A big question heading into this cycle was whether Democrats’ best path to winning back the White House ran through the Sun Belt or the Great Lakes (i.e. Rust Belt). While we won’t know for certain which pathway was best for them until the votes are actually counted, the current data shows a pretty clear divide.  If former Vice President Joe Biden is to win this election, his best chance probably runs through the Great Lakes.

Two new polls out Sunday morning are demonstrative of a larger trend. Biden was up 51% to 46% in a CBS News/YouGov poll in Wisconsin. CBS News/YouGov also found Biden at 50% to President Donald Trump’s 47% in Arizona, a result well within the margin of error. These polls taken in isolation wouldn’t be that noteworthy, but they speak to the larger aggregate.

Hillary Clinton won contests containing 232 electoral votes. Were Biden to hold the Clinton states (and polls indicate that he probably will), he needs to find an extra 38 electoral votes. Those extra 38 electoral votes are likely to come from the six closest states Trump won in 2016: Arizona (11 electoral votes), Florida (29 electoral votes), Michigan (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (15 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). You can also add in the one electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which Trump won by just 2 points in 2016.

The 2016 presidential election was a bracing reminder that the presidency is won or lost in the states and not in the national popular vote. Donald Trump lost nationally by 2.9 million votes (2.1% of the total cast) while winning a comfortable Electoral College majority.

Can he repeat this feat in 2020? Yes. Can he do it if he loses the national popular vote by a larger margin than four years ago? Probably not. To win reelection, President Trump will have to reduce Joe Biden’s national vote advantage, which now stands at more than 10 percentage points, by about 8 points during the final two weeks of the campaign, an accomplishment for which there’s no clear precedent in American history. If he falls just short of replicating his 2016 showing, the country could be plunged into a dangerous political and legal struggle combining the worst features of 2000 and 1876.

Having learned their lesson in 2016, when pollsters for various media companies had pretty good estimates of the eventual national vote but did missed significantly in what turned out to be the crucial states, survey researchers are doing more polls with higher quality in the swing states this year. This enables us to gauge with some confidence the current situation in the 13 states that could conceivably swing into either party’s column, either now or at some point in 2020.

Table 1: Biden lead in swing states

Source: FiveThirtyEight

As of now, Joe Biden leads in 11 of these 13 states. By contrast, Donald Trump won ten of them in 2016 and Hillary Clinton only three (New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Nevada). Of these three states, Biden’s lead in New Hampshire and Minnesota is too large to surmount, barring a political earthquake. Trump has an outside chance to prevail in only one Clinton state—Nevada—and to do so, he would have to improve his current standing substantially.

Looking at the current swing state polling against the backdrop of the national popular vote average enables us to project four possible scenarios.

Scenario 1. Trump cuts Biden’s lead in half

Suppose that the non-stop live-event campaign the Trump team has planned cuts Joe Biden’s lead in half, from 10 points to 5. In this scenario, Trump would win the two states where he currently leads—Ohio and Texas—and would pick up Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada would remain in the Biden column. President Trump would win 258 electoral votes, 12 short of a majority.

Scenario 2. Trump cuts Biden’s lead to 4 points

Suppose President Trump does even better, cutting Biden’s popular vote lead to just 4 points. It turns out that this would have no effect on Electoral College outcome, because Biden would still carry the three midwestern “Blue Wall” states plus Nevada.

Scenario 3. Trump cuts Biden’s lead to 2 points

Suppose President Trump’s campaign is so effective that he cuts Biden’s popular vote margin to just 2 points, replicating the 2016 results. In this event, Trump would carry all the states he won in 2016 plus Nevada—a total of 312 electoral votes.

Scenario 4: The nightmare

Suppose President Trump cuts Biden’s lead to 3 points. Although Nevada probably would fall into his hands, Pennsylvania would be too close to call. In this event, the state that most observers believe has the highest potential for electoral delays and snafus in counting mail-in ballots would determine the outcome of the race. This would all but guarantee a replay of the Florida controversy in 2000 that ended with Bush v. Gore, but with a much higher level of partisan polarization, more intense divisions over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and heightened threats of civil disorder. While it may not reach the level of rancor following the disputed 1876 election—when the post-Civil War Reconstruction era came to its bitter end—it could make the disputed 2000 election look tame by comparison.

There’s an obvious objection to my analysis: I’ve assumed that shifts in the national popular vote would be evenly distributed across the states. Isn’t it possible that the swing states might diverge significantly from the national average?

