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      Joe Biden supporters won't believe in victory until it is theirs | Greg Jericho

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      A defining characteristic of progressive voters around the world is that they believe they can lose an election when ahead in the polls, and that they cannot win an election when they are behind in them.
      To be fair there is some justification for such belief. Progressives have become quite good at losing elections they should win.
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      As we all look to the US presidential election this coming week, those working, hoping, and praying for a Biden win remain ever distrustful of the polls that have Biden up by eight points.
      Maybe we should not trust them, but we all know that were Biden down eight points, no one would think there was any hope left.
      The different attitude was nicely summarised by former Republican party consultant Stuart Stevens, who told Battleground podcast last week:

      I seem to remember losing to the Democrats in the popular vote every time since 1988, except 2004, so it’s like ‘you guys are winning, we’re losing’ and I just think there is a timidity to the idea that this can’t be a huge victory for Joe Biden … If I ran the Democratic party I would say ‘Look, this is ours, there is more of us than them, we just have to go and take it … rout them, rout them from the field and know that you are just.

      It’s true that since 1988 the Democratic candidate has won the national vote in six of the seven presidential elections (and is almost certain to do so again this time). And yet they have won just four of those times.
      The US electoral system, with its allocation of winner-takes-all electoral college votes, is so disjointed from the national vote that 538’s Nate Silver estimates that if Biden was ahead 1% in the popular vote he would only have a 6% chance of winning the election.
      Add in legitimate concerns about voter suppression (both before and after the election) and Biden supporters won’t believe the victory is won until he has his hand on the Bible delivering the oath of office.
      And even then …
      After all, we are talking about a country in which Walmart has announced that it is temporarily taking ammunition and guns off its shelves out of fear of violence in the wake of the election result. It is such a stunning announcement you kind of gloss over that this means guns and ammunition are normally on the shelves of Walmart stores.
      We’re also talking about a country where 40% of Florida voters in a recent poll said they thought Donald Trump was “compassionate” and 43% thought he was “truthful”. Words no longer have meaning at such times.
      In the past month everyone has been waiting for an “October surprise”.
      But the Trump party’s (that rancid combination of the Republican party and conservative media) attempt to smear Biden by way of his son were as arousing to voters as watching Rudy Giuliani “tuck in his shirt” while lying on a bed.
      Only the deluded and the desperate cared.
      But what about good economic news that will turn voters back to Trump? Late this past week there were reports of “record” GDP growth figures, with headlines that in the September quarter America’s economy grew 33%.
      It didn’t.
      America for some bizarre reason likes to annualise quarterly growth. The economy actually grew 7.4% in the September quarter after falling 9% in June – both figures were records.
      The US economy remains 3.5% smaller than it was before the pandemic took hold. There are also 11 million fewer Americans employed than there were in February. That is not a boom.
      But nothing – neither the polls, the economy, nor the horrendous spread of the virus – will give Biden supporters any sense that the election is his to win.
      And fair enough – the stakes are too high.
      A Trump victory would signal the failure of the US democratic experiment and the triumph of authoritarianism. Given his administration’s utter inability to deal with the virus it would also mean not only many more deaths but also a brake on the global economy for many years to come.
      It would also end hopes for limiting climate change at a global level.
      On the other side of the ledger is the hope a Biden administration with a Senate majority might be able to undo some of the damage and do some good over the next four years.
      There is no balance, and so we hold on, hoping there remains some good news for 2020 to deliver. More

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      US Congress hopeful Nancy Goroff: 'We need more scientists in public office'

