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      Women will decide this election – and Trump keeps insulting them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Trump has a very weird way of wooing women
      Suburban women can be so ungrateful.
      Donald Trump saved your damn neighbourhood, OK? He’s saving your house. He’s saving your community. He fixed your dishwashers. He’s keeping your crime way down. And he’s getting your husbands back to work! But despite this unhinged, and racism-tinged, list of imaginary accomplishments – which Trump trots out at every rally – suburban women are turning their backs on the president. Biden leads by 23 points among suburban women in swing states, according to recent polls, and by 19 points among suburban women overall, according to Pew Research.
      This is a big problem for Trump. Fifty-three per cent of white women voted for him in 2016; white women in battleground states like Pennsylvania helped usher him to victory, now they could lose him the election. Biden is currently beating Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, largely because the president has lost the support of white women. (It should be noted that while there are plenty of non-white women in the suburbs, Suburban Women tends to be code for white women – Trump certainly uses it that way.)
      Trump can’t seem to figure out why on earth the Suburban Housewives of America, who he tweets incessantly about, aren’t keen on him. Nor can he figure out a coherent strategy to get them back: like an abusive ex-boyfriend, he’s been veering between angry threats and pathetic groveling, demanding that women appreciate all he’s done for them. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” Trump bellowed at a recent rally in Pennsylvania. “Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
      That isn’t all he’s done for women, apparently. At a rally on Tuesday, Trump boasted that he’s “getting your husbands back to work”. This would be a condescending thing to say in any context, but it’s particularly infuriating when women have had to leave the workforce at a greater rate than men due to the pandemic. In September, 865,000 women left the US workforce, four times more than men.
      It’s also a little strange that Trump doesn’t seem to think women work, considering his own daughter, Ivanka, wrote a book called Women Who Work where she drops pearls of wisdom like “women who work are real”. Something not everyone realised before Ivanka pointed it out.
      Ivanka, it should be said, has certainly been working hard for her father’s campaign lately. Over the last few weeks she’s been parachuting into battleground states across the country to woo suburban women with her peerless Stepford charm. She’s recited fun facts about ice-cream in Milwaukee (“I learned that the first ice-cream sundae was created in this amazing state!”) She’s posted cute photos of doughnuts in Michigan. She’s tweeted articles about women’s empowerment and promised to help kids and parents. Except, you know, the 545 children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, who she’s stayed pretty quiet about.
      After years of being vague about her position on abortion, Ivanka has also come out as being “unapologetically” anti-abortion. In an interview with Real Clear Politics on Thursday, Ivanka seemed to suggest that her choosing to have children made her realize other people should be forced to give birth. “I respect all sides,” Ivanka said when asked about abortion, “but I am also a mother of three children, and parenthood affected me in a profound way in terms of how I think about these things.”
      I’m not entirely sure how Ivanka coming out as anti-abortion is supposed to help Trump win back women. Most people in America do not have extremist views about abortion, after all. Rather, the sudden clarification of her abortion stance seems to be a last-ditch effort to drum up support among white Catholics, who have cooled on Trump a bit. With Biden leading in the polls and the election around the corner it seems like the Trump campaign is getting desperate; throwing whatever they can against the wall and hoping something sticks.
      Things don’t look good for Trump at the moment but, if 2016 taught us anything, it’s to take the polls with a pinch of salt and not get complacent. Please Suburban Women, I’m begging you, don’t mess it up this time.
      The supreme court to hear LGBTQ right case
      Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the supreme court on Tuesday, meaning there is now a 6-3 conservative supermajority. We’re going to find out very quickly what this means for LBGTQ rights. The day after the election the court will hear arguments in Fulton v City of Philadelphia, a case that looks at whether religious foster agencies can refuse to work with same-sex prospective parents. A ruling could come as soon as 9 November and open the doors to discrimination on the basis of “religious liberty”.
      Chrissy Teigen wrote a moving piece about losing her baby
      “I beg you to please share your stories and to please be kind to those pouring their hearts out,” Teigen said. There is still far too much silence around pregnancy loss and too many women suffering alone.
      Loujain Al-Hathloul, jailed Saudi activist, on hunger strike
      “The world has a duty to save her and not forget her while she languishes in prison,’ says Loujain’s sister. Shame on everyone who participated in Saudi Arabia’s sham of a women’s summit earlier this month.
      A tactile pregnancy test for visually impaired people
      The Royal National Institute of Blind People has developed a prototype pregnancy test that delivers results by raising silicone bumps, rather than visually. A test like this means visually impaired people can check their results privately.
      How America invented the white girl who absolutely loves fall
      “The basic white girl who loves fall has become so solidified in the cultural imagination that she may as well be the season’s Easter Bunny,” this interesting piece in Jezebel notes. It traverses pumpkin spice, Taylor Swift, nostalgia and the Gilmore Girls to explain why.
      The week in poltergeistarchy
      Ever wanted to haunt a theatre after you die? Now’s your chance. The Regent Theatre in Ontario, Canada has come up with an inspired way to raise some funds: buy a $25 ticket and you’ll be put into a Halloween raffle to gain the rights to become the official ghost of the theatre once you shuffle off this mortal coil. More