While no one can rule this out, there’s important evidence to the contrary. The 4.3 percentage-point reduction in President Trump’s support between 2016 and today has been distributed remarkably evenly among the swing states, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2

Sources: State Secretaries of State; FiveThirtyEight

The bottom line: with only one outlier (Nevada), the change in President Trump’s support between 2016 and 2020 has been remarkably uniform, both among the swing states and between those states and the rest of the country. Although the electoral college results will be determined by the individual states, the 2020 election is being shaped much more by national factors than by differences among the states. The implication is that President Trump will not be able to overcome Joe Biden’s current Electoral College lead, which is substantial, unless he can reduce Biden’s national popular vote advantage to roughly the 2-point difference of 2016. The worst-case outcome is that Trump gets close to this result without equaling it, leaving the outcome of the election in doubt and throwing the country into chaos under highly adverse circumstance

An examination of the demographic voting patterns in the last few cycles and national polls indicate that Biden’s relative strength in the Great Lakes makes a lot of sense.

Remember that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin formed part of what was deemed “the blue wall” heading into the 2016 election. All three states had voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992.

Trump was able to break through that blue wall because of his strength among White voters without a college degree. These voters make up about 50% or more of the voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They make up a significantly lower percentage in the Sun Belt, which is more racially diverse.

And if you still don’t believe the polls, just look at the results in 2018 and the actions of the Biden campaign. House Democrats did significantly better in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in Arizona, Florida and North Carolina. They also won the governorship and Senate races in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2018.

There’s a reason why Biden based his campaign in Philadelphia and has been outspending Trump by factors of greater than 2:1 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

For Trump to win, he’ll probably need to knock down the big blue wall again. If he can’t, Biden’s probably the next president

Former Vice President Joe Biden is dominating President Donald Trump in the latest polls. No, the election is not over yet, and Trump still has a non-negligible chance of winning. But a look through history reveals that Biden is in a better position at this point than any challenger since 1936, when the first scientific polls were taken in a presidential race.

In the 21 previous presidential elections since 1936, there have only been five challengers who led at this time. Of those five, only one (Bill Clinton in 1992) was ahead by more than 5 points. None of those five were earning more than 48% of the vote in the polls.  In other words, Biden is the first challenger to be above 50% at this late juncture in the campaign.

This also continues to mark a massive difference with the 2016 campaign. While Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by as high as 7 points in October 2016, she never came anywhere close to approaching 50% of the vote. Trump merely had to win the lionshare of the undecided or third party voters (who would bolt their candidate) to earn a victory in 2016.

The 2020 presidential campaign has been repeatedly rocked by seismic events – from the outbreak of a devastating pandemic to President Donald Trump contracting COVID-19. Yet in at least two important respects, not much has changed: Joe Biden continues to hold sizable advantages over Trump on most major issues and key personal traits, as well as in overall voter preferences. And voters continue to be highly focused on the election and attach great importance to its outcome.

With less than a month to go before the election, a majority of registered voters (57%) say they are very or somewhat confident in Biden to handle the public health impact of the coronavirus, while 40% express a similar level of confidence in Trump. In June, Biden held a narrower, 11 percentage point lead on handling the coronavirus outbreak (52% Biden, 41% Trump).

At a time of deep political divisions and partisan antipathy, voters are far more likely to express confidence in Biden than Trump to unify the country. Half of voters (50%) say they are confident in Biden to “bring the country closer together,” compared with just 30% who express confidence in Trump.

The new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 5 among 11,929 U.S. adults, including 10,543 registered voters, finds that Biden maintains an overall lead in voter preferences: 52% of registered voters say if the election were held today, they would vote for Biden or lean toward voting for him, while 42% support or lean toward voting for Trump. Another 4% of voters back Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, while 1% support Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins in the 2020 election. (See detailed tables for full demographic breaks on voter preferences.)

The survey was in the field when Trump announced on Twitter, early on the morning of Oct. 2, that he and first lady Melania Trump had contracted COVID-19. There are no significant differences in voter preferences, or in confidence in the two candidates to handle the impact of the coronavirus, before and after his announcement.

Trump’s handling of the nation’s economy remains a relative strong point. About half of voters (52%) express confidence in Trump to make good decisions about economic policy, one the highest shares expressing confidence in the president on any of the six issues on the survey. However, about as many voters (51%) have confidence in Biden on the economy.

Since summer, there has been some improvement in views of the nation’s economy. Among all voters, 35% say economic conditions are excellent or good, up from 28% in June. However, this change has come almost entirely among Trump supporters. And the gap in economic perceptions, already wide, has grown much wider. Two-thirds (67%) of Trump supporters now say that economic conditions are excellent or good, compared with 51% who said this in June. Just 11% of Biden supporters view economic conditions positively, which is little changed from four months ago (9%).

The survey finds that voters view Biden much more positively than Trump for compassion, honesty and being a good role model. Nearly twice as many voters say “compassionate” describes Biden very or fairly well than say it applies to Trump (67% vs. 34%). More than half of voters (53%) say Biden is honest, compared with 35% who describe Trump as honest. And far more voters say Biden is a good role model (54% vs. 28%).

The ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Sunday was the latest poll to indicate Biden’s strength. Biden led Trump by a 55% to 43% margin among likely voters. The poll was the third high quality national poll published this week that had Biden up by at least 10 points and above 50%. The other two being from CNN/SSRS and Fox News.

Indeed, the average of polls has Biden at around 52% or 53% and up by somewhere between 10 and 11 points. This is an unprecedented position for a challenger with a mere 23 days to go until Election Day. Even if every undecided or current third party voter went to Trump now, he’d still be down about 5 to 6 points nationally. That’s never been the case with an incumbent since 1936 at this point.

Of course, it’s the Electoral College that matters. There are very few universes in which Trump could win the Electoral College, if he were to lose nationally by 5 to 6 points.  New polls out on Sunday from CBS News/YouGov demonstrate that Biden’s above 50% in some key battlegrounds. He leads 52% to 46% in Michigan and Nevada. In Iowa, a state that Trump took by 9 points in 2016 and is not anywhere close to must win for Biden, the race is tied at 49%.

A look under the hood reveals why Biden is in such a strong position. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Covid-19 has either been, or been within the margin of error of being the nation’s most important problem in Gallup polling.

The three challengers in the polling era (Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992) who defeated incumbents have all been trusted more than the incumbent to deal with what Americans thought was the nation’s most important problem. None, however, were trusted by more than 50% of the voters.

Today, Biden has a huge advantage over Trump when it comes to the pandemic. The clear majority (59%) of likely voters in the last CNN poll said Biden would better be able to handle the outbreak. Just 38% said Trump would do a better job than Biden.

In less than 4 weeks, voters in America will decide whether Donald Trump remains in the White House for another four years. The Republican president is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president but has been in US politics since the 1970s.

As election day approaches, polling companies will be trying to gauge the mood of the nation by asking voters which candidate they prefer.  We’ll be keeping track of those polls here and trying to work out what they can and can’t tell us about who will win the election.

Biden leading national presidential polls

National polls are a good guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, but they’re not necessarily a good way to predict the result of the election.

In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton led in the polls and won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost – that’s because the US uses an electoral college system, so winning the most votes doesn’t always win you the election.

With that caveat aside, Joe Biden has been ahead of Donald Trump in most national polls since the start of the year. He has hovered around 50% in recent months and has had a 10-point lead on occasions.

By contrast, in 2016 the polls were far less clear and just a couple of percentage points separated Mr Trump and his then-rival Hillary Clinton at several points as election day neared.

Which states will decide this election?

As Mrs Clinton discovered in 2016, the number of votes you win is less important than where you win them.

Most states nearly always vote the same way, meaning that in reality there are just a handful of states where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states.

The electoral college system the US uses to elect its president, each state is given a number of votes based on how many members it sends to Congress – House and Senate. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

As the map above shows, some battleground states have a lot more electoral college votes on offer than others so candidates often spend a lot more time campaigning in them.

Who’s leading in the battleground states?

At the moment, polls in the battleground states look good for Joe Biden, but there’s a long way to go and things can change very quickly, especially when Donald Trump’s involved.

The polls suggest Mr Biden is ahead in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three industrial states his Republican rival won by margins of less than 1% to clinch victory in 2016.

But it’s the battleground states where Mr Trump won big in 2016 that his campaign team will be most worried about. His winning margin in Iowa, Ohio and Texas was between 8-10% back then but it’s looking much closer in all three at the moment.

That’s one of the reasons why some political analysts rate his chances of re-election as low as things stand. FiveThirtyEight, a political analysis website, says Mr Biden is “favoured” to win the election, while The Economist says he is “very likely” to beat Mr Trump.

Do polls show who won the first debate?

Many pundits called the debate for Mr Biden and the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher agreed, describing it as “the political equivalent of a food fight” with the former vice-president emerging as the man “least covered in slop”.

But what do the polls tell us? Well the ones we have all put the Democrat ahead, but by varying margins.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll conducted after the debate found Mr Biden on 53% and his rival on 39% – a gap six points wider than in their previous poll two weeks earlier.

But more worrying for the president are two battleground state polls conducted by the New York Times and Siena College that found Mr Biden ahead by seven points in Pennsylvania and five points in Florida.

Overall, it doesn’t appear that the president’s debate performance helped him close the gap on his rival.

Has coronavirus affected Trump’s numbers?

The coronavirus pandemic has dominated headlines in the US since the start of the year and the response to President Trump’s actions has been split predictably along party lines.

Support for his approach peaked in mid-March after he declared a national emergency and made $50 billion available to states to stop the spread of the virus. But it dropped after that point, even among Republicans.

The virus is likely to be at the forefront of voters’ minds and one leading model produced by experts at the University of Washington predicts the death toll will have risen to about 240,000 people by election day.

Mr Trump may be hoping Operation Warp Speed, his administration’s vaccine initiative, can produce an “October surprise” – a last-minute event that turns the election upside down.

