A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come. She was sworn in almost immediately after at a ceremony at the White House.
Inside a Capitol mostly emptied by the resurgent coronavirus pandemic and an election looming in just eight days, Republicans overcame unanimous opposition by Democrats to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman ever to sit on its bench. In a 52-to-48 vote, all but one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who herself is battling for re-election, supported Judge Barrett, a 48-year-old appeals court judge and protégée of former Justice Antonin Scalia.
It was the first time in 151 years that a justice was confirmed without a single vote from the minority party, a sign of how bitter Washington’s decades-old war over judicial nominations has become. The vote concluded a brazen drive by Republicans, who moved with remarkable speed to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg six weeks before the election. They shredded their own past pronouncements and bypassed rules in the process, even as they stared down the potential loss of the White House and the Senate.
Democrats called it a hypocritical power grab by Republicans, who they said should have waited for voters to have their say on Election Day — the stance Republicans had taken four years ago when they declined even to hold hearings for one of former President Barack Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Democrats warned of a disastrous precedent that would draw retaliation if they win power, and in a last-ditch act of protest they unsuccessfully tried to force the Senate to adjourn.
Republicans said it was their right as the majority party to press ahead, and exulted in their victory.
With Justice Barrett’s elevation in place of Justice Ginsburg, a liberal icon, the court is expected to tilt decisively to the right. It is gaining a conservative who could sway cases in every area of American life, including abortion rights, gay rights, business regulation and the environment.
Wasting no time, Mr. Trump hosted an unusual nighttime swearing-in ceremony for Judge Barrett on the White House lawn, a bookend to the event only a month ago when he announced her nomination at a crowded and largely maskless gathering that later turned out to be a coronavirus super-spreader event.
In front of a crowd that included more than a dozen of the Republican senators who had voted for her confirmation, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath to Justice Barrett, who chose him for the occasion.
Her impact could be felt right away. There are major election disputes awaiting immediate action by the Supreme Court from the battleground states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both concern the date by which absentee ballots may be accepted.
Justice Barrett will quickly confront a docket studded with major cases on Mr. Trump’s programs and policies, not to mention a potential challenge to the election results that the president had cited as a reason he needed a full complement of justices before Nov. 3. Coming up quickly are challenges related to the Affordable Care Act, signature Trump administration immigration plans, the rights of same-sex couples and the census. The court is also slated to act soon on a last-ditch attempt from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers to block the release of his financial records to a grand jury in Manhattan.
The Supreme Court refused on Monday to revive a trial court ruling that would have extended Wisconsin’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the election. The 5-to-3 decision demonstrated a stark divide among the justices, and was considered a victory for Republicans in a crucial swing state, which polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing in after winning it by about 23,000 votes in 2016.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin immediately announced an effort to alert voters that absentee ballots have to be received by 8 p.m. on Nov. 3. “We’re dialing up a huge voter education campaign,” Ben Wikler, the state party chairman, said on Twitter. The U.S. Postal Service has recommended that voters mail their ballots by Oct. 27 to ensure that they are counted.
As is typical, the court’s brief, unsigned order gave no reasons for its decision. But several justices filed concurring and dissenting opinions that spanned 35 pages and revealed a stark divide in their understanding of the role of the courts in protecting the right to vote during a pandemic.
The ruling was also the latest in a flurry of election-year decisions by the court that have mostly upheld voting restrictions, and the Trump campaign and its Republican allies are seeking similar restrictions on ballot deadlines in other states. Cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania are pending before the court, the latter a second attempt after a 4-to-4 deadlock last week. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Monday night, could cast the decisive vote in that case.
In Monday’s opinions, divisions over voting rights that had been hinted at in some of the previous rulings came more clearly into the open.
In one concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, wrote that federal trial judges should not alter state voting rules when an election is looming. “Elections must end sometime, a single deadline supplies clear notice, and requiring ballots be in by Election Day puts all voters on the same footing,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
“No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges,” he wrote. “But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.”
As officials in Pennsylvania reported at least 2,492 new coronavirus cases on Monday, the most it has seen in a single day, both President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned in the state, which is key to both of their hopes for winning the presidential election.
At his first of three rallies Mr. Trump ripped into Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, in demeaning and personal terms, saying, “She will not be the first woman president — you can’t let that happen” while mocking the way she laughed during her “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday.
During a high-decibel, scattershot speech in Allentown that lasted well over an hour, Mr. Trump repeatedly targeted Ms. Harris — who is running for vice president, not president — in a heckling performance that mirrored his attacks on Hillary Clinton and other female foils over the years.
The president went on to offer caustic negative appraisals of other prominent women he said had treated him badly — the CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Moments later, he trumpeted his appeal to “suburban women,” despite polls showing him trailing Mr. Biden among suburban women in battleground states by more than 20 percentage points.
“Did anybody see ‘60 Minutes’ last night? Did anybody see it?” said Mr. Trump, who stormed out of his own interview with Ms. Stahl, accusing her of asking tough questions while her program lobbed softballs to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris.
“It was a total joke of a show,” he added. “Did you see his performance on that show? The only thing almost as bad was Kamala with the laugh, oh, that’s so funny. She kept laughing. I said, ‘Is there something wrong with her, too?’”
Mr. Trump held three rallies in Pennsylvania, and Mr. Biden made a single stop at a voter center in Chester, just over the border from Delaware. He and Vice President Mike Pence were both holding events on the campaign trail, despite the fact that Mr. Trump had the coronavirus earlier this month and there is currently an outbreak in the vice president’s office. At an afternoon rally in Lititz, Pa., the president mocked Mr. Biden for his sparse travel schedule, saying that if he loses, “he should be ashamed of himself because he didn’t work.”
He continued that line of attack on Mr. Biden in Martinsburg. “He said he doesn’t do these kinds of rallies because of Covid,” Mr. Trump told a large crowd gathered at an airport hangar, after throwing red caps into the audience. “No, he doesn’t do them because nobody shows up.”
As the president held the rallies, officials in Pennsylvania reported the new single-day record for virus cases.
Mr. Trump, who faces a widening gender gap, nonetheless defended his standing among female voters — in part, by making a racist appeal based on his opposition to an Obama-era program intended to integrate segregated suburbs.
“I think I’m doing great with suburban women. I am saving the suburbs! I am saving the suburbs. How can I do badly?” he said to wild applause from the crowd arranged on risers outside an Allentown factory, many of them not wearing masks.
“Here is what I know about suburban women,” he added. “First of all, they are great. Love our country. They want to do things. They want to leave their house alone. They don’t want the five-story project next to them or could be higher. They want to leave their house alone. They want security. OK?”
After the cheering died away, Mr. Trump asked the audience, “Am I that bad? Am I that bad?” — to shouts of “No!”
