At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explains why “Why the 2020 election won’t be a 2016 sequel” and cites five key reasons, including: “1. In 2016, the pollsters totally whiffed on the Great Lakes states. In 2020, they’ve changed their methods….2. In 2016, a ton of undecided voters broke late for Trump. In 2020, most of those voters have already decided….3. In 2016, we had the mother of all October surprises. In 2020, we have the most stable race in decades….4. In 2016, district-level polls indicated a last-minute Democratic collapse. In 2020, they indicate Democratic strength….5. In 2016, there wasn’t a global pandemic. In 2020, there is a global pandemic.” Thompson concludes, “Biden holds a solid and steady lead over the incumbent president, while the pandemic is becoming more, not less, of a story as the country heads into the final days of voting…The most important difference between 2016 and 2020 isn’t about polling methodology or the opposing candidate. It’s this: Four years ago, Trump ran on the vague promise of success, and this year he’s running on a clear record of failure. Judging by the polls, Americans have noticed.”

At The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter has a bit of comfort for Democratic nail-biters on this election eve: “To win the election, Trump will need to win every state we currently have in the Toss Up column: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Maine’s 2nd CD, as well as the newest addition, Texas. Even then, Trump would be 22 electoral votes short of 270. He would need to win at least two of the seven states currently sitting in Lean Democrat: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Hampshire. Trump carried all but Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire in 2016….At this point, Ohio and Maine’s 2nd District are probably the most promising for Trump, followed by Texas and Iowa. If he were to win all of those, he’d be at 188 electoral votes, still 82 votes shy of 270. Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina are pure Toss Ups with Biden ahead by anywhere from 1 to 2 points in those states….In Pennsylvania, the conventional wisdom, as well as the Trump campaign, see a tightening race. The FiveThirtyEight polling average puts Biden ahead by 5 points. But, congressional district polling paints a different — and more difficult — picture for the president. These polls find Biden expanding Clinton’s margins in suburban Philadelphia, but also find Trump failing to put up the same kind of numbers he did in 2016 in central, western and northeastern Pennsylvania.”

“Without discounting the possibility of an upset,” Ronald Brownstein writes, “Tuesday’s results are likely to demonstrate that the Democrats’ coalition of transformation is now larger—even much larger—than the Republicans’ coalition of restoration…With Trump solidifying the GOP’s transformation into a “white-identity party … a nationalist party, not unlike parties you see in Europe, … you see the Democratic Party becoming the party of literally everyone else,” as the longtime Republican political consultant Michael Madrid, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told me….Even in the unlikely (but not inconceivable) event that Trump squeezes out another Electoral College victory, it seems almost certain that Biden will win the national popular vote. If he does, Democrats will have won the most votes in seven of the past eight presidential elections. No party has managed that since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Likewise, the 47 current Democratic senators won 14 million more votes in their most recent elections than the 53 current Republicans, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds. With Democrats poised for Senate gains in midsize and larger states—such as Colorado, Arizona, and possibly North Carolina and Georgia—that imbalance will widen next week. Democrats don’t have the power in Washington to show for it right now, but in this century they have a much stronger claim than Republicans to be the nation’s majority party.”

Alan I Abramowitz shares  his “Final Forecast: Results from Two Methods of Predicting the 2020 Presidential Election” for the presidential election at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz, author of The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump, writes: “Two different methods of forecasting the 2020 presidential election, one based on an aggregate level model of the national electoral vote and one based on individual state polling data, yield almost identical predictions of the outcome. The aggregate level model, first published in early August, predicts a Biden margin of 345-193 in the electoral vote. A forecast based on simply combining the results of recent state polls predicts a Biden margin of 350-188. Both predictions are extremely close to the latest forecast from the much more complex FiveThirtyEight model.”

