James.galbraith

From the beginning, the Republican-promoted, Trump-boasting, former Gov. Scott Walker-lying Foxconn deal with Wisconsin sounded like a mega-scam. It was clear to anyone with a reading level above elementary school that the “incentives” used to bring the Taiwanese electronics giant into the Badger State were so much more lucrative than anything Foxconn could provide in economic stimulus. The math didn’t add up. In fact, some estimates put the timeframe it would take Wisconsin to get out of the red on the deal at … 25 years.

Then, over the course of the next few weeks and months and years, it became clear that Foxconn wasn’t going to do any of the things it said it might do, because frankly, it didn’t have to do them to get that sweet Wisconsin taxpayer money. Invisible hand of the market and all that. This left lots of vacant space where Trump and then Gov.-Scott Walker took gold-shoveled photos at. Most of 2019 was spent with Wisconsin officials, having been left holding the bag of bunk that newly un-elected Scott Walker created, trying to renegotiate with Foxconn. Something that Foxconn officials, having experienced the pathetic dealmaking of the previous Republican administration, seem most interested in delaying. Possibly in the hope of finding another set of GOP marks with which to renegotiate.

Then on Oct. 12, The Verge reported that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) denied Foxconn’s application for tax subsidies. The argument is that Foxconn hasn’t even built anything that was originally agreed upon.

WEDC also noted that even if whatever Foxconn is currently doing had been eligible under the contract, it had failed to employ the minimum number of people needed to get subsidies. Foxconn needed to employ at least 520 people at the end of 2019 to receive subsidies and claimed to have hired 550, but WEDC estimated that only 281 would qualify under the terms of the contract.

What is most important to note here is that even in a deal that Foxconn was getting away with murder on, they still wanted to cut corners because the previous Republican administration was so bereft of sense that it put little regulations in place for the deal and seemed to be such cowardly pushovers to big money. Why negotiate with Democratic representatives and agents who actually want something resembling a fair deal when you can wait and hope that a new set of Republican con men hacks show up after Election Day?

The other issue that Foxconn faced was that just because Walker was willing to take constituents’ money and line Foxconn CEO Terry Gou’s pockets with it, that didn’t mean the deal was commercially viable for Foxconn. It turns out it wasn’t.

Since Democratic Gov. Tony Evers took office, Foxconn has flirted with renegotiating the contract since they seem to have zero interest in even coming close to the bogus promises of the original one made with Walker and friends. According to The Verge, a settlement agreement seemed to have been reached this past July between the WEDC and Foxconn, but that deal expired without another deal in place. The tax subsidies being withheld from Foxconn would have been the “first installment of the nearly $3 billion in refundable tax credits that made up the bulk of former Gov. Scott Walker’s record-breaking subsidy package.”

But don’t you worry—Donald Trump is on the job.

Bad news: Donald Trump is a pathological liar. It turns out that not unlike the rest of the Foxconn deal, this was all for show. Sort of like the $100 million gift to the University of Wisconsin at Madison promised by Gou. Turns out the school received about $700,000 from Foxconn.

In an investigation conducted by The Verge, Foxconn attempted to boost hiring numbers right out of the gate, giving jobs out with no descriptions, just trying to hit the numbers that would allow them to make profits off of tax subsidies alone. These “jobs” would be and were very quickly dropped. Their business deal, so pathetically constructed by Walker and promoted by Trump and other Republicans, meant that it was better business for them to make some fake jobs up and not even really consider building out a business that might actually manufacture anything.

“Imagine being in a job where you don’t really know if it’s real or not. Or you know it’s not real, but you don’t know it’s not real. It’s a constant thing you’re doing in your head day after day,” said one employee, who returned to the rented building Trump had spoken at, where workers had been assembling TVs, only to find the line shut down and the lights dimmed a couple of weeks after the photo op was over. “I think all of us were on the verge of a major breakdown.”

According to the investigation, while this deal is likely kaput, it has cost Wisconsin taxpayers at least $400 million in land and infrastructure. People were pushed out of their homes. Foxconn, who promised it would build a 20 million-square-foot LCD complex, has built an empty building 1/20th the size that it now says will be for “storage.” Walker and friends promised 5,200 jobs by the end of 2020. There will be less than 281 by the end of this year.

The Foxconn story has been one of scam idea after scam idea. Business plans continuously changing in order to keep up the illusion that work was being done to create something that would warrant Foxconn’s hiring of 580 workers for long enough to get some tax money. Like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, it was all an inflated lie that crashed before they could grab the last bit of money left on the table.

Steve Bannon's famous "flooding the zone" strategy is dragging Trump under.

Anne Hathaway stars in The Witches. | Warner Bros.

The Witches is a weird, unfunny lesson in how not to adapt Roald Dahl’s classic — and problematic — horror tale.

Many movies that fail to win critical regard still frequently succeed as entertainment, if only because they turn into delightful excuses for their actors to have fun. One might certainly expect this to be the case for The Witches, Robert Zemeckis’s new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic, horrifying children’s novel, now streaming on HBO Max.

But I must, alas, report that no one — on-screen or off — is having enough fun to save The Witches from being a dull and puzzling thing. While Anne Hathaway as the head witch seems to love swanning around the great coastal Alabama hotel to which Dahl’s witches have bizarrely arrived, no one else seems to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps it’s because the premise of this new version of The Witches inexplicably overlays two separate stories onto one another, and no one else in the cast is quite sure which one they’re in at any given moment.

Are they in a story where a young Black boy in the post-Jim Crow South confronts racism and ethnic hatred through the thinly veiled guise of a convention of kid-ocidal witches? Or are they in a macabre, modern-ish cautionary tale, one where boys can meet monsters and be forever altered at the whimsy of a delightfully unpredictable universe?

If you’re not sure these two stories go together, you’re not alone: The Witches isn’t sure either. Despite the film’s quizzical efforts to blend them together, the two halves never cohere into something that makes much sense — or remotely justifies the strange execution.

The Witches is an oddly literal adaptation, except when it’s a wild departure

The Witches, transplanted from its original Nordic and English setting to 1960s Alabama, recounts the delightfully morbid story of an unnamed Boy (Jahzir Bruno) who moves in with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) after the death of his parents. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a witch at the local drug store, and his grandmother, something of a spiritualist herself, initiates him into a world in which child-hating murderous witches are everywhere. These witches, unfortunately, look exactly like the typical woman of the ’60s: They always wear wigs and nice shoes, they have giant expanding nostrils, and they always wear gloves.

Not long after this revelation, the Boy comes face to face with not only one witch, but an entire huge coven of witches who’ve all assembled — where else? — at a large hotel convention. And it’s, ironically, held at the very same hotel to which he and his grandmother have traveled to try and escape the witch! Because his grandmother has taught him how to recognize a witch, he immediately realizes what he’s stumbled upon. The results are calamitous (and genuinely creepy) for the Boy.

At first, Zemeckis’s version of The Witches appears to be made to order. But Dahl’s novel is really less about a story than it is about a feeling, a sense of things being terribly disordered, unreal, and unfair. This is where everything quickly goes awry.

Roald Dahl, the author of childhood classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda, gave us a body of work that feels almost intrinsically British. In the classic tradition of British children’s literature, he represents the world to children as a cold and indifferent place, in which wonders, magic, and human kindness are rare, sought-after treasures. In a Dahl story, children are often abused by their caretakers and other indifferent adults until they discover some form of fantastical escape. His work built on and influenced the youth-oriented fantasy genre, with series like Harry Potter later providing direct echos of Dahl’s work.

It’s important to understand this context because, when you watch The Witches, you’re hit with the discrepancy between Dahl’s story world — where the universe is both randomly cruel and full of random mystical delights — and the “real” world in which Zemeckis sets his film. Zemeckis’s The Witches takes place in a post-segregated Southern Alabama, where Black life is still radically unequal to that of white Southerners, and where a Black woman staying at a grand hotel on the Gulf is so extraordinary that the Black bellhops jaw-drop at the sight of her. This dissonance is striking even if you’ve never cracked open a Dahl story.

In Dahl’s version, the Boy is originally Norwegian and encounters witches after moving to England with his cigar-smoking granny. In Zemeckis’s version, co-written by Zemeckis, horror icon Guillermo Del Toro, and Girls Trip screenwriter Kenya Barris, the Boy’s grandmother is a tough, determined homemaker who coaxes her grandson out of his grief with helpings of cornbread and plenty of Motown.

Spencer, typically a master of comedic timing, has too many elements working against her to pull that off here, starting with a script that can’t quite figure out what her deal is. Is she a sensitive grandmother masking her own grief in order to care for her grandson, a voodoo practitioner with a secret life, or a would-be adventuress? It’s hard to know what the film intends her to be. Then again, it’s equally hard to know what the film itself intends to be.

Is it a campy, rollicking farce with a touch of rosy pastel-tinged nostalgia for ... a South that’s barely past segregation? Is it a creepy, sinister children’s tale? Particularly when compared to the classic 1990 film adaptation from horror icon Nicolas Roeg, it’s certainly not very scary — which is probably the worst thing to be said about a movie based on a book whose witches are terrifying. In the original novel, there’s a truly chilling moment when our narrator, the Boy, realizes that all the women in the room he’s trapped in are wearing gloves. We never come close to anything that scary in Zemeckis’s version of The Witches because we’re all assumed to be in on the joke that the witches are in the hotel the whole time.

But the joke just isn’t that funny. As the head witch of the coven, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch is both Catwoman and the Joker, with a hilariously overwrought German accent. While Hathaway has her moments of melodramatic fun, she’s the only actor who does.

And then there’s the matter of race. Even though on the surface, Zemeckis is faithfully retelling Dahl’s story of a boy and a coven of witches, he’s also giving us a story of a Black boy facing racial and class prejudice in the South that resonates with the American political climate today, even if the prejudice has been dialed back so far as to be barely more than a hint. Every Dahl story puts the trappings of white British privilege front and center, pitting our maligned waif hero against snooty rich children and their terrible parents. When that story gets transplanted onto the story of Southern life, however, it inevitably feels much different.

Dahl’s stories depend upon their hyperbolic caricatures of childhood and adulthood for much of their whimsical appeal and their ability to speak directly to young children. It’s difficult for an American viewer to find this kind of hyperbolic whimsy, however, in a recently desegregated South. It’s even harder when the potential for larger world-building around the theme of racial injustice seems to have been utterly ignored. (What does it mean that a boy would rather be a mouse than a boy in America? There’s a question ripe for exploration — but The Witches doesn’t think to ask it, let alone suggest an answer.)

In the Witches novel, what’s striking about the narrator and his grandmother is their aloneness in the world — they really only have each other. But in Zemeckis’s version, Spencer’s character lives in a small town, goes to church, visits her local shopkeepers, and has a whole history of growing up in a Depression-era community where witches were apparently a part of the local lore. But whatever community she’s a part of is only shrugged at, never brought to bear on her actions or the story itself.