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      Nancy Goroff will be the first female research scientist to serve in the US Congress if she is elected this November. The Democratic candidate is running for one of Long Island’s seats in the House of Representatives against incumbent Republican, Lee Zeldin, an ardent President Trump supporter who has described her as a “radical professor”. Facing a tight race with issues such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change looming large, Goroff, a professor of chemistry at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is stressing her science credentials.
      You’ve worked at Stony Brook University for more than two decades developing new organic molecules for solar cells and eco-friendly lighting in your lab. What made you decide to run for Congress?I decided in late 2018, when the issues top of mind were climate change, the environment and healthcare. It came from being frustrated and infuriated with the denigration of science and expertise by the Trump administration. I’ve always advocated causes that I believe in – I sit on the Union of Concerned Scientist’s National Advisory Board – but it just didn’t seem like enough any more. I couldn’t stand by.
      Given the pandemic and climate emergency, is this election a referendum on whether politicians should listen to scientific advice?It seems to be. We hear from voters that they’re frustrated with politicians for not paying attention to the science and leading us to where we are now. Biden has said he is going to be a big proponent of science.
      We need to use facts to guide us through the coronavirus pandemic. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) testified recently that the most important thing we can do to get ahead of the pandemic – more important than a vaccine – is to have everyone wear masks. That didn’t fit Trump’s narrative, so he said the CDC director misspoke. Rather than contradicting the CDC, he should be amplifying its message. That [Trump] won’t wear a mask and denigrates people for wearing masks is just unconscionable to me.
      What would the fallout for science be if Trump was re-elected?There would be a lot of pain and suffering. The pandemic will last much longer. I also worry about a continued lack of action on climate change, lack of concern about providing healthcare to people and the further undermining of experts in every government agency. People have been pushed out and there is a huge amount of work to do to rebuild that expertise.
      You’re not specifically supporting the Green New Deal, the progressive environmental package introduced last year by two Democrats including New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It sets an aggressive goal of developing a carbon neutral economy in 10 years. If elected, what would you do instead?There are many different versions of the Green New Deal. If I say I’m for the Green New Deal, the Republicans will decide that I’m for the most extreme version. I am for the US aiming to be carbon neutral in our energy production by 2035 and carbon neutral overall, including all sources, as soon after as we can. To achieve that we need to deploy the renewable energy technologies we have as quickly as possible and invest in research to develop new ones.
      I want to make sure Covid-19 stimulus spending is focused on investment in clean energy infrastructure. That will bring jobs and move us closer to a carbon neutral future. Then – I’m a scientist, I am well versed in the data – I want my office to be a resource for every member of Congress on scientific questions.
      You are backed by 314 Action, a Democratic committee whose mission is to get scientists elected to public office. Why do we need more scientists in Congress and does gender matter?We need more scientists, regardless of gender. We have a lot of lawyers and business people and that’s fine, but you want people from diverse backgrounds when you are trying to make complicated policy decisions. So many of our big challenges as a country have a scientific or technical component. There is only one research scientist in Congress now [Bill Foster, a Democratic physicist from Illinois]. As a woman in science, I know what it means to be an underrepresented group and I think that will be helpful for making sure my constituents get their voices amplified. More

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      Despair or denial – are these the only options in the run-up to election night? | Emma Brockes

