of mail-in voting. A pro-mail-in-vote group sued the state and won in a federal court, only to be overturned in a higher court when the state appealed…Pennsylvania gets a C from the Brookings Institute’s mail-in-voting accessibility scorecard. So does Georgia, which sent out mail-in ballots for its primary. Under pressure from the Republican state legislature, however, the state does not plan to follow suit in the general election. Michigan gets a B, but Trump has threatened to withhold federal funds if the state doesn’t back off its support for voting by mail. Trump has so far refrained from making similar threats against Florida over its embrace of mail-in voting, perhaps because it’s where he himself votes—by mail, at least in the case of this year’s primary. In states that succumb to Republican pressure to hang onto restrictions on mail-in ballots, most voters will have only one option, says Hale: to endure long lines at the polls.”

From “Want #NeverBiden Holdouts to Join #TeamJoe? Take it from this Bernie voter: Show them some respect” by Erica Etelson at medium.com: “When you try to convince someone to do or believe something, they get defensive and double-down in their opposition. This isn’t unique to so-called “Bernie bros”, it’s part of the human condition. If you want someone to consider the merits of what you’re saying, put aside your agenda and have a friendly conversation…Listen to their reasons for refusing to vote for Biden. Put yourself in their shoes –if you believed a certain candidate was the one and only person capable of plugging the hole in our ship only to see that candidate defeated by someone you believe drilled that hole, would you feel conflicted?..Respect their feelings, even if you don’t share them, and understand the following: Grief has five stages: Denial (“I can’t believe he dropped out”); anger (“The Democratic establishment screwed him over again”); bargaining (“Maybe Biden will drop out and Bernie can run”); depression (“Progressives will never win and our country is doomed”); and acceptance (“This totally blows but we have to make the best of a horrible situation”). Bernie supporters are at some stage of this grief process, and understanding their emotional state willl help you navigate the conversation.”

Etelson, author of “Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communcicate Across the Great Divide,  goes on to suggest ‘do’ and ‘don’t’ questions and statements to generate a mutually-respectful conversation and suggests four principles for questions and statements to “avoid triggering defensiveness,: including: “1. They’re phrased subjectively, not as incontrovertible truth.; 2. They acknowledge the other person’s thoughts and feelings.; 3. They acknowledge Biden’s flaws.; 4. They refrain from scolding the other person’s political purity…This last point is key. Sometimes leftists come across as self-righteous and contemptuous of those who don’t share their beliefs. Clinton’s campaign consultant says that Clinton’s highly contemptuous “deplorables” gaffe cost her the election. No one is charmed by a finger wagging in their face — not Trump voters, not swing voters and not Bernie voters…This habit of scolding ideological advesaries is exacerbated with so much of our political discourse now taking place online. Facebook is chockablock with obnoxious memes that preemptively blame “Bernie bros” for throwing the election to Trump.”

In “‘Hating Joe Biden doesn’t juice up their base’: Key swing state slips away from Trump: Trump has trailed in every public poll in Pennsylvania since June,”  Holly Otterbeing writes at Politico: “Senior citizens and suburban voters are sinking President Donald Trump’s campaign across the country…But here in Pennsylvania — home to one of the largest populations of residents age 65 or older and where suburbanites comprise more than half of the electorate — their defection to Joe Biden is hurting Trump even more acutely…It’s a very big problem in a swing state that’s central to his Rust Belt path to victory. Four years ago, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to carry Pennsylvania, in part by winning older and suburban voters, as well as blue-collar white workers in ancestrally Democratic areas. Now, with less than 100 days till Election Day, surveys show those voters are eyeing something different yet again.Joe Biden has an overall early lead in the state of 6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, and has led Trump in all 12 public polls released since the beginning of June.”

Harry Enten writes in “Trump must win North Carolina. He’s losing there” at CNN Politics: “Absentee ballots start getting mailed to North Carolina voters in just 33 days, and a new CBS News/YouGov poll reveals ominous news for President Donald Trump in the Tar Heel state…Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a narrow 48% to 44% advantage among likely voters. It’s the latest CNN approved poll to find Biden ahead in North Carolina. Last week, a NBC News/Marist College poll gave Biden a 7-point lead…To be clear, there are pretty much no paths to Trump winning the presidency without a victory in North Carolina. Additionally a Biden win in the state could help aid Democrats in their bid for the Senate majority come next January…North Carolina is best described as a swing state that tilts toward the Republican Party. Trump won it by 4 points in 2016, so this new CBS News/YouGov poll is the inverse of that…If Biden’s current polling edge in North Carolina were to be the final result, it would be the best Democratic performance since southerner Jimmy Carter won the state by 11 points in 1976…No Republican has won the presidency without North Carolina since Dwight Eisenhower did it in 1956.”

