Elections

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Texas is a rapidly changing state with the fastest growing population in the US. Hispanic Texans are expected to become the majority by 2022, but will this help Joe Biden flip a Republican stronghold? Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to suburban Dallas and the border city of McAllen to look at the political impact of this diversification and the legacy of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies 
Troubled Florida, divided America: will Donald Trump hold this vital swing state? – video

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The debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Kamala Harris takes place on Wednesday night from 9 to 10:30 p.m. Eastern. Here are some of the many ways you can watch it: The Times will livestream the debate, and our reporters will provide commentary and analysis. The debate will be televised on channels including ABC, […] More

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Donald Trump is bad at electoral politics.Yes, he is the president, which by itself would suggest the opposite. But to look at his conduct during the coronavirus pandemic is to see someone who doesn’t understand his own political interests and won’t listen to anyone who does.The past week has been instructive in this regard. Last Tuesday, he faced off against Joe Biden in the first presidential debate. Trump, who trailed Biden in national polls and in most swing states, had one job: to bring wavering voters back into the fold. With a sufficiently competent performance, Trump could stop the bleeding and maybe even mount a small comeback. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it should have been simple — a straightforward turn that any incumbent president ought to have been able to make.Of course, Trump blew it. He barked and ranted for 90 minutes, making the debate-that-was-not-actually-a-debate an alienating spectacle for most viewers. He demonstrated the truth of Democratic attacks on his temperament and ability at the same time that Biden dispelled the idea, pushed by the president and his allies, that Biden suffers from serious cognitive decline. The result was a rout.The debate — an indoor, in-person affair — was also a showcase for Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Would he and his entourage take the situation seriously? Would they try to model good behavior for the public? The obvious answer was no. The venue, Case Western Reserve University, asked all attendees to wear masks. But Trump and his team refused, acting as if the virus didn’t actually exist. The president even mocked Biden for his dedication to wearing a mask. “I don’t wear face masks like him,” Trump said. “Every time you see him he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”Trump seems to believe that it shows strength to flout precautions and weakness to heed them. He seems to think the public wants this “strength” and will flock to him in support of his performance. Yet again, his vaunted political instincts failed him. When, in the wake of the debate, the White House announced that Trump and much of his senior staff had contracted the virus, the public response was something akin to “We told you so.” Sixty-three percent of Americans said the president had acted “irresponsibly” in “handling the risk of coronavirus infection to the people who have been around him most recently,” according to a CNN poll.The most important issue right now for most voters is the pandemic, which has damaged the economy and radically transformed life for hundreds of millions of Americans, while killing more than 210,000 of us. They want solutions and assistance, not ostentatious displays of so-called masculine strength. They want the government, and the president, to be honest about the challenge. None of this is particularly difficult. Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, has had as much failure as success in handling the pandemic. His administration’s early decision to send thousands of discharged hospital patients back to nursing homes is arguably responsible for a significant portion of the state’s death toll. This might have doomed Cuomo with the public. But the power of the rallying effect is such that a serious performance of competence, as well as concrete actions to regain New Yorkers’ lost confidence, has been enough to keep him well above water politically.The extent to which leaders across the country and around the world have been able to thrive despite high pandemic death tolls and a vicious economic downturn is a testament to how Trump could have forged a path to re-election had he treated the pandemic with any seriousness. Wearing a mask, pressing Congress for more aid, rejecting Covid-19 denialism and refraining from magical thinking — this is probably all it would have taken to spin a once-in-a-century crisis into political gold. But Trump refused, and now, if the polls are right and the forecasts are accurate, he’s just a few weeks away from what may well prove to be a landslide defeat.Trump was the unexpected winner of the 2016 presidential election. That victory led many, including Trump himself, to believe he had some special sauce, some superpower that helped him defy political gravity. There’s no question he has some political skills. A lifelong showman, he’s good with a crowd, or at least certain kinds of crowds. He can distill an entire governing agenda into a few simple phrases. And he’s been able to build an emotional connection with a significant part of the American electorate.But even with those assets, Trump doesn’t win the 2016 election without a huge amount of luck. Take away the WikiLeaks dump, take away the Comey letter, keep Anthony Weiner away from a computer, and there’s a very good chance that Hillary Clinton is elected president. Run the 2016 election a hundred times, exactly as it was, and Trump loses most of the time.If the president had any appreciation for the role of luck and chance in his election, he would have governed in ways that maximized his advantages and cleared the path for an outright win. Instead, he embraced the myth of his political genius and brought himself, and his party, to the brink of political disaster. It took a fluke to put Trump into the White House, and if nothing changes, it will take another fluke to keep him there.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