At CNN Politics, Adam Levy, Ethan Cohen and Liz Stark report that “Republicans are narrowing the early voting gap in these states,” and write: “In the last week, voters under 30 have slightly increased their share of Florida’s early voting electorate, from 8% to 10%. Other age groups have also seen small increases, further diminishing the dominance of Florida’s senior voters 65 or older, who made up 45% of early voters a week ago, but now make up only 39%….Florida’s early voting electorate is slightly more diverse than at this time four years ago. Hispanic voters’ share of the pre-Election Day vote has increased from 14% four years ago to 16% now, and Black voters’ share has ticked slightly up from 12% then to 13% now. The vote from White voters is down three points from this point in 2016….Republicans are narrowing the gap in pre-election ballots cast. Democrats currently lead by four points. A week ago, it was nine points. Party advantage is not predictive of outcome — but nationwide polling shows many Republicans also prefer voting in person on Election Day rather than early.” In North Carolina, “Trump won the Tar Heel State by more than three percentage points in 2016….Young people are continuing to vote in large numbers in North Carolina. Last week, voters under 30 made up about 11% of early voters but that’s now ticked up slightly to over 12%….Democrats have lost some of their lead in the pre-election vote. Last week, they had a 12-point advantage over Republicans in ballots cast. Currently, it stands at eight points….By race, White voters account for the majority of ballots already cast in North Carolina at 72%, followed by Black voters with the second largest share of those ballots at 22%. This remains nearly identical to the racial composition of the early voting electorate four years ago.”

The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy makes a case that fears that the Supreme Court will steal the election are not well-grounded: “For all its flaws and added complications this year from the coronavirus pandemic, the US elections system has basic features to ensure a high correlation between the vote that is cast and the result that is announced….It is highly decentralized, with thousands of jurisdictions staffed by members of each major party, all using different technologies and independently reporting results, which can be reviewed or recounted, with both sides and the media watching out for irregularities before, during and after election day. It might take awhile, and the tragic story of disenfranchisement in the United States continues, but elections officials have vowed to deliver an accurate count.” This is not to deny the effects of voter suppression, which are glaringly evident in the unnecessary long lines and closed polls in predominantly African-American communities in many states. That’s where the election is more likely to be stolen than in a Supreme Court ruling.

Nonetheless, court rulings can have an effect, as MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes, “Politico had a related report today, adding, “Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump. “In Philadelphia, his campaign is videotaping voters as they return ballots. In Nevada, it’s suing to force elections officials in Nevada’s Democratic-heavy Clark County to more rigorously examine ballot signatures for discrepancies that could disqualify them. The Trump campaign has sued to prevent the expanded use of ballot drop boxes in Ohio, sought to shoot down an attempt to expand absentee ballot access in New Hampshire and tried to intervene against a lawsuit brought by members of the Navajo Nation in Arizona which sought to allow ballots received from reservations after Election Day because of mail delays. And that’s just a few of its efforts….The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank added in his new column, “This election isn’t just to choose a president and a Congress. It’s a referendum on the right to vote itself. The once-proud Republican Party has determined, correctly, that its only way to prevail in this election is to keep people from voting.”

David Wasserman argues that “Yes, the Polls Could Be Wrong. but That Could Help Biden, Not Just Trump” at The Cook Political Report: “Fundamentally, the current polling in the 2020 race is different from 2016 in three important ways….First, Biden’s lead is larger and much more stable than Clinton’s was at this point. Second, there are far fewer undecided and third-party voters left to woo — reducing the chances of a late break toward one side….Third, the scores of district and state-level polls conducted by the parties to make spending decisions in down-ballot races generally align with national polls showing Trump running behind his 2016 pace, including in key states. In 2016, these same polls had shown flashing red warning signs for Hillary Clinton, particularly in districts with lots of white working-class voters….But in light of recent evidence, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if Biden defies polls by winning a higher share of the vote in Arizona than Wisconsin — or breaks through in Texas more than he does in Ohio.”