In “The choice: A healer or a heel,” Glenn Altschuler explains at msn.com why the 2020 election is more about public health than anything else: “In the midst of a pandemic, in which the United States has suffered more fatalities per capita than all but a handful of other nations, Nov. 3, 2020, is almost certain to be a referendum on public health. Former Vice President Joe Biden has already defined the presidential election as, in essence, a contest between an empathetic and experienced healer and a callous and clueless heel…The strategy appears to be working. A poll completed in mid-July found that 54 percent of Americans trust Biden to address the Coronavirus crisis, while only 34 percent expressed confidence in President Trump. In another survey, Americans gave Biden a substantial edge over Trump on a range of personality traits: honesty, cares about the needs of ordinary people, a good role model, even-tempered…African Americans and Latinos, it is now clear, are about three times more likely to be infected with the Coronavirus as their white neighbors and nearly twice as likely to die from the disease. Many of them have front-line jobs, rely on public transportation, share living spaces with other people, including elderly relatives, have underlying medical conditions and less access to quality healthcare. They are collateral damage of Trump’s politicization of COVID-19.”

Altschuler adds, “Other casualties include Americans over the age of 65, who are more likely than younger people to support mask wearing and social distancing and who are apprehensive about a premature reopening of the economy. Many in this age cohort, which was responsible in no small measure for Trump’s victory in 2016, now find the president “self-absorbed” and “not serious” – and prefer Biden…In 2020, Democrats should also return to the public health agenda that resonated with so many voters in the mid-term elections. Despite Trump’s promises, they can point out, his administration did not even draft – let alone get a Congress controlled by Republicans to pass – a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Instead, they will no doubt remind voters, Trump’s Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare(which, according to a Fox News poll, is supported by 56 percent of Americans), a move that would eliminate coverage for as many as 23 million Americans (in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic that has significantly increased the number of people without health insurance)…the Democratic campaign can tout Biden’s healthcare plan, which features lowering the age to opt into Medicare to 60; offering a “public option” to anyone not satisfied with employer-sponsored coverage; reducing costs to people who buy insurance on the ACA exchanges; and repealing laws exempting corporations from negotiating with Medicare over drug prices. Unlike “Medicare for All,” which remains controversial, these significant but incremental reforms are likely to garner support from a substantial percentage of voters…Recently, Biden has contrasted his approach with that of the president, who, he says, “has quit on the country” because he is unwilling or unable to understand that “he can’t deal with our economic crisis without serving, saving, and solving the public health crisis.”

In her July 25th New York Times article, “Mothers’ Power in U.S. Protests Echoes a Global Tradition,” Amanda Taub writes “History suggests that mothers’ power is most potent when they are able to wield their own respectability, and the protections it brings, as a political cudgel. But that is easiest for women who are already privileged: married, affluent, and members of the dominant racial or ethnic group…Mothers who are less privileged often struggle to claim that power, even though they are often the ones who most urgently need it.”

A week ago, the predominantly-white ‘Wall of Moms’ in Portland got a taste of the violence that women of color have long experienced in protest demonstrations. As Taub writes, “Ann Gregory, a lawyer and mother of two who joined the wall of moms in Portland on Sunday, said they had hoped to serve as a buffer between other demonstrators and law enforcement…“We realize that we’re a bunch of white women, and we do have privilege,” she said. “We were hoping to use that to protect the protesters…So on her first night at the protests, when federal officers fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at the group of moms, “I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she said. “We weren’t being violent. We weren’t screaming expletives at them.”

The Wall of Moms demonstrations in Portland, which explicitly supports Black Lives Matter, should be welcomed by all Americans who care about racial justice. Taub writes, “However, when officers fire tear gas and projectiles at soccer moms holding sunflowers, as happened in Portland on Sunday night, even more observers — who may not previously have thought they could be at risk — see that as a fate that might befall anyone. And history suggests that could have profound political consequences.”

Countless thousands of women who are not mothers have taken part in nonviolent protest movements for racial justice, and they have made outstanding contributions in struggles against racism, going back to the early abolitionist movement. Indeed, every demographic group can play an important role in protesting against racially-motivated violence in law enforcement. But if they don’t increase their voter turnout on election day, their accomplishments will be limited.

There is something uniquely powerful in the optics of mothers organizing into a force for peaceful social change. There are ample precedents of women organized as mothers winning victories against oppressive forces, as Taub notes, including the “Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo” (a.k.a. “Mothers of the Disappeared) protests in Buenos Aires, Argentina 1976-83 and the women who organized the ‘Black Sash’ in South Africa in the 1970s. Taub explains that “The Government has let Black Sash survive while closing down other anti-apartheid groups in part because white South African society has perched its women on pedestals,” The Times reported in 1988. “The police find it awkward to pack the paddy wagons with well-bred troublemakers who look like their mothers or sisters.”

There are legitimate concerns about the protests against police violence against African Americans turning violent and provoking political backlash. Violence and destruction of property are the media optics Trump seeks in his increasingly desperate divide-and-conquer strategy, and there has been too much of that already. But it’s likely that the demonstrations will continue for a while at least. Protest organizers in Portland and elsewhere must more effectively invoke disciplined nonviolence, as did MLK and his leadership team, to stop the violence and property destruction, regardless of who is perpetrating it.