What’s even more glaring and strange is that in a community of church-going Black women in the 1960s, where most women typically wore nice shoes and gloves, just like witches, the film doesn’t attempt to address the problems that would inevitably arise if you’re a kid trying to decide who is and isn’t a witch. The film could raise this extremely obvious question, and because it’s chosen to take Black characters living in a Black community as its heroes, you’d think it would. That it doesn’t just adds to the level of disconnect between Zemeckis’s impulse to inject modern-day diversity into The Witches and the all-British story he’s telling.

But perhaps we should discuss why a modern retelling of The Witches would want to be diverse. Because the other crucial piece of context for The Witches involves its subtext — and to understand it, we have to ruin your childhood a little. (Sorry.)

Roald Dahl was an anti-Semitic, misogynistic misanthrope

Roald Dahl is one of the most celebrated children’s authors who ever lived. But he was also indisputably one of the most bigoted. He was a profound anti-Semite, perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes and falsehoods — like that of Jewish people controlling the economy and the publishing industry. In 1983, Dahl, then 67, told The New Statesman that Jewish people “provoke animosity” and blamed them for being too “submissive” to fight back during the Holocaust. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere,” he said. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

Unlike, for example, the ongoing debates around H.P. Lovecraft’s racism, we know Dahl was anti-Semitic because he literally said so. “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic,” he reportedly told The Independent in 1990. Still, despite these direct quotes to the media, critics were calling reports of Dahl’s anti-Semitism “unjustified” as late as 2009. And in 2016, Steven Spielberg, director of the Dahlian adaptation BFG, expressed disbelief that someone who could write such a kindhearted book could really be anti-Semitic. Spielberg argued that, as a classic misanthrope, Dahl often said contentious things just to aggravate others. “Everybody in his life, basically, his whole support team, was Jewish,” Spielberg added.

Dahl might have surrounded himself with Jewish staff, but that doesn’t mean he treated them well; in fact, Dahl’s increasingly anti-Semitic attitude toward staff members at his longtime publisher, Knopf, ultimately led to Knopf’s extraordinary decision to fire him as a client late in 1980 — though that was also because Dahl was allegedly horrible to the staff in general. Dahl has also been widely read as a misogynistic writer, in large part due to the openly misogynistic theme of The Witches, in which women are literally demonized for dressing up, feminizing their appearances, and framed as monsters lurking inside seemingly sweet and complacent disguises. They’re also coded as anti-Semitic, with large, hooked noses, reptilian features, a ready stash of mysterious cash, and a plot to take over the world and kill children, all tropes derived from longstanding anti-Semitic conspiracies. (As a bonus, while I’m ruining your childhood, Matilda, a sweet telekinetic orphan, was originally meant to be something of the villain of the book, terrorizing her parents instead of the reverse.)

Perhaps it’s an awareness of this troubled history and a desire to do better — or perhaps just a desire to engage in diverse casting — that sparked Zemeckis’s attempt to build his version of The Witches around Spencer’s character and her grandson. But if that’s the case, it seems the exercise hasn’t shown us much — except, perhaps, to underscore that a thoughtless kind of diverse representation isn’t much better than no representation at all.

The Witches falls apart because of its inability to reconcile its very different stories

The recent trend among Dahlian adaptations has been to assign the task of adapting his works to Jewish directors, like Spielberg or Zemeckis. (Taika Waititi, who is Maori and Jewish, is currently adapting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Netflix.)

Yet Zemeckis’s version of The Witches seems to offer nothing whatsoever to attempt to remedy the embedded issues in Dahl’s original writing. The writers have chosen not to substantially re-work the story, not even to think through the ways a bunch of witches might manipulate their Southern gothic environment. (In Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico, are there really no swamp witches around? No Cajun priestesses doing spells in moss-covered mansions or nearby pirate coves?) Then again, none of the witches really exist at all outside of their single-minded goal to squash children.

The anti-Semitism Dahl himself professed doesn’t necessarily play a role in most of his other works, but it’s directly relevant to The Witches, a story that’s explicitly about detecting imposters in the midst of society. This is, to be blunt, the theme of most anti-Semitic conspiracies throughout history, and has led in its most extreme form to the idea that Jewish people “hide” in plain sight while essentially controlling the world.

In The Witches, witches hide in plain sight by disguising themselves as ordinary women — but the tells that give them away are also coded as anti-Semitic: they’re bald beneath their wigs, have reptile-like hands and feet, and have noses that expand when they sniff out children. The grand high witch also speaks with a German accent, one that can easily pass for Yiddish.

The 1990 film unfortunately perpetuated all of these traits, and I hoped that Zemeckis’s version would take pains to shift its witches far away from this stereotype. But it’s not clear if any attempt was made to remove the story’s discriminatory bits. At least the hooked noses are gone. Even so, there’s a lot of anti-Semitic coding ported over, especially when you’re also trying to signal a commitment to diversity by casting Black actors (and an entirely atonal Chris Rock as narrator) to deliver this story. It seems as though zero forethought or even insight went into the portrayal of the witches; and honestly, perhaps this movie needed to hire a culture critic as a consultant in order to save it from itself.

Perhaps that lack of insight about the film’s symbolism and coding is why everything else in The Witches just feels so off-kilter. There are shoehorned CGI mouse adventures that don’t feel remotely fun; the CGI effects feel flattened against the perpetually pastel tones of this movie, and our talking mice are given very little character development outside some cursory backstory (and some obligatory fat-shaming of Boy’s portly friend Bruno, because it wouldn’t be a Roald Dahl adaptation without some fat-shaming). And given Stanley Tucci’s vacillating faint Southern accent, for example, he doesn’t seem to be entirely sure where he is, just like it’s not entirely clear whether racism exists in this universe or not.

Y’all, Kristin Chenoweth is in this film, and I was so discombobulated I didn’t even notice her — that’s how weird this film is.

The Witches is a children’s film, and perhaps this deep overanalysis proves that children’s films should never be subjected to this much rigorous scrutiny. But children’s films that endure are the ones that remain compelling in adulthood. With The Witches, so little thought has gone into the process of creation that it seems as though it’s destined to be a lesson in how not to adapt a problem-laden story for the 21st century.

It’s a cautionary tale, alright — just not the one the director intended to make.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Senator Lindsey Graham’s decision to skip his final debate with challenger Jaime Harrison this week in favor of ramming through Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS confirmation may come back to bite him next month. A new Morning Consult poll released yesterday puts him in the rear.

Morning Consult’s Eli Yokley writes: “Across all the surveys, the most dramatic movement was seen in South Carolina, where Graham’s 6-point advantage over Harrison has evaporated. The latest survey showed Harrison with a narrow edge (47 percent to 45 percent) over the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who has played a key role in the Senate GOP’s effort to install conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court. The lead for Harrison, one of the cycle’s most prolific fundraisers, is within the margin of error.”

The poll comes just days after a blistering segment on Fox News of all places featuring South Carolinians voicing their displeasure with their senior senator.

“It’s not just a trite political expression but he’s changed, he’s moved,” said one self-described “friend” of Graham in the video. “He’s not the same centerist, efficient, good government senator that he’s always been.”

Added another: “Lindsey Graham has betrayed the faith and trust of the American people.”

Lindsey Graham does not want you to retweet this video of South Carolinians on Fox News destroying his dreams of re-election. pic.twitter.com/ynFVqvk5L8

— Stephen Groves (@stephengrovesjr) October 23, 2020

Naturally the folks over at The Lincoln Project are having some fun at Graham and the wider GOP’s expense.

There is mourning in the Republican Party. pic.twitter.com/9QfmCWrmTN

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 23, 2020

The post South Carolina Voters Sound Off As Poll Shows Jaime Harrison Ahead: ‘Lindsey Graham Has Betrayed the Faith and Trust of the American People’ — VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The green screen might be doomed. And that’s a good thing.

The green screen is a Hollywood staple. But should it be?

It’s easy to complain about overreliance on special effects, but for projects that require impossible-to-film environments or include incredibly expensive shots, how do you get the flexibility of green screens without the drawbacks? As the video above shows, there are solutions — and Charmaine Chan has worked on one of the possible options.

As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Chan has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. Her job changed while working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM’s upgrade for the green screen: LED panels that use the same technology as video game engines to place a realistic-looking world behind the actors.

The result was a huge improvement, as green screens actually have a lot of drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world.

ILM’s solution fixes a lot of those problems. It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie — wherein VFX came last — was suddenly reversed. Now, artists like Charmaine work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn’t just eliminate a screen — it eliminates a creative barrier.

Watch the video above to see how it happens.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Trump and Melania Trump at the debate on Thursday. | Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images

The mask slips.

Though he lied a lot, President Donald Trump generally came across better during Thursday’s second and final presidential debate with Joe Biden than he did during the first, when his constant interruptions and unhinged behavior rendered it unwatchable (and ultimately hurt him in the polls). But one moment revealed the inhumanity at the core of his politics.

On the topic of immigration, Trump defended his administration’s strict immigrant detention policies by claiming that only people with “the lowest IQ” follow the law by showing up for court proceedings.

Perhaps sensing that he was about to say something unfortunate, Trump seemed to catch himself while the words were slipping out of his mouth — but it was too late. Here’s the clip:

Not only is the idea that only less intelligent people follow the law corrosive to the rule of law, but the specific claim Trump made is entirely false. As my colleague Nicole Narea detailed when Trump made similar claims in January of this year, almost all immigrants show up for hearings:

About 99 percent of asylum seekers who were not detained or who were previously released from immigration custody showed up for their hearings over the last year, according to new data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, a think tank that tracks data in the immigration courts.

Studies from previous years have also disproven the idea that most migrants will choose to live in the US without authorization rather than see their immigration cases through. But it’s nevertheless a central idea in Trump’s immigration policies, including those that aim to keep migrants in Mexico rather than letting them walk free in the US.

The immigration part of the debate in general didn’t go well for Trump. It began with him struggling to downplay new findings from lawyers appointed by a federal judge that the parents of 545 children — who were separated from their parents as a result of his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy — can’t be found.

“These children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump claimed, without evidence.

After Biden pointed out that “these 500 plus kids came with parents” and the child separation policy “makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation,” Trump replied by trying to pin blame for his administration’s policy on Obama and Biden. But as Dara Lind explained for Vox in 2018, there’s really no comparison.

It’s not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration. But former Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in particular circumstances — for instance, if a father was carrying drugs — that went above and beyond a typical case of illegal entry.

To be clear, the Obama administration’s record on immigration isn’t necessarily great either — as of last year Obama still held the record for most deportations. But the Obama/Biden policy was only to separate families when there was a reason to do so. Trump did it broadly and thought it was a deterrent. And as his comments during Thursday’s debate revealed, he’s never been particularly concerned about the humanity of those affects.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Donald Trump debates Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee. | Jim Bourg/Pool/Getty Images

Separating families was one of Trump’s cruelest immigration policies.

During Thursday night’s presidential debate, President Donald Trump was asked to answer for the 545 migrant children who may never see their parents again after his administration separated them from their families at the US-Mexico border.

But the president instead took the opportunity to air his xenophobic views of immigrants, falsely claiming that the affected children were brought to the US by smugglers known as “coyotes,” cartels, gangs and “lots of bad people.” He also argued that the Obama administration built the cages that his administration later used to take the children into immigration custody, and claimed that the children were treated well while in those facilities.