Mr. Trump also repeated falsehoods about the ballot-counting process in Pennsylvania and expressed solidarity with groups of supporters who have been showing up at polling sites to videotape people attempting to vote, a practice the state’s attorney general has called voter intimidation.
“We’re watching you very closely, Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will travel to Iowa this week, he announced on Monday, a sign of confidence that suggests his campaign is significantly expanding its electoral map with just eight days left in the presidential race.
“I’m going to be going to Iowa, be going to Wisconsin, I’m going to Georgia, I’m going to Florida and maybe other places as well,” Mr. Biden said during a stop at a voter center in Chester, Pa.
And in a remarkably bold pronouncement for a Democratic presidential candidate, Mr. Biden declared that he would win Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, three critical battleground states that might be his key to victory. He also said he thought he had a “fighting chance” in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa, states that were once thought to be a reach for Democrats but that recent polls indicate are now up for grabs.
“I am not overconfident about anything,” Mr. Biden said. “I just want to make sure we can earn every vote possible.”
“That blue wall has to be re-established,” he added, referring to the Northern battleground states, which are traditionally Democratic.
Mr. Biden’s call to resurrect the “blue wall,” which President Trump knocked down in 2016, and his announcement of an intense final push that includes visits to Iowa and Georgia, both states that Mr. Trump won handily, suggest that the Biden campaign feels it is in a position of strength heading into the final stretch.
It also comes as some Democrats have privately expressed concern about Mr. Biden’s relatively light schedule during the coronavirus pandemic even as he is leading in polls. He traveled to Pennsylvania on Saturday, but his only in-person appearance on Sunday was going to church near his home in Delaware. (He also made a brief appearance during a virtual concert held by his campaign.)
Trying to stave off any criticism about his travel, Mr. Biden on Monday offered an explanation for his careful approach to campaigning during the pandemic.
“The big difference between us and the reason why it looks like we’re not traveling — we’re not putting on superspreaders,” he said.
It is not unheard-of for campaigns to make late forays into long-shot states, sometimes to force their opponents to spend more resources there and sometimes to help down-ballot Senate or House candidates. But polling has suggested that Mr. Biden is competitive in both Georgia and Iowa, where the Democratic Senate candidate, Theresa Greenfield, is also in a tight race. An average of current polls shows Mr. Biden with a narrow edge of three percentage points over Mr. Trump in Iowa, according to The Upshot’s calculator, and roughly tied with the president in Georgia.
President Trump will hold his election night party at his hotel in Washington, a senior Republican official with knowledge of the plans confirmed Monday night, setting up a potential standoff with the city’s Democratic mayor over the district’s limits on gatherings.
The White House has largely ignored those limits during the coronavirus pandemic, most notably in August when Mr. Trump hosted more than a thousand supporters on the White House lawn for the speech in which he accepted the Republican nomination for president.
At another event on Sept. 26, Mr. Trump introduced his Supreme Court nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in front of a crowd of several hundred people in the Rose Garden. The president and the first lady are among at least 11 people who have tested positive since attending the ceremony, which the health authorities later called a “superspreader event.”
The District of Columbia has little say over events on the White House grounds, but the campaign’s selection of the Trump International Hotel as the venue for the president’s election night festivities could be different.
Gatherings are capped at 50 people in Washington under the city’s emergency orders. At a news conference on Monday outlining the city’s plans for dealing with a second wave of virus cases, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said she had become aware of the plans for the election night gathering, and suggested that the city could take action against the hotel.
“I heard about something this morning,” Ms. Bowser said. “We will be in touch with our licensee, which is the hotel.”
A Trump campaign spokesman and the hotel did not respond to requests for comment on Monday night.
The president and the mayor have clashed on a number of fronts this year, from the White House’s lack of cooperation with contact tracing efforts after the earlier outbreak of the virus in the West Wing to the federal government’s use of National Guard units in June to disperse protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
The Trump hotel, a destination for lobbyists, foreign politicians, religious groups and Fox News personalities, has been the source of multiple disputes during Mr. Trump’s first term, including complaints that the president was blurring the lines between his businesses and his office. It is a few blocks from the White House in a federally owned building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Trump organization signed a 60-year lease to operate it in 2013.
Seething over the rapid confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court by the Senate’s Republican majority only eight days before the November election, Democrats immediately vowed on Monday night that there would be reprisals at the ballot box and through their own party’s efforts to remake the court.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wasted no time in calling on Democrats to expand the court if they win the presidency and take control of the Senate, an idea that the Democratic presidential candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has so far refused to co-sign; Mr. Biden has said instead that he would set up a bipartisan commission to look at ways to overhaul the court.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was more direct. “Expand the court,” she declared on Twitter less than 10 minutes after the mostly party-line vote in the Senate.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the 48 Democrats and independents — and one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine — who voted against Justice Barrett’s nomination, excoriated her Republican colleagues in a fund-raising email to her supporters that was sent minutes after the vote.
“They stole another Supreme Court seat just eight days before the end of the election, after tens of millions of Americans had already cast their ballots, and just 15 days before the Supreme Court will hear a case that could overturn the Affordable Care Act,” Ms. Warren wrote.
Ms. Warren asked her supporters to contribute donations so that Democrats could flip the Senate. Republicans currently hold 53 seats, but several members of their caucus — including Ms. Collins — are in tight races to hold their seats.
“The reason the Republicans were willing to break every rule to jam through an illegitimate nomination eight days before the election is that they have realized a truth that shakes them down to their core: The American people are not on their side,” Ms. Warren said.
The previous Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, urged her Twitter followers on Monday night to use Justice Barrett’s confirmation as a call to action.
“Senate Republicans just pushed through a Supreme Court justice who will help them take away Americans’ health care in the middle of a pandemic,” Mrs. Clinton wrote on Twitter. “For them, this is victory. Vote them out.”
Her exhortation came moments after the Republican caucus members of the House Judiciary Committee had goaded Mrs. Clinton over Justice Barrett’s confirmation, which came on Mrs. Clinton’s 73rd birthday.
“Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed,” the caucus wrote on Twitter. “Happy Birthday, @HillaryClinton!”
In a fund-raising email to supporters on Monday night, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who succeeded Mrs. Clinton in the Senate, wrote that Republicans had “openly and unapologetically defied the will of the American people.”
“I am frustrated, and frankly, very angry,” Ms. Gillibrand wrote.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Monday, will almost immediately confront a host of issues concerning the election and the policies of President Trump, who placed her on the court. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions.
When can she start?
Justices can begin work as soon as they are sworn in, meaning she could be at work on Tuesday. Under the court’s usual practices, she cannot participate in cases that have already been argued. Should the court deadlock in some of those cases, though, the court can set them down for re-argument before the full court.
Must she recuse herself from cases involving President Trump?
The Supreme Court allows justices to decide whether to disqualify themselves. In the past, justices have not hesitated to sit on cases involving the presidents who appointed them.
Are there election disputes awaiting decisions?
