TIME - Swampland

How Joe Biden Built a Different Democratic Coalition

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 21:21:25 GMT

Standing outside a Walmart in Sterling Heights, Mich., the choice seemed simple to Heather Abro. She voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, “because I wanted to give someone who was not a politician a chance.” Besides, she “couldn’t connect” with Hillary Clinton: “I didn’t like her.”

This year Abro, a 42-year-old high-school math teacher who identifies as Catholic and has voted for both parties in the past, will cast her ballot for Joe Biden. “I think about what we look like to the world and sometimes it’s embarrassing,” she says, citing Trump’s handling of the pandemic, embrace of conspiracy theories and appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. “We teach our children to think before they talk, and he’s not modeling that.” She’ll vote for Biden this time because she thinks he’s a decent man. But mostly because “he’s not Trump.”

If Biden wins on Nov. 3, it will be largely because of college-educated suburban women like Abro. Fleeing Trump in droves, they’re the biggest and perhaps most important cohort in the Biden political coalition, an unlikely alliance of angry young voters, voters of color, terrified seniors, and exhausted suburbanites who make up the broadest base of support for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton.

The former Vice President to Barack Obama linked himself to his boss throughout the Democratic primary, but polls suggest he could wind up with a more durable coalition. Biden has shored up Obama’s base of young voters and voters of color: Americans under 30 are on track to vote at record levels in 2020, overwhelmingly for Democrats. Biden has maintained the gains Democrats made in the suburbs in 2018, winning suburban voters — particularly suburban women– by more than 20 points. Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has allowed the Democratc nominee to build a durable lead with seniors, who are especially vulnerable to the disease and disapproving of the President’s handling of it.

And while Trump handily won white evangelical and Catholic voters in 2016, Biden is now even or even narrowly leading with white Catholics in some polls— something only two Democrats have achieved in the last 50 years. Biden has also narrowed Trump’s lead with non-college whites and rural voters, the key component of the President’s base.

If the polls are right, assembling this coalition would amount to a rare electoral feat: attracting broad swaths of historically Republican voters, without losing the young, urban, racially diverse Democratic base. “He’s leading in some cases by double digits with independents, white college-educated voters, suburbanites, and seniors,” says John Anzalone, Biden’s lead pollster, who also polled for Obama and Hillary Clinton. “He’s created a coalition that’s completely unique in Democratic politics for the last 20 years.”

He’s had help from his opponent. Unlike in 2016, Trump is running as an unpopular incumbent, not a celebrity outsider. The pandemic, which Trump has flubbed, became the central issue of the campaign.

But Biden brought a variety of strengths to the contest. He has cultural traction with non-college white voters that Clinton lacked, and attracts little of the visceral loathing that Clinton inspired. And his promise of restoring decency and competence to the White House seems to be resonating with an exhausted and demoralized electorate.

In 2016, young voters and voters of color didn’t turn out for Clinton the way they had for Obama, which may have cost her key states. But record youth turnout in the 2018 midterms suggests a generation of formerly apathetic young Americans may be turning into dedicated voters, according to Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. A summer of racial justice protests has only strengthened their political resolve. In 2016, just 5% of young voters had attended a protest, she said; by 2020, 27% had. “Young people are essentially mobilizing one another,” Kawashima-Ginsberg says.

So are their grandparents. One of the most interesting trends of the 2020 election has been the exodus of white senior citizens from the Republican Party, largely because of Trump’s response to the coronavirus. Trump won seniors by 9 points in 2016, according to Pew. In an NPR/Marist poll released last week, Biden led with seniors by 6 percentage points, as voters over 65 disapproved of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by a 15-point margin.

“Voters over the age of 65 are actually comprising the biggest share of voters who didn’t vote in 2016 who are now voting in this election,” says Tom Bonier, executive director of the liberal data firm TargetSmart.

Any path to presidential victory winds through the American suburbs, and there, too, Biden is trouncing Trump. Trump won suburban voters by four points in 2016, according to exit polls. But Democrats erased that edge in 2018, winning suburban districts in red states like Oklahoma and Texas. Biden now leads among suburban voters by 20 points, according to a an Oct 7 Fox News poll, and by 25 points among suburban women. “That’s where the votes are,” says Joel Benenson, a pollster for Obama and Hillary Clinton. “If you’re dominating in the suburbs, that’s a hard deficit to make up for Donald Trump.”

Biden’s strength in the suburbs illustrates how the very qualities that made him vulnerable for much the primary—his moderate politics, his familiar face, his desire to appeal to the white-working class and reticence to embrace policies favored by the left-wing activist base—have made him formidable in the general. “All of that made him the object of suspicion particularly for younger Democratic voters in the primary,” says veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod. “But they’re an advantage now.”

Biden is also working to shrink Trump’s advantage with groups that favor the Republican. By focusing on economic issues and avoiding hot-button culture war issues, he’s made gains with the white voters without a college education who make up the bulk of President Trump’s base. Trump still leads with non-college white voters by 14 points, according to the Fox News poll. But he won them by 36 points in 2016, according to Pew. Biden doesn’t need to win a majority of voters without a degree to kill Trump’s advantage; he just needs to lose them by less than Clinton did. “Culturally, she did not feel kin to them in the way that Biden does, the idiom in which Biden speaks, the stories he tells, the constant drawing on his working-class roots,” says Axelrod. “He is of them in a way that she was not.”