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      ‘An awakening I haven’t seen before’: Detroit voters say 2020 won’t be like 2016

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      Cole Thompson isn’t voting this year – he can’t because he’s only 17. But on a frigid and rainy afternoon last week, he and about half a dozen of his classmates at University of Detroit Jesuit high school fanned out in the blocks around their school to leave flyers on door handles encouraging people to vote.
      “Last election, we didn’t put forth our effort and we didn’t vote and it kind of backfired on us because we wound up being a Trump state rather than a Hillary state and we should have been a Hillary state,” Thompson said. “It doesn’t matter whether or not I can vote. It’s still important to get people who can vote to vote.”
      Michigan, with 16 electoral college votes, is one of a handful of states that will determine the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Detroit, the state’s largest city, will play a big role in determining that outcome. There’s little doubt that Joe Biden will win the vote in the Democratic-friendly city, but his margin of victory could shape whether he will carry the state. In 2016, turnout fell in Detroit; Hillary Clinton got about 47,000 fewer votes in the city than Barack Obama did in 2012. Donald Trump won Michigan by just 10,704 votes.
      Memories of that decline have helped fuel an aggressive blitz to turn out voters in the city in the final weeks of the campaign, even as Covid-19 has made in-person canvassing harder. That effort includes not just encouraging Detroit residents to vote but also explaining how; Michigan has dramatically expanded its voting laws since 2016, including allowing for no-excuse absentee and early voting.
      “I know people I’m speaking to now in 2020 that haven’t voted in eight years in a presidential campaign. They are like, ‘Thank you for telling me where to go, thank you for coming to talk to me,’” the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents portions of Detroit and the suburbs, told the Guardian. “There’s an awakening that I haven’t seen before.” More

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      ‘I’m not voting for personality’: why this Pennsylvania county is the one to watch

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      A steady stream of voters arrived to deliver their sealed ballots at an early voting drop-off box inside the courthouse in the Pennsylvania city of Easton, a diverse community in Northampton county which could be pivotal in deciding who wins the key battleground state – and the White House.
      Northampton county, a mixed rural-urban area with about 300,000 habitants, has backed the winning presidential candidate all but three times since 1920. As Northampton county goes, so do Pennsylvania’s precious 20 electoral votes, according to electoral history.
      It is the political bellwether county in a crucial swing state which helped deliver victory to Donald Trump in 2016. Northampton county was among just 206 out of 3,141 nationwide that backed Barack Obama twice and then flipped for Trump.
      But with less than a week to go before election day, the polls here are mixed and too close to call. The campaign signs scattered across the picturesque county seem pretty evenly spread between the president and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, and so do the votes being cast at the courthouse.
      Voting for Biden is Shelene Monroe, a 48-year-old business analyst. “Trump has divided us as a nation, severed relationships with our partners while aligning himself with dictators, and shown a total lack of leadership,” said Monroe, who voted for Democratic candidates in the down-ballot races. More

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      If Trump wins, will I be giving my twins a life lesson: sometimes bad guys finish first? | Hadley Freeman