Yes. The court will soon act on cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania concerning whether deadlines for receiving mailed ballots may be extended. On Monday it ruled on a similar case in Wisconsin, rejecting by 5 to 3 a request by civil rights groups and Democrats to extend the deadline.
When is she likely to hear her first arguments?
Next Monday, when the court returns to the virtual bench for a two-week sitting to hear arguments by telephone.
In the coming months, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the fate of the Affordable Care Act, on two major Trump administration immigration policies, on whether Mr. Trump can exclude undocumented immigrants from the reapportionment of congressional seats and on whether religious groups must comply with government policies barring discrimination against same-sex couples.
Political campaigns rushed to submit their digital advertisements to Facebook before the end of the day Monday, ahead of a rule imposed by the social media company that bans new political ads in the week before Election Day.
The range of campaigns covered by the rule, which goes into effect at midnight on Monday, reaches beyond just candidates and their parties. In fact, some of the biggest spenders in key battleground states may be surprising, according to new research published by Tech for Campaigns, a technology nonprofit that works with left-leaning campaigns.
In a blog post analyzing the top 20 digital Facebook ad spenders, excluding presidential and federal candidates, as well as super PACs, the group found that relatively unknown organizations like Catholic Vote, a conservative religious advocacy group; Numbers U.S.A., which pushes for tighter immigration restrictions; and Acronym, which backs progressive causes, were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to sway voters ahead of Election Day.
In Michigan, Numbers U.S.A. has spent $186,000 on Facebook ads over the last four weeks urging Congress to “pause immigration.” Another group, led by the former assistant manager to the Trump campaign, David Bossie, has spent $175,000 in the state on ads that support the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — a campaign that ended in victory for Mr. Trump and Republicans on Monday — and down-ballot Republican candidates.
In Pennsylvania, The Keystone, an organization that appears to be a local news outlet but which produces partisan content financed by Acronym, has spent half a million dollars on Facebook ads supporting various Democratic candidates. Another organization called the Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a PAC backed by right-wing donors including Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, has spent $103,000 on Facebook ads against state and local Democratic candidates in the state.
BlackPAC, which is devoted to registering and mobilizing Black voters, has spent $200,000 on ads in Florida over the last month, many of them advising people on how to vote by mail. And Catholic Vote, which seeks to elect candidates who support Catholic teachings, has spent $42,000 in the state, much of it advertising against the Biden campaign’s stance on abortion.
Jessica Alter, a co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, said the organizations were “a microcosm of how money flows to issues and states — where everything from voting rights to redistricting will be decided.”
When Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat running for re-election in the conservative-leaning suburbs of Richmond, Va., arrived to debate her Republican opponent one recent evening, she received a heroine’s welcome from cheering supporters lining the street, holding balloons and handmade signs.
There was no such warm reception for Nick Freitas, the state delegate running to oust her, recalled Carol Catron, 52, who was among those shouting “We love Abigail!” as Mr. Freitas walked in without making eye contact.
The scene in a Republican-leaning district that voted heavily for President Trump in 2016 underscored how solidly Ms. Spanberger — a freshman once thought to have an uphill climb to re-election — has cemented her following and has the advantage with Election Day approaching.
Across the country, Democrats like Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer who has cultivated a brand as a moderate unafraid to criticize her own party, have helped position Democrats to maintain control of the House and build their majority.
She and dozens of other first-term Democrats whose victories in Trump-friendly districts in 2018 handed the party control of the House — and who were seen as the most vulnerable to defeat this year — are leading their Republican challengers in polling and fund-raising headed into the election’s final week.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi likes to call this group of about 40 lawmakers — mostly young, many women, and predominantly moderates — her “majority makers.” They have largely managed to buck intense Republican attempts to brand them as Ms. Pelosi’s minions, socialists or out-of-touch coastal elites.
“We knew we had a lot of work to do when we got elected, and we got to work,” said Representative Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois and a registered nurse.
Former President Barack Obama will continue his efforts to increase Black voter turnout ahead of the election, including an interview with the basketball star LeBron James set to be published this week.
Mr. Obama joined Mr. James for the interview as a part of the athlete’s More Than A Vote initiative, according to sources familiar with the event. More Than A Vote, the collective of athletes led by Mr. James, has focused its political efforts on issues like limiting misinformation among Black voters and increasing poll workers in Black communities.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. James said he cared more about seeing Black turnout increase than President Trump’s removal.
“You can see it every time. Who didn’t vote? What counties didn’t vote? What communities didn’t vote? And a lot of that has had to do with our Black people,” Mr. James said. “So, hopefully, we can get them out and educated and let them understand how important this moment is.”
Mr. Obama’s efforts to increase turnout come as some Democrats worry that Black voters, and specifically Black men, could back Mr. Trump in greater numbers in this year’s election. National polling shows Mr. Biden with a healthy lead over Mr. Trump heading into the campaign’s final days. However, the same polling shows Mr. Biden with tepid numbers for a Democrat among Black voters, traditionally one of the party’s most loyal constituencies.
In recent stops for Mr. Biden’s campaign, Mr. Obama, the nation’s first Black president, implored Black voters to support his former vice president. Black voter turnout reached record highs in 2012, when Mr. Obama won re-election, but fell in key swing states for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In addition to his interview with Mr. James, Mr. Obama also has spoken with Black men in Philadelphia and recorded a video message for the Shade Room, a media company whose social media and pop culture sites are popular with young Black Americans.
In Philadelphia this week, Mr. Obama spoke directly to Black men.
“What I’ve consistently tried to communicate this year, particularly when I’m talking to young brothers, who may be cynical of what can happen, is to acknowledge to them that government and voting alone is not going to change everything,” Mr. Obama said. “But we did make things better.”
President Trump walked out of his interview last week with the long-running CBS program “60 Minutes” and publicly accused its anchor Lesley Stahl of “bias, hatred and rudeness.”
If Mr. Trump had hoped to dissuade viewers from watching the contentious interview — in which the president balked as Ms. Stahl questioned him about the coronavirus, the economy and health care and told her, “That’s no way to talk” — his tactics proved ill advised.
Nearly 17 million people watched Sunday’s “60 Minutes” broadcast, the show’s biggest audience since it secured an interview with the adult film actress (and alleged Trump paramour) Stormy Daniels in 2018, according to preliminary data from Nielsen.
“60 Minutes” has the broadest reach of any TV news program, a category whose audience skews older, meaning Mr. Trump’s less-than-optimal interview was seen by millions of Americans above the age of 50, who are likely to be engaged in the political process — and a group Mr. Trump has been struggling with, according to opinion polls.
This Sunday’s episode, which featured interviews with Mr. Trump, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and their running mates, drew more viewers than Game 5 of the World Series and an evening N.F.L. game on NBC.
In fact, save for sporting events and the political conventions and debates, Sunday’s “60 Minutes” episode notched the biggest television audience of the year for any network since the Academy Awards in February, CBS officials said.