The 2016 election was rare in that both candidates were deeply disliked, and many of those so-called “double-haters” broke for Trump in the end. This time, Biden’s unfavorables aren’t as high as Trump’s (or Clinton’s), and voters have four years of a Trump presidency to inform their decision. “If he’s winning over any sector of the Trump electorate, it’s people who felt Trump was the better candidate in 2016, felt he brought a level of disruption that was necessary,” says Joe Brettell, a media consultant who has worked for Republicans in the past. “Now they’re ready to get back to a tried-and-true type of president out of central casting.”

People like Heather Abro, in other words. “I just feel like he’s unequipped,” Abro says of Trump, echoing the views of 64% of suburban women who disapprove of the President. “I think he’s in over his head.”

The Supreme Court’s Alabama Ruling Could Disenfranchise Thousands of High Risk Voters

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 19:45:30 GMT

Jenny Lux didn’t want to risk her life to vote. Her acute respiratory distress syndrome puts her at a high risk for dangerous complications related to COVID-19, compelling her to take quarantine seriously.

So when the 39-year-old read Alabama’s requirements for voting by mail this election cycle, she was stunned. While Alabamians no longer needed to give a reason for requesting a mail-in absentee ballot, they still need to either have their mail ballot notarized or witnessed by two adults simultaneously, as well as include a copy of their photo ID when applying for the ballot. Lux lives alone with her 17-year-old son, and suddenly faced an impossible choice: either risk COVID-19 exposure at a notary service or and allow two adults into her home to witness her ballot.

“My reaction [was], ‘Wow, really? You’re going to do this to me?’” she says. “I just can’t risk it. It’s life and death that we’re talking about here… Why should I jump through all these hoops?”

Lux considered other options, including curbside voting, which many states have adopted this year amid COVID-19. But while Alabama law does not prohibit the service, the state has gone to great lengths to prevent counties from offering it this year. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said explicitly that curbside voting would not be allowed under the state’s law. On Oct. 21, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s de facto ban on curbside voting could stand, reversing a lower court’s ruling that the restriction violated the Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was the latest instance of a conservative court upholding Republican-backed voting restrictions in the final weeks before Election Day.

That court decision, combined with Alabama’s requirements that mail ballots be notarized or witnessed, and include a copy of an ID with the application, collectively create an extremely high burden to vote amid the pandemic—particularly for disabled, elderly and other high-risk people.

“Alabama voters are going to have to decide whether they want to vote in person or not vote at all because some of them will have a very difficult time complying with the absentee ballot requirements,” says Sarah H. Brannon, a managing attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Voting Rights Project, which helped bring the suit against Alabama’s rules.

In May, several Alabama voters challenged the state’s de facto ban on curbside voting, as well as its witness and voter ID requirements, arguing that the rules posed a threat to their health. In September, a federal district court agreed with the plaintiffs, ordering Alabama to allow curbside voting and suspending the witness and ID rules for elderly voters or those with underlying medical conditions. Alabama appealed the case and earlier this month, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals handed Alabama Republicans the victory: the appellate court reversed the lower court decision, reinstating the witness and ID requirements.

The court drama continued. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling left open the option that counties could offer curbside voting, and two of the state’s most populous counties—Jefferson County and Montgomery County—took steps to implement the service. But Alabama appealed again and the Supreme Court decided in its favor. Curbside voting will not be an option for Alabama voters this year.

After the prolonged litigation battle, Alabama voters who are disabled, elderly or have underlying conditions were back where they started: deciding whether to put their health at risk to fulfill the witness and ID requirements or vote in person—or not vote at all. “Nobody should have to make a decision between being able to vote and protecting yourself from COVID-19,” says Michelle Bishop, voting rights specialist at the National Disability Rights Network.

Lux, who is legally blind, is a member of the disability rights advocate group People First of Alabama, the plaintiff in the suit, and testified in the trial. “I know if I’m affected by it, there are thousands others like me affected,” she says. “It’s a fight for social justice.”

Americans with disabilities and chronic illnesses have already been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. And as they prepared to vote this year, many found that their states’ procedures did not take into account their needs, prompting cases like this around the country. Voters with disabilities sued in North Carolina, Virginia and Texas, and advocates sued South Carolina over a witness requirement for absentee ballots in that state.

In Alabama, where coronavirus cases have been on the rise, the issue is particularly acute. The state has a history of voter suppression and a high proportion of Black and disabled voters, all of whom are disproportionately affected by both the pandemic and voting rights issues. There are 748,000 eligible voters with disabilities in Alabama, representing 20% of the state’s electorate, according to data from researchers Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur at Rutgers University. Alabama’s population is among the highest risk for heart disease, stroke and has the highest rate of diabetes in the country. Over 40% of its coronavirus deaths have been people with diabetes. Many high-risk voters are taking the threat seriously.

Tonja Leath, 57, usually votes by mail from her home in Hoover, Ala. because of a disability that makes it difficult for her to stand for long periods of time. But when she realized she would still need to fulfill the witness and photo ID requirements during the pandemic, she was frustrated. “Why with this election? It does not make any sense. They’re inconveniencing people, especially the disabled and the elderly,” she says. Leath says she wishes her county offered curbside voting.

In Montgomery, 37-year-old Terri Flowers has also been trying to stay home because her daughter has asthma. Flowers has decided to have her daughter attend school virtually for the foreseeable future to protect her from any exposure to the virus. “If I’m going to keep her from going to school because of [the virus],” she says, “it doesn’t make sense for me to go out and be exposed to COVID and potentially bring it back to her.”

