Snap polls give Joe Biden edge over Trump in final TV debate – US politics live

With the new rules on mic muting at the second presidential debate, the two candidates were able to, on the whole, advance more substantive arguments on a range of topics than the insult-slinging the first debate degenerated into. Here are some of the key things each man said on the main themes raised in the debate

Coronavirus

Trump: We’re fighting it and we’re fighting it hard… We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away. I caught it. I learned a lot. We have to recover. We can’t close up our nation. We’re learning to live with it. We have no choice. We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready, it’s going to be announced within weeks.

Biden: If you hear nothing else I say tonight hear this. Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of United States of America. This is the same fellow told you this is going to end by Easter last time. This is the same fellow who told you that, don’t worry, we’re going to end this by the summer. We’re about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan.

Environment

Trump: If you look at what he wants to do — if you look at his plan, his environmental plan — you know who developed it? AOC plus three. We are energy-independent. I know more about wind than you do. It is extremely expensive, kills all the birds, it’s very intermittent. Basically what he is saying is he is going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma? Ohio?

Biden: I would transition from the oil industry, because the oil industry pollutes, significantly. We can capture emissions from the factory and capture the emissions from gas, we can do that. And we can do that by investing money. He takes everything out of context. But the point of it is, look, we have to move toward net-zero emissions.

Race and criminal justice

Trump: Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln – the possible exception – but the exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has done what I’ve done. The criminal justice reform bill, prison reform, opportunity zones, I took care of Black colleges and universities.

Biden: I never had to tell my daughter, if she’s pulled over, make sure she puts — for a traffic stop — put both hands on top of the wheel and don’t reach for the glove box, because someone may shoot you. But a Black parent, no matter how wealthy or how poor they are, has to teach their child: When you are walking down the street, don’t have a hoodie on when you go across the street. Making sure that you in fact, if you get pulled over, just ‘Yes sir,’ ‘no sir,’ hands on top of the wheel. The fact of the matter is, there is institutional racism in America.

Healthcare

Trump: He wants socialized medicine. Bernie Sanders wants it. The Democrats want it. No matter how well you run the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), it’s no good. What we’d like to do is terminate it.

Biden: What I’m going to do is pass Obamacare with a public option. It will become Bidencare. If you qualify for Medicaid you and do not have the wherewithal in your state to get Medicaid, you automatically are enrolled, providing competition for insurance companies. Secondly, we’re going to make sure we reduce the premiums and reduce drug prices by making sure that there’s competition that does not exist now, by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the insurance companies. He’s never come up with a plan.

Two very different closing arguments

Trump: I am cutting taxes, and he wants to raise everybody’s taxes, and he wants to put new regulations on everything. He will kill it. If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you have never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell and it will be a very, very sad day for this country.

Biden: I [will] represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me. And I’m going to make sure that you’re represented. I’m going to give you hope. What is on the ballot here is the character of this country. Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making that sure that everyone has an even chance. And I’m going to make sure you get that. You have not been getting it the last four years.

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny have written for NBC News this morning about the vexed question for journalists on the extent to which they should be covering fringe conspiracy theories about the election.

One factor in the decision is that, compared to 2016, the stories seem to have crept way more into the official Republican campaign and American consciousness than the most extreme conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton ever did four years ago. They write:

Some of the same people who pushed a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that first emerged in 2016 are now targeting Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, with similar falsehoods. Their online posts are garnering astronomical numbers of shares on social media.

The fantastical rumors, which NBC News is declining to repeat verbatim, echo specific plot points central to “pizzagate,” a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse.

There is an important difference, however. The pizzagate-style rumors in 2016 were largely confined to far-right message boards like 4chan and parts of Reddit. But the Hunter Biden iteration of the same conspiracy theory took off last weekend with the help of speculation from conservative TV hosts and members of Congress. Their theorizing can be traced back to a new website that has been promoted by president Donald Trump and his surrogates.

The path of the conspiracy theory highlights how once-obscure and fringe claims are now able to reach mainstream conservative media and even elected officials in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The disinformation campaign appears to have been successful in its goal of generating a smear against the former vice president’s son. According to Google Trends, “human trafficking” is now the third-most common related search term for “Hunter Biden” in the last year, after “laptop” and “New York Post,” which point to search interest around the unconfirmed allegations that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden contained evidence of crimes.

Collins and Zadrozny go on to say that conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden “began swirling before the New York Post article and can be traced to associates of former White House aide Steve Bannon”.

NBC News was moved yesterday to issue a strong statement of support for its reporter Brandy Zadrozny who herself was targeted in a segment on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson show. “Fox News has chosen to smear Brandy. In so doing they have shamefully encouraged harassment and worse,” the network said.