The total audience for Mr. Trump’s interview was likely even higher, between online streaming views and additional viewing data that Nielsen is compiling and will release on Tuesday.
The New York Post on Monday became the largest of a narrow set of newspapers to endorse President Trump for re-election, writing in an editorial that, despite being “vainglorious,” Mr. Trump had presided over an economic revival before the coronavirus pandemic and had “defended pride in American values.”
While newspaper endorsements have been few and far between for Mr. Trump, who has relished his frequent jousts with the news media, a number of publications have broken with tradition of not making endorsements or backing Republicans to support Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.
For the first time in more than 100 years, one of the largest newspapers in New Hampshire, where Mr. Trump campaigned on Sunday, endorsed a Democrat for president. The Union Leader of Manchester wrote that while “Mr. Biden is not perfect,” it could not bring itself to back Mr. Trump, whom the newspaper wrote “is not always 100 percent wrong, but he is 100 percent wrong for America.”
Last week, USA Today’s editorial board made its first presidential endorsement in its 38-year history, calling for readers to vote for Mr. Biden and “reject” Mr. Trump. And earlier this month, The New England Journal of Medicine, which has been staunchly nonpartisan throughout its 208-year history, repudiated the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, though it did not explicitly endorse Mr. Biden. Scientific American, however, did endorse Mr. Biden, in what it said was its first presidential endorsement in its 175-year history.
The Post, a favored outlet for Mr. Trump since his days as a New York developer, is owned by the media baron Rupert Murdoch. It lauded the president for lowering corporate taxes and for his trade war with China, which it wrote had reduced the unemployment rate and raised wages.
Its endorsement played down Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic and contended that it was not clear whether Mr. Biden would do anything different, other than impose more lockdowns.
“We can put annus horribilis, 2020, behind us and make America great again, again,” The Post wrote.
Mr. Trump touted The Post’s endorsement at a rally later on Monday in Martinsburg, Pa., praising the paper “because they’re the only one with the courage to do it.”
Mr. Trump’s other newspaper endorsements include The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is owned by the casino mogul and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson; The Gazette in Colorado Springs; and The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.
Each of those endorsements, though, tempered support of Mr. Trump with pointed criticism of his personal conduct and cantankerous style, with The Spokesman-Review calling Mr. Trump a “bully and a bigot.”
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been spearheading the Trump campaign’s outreach to Black voters for over a year, arguing that even if President Trump can increase his support among them by as little as two percentage points, it could sway the election.
On Monday, in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” however, he made comments seeming to question whether Black Americans “want to be successful,” a remark that played into a racist stereotype and was quickly seized on by the Democratic National Committee.
“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Mr. Kushner said. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
The D.N.C. responded to Mr. Kushner’s remarks with a lengthy statement. “According to the Trump administration, when African Americans find fault in policies that have led to historic unemployment for Black families, an explosion of racial inequities and wealth gaps, and an uncontained global pandemic that has taken the lives of over 45,000 Black Americans, it means that we just don’t want to be successful badly enough,” it said.
“This dismissive approach to the issues that Black voters care about is indicative of Trump’s callousness and disregard for the lives of Black people.”
Mr. Kushner’s comments were widely denounced on social media. “We will remember his casual racism,” Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, claimed that Mr. Kushner’s remarks had been taken out of context.
Mr. Kushner’s comment came after a discussion of racial unrest, which he referred to as “the George Floyd situation,” a reference to the Black man who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis this summer.
Mr. Kushner accused many protesters of virtue signaling. “They’d go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey, or write something on a basketball court,” he said. “And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”
He claimed what was more important was policies that have helped Black Americans, like criminal justice reform and the funding Mr. Trump has supported for historically Black colleges and universities. Those have been two of the administration’s main talking points in its outreach to Black voters, even as the president has made it clear in recent months that he believes the country’s real racism problem is bias against white Americans.
Mr. Kushner said he has been hearing from Trump campaign state directors across the country about a “groundswell of support in the Black community, because they’re realizing that all of the different bad things that the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true.”
A recent CBS News poll found that 85 percent of registered Black voters felt that as president, Mr. Trump “favors white people.” About 79 percent of those voters said he “worked against” Black people.
The news over the weekend that another coronavirus outbreak had struck the White House, infecting Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and four other top aides, further underscored the Trump administration’s cavalier approach to the worst health crisis in a century.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning, essentially offering a verbal shrug in response to any effort to prevent an outbreak in the top echelon of the nation’s leaders. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations, because it is a contagious virus — just like the flu.”
The in-house outbreak, playing against the national backdrop of the biggest three-day total of new infections in the entire course of the pandemic, is also making it harder for the president to change the subject as he dashes through swing states in a bid to mount a come-from-behind victory.
“Covid, Covid. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Mr. Trump had groused at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, hours before the revelation of the infections on his running mate’s staff. He made up a scenario: “A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’”
Mr. Trump made no reference to the new cases during campaign rallies in New Hampshire and Maine on Sunday.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday that the statement by Mr. Meadows was “an acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
“It’s sadly no surprise then that this virus continues to rage unchecked across the country and even in the White House itself,” said Mr. Biden, who has sought to make the administration’s handling of the coronavirus the centerpiece of his campaign.
Georgia, a Republican stronghold for nearly two decades, is growing fast and changing in profound ways that are giving Democrats big hopes for 2020.
With only a week left before the Nov. 3 election, polls show President Trump, who won Georgia by five points in 2016, locked in a virtual tie with his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who plans to visit the state on Tuesday.
At the same time, two well-funded Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, are running competitive races for the state’s two Senate seats. Representative Lucy McBath, a Democrat, is favored to win re-election to her suburban Atlanta House seat against Karen Handel, whom she beat in 2018. The suburban Atlanta House seat of a retiring Republican is expected to flip to the Democrats.
Some Democrats even dream of capturing the state House.
All this is happening in a diverse state whose new politics are defined by young voters, suburban women alienated by Mr. Trump, and minorities energized by the Democrat Stacey Abrams and her near-miss bid in 2018 to become the country’s first African-American woman governor.
Georgia Democrats — stung in the past by premature talk of a realignment of the state’s politics — are careful to temper their optimism. The Republican Party remains well-organized, popular and powerful here. Republicans hold every elected statewide office, control both chambers of the state Legislature, still command a majority among college-educated white voters, and maintain a dominance in rural counties.
Jason Carter, the grandson of President Jimmy Carter and a Democrat who was soundly defeated in the 2014 race for governor, joked, “Frankly, I think it would be impossible for Trump to win — and I haven’t been this confident since 2016,” when Hillary Clinton’s campaign dared to dream of a Georgia victory.