Yet the spectacle of mothers being bullied by Trump’s mercenaries on national television, and in print and internet media will likely amplify his image as the most corrupt and divisive president in U.S. history. The Wall of Moms protest may yet have a positive effect on November 3rd voting.

Credit Portland’s Wall of Moms protest with taking a creative stand for racial justice. These women could have stayed home and watched Trump’s hired militia brutality on television. Instead, they traded complacency for a season of service on the front lines of nonviolent protest. May their courageous examples inspire concerned mothers in all states to join nonviolent protests for racial justice and equality — and turn out at the polls in record numbers.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. concldes his latest Washington Post column, “This Republican implosion has been a long time coming” with ths observation: “Having skipped their homework, having spread the coronavirus with a spring break fantasy that bars and restaurants and everything else could open wide, Republicans had the nerve on Wednesday to ask for an extension. Pass a “skinny” bill extending some unemployment insurance provisions and a rent moratorium (without, of course, helping renters pay the rent)…Sorry, but you reach a point when political parties, like wayward students, must be given an F. I hope Republicans will be ready to govern again someday. Right now, the party has earned itself only a multi-year expulsion…Even more dramatically, Biden has reversed Trump’s 2016 lead among voters age 65 and older. In 2016, Trump carried seniors 56 percent to 41 percent, according to the CCES data. But Biden, who carried seniors overwhelmingly in the Democratic primaries, leads Trump 50 percent to 45 percent among the oldest voters in the average of current polls.”

At The Cook Political Report, David Wasserman shares some data-based observations that should gladden Democratic hearts: “The 2016 election was defined by mass defections of remaining white, working-class members of Democrats’ coalition to Trump, particularly in heartland states. Much in the same way, the 2020 election is currently on track to see mass defections of the remaining white professional members of Republicans’ coalition to Biden — a trend disproportionately playing out in the suburbs where those voters tend to live…In an average of nine live-interview national surveys conducted since the start of June, Biden is clobbering Trump 58 percent to 37 percent among whites with college degrees, more than double Clinton’s 51 percent to 42 percent lead among that group in 2016 according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a nationally representative sample of 64,600 adults. Biden has also modestly cut Trump’s lead among whites without degrees to 55 percent to 37 percent, down from 59 percent to 35 percent in 2016.”

However, Wasserman adds, “If there’s a surprising weakness for Biden, it’s non-white voters – especially Latinos. He’s carrying African-Americans by 75 points over Trump in the latest polls, down from Clinton’s 80 point margin in 2016. But Trump has narrowed the gap among Latino voters to 30 points, down from his 40 point deficit four years ago. Latinos, along with 18-29 year old voters, sport some of the highest undecided rates in today’s polls…Perhaps fortunately for Biden, Latinos are underrepresented in the Electoral College battleground. In 2016, Latinos made up nine percent of the nation’s voters, but they were less than four percent of all voters in all but three of the ten closest states in 2016: Arizona (17 percent), Florida (17 percent) and Nevada (16 percent). That could limit the real benefit of any Trump improvement with Latinos since 2016…What’s more, Biden’s relative weakness with Latinos may be offset by the fact that Arizona and Florida also happen to boast the highest shares of seniors – a group with whom he is demonstrating surprising strength – of all the battleground states.”

Nathaniel Rakich explains why “Florida Could Go Blue in 2020” at FiveThirtyEight: “Florida has long been a slightly red state. Since 2004, it has consistently voted 3 or 4 points more Republican than the nation as a whole in presidential elections. (Indeed, polls of Florida are currently¹ 0.9 points better for President Trump than national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages.) But could what happened in 2018 — when Florida was so much redder than the nation that it was out of reach for Democrats, even in a wave election — happen again in 2020?…Most glaringly, Miami-Dade County — Florida’s most populated county — and Osceola County voted more than 8 points more Republican in the 2018 Senate race than in the 2016 presidential race. In addition, Nelson underperformed Clinton by 6 points in the much less populous Hendry County.” Despite the Republican edge with Cuban-American voters in south Florida, Rakich notes that “Puerto Rican Floridians (who make up 32 percent of Osceola County) strongly dislike Trump” and “According to Carlos Odio, the co-founder of data firm EquisLabs, a private poll recently gave Biden a 41-point lead among Puerto Rican voters in Florida, which would be close to the 46-point lead Clinton enjoyed in a Latino Decisions pollimmediately before the 2016 election.”

Rakich concludes, “In summary, it’s not unreasonable to believe that Biden will be able to hold onto (or build upon) Nelson’s gains in the blue counties in the map above, thanks to the current pro-Democratic national environment. And with the help of Hispanic voters, older voters, or both, it’s also not hard to imagine Biden returning to Clinton’s levels of support in some of the counties that drifted red in 2018. However, Trump is fighting to build upon his 2016 support among these voters too, and without them, Biden will have a hard time winning the state — as 2018 showed…The bottom line: The outlook is bright for Democrats in the Sunshine State. On average, polls of Florida show Biden leading Trump by a healthy 7.1 points.⁴ If that holds, it would be a blowout by Florida standards — the widest margin for a presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush won by 22 points in 1988. But, of course, if Florida does go blue again in 2020, it would put the state in a very familiar role: as a beach ball once again.”