“They are so well taken care of,” he said. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

All of the 545 children, who are now party to a lawsuit in federal court, came to the US with their parents. Many of them have been separated from their parents since 2017, before the Trump administration began separating immigrant families routinely, hoping to deter immigrants from crossing the border without authorization.

The conditions under which the children were held drew widespread condemnation in 2018. Some were placed in US Customs and Border Protection holding cells that got so cold that they were called “hieleras” — Spanish for “freezer” — where they slept on concrete floors with nothing but thin Mylar blankets to keep them warm. They often lacked basic hygiene products, including soap and toothbrushes, and were not provided regular meals and snacks as required by agency guidelines.

“It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation,” Biden said of the policy on Thursday. “It’s criminal.”

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said that they still cannot find the parents of 283 children despite thorough on-the-ground searches in Central America, and don’t expect to be able to reach them by telephone, meaning that the families may never be reunited.

The children have been released to sponsors, who are typically family members or friends, but also include foster families. Their parents, two-thirds of whom were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be identified and reunited with their children in 2018, either have not been located or have not been successfully contacted. The group Justice in Motion is continuing to work to locate the parents in Mexico and Central America, though that has become more difficult amid the pandemic.

Trump offered no plan to help reunite the families on Thursday.

The US government had a policy of separating families — despite officials’ denials

Beginning in mid-2017, the federal government ran a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, under which it began filing criminal charges against anyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents with minor children — even though many of them intended to seek asylum in the US, which is legal.

Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would have simply released the families from detention.)

The Trump administration formalized the policy in May 2018, which it dubbed the “zero tolerance policy.” At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy.

The federal government, however, neglected to link the children to their parents in its databases, making the reunification process difficult, especially in the hundreds of cases of children who were under the age of 5, including one who was just 4 months old.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Obama administration did not have a policy of separating families, but it did try to detain families together on a wide scale and deport them as quickly as possible during the 2014 migrant crisis. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times in 2018 that the administration had briefly considered pursuing family separations but quickly dropped the idea.

“We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” she told the Times. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

Senior Trump administration officials, including former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation. Nielsen told Congress in December 2018 that the administration “never had a policy for family separation.” It was later revealed that she had, in fact, signed a memo greenlighting the practice, which clearly stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has tried to carry out what immigrant advocates call a new kind of family separation. It pressured parents already detained within the US to voluntarily separate from their children by presenting them with what the administration has called a “binary choice”: Either allow their children to be placed with relatives or a foster family in the US while the parents remain detained, or stay together as a family in indefinite detention and risk contracting the coronavirus.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

US President Donald Trump speaks during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

It’s Donald Trump.

During the presidential debate Thursday, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden argued that their opponent accepted money from foreign sources. But only one candidate is actually known to have done that: Donald Trump.

While president, Trump has continued to own his business, and through his hotels, clubs, and golf courses he’s accepted millions of dollars in payment from foreign entities. Indeed, Trump made more than $200 million in income from his foreign business interests since 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Biden, meanwhile, insisted that “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life” — and as far as we know, that’s correct. Biden has indeed released many years of his tax returns and financial disclosure forms, and as he said, they show no sign of any foreign money going to Joe Biden. (Trump famously has refused to release his tax returns, even though he promised he would back during the 2016 campaign — the New York Times recently disclosed some of them.)

Now, Joe’s son Hunter is a different story. Hunter Biden has in fact been paid millions of dollars from foreign sources. But on the debate stage, Trump repeatedly and misleadingly tried to conflate Hunter Biden’s money and Joe Biden’s money. Often Trump would insist to Biden that “you” got certain payments, before then clarifying he meant “your family.”

Trump’s campaign has been trying desperately to prove that some of Hunter’s money went to Joe — most recently by citing suddenly disclosed emails from or about Hunter — but so far, they have not proven their case. The only candidate known to be taking in lots of money from foreign sources is Donald Trump.

Sorting out the various claims of foreign payments

The exact amount of money Trump is taking in from foreign sources is not known, because the Trump Organization is a private company.

The Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that he made $200 million in income from foreign business interests since 2016, citing tax forms and financial disclosure forms. But that number does not include money that foreign sources pay to Trump’s business interests in the United States. And there’s a lot of it. For instance, delegations from at least 33 foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Kuwait, and Romania booked stays or held events at Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel.

That’s what’s happened since Trump was president, but of course he made lots of money from foreign interests before he was president as well. For instance, he sold a Florida property for the eyebrow-raising sum of $95 million to a Russian oligarch in 2008. He partnered with corrupt oligarchs in Azerbaijan to build a hotel in Baku. And he infamously tasked his lawyer Michael Cohen with trying to strike a deal for him to build a Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign, though the deal didn’t work out.

Joe Biden, by contrast, was in political office from the early 1970s through early 2017. After leaving office, in 2017 and 2018, he and his wife Jill made more than $15 million in 2017 and 2018 — mainly from speaking fees and book payments. But there’s no evidence he received any money from foreign sources.

So Trump’s scrutiny has instead fallen on Joe’s son Hunter, who indeed carried on some business transactions with foreigners that have been criticized. Specifically, Trump focused on payments from a few such foreign sources (though his train of thought was often tough to follow).

“I don’t make money from China. You do. I don’t make money from Ukraine. You do. I don’t make money from Russia. You made 3 1/2 million dollars, Joe,” Trump said. But none of that is true for Joe, it is only true for Hunter, and even there Trump is exaggerating what is known.

Elena Baturina, the wife of the late former mayor of Moscow, wired $3.5 million to a company associated with Hunter Biden and his business partners for consulting. But it is not clear how much of that money went to Hunter himself. Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company, also paid Hunter hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a board member, as was much discussed during the impeachment inquiry last year.

And when it comes to China, Trump cited a new purported email from one of Hunter’s business associates. “They even have a statement that we have to give 10 percent to the big man,” Trump said. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know. Maybe you’re not. But you’re the big man I think. Your son said we have to get 10 percent to the big man. Joe, what’s that all about? It’s terrible.”

Again, Trump is misdescribing this. There is an apparent email from one of Hunter’s business associates discussing a proposed equity split for a business venture with a Chinese energy tycoon. The associate (not Hunter) wrote “10 held by H for the big guy ?” Trump’s allies have claimed this is a suggestion that Hunter hold 10 percent of the business venture for his father. But there’s no evidence Joe knew about this, and a further email suggests that the proposal fell apart. (However, the Chinese energy tycoon’s associates did later send $5 million to an account held by Hunter, as Hunter tried to negotiate a gas deal for the Chinese company in Louisiana.)

“I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life,” Biden insisted. He responded by pointing out that Trump himself had a “secret bank account with China.” This did come to light in a New York Times report this week, but Trump has said that it was only set up to pay local taxes while he explored business opportunities that didn’t work out, and no evidence has emerged to disprove that claim.

It’s the last time we need to see Donald Trump debate. Win, lose, or fascism, Trump won’t be a part of another presidential debate for some time. The first question brought up was about Trump and his horrific handling of the public health crisis that we are now living under. Biden made it clear that Trump’s continued inability to accept the responsibilities of his office and in particular his responsibility for taking care of the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic are why our country is in this situation. 

It was at this point that Donald Trump gave this heroic statement: “I take full responsibility. It's not my fault that it came here. It's China's fault.”

That’s verbatim.

(727): His ass is a ten, but his personality is a two. Which would average to a six if I didn't have to figure in apologizing to all and sundry. In short hard no. Get a new wingman.

Asked if there was one sleeper race for Senate this year that he wouldn't count out, Daily Kos Political Director David Nir told The Brief it was Kansas, where Democrat Barbara Bollier is running for an open seat against Republican Rep. Roger Marshall.

A New York Times/Siena poll released Thursday showed Bollier running 4 points behind Marshall, 42%-46%, with 6% undecided and independents and non-whites accounting for a larger proportion of those undecided votes. The poll had a 4-point margin of error. 

Want to help flip the U.S. Senate to Democratic control? Give $2 right now to help Barbara Bollier close the deal in Kansas.

What's perhaps most interesting about the Times poll is the fact that Bollier, a state senator and former Republican who switched parties in 2018, is running several points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who trails Donald Trump 41%-48% in the survey. Even with Trump’s lead, that represents a distinct softening for Republicans since 2016, when Trump sailed to victory in the state by more than 20 points.

Like many former Republicans, the party simply got too extreme for Bollier, diverting its focus from actually helping the state's residents to pushing the pet issues of the right. She finally parted ways with the party in 2018 when it explicitly targeted transgender individuals in the state platform.

“That was the last straw,” ­Bollier told The Washington Post. “I had been at odds with the Republican leadership for years on school funding and expanding Medicaid. At some point, you have to recognize you can’t participate in a party that continues to block what you need to do to get your work done.”

Now Bollier is making an all-out push in the closing days of the race to overtake Marshall before Election Day for a seat left open by retiring GOP Sen. Pat Roberts. Her bid has been boosted by several factors, including a substantial war chest and a more than 40% uptick in Democratic voter registrations in the state since 2016, according to reporter Steve Kraske of KCUR radio. 

Bollier raised a whopping $13.5 million in the third quarter, bringing her fundraising total for the campaign to $20 million, writes the Post. By comparison, her GOP rival raised just $2.7 million in the third quarter for a total haul of $5 million.

Kraske told MSNBC Thursday that the lopsided fundraising is particularly evident in this final stretch, with Bollier simply "overpowering" Marshall by a 4-to-1 ratio on the airwaves with a series of straight-to-camera appeals to voters. 

That advantage has state Republicans both worried and whining. “It’s not a fair fight right now,” one state GOP operative told the Post, noting the "passion" that Democratic donors and voters are bringing to the fight.

Bollier and Marshall are both doctors, but Bollier supports a Medicaid expansion for low-income residents in the state while Marshall does not. Marshall also used to own a for-profit hospital, and a Kansas City Star investigation this week charged that he urged Congress to ease restrictions on physician-owned hospitals while his wife was profiting from them.

Bollier has also been hammering Marshall on the pandemic. “As a congressman and doctor, @RogerMarshallMD has access to top scientists at the drop of a hat. Yet, he continues to spew toxic disinformation about American deaths," she tweeted Thursday. "I, for one, would like our senator to be someone who doesn’t spread QAnon conspiracies." Marshall has also rated Trump's handling of the coronavirus response an "A+."

Bollier, who has conducted an almost entirely virtual campaign, is particularly concerned about Marshall's embrace of quack science and conspiracy theories. “Kansas is exploding right now with COVID cases," she said. "We’re hot red. We need to take this seriously.”

As the returns pour in on election night, KCUR's Kraske reminded viewers that results from the eastern side of the state would come in first and they would favor Bollier, but the western side of Kansas would go for Marshall. So it's really a matter of how far Bollier can run up the score in the early part of the night.

Whatever the outcome, there's a real sense of excitement about the race. “It’s certainly a tighter Senate race than has happened in Kansas in years," said Russell Arben Fox, a political science professor at Friends University in Wichita.