Yet there is a bipartisan consensus that the state is not exactly what it was, even just a few years ago. Its population surged from 7.9 million to 10.6 million people from 2000 to 2019, and its foreign-born population now exceeds 10 percent. While Republicans remain formidable in rural areas, an accurate portrait of 21st Century Georgia would have to include not only peach and peanut farms, but also Your DeKalb Farmers Market, a global culinary bazaar in the Atlanta suburbs staffed by workers from 40 countries that attracts both immigrants and native-born bourgeois bohemians.
Ad Watch
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign has returned to a familiar Democratic refrain in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign: promising to protect Social Security and accusing President Trump of undermining the program.
The Message
One of Mr. Biden’s Social Security ads is narrated by an older voter in a long-sleeved union shirt, identified as “Mike” from Wayne County, Mich. “Donald Trump — he’s talking about messing with my Social Security?” says Mike.
“Them guys think it’s monopoly money?” he asks defensively as video flashes of the president with some of his administration officials. “No, it’s our money. We worked for it. You don’t get to play with my financials.”
The ad is tailored to older voters who Mr. Biden has polled better with than past Democrats. “He understands what seniors are going through,” Mike says. “We need to get Biden in there to protect it.”
Fact Check
This particular Biden ad does not make specific claims about Mr. Trump’s plans for Social Security, but other Democratic ads have been more explicit, accusing Mr. Trump of supporting plans that would “wipe out” Social Security.
At issue is that Mr. Trump has expressed support for cutting the payroll tax, which funds Social Security. At the same time, Mr. Trump has said “we’re not going to touch Social Security” and promises to forgive deferred payroll taxes without impacting the program.
The ad also tries to reassure voters that Mr. Biden is going to protect their government benefits. His current plan calls for putting more resources behind Social Security, which would be paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy.
Where It’s Running
The ad — which the Biden campaign has spent nearly $3.2 million on in the last two weeks — is running nationally and in many of the top battlegrounds, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada. The top market for the ad is Phoenix, which is home to a large retiree population.
The Takeaway
In the closing stretch, many of Mr. Trump’s ads are accusing Mr. Biden of wanting to raise taxes, and many of Mr. Biden’s are focused on Social Security. These campaign tactics show the continued resilience and resonance of those two political standbys — even amid a pandemic.
New York City residents seeking to vote early encountered long lines at the polls for the third consecutive day on Monday, reigniting longstanding criticisms of the government agency that runs elections in the city, the Board of Elections.
In Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and elsewhere, voters reported having to stand for hours in rainy conditions. That was similar to the waits reported over the weekend, when more than 190,000 turned out at the start of the first presidential election with early voting in the state.
Officials decried the lines, with some saying that they amounted to voter suppression.
“There is no place in the United States of America where two-, three-, four-hour waits to vote is acceptable,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat. “If this was happening in a swing state, there would be national coverage. So I don’t want us to think that just because this is a blue state, this isn’t a problem. This is very clearly a problem.”
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, also both Democrats, echoed the concerns. Mr. Cuomo said the Board of Elections was doing a “terrible job” with early voting and added that he was open to redesigning the board; Mr. de Blasio said he would happily join that effort.
Both politicians have long criticized the board, but they and other officials have never seriously pushed to reform the system.
New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses, even the computer programmers — a structure enshrined in the state Constitution and meant to ensure fairness.
Under the rules, almost every job must be duplicated, with a Republican and Democrat each performing the same function.
In New York City, the elections board has been plagued by decades of dysfunction because staffers get their jobs through political connections, not credentials, and many are unqualified.
The board has made increasingly high-profile blunders, from long lines to illegal voter purges.
Already this year, it failed to mail out many absentee ballots until the day before the primary, disenfranchising voters, and it sent out erroneous general election ballot packages to many other residents, spreading confusion.
The 2020 finish line is still more than a week away, but Democrats in Wisconsin believe that President Trump’s unpopularity will linger well into 2022, making one of his most loyal defenders, Senator Ron Johnson, a prime target in the midterms.
On Monday, Tom Nelson, the Outagamie county executive and a former State Assembly majority leader, became the first Democrat to announce he would challenge Mr. Johnson, who has not yet said if he will seek re-election to a third term.
The senator, who opposes mask mandates, tested positive for the coronavirus last month and backs Mr. Trump’s plans to reopen schools and businesses quickly, even as the pandemic rages on.
Mr. Nelson said Mr. Johnson’s actions on the virus motivated him to run.
“We are the hottest of the hot spots in the country,” said Mr. Nelson, 44, in a video posted to his Twitter page on Monday. “We are doing all that we can at the local level.”
“There is just no help in sight, and people like Ron Johnson have made this worse,” he added.
In announcing this early, Mr. Nelson hopes to stand out from what is expected to be a crowded primary field that might include Alex Lasry, an executive with the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and Josh Kaul, the state attorney general.
Mr. Nelson’s candidacy was first reported by Politico.
Mr. Johnson had been a relatively unknown rank-and-file conservative before Mr. Trump was elected to office. Since then, he has been an aggressive defender of the president in his capacity as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, pursuing investigations into Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s family business dealings.
President Trump maintains a narrow edge in Texas, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll on Monday, as he faces a rebellion in the state’s once overwhelmingly Republican suburbs.
Mr. Trump leads Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Texas by 47 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, the survey found, which is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The survey of 802 likely voters was mostly conducted before the final presidential debate on Thursday.
In the Senate race, the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, holds a larger lead, 48-38, over the Democrat, M.J. Hegar.
New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in Texas
Trump
47%
Biden
43%
Other/Undecided
10%
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 802 likely voters from Oct. 20-25, 2020.
Polls have shown a competitive race in Texas all cycle, but the Biden campaign has made only limited efforts to contest the state.
The Republican grip on Texas has deteriorated rapidly during the Trump era, as a Democratic breakthrough in the suburbs has endangered more than one-third of the state’s Republican congressional delegation and Republican control of the state House.
In these districts, Republicans face a combination of rapid demographic change and previously unthinkable Democratic gains among white college-educated voters. Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden by just two points among white college graduates in these districts, even though they say they backed Mr. Trump by 24 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The survey suggested that Mr. Biden’s support among Hispanic voters, 57 percent to 34 percent, is weaker than Mrs. Clinton’s was four years ago. The finding broadly tracks with national surveys, which have shown Mr. Trump improving among Hispanic voters compared with his 2016 standing.
In 2018, Times/Siena surveys generally underestimated turnout by Hispanics and their support for Democrats in Texas. So far this cycle, polls have varied widely on Mr. Trump’s standing among the group in Texas, with a recent Quinnipiac survey showing Mr. Biden ahead by just eight points, 51-43, while a Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler Texas survey showed him ahead by a far wider margin, 67-20.
In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, right-leaning news sites with millions of readers have published dozens of false or misleading headlines and articles that effectively back unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and his allies that mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of the election.
The Washington Examiner, Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit and The Washington Times are among the sites that have posted articles with headlines giving weight to the conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data.