To avoid concerns about voting by mail, both Leath and Flowers decided to vote “in-person absentee,” a process that allowed them to go to their absentee ballot manager’s office, apply for an absentee ballot in person, fill out their absentee ballot and then have it notarized. While they made their situations work, not all voters will be able to do so, as the method still requires voters to risk COVID-19 exposure at their absentee ballot manager’s office, which can be difficult to access for disabled or rural voters.

The other state requirement for voting by mail—that Alabama residents include a copy of their photo ID in their ballot application—can also present obstacles for lower income voters who might not have regular internet access or printers at home.

Alabama argued that the laws in question were necessary to prevent voter fraud and preserve confidence in the upcoming election. It also said that the restrictions did not place an undue burden on the plaintiffs. “The photo ID and witness requirements are necessary deterrents for those looking to commit voter fraud, and I am glad the 11th Circuit has recognized their importance in safeguarding the elections process,” Merrill said in an Oct. 13 statement. Evidence has repeatedly shown that voter fraud in the U.S. is nearly nonexistent.

Caren Short, a senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which jointly filed the suit against Alabama, says the 11th Circuit’s ruling allowing the vote-by-mail laws to stand “demonstrates part of a trend where unfortunately more conservative state election officials are leaning heavily on the myth of voter fraud to justify onerous and unnecessary restrictions on voting to essentially suppress votes.”

Maia Fleischman, a voting rights fellow with the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program (ADAP), which also jointly filed the suit, adds that while they found the 11th Circuit’s ruling disappointing, it “pretty much aligned with what we’ve been seeing in the courts the last month.” She said that her group chose not to appeal the 11th Circuit’s ruling on the absentee ballot laws after looking at how the Supreme Court has ruled in similar voting rights cases this year. “We don’t also want to make things harder for voting rights cases in the future,” she says.

The Supreme Court did not offer an opinion explaining its decision to stay the 11th Circuit’s ruling this week, and only the three liberal justices dissented. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last month, the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority, and if President Donald Trump’s nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed as expected, that will cement the court’s rightward tilt. Trump has also appointed roughly a quarter of all federal appeals court judges during his time in office, meaning that cases are now more likely to be heard by conservative judges on appeal.

Disability and voting rights advocates say that impact of a conservative-leaning bench will affect civil rights litigation long past Nov. 3. “We have to file cases at the trial level, because voting is a constitutional right and the foundation of our democracy,” says Christina Brandt-Young, a managing attorney at Disability Rights Advocates, which signed onto an amicus brief in the Alabama case. “But if appeals are less and less attractive, that will push us back into other kinds of advocacy.”

After much deliberation, Lux was able to vote this year. She found a notary who was willing to come to her house, wear a mask, and certify her ballot, so she didn’t have to risk a trip to the county elections office. She’s since mailed her ballot and received a notification that it was received. But the process left a bitter taste in her mouth. “I feel marginalized,” she says. “It’s like I’m being swept under the rug.”

She also recognizes that many voters won’t be able to find the same work-around like she did. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent on the high court’s ruling, one of the plaintiffs, Howard Porter, Jr.—a Black man in his 70s with both asthma and Parkinson’s Disease—described the state voting restrictions as a question of life or death.

“‘[S]o many of my [ancestors] even died to vote,” Porter testified before the lower court. “And while I don’t mind dying to vote, I think we’re past that—we’re past that time.’”

Donald Trump Uses Final Debate with Joe Biden to Dog Whistle His Attacks

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:52:28 GMT

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Joe Biden did nothing to conceal how little respect he holds for his rival, Donald Trump, during the final presidential debate on Thursday. Gesturing on stage in Nashville, the former Vice President told his limited in-person audience — and the millions more watching at home — that the incumbent President is little more than a walking embodiment of racism and extremism. “Come on,” Biden said, the contempt audible in his voice. “This guy is a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”

But here’s the thing about dog whistles: they only reach certain sets of ears. For everyone else, the vibrations whiz past without registering. And, perhaps by accident, Biden publicly diagnosed one of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of Trump’s performance during their last scheduled face-to-face meeting: if you were an average voter tuning in for the first time, you had no idea what Trump was talking about during some of their more heated exchanges.

The format of modern debates offer very few opportunities to have an expanded answer on any topic. Last night, the longest any candidate was ever supposed to take was two minutes to respond to each of six main questions. Trump often used his two minutes to float unproven allegations, personal attacks, political shorthand and dubious innuendo. When debate moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump if he understands why some Black families fear for their children’s safety, Trump wound himself into knots to talk instead about Biden’s 1994 crime bill and a “laptop from hell,” referring to a computer allegedly containing incriminating emails from Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which national security experts have widely said bears all the hallmarks Russian disinformation.

What does any of that have to do with Black families’ security? To the uninitiated, it is a bunch of words strung together like a late-night presidential tweet storm. To Trump’s base — and viewers of Fox News in particular — it was a bunch of shorthand that summarized Trump’s closing arguments in his race against Biden: that the former Vice President and his family are greedy criminals who traded U.S. policy for personal wealth and there’s a secret laptop that proves it all.

Before we go on, it must be said: Senate Republicans spent months looking into allegations about Biden and his brood. When their report was released six weeks before Election Day, it contained no evidence Biden ever bent U.S. policy to help his son or ever personally profited. Instead, Democrats noted that much of the allegation overlapped neatly with a disinformation campaign led by a Urkainian lawmaker with close ties to Moscow. Trump’s own Treasury Department had been so aghast at the disinformation campaign that it imposed sanctions on involved individuals and warned Americans about the spread of false information.