Read more here: NBC News – Inside the campaign to ‘pizzagate’ Hunter Biden

With a record amount of early and mail-in voting for a US presidential election already accounted for, it may have been too late for any debate performance to shift the dial. Amanda Holpuch in New York has been looking for us at one dial that – according to the polls, anyway – appears to have already shifted in Joe Biden’s favor. Nationally, the Democratic nominee has the largest lead among women in modern history.

In Pennsylvania on 13 October, Trump asked: “Suburban women, will you please like me?” On 17 October in Michigan, he implored: “I saved your suburbs – women – suburban women, you’re supposed to love Trump.” And the next day in Nevada, Trump begged: “Suburban women, please vote for me. I’m saving your house. I’m saving your community. I’m keeping your crime way down.”

These half-hearted pleas are about three years too late for voters like Becky, who lives in a suburb of Des Moines and asked for her last name not to be used because she was worried about being targeted for her opinions.

It didn’t take the 63-year-old long to regret her vote for Donald Trump, who she wanted out of office within weeks of him becoming president.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, what did I do? What did we all do? What would’ve been so bad about Hillary?’” Becky said. “He’s so good with his lies. He made you believe she was hiding her emails, doing all these things she shouldn’t be doing.”

At this point, Becky can’t stand the president and laughed before calling him the antichrist. “That’s how badly I feel about him,” she said. “If we don’t get him out, we’re in a load of trouble here.”

Read more of Holpuch’s report here: ‘What did we all do?’ – why women who voted for Trump could decide the 2020 election

That is the the verdict of the New York Times fact-checkers on the deabte this morning.

In their final debate, president Trump unleashed an unrelenting series of false, misleading and exaggerated statements as he sought to distort former vice president Biden’s record and positions and boost his own re-election hopes. The president once again relied heavily on well-worn talking points that have long been shown to be false.

Among Trump’s claims they ranked as false or misleading were

• I was put through a phony witch hunt – false
• We are rounding the turn on coronavirus – false
• We have the best testing in the world by far — that is why we have so many cases – false
• We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready, it’s going to be announced within weeks – this lacks evidence
• He wants to raise everybody’s taxes – false
• He doesn’t come from Scranton – false
• He called [the Black community] super predators, and he said it, super predators – false
• China is paying. They are paying billions and billions of dollars – false
• The [Trump Chinese] bank account was in 2013. That’s what it was. It was opened — it was closed in 2015, I believe – false
• They want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows – false
• We have the best carbon emission numbers that we’ve had in 35 years under this administration – misleading
• We’re rebuilding it, and we’re doing record numbers. 11.4 million jobs in a short period of time – misleading
• Look at China, how filthy it is. Look at Russia. Look at India. It is filthy. The air is filthy – misleading

For Biden, they singled out these moments:

• He has caused the deficit with China to go up, not down – false
• Look at the states having a spike, they are the red states, the states in the Midwest, in the upper Midwest, that is where the spike is occurring significantly – exaggerated

Read it in full here: New York Times – Fact-checking the final presidential debate

NBC News had three experts grade the Trump and Biden performances last night, and to be honest it doesn’t make for comfortable reading for either camp. Biden got a higher grade than Trump from all three, but nobody was scored higher than a B+.

Mitchell McKinney, director of the political communication institute at the University of Missouri, said:

Biden was prepared for Trump’s attacks on him and his family and “didn’t get rattled,” McKinney said. Biden was able to project empathy, and he took an effective page out of the Obama playbook while declaring that he’d be a president of “not red states and blue states but the United States.” Most important, he was “able to avoid any major gaffes or blunders that would have had supporters wringing their hands,” McKinney said.

Susan Millsap, and communications professor, said:

It started better than the first one, but it slowly devolved a bit. The last 20 minutes or so, the interruptions were increasing again, and Trump was slowly turning it into a campaign speech. I was like, ‘Oh, no — don’t do it.’ Towards the end, Trump was back on his hyperbole and bombastic style.

Read more here: NBC News – Who won the Trump-Biden debate? Experts grade the candidates

Also published last night was a very strong op-ed from David Ignatius in the Washington Post, asking the blunt question of director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe: Can Trump’s spy chief be trusted?

The mission statement for the director of national intelligence stresses nonpartisan values: excellence, courage, respect and integrity. Regrettably, the performance of current DNI John Ratcliffe has often seemed to emphasize another metric — serving the political interests of the man who appointed him, President Trump.

Trump wants Ratcliffe’s help as Nov. 3 approaches. The president is desperately seeking a silver bullet to fire at former vice president Joe Biden — some nugget from the intelligence world that would justify Trump’s wild accusations of “hoaxes” and “criminals.” Sources tell me Trump has been raging inside the White House for Ratcliffe to deliver the goods.

Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman, is facing a moment of truth: Will he serve the intelligence community that he heads, protecting information that — in making a momentary splash for Trump — could disclose sources and methods and damage the country? Or will he join Trump in an assault on the very agencies he leads, treating them as part of an imaginary “deep state” that the president sees as his enemy?