(732): My professor just said irregardless, get me out of here
(732): I guess he's ir-illiterate.

In a “policy departure” by the U.S. Postal Service, under incompetent Trump campaign donor Louis DeJoy, lawmakers have been barred from observing “firsthand how mail is being processed at large facilities in the final weeks of the election.” According to the Wall Street Journal, at least five Democratic lawmakers have been barred from entering facilities by Trump’s postal service, and their excuses have been “inconsistent.”

New Jersey Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell told the WSJ that he was refused entry last month, and then again on Monday. He and his delegation wanted to see how the handling of mail-in ballots, amidst the building workload, was being handled at a large mail-processing plant in Kearny, New Jersey. According to Pascrell, the post office said there were security concerns and that Pascrell’s appearance might be a violation of the Hatch Act.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer told Forbes that surprise, surprise, in 2018 under Trump the agency “updated its ethics guidelines to include this phrasing: “members of Congress who are on the ballot are not allowed to tour a postal facility within 45 days of a primary or general election.” Of course, because this is the incompetently corrupt Trump administration, the WSJ and Forbes point out that even under their own revised guidelines elected officials can visit federal facilities for “official purpose, such as receiving briefings, tours, or other official information.”

Other Democrats that have been turned away include Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who was told she hadn’t taken a “special training course first,” and California Rep. Jared Huffman who has not been able to observe his post office in Eureka, California, saying this is completely new, and that he has had “all sorts of previous meetings and tours and it’s never been an issue.” 

Considering that the Trump administration has done everything in its power to hamstring the U.S. Postal Service in their duties, especially approaching Election Day, requests to see how things are progressing should be considered essential for a democracy. The level of blowback the Trump administration received for its transparent attacks on the Democratic process of mail-in-voting during a pandemic when record numbers of Americans will be casting their vote by mail, has been almost nonpartisan. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is a minority party of authoritarian fetishists at this point, and many have kept mum.

The Trump administration has been one enormous Hatch Act violation after another, and right now their only chance at getting four more years in office is to steal the election. To say this is not their plan is to forget that through gerrymandering they have stolen what little remained of the democratic process of the Senate, and through that they have stolen the Judicial Branch of our country away from the majority of Americans.

As Daily Kos has covered, Black Americans have the police called on them with an entirely disturbing regularity. We’ve covered an instance of a Black man having the cops called on him while simply sitting in a frozen yogurt shop. We saw an adult threaten to call the police on a young Black girl selling bottles of water. In one of the higher profile cases, we covered the viral video of a white woman calling the police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. Calling the police on people of color is such a systemic issue, in fact, that San Francisco is moving to take action against discriminatory 911 calls with the aptly named CAREN Act. 

The latest example? Michigan State Sen. Marshall Bullock, chair of the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus, told the Advance that someone called the police on him while he was campaigning with 21-year-old Chokwe Pitchford—the Democrat who is hoping to unseat Republican state Rep. Pauline Wendzel—as well as candidate for the Berrien County Commission Rayonte Bell. You might remember that Daily Kos Elections actually endorsed Pitchford for the Michigan House back in September. 

Bullock told the outlet, “As soon as I saw the squad car pulling up, I said, ‘This is about to be some bulls—,’.” Why were the police called? According to Bullock, the police department told him they received a call from a resident about three Black men looking into windows when they walked up to houses. Bullock denied that allegation, saying that while they were campaigning, canvassers were instructed to ring doorbells and then step back from the door. It’s worth noting they were canvassing in St. Joseph, a mostly white, affluent community in West Michigan.

Want to show Pitchford some support? Donate $3 to help Pitchford and other Democrats turn the Michigan House blue today.

The St. Joseph Public Safety Department officers who arrived, including one white officer and one Black officer, were, thankfully, reportedly friendly and professional. Still, Bullock stressed, “I know that I was racially profiled.”

Bullock said most people they spoke to in that community were “cool” and described seeing both Democrat and Republican lawn signs. But the call to the police can’t be ignored. He said, “But somebody called the police on the Black boys.”

“I think the person who called the police officers should really think,” Pitchford told local outlet WSBT. “Check your biases before you go into a situation.”

Bullock tweeted about the incident as well.

As did Pitchford.

Here’s a heartwarming piece of sweet news where Bullock reads a book for elementary students.

Here is a great conversation between Bullock and Authority Health President and CEO Loretta V. Bush on racism as a public health crisis.

You can check out a recent video from Pitchford on the cost of medications and COVID-19 below.

Want to show Pitchford some support? You can donate to help Pitchford and other Democrats turn the Michigan House blue today. 

Burger King is planning to test reusable containers starting next year as part of its efforts to reduce waste. From a report: The trial is part of a partnership with TerraCycle's zero-waste delivery platform, Loop. Customers can opt in for reusable packaging for menu items such as sandwiches, soft drinks and coffee. They can then return the reusable sandwich container or beverage cup to Burger King restaurants to be cleaned and reused. But for those who participate, the program comes with a cost: Customers will be charged a small deposit upon purchase, and once the packaging is returned, they'll receive a refund. The reusable containers and cups will be introduced at select restaurants in New York, Portland and Tokyo. The fast food giant says it plans to add more cities following its first three locations afterward. The program is a part of the company's continuing sustainability efforts. In July, the fast food chain announced a version of its Whopper made from lemongrass-fed beef, which it said would cut methane emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TV cord-cutting is picking up steam, and AT&T's CEO predicts there's a long way to go before it stops. From a report: On an earnings call Thursday, AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey said "we're probably going to see a little bit of a plateauing" when the number of homes subscribing to pay TV hits 55 million to 60 million. Most of those homes will include sports fans, he said. It's a stark outlook for an industry that's already suffered a long subscriber exodus. There were about 91 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2019, including some 8 million who signed up to online-TV bundles like Hulu and YouTube TV. About 3.5 million people cut the cord in the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. While AT&T, Comcast, Charter and other TV providers are focusing their businesses on delivering internet service, owners of cable channels are especially vulnerable. That's because more cord-cutting means lower subscriber fees, a key revenue stream. Stankey added that AT&T is focusing on growing its new online streaming service, HBO Max, to prepare for the future. AT&T said Thursday that it shed another 590,000 TV subscribers last quarter. With customer losses mounting, AT&T has been looking to sell the majority of its satellite-TV business, DirecTV.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Gilead Sciences' antiviral drug remdesivir as a treatment for the coronavirus. From a report: In May, the FDA granted the drug an emergency use authorization, allowing hospitals and doctors to use the drug on patients hospitalized with the disease even though the drug has not been formally approved by the agency. The intravenous drug has helped shorten the recovery time of some hospitalized Covid-19 patients. It was one of the drugs used to treat President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the virus earlier this month. Earlier in the year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, said the drug would set "a new standard of care" for Covid-19 patients. The drug will be used for Covid-19 patients requiring hospitalization, Gilead said. Remdesivir is now the first and only fully approved treatment in the U.S. for Covid-19, which has infected more than 41.3 million and killed more than 1 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

In 2018, Texan MJ Hegar burst onto the political scene with an introductory video that I described at the time as the "best political ad I'd ever seen." I’ll include that at the end of this post in case you somehow missed that magical introductory video or want to see it again. It went megaviral at the time and helped propel Hegar, a Purple Heart-decorated combat veteran helicopter pilot, into a 2020 race for U.S. Senate against Sen. John Cornyn, a man who has long overstayed his time in Washington. 

Two years later, MJ Hegar is giving John Cornyn a real run for his (dark, swampy) money. She has been facing an uphill battle against someone who has spent 18 years in the Senate, but as voters get to know her, they like what they see. The Daily Kos Elections polling average currently shows Hegar within striking distance of Cornyn, with a 5-point gap between the two and a whopping 9% of voters saying they are still undecided. That means the closing days for both campaigns are focused on defining, for the undecided voter, exactly who MJ Hegar is. Sen. John Cornyn’s camp has decided to define her as a foul-mouthed (and presumably un-ladylike) candidate. Unfortunately for Cornyn, this ad makes her seem like a total bad ass, which she is.

Watch the ad below.

Yes, Sen. John Cornyn’s way. That would include: Always be polite while you are taking infants from their parents at the border. Always maintain your composure while taking away health insurance from cancer survivors—it’s the dignified ‘John Cornyn way.’ 

Can you click here to donate $5 MJ Hegar’s race and the Texas Democrats in crucial races that could help flip the Texas legislature from red-to-blue? Let’s show them everything is bigger in Texas, even the underdog upsets.

Update! MJ Hegar has already responded to the ad.

And she’s on a roll!

And if you missed her 2018 introductory video, here it is again. 

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

If Trump thinks struggling to answer Lesley Stahl’s basic questions speaks well for him, he should probably think again.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump went ahead and preemptively published the footage of his interview with Lesley Stahl that will air on 60 Minutes this weekend. It’s hard to imagine how he thought doing so would reflect positively upon him.

Trump posted the Stahl interview footage on Facebook below a caption that read, “Look at the bias, hatred and rudeness on behalf of 60 Minutes and CBS.” Oddly, he compared Stahl’s performance favorably with the moderator of the upcoming final presidential debate, Kristen Welker, writing, “Tonight’s anchor, Kristen Welker, is far worse! #MAGA” (Trump has spent the better part of a week preemptively attacking Welker).

But if the idea is supposed to be that Stahl was trying to do a hit job on Trump, the footage doesn’t bear that out. The video Trump posted begins with Stahl asking him, “You’re okay with some tough questions?” You’d probably expect the president of the United States to say that’s no problem, but instead, Trump said, “No, I’m not.”

“You’re not okay with tough questions?” Stahl replied, incredulously.

Nearly 40 minutes later, the interview ended on a similar note, with Trump whining to Stahl that “your first question was, ‘this is going to be tough questions’ ... but when you set up the interview, you didn’t say that. You said, ‘oh, let’s have a lovely interview.’ And here’s what I do say: You don’t ask Joe Biden [tough questions].”

Stahl replied by pointing out she hasn’t recently interviewed Joe Biden, but Trump admonished her that her opening statement “is no way to talk.” Seconds later he walked away from the interview in a huff.

Given all this, you’d probably think Stahl grilled Trump with a series of hard-hitting questions. But the content of the interview consisted of Trump getting offended when Stahl made a number of obvious (albeit unflattering for him) observations.

Trump is ill-equipped to deal with the most basic of questions

Perhaps the most substantial exchange of the interview came when Stahl asked Trump about his administration’s effort to get the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act during a pandemic that has made having access to health care more important than ever.

Stahl pointed out the obvious — that Trump has for years been promising a replacement plan for the ACA that still hasn’t materialized — but Trump replied by insisting that his plan is “going to be announced very soon.”

Later, in an unfortunate soundbite, Trump admitted to Stahl that he hopes the Supreme Court overturns the ACA — a ruling that could cost more than 20 million people their health insurance.

“I hope that they end it. It’ll be so good if they end it,” Trump said, in an exchange that seemed tailor-made for Joe Biden ads.