The chief scientific adviser to the initiative has said it’s “extremely unlikely but not impossible” that a vaccine could be ready to distribute before 3 November.

Can we trust the polls?

It’s easy to dismiss the polls by saying they got it wrong in 2016 and President Trump frequently does exactly that. But it’s not entirely true.

Most national polls did have Hillary Clinton ahead by a few percentage points, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong, since she won three million more votes than her rival.

Pollsters did have some problems in 2016 – notably a failure to properly represent voters without a college degree – meaning Mr Trump’s advantage in some key battleground states wasn’t spotted until late in the race, if at all. Most polling companies have corrected this now.

But this year there’s even more uncertainty than normal due to the coronavirus pandemic and the effect it’s having on both the economy and how people will vote in November, so all polls should be read with some scepticism, especially this far out from election day.

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Democratic nominee Joe Biden released his most recent tax returns just hours before Tuesday night’s debate with Donald Trump, signaling he wants new revelations about the president’s taxes at center stage for their first face-to-face encounter.

The difference between the two candidates’ tax history is fodder for Biden’s argument that Trump has conned working-class voters into supporting him. The debate begins at 9 p.m. New York time.

Biden’s taxes showed that he and his wife Jill paid more than $346,000 in federal taxes and other payments for 2019 on an income of nearly $985,000 before seeking a refund of nearly $47,000 they said they had overpaid the government.

“This is a historic level of transparency meant to give the American people faith once again that their leaders will look out for them and not their own bottom lines,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said on a call with reporters. “Mr. President, release your tax returns or shut up,” Bedingfield added.

Billionaire Trump, meanwhile, paid $750 in 2016 and 2017, and nothing in ten of the last 15 years, according to the New York Times.

With more than a million Americans already casting early ballots and time running out to change minds or influence the small sliver of undecided voters, the stakes are enormous as the two White House candidates take the stage five weeks before the Nov. 3 election.

The 90-minute debate, with a limited and socially distanced in-person audience because of the coronavirus pandemic, will begin at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT on Wednesday) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, with Chris Wallace of Fox News serving as the moderator. It is the first of three scheduled debates.

The Biden tax returns gambit ahead of the debate shows that the former vice president is seeking political advantage on an issue that could resonate with voters – a wealthy real estate developer-turned-politician who has, according to the New York Times report, often avoided paying federal income taxes.

Democrats have sought to portray Trump as a tax dodger. Trump’s persistent refusal to release his taxes has been a departure from standard practice for presidential candidates. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh issued a statement responding to Biden’s disclosure, accusing him of being dishonest in public statements about his own past earnings, but did not address whether Trump would release his returns.

The Times also reported that Trump was currently embroiled in a decade-long Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed after declaring large losses. If the IRS rules against him, he could have to pay over $100 million, according to the newspaper.

BIDEN INCOME

Biden’s 2019 return showed most of his income came from a company he has said handles payments from his speaking and writing engagements and from a University of Pennsylvania teaching post from which he took an unpaid leave of absence after launching his candidacy.

The 2019 tax returns for Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, also were released. Harris and her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff, reported paying about $1.2 million in total federal taxes on $3.3 million of income for the year, according to the tax returns released on Tuesday. Vice President Mike Pence released a decade of returns before the 2016 election but no tax information since then.

The combustible Trump and more low-key Biden will debate an array of urgent political challenges, including a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States and thrown millions out of work, a brewing battle over Trump’s nomination of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and continued protests for racial justice.

Biden, 77, has held a consistent lead over Trump, 74, in national opinion polls, although surveys in the battleground states that will decide the election show a closer contest.

The debate will be divided into six segments: the records of Trump and Biden, the Supreme Court, the pandemic, the economy, election integrity and “race and violence” in U.S. cities. A senior Trump campaign official told reporters aboard Air Force One that the president “knows exactly what he wants to communicate” and hopes to get into his differences with Biden on trade, “endless wars,” the issue of America’s “haves and the have nots” and Biden’s long career in elected office.

Biden is certain to press his criticism of Trump’s response to the pandemic, and highlight Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, the law known as Obamacare that has helped millions of Americans obtain health insurance.

President Trump cast doubt on the transition last week, questioning the probity of the vote with so many ballots likely to be cast by mail. But Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said there would be a peaceful handover in January as there had been every four years since 1792. Democratic senators label Trump a grave threat to American democracy. The president currently trails his challenger, Democrat Joe Biden, in national opinion polls with 40 days to go until the election.  Many more Americans than usual will be casting their votes by post this year, due to the pandemic, and Trump has been questioning the security of this mail-in ballot system. If Trump were to refuse to accept the result of the election, it would take the country into uncharted territory. Biden has suggested that should this happen, the military could remove Trump from the White House. However, Trump’s spokeswoman said the president would abide by the results of a free and fair election. 

What have Republicans said?