With voting underway in more than 30 states, the Republican National Committee has begun a $60 million digital get-out-the-vote campaign that will harness social media, text messages, emails and other platforms to digitally chase voters.The expansive effort leverages the vast data operation the party has built over the past three years, and will involve quickly filling the newsfeeds, inboxes and text threads of potential voters with information on how to vote and reminders about key deadlines.“We can target you every step of the way,” said Richard Walters, the chief of staff of the R.N.C. “We know when you requested the ballot, and we know to continue following up with you until your ballot has been returned, and until we can see it has been returned.”The $60 million initiative will complement the operations of the Trump campaign’s digital team, which will primarily focus on running persuasion ads, according to officials at the R.N.C.While a crucial part of the digital get-out-the-vote effort will be persuading Republican voters who have requested an absentee ballot to turn it in, possibly by mail, it is a message that runs counter to President Trump’s frequent and baseless denunciations of mail ballots, which he called a “disaster” in the first presidential debate, suggesting without evidence that they would lead to a “rigged election.” More

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has called for the US to put politics aside and unite as the country faces ‘too many crises’. Speaking at Gettysburg, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the US civil war, Biden said he decided to run for president after the far-right rally and resulting violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. ‘It was hate on the march in the open. In America,’ he said. ‘Hate never goes away. It only hides. And when it’s given oxygen, when it’s given an opportunity to spread, when it’s treated as normal and acceptable behaviour, we’ve opened a door in this country that we must move quickly to close’
‘Again we are a house divided’: Joe Biden calls for unity in Gettysburg speech
Trump aide Stephen Miller tests positive for Covid-19

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US elections 2020

Democrat issues rebuke of president’s leadership and addresses coronavirus, racial injustice and hyperpartisanship

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Biden denounces hate and calls for US unity in ‘house divided’ speech at Gettysburg – video

Joe Biden delivered a forceful appeal for national unity from the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, as the nation lurched from crisis to crisis and the president continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus after being hospitalized for Covid-19.
From the storied civil war battlefield of Gettysburg, a symbol of the divisions that nearly tore the nation in two, Biden cast the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and emphasized the stakes this November.
“Today, once again we are a house divided,” Biden said, framed by a row of American flags with the rolling hills of Gettysburg behind him. “But that, my friend, can no longer be. We are facing too many crises. We have too much work to do. We have too bright a future to leave it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division.”
In a sweeping speech – one that drew on Abraham Lincoln’s address at the same spot, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and Lyndon Johnson’s remarks from there one hundred years later – Biden warned of the “cost of division” and his fears that partisanship threatened to undermine the central pillars of American democracy.
Biden vowed to govern as an “American president”, one who would seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s most consequential problems, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice and economic turmoil.
Though he did not mention Trump by name, Biden’s remarks amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of the president’s leadership in the wake of a global pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president and a widening circle of White House aides and allies. Lamenting the politicization of science and facts, he called for a national strategy.
“Wearing a mask isn’t a political statement – it’s a scientific recommendation,” Biden said, a surgical mask clenched in his fist. “We can’t undo what has been done. We can’t go back. But we can do better.” More

