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The Observer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Mitch McConnell says he will fill supreme court vacancy
Democrats cry foul, citing case of Merrick Garland
Opinion: Ginsburg changed US before she joined supreme court
Obituary: Ruth Bader Ginsburg More
“My most fervent wish,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg said days before her death on Friday, “is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”Ginsburg’s wish could be fulfilled, if the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, falls short in his 11th-hour push to rally Republicans to replace her. But even before Ginsburg’s death, McConnell, Donald Trump, conservative legal activists and evangelical groups were mobilizing for an all-hands campaign to fulfill their dream of a conservative super-majority on the supreme court that could endure for generations.That dream sees Roe v Wade, the landmark abortion rights decision, overturned; healthcare laws and environmental regulations tossed out; voting rights rolled back; anti-discrimination protections stripped; protections for immigrants vacated; and crucial bonds restraining the power of the presidency loosed.A national anti-abortion group, Susan B Anthony List, hailed a historic crossroads in the battle to make abortion illegal.“This is a turning point for the nation in the fight to protect its most vulnerable, the unborn,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said. “The pro-life grassroots have full confidence that President Trump, leader McConnell, [judiciary committee] chairman [Lindsey] Graham, and every pro-life senator will move swiftly to fill this vacancy.”Ginsburg’s death has opened the way for Trump to make a third appointment to the court in just four years. But this one would be special. With his first two picks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump filled slots that had been occupied by conservatives.By replacing Ginsburg, Trump will have the opportunity – and he has left no doubt that he sees it as such – to swap out a liberal lion with a young conservative, building up the current four-vote bedrock conservative minority into an impregnable five-vote majority. The nine-seat court decides cases with strict majority votes.If Trump can replace Ginsburg, conservatives would not even need the vote of the chief justice. A George W Bush appointee, John Roberts’ rulings with the liberal bloc on healthcare and LGBTQ+ and immigration rights have led activists on the right to view him as unreliable.Such a fundamental ideological tilt has not happened in 50 years. Progressive groups have raised an alarm about a generational threat to basic rights and protections.“It would be an insult to [Ginsburg’s] legacy for this president to select a justice he promises will assail our rights and undermine, upend and unravel our democratic norms for generations,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Our fundamental rights are at risk.”Trump has released lists of potential nominees, in an effort to shore up support among evangelicals and so-called “values voters”.The lists include eight circuit court judges, three senators and two former solicitors general. But court watchers see three names as most likely to get the call: Amy Coney Barrett, 48, a federal appeals court judge in Chicago; Thomas M Hardiman, 55, an appeals court judge in Philadelphia; and William Pryor, 58, an appeals court judge in Atlanta.With only 45 days left until an election which could usher Trump out of the White House and change the balance of power on Capitol Hill, Trump was expected to name a selection almost immediately. The confirmation process would be extraordinarily short.Any Trump nominee would have to appear before Graham’s judiciary committee, which would then vote the nomination onto the Senate floor, where a majority would be required to install the judge on the court.Outraged that McConnell planned hearings so close to the election, in what critics see as a cravenly hypocritical reversal of his refusal in 2016 to consider a Barack Obama nominee advanced in March of an election year, Democrats and activists vowed to stop any rushed confirmation.With the next presidential election quickly closing in, now is not the time to ram through a supreme court justiceNan Aron“With the next presidential election quickly closing in, now is not the time to ram through a supreme court justice,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice.The perceived frontrunners in Trump’s selection process have drawn sharp warnings from progressives about ties and statements on abortion, criminal justice and other topics.Barrett, a former law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is an outspoken Roman Catholic and a mother of seven.“The dogma lives loudly within you and that’s a concern, when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country,” the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett at confirmation hearings for her appeals court post.Barrett replied: “If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously, and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am, although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”Pryor, 54, of Alabama, once described Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision making abortion legal, as the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law” and wrote that it had “led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children”.Appointed to the circuit court by Bush in 2004, Pryor was previously Alabama attorney general, replacing future Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions.Hardiman, 51, of Pennsylvania, has advanced conservative rulings in “law and order” cases on issues such as sentencing guidelines, the death penalty and gun rights issues. In one case, he questioned if the first amendment protected people who videotaped police during a traffic stop.For any nominee to advance, Graham, in a tough re-election fight in South Carolina, must agree to schedule a last-minute hearing. After Obama nominated Merrick Garland in 2016 to fill a seat vacated after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Graham said he was against such an election year move on principle.“I want you to use my words against me,” Graham said in televised remarks. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’” More