After a lot of digging around for information, I wrote up a quick primer for New York on the problems the usual sources of authoritative information will face in “calling” the 2020 election results, particularly on Election Night:

You are undoubtedly aware that Election Night on November 3 could be unlike any other we’ve seen before. Heavy, heavy pandemic-driven voting by mail; laws in some states allowing mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted afterwards; problems (legal or logistical) many states will have in efficiently processing a glut of mail ballots could produce a much slower count nationally than is normal. But at the same time, a big partisan split in how and when voters choose to vote could produce some herky-jerky results. Democrats fear that Republicans’ preference to vote in person on Election Day will create an ephemeral lead for Donald Trump that he will use to prematurely declare victory.

Americans are accustomed to being told who has won major elections quickly. With the exception of the infamous 2000 contest, we’ve known the winner of every presidential election in this and the last century by the day after Election Day. In the post-1960 era of exit polling and media network competition to “call” races, we usually know much earlier than that, sometimes moments after polls close in enough states where the overall “winner” can claim the necessary 270 electoral votes to be president.

So how will the system work in this insane election cycle? Here, some key issues to think about.

Who “Calls” Elections, Anyway?

We generally think of the authenticators of presidential, congressional, and statewide election results as the major television-broadcast and cable networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox) along with independent media services, preeminently the Associated Press, now supplemented by outfits emphasizing speedy results like Decision Desk HQ. All these authorities employ “decision desks” of election wizards, typically locked away in deliberate isolation from their employers and other potential sources of influence, who utilize carefully developed “models” to make projections (or, in the AP’s case, “declarations”) of who will ultimately win each contest. For presidential elections, of course, these “calls” are state by state (and also district by district, in the case of Maine and Nebraska, which let each congressional district cast one electoral vote) to reflect the reality that electoral votes determine the overall winner. None of these worthies will “call” the presidential race until they have “called” enough states to give the winner the requisite 270 electoral votes.

In addition to the “official” arbiters of the results, other media organizations will be collecting data for their own “unofficial” analysis, some of it quite influential, as anyone who associates Election Night 2016 with the infamous New York Times “needle” can tell you.

Anyone, of course, with access to a camera, a microphone, or a social-media account can “announce” an election result, real or imagined, and it is important to keep in mind that what we think of as “official” authenticators of the results are not necessarily authoritative to everyone. Let’s go ahead and look at the “red mirage” scenario, in which Donald Trump claims victory at midnight on November 3 based on sure-to-be-reversed leads in very partial results. It’s extremely unlikely that any of the television networks or the AP would verify such a claim. But whatever Fox News’ official “decision desk” decides to do or not do (and the network has gone out of its way to insist upon its independence), it’s likely that highly influential Fox News pundits would echo Trump’s claims anyway, along with vast armies of social-media warriors and Russian bots.

So it’s possible that “official” and “unofficial” calls of the election will compete for attention, with the unwillingness of the “official” outlets to make pronouncements based on incomplete data perhaps undermining their authority.

How Can You Do Exit Polling in a Year Like This One?

Back in the day, when voting by mail was rare and exceptional, Election Night “calls” depended on models that verified exit-poll data of people who had cast ballots in person with raw votes from key precincts, making quick decisions possible in all but really close races. Since 2004, exit polls have been conducted by Edison Media Research, backed by a consortium of media companies (currently ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN).

Exit polls have a good recent record of reliability, but there have been serious problems historically. In 2002, the whole system broke down and no exit-poll data was released, and in 2004, exit polls significantly overestimated Democratic voting, leading John Kerry’s staff to prematurely celebrate a victory he never actually won.

The steady growth of voting by mail has been a particular problem for exit-poll-based decision models. That’s one reason the AP and Fox News withdrew from the Edison consortium in 2018, deciding to rely entirely on the preelection polling everyone uses to get a handle on those who vote by mail. With mail ballots spiking this year, and with the partisan skew in voting methodologies, the particular value of exit polls (often used to interpret elections results as well as to project them) may decline further. Often the major media organizations will publish exit-poll findings (not the horse-race numbers but highly suggestive answers to questions other than candidate preference) even before polls close, but this year it may be necessary to take them with a shaker of salt.