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      The other night I watched The Trump Show – the new BBC series about, oh, go on, have a guess. I do recommend it as a kind of This Is Your Life experience, and by “Life” I mean “the past four years, which your poor brain, has desperately tried to forget in real time, like the broom dog in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, sweeping away the path as he goes”.You’d think watching a documentary about Trump would pummel you into a state of catatonic depression but, actually, it’s like going through an old school yearbook, looking at photo after photo of people who held such an outsized position of importance in your mind at the time, but whom you’ve totally forgotten about since: “Oh yeah, Sean Spicer! Scaramucci! Reince Priebus! Whatever happened to those guys?” you shout from the sofa. Trump goes through men faster than Jessica Rabbit, and if I had to describe the experience of watching The Trump Show in one sentence, it would be, “Oh yeah, that guy!”Of course, watching it now, before the election, the question is whether the documentary captures some weird blip in time, or the beginning of the apocalypse. You’ll probably be amazed to know that I’d prefer the former. In fact, if it were really up to me, I’d like the past four years to be like the opening scene in the classic 1991 comedy King Ralph, in which the entire royal family is accidentally electrocuted, resulting in John Goodman becoming the king of England. I’m not saying I want all of the Trumps and everyone associated with them to die (although I wouldn’t say no to Goodman taking charge of the country). But when we all wake up next Wednesday morning, I would very much like the past four years to be erased and for us all to agree to pretend they never happened and never to mention them again.And so, to achieve that end by legal means as opposed to murderous ones, I sent in my overseas ballot last week. I posted it with my twin boys, who are now five, because these days going to the post office counts as quite an exciting outing, and you don’t say no to one of those during a housebound half-term. But there were other reasons, too. They were barely toddlers during the last election, and I remember thinking – on that innocent, calm-before-the-hellscape day of 7 November 2016 – how cool it was that the first president my children would remember, their formative president, would be President Hillary Clinton. Insert hollow laugh here. Well, now their baby sister is wearing the poignantly tatty Clinton 2016 onesies (tatty, like my hopes and dreams), and the boys are asking questions about who the president is and what he’s like. And I had thought the conversation to dread was how their sister got in mummy’s tummy in the first place. (That one, in fact, turned out to be very easy – like all high-quality parents, I lied and said I ate her, and they accepted that with little apparent surprise. But Donald Trump is harder to explain than maternal cannibalism.)In the hormonal fug after their birth, it felt desperately important to get US citizenship for my twins, in the same way I was determined to include my surname in their names somehow. It was something to do with stamping an identity on them – my identity, I guess, or the one I’d grown up with. Within a year, I was bitterly regretting the whole citizenship thing, and not just because I realised I’d saddled my kids with the hell that is paying US taxes for the rest of their lives. It turned out I’d also saddled them with a president who outdoes any Philip Roth satire, and who probably paid less in tax at the age of 72 than my children did at the age of one.So here we are, four years later, and I’m explaining to them why I’m ticking this box on the ballot and not that one. “We’re making good Joe the king, and not bad Donald!” they tell everyone in the post office. And, monarchy aside, that does sum up the situation as I see it. But how will I explain it to them if the bad guy wins? A small part of me broke for ever on the morning of 9 November, when everything I thought I understood about my past, present and future proved untrue and Trump won. If I felt like that at 38, how will a pair of five-year-olds feel if I have to tell them that, contrary to what their parents taught them, being good doesn’t always get you what you want. Sometimes the bad guys finish first. Five seems a little young for innocence to be shattered.Or maybe not. When I solemnly explained to them that good Joe might not be president next week – it really might be bad Donald – they took the news pretty much in the same way they took the revelation that their mother eats babies: mild consternation, shrugging acceptance, swift uninterest. They then turned back to the more pressing matter of Hey Duggee, and the only person looking anxious, confused, miserable and scared on the sofa was me. More

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      'I hope it makes a difference': voters on remote Maine island cast their ballots

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      Located over 20 miles off the coast of Maine, Matinicus Island is often among the first communities in the state to report their official vote counts. It doesn’t take long, explains clerk and registrar of voters Eva Murray, because they have so few registered voters. “Out of the 70 active voters, I’ve already handed out 26 ballots,” she says.
      In addition to running the election, Murray also runs the solid waste program, operates a bakery out of her house, works as a freelance writer and is a certified pilot and EMT. She knows most everyone on Matinicus, and most everyone knows her. There seems to be little confusion about how, logistically, to submit a ballot on the island. She predicts a “good turnout” this year.
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      Although the ferry runs only 30 or so times a year, it is possible to get on and off the island via plane, and that’s how the paper ballots will get to Rockland city hall if there is any call for a recount. Otherwise, the islanders’ votes are collected, counted and reported on Matinicus at the town office. The results are sent “by both computer and fax”, explains Murray, “to the secretary of state’s office, bureau of elections, in Augusta, just like any other town.” She takes great pride in this process, and stresses that they’re a small community, but they’re committed to “doing it right”. More

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      'Red mirage': the 'insidious' scenario if Trump declares an early victory