Lines formed at polling stations in three states on Friday, 46 days out from 3 November, election day itself, as early voting began. Concern about ballot access under the pandemic has been widespread, particularly as Donald Trump continues to attack voting by mail with baseless claims of widespread fraud.In Minnesota, a state Hillary Clinton won by just 1.5 points in 2016 and which the Trump campaign is targeting, the president and Joe Biden were both on the campaign trail.In Virginia, the state’s two Democratic US senators were among early voters. At one site in Richmond, the state capital, dozens lined up before a polling station opened. CNN reported local officials as saying “they’ve never seen this many people show up on the first day”.Virginia was until recently a swing state but now leans firmly Democratic. Voting also began on Friday in South Dakota, which is solidly Republican.Trump has repeatedly said he wants to flip Minnesota in November, in hopes that it could offset losses elsewhere. He has visited regularly and has tailored policy moves to rural parts of the state, including reversing an Obama policy prohibiting the development of copper-nickel mining and bailing out soya bean, corn and other farmers hurt by Trump’s trade clashes with China.More recently, Trump has embraced a “law and order” message aimed at white voters concerned by protests against racism and police brutality which have sometimes turned violent. Minnesota saw unrest after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.However, polls indicate Biden has a significant edge in the state. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week, Biden leads by 16 points among likely voters, 57% to 41%.On Friday, Trump was scheduled to speak in Bemidji while Biden traveled to Duluth for a tour of a union training center. Duluth mayor Emily Larson told the Associated Press: “One of the things the Trump campaign has been very good about is visibility in Duluth, but also in areas around Duluth.”In Michigan, meanwhile, a judge handed down a key ruling concerning mail-in voting, writing that the state must accept ballots postmarked the day before election day, 3 November, which arrive in the weeks following.The decision will probably result in thousands more voters having their ballots counted in a key battleground state.In 2016, Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes. One of the top reasons mail-in ballots are rejected is because they arrive past the deadline to be counted: 6,405 ballots were rejected for that reason in Michigan’s August primary. Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the state’s top election official, called for extending the deadline.The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with reports of mail delays, have made that deadline unrealistic, wrote Judge Cynthia Diane Stevens of the Michigan court of claims.“Some flexibility must be built into the deadline in order to account for the significant inability of mail to arrive on what would typically be a reliable, predictable schedule,” the judge wrote, ordering ballots counted as long as they are postmarked by 2 November and arrive within 14 days of election day.The ruling was the second in two days extending ballot deadlines in a key state. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania supreme court blocked the state from enforcing an election night deadline for absentee ballots, instead ordering it to count them as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive by the following Friday.The Michigan ruling was in a suit filed by Priorities USA, a Democratic group. Michigan also restricts who can return an absentee ballot on behalf of a voter. Stevens, citing the pandemic, said the state could not enforce those restrictions from the Friday before election day through election night. More
The fight to vote
Texas
Texas is a ‘voter suppression’ state and one of the hardest places to vote. Will it help Trump win?
Despite the pandemic officials have placed tight restrictions on voting by mail, while students and minority groups face particular hurdles More
US elections 2020
As the presidential campaign heats up, the Guardian is tracking the latest polling in eight states that could decide the election
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Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump in the national polls for the presidential election.
But that doesn’t guarantee the Democratic candidate victory. Hillary Clinton also had a clear lead over Trump in the polls for almost the entire 2016 campaign. She ended up losing in the electoral college.
Because the presidential voting system assigns each state a number of electoral college votes, which go to the state’s victor regardless of the margin of victory, a handful swing states will probably decide the election and be targeted heavily by campaigners.
Each day, the Guardian’s poll tracker takes a rolling 14-day average of the polls in eight swing states.
In order to track how the race is developing in the areas that could decide the election, six of the eight states we focused on were those that flipped to Trump in 2016 after backing Barack Obama in 2012. Arizona and North Carolina were also added due to what they might tell us about a shifting electoral landscape – they could emerge as vital new swing states this year.
We must caution that the polls – particularly some swing state polls – severely undercounted Trump supporters in 2016. We are not certain, despite assurances, that they they have corrected this. Additionally, they may be over-counting Democratic support (more people may say they will vote for Biden than actually turn out).
We present the latest polls with those caveats to be borne in mind.
[embedded content]
The national polls
The latest polling average puts Biden ahead of Trump nationally.
While the national poll tracker is a poor indicator of how the crucial swing states will sway the election, a strong polling lead across the country can point to how the race will develop.
Each day, the Guardian’s national poll tracker takes a 14-day average of national voting intention polls.
[embedded content]
On Tuesday 3 November 2020, Americans will vote for their next president, with a choice between Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent, or his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
[embedded content]
Methodology
The Guardian poll tracker tracks the latest polls in eight crucial swing states. For Biden to win, he needs to reclaim some of these swing states.
The Guardian is collating polls in each of these states, as well as another set of national polls. Any polls deemed unreliable – for example, because they have small sample sizes – are excluded.
Our polling average is a 14-day rolling average: on any day, we collate any polls published in the last 14 days and take a mean average of their results.
If any company has conducted multiple polls in the last 14 days, we average out their polling results in order to give them just one entry. After this standardization process, we take a mean average of these daily entries to present the polling average.