None of that has stopped Trump from digging in on the allegations or his friends in conservative media for promoting it. In the hours before last night’s debate, a former Hunter Biden business associate made his way into the room where the White House band of reporters was standing by for the debate. Over the course of seven minutes, Tony Bobulinski read a statement that seemed to suggest Joe Biden wasn’t being honest about his involvement in his son’s business, citing his own meeting with Joe and Hunter Biden in May of 2017 about a potential — but unrealized — Chinese partnership. (Joe Biden left the White House on Jan. 20, 2017.)

Writing about the alleged synergy, The Wall Street Journal reached this conclusion: “The venture — set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign — never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.”

Trump did his level best to force Biden to talk about the latest allegations involving the laptop that the NY Post reported on last week and the new Chinese deal. But as they had when they last debated and Trump kept chewing Biden on Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine, the details of Trump’s accusations were so muddled in the moment that most Americans could only surmise that there was something going on that has nothing to do with rebuilding the economy or curing the coronavirus. The dog whistle was a staccato, not a melody.

For those steeped in the Biden-is-corrupt mythology, Trump’s message came through loud and clear. He hit other notes that would be familiar to his base throughout the evening. When Trump was asked about his own foriegn financial obligations, Trump turned the answer into another ding on Hunter Biden, who has been open about his struggles with addiction: “His son didn’t have a job for a long time period, … no longer in the military service. I won’t get into that.” It was a dirty way to remind Trump’s loyal supporters that Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy after testing positive for cocaine.

And when asked about his still-unreleased tax filings, Trump took the chance to take a potshot at Joe Biden’s brother, Jim Biden: “Your brother made money in Iraq. Millions of dollars.” He then implied — again, without evidence — that his relatives were kicking money back to Joe Biden. “They say you get some of it. And you do live very well. You have houses all over the place. You live very well,” Trump said.

For anyone who closely followed the years-long scrutiny that befell the Clinton Foundation and Trump’s innuendo-based campaign against it, there were disturbing echoes. Trump — who has not divested from his own businesses and continues to own a company that does business abroad — alleging foreign entanglements against an out-of-power Vice President and his family just seemed an unnecessary moment to remind everyone that Trump continues to break norms and conduct business as the head of an multinational corporation.

What’s unclear is how much any of this matters in Trump’s fight to bring in more votes on Nov. 3. He is trailing Biden in state and national polls, his fundraising is at all-time lows and he is down to 10 days to close the gap. Trump’s attacks on his rival’s family seem to be doing nothing to win back the suburban voters who have been abandoning Trump, according to national and state-level polls. His racially-tinged attacks on cities and talk about criminal justice reform as an issue that is only important to Black voters aren’t building him any sort of coalition. And where mainstream Republicans could credit Trump with an economy that was doing well for them, Main Streets are now shuttered.

For a segment of the electorate, this sort of drive-by sucker-punch of Biden makes sense and validates their distrust of Biden, a career politician and the ultimate Washington insider. For Biden’s supporters, this is crazy conspiracy ground that should be treated like bunk. And for Americans simply worried about paying rent and staying alive these days, this talk of China, Ukraine and cocaine was just garbage.

In the Trump echo chamber, the President’s message was duly passed on. Fox’s Laura Ingraham said after the debate voters need to educate themselves about Hunter Biden “even if the media is trying to hide the ball.” Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes predicted the “corporate media” wouldn’t touch the story. Other guests that appeared in the network’s post-debate analysis all seemed well versed in the Trump-endorsed version of Hunter Biden’s admittedly complicated existence.

After the debate, members of the Biden campaign stood by their boss’ assessment of Trump’s use of coded language meant to trigger only those trained to hear it. “He talked about everything except the job he’s done for the last four years,” Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders told reporters.

With 10 days to go, that may well be Trump’s strategy.

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Young People Are Creating a New Generation of Enthusiastic Poll Workers

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 16:05:33 GMT

By June, Ella Mitchell, a 30-year-old in Minneapolis, was getting tired of the partisanship of election season. “There’s a lot of really touchy conversations with family members and people in my life with different views,” she says now. Still, she wanted to “help the whole democratic process,” and she was unemployed, having just finished a graduate degree in urban studies and about to kick off her job hunt. So she did something she saw as politically neutral: she signed up to work at a polling station for the primary election this summer.

The three-hour training at Minneapolis City Hall was socially distanced but overwhelming. “It was sort of an onslaught of information, frankly. Lots of technical details about how the ballot box works, what we can and can’t tell voters when they ask us questions, what we can answer them,” Mitchell says. “And then the mechanics of how you can set up the big machines where you insert your ballot in the slot and it counts it. I was like, ‘Oh no, will I be able to remember all this?’” But she and the seven other poll workers at the Hennepin County church ended up having a doing just fine helping about 150 local voters cast their ballots. “It was much less intimidating once I actually got there,” she says. “They’re such community places.”

This year’s organized push for poll workers is new to the U.S. election landscape. More than 500,000 people have signed up to become first-time poll workers through recruitment organization Power the Polls alone, over half of them under the age of 40; others have connected directly with their local elections officials. With efforts like a Sept. 1 National Poll Worker Registration Day and the support of non-profits, corporate initiatives and celebrity endorsements from the likes of Trevor Noah and Billie Eilish, even Chairman of the Election Assistance Commission Ben Hovland has a rosier outlook this election season, and tips his hat to youth organizing in particular. “So many [jurisdictions] are in such a better place than we were in the summer in terms of sign ups,” he says.