In his New York Times column, “Trump Is Trying to Bend Reality to His Will: Can his aggressive version of ethnonationalist populism prevail in 2020? The answer is not obvious,” Thomas B. Edsall shares the results of a study that illuminates the relationship between social mobility and political behavior: “The difficulty of rising up the economic ladder is reflected in the decline in mobility in the United States. Research by Raj Chettyand colleagues has demonstrated that the percentage of children who make more than their parents has fallen from just over 90 percent for those born in 1940 to 50 percent for those born in 1984. The declines have been sharpest in the South and Midwest, as shown in the accompanying map — in many of the areas that provided key support to Donald Trump in 2016. The frustration over the lack of mobility is particularly acute for those without college degrees.”

Edsall cites another study, which sheds on social class and income, and writes “In a 2019 paper, “The College Wealth Divide: Education and Inequality in America, 1956-2016,” three German economists, Alina Bartscher, Moritz Kuhn and Moritz Schularick, all of the University of Bonn, determined that in the United States since the since the 1970s “the real income of non-college households stagnated, while the real income of college households has risen by around 50 percent.” The income data is, however, dwarfed by the findings on wealth: While non-college households were treading water in terms of wealth, college households have increased their net worth by a factor of three compared to 1971.”

Edsall adds that Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, political scientists at Hebrew University and Harvard write in “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration” that “support for radical parties is likely to be especially high among people who feel they have been socially marginalized, i.e. deprived of the roles and respect normally accorded members of mainstream society.” Edall notes that “subjective social status” — that is, “people’s own beliefs about where they stand relative to others within this status hierarchy” — has become a crucial factor in shaping political commitments. As Gidron and Hall note, “There is a consistent association between levels of subjective social status and voting for parties of the populist right and radical left. The more socially marginalized people feel, the more likely they are to gravitate toward the fringes of the political spectrum.” Edsall continues, “How many voters can be described as cross-pressured by conservative cultural views and liberal economic views?…A Voter Study Group analysis of the 2016 election by Lee Drutmanfound that just under 30 percent of voters feel this way. In addition, Drutman’s study provided support for Gidron’s view that these culturally conservative and economically liberal voters lean decisively to the right. Among the 24.3 percent of voters who fit this category and voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, 75.2 percent cast ballots for Trump and 24.8 percent for Clinton, a 3 to 1 split.”

Writing at Vox, Jen Kirby flags a new Democratic proposal, “A wave of evictions is coming. Democrats are proposing a lifeline,” which could help millions of moderate income voters, who are struggling to stay solvent during the pandemic. “The federal eviction moratorium expired last week, ending protections for approximately 12 million renters. A patchwork of state and local eviction moratoriums are elapsing, or will in the coming weeks. And expanded unemployment insurance guaranteed by the CARES Act will also run out by the end of the month, eliminating $600 a week to millions of unemployed workers who don’t have jobs to go back to right now…As these benefits dry up, the United States “is facing an eviction crisis of biblical proportions,” as Aaron Carr, founder and executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative, a nonprofit housing watchdog group, put it to Vox earlier this month. All this is happening in a country with more than 4.3 million confirmed Covid-19 cases, where one of the best strategies mitigate the coronavirus outbreak is to keep people home…To try to ease this crisis, Democrats in Congress have proposed new legislation to help Americans facing evictions. On Tuesday, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) are introducing the Housing Emergencies Lifeline Program (HELP) Act, which will provide funding so those at risk of eviction can access legal representation and any evictions will do limited damage to renters’ credit.”

The title of Joshua Zeitz’s Politico, article provides an irresistible teaser for this political junkie: “How John Lewis Transformed American Politics: He took his radicalism inside the establishment, forever changing the Democratic Party and America itself.” That should be enough to grab the attention of any good Democrat. Among Zeitz’s observations:

How risky is the Biden campaign’s decision to skip campaign rallies? Not very, according to Alan I. Abramowitz, who writes in “Do Campaign Visits Pay Off? Evidence from the 2016 Presidential Election” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “In order to estimate the impact that campaign visits had on the election results, I conducted a regression analysis of the results in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. I used the Democratic vote margin as the dependent variable and the relative number of campaign visits to each state along with the Democratic vote margin in the 2012 presidential election as independent variables…the relative number of campaign trips to a state by Trump and Clinton had no effect on the results…With infection levels rising in many states and several Trump campaign staffers having tested positive for COVID-19, it is not clear how many more live rallies the Trump campaign will be able to conduct between now and Election Day. The Biden campaign currently has no plans to hold live campaign rallies. However, the findings reported in this article indicate that whether either campaign holds live rallies and whether one holds more rallies than the other will probably have little or no impact on the election results at the state level. Campaign events may have other benefits such as energizing supporters and stimulating donations, but in 2016 they did not appear to have any effect on how well candidates did in the states in which they were held.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains “Why progressives should welcome anti-Trump Republicans,” and observes “if you believe (as I certainly do) that defeating President Trump is the prerequisite for anything good happening again in American politics, you should welcome everyone willing to help get the job done. And in light of Trump’s threats to challenge the results if he loses, the health of our democracy may depend on Biden’s winning by a landslide that would leave not a smidgen of doubt about what the voters were saying. This is an all-hands-on-deck proposition…But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves: If the race tightens, the Republican converts could be essential to getting Biden over the line…Finally, for a progressive program to have any chance in Congress, the Democrats will have to take over the Senate. The bigger Biden’s margin, the better the chances of this happening…That Trump and Trumpism create a national emergency is reason enough to pitch a very big tent. But this election could also open the way for a durable shift in the nation’s dominant public philosophy toward social decency and greater equality. A transformation of that sort requires the witness of converts.”