“The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th,” Mr McConnell tweeted on Thursday. “There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.” Other Republican lawmakers, including vocal Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham, have similarly promised a safe and fair election. “I can assure you it will be peaceful,” Mr Graham told Fox News, but suggested a decision could go to the nation’s top court. “If Republicans lose we will accept the result. If the Supreme Court rules in favour of Joe Biden, I will accept that result.” Senator Mitt Romney offered a more critical response on Wednesday, saying “any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable”.

What did Trump say?

On Thursday, Mr Trump again cast doubt on the integrity of the election, saying he was not sure it could be “honest” because, he claimed, postal ballots are “a whole big scam”. The president sparked the controversy on Wednesday evening when he was asked by a reporter if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power “win, lose or draw” to Mr Biden. “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots,” Mr Trump said. “And the ballots are a disaster.” When the journalist countered that “people are rioting”, Mr Trump interjected: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very – you’ll have a very peaceful – there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.” Back in 2016, Trump also refused to commit to accepting the election results in his contest against the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, which she characterised as an attack on democracy. He took the White House after winning the all-important electoral college count, although he lost the popular vote by three million ballots, an outcome he still questions. 

What have Democrats said?

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the third most powerful politician in Washington, told reporters on Thursday that she was not surprised at Mr Trump’s earlier remarks. Mrs Pelosi added that the president “admires people who are perpetuating their role in government”, citing Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “But I remind him: you are not in North Korea, you are not in Turkey, you are not in Russia, Mr President… so why don’t you just try for a moment to honour your oath of office.” Speaking to reporters in Delaware, Mr Biden said Mr Trump’s comments on the transition of power were “irrational”. The Democrat’s team also said “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House”. A Biden spokesman told Politico the former vice-president “obviously, has participated in a peaceful transition of power before” and will do so after the 2020 election as well. Biden has himself been accused by conservatives of stoking unrest over the election by saying in August: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?” Last month, Mrs Clinton urged Mr Biden to not concede defeat early on election night. “I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch.” She raised the scenario that Republicans would try “messing up absentee balloting” and mobilise an army of lawyers to contest the result. Doubts about the fairness of November’s vote come as another high-stakes political battle is fought – on whether or not to appoint a new Supreme Court justice before the election. 

Senate Republicans’ decision to vote on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor reflects individual and collective cost-benefit calculations of seating a rock-ribbed conservative in what may be the Trump administration’s waning days. As a fig leaf to obscure the hypocrisy of voting on President Trump’s election-year nominee after refusing to vote on President Obama’s in early 2016, Republicans have claimed an historical norm that doesn’t exist.

The GOP Senate’s initial claim

In March 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to justify denying a vote on Obama’s nomination of DC Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia: “All we are doing is following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.”

There is no such tradition. The table shows the nine Supreme Court vacancies in place during election years in the Court’s post-Civil War era—once Congress stabilized the Court’s membership at nine and the justices largely stopped serving as trial judges in the old circuit courts. Those nine election-year vacancies (out of over 70 in the period) were all filled in the election year—one by a 1956 uncontested recess appointment and eight by Senate confirmation.

Last year, given the lack of any “long-standing tradition” but anticipating the possibility of an election-year vacancy, McConnell fabricated a different history to justify treating a Trump nominee differently from Obama’s. He argued that “[y]ou have to go back to … 1880s to find the last time … a Senate of a different party from the president filled a Supreme Court vacancy created in the middle of a presidential election. That was entirely the precedent.” When that anticipation became reality with the death of Justice Ginsburg, he offered a slightly different excuse: “Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year”. A National Review article claimed a norm: “when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies . . . [but] when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees . . .”.

Other Republican senators have fallen in line. Mitt Romney (Utah) cited the party-control distinction in claiming that he “came down on the side of the Constitution and precedent as I’ve studied it.”

Pre-2016 modern-era confirmations offer a different story: First, it’s not as if there were a string of election-year vacancies, some during unified government, which got filled, and others during divided government, which didn’t. Rather all five election-year vacancies from the 1890s until the 1950s were during unified government, offering no test of whether divided government would have confirmed them. However, the three voice votes suggest the minority party, had it been in power, would have confirmed.

Second, even excluding as McConnell does the 1880s’ two divided-government confirmations, the two more recent divided-government vacancies got filled:

• in 1988, the Democratic-majority Senate voted 97-0 to confirm Justice Kennedy (after the 1987 rejection of the controversial Bork nomination), and
• Eisenhower made an uncontested October 1956 recess appointment of Justice Brennan. Had the Senate been in session, it would have confirmed a Brennan nomination—as it did early in 1957.

Bottom line: there was no historical justification for denying Garland a vote; thus, voting for Trump’s late-2020 nominee is hypocritical.