Perhaps in awareness that this part of the interview didn’t go well for him, on Wednesday the president tweeted photos of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany presenting Stahl with reams of paper meant to demonstrate “the many things” the administration has done on health care — as if the mere bulk of a stack of papers proves something rather than what’s actually written on it.

If Trump making stuff up to defend his (lack of) a health care plan was bad, his defense of holding pandemic rallies that make a mockery of basic public health guidelines was even worse. When Stahl pointed out to him that many people at his rallies don’t wear masks and aren’t social distancing and asked him about “the message he is sending,” Trump responded by insulting her and lying.

“You know, you’re so negative ... these are the biggest rallies we have ever had,” Trump said (falsely), prompting Stahl to note, “I can’t believe after what happened in the Rose Garden here at the announcement, with all of the people getting sick, that you are not being more strongly encouraging about wearing masks.”

“What’s your next question?” Trump eventually replied, trying to change the topic.

Perhaps Trump’s most brazen lie came when he insisted to Stahl that he hasn’t encouraged “lock her up!” chants at his recent rallies. In fact, encouraging chants of that sort aimed at Hillary Clinton, Gretchen Whitmer, Ilhan Omar, and others has become a staple of Trump’s stump speeches.

Trump’s recent interviews with real journalists have uniformly been disasters

The first indication the 60 Minutes interview didn’t go well for Trump came on Tuesday, shortly after filming of it ended at the White House, when Trump posted a bizarre 5-second gotcha video to his Twitter account above a caption that read, “Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes not wearing a mask in the White House after her interview with me. Much more to come.”

Shortly thereafter, news broke that Trump “cut the interview short and then declined to participate in a ‘walk and talk’ segment with Ms. Stahl and Vice President Mike Pence,” as the New York Times put it.

Then, on Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “I am pleased to inform you that, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, I am considering posting my interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, PRIOR TO AIRTIME! This will be done so that everybody can get a glimpse of what a FAKE and BIASED interview is all about ... Everyone should compare this terrible Electoral Intrusion with the recent interviews of Sleepy Joe Biden!” He also brought up the Stahl episode during a rally speech that night in Erie, Pennsylvania.

That preemptive framing echoes the president’s recent pattern of attacking debate moderators and other journalists for critical questions or coverage — some even before he’s interacted with them. It also comes while Trump is making a concerted effort to discredit members of the media ranging from Stahl to Welker to Chris Wallace of Fox News. He thinks any reporter he interacts with should fawn over him the way Sean Hannity or Brian Kilmeade does.

Whether we’re talking about his interactions with Jonathan Swan of Axios, Savannah Guthrie of NBC, or Chris Wallace of Fox News, Trump’s recent interviews with real journalists have uniformly been disasters. He’s so immersed in the insular world of Fox News that he regards obvious truths (“why didn’t you develop a health plan?”) as attacks on him.

For whatever reason, the session with Stahl seems to have sent Trump into an unusually drastic tailspin. Some people will watch the footage he published and see a president who can’t deal with basic lines of questioning and is a world-historical whiner, but Trump apparently views it as evidence that he’s beleaguered on all sides by people with an agenda who are out to get him.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Trying to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s head is truly an exercise in futility, and today it’s just downright bonkers. Apparently Trump believes that sharing snippets of Leslie Stahl’s attempt to interview him for 60 Minutes is going to show that ... she’s mean and he’s brilliant? Is there really no one in the White House who is willing to tell him when he has a really, really bad idea?

It’s a tremendous gift to Joe Biden, though, that Trump decided to release these videos in plenty of time for them to be a factor in Thursday’s debate. Especially when it comes to the Supreme Court and Obamacare. “I hope that they end it,” he said. “It will be so good if they end it.” Serving it up on a silver platter there. But there’s more. “It’ll be so good if they end it,” he said, “because we will come up with a plan.” Stahl: “Will?” 

That’s after Trump insisted that his plan “is fully developed; it’s going to be announced very, very soon.” It’s not. Because the only thing that has ever mattered is that President Barack Obama’s signature achievement be erased. There is no plan. There never will be a plan. He never meant for there to be a plan.

Donald Trump is not doing particularly great right now. Not unlike every day of the last seeming-million years with Trump in the White House, the Donald has been beset by stories of corruption and dirty dealings, stories contradicting everything he says he’s doing and has done. In 2015 and 2016 this seemed to work well enough for him to win the Electoral College against Hillary Clinton. Part of that was because Clinton came with decades of misinformation piled on top of her by way of the right-wing propaganda machine, and part of that was due to Trump having next to no nationally known record of anything outside of hosting a reality show. Now, we have the plague.

As a result, attempts to recreate the Trump win of yesteryear are all that Trump and his surrogates seem to have. This playbook includes wildly projecting one’s own insecurities and failings onto others. Donald Trump Jr. has been able to follow in his father’s footsteps, earning a place in history as one of the great failures of society. Junior appeared on Fox & Friends Thursday morning to do some damage control ahead of Thursday night’s upcoming debate. You read that right: Junior came in to explain why his father will get killed at tonight’s debate. The one in the future. It turns out, it’s because of all kinds of QAnon stuff, liberal media stuff, secret powers, and other nonsense gibberish.

Help Democratic representatives take back state legislatures by donating what you can. Everything helps.

But before Donny Jr. came on to speak with the “friends,” he tweeted this out.

This is the mindset of someone lost in the speedy torrent of Alice in Wonderland-ian mania. A quick reminder: On Monday, reports came out that Donald Trump had a secret bank account in China that he left off his financial disclosure statements. Anyways! Junior came to Fox & Friends and he was hot! After mysteriously claiming that Trump’s people would have someone “monitoring” the mute button during the debate, and then saying that Hillary Clinton messed with Trump’s mic in a 2016 debate, Junior launched into this:

DONALD TRUMP JR.: This moderator, apparently is, you know, a big Obama administration person. I mean you literally can't make up the nonsense. When you look at the bias that we face on a daily basis, it's literally hard to believe that we are in a free country in America.

It is literally hard to believe. It’s figuratively hard to believe. It’s galactically hard to believe that Donald Trump Jr. isn’t in jail.

Click for full size

If you dislike elections, take heart: this one may be the last.

Good luck to us all.

Barack Obama said President Trump was “incapable of taking the job seriously” at a rally for Democratic nominee Joe Biden on October 21 in Philadelphia. | Matt Slocum/AP

“Character matters.”

Speaking for the first time in person on the 2020 campaign trail in Philadelphia, former President Barack Obama did not hold back.

In a 36-minute speech delivered Wednesday to an audience seated in or standing by their cars, Obama slammed President Donald Trump as “incapable of taking the job seriously.” In between plugs for his former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s running mate Sen. Kamala Harris, Obama repeatedly attacked Trump’s record, starting with his handling of Covid-19.

“At least 220,000 Americans have died. More than 100,000 small businesses have closed. Millions of jobs are gone. Our proud reputation around the world is in tatters,” Obama said. “Presidents up for reelection usually ask if the country is better off than it was four years ago. I’ll tell you one thing, four years ago you’d be tailgating here at the Lincoln instead of watching a speech from your cars.”

Obama also pointed to statistics indicating that despite the US having its first identified cases around the same day, South Korea’s “per capita death toll is just 1.3 percent of what ours is.”

Obama’s visit to Pennsylvania underscored the importance the Biden campaign is placing on the state, and in mobilizing Black voters in the Philadelphia area particularly. Obama’s approach: focus more on personality than policy.

While Obama’s remarks also lauded Biden’s health care plan and his foreign policy experience, the bulk of the speech focused on questions of character — both Biden’s and Trump’s. Throughout the speech, Obama returned to that familiar theme, including his oft-used maxim: “The presidency doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”

When he discussed his view of Trump’s fitness for office, Obama’s incredulity was palpable. As he recounted Trump retweeting conspiracy theories about whether SEAL Team Six actually killed Osama Bin Laden, he spoke to voters exhausted by the news cycle: “You might be able to have a Thanksgiving dinner without having an argument” if Trump loses this November.

“And, look, this notion of truthfulness and democracy and citizenship, and being responsible, these aren’t Republican or Democratic principles, they’re American principles. They’re what most of us grew up learning from our parents and our grandparents. They’re not White or Black or Latino or Asian values, they’re American values, human values, and we need to reclaim them. We have to get those values back at the center of our public life.”

At one point, he leveled his ire at those who have made excuses for what he views as intolerable behavior from the president. Obama also lamented that Trump’s abnormal behavior “distracts all of us” from the policy ramifications of this administration. Ironically, in this speech, the former president seemed to be caught in that trap as well.

The Atlantic has reported that while “Obama is alarmed about Trump’s presidency,” like many he has struggled with how to campaign during a pandemic. Wednesday night’s speech — and an accompanying stop to meet with community organizers — seems to indicate he’s found his answer. It will be one event in a two-week blitz where “Obama will hit the trail, potentially adding joint appearances with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Trump got another chance to share his health care plan in a 60 Minutes interview. He didn’t have an answer.

Days before the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump isn’t making any secret of his health care agenda: He wants the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act — which could leave tens of millions without health care coverage — and he’s nowhere close to having a plan in its place.

“I hope they end it,” Trump told 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl, in an interview that the Trump campaign preemptively released over purported concerns that the president’s words would be misconstrued.

“It’ll be so good if they end it.”

Obamacare, which Trump and congressional Republicans failed to repeal in 2017, is more popular than it’s ever been. Yet Trump’s Justice Department is supporting a lawsuit from 20 Republican states to overturn the law in its entirety. More than 20 million people could lose their insurance without a plan to replace the law. The law’s regulations that bar insurers from discriminating against people based on their medical history, its financial aid to help people buy insurance, and the Medicaid expansion that covered more than 12.5 million Americans would be wiped out.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has previously expressed opposition to Court decisions upholding Obamacare. But there may be reason to believe she could vote to preserve the law, at least in the current suit, given the dubious arguments in the case.

Trump has been gunning to end Obamacare, in one way or another, since he came into office. But he is yet to come up with a plan that could both pass through Congress and not lead to millions of Americans becoming uninsured.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Stahl asked how Trump would protect people with preexisting conditions.

“I’ll protect it,” Trump said. “Will be totally protected.”

“How?”

“They’ll be protected, Lesley,” the president repeated. “I mean, the people with pre-existing conditions are going to be protected.”

Stahl tried one more time: “How?”

Trump instead promised that a health care plan would be coming, eventually, some day. Once the country saw what the outcome of the Supreme Court case is.

“It’s fully developed,” he said, without specifying any of its details. “It’s going to be announced very soon, when we see what happens with Obamacare.”

Trump’s desire to appear to have a health care plan has been evident in the final months of the campaign. He signed a legally toothless executive order about preexisting conditions. His administration has been trying to figure out how to send $200 discount cards for prescription drugs to Medicare beneficiaries. Trump says he has a health care plan but the public hasn’t seen it.

The fundamental problem for Trump is covering people with preexisting condition has already been accomplished — through Obamacare’s regulations for health insurers and the government assistance it provides to lower premiums. The various Republican health care plans would roll back both of those provisions, which makes insurance more expensive for people who are less healthy and would likely lead to millions of people losing coverage. That is not a replacement plan the public is likely to support.