Aside from the doubts the pandemic has sowed in the adequacy of exit-poll data, it has affected the mechanics, too. Here’s a description from ABC News of how exit interviews will work this year:

“Some exit polling procedures have been modified this year to help ensure a safe experience for the interviewers and voters. Typically, the exit poll interviewer walks right up to the selected voter and hands them the exit poll questionnaire and a pen. This approach has been modified.

“This year, the interviewer, who will be wearing a mask at all times, will approach the voter from a distance of at least 6 feet. Voters who agree to fill out the exit poll will be directed to a nearby table to get the questionnaire and a single use golf pencil.”

While ABC assures us that “these procedures were tested successfully during the recent primaries,” you do have to wonder if they will affect interview participation patterns in a general election where groups of voters across the country may react differently to the risks involved.

When Is the Presidential Race Likely to Be Called?

Again, the “official” arbiters of election results have, since at least 1980, followed the practice of refraining from any “call” of the presidential election until individual state “calls” have been made awarding one candidate or the other 270 electoral votes. In a highly informative interview with FiveThirtyEight, ABC’s Dan Merkle admits that the virtual certainty of slow counts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin makes it very unlikely that a winner will be indicated before November 4, if not later.

This is an important point to keep in mind. There has been a lot of talk about results from faster-counting states such as Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina telling us what we need to know about the ultimate outcome. It’s true that if Joe Biden wins all three on Election Night, the odds of him ultimately winning are prohibitively high. But if Biden hasn’t nailed down 270 electoral votes, he won’t be officially “called” the winner, even if the pundits are all concluding Trump is done.

The time gap between the first “takes” on Election Night on the results and their ultimate authentication is a window for great mischief, particularly on the part of a president who has repeatedly said he cannot lose unless the results are “rigged.” And if the race really is very close, with the results legitimately in doubt, Americans may relive the twilight experience of 2000, when every morning we woke up to wonder if we had dreamed Election Night had never quite ended.

The following post by Matt Morrison of Working America is cross-posted from a Working America e-blast:

We are six days out until voting ends on Tuesday, Nov. 3. The ever-present noise machine has the volume turned all the way up, and it’s even louder if you live in a battleground state. But all of us are being buffeted by the news of the day: Everyone around Pence is COVID-positive and he is still campaigning; Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in to RBG’s seat on the Supreme Court and each day there is a new record for COVID cases in the U.S. After all that, Trump’s tax returns, which show an astonishing level of indebtedness and near complete tax avoidance, while perhaps offering a greater explanation of his motivations, are no longer a topic of discussion.

If you are wondering when it will all end, consider what battleground state voters, who don’t necessarily even like politics, think of the deluge they’re experiencing. That, in part, explains why so many have rushed to cast ballots early (they know we will stop calling them).
So, let’s look at what we know about the state of the race today.

Where Do Biden’s Chances Look Strongest?

Last Sunday, Working America surveyed 38,871 battleground-state voters who have already cast their votes and compared those results to responses from people yet to vote whom we have surveyed in the last month. This research approach means we can look beyond the simple ballot returns by voter partisanship or aggregate polling data. By dividing up survey data between those who have voted and those likely voters who have yet to cast ballots, we can get clearer insight on the range of election outcomes.

First, we compared how many ballots have been cast in this year’s contest versus the total 2016 turnout. We found that it’s likely that a majority of the total vote is already in across a handful of states, while others are moving at a slower pace. (Of course, a big unknown is whether voter turnout will surge or decrease and if it does, among which voters, in the last few days — hence we are not making projections on the final tally.)

Next, we looked at how the race breaks among early voters. One of the important distinctions between our data and some of the voter-file-based reports is that we see the Biden margin increasing more than partisan identity would suggest virtually everywhere. The difference is that we are reflecting what voters shared with us, while other reports simply use the probable vote choice based on voter file data.