Major polls have shown Mr. Trump lagging behind the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an election that will have significantly more people than usual voting by mail because of the coronavirus. False claims about mail-in voting have been a staple of the president’s campaign. At last month’s debate, he claimed without evidence, “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”
In August, The New York Post published an article that relied on one anonymous source, identified as a Democratic operative, who claimed that he had engaged in voter fraud for decades. The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller, FoxNews.com and The Washington Examiner posted their own versions of the article. It was also promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric, the Trump campaign’s communications team, the “Fox & Friends” television program and Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, according to a recent Harvard University study.
The Harvard researchers described a “propaganda feedback loop” in right-wing media. The authors of the study, published this month through the school’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, reported that popular news outlets, rather than social media platforms, were the main drivers of a disinformation campaign meant to sow doubts about the integrity of the election.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump on all but two days in the last two months, according to a New York Times analysis of $1.8 billion donated by 7.6 million people since April.
The data reveals, for the first time, not only when Mr. Biden decisively overtook Mr. Trump in the money race — it happened the day Senator Kamala Harris joined the ticket — but also which corners of the country, geographically and demographically, powered his remarkable surge.
The findings paint a portrait of two candidates who are, in many ways, financing their campaigns from two different Americas.
It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does. Or that Mr. Trump’s financial base is in Texas, which it is. It is that across the country, down to the ZIP code level, some of the same cleavages that are driving the 2020 election — along class and education lines — are also fundamentally reshaping how the two parties pay for their campaigns.
Melania Trump, the first lady, is set to return to the campaign trail on Tuesday, headlining an event in Pennsylvania where she will be interviewed by Kellyanne Conway, the former White House official and 2016 Trump campaign manager.
The event, in Atglen, between Philadelphia and Lancaster, was being referred to internally by Trump allies as “the sequel,” a reference to Mrs. Trump’s solo visit to Pennyslvania in the final days of the 2016 presidential race. Four years ago, Mr. Trump won the battleground state by less than a percentage point.
Mrs. Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, had been set to make her first appearance after receiving a negative test last week, at a rally in Erie, Pa., with her husband. It would have been her first rally in over a year, since she accompanied her husband to the official “kick-off” event of his re-election campaign in Orlando, Fla., in June 2019.
But at the last minute, Mrs. Trump canceled her trip because of a lingering cough. She has since appeared at the final presidential debate last week, where she wore a face mask, and at a Halloween event for children at the White House, where she did not.
Ms. Conway also tested positive for the virus earlier this month, after attending the Rose Garden ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and has not been seen on the campaign trail since leaving her position at the White House in August.
Mrs. Trump is viewed as a compelling surrogate for her husband, but she has always been loath to give over too much of her schedule to the campaign. She has taken an even more cautious approach since the pandemic hit in March, refusing to attend fund-raising luncheons.
The head of a federal panel that advises the White House on compensation issues resigned on Monday to protest President Trump’s new executive order that could wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of federal workers.
Ronald P. Sanders, the chairman of the Federal Salary Council, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2017, said that the new executive order would replace “political expertise with political obeisance.”
The order, signed last week, gives Mr. Trump and his political appointees the power to hire and fire certain federal civil servants who now hold jobs that are supposed to be exempt from political influence.
“The Executive Order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process,” Mr. Sanders, who called himself a lifelong Republican, wrote in his resignation letter, dated today and sent to the White House. “I have concluded that as a matter of conscience, I can no longer serve him or his administration.”
The president’s executive order has already provoked protests by federal labor unions and some Democrats in Congress. If Mr. Trump is not re-elected, the next administration could repeal the measure.
Mr. Sanders wrote of civil servants, “The only ‘boss’ that they serve is the public,” adding, “No president should be able to remove career civil servants whose only sin is that they may speak such a truth to him.” The board Mr. Sanders resigned from is made up of experts in labor relations and representatives of federal labor unions.
A White House official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The White House, in a statement that accompanied the executive order, said the new employee classification was justified because under current rules “removing poor performers, even from these critical positions, is time-consuming and difficult.”
The Office of the U.S. Special Counsel has opened a second investigation into whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo violated federal laws by helping President Trump’s campaign in his official duties — including by speaking to the Republican National Convention while on a diplomatic trip to Jerusalem.
Representatives Eliot L. Engel and Nita Lowey, Democrats of New York, confirmed the investigation into Mr. Pompeo’s convention speech on Monday.
One week ago, the independent group American Oversight cited a special counsel investigator who confirmed a separate inquiry into Mr. Pompeo’s pledge to release any additional Hillary Clinton emails that might remain at the State Department, as Mr. Trump has demanded.
At issue in both cases is whether the country’s chief diplomat violated the Hatch Act, a law that bans political activity in the federal workplace. Investigating potential Hatch Act violations is one of the four primary responsibilities of the Office of the U.S. Special Counsel.
“As we get closer to both this year’s election and his own inevitable return to electoral politics, Mike Pompeo has grown even more brazen in misusing the State Department and the taxpayer dollars that fund it as vehicles for the administration’s, and his own, political ambitions,” Mr. Engel, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s chairman, and Ms. Lowey, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement on Monday.
They said the State Department has either withheld or delayed necessary documents the committees have demanded for its own investigations into whether Mr. Pompeo’s speeches to conservative audiences in Florida, Iowa and elsewhere amount to improper political activity.
Mr. Pompeo is widely believed to be courting support for his own political ambitions — including a potential presidential run in 2024 — as well as urging Americans to vote as he extols Trump administration policies.
For nearly a year, Democrats in Congress have accused Mr. Pompeo of using taxpayer-funded government aircraft for speeches in political bellwether states and hosting receptions at the State Department for potential donors and Republican influencers. In January, the Office of Special Counsel, reported that it found no evidence that Mr. Pompeo acted improperly while exploring a Senate run from Kansas last year.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
With about a week until Election Day, labeling opponents as radicals has become the closing message for Republicans in tight races around the country. While Democrats have focused on health care access and getting the coronavirus pandemic under control, most Republicans have settled on a message of grievance — that Democratic governance would bring socialism and left-wing extremism.
Like Democratic candidates for the Senate in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, Theresa Greenfield of Iowa has balked at progressive issues like single-payer health insurance, adding seats to the Supreme Court and defunding the police.
On a recent tour of Southeast Iowa, she talked about expanding job training programs and health care coverage through a public insurance option. She criticized Democrats for not prioritizing an infrastructure bill and vocational education.
She has rejected the Green New Deal, the expansive piece of climate legislation backed by two progressive lawmakers, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
But that has not stopped her opponent, the Republican incumbent Joni Ernst, from casting her as a secret socialist, or someone who will become one once in Washington.
When Ms. Ocasio-Cortez mentioned the Iowa race on Sunday in an interview with CNN, Ms. Ernst’s campaign immediately sought to weaponize the comment.