So instead, Trump continues to dodge when pressed on this issue, which is of critical importance to many voters. The stakes for US health care are high in the 2020 election. If Trump wins at the Supreme Court but doesn’t have a replacement plan, 20 million people or more could lose insurance; if Joe Biden wins and passes his health care plan, as many as 25 million coverage would gain coverage.

Biden seems likely to draw that distinction at Thursday’s second, and final, presidential debate. Trump has laid up the argument for him with this latest interview.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Trump disembarks from Air Force One on October 21. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The stakes of this election are so high because the system itself is at stake.

I recently asked Melissa Schwartzberg, a professor of politics at NYU who specializes in democratic theory, why democracy survives in some countries and crumbles in others.

Why was I thinking about it? Oh, no reason. But her answer has been ringing in my head since. It explains much of what makes this moment in politics so distinct, so desperate.

“The really important question is when do electoral losers think that it’s in their interest to go along with their defeat, and when do they think they’re better off resisting and revolting?” Schwartzberg replied. “It has to be that they think they have some better chance of obtaining power in the long run by continuing to abide by the rules of the game.”

In American politics in 2020, both sides doubt that abiding by loss is the surest path back to power. This is an election — and more than an election, it is a politics — increasingly defined by a fight over what the rules of the game should be.

Democrats see a political system increasingly rigged against them and the voters they represent, and they are right. They are facing an Electoral College where a 2- to 3-point win in the popular vote still means Republicans are favored to take the presidency. They are vying to win back control of a Senate where Republicans have a 6- to 7-point advantage. The simple truth of American politics right now is this: Republicans can lose voters, sometimes badly, and still win power. Democrats need landslides to win power.

It gets worse. Democrats fear a doom loop. They are faced with the reality that when they lose power, Republicans will draw districts and change rules and hand down Supreme Court decisions that further weaken their voters, that pull America further from anything resembling democracy. Democrats have watched it happen in recent years again and again, as I document below. Losing begets losing, because in the American political system, electoral winners have the power to rewrite electoral rules.

But Republicans also see their position as desperate. They know their coalition is shrinking. They know that they are winning power but losing voters. They see a younger, more diverse, and more liberal generation building against them. They fear that Democratic efforts to expand the franchise and make voting an easily exercised right rather than a politically metered privilege will spell their long-term demise. They believe that mass democracy is inimical to their interests, and they state that fact baldly.

In March, when House Democrats proposed vote-by-mail options, same-day registration, and expanded early voting — a package Republicans blocked — President Donald Trump told the Fox & Friends hosts, “They had things, levels of voting, that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Rey Del Rio/Getty Images

In recent months, Trump has made clear that he intends to contest the results of the election if he loses, even musing about delaying the election entirely. During the presidential debates, neither Trump nor Vice President Mike Pence would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of a loss. “I’m urging my supporters to go in to the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen,” Trump said darkly.

But Democrats, too, are preparing for a legitimacy crisis: What if Trump wins, but only because shocking numbers of mail-in ballots sent by Democratic voters were thrown out? What if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by 5 points but the election comes down to a 2000-style recount in Florida? What if the final vote on the Supreme Court is cast in Trump’s favor by newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett?

Of every election I have covered, this is the one where electoral losers seem least likely to automatically respect the results of the count. I am not saying crisis is inevitable. The likeliest outcome, judging from the polls, is that Biden wins by an indisputable margin and that outcome is respected. But the possibility of crisis is real, and if we have learned anything in recent years, it is to cease pretending that unlikely is a synonym for impossible.

The stakes are so high because the system itself is at stake — both sides are losing faith in the electoral system, and they doubt they can win power in the future if they lose many more elections now. And perhaps they are right.

This is the fight behind the fight, the battle that will decide all the others. America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats want to make it one, or at least more of one.

Republicans against democracy

“We’re not a democracy,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted during the vice presidential debate. As the backlash mounted, Lee poured cement around his position. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Rank democracy. There is no subtext in this election, only text; no dog whistles, only foghorns. Lee, a former Supreme Court clerk and one of the GOP’s brighter intellectual lights, is stating his party’s position simply: Democracy is the enemy, the specter stalking Republican power.

A party that wins power even as it fails to win over voters will quickly turn against democracy itself. And when that happens, it will use the power it has to make it yet easier to win power without winning voters. And so the Republican Party is. A full accounting of the GOP’s recent assays against democracy would require a book, but a few examples:

• In North Carolina in 2016 and Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018, Republican legislatures responded to electoral defeat by using lame-duck legislative sessions to entrench their own power and strip incoming Democratic governors and officeholders of key powers and privileges.
• Republicans at the state level have consistently pushed policies — from voter ID laws to voter roll purges to shutting down polling locations in low-income communities — that disproportionately disenfranchise low-income minorities and Democrats more broadly.
• The Supreme Court’s conservative bloc has handed down decision after decision undermining voting rights — including gutting the Voting Rights Act — while permitting money to flood politics. And it’s not just the Supreme Court that holds sway here. A recent study tracked 309 votes by judges in 175 election-related decisions and found that “Republican appointees interpreted the law in a way that impeded ballot access 80 percent of the time, versus 37 percent for Democratic ones.”
• The Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question to the census, with the explicit intention of scaring off Hispanic respondents so the population counts would give Republicans a bigger electoral advantage. The Supreme Court narrowly rejected their machinations, but only because they had been so obvious about the political aims motivating the change.
• A number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians — including Mike Lee — have called for repealing the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of US senators. The alternative would be state legislatures choosing senators, which would maximize the GOP’s geographic advantages.
• In 2020, Republicans, including the Trump campaign, filed lawsuits to prevent states from making it easier for Americans to vote, and have their vote counted, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. When groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have tried to get judges to change or invalidate existing laws that make it difficult for Americans to vote and have their vote counted during the pandemic, Republicans — including the Trump campaign — have actively fought against them.

All of these efforts continue, with examples piling up even as I write these words. On Monday, the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 over a request by Pennsylvania’s Republicans to overturn a court ruling allowing election officials to count ballots received for up to three days after Election Day, due to restrictions and delays imposed by the coronavirus.

The 4-4 deadlock means the Pennsylvania court ruling will stand, and ballots will be that much likelier to be counted. But if Barrett had already made it to the Court, she might have joined the conservatives and provided the crucial fifth vote to grant a stay, leading more ballots to be trashed. And on Wednesday, the Court’s five conservatives joined together to block Alabama from allowing drive-up voting.

Nor is the turn against democracy just a Trumpist obsession, or just an Election Day question. More genteel conservatives, even those who loathe Trump, are casting their ideas in more boldly anti-democratic terms. In his book The Conservative Sensibility, George Will places James Madison’s “catechism of popular government” at the core of the conservative project. “What is the worst result of politics? Tyranny,” Will writes. “To what form of tyranny is democracy prey? Tyranny of the majority.”

To this tyranny — otherwise known as democracy — Will proposes that conservatives embrace a more profound form of judicial check, one that would render not just elections, but legislators, toothless. “Conservatives’ indiscriminate denunciations of ‘judicial activism’ serve progressivism,” he writes. “The protection of rights, those constitutionally enumerated and others, requires a judiciary actively engaged in enforcing what the Constitution actually is ‘basically about,’ which is compelling majority power to respect individuals’ rights.”

Will is clear as to the radicalism of intentions here. Lochner v. New York, the infamous — and later overturned — case in which the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for New York to limit bakers’ workweek to 60 hours, and which set off a period in which the Court ruled vast swaths of social and economic policymaking unconstitutional, “richly repays reconsideration.” If a 6-3 conservative Court did as Will counsels, even winning elections wouldn’t lead to progressive governance, because the Supreme Court would wipe out progressive legislation.

Democrats for democracy

Over the past decade, the right has understood that democracy is its enemy with far more clarity than the left has realized that democracy is its answer. But that is, perhaps, changing. In 2018, after Democrats took back the House, the first bill they considered was the “For the People Act,” which knit together a smorgasbord of proposals securing voting rights, curbing government corruption, and empowering small donors. But that bill is a dead letter in the Senate, where anything that isn’t purely budgetary in nature will fall to the filibuster.

But in the aftermath of Mitch McConnell’s obstructionist innovations and Supreme Court hardball, Senate Democrats are beginning to consider ridding the institution of the filibuster and taking democratization seriously. And they are being pushed in that direction by the most senior members of their own party.

Speaking at Rep. John Lewis’s memorial, former President Barack Obama exhorted Democrats, “If politicians want to honor John — and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here — but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute.”

Then Obama lowered the hammer: “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”

Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images

Just as surprising has been Biden’s refusal to take expansion of the Supreme Court off the table, a notable position given the enthusiasm with which Biden disavows progressive policies he does intend to reject. And it’s not just Biden. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who holds Biden’s former seat in the Senate, and is a leader among the Democrats’ more cautious, institutionalist, wing, has also signaled openness to Supreme Court reform.

The fight to define the next era in American politics

In his book The Great Democracy, Vanderbilt law professor and former top Elizabeth Warren adviser Ganesh Sitaraman writes:

Many centrists, liberals, and even some moderate conservatives worry about tactics like these, but they also worry about fighting hardball with hardball. They are concerned, for example, about proposals to reform the Supreme Court, change filibuster rules, or regulate money in politics. ...

They fear that more hardball will simply unleash a never-ending tit-for-tat process—an era of permanent escalation in which politics spins out of control. Although we cannot rule that possibility out, this view assumes that neither side can win outright. But this assumption might be wrong. Shortly after Lincoln declared that a “house divided against itself cannot stand,” he added, “It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Sitaraman’s argument is that we are in a time of transition, an unstable space between potential equilibriums. If Democrats win the fight to make America a democracy, the Republican Party will have to transform itself into a party capable of winning majorities in a country that is becoming more diverse and more secular. That will force the GOP to become a different type of party, with a different animating coalition, and a more broadly appealing policy agenda, if it wants to avoid irrelevancy.

But if Democrats lose the next few elections, they may lose democracy itself to a conservative Supreme Court and an anti-democratic Republican Party. In that world, the Democratic Party will have to become a different party than it is, and a different party than its voters want it to be, as it tries desperately to win over the older, whiter, more religious places that retain disproportionate political power, and to satisfy the demands of a conservative Supreme Court that Republicans control.

That is the political system Republicans explicitly intend to build, and that they will use their power to create if they win in 2020. (I recently had Sitaraman on my podcast to discuss his arguments. You can listen to that interview here.)

Right now, in other words, both sides fear that if they lose, the other side will change the political system such that they cannot win again. This is, to some degree, hyperbole: Victories are never permanent, and losses are rarely irrecoverable. But it is not entirely alarmism, either. This is a fight to decide the rules of American politics going forward, and those rules will decide the kinds of parties, agendas, and political competition we have.

“In moments of extraordinary politics, in moments of transition between eras, the struggle is not to save the old regime, and political hardball is not a permanent status,” writes Sitaraman. “The struggle is to achieve a new equilibrium.”