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      Scenarios for how an election disaster could unfold in the United States next week involve lawsuits, lost ballots, armed insurrection and other potential crises in thousands of local jurisdictions on 3 November.
      But there is one much simpler scenario for election-night chaos, centering on a single address, that many analysts see as among the most plausible.
      The scenario can be averted, election officials say, by heightening public awareness about it – and by cautioning vigilance against carefully targeted lies that Donald Trump has already begun to tell.
      Known as the “red mirage”, the scenario could develop if Trump appears to be leading in the presidential race late on election night and declares victory before all the votes are counted.
      The red mirage “sounds like a super-villain, and it’s just as insidious”, the former Obama administration housing secretary Julían Castro says in a video recorded as a public service announcement to voters this week.
      “On election night, there’s a real possibility that the data will show Republicans leading early, before all the votes are counted. Then they can pretend something sinister’s going on when the counts change in Democrats’ favor.”
      In the scenario, Trump’s declaration of victory is echoed on the conservative TV network Fox News and by powerful Republicans across the US. By the time final returns show that in fact Joe Biden has won the presidency, perhaps days later, the true election result has been dragged into a maelstrom of disinformation and chaos.
      To some officials, the scenario is too realistic for words. A potential multi-day delay in counting votes is anticipated in Philadelphia, whose mostly Democratic votes are crucial for Biden to win in Pennsylvania, currently the state the quants see as most likely to tip the election one way or the other.
      After counting only 6,000 absentee ballots in the 2016 election, the city of Philadelphia, where Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, expects to receive and count as many as 400,000 mail-in ballots this year, with the coronavirus pandemic raging.
      All of those ballots will be counted inside the city’s cavernous convention center on Arch Street, beginning at 7am on the day of the election, by an army of poll workers, including many new recruits, using recently purchased equipment.
      The delay that officials know will be required to finish the counting could be enough time for Trump to sow doubt about the result, an effort the president has already begun.
      “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” Trump said at the first presidential debate in September, warning about “tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated” and “urging my people” to watch polling sites carefully, despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud in US elections.
      Current and former Pennsylvania officials and activists say that the antidote to the “red mirage” is as simple as the scenario itself.
      The public must understand, these officials say, that Philadelphia will not be able to report its election result on the night of 3 November, and may not be able to do so for days afterward, owing to the extraordinary circumstances that the pandemic has wrought.
      In turn, the surge of Democratic votes out of Philadelphia, when they do land, will probably create the perception of a huge swing in the state to Biden. And finally, that swing could well be large enough to erase a lead that Trump might build up in rural counties elsewhere in the state – to appear to turn Pennsylvania from “red” to “blue” – and to potentially decide the entire election. More

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      The US election that doesn't count: Guam goes to the polls but votes won't matter

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      Politics is a favourite sport on the streets of Hagatna, where voters are preparing for the US elections.Billboards adorn every street corner and conversations are dominated by candidates and their policies. But when Guamanians go to the polls on 3 November and mark down their preference for president, their “votes” won’t count.Despite being American citizens, an anomaly in US law means the residents of the island, which lies in the Pacific Ocean 8,000 miles from Washington, have no say as to who runs their country.They vote for a local legislature, a governor, and a delegate to the US House of Representatives – a delegate who cannot vote – but their choice for president, marked on the same ballot, carries no weight.Guam’s is a straw poll: a non-binding four-yearly exercise that serves merely as an early barometer for how the rest of the nation will vote.Guam residents are among the 4 million disenfranchised Americans living in US territories who can’t vote for president. And being left out of the election stings.“I am deeply unhappy that as a US citizen formerly residing on the mainland, I have to give up my voting rights for president simply by moving to another part of the US,” James Hofman, a corporate lawyer who moved to Guam from California in 2006, told The Guardian.Guam, “where America’s day begins” – as the island’s slogan goes – is 14 hours ahead of Washington, DC.“It might have some symbolic value, but until there is a direct nexus between our political will and some reciprocal action and engagement by DC it’s not very meaningful,” Hofman said of the straw poll. More

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      US election roundup: Trump and Biden swing through battleground states

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      The two US presidential candidates swung through northern battleground states on Friday amid signs that the coronavirus pandemic was once more threatening to overcome hospital capacity in several US regions.
      Donald Trump was due to hold a succession of airport rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while Joe Biden was scheduled to have drive-in rallies in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
      The trip to Minnesota marked a rare defensive move for the Democratic challenger, who held a low double-digit lead in new polls published with four days left of the election campaign. Hillary Clinton narrowly held Minnesota in 2016 and the latest polls show Biden with a five-point margin.
      But he told reporters: “I don’t take anything for granted. We’re going to work for every single vote up until the last minute.”
      The president insisted the state was vulnerable.
      “I think it’s going to flip for the first time since 1972,” he said, claiming he had stopped rioting there following the police killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.
      Before setting out from Washington on Friday morning, Trump railed against the supreme court for ruling to allow election officials in North Carolina to accept votes received by 12 November as long as they are postmarked by 3 November.
      “This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period,” Trump said on Twitter.
      He has been similarly critical of a parallel supreme court decision this week to allow Pennsylvania to extend its count. His new appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not take part in the decisions as, according to the court, she had not had time to review the arguments.
      Behind in the polls, the Republicans have put significant effort in campaign endgame focusing on procedural and legal attempts to suppress the turnout or the vote count. Trump has said he wants a result on 3 November, but by law states have until 8 December to finalise their returns. More