Still sick and dependent on a potent cocktail of antiviral drugs and steroids, President Trump turned his highly choreographed return to the White House into another vivid example of the recurrent theme of his presidency: the denial of obvious facts when they don’t meet his political needs.His message on Monday evening and reiterated on Tuesday was that Americans had nothing to fear from the coronavirus, and it denied the obvious: The disease he said would disappear as the weather warmed in the spring, “like a miracle,” had already claimed the lives of more than 210,000 of his compatriots.Mr. Trump wasn’t really saying anything new — he has minimized the effects of the virus since January — and his presidency has in many ways been defined by his dismissal of many of the biggest threats facing the United States. His preoccupation with demonstrating strength or rearranging facts to reinforce his worldview has led him, time and again, to downplay, ignore or mock everything from climate change to Russian interference in the American political process.Mr. Trump’s own Pentagon declared in a report last year that a warming climate was a major “national security issue” that could spur future instability around the globe, but to Mr. Trump it remains a theory, something to be stricken from government reports and explained away when the West erupted in wildfires.His intelligence agencies have assessed that North Korea’s nuclear stockpile has expanded significantly on Mr. Trump’s watch. But to the president, that arsenal — which he said in 2017 might force him to take military action leading to “fire and fury like the world has never seen” — is hardly worth mention today. Asked about it, he invariably turns the conversation to his relationship with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.The unremitting stream of cyberattacks by Russia, many aimed at the heart of the American political process, has preoccupied intelligence and military officials determined to keep Vladimir V. Putin from interfering in another election. But not Mr. Trump, who has said he has no reason to disbelieve the Russian leader’s denials that Moscow was involved.On virtually every front, said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Trump has embraced “denialism,” as if wishing problems away was a substitute for policy and action.“The denialism is a pattern,” said Mr. Haass, who served several Republican presidents at the National Security Council and the State Department. “It is pervasive. And the fear among friends and allies is that all this is not limited to Trump but reflects how this country has not just changed, but changed for the worse.”“They have put their security in our hands,” said Mr. Haass, the author of “The World: A Brief Introduction,” “and they are questioning that wisdom, at the same moment that our adversaries see us as divided and distracted.”It is a distinctive pattern that began in the Trump administration’s first hours, when the new president bristled at photographs released by the National Park Service that suggested the crowds at his inauguration paled when compared with the turnouts for the swearing-in of some past presidents, including Barack Obama. Then came his search for three million fraudulent votes — all in the service of denying that he had lost the popular vote, even while winning the Electoral College.Some of the moments were laughable, like the Sharpie used to alter National Weather Service maps of the course of Hurricane Dorian last year, all to justify Mr. Trump’s erroneous declaration that the storm was headed to Alabama.It was great fodder for late-night comedians. Then, in March, as the virus emptied out offices and began to strike American cities, denialism went from deadly serious to simply deadly.Mr. Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services, with the help of the White House staff, had prepared for an influenza pandemic that many experts had viewed as inevitable. They had even run a monthslong exercise, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” that mapped out how the government needed to respond if a virus — somewhat different from the coronavirus — that originated in China came to American shores aboard direct flights, borne by tourists, students, business executives and returning Americans.White House Coronavirus OutbreakLatest UpdatesUpdated Oct. 6, 2020, 8:55 p.m. ETPiecing together clues, medical experts suggest Trump could be entering a pivotal phase in his fight against Covid-19.Mr. Trump has tweeted dozens of times since falling ill. One topic he has avoided: the 210,000 Americans who have died from the virus.Trump calls off negotiations on a stimulus package.But the tabletop exercise missed one key element: a president who made it clear he didn’t want to hear news that imperiled economic expansion, especially in an election year.“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,” Mr. Trump said in mid-March, as his early story that the virus was under control began to collapse around him.In fact, they had — it was simply that Mr. Trump did not want to acknowledge those numbers. He kept downplaying the casualties, saying he was sure that deaths would top out below 60,000 and creating a White House culture where mask-wearing was equated with weakness, rather than the pandemic equivalent of strapping on seatbelts.Mr. Trump has also seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to acknowledge the cost of denying reality. He continues to insist the economy will have a “V shaped” recovery, even though the Federal Reserve chairman he appointed, Jerome Powell, said on Tuesday that Americans should brace for a “longer-than-expected slog back to full recovery.”Mr. Powell warned of potentially tragic consequences if economic stimulus wasn’t extended; hours later Mr. Trump pulled the plug on negotiations with Democrats, saying he would take it all up again after he won re-election.The recklessness of mocking mask-wearing appealed to the base, but imperiled his staff, his Secret Service detail and his supporters.Anyone who thought the president might be chastened by his personal experience with the coronavirus, from the drop in his oxygen levels to his helicopter evacuation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, got a dose of reality when he insisted on being driven around the outside of the hospital to wave at his supporters, no matter what the risk to his protective detail in an armored limousine designed to cut off outside air.But it was his return to the White House that showed Mr. Trump was determined to turn his infection from a vulnerability into another sign of strength, of triumph. He declared that the United States should just soldier forward, even while his press secretary was announcing that she, too, had the coronavirus.And his dramatic ripping off of his mask as he returned to the White House, even though he knew he would be encountering White House staff members as soon as he stepped indoors, drove home his determination to deny the risks — not for him, but for those who worked for him.Now he presides over an executive branch that is running on half speed. Most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in isolation. His chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, is working at home because he has comorbidities, and his staff is staying away, too.In short, there was nothing the president was doing at the White House, one of his aides conceded, that he couldn’t have gotten done from the sprawling presidential suite at Walter Reed. Except it wouldn’t have looked right — it would have looked as if Mr. Trump was sick. More