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on October 21. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The Trump campaign has been whining about anything and everything related to the second presidential debate.

Typically, debates present an opportunity for political candidates who are losing their races to make up ground on the frontrunner. President Donald Trump, however, is not your typical come-from-behind candidate.

That’s why in the lead-up to Thursday’s second and final debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump has preemptively attacked moderator Kristen Welker of NBC almost every day. That’s why his campaign has made such a big fuss over the debate topics and the addition of a mute button aimed at making the debate more watchable than the first one was thanks to Trump’s antics. And that’s why they’ve seemed to be spinning a bad showing before the debate has even happened.

With the national polls showing Biden’s lead over Trump holding steady at 9 percentage points or more (though battleground polling is tighter), Thursday’s debate is the last chance Trump will have to try and make his case before a large, nationwide TV audience. But the campaign itself doesn’t seem to be projecting much confidence it’ll go better for him than his widely panned performance in the first debate, when he incessantly interrupted Biden and went on rants that required full immersion in Hannityworld to understand.

Trump has spent a week bashing Kristen Welker for very flimsy reasons

Kristen Welker is a well respected White House reporter known for asking Trump and other administration officials tough but fair and respectful questions. Nonetheless, Trump has spent much of the past week trying to paint her as a far-left radical who is conspiring with Biden to hurt him.

“She’s extraordinarily unfair,” Trump said of Welker during a rally in Wisconsin on October 17, lumping her with another NBC employee, Savannah Guthrie, who did an effective job grilling him during a town hall event the night before.

Then, on October 19, Trump described Welker as “a radical left Democrat, or whatever she is.” During a rally later that day in Arizona, he falsely accused Welker of deleting her Twitter account, adding that she’s been “screaming questions at me for a long time. She’s no good.” (Welker hasn’t donated to Democrats and isn’t affiliated with any party.)

Trump’s attacks on Welker continued through a Fox & Friends interview on Tuesday, when he described her as “far worse than Scully” (Steve Scully of C-SPAN was supposed to moderate the second presidential debate, but it was canceled following Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis).

In comments illustrative of the contempt he holds for any member of the media who dares to not treat him with kid gloves, Trump went on to attack Guthrie and Chris Wallace of Fox News, who moderated the first presidential debate.

On Wednesday, Trump, alluding to the fact that Welker’s parents have donated to Democratic candidates, again described her as “a very biased person.”

“But that’s my life,” Trump said. “In the meantime, that’s the White House back there.”

Finally, on Thursday, Trump posted video of his ill-fated interview with Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes on Facebook, but took a gratuitous shot at Welker in the process, writing, “Look at the bias, hatred and rudeness on behalf of 60 Minutes and CBS. Tonight’s anchor, Kristen Welker, is far worse!”

In reality, Trump would object to any moderator who isn’t a loyalist. He made this explicit during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show earlier this month, when he said right-wing media personalities like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Judge Jeanine, Laura Ingraham, or Tucker Carlson should moderate his debates.

That being said, if Trump expected Thursday’s debate to go well, you’d think he’d at least try and play nice with Welker and focus on attacking Biden. Instead, the incessant attacks on Welker — who’s nobody’s idea of “a radical-left Democrat” — suggests he’s making excuses for a poor showing before the debate has even happened.

Trumpworld has been complaining about everything

The second presidential debate was widely expected to focus on foreign policy before it was canceled following Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis. With there now being only two debates instead of three, the topics announced for Welker’s debate ended up being much broader and include fighting the coronavirus, American families, race in America, climate change, national security, and leadership. Foreign policy may come up within those parameters, but it won’t necessarily be a focus.

With hundreds of people still dying each day from a pandemic that continues to upend American life, it’s certainly understandable that Welker would choose to focus on topics that are close to home. But the Trump campaign took the opportunity to throw another fit.

In a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) that he posted on Twitter, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien referred to the commission as the “Biden Debate Commission” and blasted the topic choices, but also gave away the game Trump wants to play.

“If a major party candidate for President of the United States is compromised by the Communist Party of China, this is something Americans deserve to hear about, but it is not surprising the Biden [sic] would want to avoid it,” he wrote, alluding to baseless conspiracy theories that Joe Biden and his son Hunter leveraged Joe’s government position into massive payouts in China.

As Stepien’s letter suggests, Trump wants to talk about “foreign policy” because it would give him an opportunity to rail against China — the country he’s blaming for the coronavirus — and Hunter Biden. Discussing the devastating impact the pandemic has had on American life and racial tensions he’s spent years inflaming is a much tougher task.

Stepien also blasted the commission for canceling the second debate because Trump “was medically cleared as having tested negative for the virus.” What he didn’t mention, however, is that Trump left the hospital a mere 72 hours before the debate was supposed to happen, and aroused suspicions he may have exposed Biden to the coronavirus during the first debate and refusing to say when he last tested negative before standing onstage with Biden.

While Trump and his campaign incessantly work the refs, Biden has quietly gone with the flow. That tactical difference can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that Biden is leading, but it also appears as though Trump is creating excuses for himself ahead of time.

Team Trump’s whining isn’t just limited to the topics. They’ve also been complaining about CPD’s announcement that a mute button will limit the candidates’ ability to interrupt each other during the two-minute statements they’ll be making at the beginning of each topic. During a Fox & Friends interview on Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. went as far as to suggest that the Trump campaign will try to intimidate debate officials.

“They’re gonna have someone in the room, and we’re gonna call nonsense when we see nonsense,” he said.

The backdrop is Trump’s disastrous performance at the September 29 debate, which seemed to hurt him in the polls in the days following. The debate also may have continued to damage him to an “unusual extent” during the campaign’s final stretch, as David Lauter wrote for the Los Angeles Times last week.

“The encounter in Cleveland, dominated by Trump’s repeated interruptions and his cryptic statement that seemingly welcomed the support of a right-wing extremist group, appears to be the exception to the usual rule that the impact of debates fades quickly,” Lauter wrote, adding later: “Since the debate, roughly half the voters polled said they do not believe Trump is mentally fit.”

Beyond his interruptions and refusal to disavow far-right groups or conspiracy theories, Trump spent part of that debate mocking Biden for how regularly he wears a mask — only to be hospitalized with the coronavirus 72 hours later.

In a way, the use of a mute button at the final debate could actually help Trump a bit, as in theory it’ll prevent him from constantly interrupting Biden and coming across as a jerk. But at this late date, it’s unrealistic to expect that the president might suddenly change his tone or moderate his message when it comes to topics like the coronavirus or race relations.

Trailing in the polls and with a thin résumé of positive accomplishments to tout, Trump will likely devote Thursday evening to trying to disqualify Biden. And if that doesn’t work, he and his campaign will do what they always do: complain about being treated unfairly.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps a poker face while playing Among Us on Twitch. | AOC on Twitch

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first Twitch stream is now one of the platform’s most viewed streams of all time.

The internet has crowned an unlikely new video game streaming superstar: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). AOC, as the 31-year-old Congress member from the Bronx is commonly known, played the hit video game Among Us Tuesday night on the video game live-streaming platform Twitch, drawing more than 400,000 concurrent viewers. That makes her stream one of the 20 most-watched streams in Twitch history.

It was Ocasio-Cortez’s first time playing a game live on Twitch; she’d launched her channel just one day earlier, on October 19, after casually asking her Twitter followers if they would like to play the multiplayer favorite with her.

“Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?” she tweeted. She then added that she had never played the hugely popular game before, “but it looks like a lot of fun.” There were several Twitch celebs among the nearly 44,000 fans and potential players who responded — and 24 hours later, there she was, keyboard on deck and headphones on.

Among Us lets up to 10 people work together to solve tasks on a spaceship. As many as three of those people are assigned the role of the “Impostor,” which means they’re secretly bent on killing everyone else on the crew and sabotaging the mission at hand. The way to win is to correctly identify all the Impostors or end up with only Impostors left alive. (The game is strikingly similar to the playground classic Manhunt.)

Ocasio-Cortez’s ultimate crew ran deep, with 12 streamers rotating in and out to play with her. They had millions of fans and followers between them; for example, two of Ocasio-Cortez’s teammates, the Twitch stars DrLupo and Pokimane, average 5 million followers each. Also in the mix was another politician: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), whose daughter joined the game later in the stream.

At the start of the stream, Ocasio-Cortez directed viewers to I Will Vote, a website that aims to help people establish a voting plan. (She also encouraged New York residents to vote for Joe Biden via the endangered Working Families Party line on their ballots.)

She also had a bit of a learning curve as she tried to figure out how to actually run a Twitch stream. But once that was sorted, Ocasio-Cortez dropped her serious tone and got hardcore about Among Us. Before long, she was picking off other Twitch streamers and reveling in how well she was doing, all while other players called her out as a possible “Impostor” to entertaining effect. And whenever possible, she was sure to plug health care policy and stump for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

It’s not hard for someone like Ocasio-Cortez to rally big-time Twitch streamers to play a game with her online, as a celebrity playing a popular video game on Twitch is almost guaranteed to rack up an impressive number of viewers. (Drake’s memorable 2018 stream of Fortnite with Ninja, one of the most successful Twitch streamers, is still the most viewed stream ever.) And Ocasio-Cortez, whose landmark congressional campaign and win in 2018 established her as a political rising star, has already amassed many a young (and, likely, more Twitch-aware) fan over her short tenure. She’s beloved for her active social media presence, charming snark, approachable persona, and brazen willingness to criticize President Donald Trump and other polarizing political figures.

Her Twitch stream is also a peak example of her political savvy, proving that she knows how to reach a young audience better than most politicians. In the final weeks before the election, Democrats have been pushing extra-hard to encourage people of all ages to go vote. Ocasio-Cortez has used her substantial social media platform to do the same, posting Instagram videos and tweeting often about the importance of this particular presidential election.

But she isn’t just lecturing her fans and constituents about how voting is their civic duty. She’s also reaching out to them in much more fun, organic ways — like by offering to play video games with them in an effort to raise electoral awareness. And the idea to leverage a game as big as Among Us on a platform as big as Twitch with participation from well-established Twitch celebrities was tailor-made to get potential voters’ attention.

Among Us, first released in 2018, is available on mobile platforms (for free) and PCs (for $5). The game is easy to pick up and play, and built on a familiar conceit. It’s steadily grown in popularity since its debut, with it becoming a cultural behemoth this summer in particular. Now it’s a commercially and critically acclaimed hit with a broad player base. Its tiny astronaut characters and “Find the impostor” motive have become memes on Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr, and the game developer Innersloth continues to iterate to fans’ approval.

The popularity of Among Us on Twitch can be attributed to its simple, goofy gameplay as well as its high fun viewing potential. Twitch isn’t a platform made solely for gamers to play games or watch other gamers play games; it’s also highly interactive and communication-based. During Among Us streams, it’s expected for viewers to jump into the chat and shout at players about who they believe the Impostor is. Players can speculate and react loudly to whatever happens, like if they are killed or kill someone else. Sometimes players don’t even have to play — they can just sit with the game open and talk with their viewers or other streamers they’re playing with about whatever they want. And as long as they’re funny or cool or attractive or interesting enough, they know they’ll be able to find a captive audience.