But there is more to this fig-leaf history than its lack of a factual basis. First, it provides no reason why a vote is permissible only if the same party controls both the White House and the (constitutionally malapportioned) Senate. McConnell’s September 18 statement said “Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump,” including on judicial appointments. Even so, 2018’s two-seat gain reflects no national consensus that a president elected with large popular vote deficit should be able to reshape the Court in the waning days of his reelection bid.

Second, historical precedents—even accurate ones—are of questionable value given that today’s Supreme Court confirmations happen in a different world than before. Let’s look at the period from 1901 to the end of the Johnson administration (1969) for some context. During that time, there were 10 median days to confirmation, with 62% by voice vote; since then, 65 median days and no voice votes.

Third, this cynical power play will weaken the Court’s legitimacy. I noted here the arguments from many sources that presidential elections put a necessary but indirect popular imprint on the judiciary, assuming that those choosing the judges reflect in some sense popular majorities. With the late 2020 confirmation, the Court will have a six-member conservative majority, five of whose members were appointed by presidents who gained office after initially losing the popular vote.

Finally, the appointment will strengthen what was until recently a fringe restructuring movement. If Democrats control the White House and Congress, there will be great pressure to restructure the Court by adding seats to counterbalance those occupied by Trump appointees. Some say, were roles reversed, Democrats would do what McConnell and company are doing. Maybe so, but that’s not the situation facing the country now. (Source: Russell Wheeler at the Brookings Institute)

In a new batch of swing-state polling released this weekend by the New York Times and CBS News, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to lead President Donald Trump in several key states with just 51 days to go until the November election.

Specifically, a New York Times/Siena College poll taken from September 8 to 11 shows Biden retaining his lead with likely voters in four important states: Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. Likewise, a CBS News/YouGov survey conducted from September 9 to 11 gives the former vice president the edge among likely voters in both Minnesota and Arizona.

In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire; Trump won Arizona and Wisconsin.

This time around, the GOP has indicated they’re playing to win in Minnesota. “In 2016 I almost won Minnesota,” Trump tweeted last year. “In 2020, because of America hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar, & the fact that Minnesota is having its best economic year ever, I will win the State!” His campaign has followed that bluster with a $14 million advertising push in the state, larger than their buys in the swig states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

However, the New York Times and CBS polls would appear to throw some cold water on Trump’s Minnesota ambitions: While Clinton eked out a narrow win by less than 2 percent in 2016, both the New York Times and CBS show Biden leading Trump by 9 percentage points.

The same polls suggest that Trump is in danger of ceding Arizona and Wisconsin to Biden in November. CBS reports that Biden narrowly leads Trump by 3 percentage points in Arizona, and according to the New York Times poll, Biden is up by 5 percentage points in Wisconsin.

In Nevada, where Trump held a rally on Saturday, Biden also has a small lead of 4 percentage points — but Chuck Rocha, a former adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign, says that Democrats need to take the state more seriously, or that might change:

“What’s underreported right [now] is the problem in Nevada,” Rocha said. “The entire Culinary Union is laid off. The entire [Las Vegas] strip is shut down, for the most part. So there’s astronomical unemployment there.”

Rocha said Democrats have not been sensitive enough to the economic hardship that has affected the area — and that has impacted Latinx voters particularly hard. To win the state, he said, Biden will have to present a clear plan of how his policy vision will help those who need work, and income, right now.

According to NBC News, the Trump campaign does not see Nevada as a sure thing for Biden, either. In fact, Trump campaign officials view Nevada as part of an “alternate route” to winning 270 electoral votes, should the president lose some of the states that handed him victory in 2016.

New Hampshire, a 2016 squeaker that went for Clinton by just three-tenths of a percent, is also part of that “alternative route” strategy. The New York Times/Siena College poll shows Biden with a 3 percentage point lead, but Trump made a point of holding rallies in the state, which has a Republican governor, shortly after wrapping up the Republican National Convention last month.

Overall, these polls contain good news for Biden — but many if his leads, like those in New Hampshire and Arizona, are narrow ones, suggesting there is still room for the president to swing opinion his way.

A mostly stable race

Looking beyond the particulars of any one poll, polling for the 2020 presidential race has been largely stable. Nationally, Biden leads Trump by an average of about 7.3 percentage points, and he has retained a consistent lead in key swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. These latest results fall in line with these standing trends.

And Biden’s national average also squares with a recent Fox News poll of likely voters, which shows Biden with a slightly smaller lead versus Trump — just 5 percentage points — but a solid advantage on most issues, including racial inequality, the pandemic, health care, the courts, immigration, and policing. Only on the economy did likely voters have more faith in Trump, by a margin of 5 percentage points.

One possible reason for the consistency seen in polling is that surveys have suggested there are fewer undecided voters than there were in 2016. According to CNN, just 13 percent of registered voters either haven’t decided or are still open to changing their minds, and a Quinnipiac University poll from earlier this month found that only 3 percent of likely voters were still undecided.