In 2016, over 910,000 poll workers came together to staff in-person polling stations. (It’s not always volunteer work; many states offer hourly compensation.) The majority of those poll workers—85%—were over the age of 60. During this summer’s primary election, about 70% of voting jurisdictions reported difficulty in staffing, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC); as many as 90% of older poll workers, many of whom have made it a regular tradition, were unable to help out due to their increased risk of contracting COVID-19. With the 2020 general election just weeks away, election officials know it’s vital that young, healthy people step into this gap—and hopefully form a new generation of civic-minded citizens.

Mitchell has already committed to poll working again; even with a new job as an urban planner at a non-profit, she’s requested time off to take part on Election Day. “I was struck when talking with the other poll workers at my location [this summer], most of them had been doing it for years and years,” she says. “That’s just what they do. That would be a nice tradition to keep doing in perpetuity.” Of nearly a dozen other first-time poll workers TIME spoke with for this story, all were planning to continue their civic engagement in future years.

Not all young people looking to do work the polls have had such an easy time. Some jurisdictions in states like California, Pennsylvania and North Carolina have been so inundated with applications, they’ve been turning away volunteers—and not just in urban centers. TIME heard from eager applicants in Buncombe County, NC, Bucks County, PA and parts of northern and southern California who are still struggling to get staffed.

In Kathryn Jankowski’s home of Bucks County, PA, front lawns are littered with competing political signs.

Kathryn Jankowski, 29, is still waiting to hear back this week if she is able to volunteer at her home county, Bucks County, in Pennsylvania, after applying through a family friend in September. Hillary Clinton took her home jurisdiction by fewer than 2,000 votes in 2016, and the energy has only ramped up this year, leading to high interest in poll work. “Our area is so cluttered with TV messaging and lawn signs. Every other house is a different standpoint,” she says. The primaries this summer were a “bit clunky,” she says, referring to voter confusion about the relatively new ballot system that had been put in place; some of the older poll workers, she says, didn’t have a great grasp on the voting technology. “Nobody’s taking this for granted; 2016 took us by surprise,” Jankowski says. “It’s almost a cliche: I don’t want to wake up on November 4th and think I could have done something.”

These new voting technologies—and digital-only trainings—are another reason organizations are calling for younger poll workers. Dalton Lucas, a college junior, was just appointed the chief of his polling station, the Fairfield United Methodist Church in High Point, North Carolina. It will also be the first time he’s been a poll worker—and the first time he’s voted in a general election altogether. He’s still awaiting his online training session, and has been told there will be further preparations in his precinct the day before the election. He doesn’t sound worried that he’ll mostly be prepped virtually. On the contrary, Lucas and young people like him—including many teens around the country; some jurisdictions set the poll worker age as low as 16—have made headlines for their engagement this year.

“I knew I wanted to do something to make sure every North Carolinian who wanted to vote would be able to,” Lucas says; he’s also part of the Campus Vote Project, a national organization that coordinates college student voting plans. “We’re really excited about it, and as young people we really want to contribute.”

Dalton Lucas, a student at High Point University in North Carolina, voted in his first election in 2018. He’s the chief of a polling station for 2020.Dalton Lucas

Those who have gotten signed up and trained have heard talk in the media of potential violence at the polls. President Trump has called for his supporters to keep an eye on their polling locations, and groups like the white supremacist organization the Proud Boys have been the alleged sources of recent voter intimidation. But none of the poll workers who spoke to TIME expressed serious concerns about interference, nor had they witnessed it at early voting locations. “It sort of makes me nervous in a larger sense,” says Mitchell, “but when I think of the poll station where I work, the polling places that I know of… I feel like everybody knows each other.”

EAC Chairman Hovland backs up Mitchell’s observation. “From our partners in law enforcement, I’m not hearing anything,” he says. “The biggest thing is, there are rules and laws and parameters that govern who can be in the polling place.” Further, 48 states mandate that workers are split across party lines, ensuring a bipartisan experience. Hovland is more concerned about misinformation and disinformation spreading at large in advance of Election Day, he says—a concern that was validated this week when intelligence officials announced that Russia and Iran had acquired U.S. voter information for targeted misinformation. Still, he maintains that working in an election is the easiest way to be reminded of the checks, balances and security measures that are built into the democratic process.

“Poll workers are really the unsung heroes of our democracy,” Hovland says. “You have the chance to be the customer service face of our democracy.” Including more young people means there will be more friendly faces for first-time voters to relate to, even if they don’t have prior experience. College student Charles Conner, who will be a first-time poll worker this year, put it a little more bluntly: “It’s a job that needs to be done. It’s good work, it helps your community, and you’re rewarded for your efforts.”

In elections past, the biggest concerted effort from non-partisan groups has usually been to get out the vote. But this year’s push for new poll workers, supported by upstart organizations like Power the Polls and the Poll Hero Project and more established groups like the Campus Vote Project, has been fruitful. In June, Scott Duncombe, now the co-director of Power the Polls, had the modest goal of recruiting 1,000 new poll workers to hand out free pizzas to people waiting in line to vote through his Pizza to the Polls organization. That snowballed: after teaming up with other groups recruiting poll volunteers, Power the Polls has surpassed their targets for sign-ups every month so far. It’s exciting from a civic engagement perspective, but he’s trying to keep his efforts focused on making sure everyone is “having a good time and not get wrapped up in the anxieties that a lot of people are feeling right now.” That focus on fun might be the secret to the organization’s success.