“Theresa Greenfield is a liberal who has the full support of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the author of the Green New Deal,” a spokesman for Ms. Ernst, Brendan Conley, said in a statement. “Theresa Greenfield supports extreme new environmental rules that would kill American jobs and hurt Iowa farmers, making clear that Greenfield is perfect for New York or California, but wrong for Iowa.”
The Republican strategy was also on display during a recent debate. At times, Ms. Ernst focused on her record, trying to project the strength of an incumbent front-runner. At other times, she accused Ms. Greenfield of calling police officers “racist” and supporting “Medicare for all,” which led to some pointed exchanges in which the candidates talked over each other.
“I don’t support Medicare for all, but I do support strengthening and enhancing the Affordable Care Act,” Ms. Greenfield said.
As the presidential campaign begins its final week, early voting is shattering records, and some experts are predicting the highest turnout in decades. But if history is any indication, a significant portion of Americans will not participate, a signal of distrust and disillusionment with the political system that spans the partisan divide.
Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. But since the 1960s, between a third and a half of eligible voters have stayed home during presidential elections, giving America one of the lowest rates of national-election participation in the developed world.
Since the early 1900s, the high point for presidential turnout was in 1960, when 64 percent of eligible adults voted, according to the United States Elections Project, which tracks voting data back to 1789. Most recently, the highest peak was in 2008, when 62 percent turned out.
An analysis of Census Bureau survey data from the 2016 election shows a deep class divide: Americans who did not vote were more likely to be poor or unemployed, less likely to have college degrees, and more likely to be single parents compared to people who voted.
Not voting has been a feature of the American political landscape for decades. But with razor-slim margins in a number of swing states in 2016, nonvoters have taken on an outsize importance. For instance, in Pennsylvania, more than 3.5 million eligible voters in the state did not cast ballots for president in the 2016 election, a number that dwarfed Mr. Trump’s 44,000-vote margin of victory.
Keyana Fedrick of East Stroudsburg, Pa., in the northeast part of the state, sat out the 2016 elections and plans to again this year. She said not voting is something that she and a friend have started to hide from people they know.
“We said we’re just going to lie, like, ‘Oh yeah, I voted,’” said Ms. Fedrick, 31, who works two jobs, at a hotel and a department store, and said she did not trust Democrats or Republicans. “I don’t feel like getting crucified for what I think.”
Mike Espy and Jaime Harrison, two of the five Black Senate candidates in the South this year, may belong to different political generations, but they both came up in a Democratic Party where African-American politicians didn’t talk directly about race in campaigns against white opponents.
But there was Mr. Harrison this month, speaking before more than 250 cars at a drive-in rally in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, explicitly urging a mix of white and Black supporters to right the wrongs of the state’s past.
“The very first state to secede from the union,” Mr. Harrison said to a cacophony of blaring horns, “because we will be the very first state in this great country of ours that has two African-American senators serving at the very same time — and you will make that happen.”
A day later, speaking to an equally diverse audience in northern Mississippi, Mr. Espy called his Republican opponent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, “an anachronism.”
“She is someone who believes in going back to the old days,” he said, lashing his Republican rival for hailing the Civil War-era South and refusing to take a stand in the debate over Mississippi’s state flag, which until this summer included the Confederate battle emblem. “We need a Mississippi that’s more inclusive, that’s more diverse, more welcoming.”
While it has been overshadowed by the presidential race, a political shift is underway in the South that could have a lasting impact well past this election. Democrats have nominated several Black Senate candidates in a region where they’ve often preferred to elevate moderate whites, these contenders are running competitively in conservative states, and they’re doing so by talking explicitly about race.
Mr. Harrison, a onetime lobbyist and state party chair; Mr. Espy, the former agriculture secretary; and the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church and a Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia, are each making Republicans nervous about seats that have not been competitive in decades. Black Democratic Senate candidates have also emerged in Tennessee, where Marquita Bradshaw is competing for an open seat, and Louisiana, where Mayor Adrian Perkins of Shreveport entered late in the race.
With two Black Republicans vying for seats in Michigan and Rhode Island, there are a record seven major Black candidates running for the Senate this year.
It’s a remarkable roster in a part of the country that has both the highest concentration of African-American voters and a history of hostility to Black candidates running statewide — a resistance so strong that national Democrats for decades treated Black recruits as an afterthought at best.
Early voting in this election has surpassed records in states across the country, including California, where more than 6.5 million ballots have already been returned.
The New York Times spoke with Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, about what voters should know in the homestretch, especially if they plan to vote in person. Here’s part of the conversation, which was lightly edited for clarity:
How are things going? What’s the biggest challenge on your mind right now?
Californians are voting in big numbers. We’re about 2.5 times where we were at this point in 2016, if that’s any indicator.
We’ve been planning and preparing for months. And if voter registration and early returns are any indication, it’s going to be a big turnout.
What’s the latest on the unauthorized “official” ballot boxes that Republicans placed in three counties, which you demanded they remove?
The unofficial boxes have been removed, but other elements of our requests for information have not been complied with. So the attorney general has issued subpoenas and we’re taking the matter to court.
Any thoughts for voters who are planning to vote in person?
Expect to see the signage for physical distancing, equipment being wiped down between voters, hand sanitizer everywhere. We want to keep in-person voting as safe, healthy and accessible as possible — for voters and election workers alike.
From some 250 miles above Earth, circling the planet at 17,500 miles an hour aboard the International Space Station, the American astronaut Kathleen Rubins cast her ballot in the election, joining millions of others across the country who have voted early.
“If we can do it from space, then I believe folks can do it from the ground, too,” she said in a video posted to NASA’s website.
An astronaut and marine biologist, Dr. Rubins, who goes by Kate, was the first person to sequence DNA in space during a 2016 mission. On her current mission, she is conducting experiments related to the cardiovascular system.
As it turns out, Dr. Rubins may have had an easier time voting from space than if she were back on Earth.
In New York, where early voting began on Saturday, tens of thousands of voters waited hours to cast ballots, with lines stretched for blocks outside polling sites. Similar scenes have been reported in other states.
With Election Day still eight days away, more than 60 million Americans have already voted, surpassing 2016’s early turnout record.
Astronauts have been voting from space since 1997, when Texas legislators set up a technical procedure that enabled them to cast ballots. Many astronauts opt to register in Texas, since they train at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Dr. Rubins skipped the queues, but had to take a few extra steps to vote from space. First, before her rocket launch, she signaled her intent to participate in the election by filling out a Federal Postcard Application, the same form completed by military members who are serving outside of the U.S., NASA said in a post on its website.
The next step, like most things at NASA, involved a trial run. The county clerk sent a test ballot to a team at the space center in Houston, where officials checked whether they could fill out the ballot and send it back.
After the test, the space center’s mission control center uplinked Dr. Rubins’s ballot. From space, she cast her ballot, which officials downlinked and delivered back to the county clerk’s office by email.
