Independent:
At a campaign event on Friday, Joe Biden gave his reaction to The Atlantic article that claims president Donald Trump referred to dead American service members as “losers” and “suckers”.
“If what is written in The Atlantic is true, it is disgusting. It affirms what most of us believe to be true, that Donald Trump is not fit to be the commander-in-chief,” the former vice president and Democratic candidate said.
The story has, as they say, legs.
Daily Beast:
Trump’s Defenders: He Doesn’t Hate the Troops, He Just ‘Sounds Like an Asshole’
In The Daily Beast’s interviews with 11 senior administration officials, Trump aides, Republican operatives, and former and current friends of the president, several of them mounted a curious defense of Trump. Yes, they admitted, the commander in chief at times makes callous, tone-deaf comments about American military personnel behind closed doors. But it’s because he hates the wars they’re forced to fight, not the service members themselves.
Et tu, Fox News?
Amy Walter/Cook Report:
With Two Months To Go, a Steady Presidential Race
This week, a slew of new, high-quality polls out this week confirmed their off-record observations: Biden continues to hold a steady lead over President Trump.
Post-convention national polls from Quinnipiac, Suffolk/USA Today, CNN and Selzer & Company show Biden ahead of Trump by 7-10 points. The FiveThirtyEight model, which incorporates a larger universe of polls, puts Biden's lead at 7.4 percent. That's not much different from Biden's pre-convention lead in early August of 8.3 percent.
Battleground state polling from Monmouth, Quinnipiac and Fox News find Trump trailing. More importantly, these polls show the president stuck in the low-to-mid 40 percent range.
As I've written for a while now, the margin between Biden and Trump is less instructive than the vote share that Trump is getting. For example, a Monmouth poll out this week found Biden's lead over Trump in Pennsylvania had narrowed from seven points in July (51-44 percent) to four points (49 to 45 percent.) A poll out from Quinnipiac this week showed Biden leading Trump by a more robust eight-point margin (52-44 percent) in the Keystone State. While the margins may be different, or have changed, one thing has remained constant: Trump has not been able to improve his share of the vote. He remains stuck at 44/45 percent of the vote. Pennsylvania is one of six states that Trump carried with less than 50 percent of the vote back in 2016. The fact that Trump continues to poll in the mid-40's suggests that his 48 percent showing here in 2016 is his ceiling. That was enough to win the state when third party candidates combined for four points. This year, he can't count on third-party candidates siphoning away that vote.
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters
If a pandemic that has killed nearly two hundred thousand Americans can’t significantly hurt Trump’s support, can anything?
It’s tempting not to pay attention to any of this, given the stubborn immutability of Americans’ attitudes about the election. But the paradox of our politics right now is that just because the race seems immovable does not mean that nothing can move it. In 2016, Clinton entered into September with essentially the same lead over Trump which Biden has now. But she did not leave the month with that lead intact. By mid-September, the Quinnipiac poll showed her lead cut in half, to just five points. (And, of course, the national surveys did not reveal the true state of Clinton’s weakness in the battleground states that ended up deciding the race’s outcome in the Electoral College.) Biden today is a bad debate, a campaign stumble or two, and an October surprise away from a 2016 repeat. Which is why the small ups and downs of the race may, in fact, matter—the slight shifts that do not register in the national aggregate but mean everything in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Florida. But neither is Biden doomed to Clinton’s fate. It may be that we are stuck in an endless loop of replaying the events of 2016 so much that it has become almost impossible to look at the politics of 2020 for what they are: an increasingly uphill battle for an embattled incumbent at a time when the country is mired in crises for which a majority of Americans blame him. Biden may yet stumble, but isn’t it just as likely that the race moves as little in the next two months as it has in the past two? There are no examples in our recent history of an incumbent President down this far in the polls who has still managed to win. If Trump is at the same place on November 3rd that he is today, he would lose in a landslide as unprecedented in modern times as the Presidency that preceded it.
The possibility of a Trump win is real. But so is a Biden landslide, and this is one of the few articles that says so.
The September/October surprise is coronavirus. Same surprise as the last six months.
Kathy Kiely/USA Today:
The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason
Trump wants to pull funding from Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for American troops that began in the Civil War and has been serving our soldiers.
Today Stars and Stripes is printed at sites around the world and delivered daily to troops — even those on the front lines, where the internet is spotty or inaccessible. As the “local paper” for the military, it provides intensive and critical coverage of issues that are important to members of the nation’s armed services and “cuts through political and military brass BS talking points,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine veteran, told Military.com.
It’s also arguably one of the most powerful weapons our soldiers have carried into battle with them. As a publication that’s underwritten by the military but not answerable to the brass, Stars and Stripes embodies that most American of values: the right to speak truth to power.
Seems clear to me that trump wants to shut anything down that he can’t control.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The latest polling suggests Trump’s ugliest campaign strategy may be imploding
As a new wave of unrest breaks out, some commentators have cracked open their well-worn pundit handbooks and recited a trusty old trope: Violence simply must help the “law and order” candidate. It cannot be any other way, because the handbook says so: Violence must beget backlash — a craving for the candidate vowing “strength.”
But what if a public backlash is brewing against what President Trump is doing? What if many voters see Trump’s exploitation of the situation as part of the problem, and are recoiling from that? If so, this could challenge the conventional pundit playbook, and prompt a revisiting of how cycles of racial nationalism and attempts at reconciliation play out in our politics.
New polling suggests this possibility. A CNN poll finds that 58 percent of Americans say Trump’s response to the protests has been “more harmful,” while only 33 percent say it’s “more helpful.”
Marc Caputo/Politico:
Biden lags among Florida Hispanic voters
A new poll finds the Democratic nominee is running behind Hillary Clinton’s pace in the critical swing state.
The good news for Biden is that, while he probably won’t match Clinton’s numbers, he’s on pace to exceed former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson’s margins with Hispanic voters in the 2018 race he lost narrowly, Odio said. And if Biden continues to get outsized backing from Black voters and keeps pulling more than 40 percent support from non-Hispanic white voters — who are still a supermajority in Florida — he’s in a good spot to win the battleground and end Trump’s hopes of reelection.
Recent polls of Florida’s overall electorate show Biden with a slight lead over Trump, within the margin of error in most polls, making it essentially a tied race here.
Good article, read beyond the headline. Room for Biden to grow, and FL is always tied. But win FL and Trump’s chances of reelection plummet.
Laurie Garrett/Foreign Policy:
Trump’s Vaccine Can’t Be Trusted
If a vaccine comes out before the election, there are very good reasons not to take it.
State and territorial governors across America have received a letter dated Aug. 27 from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Robert Redfield, instructing them to grant facilities and licensing to a private contractor, McKesson Co., for mass immunizations. “CDC urgently requests your assistance in expediting applications for these distribution facilities,” Redfield wrote, “and, if necessary, asks that you consider waiving requirements that would prevent these facilities from becoming fully operational by November 1, 2020.”
With that mass vaccination date less than 58 days away—and, surely not coincidentally, two days before the national elections—states must scramble to submit their immunization scheme to the CDC for approval by Oct. 1. This must cover everything from logistics and personnel to public education and recruitment. The pace required here is astounding, dramatically more rapid than any prior drug or vaccine rollout in history. Though officials insist no corners are being cut, the timetable is simply too short for full safety analysis of any vaccine.
It is hard to comprehend the decision as anything but an election maneuver. In his speech to the Republican National Convention last month, President Donald Trump vowed, “We are delivering lifesaving therapies, and will produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner! We will defeat the virus, end the pandemic, and emerge stronger than ever before.”