Stepping back from the chaos to look at how the president’s reelection strategy has been implemented, I offered some tentative final thoughts at New York:

[A] week from November 3 and many months into the strangest general-election campaign ever, with both debates over and all the messages sent or set in stone, it’s not too early to make one important judgment: Donald J. Trump has failed to make this contest “about” Biden (or the “socialist Democrat” party), rather than about his own performance as president. To put it in strategic terms, Team Trump’s efforts to turn a “referendum” election into a “choice” election have not only failed but arguably backfired: To the extent that persuadable voters look at the candidates instead of at Trump’s record, the comparison is working against him.

It’s a truism of political science that presidential reelection bids turn on perceptions of the incumbent’s performance above all else. With extremely rare exceptions, presidents with positive job-approval ratings (Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1996, George W. Bush in 2004, Obama in 2012) get reelected, while those with negative ratings (Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992) don’t. Trump’s approval ratings in 2020 (generally in the low-to-mid 40s) haven’t been that far below W.’s in 2004 or Obama’s in 2012, but to an extraordinary extent, Trump’s numbers have been inelastic. So it’s not surprising that in looking forward to 2020 the Trump reelection strategy focused on turning polarization to the candidate’s favor rather than reducing it to broaden his coalition. The idea was to pursue the president’s time-tested divisive themes of cultural and partisan grievances to rev up his base while pressing swing voters to choose between the status quo and a caricature of the opposition.

At the beginning of 2020, it looked as though it could all work out for Trump. The economy was improving steadily enough to boost his job-approval numbers to near their historic ceiling. The failed Democratic drive to remove him from office via impeachment had solidified his base, focused his supporters on vengeance, and contributed to his campaign’s depiction of Democrats as a gang of extremists bent on a coup d’état. The occasionally fractious Democratic presidential nominating contest encouraged Team Trump that it might be able to batten on the opposition party’s divisions, and/or might face a nominee who was vulnerable to “socialism” charges.

But then two things happened almost simultaneously: Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination, and the coronavirus became a pandemic that Trump instantly and irrevocably mishandled. The former development made it more difficult to caricature the opposition party as extremist, while the latter put a firm cap on Trump’s popularity and closed off any alternative strategy.

The trajectory of the campaign has made it clear that Trump’s efforts to demonize Joe Biden and his party have failed. The claim that Biden is senile was essential to the twin charges that he is dangerously incompetent and a puppet of the “radical left” of the Democratic Party (or perhaps the front man for the “communist” and “monster” Kamala Harris). In the two debates, however (the most salient opportunities for comparing the two septuagenarians), Biden was, on balance, the more coherent and self-possessed of the two. And while Trump did score some points in the final debates concerning Biden’s record on criminal-justice reform, the former vice-president easily parried the “socialist” attack line by calmly pointing out that Trump must be confusing his platform with those of the progressive rivals he vanquished.

The major strategic adjustment Trump made since Biden’s nomination has been to depict him as Hillary Clinton Redux, a creature of the same bipartisan Establishment that Trump campaigned against in 2016. A corollary of this dubious effort to regain an outsider position has been the president’s tedious attacks on the looters and murderers of “Democrat cities,” who are apparently itching to cross the invisible barricades erected by Trump to sack and pillage the pristine suburbs. More broadly, the “China virus,” Black Lives Matter activists, antifa “thugs,” and Fake Media traitors are alien forces that have somehow taken control of Great-Again America with only the besieged president willing to rescue her. But as Tim Alberta notes at Politico, this just doesn’t work for an incumbent:

“Four years ago, just a third of the country believed America was on the right track. These conditions were fundamentally advantageous to Trump, a political outsider, whose party had been out of power for eight years. Today, only one-fifth of the country believes America is on the right track. But this time, Trump bears the brunt of the public’s frustration, primarily due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Had Trump focused his reelection campaign on rebuilding his approval rating via (a) a pivot toward accepting responsibility and articulating a national strategy on COVID-19 and (b) making a credible case that the economy will come roaring back after the pandemic has subsided, not through some forced “reopening,” he might have lifted his approval rating and come closer to victory in a referendum election. At the same time, he might have done a better job of winning a “choice” election had he focused relentlessly on weak points of Biden’s agenda and Biden’s own record rather than trying to force him into an “extremist” template that just doesn’t fit him. A more disciplined and realistic comparative campaign might also have avoided the absurd effort by the most consistently incoherent and mendacious politician in American history to accuse Joe Biden of incoherence and lies.

As it is, the president’s campaign seems to have fallen between two stools: He hasn’t made a convincing case that he deserves a second term, and he has barely laid a glove on Biden. His very slim hopes for reelection now depend on an outsize turnout among the voters who have been with him from the beginning.

The following article by John Russo of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

It is always dangerous to publicly predict the outcome of a presidential election, especially in a purple state like Ohio. But I’ve done it twice, in 2011 and 2016, months in advance, when both of my predicted winners, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, respectively, were behind.

Photo by Alex Brandon, Trump speaking at a rally at the Toledo airport
This year, I am predicting that Trump will lose in Ohio. That might seem like a somewhat safe bet, since the most recent Real Clear Politics polls for Ohio show Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a very slight lead. Then again, at this point in 2016 the Real Clear Politics average showed Trump ahead by less than 2 percent, and Hillary Clinton ultimately lost Ohio by 8 points. So it’s worth considering how the Democrats will overcome the political ineptitude they displayed in 2016 and—as was not the case in the rest of the nation—2018, when the “Democratic Party left Ohio.”

The answer lies in changing demographics, Trump’s failures, the shifting views of some evangelicals, and problems in the Ohio Republican Party.

Read more…

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I have frequently noted here the large scale and political significance of the white noncollege shift toward Biden relative to Trump’s performance in 2016. It’s an interesting question what parts of the white noncollege voting pool are responsible for this shift. One way to look at it is by age–is it younger or older white noncollege voters who are driving this shift?

I looked at this using the UCLA + Democracy Fund Nationscape survey data (which includes about 1800 likely white noncollege voters per week) since September 1 and comparing the white noncollege Trump-Biden vote by age to the Trump-Clinton white noncollege by age split from 2016, as estimated by the States of Change project.

What I found is quite eye-opening. At least by this comparison, the shifts we are seeing are by no means uniform across the white noncollege population.. Older white noncollege voters, especially seniors, are heavily driving the shift, while the shifts among younger white noncollege voters are much more modest.

white noncollege 18-29: +6 toward Biden

white noncollege 30-44: +3 toward Biden

white noncollege 45-64: +19 toward Biden

white noncollege 65+: +32 toward Biden

In “A Crusade for Something Noble: Americans are coming together to save our Republic, right now. And it means something” at The Bulwark, James Carville writes, “I know it’s difficult for so many of us to feel hope in this moment, which seems so incomprehensibly dark. We are a nation deeply wounded from a liberated virus. We’re struggling with systemic racism. And we’ve endured lashing mental abuse, time and again, from the president of the United States. But it is not a darker moment than what Ike saw when he looked across the English Channel on June 6, 1944 at the continent of Europe, dominated by the Nazis…So I see a light ahead. Just days away, a unified and electrified coalition of Americans, coming together like our country did in World War II, standing united to send a message that will be heard around the world to all those who look with expectant hope to the America that led the crusade more than half a century ago: That America has not succumbed to a demagogue and would-be autocrat. That we have overcome. And that Donald J. Trump is not who we are…In just a short time, America will go from its darkest hour to its finest hour.”