In her Fox News opinion article, “To win presidency and majorities in Congress, Democrats should follow this battle plan,” Donna Brazile writes: “So, putting aside the purported current state of this election campaign, here is what Democrats need to do to win the White House, retake control of the Senate, and expand their majority in the House…The four most important letters in politics are GOTV — Get Out the Vote! I know that sounds obvious. But in the middle of a deadly pandemic, getting out the vote in November will be both incredibly challenging and more important than ever before…Democratic candidates need to make this election a referendum on Donald Trump’s lack of character, utter absence of empathy, unethical use of the presidency to boost his business earnings and attack his enemies, and total lack of qualifications to be our nation’s leader…In focusing on the issues that matter to Americans, Democrats must convince voters across the political spectrum that, unlike Trump, we can be trusted. We care about people over profits. And we can unify our country after four of the most divisive years in our country’s history…Democrats must highlight the extreme right-wing trajectory of the federal bench under Trump, and tell the American people how this will immediately change on the day Biden becomes president and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., becomes Senate majority leader…”

Brazile adds, “In distinguishing our candidates from Trump, Democrats must be laser-focused on the issues, and on character and unity. We cannot respond to every inane Trump tweet, every shameless attack, and every contrived dispute. Instead, we must seize specific opportunities to rebut Trump’s angry and divisive approach to politics, by putting forward Democrats’ positive and bipartisan approach to governing…Democratic candidates must also show how the Republican Party has been co-opted by Trump. We must tell the American people how we will focus on unifying our country and ending the chaos that Trump brought to Washington. And we must highlight how Republicans have been complicit in this chaos, when they prioritize loyalty to their party and to Trump over the American people…So with 100 days until Election Day 2020, this is my message — and my warning — to Democratic candidates and our potential supporters: Get out the vote!  And focus on character, unity, and the issues that are most important to the American people, and to the voters in your individual states and congressional districts.”

Writing in Newsweek, Martin Luther King III shared the following thoughts on Rep. John Lews’s legacy and challenge to progressives: “Lewis understood that the unobstructed right to vote for all citizens, regardless of their race, religion or gender, is the cornerstone of every great democracy. A recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize, Lewis worked tirelessly to end voter suppression practices that are still being deployed. The Voting Rights Alliance lists 61 forms of voter suppression. These include: reducing the number of polling places in communities of color, intimidating voters on Election Day, “caging” and purging of registration rolls in selected ZIP codes, discriminatory voter identification requirements, draconian felon disenfranchisement laws, faulty voting machines in minority precincts, manipulation of legal residency requirements for college students, shrinking the window for early voting in key states and excessive restrictions on voting by mail, to name just a few…The daunting challenges Americans face in 2020, including police violence and its cascading repercussions in many American communities, deepening polarization and the COVID-19 pandemic, underscore the enormous consequences of our elections and the leaders we chose to guide us through crises. My fervent hope that the celebration of Lewis’ life and legacy will energize millions of Americans to vote and elect leaders who will honor his memory by passing laws to make it easier, not harder, to vote…We cannot rest until exercising the right to vote is simple and easy for all Americans. Restoring the Voting Rights Act to its full strength is one of the best ways we can honor the life and legacy of Lewis.”

At abcnews.go.com, Alisa Wiersema reports that “available data seems to indicate that Democrats are leaning into mail voting in greater numbers than Republicans…In the key battleground of Florida and Ohio, Democrats outpaced Republicans in absentee ballot requests during primary contests. North Carolina, another state that is crucial for the presidential electoral count, is slated to be among the first to mail general election ballots this fall. There, Democrats’ requests for absentee ballots currently top Republicans by nearly five times…As of Wednesday, in Florida, 210,593 Democrats had already cast mail ballots for the state’s August primary election, compared to 175,458 Republicans according to data provided by the Florida Division of Elections. Last week, Florida Democrats announced more than one million Democrats had enrolled or renewed their vote by mail enrollment in the time since the March presidential preference primary. Currently, Sunshine State Democrats tout an enrollment advantage of more than 400,000 voters over Republicans.”