That’s likely not good news for Trump, who did well with late-breaking undecided voters in 2016 but has far more ground to make up this time around with a smaller pool of undecideds. As CNN’s John Harwood points out, Biden is also quite a bit more popular than Clinton was in 2016, while the majority of Americans still dislike Trump.

Of course, polling isn’t prophecy. As my colleague Li Zhou has explained previously, polls only really “capture public sentiment during a moment in time,” and things could still change, especially with three presidential debates yet to come. And given one needs only to win the electoral college rather than the popular vote, a candidate winning over even a portion of a group that may have traditionally voted for his rival could have an outsized effect on results.

If Biden wins by more than 5 points nationally, he’s almost certainly going to win enough electoral votes to get to at least 270 and take the Electoral College. There’s simply little record of a difference between the margin in the key swing states and the national vote being greater than 5 points.

If Biden wins by somewhere between 3 and 5 points nationally, he’ll be the clear favorite in the Electoral College, even if there is some non-negligible chance Trump could emerge victorious.  Biden’s national advantage right now is clearly outside this 5-point window.  In this particular moment in time though, Biden looks to be in a strong spot ahead of the November election.

The existential choice facing America was laid bare during the recent Party Conventions, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden set out radically contrasting visions for a nation impacted by the pandemic, economic meltdown, unemployment, and racial injustice. Biden, the former vice-president and the Democratic nominee for president in November, delivered a somber speech, suggesting the US is at one of the most important crossroads in its history, calling Americans to choose light over darkness. For once, President Trump spoke the truth during the recent Republican National Convention. He roared that this election is the most important one deciding which direction the country will take. According to the Washington Post as of July 9, he has made 20,000 false or misleading claims while in office – a tsunami of untruths. “We can be forgiven for believing that the president is more interested in power than in principle,” he said, adding that Trump “is part of the problem, and accelerates it,” Joe Biden said. He compared the president to notoriously racist officials from the 1960s, adding: “I promise you this. I won’t traffic in fear and division. I won’t fan the flames of hate. I will seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country – not use them for political gain.” A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to preserve democracy and the noble principles the U.S. stands for. Reflecting this, a group representing almost 100 former Republican lawmakers and officials have endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in an effort to defeat President Donald Trump in the November 3 election. The group, called Republicans & Independents for Biden, led by former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, stated that its “sole mission is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden the next President of the US”. “More than 180,000 Americans are dead from a pandemic that, with consistent leadership, could have been contained. Instead, it has been left to spin out of control by a President who ignored it, refused to lead and endangered American lives,” Whitman said in a statement. “In this moment of great national crisis, we need to elect a leader matched to the moment, someone who can restore competence to the Oval Office and unify the country. “Joe Biden is that leader,” Whitman added. The group also includes former Republican Governors Rick Snyder and Bill Weld, a onetime 2020 presidential candidate. As nearly 55 days left for the Polls for this historic election, several polls reveal that former Vice President Joe Biden maintains his grip on the 2020 race for president. Biden’s up 52% to 42% over President Donald Trump among likely voters nationally, and he has a 50% to 44% edge over Trump in the key battleground state of Wisconsin as well. Biden’s 10 point and 6 point advantages are the exact same they were when CBS News/YouGov polled the contests before the party conventions. The polls are reflective of a race that barely budges even after two conventions, protests and unrest in some cities over police brutality and as the nation navigates the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, the stability of this race is record breaking when looking at polling dating back to 1940. A Monmouth University poll released on Wednesday found the two candidates virtually tied in Pennsylvania, one of Trump’s key pickups over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. Most polls suggest Biden is ahead in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three industrial states his Republican rival won by margins of less than 1% to clinch victory in 2016. But it’s the battleground states where Trump won big in 2016 that his campaign team will be most worried about. His winning margin in Iowa, Ohio and Texas was between 8-10% back then but it’s looking much closer in all three at the moment. Betting markets, however, are certainly not writing Trump off just yet. The latest odds give him just less than a 50% chance of winning on 3 November, which suggests some people expect the outlook to change a lot over the next few weeks. But political analysts are less convinced about his chances of re-election. FiveThirtyEight, a political analysis website, says Biden is “favored” to win the election, while The Economist says Biden is “likely” to beat Trump.