From Harry Enten’s “9 days to go: Biden’s lead over Trump is holding, while Clinton’s was collapsing at this point” at CNN Politics: “The clock is running out on President Donald Trump’s chances for a comeback. He continues to trail former Vice President Joe Biden nationally and in the key swing states with just nine days to go…But perhaps most worrisome for the President: Trump’s clearly behind his 2016 pace. By this point four years ago, he was rapidly closing the gap with Hillary Clinton. No such advancements can be seen in the 2020 polling against Biden…Right now, Biden is up by about 9 to 10 pointsnationally, depending on the average you examine. He is, importantly, over 50%. Biden’s edge may be down a point or so from early October, though it is well within the historical average from the beginning of the year.”

Thomas B. Edsall writes in “What if Beating Trump Is the Easy Part? If Biden holds on, keeping the Democratic coalition intact will take an unusual level of political skill” at The New York Times: “Winning control of the Senate is critically important, of course, and will shape what happens as much as anything else an election can decide…FiveThirtyEight estimates the odds of a Democratic takeover of the Senate at 74-26, or three to one…David Card, an economist at Berkeley, posed the question, “How crucial for the success of a Biden presidency is a Democratic Senate?” and answered the question himself: 100 percent. Obama came in after 2009 with a lot of troubles but Biden is taking over with nearly impossible deficit, pandemic and completely gutted federal government…Not only does Biden need a Senate majority, the size of the majority will also be crucial…If he only has a cushion of one or two votes, Gary Burtless, an economist at Brookings, argues,

it would greatly reduce the chances Democrats could enact sweeping political and regulatory reforms, including major climate change legislation and rationalization of the Affordable Care Act.

But, Burtless continued,

Even a bare majority would allow Democrats to enact sensible fiscal policies, provide adequate relief to the unemployed, confirm centrist and liberal federal judges, and give the Democratic President greater leeway to reverse Trump-era regulations/deregulations.”

“Enlarging the Supreme Court is the only answer to the right’s judicial radicalism,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in The Washington Post: “The truly scandalous lack of institutional patriotism on the right has finally led many of the most sober liberals and moderates to ponder what they opposed even a month ago: The only genuinely practical and proper remedy to conservative court-packing is to undo its impact by enlarging the court…Note the language I just used. Court-packing is now a fact. It was carried out by a Republican Senate that was cynically inconsistent when it came to the question of filling a court seat during an election year…And conservatives are as hypocritical about court enlargement as they are about Garland and Barrett: In 2016, Republicans expanded the state supreme courts of Georgia and Arizona to enhance their party’s philosophical sway…Court enlargement will be a long battle, but those of us who support it should be encouraged, not discouraged, by Joe Biden’s call for a bipartisan commission to study a court system that is, as Biden put it, “getting out of whack.”…Biden is a long-standing opponent of enlargement, so his statement is an acknowledgment that this crisis can’t be avoided. His commission would help the public, which usually doesn’t want to worry about judges, understand the danger of a judiciary dominated by reactionaries.”

After watching the second and final presidential debate, I registered my thoughts at New York:

Donald Trump went into the final debate of the 2020 campaign needing a clear win and even more than that, needing to defend his record as president in clear, comprehensible language. His signal mistake in the first debate, I argued at the time, was to lapse into the right-wing code language of Fox News/Breitbart conspiracy theories, which almost certainly sounded like gibberish to the low-information undecided voters whose support is his only hope of victory.

In the Nashville debate, Trump started off doing exactly what he needed to do: defending his record on handling COVID-19 in complete sentences, with a bit of counter-punching against Biden’s criticisms (though the former veep’s “He said people are learning to live with it … they’re learning to die with it” line was unanswerable, and Trump’s pandemic record is tough to defend).

The president’s self-discipline began unraveling when he seized his first opportunity to bring up the Hunter Biden email story that has gotten right-wing media so excited. His reference to the Obama administration merely sending “pillows and sheets” to Ukraine is a fine old conservative media line, but Trump never explained it. The jibe about Hunter supposedly reserving “ten percent for the big man,” a reference to the latest allegations about Joe’s role in his son’s business dealings, was completely inscrutable to anyone who didn’t spend the entire day wallowing in the story. Later he alluded to the “laptop from hell,” again without any effort to explain the link to Hunter, as though he was counting on subtitles or footnotes.