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US elections 2020
Democratic presidential nominee tells town hall the president’s pandemic response is ‘close to criminal’ and crisis is far from over
Coronavirus – latest updates
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A memo by Senate Republicans’ campaign arm has admitted that control of the upper chamber is “at risk” and that Democrats could win the Senate in November’s elections.The September 2020 political update from the National Republican Senatorial Committee summarizes the state of the race of 10 states with Senate races around the country and how the outcome of each could factor into whether Republicans or Democrats control the chamber in January.The memo, obtained by the Guardian, has been circulating among political operatives, donors and interested parties. It comes just shy of 50 days before the November 2020 elections.“The next few weeks will define the future of our country for generations to come,” the NRSC memo reads.Memos like these are often shaped like dispassionate updates but in actuality they are often used to convince interested parties that races slipping out of reach are still in play. They are also often used to juice donations to lagging candidates and counter trending narratives.Democrats need to pick up three or four seats to take control of the Senate. The fact that the NRSC memo categorizes seven Senate races as ones that simply can’t be lost or deserve serious attention suggests that it’s possible, but not certain that Democrats can take control of the Senate.“Make no mistake: the Senate Majority is at risk. Beyond the four battleground states of Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona and Maine, Democrats are going on offense in historically red states like Montana, Iowa and Georgia,” the memo continues. “They’re even eyeing states like South Carolina, where [Democrat] Jaime Harrison just reported raising a staggering $10.6m in August alone.”The memo goes on to list four states under its “firewall” rubric: Iowa, Montana, Georgia and Kansas. Those states generally trend red but Democrats have staked their hopes on candidates with track records of appealing to both Republicans and Democrats or can rally key voting blocs.All four of those states, though, are usually more fertile ground for Republicans. Georgia, in particular, has been a state Democrats have hoped to flip for the last few presidential cycles.Three states fall under the memo’s “battleground” rubric and they have all been trending toward Democrats in the past few cycles. The Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, in particular, has consistently maintained a low double-digit or high single-digit lead over the incumbent Republican senator Martha McSally.The memo also warns that “North Carolina will be a knife fight in a phone booth until the end …”Still, the memo urges Republicans to take solace that despite the “defensive map” all is not lost. Republicans are highly likely to flip at least one Senate seat: Alabama.Notably, two major Senate races are not on this list; Kentucky and Texas. For years Democrats have vainly promised that one day Texas would flip in a statewide race. But its leaning remains toward Republicans. In Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is up for re-election. That race’s omission from the memo suggests that the Senate leader’s re-election is not a pressing concern for Republicans. More
US elections 2020
As the presidential campaign heats up, the Guardian is tracking the latest polling in eight states that could decide the election
Wed 16 Sep 2020 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 16 Sep 2020 12.58 EDT
Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump in the national polls for the presidential election.
But that doesn’t guarantee the Democratic candidate victory. Hillary Clinton also had a clear lead over Trump in the polls for almost the entire 2016 campaign. She ended up losing in the electoral college.
Because the presidential voting system assigns each state a number of electoral college votes, which go to the state’s victor regardless of the margin of victory, a handful swing states will probably decide the election and be targeted heavily by campaigners.
Each day, the Guardian’s poll tracker takes a rolling 14-day average of the polls in eight swing states.
In order to track how the race is developing in the areas that could decide the election, six of the eight states we focused on were those that flipped to Trump in 2016 after backing Barack Obama in 2012. Arizona and North Carolina were also added due to what they might tell us about a shifting electoral landscape – they could emerge as vital new swing states this year.
We must caution that the polls – particularly some swing state polls – severely undercounted Trump supporters in 2016. We are not certain, despite assurances, that they they have corrected this. Additionally, they may be over-counting Democratic support (more people may say they will vote for Biden than actually turn out).
We present the latest polls with those caveats to be borne in mind.
The national polls
The latest polling average puts Joe Biden ahead of Trump nationally.
While the national poll tracker is a poor indicator of how the crucial swing states will sway the election, a strong polling lead across the country is a good indicator of how the race will develop.
Each day, the Guardian’s national poll tracker takes a 14-day average of national voting intention polls.
On Tuesday 3 November 2020, Americans will vote for their next president, with a choice between Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent, or his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
Methodology
The Guardian poll tracker tracks the latest polls in eight crucial swing states. For Biden to claim the White House, he needs to reclaim some of these swing states.
The Guardian is collating polls in each of these states, as well as another set of national polls. Any polls deemed unreliable – for example, because they have small sample sizes – are excluded.
Our polling average is a 14-day rolling average: on any day, we collate any polls published in the last 14 days and take a mean average of their results.
If any company has conducted multiple polls in the last 14 days, we average out their polling results in order to give them just one entry. After this standardization process, we then take a mean average of these daily entries in order to present the polling average. More