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      Four days out from the US election, and everyone is feeling tired and emotional. It is hard to focus, easy to agonise, and soothing – if the volume of pain on social media is anything to go by – to share with the group one’s inability to function. This is not limited to people living in the US, but – as with the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and ascent of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court – is felt by plenty of observers abroad as acute and very personal pain. People are, by their own admission, weeping, paralyzed, grief-stricken, terrified, frozen, nauseous and bingeing. You can’t turn it off. There is no escape.
      At least this is the impression one gets after spending too long online. How we live psychologically in relation to the news is something we are assumed not to have much control over. You can be an ostrich and happy or that guy trapped in a feedback loop of conspiracy theories on Facebook – but nobody wants to be him. Or you can be informed and miserable, on which count not feeling completely dismantled at the moment is a dereliction of civic duty. Who runs the US affects the rest of the world, and it is not outlandish for Brits – or, say, affluent New Yorkers, insulated from the worst effects of a Trump re-election – to be emotionally disturbed ahead of the election. What remains curious is whether the sheer levels of reported distress are to any degree optional, or entirely related to the trauma at hand.
      If I put down my immediate worries, I can, within about three mental leaps, get from Trump’s re-election to the ship sailing on climate breakdown, to the end of human civilisation, taking my descendants with it. The same goes for the domino run of panic around Coney Barrett’s confirmation on the supreme court, bringing with it the threat of reversals on abortion and marriage equality. These planes, always idling at the end of the runway, require a small amount of energy to get airborne, however, and with a bit of effort – staying off social media; narrowing my range of vision to the next 45 minutes – I can usually stop the thing taking off.
      The question is whether I should want to. Distress as a form of empathy is imagined to be a precursor to action, the necessary spur to political activity. Denial, meanwhile, is imagined only ever to foster apathy. I’m sure this is true in lots of contexts, and yet when we are powerless to do anything, as we are at this stage of the election, anxiety itself feels like a proxy for Doing Something, and a useless one at that. Fretting on Twitter might offer solace, but it risks exacerbating the very thing it seeks to remedy.
      And it’s an unreliable measure of anything much beyond one’s own temperature. The two sharpest responses I’ve had to an election were in 1997, when Tony Blair became prime minister, ending a Tory run that had lasted all but three years of my life, coinciding with the elation of graduating and the dawn of adult life, and seven years later, when George W Bush won a second term by defeating John Kerry. I was in Britain in 2004: the US election had nothing to do with me – or rather, it was less my concern than it would be in 2016, when Donald Trump became president of the country I lived in. But while Trump’s election was a terrible shock, I felt the disappointment of the Bush re-election more keenly. I was less politically jaded then, more inclined to believe things would turn out OK, and still recovering from the death of my mother. As in 97, my response to the election was more life than politics.
      There are broader injuries that perhaps can’t be dodged. For Americans, Trump has delivered a psychological blow in the form of besmirching the very idea of their country, an injury over-arching all others. And while, for reasons of self-preservation, it might make sense to skirt Twitter for a few days, you can’t entirely avoid these things. I used to sleepwalk – or sleep-bolt – something I haven’t done for 10 years. I am calm during the day, but one night this week, I woke up at 2.30am in my living room, eyes on the clock, heart racing, trying to figure out how I got there and why.
      • Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      'Voters are fed up': will Arizona's suburbs abandon the party of Trump?

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      In the agonizing days after the 2018 election, Christine Marsh, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in a traditionally Republican suburban Phoenix district, watched her opponent’s lead dwindle to a few hundred votes, with thousands of ballots left to be counted.
      In the end, just 267 votes separated them.
      Marsh lost. But the result was ominous for Republicans, in a corner of Phoenix’s ever-expanding suburbs where Barry Goldwater, the long-serving Arizona senator and conservative icon, launched his presidential campaign in 1964 from the patio of his famed hilltop estate in Paradise Valley.
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      In the decades since, population growth and shifting demographics have transformed the cultural, political and economic complexion of the region.
      And the election of Donald Trump has exacerbated these trends across the country, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in diverse, fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix, where the coalition of affluent, white suburban voters that once cemented Republican dominance is unraveling.
      “We’ve seen a huge shift in my district, even in just the last two years,” said Marsh, a a high school English teacher who is challenging Republican incumbent Kate Brophy McGee again this year. The district, which includes the prosperous Paradise Valley and parts of north central Phoenix, is now at the center of the political battle for Arizona’s suburbs.
      Over the last four years, Republicans have watched their support collapse in suburbs across the country, as the president’s divisive rhetoric and incendiary behavior alienates women, college graduates and independent voters. But as Trump continues to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, even after more than 225,000 deaths nationwide and as cases continue to climb, his conduct is imperiling not only his own re-election campaign, but his entire party. More

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      Australians ask me what the mood is in the US. I say optimism, quickly smothered by dread | Chloe Angyal