In the middle section of the debate, Trump began overriding moderator Kristen Welker regularly. Then on the very dangerous topic of children being separated from their parents at the border, Trump just lost it, shouting repeatedly “Who built the cages, Joe!” I know a fair amount about immigration, and if I had no idea what the president was alluding to, how would an undecided voter who hasn’t made Stephen Miller his guru on these issues?

Towards the end of the debate, Trump found his bearings and hit Biden hard on crime policy, just as the Democrat was beginning to lose steam and some of his own coherence. But he may have spoiled the effect (if any) on Black voters with his bizarre repeated insistence that “I am the least racist person in this room.” Was he suggesting the Black moderator is racist? Or appealing to the white racists who think that it’s Black people who are the racists? Again, you could almost hear the cheers in a room full of people who are already wearing MAGA hats.

The ultimate moment of speaking in code for Trump was in his attack on Biden’s environmental proposals, which he triumphantly described – twice – as “AOC plus three!” I get the reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman who is every conservative’s favorite demon-figure these days, but “plus three?” Is that a reference to the other members of the so-called “squad?” I don’t know, and neither did most viewers who aren’t already deep in the tank for the president.

The bottom line is that Trump had an unmistakable and unavoidable mission in this debate, which went beyond “not setting himself on fire,” as one commentator put it, and wasn’t accomplished even if he did score more points against Biden than Biden scored against him (which I don’t think he did). It was Trump’s last chance to make a case that his record entitles him to a second term, at a time when it’s really too late to make this a “choice” election where sowing doubts about his opponent will suffice. By this standard, Trump started out strong, but in the end he just could not help being himself.

Jennfier Agiesta writes at CNN Politics that ” according to a CNN Instant Poll of debate watchers. Overall, 53% of voters who watched the debate said that Biden won the matchup, while 39% said that President Donald Trump did.” In addition,

Viewers once again said that Biden’s criticisms of Trump were largely fair (73% said they were fair, 26% unfair), and they split over whether Trump’s attacks on Biden were fair (50% said yes, 49% no)…That’s a more positive outcome for Trump. In a CNN Instant Poll after the first presidential debate, just 28% said they thought the President had won the debate, and 67% called his criticism of Biden unfair.

All told, though, the debate did not do much to move impressions of either candidate. Favorable views of Biden before the debate stood at 55%, and they held steady at 56% in post-debate interviews. Likewise, Trump’s numbers held steady, with 42% saying they had a favorable view of the President in interviews conducted before Thursday’s debate and 41% saying the same afterward.

More debate watchers, though, said Trump’s performance raised concerns about how he would handle the presidency (55%) than did Biden’s (41%).

Thursday’s debate watchers preferred Trump over Biden on the economy (56% say they think Trump would better handle it vs. 44% who say Biden would), and divided about evenly between the two on foreign policy (50% prefer Biden, 48% Trump). Biden held a wide edge as more trusted to handle the coronavirus (57% Biden to 41% Trump), climate change (67% Biden to 29% Trump) and racial inequality in the US (62% Biden to 35% Trump).

In terms of demographic breakdown, Agiesta notes:

Women were more likely than men to say that Biden did the better job in the debate (60% of women said Biden won, 35% Trump, while among men, 47% said Biden won, 44% said Trump did). Independents also largely felt Biden won (55% Biden to 36% Trump), as did moderates (56% Biden to 37% Trump) and White voters with college degrees (64% Biden to 29% Trump). Among those 65 and older — a group backing Biden in greater numbers than they did Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to most polls — the verdict was a split decision, with 46% saying Biden won, 43% Trump and 10% saying they both did equally well. Younger voters broadly saw Biden as the winner, 66%, to 27% for Trump among those under age 45.

The poll of 585 voters has a m.o.e. of 5.7 percentage points.