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Things are not going as well for the Trump campaign as it might have wished. In the past 10 days alone, the president has seen his long-concealed tax returns leaked on the front page of The New York Times, turned in a thuggish debate performance that repelled voters in crucial swing states, and fell victim to his own mishandling of a pandemic disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and continues to spread across the highest level of government.After hearing of Mr. Trump’s diagnosis, Joe Biden, wary of appearing to kick a man while he’s down — or while he’s up, waving from the White House balcony like a consumptive Evita, as the case may be — responded by wishing the first family a speedy recovery and moving to take down his campaign’s negative ads.The president’s campaign, on the other hand, made clear it wasn’t interested in reciprocating such gestures of fellow feeling. As The Times editorial board wrote in its endorsement of Mr. Biden on Tuesday, his vow to “restore the soul of America” is core to his appeal. But in the final month of the presidential race, could his commitment to the rhetorical high road end up costing him? Here’s what people are saying.‘A unilateral surrender to a fake civility’Many political analysts have criticized the Biden campaign for forfeiting a political advantage over an opponent who would never return the favor. “Do a thought experiment: If Biden were sick, what would happen?” tweeted Anne Appelbaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. “Here’s my guess: Trump would be openly gloating, Republicans would be loudly celebrating, their campaigns would put out ads trying to raise money on the back of his illness.”The hypothetical is scarcely needed. By Monday, the president’s surrogates were trying their best to spin his coronavirus infection as a political liability not for himself but for Mr. Biden. “He has experience as commander in chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience — now — fighting the coronavirus as an individual,” Erin Perrine, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said on Fox. “Those firsthand experiences — Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.”However the Trump campaign handles his illness, some high-profile Democratic strategists argue that Mr. Biden has an obligation to sustain his criticism of the president. “At this point, Biden must share truth and facts even if they paint Trump negatively,” Amanda Renteria, the political director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, told McClatchy. “There is simply too much the public needs to know in the most important election in our lifetime. It is critical that Biden also vigorously proceeds.”Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, is more forgiving of the Biden campaign’s posture, since harsh ads assailing the president right now might risk undermining Mr. Biden’s calls for national comity under crisis. At the same time, though, he warns Democratic candidates in other races, especially Senate ones, against taking their cue from the former vice president.“Trump’s failure to prepare for and respond to Covid is the most important issue in this election,” Mr. Pfeiffer writes. “As Democrats and as Americans we can simultaneously wish that Donald Trump and the growing number of Republican politicians he has infected recover and hold them accountable for their misdeeds. No one should stop making the political case against Trump and his enablers — the stakes are too damn high.”‘Stop telling Joe Biden what to do’As Mr. Pfeiffer himself notes, taking a combative approach to Mr. Trump may not be as effective as common sense suggests: Some political science research has found that voters respond more to positive messages about Mr. Biden than to negative messages about Mr. Trump, about whom most Americans have already made up their minds.