Ignatius goes on to claim:

Intelligence officials have told me they fear Ratcliffe was appointed DNI for a simple reason: Trump wanted a loyal supporter in charge of the spy agencies as the country headed toward election day. That’s the kind of raw self-interest the country has come to expect from Trump, but we don’t often assess the consequences for the intelligence community.

Read more here: Washington Post – Can Trump’s spy chief be trusted?

Again, leaving the debate aside for a second, Molly O’Toole filed a report yesterday evening for the Los Angeles Times about the growing scandal of women at a Georgia immigration facility forced into “overly aggressive” or “medically unnecessary” surgery without their consent, including procedures that affect their ability to have children. A new report examines the cases of 19 women. She writes:

The 19 women were all patients of Dr. Mahendra Amin, the primary gynecologist for the Irwin County Detention Center, the report says. The records, including pathology and radiology reports, prescriptions, surgical impressions and consent forms, sworn declarations and telephone interviews, detail and support the women’s allegations of medical abuse by the doctor, according to the report.

The medical experts found an “alarming pattern” in which Amin allegedly subjected the women to unwarranted gynecological surgeries, in most cases performed without consent, according to the five-page report, which was submitted Thursday to members of Congress.

“Both Dr. Amin and the referring detention facility took advantage of the vulnerability of women in detention to pressure them to agree to overly aggressive, inappropriate, and unconsented medical care,” the report states.

One woman says she’s still not sure what Amin did in surgery, because she hasn’t subsequently been able to afford to go to the doctor to establish it. Dr. Amin strongly denies all of the allegations.

Read more about this worrying case here: Los Angeles Times – 19 women allege medical abuse in Georgia immigration detention

Politico this morning have a reaction piece to last night which is eye-catchingly headlined: “The debates, like everything else in 2020, were a dumpster fire”

American voters only got two presidential debates in the 2020 general election, and in a normal year this one would have been hotly anticipated and carefully picked over, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden jabbed at each other over money, immigration, racial justice and their support for the oil industry. But as of the start time, close to 50 million Americans had already voted, and polls are locked in as they’ve ever been—so perhaps the biggest question is whether it was possible for this debate to change anything at all. And after this bizarre debate season—a meltdown, a cancellation, a rogue fly and this almost shockingly orthodox interaction, with a mute button—is it time to change what we really expect from debates?

They’ve gone on to ask what they describe as ‘operatives, campaign analysts and other political insiders’ what they think about the whole debate process, and some of it is quite enlightening, including the observation that “Debates are supposed to be televised job interviews, not a form of reality TV” and just maybe “It’s fair to wonder whether debates have run their course”.

Read more here: Politico – The debates, Like Everything Else in 2020, Were a Dumpster Fire

Away from the debate a second, there’s a quick foreign policy snap here from Reuters. Russia’s deputy foreign minister has said today that Moscow and Washington were still not close to reaching an agreement over the New Start arms control treaty, the RIA news agency reported.

The two countries’ positions on the nuclear pact, which expires in February, appeared to have moved closer when Washington this week welcomed a Russian proposal to extend it if they agreed to freeze their stocks of nuclear warheads. It is the last remaining nuclear treaty between the two nations.

Richard Wolffe was very busy last night. As well as contributing to our podcast debate on the debate, he also had time to pen his own verdict.

Normal presidents get their third debate right. They flunk their first in a fit of presidential pique about standing on stage with their upstart rivals. They over-correct their second after a frantic period of long-delayed rehearsals. By the time the third comes along, they usually remember what got them elected in the first place. Donald Trump is not a normal president.

Wolffe goes on to observe:

Not to put too a fine point on his presidency, this might just be the fatal flaw in the entire Trump project: the cosmic chasm between Donald’s self-regard and the way the rest of the sentient universe sees him. Donald apparently sincerely believes he is an elite political athlete, while the majority of American voters keep telling pollsters that his gameplan isn’t working.

For some reason unknown to political strategists of all persuasions, Trump is closing this election by attacking 60 Minutes for being mean to him, and attacking Joe Biden’s son for business dealings with China. This in the week we all learned that Trump has a secret bank account in China, where he has paid more taxes to the People’s Republic than he has to his own country.

Read more here: Richard Wolffe – Donald Trump reverts to type in debate – and it isn’t ‘magnificently brilliant’

Post-debate polls and focus groups may have given Joe Biden the win, and plaudits may have gone to Kristen Welker, but there was only one winner as far as the Trump campaign was concerned. Trump’s comms chief Tim Murtaugh tweeted out a picture of the president “just before the debate victory” this morning.

Trump was also boasting about poll numbers handing victory to him, although in this case he was posting screenshots of self-selecting Twitter votes from conservative-leaning sources.