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      In Iowa, lawn signs keep vanishing. They’ll be there in the front garden one night, red white and blue against the unnaturally lush suburban American green grass, advertising to drivers and dog walkers alike that the people inside want Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. “Joe 2020.” “Unity over division, Biden-Harris 2020.” “Bye-Don.” And the next morning, they’re gone. One man got caught stealing a sign, and then got caught stealing the newspapers reporting what he’d done. (Trump signs have been stolen and vandalised too).
      Iowa, where the presidential primaries began with the shambolic caucuses in February, has become one of the most expensive electoral battlegrounds in the nation. In 2016, the state went for Trump by a massive 10 points after voting for Obama by two in 2012; the 12-point swing was the largest of any state in the nation. Now, the swing state is living up to that label: FiveThirtyEight has Biden slightly ahead. But it’s not only the presidential race on the line: the incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst is neck-and-neck with her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, who has raked in a staggering amount of money – $28.7m in the third quarter of this year alone – to try to flip one of Iowa’s two red Senate seats to blue.
      This is my fourth presidential election in the US, but my first in Iowa. I grew up in Australia, and moved to this state two years ago after living in New York City for a decade, because my partner, an Iowan, ran for office here.
      The vanishing lawn signs, of course, are not the only dirty trick we’ve seen this year: Republicans have done everything in their power to make voting harder for people who likely won’t vote for them, from closing ballot drop locations to reimposing felon disenfranchisement to knee-capping the postal service.
      I voted early and in person, waiting for half an hour in a socially distanced line at the local library. That’s nothing compared with the hours-long wait other voters have endured, but still a tax in the form of time, and in the middle of a pandemic in which Iowa is faring absolutely terribly, a risk voters shouldn’t have to take to get their ballot counted.
      By now it has become a cliche to compare America’s voting system – a state-by-state patchwork of time-consuming and easily-screwed up registration procedures, followed by deliberately limited in-person voting options – to Australia’s. Similarly, it has become a threadbare exercise in horror to compare how the US has responded to coronavirus with how Australia has. When I returned home to see my family in July, I was required to spend two weeks in a hotel room in Sydney and was regularly tested for coronavirus during my quarantine. Six weeks later, when I flew back to Iowa, there was nothing to stop me from driving from the airport to my local supermarket, mask-free, and breathing all over my fellow Iowans.
      To date, more than 120,000 people in Iowa have contracted coronavirus, and 1,693 of them have died. The population of Iowa, where a Republican governor never issued a stay-at-home order and has pushed the state to a full re-opening even as case numbers continue to rise, is 3.1 million. Australia, with its population of 25 million, has seen 27,569 cases to date, 907 of them fatal.
      Cliches or no, it is hard to avoid making these comparisons as election day hurtles towards us. Because they are not simply thought experiments, they’re questions about life and death, and about who and what government is for. What would this country look like if it invested in the infrastructure of a truly representative democracy, as Australia has? Would the officials elected under such a system have taken the threat of the pandemic seriously, rather than allowing partisanship to warp their understanding of not just science but of what sacrifices we owe to each other?
      Just as it was hard to explain to Americans how stringent Australia’s policies for returnees were, it has been hard to explain to Australians what the mood is here as the election approaches. After four years under Trump’s Republican party – four years of obscene policies meant to harm the most vulnerable, four years of testing and in some cases breaking the institutional guard rails of American democracy – and eight months of coronavirus, the mood is sheer anxiety. The mood is utter exhaustion.
      The mood is optimism quickly smothered by fear and dread. This time in 2016, the polls predicted a Trump loss, but voter suppression and Russian interference kept just enough people from voting in crucial states to swing the election Trump’s way.
      The mood, for me and many of my fellow journalists, is disassociation and numbness, coping mechanisms we learned a long time ago are essential for doing the work of covering the horrors and incompetencies of this administration.
      The mood is anticipation of relief, mingled with the knowledge that relief might not come, that it all might go wrong, and that the election, like our lawn signs, might once again be stolen from us.
      • Chloe Angyal is a contributing editor at marieclaire.com and the author of the forthcoming book Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself. She is from Sydney and lives in the Iowa City area More

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      US election roundup: Joe Biden and Donald Trump descend on key battleground of Florida