Dr. Rubins’s vote, cast last week, arrived well before the 7 p.m. Election Day deadline for astronauts.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s $2 trillion plan to fight global warming is the most ambitious climate policy proposed by a leading presidential candidate, a political lightning rod spotlighted on Thursday night when the Democratic nominee acknowledged during a debate that it would “transition” the country “from the oil industry.”
But no one knows better than Mr. Biden, the former vice president, that it almost surely will not be enacted, even if his party secures the White House and the Senate. Thirty-six years in the Senate and the searing experience of watching the Obama administration’s less ambitious climate plan die a decade ago have taught him the art of the possible.
Still, a President Biden could have real impact: solar panels and wind turbines spread across the country’s mountains and prairies, electric charging stations nearly as ubiquitous as gas stations and a gradual decrease in the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse pollution.
“The oil industry pollutes significantly,” Mr. Biden said at the final presidential debate, adding, “it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
Mr. Biden’s advisers insist that climate change is not just a political slogan. And on Capitol Hill, his team is already strategizing with Democratic leaders on how they can realistically turn at least some of those proposals into law.
If Mr. Biden wins the White House but Republicans hold Senate control, Mr. Biden’s loftiest climate pledges will certainly die.
In that scenario, “All Biden can try to do is cobble back together the Obama environmental agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian who focuses on presidents’ environmental legacies. That would include, he said, rejoining the international Paris accords — the agreement between nations to fight climate change, which President Trump is withdrawing from — and reinstating Obama-era climate regulations. And with a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, even that could be thwarted.
But even a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate would leave a President Biden with options. And this time around, Mr. Biden wants to do it differently, not with a stand-alone climate bill but by tucking climate measures into broader, popular legislation to insulate them from partisan attack.
If President Trump pulls off a come-from-behind victory on Nov. 3, it’s likely to run through Pennsylvania — one of the three states he won by less than one percentage point in 2016, and arguably the one that’s still within range for him.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, has built a polling lead in Pennsylvania that is now considerably stronger than Hillary Clinton’s was on the eve of the election four years ago. But the president’s weakness is driving the race more than Mr. Biden’s strength. Mr. Biden has only recently achieved a positive overall favorability rating among voters in Pennsylvania, according to various surveys.
High-quality polls of Pennsylvania conducted this month have put Mr. Biden up by anywhere from five to 13 points among likely voters. But they have also shown 5 percent to 10 percent of those voters declining to express support for either major nominee.
A Trump comeback will probably depend on his winning over a good share of those undecideds while driving down Mr. Biden’s support among demographics that have long since turned against the president — such as older voters and suburbanites — but that have not swung as heavily to the Democrat. It’s a possibility that Democrats and pollsters alike are unwilling to rule out, especially given the lingering shock from Mrs. Clinton’s loss in 2016.
That year, a late swing tilted the race in Mr. Trump’s favor — and laid bare the problems with battleground state polls, most of which had not taken into account the difference in vote preference between white voters with or without college degrees.
This year, views of the president are much firmer, meaning there is less volatility in the race, and pollsters have tried to adjust for their mistakes from four years ago. It is now the industry standard for state polls to take into account education level, ensuring a fair representation of voters without college degrees. But survey researchers have other uncertainties to worry about this year — particularly the potential for widespread voter suppression, which polling has no established method of accounting for.
Just over a week before Election Day, The Upshot’s polling average shows Mr. Biden with a six-point lead in Pennsylvania. That’s slightly narrower than his polling leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, the other two states that put Mr. Trump over the top in 2016, but wider than his leads in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. As a result, if the election comes down to one state, there’s a good chance it will be Pennsylvania.
Watch the final episode in the Stressed Election series, which examines how Americans are borrowing from Russia’s 2016 playbook, using disinformation on social media against each other.
Political tensions over the election escalated on New York City’s streets on Sunday as supporters of President Trump clashed with counterprotesters during a day of demonstrations.
Eleven people were arrested, the police said, during skirmishes between opposing sides in Manhattan, where Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and the city’s former mayor, encountered protesters targeting a caravan of cars organized by a group that identifies itself as Jews for Trump. All have been released except for a 36-year-old man who threw eggs in the faces of two police officers, the police said.
In one video, Mr. Giuliani could be seen in the passenger side of a vehicle with the window rolled down as anti-Trump protesters screamed at him.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said that he had encountered the caravan and the protesters while driving down Fifth Avenue after taping his radio show.
“I would love to have had a campaign commercial of it,” he said, “and put it on in the middle of America and say, ‘Who would you prefer for the next four years? This group of foul-mouthed people who don’t seem to have a vocabulary beyond three words, or these very nice Jewish people who are driving in the car and not saying anything back and not doing anything other than exercising their right to say they’re for Donald Trump.’”
According to the police, the pro-Trump caravan passed through Times Square, where it converged with a group of anti-Trump protesters who had marched from Brooklyn. The cars in the convoy were then blocked by counterprotesters, and some drivers got out of their cars to confront the anti-Trump demonstrators.
The two sides hurled political slurs — calling each other “fascists” and “anarchists”— traded blows, and fought over the Trump supporters’ flags before the police broke them apart, according to videos posted online.
Separately, a police officer was suspended without pay on Sunday after he used a police loudspeaker to voice support for the president.
The president of Fox News and several of the network’s top anchors have been advised to quarantine after being exposed to someone on a flight who later tested positive for the coronavirus, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said on Sunday.
The infected person was on a charter flight to New York from Nashville with a group of network executives, on-air employees and other staff members who attended the presidential debate on Thursday, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal network matters.
Everyone on the flight has been told to get tested and quarantine.
Those who were exposed include Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News Media; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor; Martha MacCallum, the anchor of Fox’s 7 p.m. show, “The Story”; and Dana Perino and Juan Williams, two hosts of “The Five.”
A network representative would not confirm any details of the exposure, citing the confidentiality of health information.
Fox has been faster than other cable news and broadcast networks to resume in-studio programming. And it has had one of the largest in-person footprints of the news organizations that covered the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Several Fox shows are now regularly broadcast from its Midtown Manhattan headquarters.
The anchors who were potentially exposed are expected to host their shows from home for the time being.
Network personnel have been serious about taking precautions like wearing masks and social distancing, both in the studios and on the road for major events like the debates, network employees said. And Fox staff members on the ground in Nashville were regularly tested by the network and the Commission on Presidential Debates.
But on the air, Fox has not always treated the coronavirus like the serious and potentially fatal illness that it is.
In February and March, as the virus took hold in the United States, anchors and commentators like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham repeatedly echoed President Trump’s claims that the mainstream news media and Democrats were exaggerating the issue to harm him politically.
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October 27, 2020 at 02:41AM
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Amy Coney Barrett Sworn In as Supreme Court Justice, Cementing Conservative Majority - The New York Times
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