Ocasio-Cortez’s desire to play Among Us seemed earnest — it’s a fun game, and she’s shown an interest in video games before. Most notably, she volunteered to visit people’s Animal Crossing games earlier this year, when the Nintendo game was all the rage. Players posted screenshots of her hanging out on their Animal Crossing islands, complimenting their creative town designs.

Ocasio-Cortez’s excitement about playing Among Us, and the excitement of her fellow players, would have made the nearly four-hour stream a wild success even if it hadn’t attracted 400,000 viewers. It was a genuinely fun watch, with a side of civic engagement. Ocasio-Cortez proved herself a winning Twitch personality, ranking alongside the best of them; she laughed, she yelled, she gasped, and viewers did the same alongside her, all while she engaged with people on important issues. The combination of her willingness to get on Twitch and hang out, her smart choice to play a popular and accessible video game, and her savvy in assembling a game-playing crew full of familiar Twitch names helped cement her stream as a shining example of how (and where) politicians can meet the hugely important younger voting body.

Biden’s campaign has recently released in-game Animal Crossing merch, launched an in-game Animal Crossing campaign office, and gotten the help of a teen influencer to promote the Democratic candidate on Instagram. But on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez went much further than that. She dived right in and met many younger voters on their own turf. She even murdered some of them in-game. And for some voters, watching a politician they favor declare victory in their favorite video game will likely make a difference when it comes to expanding their awareness of what’s at stake in the 2020 election.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Democratic Senate candidate Jaime Harrison addresses supporters at a drive-in rally on October 17, 2020, in North Charleston, South Carolina. | Cameron Pollack/Getty Images

The historically Republican state is now competitive, as Sen. Lindsey Graham defends his seat from Jaime Harrison.

South Carolina is the Senate battleground that no one saw coming.

In a state where no Democrat has won a Senate seat for more than two decades, former South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison has fielded an incredibly strong challenge to incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham, a high-profile Trump ally. Although early polling had Harrison lagging Graham by as much as 17 percentage points in February, some recent surveys show the two lawmakers with an even split in support.

The support he’s gotten has surprised many — including Harrison himself.

“I’m amazed by it,” he told Vox. “I got into this race because I knew I had a shot, but not in my wildest dreams did I imagine a campaign growing like this campaign has grown.”

Longtime South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), whom Harrison previously worked for as a congressional staffer, has echoed this sentiment. “Not a single soul alive believed when he announced for the Senate that he would be sitting here 30 days out, 48-48,” Clyburn said in an early October interview with Politico.

By raising a staggering amount of money, and positioning himself as a moderate with close ties to the state, Harrison has been able to garner strong support from Democrats and independents, as well as a sliver of moderate Republicans. And now Graham faces one of the closest races of his political career.

Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images

Graham has acknowledged this by making appeals for donations during several Fox News appearances, and campaign spokesperson T.W. Arrighi seemed to project a mixture of optimism and realism in a statement to Vox: “Make no mistake — our internal polling has us on track for a victory in November, but Senator Graham is fighting for every vote as he never takes anything for granted.”

Overall, the contest between Harrison and Graham could hinge on voters who split their ticket between the presidential and Senate races. President Donald Trump is still expected to win in South Carolina — even if it’s by much narrower margins than he did in 2016, when he was ahead by 15 points. This means some Trump voters would likely need to defect from Graham — in favor of either Democrats or a third-party candidate — for Harrison to edge out the longtime Republican lawmaker.

That scenario, Winthrop University pollster Scott Huffmon says, is “Harrison’s narrow path on a Nepalese cliff.”

How Harrison closed a double-digit polling gap, briefly explained

Harrison’s strength as a candidate and his ties with national Democrats (he’s an associate chair of the Democratic National Committee) are among the factors that have helped him launch a robust campaign that’s attracted millions in donations from both inside and outside the state. As of September, Harrison had raised $85 million compared to Graham’s $58 million, and that advantage has translated to a huge presence on television and in digital advertising.

Harrison’s massive fundraising haul has been critical in establishing him as a formidable challenger in part because it has allowed him to quickly go from being less well-known to having wide name recognition across the state.

“Jaime Harrison has done what no Democratic candidate has successfully been able to do, and that is raise enough money to take the fight to Lindsey Graham in every part of South Carolina,” says Anton Gunn, a strategist and former state political director for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Harrison tells Vox this support has been driven by grassroots energy. “We have gotten thousands of volunteers, I think we’re on [14,000] or 15,000 people who signed up to volunteer for our campaign. We’ve gotten well over a million contributions,” he said. As the Guardian reported, both Harrison’s and Graham’s campaigns have seen a high proportion of their contributions coming from out of state.

Cameron Pollack/Getty Images

Experts also note that Harrison began putting out advertising early in the year — months before Graham began mounting a comparable effort on the air — enabling him to introduce himself to voters by focusing on his background, family, and values. Throughout his campaign, Harrison’s messaging has emphasized his ties to South Carolina and policies that relate to the state, like rural broadband access, rather than his partisan affiliation or opposition to Trump. A native South Carolinian who grew up in Orangeburg with a single mother, Harrison frequently talks about his personal connection to the state.

He’s also taken more moderate positions broadly, shying away from support for Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal and noting that he wouldn’t back eliminating the filibuster, for now. “It’s about opening a Pandora’s box, and the question is, there may be short-term political gains, but are we comfortable with long term repercussions for that?” he said.

As the focus on health care has grown during the pandemic, Harrison has instead emphasized the need for Medicaid expansion. Graham, meanwhile, has continued to oppose the Affordable Care Act and has said he would prefer a system that involved block grants to states, which he says would give South Carolina more flexibility.

Because of the effects of the coronavirus, health care is a top issue for many voters. “The Trump administration’s failure to address Covid-19 early and emphatically weighs on the minds of far too many South Carolinians.” said Democratic strategist Lauren Harper, who’s also the spokesperson for the Lindsey Must Go super PAC. “That failure has exacerbated the need for quality and affordable health care here in our state.”

Broadly, in his messaging, Graham has characterized Harrison as being tied to the “far left,” while emphasizing his own commitment to what he has referred to as “law and order.” The senator has made it clear that he opposes criminal justice reforms like defunding the police (which Harrison has also said he’s against). And Graham has argued that he not only has strong connections to the state but has brought South Carolina federal funding for projects like the development of the Port of Charleston.

Harrison has been able to counter Graham’s campaign rhetoric so successfully, according to Furman University political science professor Danielle Vinson, because his ideological positioning and personal story make him an “ideal Democratic candidate for South Carolina.”

“He’s not too far left; he knows the state really well having been the South Carolina Democratic Party chair,” Vinson says.

The coalition of voters Harrison needs include independents, moderate Republicans, and ticket splitters

Because of the political stance he’s taken, Harrison has been able to connect with Democrats as well as a strong segment of independents and a small group of moderate Republicans who are likely turning away from President Donald Trump. To win, he’ll need massive turnout from Democratic base voters — including the Black voters who comprise 60 percent of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina.

“We have to have the turnout that we had in 2008,” said Gunn. That year, 65.2 percent of Black voters nationally turned out, compared to 59.6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Per a September Quinnipiac poll of the state, Harrison has the backing of 97 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of independents, and 5 percent of Republicans. Gunn estimates that the state usually falls 55-45 in favor of Republicans, so securing GOP voters — especially moderate Republican women who may be moving away from both Trump and Graham — is vital for Harrison. Concerns about the president’s handling of the pandemic, as well as his rhetoric, are among the factors turning these voters toward Democratic candidates.

Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor has noted, too, that Democratic candidates for federal office have historically capped out at 48 percent of the vote in South Carolina, meaning eking out even an improvement of a few percentage points among swing voters could secure the race for Harrison.

There are some other trends in the state that could raise that 48 percent cap Democrats have struggled to surpass in the past. Among them is an influx of new residents who have moved from other left-leaning places. “New folks from other parts of the country that tend to be a little more blue are moving to South Carolina,” says College of Charleston political science professor Gibbs Knotts. “That’s been something that Democrats have been able to tap into.”

In addition to garnering the support of all these groups, Harrison will also have to convince some Republicans who are still aligned with Trump to break with Graham and split their ticket.

It’s unclear how Graham’s weakness with conservative voters will affect the race

One of the biggest variables in the race is the bloc of conservative voters who support Trump but still aren’t that excited about Graham.

Graham — like Republicans in some of the other contested races — is feeling the pressure from both wings of the GOP. On the conservative side, there are voters who think he still doesn’t back Trump enough, despite his staunch defenses of the president’s controversial Supreme Court nominees: first during a fiery moment in Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, and more recently in the hearings for nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images

Graham, before Trump’s election, had been viewed as a more moderate figure in the Senate who aligned himself closely with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), which many conservatives in the state weren’t happy about. “Five years ago, certain elements of the Republican Party were burning him in effigy because of his affiliation with McCain,” says Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist who’s also an adviser for the Lincoln Project.

There’s a question of whether these conservative voters’ concerns with Graham are still so strong that they’ll split their ticket: If they do, experts think a small fraction could vote for third-party for Constitution Party candidate Bill Bledsoe, though they’re less likely to cross over to Democrats.

“I don’t think there will be a lot of people who will vote for Trump and not Graham,” says Felkel. “I think there are some former Tea Party members — now Trump enthusiasts — who might choose to vote third party, but I don’t think there will be a lot of them.”

Concerned that support for him would lead to Harrison winning the election, Bledsoe dropped out of the race in early October and endorsed Graham, saying, “President Trump has asked that conservatives stand together and reelect Lindsey Graham in order to help make America great again, and I agree.”

But because his exit came so late, Bledsoe’s name will still appear on the ballot. Harrison, hoping to take advantage of this fact, has recently put out advertising aimed at swaying this segment of conservative voters in favor of Bledsoe, including digital ads arguing that he is “too conservative” for South Carolina. Given how close the Senate race has shaped up to be, any narrow gains made from this strategy could potentially be decisive.

Graham has tried to avoid this scenario himself by shoring up his conservative bona fides, and proving his closeness to Trump — most recently playing a prominent role in the advancement of Barrett’s nomination, which is a top priority for the president and many Republican voters.

And, in fact, Arrighi, Graham’s spokesperson, highlighted Graham’s push to seat Barrett as one of his key achievements, saying, “Senator Graham is fighting for South Carolina, helping families and businesses get through the pandemic, and working to ensure a conservative Supreme Court with Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the newest member.”

Barrett’s confirmation process, too, has highlighted the role a Republican majority plays in the Senate. If Republicans were to keep their majority, they’d be able to obstruct Democratic bills in a potential Biden administration, and continue advancing judges in a Trump administration. This could be a reason that some conservative voters ultimately back Graham, even if they don’t fully agree with his record.

With just a few weeks to go, this race is poised to be close to the very end. “I think it’s going to be razor-thin margins,” said Gunn. “It’s not going to be a blowout either way.”

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.