Kathryn JankowskiBucks County was decided by about 2,000 votes in 2016.

But for Conner, a sophomore at James Madison University in Virginia, the question is less about how to create that atmosphere and more about making sure the state is appropriately covered. Another Campus Vote Project fellow, he has been managing poll worker registration this fall. His efforts were slightly derailed by COVID-19: his university sent half of the student body home after a month on campus, turning his work state-wide. Some jurisdictions, he has discovered, are more easily accessible to a younger volunteer than others; some websites, for instance, are out of date. Conner, who is polite and chipper on the phone, doesn’t seem too upset by the change in plans. “The people who usually do a great job can’t be there. If we don’t step up, there’s nobody who will be able to,” he says. “It would just be horrible if people like me in my generation didn’t come to the challenge.”

Conner, like 28 million citizens around the country, is part of a record-breaking wave of early voters. This fall was his first time casting a ballot in a general election. “It was very cathartic, I will say,” he says. And on Election Day, he and his cohort of first-time poll workers will hope to offer that catharsis to millions of other Americans.

President Trump Bet On College Football To Help Win Key Swing States. ...

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:15:26 GMT

Going into the home stretch of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump has seized on an unusual political tactic: take credit for the return of Big Ten football to appeal to sports-crazy voters in key Midwestern swing states.

When conference officials announced Aug. 11 that they would postpone the football season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump slammed the decision, lobbying publicly for a return to the gridiron. On Sept. 16, Big Ten officials reversed course. The season opener, between Illinois and Wisconsin, kicks off Friday night, and tomorrow will see a full slate of games. For the President, it’s a chance to spike the football before fans in crucial Electoral College states. “We got Big Ten open,” Trump told sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview released on Thursday.

But the play hasn’t worked very well, according to a new poll from Arizona State’s Global Sport Institute that was shared exclusively with TIME.

The survey of undecided voters who identify as college football fans and live in closely contested Midwest swing states with Big Ten schools or other key states found that just 2% of this cohort would be “much more likely” to vote for Trump because he’s claimed credit for Big Ten football’s return. Another 7% said they’d be “somewhat more likely” to vote for him.

But whatever gains Trump appears to have made among this small subset of the electorate were mostly offset by those turned off by his boasting: 7% of those surveyed said Trump taking credit for the Big Ten restart made them “much less likely” or “somewhat less likely” to vote for Trump. In the end, 84% of respondents said the Big Ten strategy had no effect on whom they will support.

The poll, by OH Predictive Insights, a non-partisan public-opinion research company, surveyed 400 registered voters who identified as undecided college football fans in Midwestern battleground states with Big Ten schools—Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Minnesota—as well as the battleground states of Florida, Arizona and Nevada. (The poll has a 4.9% margin of error and was conducted between Oct. 14 and Oct. 21.)

Mike Noble, managing partner and chief pollster at OH Predictive Insights, questions the efficacy of Trump’s strategy of claiming credit for the return of college football during the waning weeks of the campaign. “It’s not moving the needle,” Noble says. “It’s not effective. And frankly, if I was their internal team, I’d be like, stop talking about it.”

The results surprised Noble, a former political consultant and campaign manager. “I actually thought it would have had a bit more of an effect,” Noble says. He figured more of them would be cheering Trump for his role—real or perceived—in the restart. “I feel like if I’m a college football fan, I’m saying, ‘right on.’ This is great.”

In truth, Trump had little to do with the Big Ten restart. (He also claimed credit for the Pac-12’s decision to play a season: schools will kick off an abbreviated schedule starting Nov. 7.) While Trump did speak with Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren in early September and applied public pressure to change course—”Play Football Big Ten!” he tweeted on Aug. 31—Big Ten administrators and school presidents have gone out of their way to credit improvements in testing, rather than presidential hectoring, for the reversal.

“For me, it wasn’t about political pressure, money, lawsuits, or what everyone else was doing,” said Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro, chair of the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors. “It was the unanimous opinion of our medical experts that evolved over the course of weeks.”

That hasn’t stopped Trump from taking a marathon victory lap. “It was dead, it was totally dead,” Trump told Fox Sports Radio’s Outkick The Coverage with Clay Travis on Sept. 17. “And I told my people, look, we got to call, I say, who am I going to call, who’s the head of it? And, it was Kevin Warren who really turned out to be very open about it.”

At the first presidential debate, during a discussion about the economy, Trump pivoted to the talking point. “By the way, I brought back Big Ten football,” he said. “It was me, and I’m very happy to do it. And the people of Ohio are very proud of me.” On Oct. 20, Trump said on Fox & Friends: “I’m the one that got Big Ten and Pac-12 football back. You know, I got that back. That wasn’t coming back. And I got it back. Hope people realize that. That was pure and simple me, or whatever.”

But the message doesn’t seem to be landing with crucial undecided voters. Among the poll respondents who identify as Big Ten fans in key states, just 1% say they’re much more likely to vote for Trump; 8% are somewhat more likely to vote for him. At the same time, 8% of Big Ten fans say they’re turned off by Trump’s message, and are much less likely or somewhat less likely to vote for him. The overwhelming majority—83%—of these Big Ten fans don’t seem to care either way.