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      Donald Trump and Joe Biden converged on Florida on Thursday in the final stages of the battle for the swing state, which the president must win to have a realistic chance of holding on to power.
      “You hold the key,” Biden told a rally in Broward county. “If Florida goes blue, it’s over. It’s over!”
      The rivals duelled over interpretations of new data which showed the US economy recovering fast in the third quarter, but still suffering from the impact of the Covid pandemic. And despite Trump’s efforts to push the issue aside, the candidates’ widely different approaches to the pandemic came into focus once more.
      The Trump campaign broadcast new Spanish-language advertisements showing the president wearing a mask – a tacit admission that his frequent derision of mask-wearing was damaging his standing among at least some of his supporters.
      But the president’s rally held outside a Tampa football stadium followed the pattern of his campaign, packing thousands of mostly maskless fans together.
      Adding to the irony, Melania Trump told the crowd that her husband and his team were focused on creating ways for people to “start gathering with friends again on safe distances”.
      The president’s disregard for masks has alienated many elderly voters, who are critical in Florida, where polls show the race to be more or less tied – and whose 29 votes in the electoral college have proved decisive in the past.
      Most electoral analysts argue that it would be virtually impossible for Trump to hold on to the presidency without winning the state.
      If Trump wins Florida, it would increase pressure on Biden to win the big battleground states to the north, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democratic challenger began the day in Broward county, part of the coastal urban sprawl north of Miami, before crossing the state to Tampa, where he was due to arrive in the evening, a few hours after Trump had departed for North Carolina, one of the traditionally Republican strongholds he is trying to defend against a Democratic surge.
      As part of the continuing deliberate contrast with the president’s campaign style, the Biden Broward county event was a socially distanced drive-in at a college campus, where supporters were cautioned not to stray more than an arm’s length from their cars. The evening rally scheduled in Tampa was also a drive-in.
      In a new advertisement launched on Thursday, Biden pledged to set up a special taskforce on his first day in office which would be devoted to finding the families of 545 children forcibly separated from their families under Trump immigration policies.
      Data released on Thursday showed GDP had bounced back dramatically in the third quarter of 2020, 33% on an annualized rate in the third quarter after dropping 31% in the second quarter, but the economy was still nearly 4% down compared with the end of 2019.
      On Twitter, Trump proclaimed the recovery to be the “Biggest and Best in the History of our Country”. Biden countered that the country was still “in a deep hole” and warned that the recovery was “slowing if not stalling” while benefiting the wealthiest Americans. More

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      The polls point to a Biden victory but can they be trusted this time?

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      For months, activists and Democratic party officials have been telling Joe Biden supporters that the only answer to the question “can we trust the polls?” is to go out and vote for Biden, and then get others to do the same.
      “The polls are a mirage,” one organizer told the Guardian last month.
      For partisans on either side of the presidential election, “go vote” remains the only sound advice. Tens of millions of people have acted on that advice and cast their ballots early in record numbers. Others are preparing to vote in person on Tuesday.
      After the dust has settled on the election, there will be plenty of time to analyze whether the state-level polling delivered a better picture of the race this year than it did in 2016, political organizers say.
      But one thing is certain: the polls at the end of the 2020 presidential race are telling a very different story from the polls at the end of the 2016 race, and it’s a rosier picture for Biden than it was for Clinton.
      An unchanging polling graphic has emerged in this presidential race: two lines, a blue one above and a red one below, running in parallel, separated by 8 points or so, for the entire year.
      Those lines represent the national polling averages over time of a head-to-head match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, and they have never intersected.
      In the last presidential election, between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the polling averages intersected every couple of months, weaving their way towards an endpoint that depicted Clinton ahead by three points. She won the popular vote by two points.
      The averages this time have Biden up by 7.5 points (Real Clear Politics), 9 points (New York Times/Upshot) and 9 points (FiveThirtyEight) – depicting a lead that is two or three times larger than that depicted for Clinton.
      The White House is not won through a popular vote, of course. But opening up a large national lead is impossible without opening up state-level leads. And the state-level polls in 2020 also depict larger leads for Biden in key battlegrounds than they did for Clinton – with some important caveats. More