Wiersema notes further, “A similar scenario appears to be unfolding in the battleground state of North Carolina, where according to data provided by the state’s Board of Elections, as of Thursday, 44,555 Democrats so far had requested absentee ballots for the November general election. At the same time, just 8,623 Republicans had done the same…A week out from the contest, [Republican Secretary of State Frank] LaRose announced that 1,667,883 Ohioans had requested a vote-by-mail ballot. Of the data available at the time, 866,104 of them were Democrats and 705,478 were Republicans. At that point, Democrats had also cast 88,000 more ballots than Republicans.As of July 17, 534,610 Democrats in Kentucky — where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is up for reelection — had requested absentee ballot applications, compared with 318,729 Republicans. In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins, the last New England Republican in either chamber of Congress, is facing her toughest reelection battle yet. There, McDonald’s data analysis indicated that 132,536 Democrats requested mail ballots for the June 14 primary, compared with 38,516 Republicans.”

“In deploying federal forces,” Ronald Brownstein writes at The Atlantic, “Trump appears to be trying to provoke clashes with protesters, which he can use to convince white suburban voters that he’s the last line of defense between them and the chaos allegedly incubating in cities, Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, told me. Referring to the street battle between construction workers and anti-war protesters in Manhattan in 1970, Emanuel said, “Trump is trying to create his own hard-hat riot, and they are wearing [law-enforcement] helmets.”…The political risk for Republicans in that strategy, many political observers told me, is not only that it could provoke more opposition from residents in the city centers, but that it could also accelerate the shift toward Democrats in the large, well-educated, and more and more diverse inner suburbs around the major cities. Over time, the “larger denser suburbs” have become “like cities and throw in with the cities”—they don’t identify as much with the less-populated areas, says Robert Lang, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and a co-author of the upcoming book Blue Metros, Red States.”

“The politics of all these proliferating battles between Republican officials and Democratic cities may unfold at two levels,” Brownstein continues. “With Trump monumentally unpopular in urban centers but still strong in rural places, the most immediate political question is how suburban voters will respond…since the 1990s, more suburbanites have concluded that their political views align more with the diverse, cosmopolitan cities nearby than with the more culturally conservative, preponderantly white, and Christian smaller places far from the urban core. Under Trump that process has intensified: He’s precipitated a significant shift toward the Democrats in white-collar suburbs that fueled the party’s sweeping gains in the House in 2018. Though Republicans once could count on big margins as soon as they crossed a city’s boundaries, Lang notes, now, in most places, “the line for Republicans has moved outward further” in the metro, he says…Trump’s alarms about “angry mobs” and “violent mayhem” in Democratic cities might allow him to recapture some Republican-leaning white suburbanites and energize his rural and small-town support, analysts in both parties told me. But as I’ve written before, his belligerent tone simultaneously risks hardening the opposition he’s facing from the many suburban voters who feel that he’s exposing them to more danger—both in his response to the policing protests and his unrelenting push to reopen the economy despite the coronavirus’s resurgence. In last week’s national Quinnipiac University poll, just over seven in 10 white voters holding at least a four-year college degree disapproved of Trump’s handling of both race relations and the outbreak.”

At The New York Times, columnist Thomas B. Edsall takes a look at a range of studies of the determinates of liberal and conservative views, and his findings may help explain Trump’s messaging success in 2016. As Edsall writes “In a February 2019 paper, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” four political scientists, Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher and Bert N. Bakker, argue that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties” and that this variance in linguistic complexity is “rooted in personality differences among conservative and liberal politicians. The former prefer short, unambiguous statements, and the latter prefer longer compound sentences, expressing multiple points of view.”…The authors cite studies suggesting that this linguistic divide is persistent: “The Readability and Simplicity of Donald Trump’s Language,” published in The Political Studies Review and “Research on linguistic habits of American and British politicians shows that conservative politicians make less complex statements than liberal politicians.”

Edsall writes, further, “One study showed that “the speeches of liberal US presidents score higher on integrative complexity than those of conservatives, as measured by the presence of “words involved in differentiation (exclusive words, tentative words, negations) as well as integration of different perspectives (conjunctions).”…Another found that “conservative political bloggers use less complex language than their liberal counterparts and conservative citizens use language that scores lower on integrative complexity than liberal citizens.”…Separate studies of the language used by presidents — both “The Readability and Simplicity of Donald Trump’s Language,” and an analysis of the language used by the last 15 presidents on the blog Factbase — concluded that President Trump speaks at the lowest level of all those studied, as measured on the on the Flesch-Kincaid index. As Factbase put it: “By any metric to measure vocabulary, using more than a half dozen tests with different methodologies, Donald Trump has the most basic, most simplistically constructed, least diverse vocabulary of any president in the last 90 years.”