The poll also provided insight into what the country thinks about a question at the intersection of sports and politics. While some fans have criticized athletes for speaking out on political issues—“stick to sports,” the refrain goes—they’d also prefer that the reverse hold true: that politicians stay in their lane.

Researchers asked these undecided voters if they agreed or disagreed with following statement: “It is appropriate for elected officials to become involved in the nationwide start/stoppage of sporting events.” Only 5% strongly agreed; 18% agreed somewhat, and 39% were ambivalent.

“It looks like the same fall in the middle type of thing,” says Ken Shropshire, CEO of Arizona State’s Global Sports Institute. “This doesn’t do anything for me.”

President Trump Won’t Say How 545 Migrant Children Still Separated From Their Parents Will Be ...

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 04:48:27 GMT

President Donald Trump defended his Administration’s decision to separate migrant children from their parents—and would not detail how he planned to reunite hundreds of kids who reportedly remain separated years later.

At the final presidential debate Thursday night, Trump was asked about the families of 545 kids who have not been located after being separated because of his administration’s immigration policy. The Trump Administration previously pursued a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy as a deterrent for immigrants by prosecuting adults who crossed into the country illegally, resulting in systematic family separation. While many of the families separated by this practice have been reunited, it was later learned that the number of separated children was bigger than initially reported. Earlier this week, members on the steering committee charged with reuniting the families, including the ACLU, said 545 children’s parents still cannot be found, and estimated that about two-thirds had been deported without their kids.

“Yes, we’re working on it, we’re trying very hard,” Trump said when pressed on how his Administration was working to reunite the families. He did not go into details, pivoting instead to tout border security.

Meanwhile groups like Justice in Motion are working to make family reunification happen, including by conducting on the ground searches, to track down the families. They have reportedly struggled in part because of the time that has lapsed since the separations took place at the border.

Instead of engaging with the policy around the specifics, Trump tried to place blame on the Obama Administration, and suggested that “bad people” had brought the children to attempt getting into the U.S. In fact, they were brought by their families, many fleeing violent and dangerous situations, to attempt building a better life.

The zero-tolerance policy sparked national fury in 2018 when thousands of families were torn apart at the border, with heartbreaking crying of some of the children among one of the most poignant cases against it. Eventually, the Trump Administration reversed course following public outrage. A recent New York Times report on an inspector general’s investigation into the policy revealed that top Department of Justice officials knew the policy would separate families, yet chose to pursue it broadly.

The immigration portion of the debate spanned several subjects. Asked about the Obama Administration’s immigration policy—which included record deportations— Biden sought to create rare distance between himself and the President he served.

“We made a mistake,” Biden said of their immigration agenda. “It took too long to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States.” Notably, the reason an immigration overhaul did not move forward during Obama’s tenure was because a Republican-led House refused to take up the bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate in 2013.

Biden said Thursday he was committed to creating a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented people. He specifically nodded to DREAMers, whose status the Trump Administration has challenged.

Trump is known for his racist and xenophobic comments, and has a long history of making them against immigrants. His biases were on full display during the immigration portion of the debate. During a discussion about “catch-and-release,” which allowed undocumented immigrants to return for a court date rather than be held in custody, Trump said: “Only the really — I hate to say this — but those with the lowest IQ, they might come back.”

Biden criticized Trump on his immigration agenda. “It makes us a laughingstock,” Biden said. “It violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”

The Final Presidential Debate Was Better. But Who Is Left to Convince?

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 04:37:56 GMT

After the nearly unintelligible shout-fest of 2020’s first presidential debate, the last match-up between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden felt like a throwback to something approaching normal.

In a more sedate, more substantive and more respectful sequel, the candidates still had plenty to squabble over. With just 12 days until polls open on Nov. 3, Trump and Biden sparred over the President’s handling of the pandemic, how to lower health care costs, taxes, immigration, racial justice and climate change.

Both appeared to accomplish what they came to do. Trump took a page from his 2016 playbook, painting his opponent as a corrupt career politician and himself as an outsider, despite his perch as an incumbent President. He launched unfounded attacks, inflated his accomplishments and curbed some of the haranguing that turned voters off in the first debate.

Biden, leading in national polls by about eight points, needed a steady performance and delivered one. He hammered Trump for fumbling the U.S. response to the pandemic, framed the campaign as a test of character and said that if he was elected, he would be a president who would represent all Americans, “whether you voted for me or not.”

Whether any of it can shake up a remarkably static race is another matter. It’s unclear how many people in the country can be swayed at this point. Polling shows only a sliver of undecided voters remain. More than 47 million Americans have already cast their votes.

But for Trump, it was progress, after a performance in the first debate that was widely panned. “It’s very clear the first debate moved numbers sharply against Trump and toward Biden,” says Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and political consultant. Trump seemed to have learned his lesson. He gave Biden time to speak—the “mute button” during each segment’s opening answers helped—praised the moderator and returned to the fundamental argument that launched his political career five years ago: that he came to Washington to do battle against crooked and ineffectual career politicians.

“I ran because of you,” Trump said to Biden. He repeatedly hit Biden for failing to make progress on policy issues during his eight years as Vice President. “You’re all talk and no action,” Trump said. His message was summed up in an email from campaign manager Bill Stepien that arrived minutes after the debate’s conclusion: “This was the businessman versus the career politician, the outsider versus the Washington insider, the reformer against the swamp.”

