WaPo:
Former Pence aide says she will vote for Biden because of Trump’s ‘flat out disregard for human life’ during pandemic
Troye is the first Trump administration official who worked extensively on the coronavirus response to forcefully speak out against Trump and his handling of the pandemic. But she joins a growing number of former officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who have detailed their worries about what happened during their time in the administration while declaring that Trump is unfit to be president.
So… the election.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
With Weeks to Go, Trump Needs a Big Change
Even assuming some errors, recent polling suggests the president will have a hard time repeating his path to victory.
- We’re still seeing plenty of state and national polls, and there’s very little evidence of significant change. Former Vice President Joe Biden is up by about 7 percentage points nationally and by a smaller margin in the most likely tipping point states, suggesting that he needs to win by about 3 points nationally in order to win the Electoral College and, therefore, the election.
Best moment of the CNN town hall last night:
Monmouth polls has been active this month. Monmouth is a solid pollster, and I love their different turnout models. Head scratcher that this month they see FL (+5 Biden) a tick more than PA (+3) or AZ (+2). NC (+2) and WI (+7) round out the polling, and they seem in line with expectations right now.
Amy Walter/Cook Political Report:
New Survey Results From KFF/Cook Political Report Survey in AZ, Fl, and NC. AZ Moves to Lean Dem
This poll tracks with other recent surveys of Arizona which show Biden ahead. The FiveThirtyEight average puts Biden's lead in the state at five points (49-44 percent).
The new data in this poll, combined with other recent polling in the state, all find Arizona slipping away from Trump. We are moving it from Toss Up to Lean Democrat.
Cook now has Biden at 290 EV with 61 tossups (FL, GA, NC and ME-02).
Sarah Posner/NY Times:
The Evangelicals Who Are Taking On QAnon
Some leaders are trying to save their flocks from the lure of the online conspiracy theory.
Some of QAnon’s dizzying pileup of false claims — that the Covid-19 pandemic is overstated or even nonexistent, for example — have been embraced by Trump fans, Republican congressional candidates and the president himself. Mr. Brown and others say they are proliferating in white evangelical circles, even as many of the people sharing the content may have never even heard of QAnon.
Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical who is a psychology professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, says the Q-adjacent claims he has seen on social media relate broadly to the notion that the president “is being unfairly maligned.” Evangelicals are drawn to these posts, Dr. Throckmorton added, because they reinforce their belief that Mr. Trump is under attack. “It’s a way of trying to justify their support for the president,” he said. “Anything that makes Donald Trump look honest or compassionate or good, they’ll spread, without checking out where it comes from, who posted it, who the source is.”
John A Stoehr/Religion Dispatches:
THE DANGEROUS FACT ABOUT QANON BELIEVERS THAT REPORTERS FAIL TO GRASP
The Times almost never hires the people I’m talking about. The Times, like all elite institutions, hires its own, which is to say other elites. A reporter who spent her life in college prep schools and the Ivy League before moving to Manhattan to work at the Times is vulnerable to media representations of rural life, because they’re media representations created by and for other elites. Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over a plate of eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that. The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources aren’t delusional. She can’t know they aren’t crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics are.
She ends up reporting that some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.) What she should be reporting is that some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action—violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing. The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.
Politico:
Trump spent years trying to win over Indian Americans. Then Biden picked Harris.
Kamala Harris, whose mother emigrated from India, swiftly dented the Trump campaign's unprecedented Republican efforts to woo Indian Americans.
Donald Trump has worked for years to make inroads with Indian Americans in ways Republican presidential candidates never have — recruiting volunteers at Indian grocery stores, holding events in five Indian languages and paying for targeted digital ads.
Joe Biden undercut those efforts in a matter of weeks.
First, Biden selected Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, as his running mate. Within days, Harris was speaking to Indian Americans on India’s Independence Day about her grandfather, who helped push for India’s liberation. Then she was boosting the campaign’s launch of a new Indian coalition. And last week, Biden supporters released a video with a song remix from the popular Bollywood movie "Lagaan" about an Indian village fighting British rule.
Daily Beast:
How Trump Screwed His Own Campaign With One Executive Order
Joe Biden may be publicly responding to Democratic angst over law and order attacks. But, privately, his campaign is bludgeoning the president on Social Security.
Earlier this month, Joe Biden flew to Wisconsin to address the mounting punditry that his election chances were spiraling downward over Donald Trump’s focus on “law and order” in Kenosha. That same day, his campaign put out a new advertisement that suggested they had a different conception about what issue would shape the presidential race.
The ad, released on Sept. 3, bludgeoned Trump directly on a historically reliable Democratic turf: Social Security. In it, the narrator said the president was plotting to leave the much-loved entitlement program “permanently depleted” in just a few years.
The spot was delivered to little fanfare and was overshadowed by Biden’s decision to meet with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot and left critically wounded by a white police officer. But for some Democrats, it was a signal about where the party’s nominee placed his electoral and legislative priorities. And an overwhelmingly positive one at that.
Dan Froomkin/PressWatch:
Failing to clearly identify what’s at stake in 2020 is bad journalism
With the first votes in the 2020 presidential election already being cast, the nation’s political journalists face a moment of reckoning: Will they continue to treat this like a normal election, acting as if both sides have equally compelling claims on the American voter?
Or will they sound the alarm, and make it clear in every story precisely what is at stake for the country?
Our top newsroom leaders need to empower their political reporters and producers and editors to do the latter – right now — because equating the two choices currently before the voters in any way is bad journalism.
The solid, evidence-based reporting that’s been done over the past four years clearly establishes that Donald Trump’s ignorance and authoritarianism endanger our democratic institutions and core democratic values. The federal government under Trump is failing at its basic tasks – in many cases, fatally — and during a second term would inevitably be turned against its own people. At a historic moment that offers hope for a national coming-together on race, Trump is trying to foment hysteria and division. This election is the moment of accountability that all that journalism has been building toward.
But out of habit and a misbegotten sense of obligation, the mainstream media’s campaign coverage is still framed like it’s a normal contest — where reasonable voters could go either way. And the relentless who’s-up-who’s-down narrative actively obscures just how morally and ethically asymmetrical a race it is.