In addition, Edsall notes that “Some scholars argue that a focus on ideological conflict masks the most salient divisions in the era of Donald Trump: authoritarians versus non-authoritarians…Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” emailed me on this point to say that “It’s really critical to help people understand the difference between conservatives and authoritarians. Conservatives are by nature opposed to change and novelty, whereas authoritarians are averse to diversity and complexity. It’s a subtle but absolutely critical distinction…“What we’re facing,” she continued, “is an authoritarian revolution — not a conservative revolution, the term is inherently contradictory — which in the U.S. has been creeping up since the 1960s…Authoritarianism, Stenner continued, is “clearly distinct from what I call “laissez faire conservatism.” In fact, in cross-national research I consistently find that these two dimensions are actually negatively related. If anything, authoritarians tend to be wary of free markets and more supportive of government intervention and redistribution, perhaps even schemes of equalization and progressive taxation.””

Trump’s messaging has taken the politics of distraction to a new low, piling one outrage on top of another so quickly that the news media has trouble keeping focused on his unprecedented corruption. “Trump has been involved in so many scandals and says so many reprehensible things,” writes E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his Washington Post column, “that our country has developed a kind of herd immunity to the outrage that just one of his actions would have called forth in any previous administration. We have allowed Trump to fend off one scandal with . . . another scandal…The key is seeing that Trump’s entirely selfish approach to the presidency has a measurable and material impact on the lives of citizens and on the policies he pursues — to the extent that he is interested in policy at all. He cares above all about his own finances, his ego, his ratings and escaping accountability. Everything else falls by the wayside …Trump’s opponents cannot assume, as they did in 2016, that if they drive home just how awful Trump is personally, voters will recoil in horror. This year, it is essential to make the case that Trump’s corruption means that most of the time he pays no attention to governing. And when he does, he governs in a way that subordinates the public interest to his own interests — and the interests of those who keep him in power.”

The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index “measures how much more Democratic or Republican a district performs compared to the national average.” For example, AL-1 has a p.v.i. rating of R+15, which means that this congressional district voted an average of 15 points more for Republican presidential candidates than the national average in the last two presidential elections.  To find out your congressional district’s p.v.i., click here.

In his article, “Primary voting was a disaster. The general election doesn’t have to be that way,” David Litt, former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and author of “Democracy In One Book Or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think,” writes: “But it’s not too late to protect the integrity of the 2020 election while making it safe for every eligible American to vote. There are simple steps states and counties can take that would dramatically reduce the possibility of disaster at the ballot box or mailbox this year…First, states must set clear ground rules as early as possible. Because the impacts of coronavirus weren’t really felt in America until March, many officials had little time to make decisions about how to run the primary election process, leading to fear and confusion among the electorate. But when it comes to the general election, we have more time to prepare…Who automatically gets sent an absentee ballot? How many polling places remain open? When is the deadline for ballots to be sent or received? With the coronavirus still raging across the country, these kinds of questions must be decided decisively and quickly enough that any legal challenges to new rules can work their way through the courts.”

Litt adds, “Second, when adapting to the virus, states should err on the side of making it easier, not harder, to vote. Contrary to President Donald Trump’s evidence-free tweets, there’s no indication that mail-in voting will lead to large-scale election fraud. Five states already conducted their elections entirely by mail before the pandemic hit, and the President himself voted by mail in 2018. But there is clear evidence that confusion over mail-in balloting, coupled with overly strict rules about which ballots do and do not count, can discourage voting and invalidate eligible citizens’ ballots…To prevent this, states should mail all registered voters not only an absentee ballot, but clear instructions for how to use it. Upon receiving those ballots, states should apply the election equivalent of “innocent until proven guilty.” Rather than assume ballots with small errors are fraudulent and shouldn’t be counted, they should assume they’re valid and should be counted. In practice, this means making an aggressive effort to contact voters whose ballots are in danger of being thrown out for minor errors and giving them ample time to correct any irregularities…By acting quickly and taking commonsense, non-partisan steps, we can preserve the most important element of our country’s promise: that we, the people, can shape our destiny together.”

At Sabato’s Crystall Ball, Louis Jacobson takes a look at the longer horizon of elections and sketches “The Future Shape of the Senate.” As Jacobsen writes, “The Constitution divides the Senate into three “classes” that face the voters on six-year cycles. Under today’s political dynamics, the class that faced the voters in 2018 was favorable to the Republicans, while the class that faces the voters in 2020 is favorable to the Democrats…What about the class that faces the voters in 2022? Our analysis shows that this class is also favorable to the Democrats…If the Democrats manage to seize the Senate majority in 2020, the relatively pro-Democratic map in 2022 could insulate the party somewhat if Joe Biden is elected president and a midterm backlash benefiting the GOP emerges…The Democrats will need to run up the score in the Senate in both 2020 and 2022 if they are going to keep the majority past the 2024 elections, when the Republicans benefit from an extremely favorable map for their party.”

In his Washington Post column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes about a new opportunity for bipartisan legislation that can help working people. “Last week, a group of socially conservative luminaries — are they the last surviving “compassionate conservatives”? — strongly endorsed further aid for some of the most economically vulnerable people in our country…In a letter organized by W. Bradford Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the signers called for an expansion of the earned-income tax credit, which, as they noted, “rewards work,” and a $2,000 payment this fall under the Child Tax Credit program…Progressives rightly take conservatives to task for preaching about “family values” without offering any concrete help for parents desperate to build better lives for their children. Here, happily, is one occasion when words and deeds intersect…And the Child Tax Credit is the ideal policy for bringing together the left and the kinder-hearted right. Expanding the credit has been a major cause of a group of Democrats that includes Sens. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio), as well as Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.), Suzan DelBene (Wash.), Richard E. Neal (Mass.) — and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). Versions of it have also won endorsement from Republican Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah) and Josh Hawley (Mo.).”