The little tick next to his name in the results on the screenshot suggests that the president had just voted for himself in the poll. Fair enough, he was hardly going to vote that the other guy had won, was he?

If you’d like to get your ears around something this morning, as soon as last night’s debate was over, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland sat down with his trans-Atlantic counterpart Richard Wolffe to discuss what had just gone down. You can listen to it here.

Kristen Welker succeeded where Chris Wallace failed in the first debate, and came out widely praised for the way that she handled the debate. Max Benwell reports:

Welker, 44, the only person of color chosen to moderate presidential debate this year, quickly earned plaudits as the event unfolded in a calmer and less chaotic manner than the first presidential debate in Cleveland. The winner of Thursday night’s debate was “obviously” Welker, tweeted New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie.

Wallace, whose own moderation was widely criticized after the first debate, was asked on air what he thought of the tenor of the final debate moderated by Welker. “First of all, I’m jealous,” he said.

Trump, who is trying to appeal to female voters as he trails Biden in national polling, also praised Welker after spending the days before the debate criticizing her.

“So far, I respect very much the way you’re handling this,” Trump said to Welker when she gave him time to respond to Biden at one point.

The praise came after Trump attacked her on Twitter over the weekend. She has “always been terrible and unfair, just like most of the Fake News reporters”, he tweeted at the time.

Read more here: The ‘obvious’ winner of the final debate: moderator Kristen Welker

Racial injustice was another area where the two men clashed last night. Accusing Trump of being “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history”, Biden said that the president “pours fuel on every single racist fire. … This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”

Trump asserted that “I am the least racist person in this room.”

The debate between them on the topic wasn’t entirely well received.

“Blackness and criminality are not the same,” Phillip Atiba Goff, a leading researcher on racial bias in policing, wrote on Twitter. “Would really love Black communities to be on the agenda outside of questions about punishment.”

And Gene Demby, the co-host of Code Switch, National Public Radio’s podcast on race and identity, wrote: “This conversation about race in the US with two rich, powerful septuagenarians is going about as well as anyone could have anticipated.”

Lois Beckett last night was keeping an eye for us on how viewers rated the performances of the two men in the debate. She writes:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was perceived as the winner of the final debate with Donald Trump on Thursday night, according to a CNN poll of debate viewers and a panel of undecided North Carolina voters.

The CNN poll found it was perceived as a slightly weaker Biden performance compared to the first, chaotic presidential debate last month, when 60% of viewers perceived the Democratic nominee as the winner, compared to 53% on Thursday night.

Participants in a CNN panel of undecided North Carolina voters said that Trump’s strength in the debate was his focus on the economy, while Biden’s strength was his emphasis on “unifying” Americans.

But there were mixed reviews for Biden in a panel assembled by the Los Angeles Times:

Words that the undecided voters in that panel used to describe Biden’s debate performance included: “vague”, “cognitively impaired”, “I don’t want to say senile, so I’ll say old”, “uncomfortable”, “grandfatherly”, “defensive”, and “ambiguous”.

Trump was described by the same group as “controlled”, “constrained”, “petulant” “reserved”, “surprisingly presidential”, and a “con artist”.

You can read more here: Biden the winner of final debate, TV viewers and undecided voters say

With over 223,000 Americans dead to date from the coronavirus pandemic, it was a significant topic in last night’s debate. While Donald Trump promised a vaccine would be available within weeks, Joe Biden questioned the veracity of his claims, citing the president’s previous predictions the pandemic would end by Easter.

Hello, and welcome to Friday’s live coverage of US politics. The debate is done, there’s 11 days to go. Will it have changed anybody’s minds?

• Trump and Biden sparred over the coronavirus pandemic, with the president defending his response to a pandemic that has already claimed 223,000 American lives. Trump said of the pandemic, “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault that it came here. It’s China’s fault.”
• Biden criticized Trump as “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history”. Biden said, “He pours fuel on every single racist fire. … This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”
• Trump reiterated that he wanted the supreme court to dismantle Obamacare. Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination process was moved to the next stage by the judiciary committee yesterday despite a Democratic party boycott.
• Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News was praised for her orderly management of tonight’s debate. Unlike the first debate, which devolved into chaos as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden, Welker successfully kept the debate on task
• Overall, the debate seems unlikely to sway many voters, which is a victory for Biden. Snap polls taken after the debate showed viewers favored Biden’s performance by about 10-15 points. But victory wasn’t as clear-cut as the first debate, with an undecided voters panel characterising his performance as “vague”.
• You can have a scroll back through last night’s live coverage here: Biden slams Trump on coronavirus response, family separations and racism in final debate – as it happened
• Covid cases continue to increase across the US, as the upper midwest sees rapid rise.
• The US signed an anti-abortion declaration with a group of largely authoritarian governments.

Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October. You can find our more details and book tickets here.