“For Biden to have a shot at the landslide victory he’s aiming for, he needs to win over the people who already dislike Trump, but aren’t yet sold on Biden,” Sarah Longwell writes at The Bulwark. “So a classy move — like pulling your negative ads while your opponent is in the hospital with a life-threatening disease — absolutely could help make people like you more.” Astead Herndon, a national political reporter for The Times, tweeted:And if attacking Mr. Trump was politically inefficient before, it might be even more so now that the story of his illness is saturating the news. “In a role reversal,” Marc Caputo writes for Politico, “the president who mocked his rival for being weak and hiding ‘in his basement’ is stuck in isolation under doctors’ supervision while Biden jets off to states like Michigan on Friday and Florida on Monday, with the battleground map all to himself.”The Biden campaign arguably doesn’t need to make any major shifts to sharpen that contrast. According to a poll conducted over the weekend, nearly three in four Americans, including two in five Republicans, believe the president took neither the personal nor the public risk of the virus seriously enough.And while the Trump campaign was hoping the nation would rally around him, the first polls conducted since the announcement of the president’s diagnosis did not show a sympathy bounce. If anything, his fortunes seem to have sunk in recent days, with one poll showing Mr. Biden doubling his national lead after last week’s debate.As Dave Wasserman, the House editor at The Cook Political Report, writes in The Times, Mr. Biden will need to flip some combination of the 10 states Mr. Trump carried by less than 10 points in 2016 to win the election, while Mr. Trump would most likely need to win at least eight of those states. “A look at these bellwethers — all either tossups or leaning toward Mr. Biden — makes clear that Mr. Trump is in serious trouble,” Mr. Wasserman says.All that being said, the Biden campaign can’t stop other political organizations from pillorying the president, and is perhaps even depending on them to do so. After vowing last weekend to “continue to prosecute the campaign against a Trump second term and work to defeat the Republican senators who enable him,” the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump conservatives, cut a new social media ad Monday highlighting the negligence that led to the outbreak in the White House.“If Donald Trump doesn’t care enough about those closest to him to warn them he has Covid,” the narrator intones, “why should we ever think he cares about us?”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.MORE ON THE FINAL WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN“Trump’s Campaign Saw an Opportunity. He Undermined It.” [The New York Times]“Trump’s Moment of Reckoning” [The Atlantic]“One month out, battered Trump campaign faces big challenges” [Associated Press]“In an October filled with surprises, can President Trump still win?” [The Miami Herald]“The Upshot on Today’s Polls” [The New York Times]WHAT YOU’RE SAYINGHere’s what readers had to say about the last debate: Should the presidential debates be canceled?Rohan from London: “Just a question for America — you do realize that the rest of the world can see these ‘debates’?”Ellen from California: “Some in the family found the debate useful in that it demonstrated the candidates’ demeanor under pressure. Whose finger would you rather have hovered over the atomic trigger?”Salina from New Haven: “Presidential debates should be canceled. Even the ‘civil’ ones are not informative. I’d love to hear podcast episodes or watch longer interviews where a skilled host talks to each candidate separately and asks them the same questions. There wouldn’t be any temptation for one candidate to interrupt, one-up, or try to refute the other.” More