In her article, “Nearly 6 million donors contributed record $710 million through ActBlue in three months, group says,” Fredrecka Schouten notes at CNN politics that “In all five Senate contests considered toss-ups by the Cook Political Report — races in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Maine and Montana — Democratic challengers outraised Republican incumbent senators during the April-to-June fundraising quarter, according to candidate filings with the Federal Election Commission …Democrats need a net gain of just four seats to seize the chamber from Republicans or three if Democrat Joe Biden wins the presidency and his vice president breaks ties in a 50-50 Senate. Republicans have sought to catch up to Democrats’ online advantage…WinRed, launched last year as a conservative counterweight to ActBlue, raised more than $275 million for Republican candidates in the second quarter, the group previously announced. That set a record for the GOP platform.”

At Vox, Ezra Klein reports, “Last week, Joe Biden held a 45-minute call with a small group of reporters, including myself. The main subject of the conversation was Biden’s new plan, Build Back Better: a new, post-Covid framework for his proposals to build clean energy infrastructure, revitalize American manufacturing, make care work pay for those who do it and affordable for those who need it, and address racial inequalities. My question was simple. Democrats don’t have a path to 60 seats in the Senate. So how will Biden keep his agenda from dying at the hands of the filibuster? Would he support filibuster reform, or elimination? Biden’s reply was his campaign in miniature, reflecting both the instincts that have made him successful and the caution that has frustrated many on the left…“I think it’s going to depend on how obstreperous they” — meaning Republicans — “become, and if they become that way,” he replied. “I have not supported the elimination of the filibuster because it has been used as often to protect rights I care about as the other way around. But you’re going to have to take a look at it.”…That answer, which reflected a genuine shift in Biden’s rhetoric on the issue, made some headlines. But it wasn’t the end of Biden’s argument. “I’ll say something outrageous,” he continued. “I think I have a pretty good record of pulling together Democrats and Republicans.” He went on to say many Senate Republicans will feel “a bit liberated” by Trump’s defeat and may be ready to work with Democrats on issues like infrastructure and racial inequality.”

Klein also observes, “After the 2016 election, panicked, wounded Democrats settled on a diagnosis. Trump, for all his mania, bigotry, and chaos, had given angry Americans something to vote for. To stop him, Democrats would need to match force with counter-force, polarization with mobilization. They would need to show as much anger, as much populism, as much wrecking ball energy as he did…Biden is running — and, for now, winning — by defying that diagnosis. He is executing a careful, quiet campaign focused less on thrilling his partisans than denying Trump the boogeyman he needs to reenergize his base. It’s a campaign that frustrates liberal activists and pundits because it repeatedly, routinely denies them the excitement and collisions that structure modern politics. It’s also, for that reason, a campaign that is frustrating Trump and Fox News, which is why they keep trying to run against Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar instead.”

Klein adds, “What’s striking is how well it appears to be working. As I write this, Biden is ahead by more than 9 points in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average. The Economist’s election forecasting model gives him a 92 percent likelihood of winning the Electoral College. He leads in polling averages of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina. He’s neck-and-neck with Trump in Texas. Texas! As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, even if polls prove as off in 2020 as they did in 2016, these numbers still predict a large Biden victory…The key to Biden’s success is simple: He’s slicing into Trump’s coalition, pulling back the older, whiter voters Democrats lost in 2016. The Biden campaign’s insight is that mobilization is often the flip side of polarization: When party activists are sharply divided by ideology and demography, what excites your side will be the very thing that unnerves the other side. Studies of House elections show this dynamic in action: Ideologically extreme candidates perform worse than moderates because they drive up turnout on the other side.”

Klein says, further, “Biden’s theory of wavering Trump voters is the same as his theory of wavering Republican senators: He thinks they want to vote with him but need help getting over their political hang-ups about voting for a Democrat. And so he is trying to give them that help. He praises the old Republican Party, refuses to pick a side in American politics’ hottest fights. Biden has resisted calls to abolish private insurance, ban fracking, decriminalize immigration, and defund the police. It’s cost him enthusiasm on the left, but it has denied Trump the clear foil he needs. That’s left Trump confused, pathetically insisting Biden holds positions Biden doesn’t hold and getting fact-checked live on Fox…Biden is treating Trump voters not as a monolith but as a coalition — a coalition that can be broken.All this has given Biden the opportunity to run the campaign he’s most comfortable with, and most suited to run. A campaign that’s more about giving people who don’t agree with him on everything permission to vote for him, rather than a campaign about mobilizing his own base. It might not work in every year, against every opponent, but it’s working this year, against this one.”