Donald Trump on Thursday, August 27^th night accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the November election from the White House Lawn, in which he sought to defend his record on the pandemic while tearing down Democrat Joe Biden – sometimes inaccurately – as a “weak” instrument of his party’s left-wing. He blasted Democratic rival Joe Biden as a hapless career politician who will destroy “American greatness,” h said and added, “Joe Biden is not a savior of America’s soul,” Trump asserted during roughly 70 minutes of remarks. “He is the destroyer of America’s jobs.” In a speech delivered from a huge stage on the White House front lawn he said he did so with a “heart full of gratitude and boundless optimism,” and described the upcoming election as “the most important in the history of our country.” In direct contrast to what Biden had characterized Trump to be during the Democratic Convention a week earlier, the incumbent who is seeking a second term said, “We understand that America is not a land that’s cloaked in darkness. America is the torch that lights the entire world. This towering America spirit has prevailed over every challenge and lifted us to the summit of human endeavors.” Among the most noted lines of Biden’s own acceptance speech came when he promised to deliver the nation out of division, arguing that Trump “has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst,” Biden said. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.” As the president strode to the podium at the end of day four, he had two additional options. The first was to shift the focus from his performance during his first term by laying out a compelling vision for the next four years. After nearly an hour at the podium Trump did lay out a vision for the future, but it was a rushed, almost perfunctory recitation of bullet-points. The real energy of the speech lay in the alternative strategy—turning the election into a choice rather than a referendum on President Trump’s first term or a competition over plans for the next four years. Trump would have the voters believe that Joe Biden is a “Trojan horse for socialism” too weak to stand up to Bernie Sanders and the radical socialist left, a candidate who if elected president would “demolish the suburbs.” Republicans largely abandoned talk of the health crisis as if it had abated, in favor of reminding voters of the robust economy that existed beforehand. During the Democratic convention the previous week, Biden put the focus on holding Trump accountable for his actions during the outbreak.“These two conventions have offered very different pictures of reality, in terms of where our country is now and what our future may hold,” said Christopher Devine, an expert in U.S. elections at the University of Dayton in Ohio. 

Although most of the speakers ignored it, the administration’s headliners, First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, did their best to defend the president’s record. The first lady opened with a heavy dose of empathy for Americans who have suffered during the pandemic, assuring people “you are not alone… my husband’s administration will not stop fighting until there is an effective vaccine.” And Vice President Pence claimed that “we’re slowing the spread… we’re opening up America again… and we’re opening up America’s schools,” ignoring the reality that the premature opening up of states, especially in the south, brought the virus back with a vengeance and that most of our schools are not able to conduct business as usual.

During the Republican convention, President Trump’s strategy for closing the gap became clear: intensify his support among white working-class voters while diminishing opposition among white suburbanites (especially women) and peeling off enough African American men to prevail in the Blue Wall states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—whose electoral college votes put him over the top in 2016. The alternative—tacking to the center and softening his tone to broaden his appeal—seems not to have been considered.

While Trump gave the speech on the South Lawn of the White House, protesters gathered just outside the cordoned-off area to call for the end of the Trump administration, blowing horns and sirens in an attempt to drown out his televised speech (though they were at a distance).

 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has ripped into President Donald Trump to rebuke the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC), saying it was “designed to soothe his ego”. “The Republican convention is designed for one purpose — to soothe Donald Trump’s ego. To make him feel good. But here’s the thing, he’s the President of the Us. And it’s not supposed to be about him,” Harris said in a speech in Washington, D.C on Thursday. “It’s supposed to be about the health, and the safety, and the well-being of the American people,” she said. “And on that measure, Donald Trump has failed.” Harris railed on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected 5,863,363 million people and killed 180,595, the highest tallies in the world. “It’s relentless. You can’t stop it with a tweet. You can’t create a distraction and hope it’ll go away. It doesn’t go away. By its nature, a pandemic is unforgiving. “If you get it wrong at the beginning, the consequences are catastrophic. It’s very hard to catch up… President Trump got it wrong in the beginning,” she added. Biden responded Thursday to the Trump campaign’s recent attacks on him with a lengthy statement directly refuting Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on Wednesday night. “Vice President Mike Pence stood before America and with a straight face said, ‘You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.’ His proof? The violence you’re seeing in Donald Trump’s America,” Biden said. “Did Mike Pence forget Donald Trump is president? Is Donald Trump even aware he’s president? “These are not images from some imagined ‘Joe Biden’s America’ in the future. These are images from Donald Trump’s America today. The violence we’re witnessing is happening under Donald Trump. Not me,” Biden said. “How safe do you feel in Donald Trump’s America?” The Biden campaign wants the presidential election to focus on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and on the economic fallout.Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele — a critic of President Trump — warned that the presidential race is a dead heat and that Democratic nominee Joe Biden needs to offer a more compelling argument for why he should be elected. “This is a 50-50 race. It’s a 50-50 race right now,” Steele, one of the many high-profile Republicans who are supporting Biden, said in an interview Thursday on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. Biden held a robust lead over Trump over the late spring and into the summer, but that lead has been shrinking. The RealClearPolitics polling average showed Biden up by 10 points in June, but the lead is now around 7 points. 

One thing is clear: the suburbs will be the central battleground in 2020, and both parties face challenges. If Republicans persuade suburban voters that Democrats will not stand up to violence and looting, President Trump could win a come-from-behind victory. If Democrats persuade these voters that Republicans are trying to win the election with racist dog-whistles, the result could be a Biden landslide.