If Trump’s task was to dig out of the hole he’s created for himself, Biden simply needed a solid performance to hang on to his lead. “It’s not about Biden or anything really he’s doing. He’s just showing that he’s an alternative who has a pulse,” says Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist. “You could run a pile of bricks next to Trump and have a large segment of the population voting for a pile of bricks.”

Biden’s performance seemed unlikely to damage his standing. He often turned toward the camera, at one point telling voters to “look at us closely,” and pitched a vote for him as a vote for “decency, honor and respect,” arguing that “the character of the country is on the ballot.”

Trump scoffed in response. “Don’t give me the stuff about how you’re an innocent baby,” he said.

The former Vice President faced an expected line of questions from Trump about his son Hunter, following a New York Post release of emails purportedly from Hunter Biden. The exchange pushed Biden onto the defensive. “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life,” Biden said. But it wasn’t clear that Trump’s many allusions to a story that some intelligence experts consider Russian disinformation were decipherable to most voters, let alone persuasive.

Trump, meanwhile, defended his Administration’s response to COVID-19, which has killed more than 220,000 Americans. “Anybody who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America,” Biden said. Trump urged a continued reopening of the economy, saying “we’re learning to live with” the virus. “People are learning to die with it,” Biden retorted.

In an exchange on immigration, Biden criticized Trump for rescinding the program that provides protections for people brought to the country illegally as children and promised to send an immigration bill to Congress with a pathway to citizenship for the millions of people country illegally. Trump was challenged on his Administration’s policy of separating children from parents who had crossed the border illegally, which has caused the Department of Homeland Security to lose track of more than 500 separated families.

“We’re trying very hard” to reunite kids and their families, Trump said, claiming the children and families are “so well taken care of. They are in facilities that are so clean.” With a flash of indignation, Biden retorted, “Those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

As the debate went on, Trump’s tone grew more heated. The candidates clashed over climate change and energy, with Trump defending his Administration’s record and arguing Biden’s polices would curb economic growth. When Biden said he would push to phase out fossil fuels over time, Trump pounced, overstating Biden’s position: “What he’s saying is he will destroy the oil industry.”

“Just because Donald Trump’s voice was calmer doesn’t mean he all of a sudden told the truth,” said Symone Sanders, a Biden senior campaign adviser.

Though the campaign is in the home stretch and tens of millions of Americans have already voted, analysts caution that the race isn’t over yet. “The challenge for Trump is the undecideds have decided they don’t like him,” says GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “But they’re nervous about Joe Biden. So it’s not liking the President versus not trusting Joe Biden. That’s the challenge. Donald Trump has to win 90% of those undecideds.”

The final days of the campaign will hinge on whether Trump can reach those voters, or bank on a robust GOP field operation to turn out enough of his supporters. Says Luntz: “You can hear the bells tolling, but they haven’t tolled for good.”

-With reporting by Charlotte Alter/New York

Joe Biden Said He Wants to ‘Transition From the Oil Industry.’ That Shouldn’t Be a Surprise

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 04:22:37 GMT

When former Vice President Joe Biden said at Thursday’s presidential debate that he wanted to “transition from the oil industry,” President Donald Trump pounced.

“Oh, that’s a big statement,” Trump said, later adding, “He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”

Despite Trump’s taunts, Biden has laid out a plan to eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2050. Moving away from producing oil over time is an obvious component of any plan that truly reckons with climate change, including Biden’s. Nearly 80% of U.S. energy-related emissions came from oil and gas last year. The math is unavoidable: the industry will need to evolve dramatically, or disappear.

“The oil industry pollutes significantly,” Biden said. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time. Over time.”

In a sense, the exchange offered a variation on a debate that’s been happening on the campaign trail, particularly in places with a large oil industry presence. That discussion has largely centered around fracking: Trump has accused Biden of planning to ban fracking and Biden has insisted he has no intention of doing so (a point his running-mate made emphatically at the vice-presidential debate.)

Biden’s statement may sound like tough love for the millions whose jobs are linked to the industry, but the truth is that the transition is already happening for a variety of reasons. Market forces have played a big role, and the oil industry is already in difficult straits. A collapse in oil prices earlier this year drove some smaller firms out of business and led to major overhauls—including layoffs—at many of the bigger ones.

Many analysts believe the world may never consume as much oil in a year as did it did in 2019. These realities have driven growing acknowledgement within the industry that it needs to adapt. Some companies have charted a long-term transition away from oil and gas and into renewables, electricity or other energy-related businesses.

The U.S. also faces international pressure to decarbonize as an array of countries—including China and the European Union—have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints, and have slowly begun ratcheting up the pressure on the U.S. to do the same.

All of these factors make Trump’s outrage over a “transition from the oil industry” a little detached from the reality. The transition will happen. The bigger question is “what does it look like?”

Biden has sought to shift attention away from the decline in fossil fuels to the opportunity that such a transition would present to create jobs. His climate plan includes support massive investment in clean energy. Trump has presented nothing, leaving oil communities vulnerable to the industry’s long-term decline and all the gyrations that may happen on the way.

President Trump Touted His Relationship With North Korea – Even Though He’s Got Little to ...

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 04:21:25 GMT

Less than two weeks after North Korea showed off new intercontinental ballistic missiles in a military parade, President Donald Trump touted how his Administration has handled the relations with the nation.

“North Korea? We’re not in a war,” Trump said during Thursday’s presidential debate. “We have a good relationship. People don’t understand—having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.”

That relationship has been accompanied by a number of strategic setbacks for the U.S., and for stability in East Asia.

Under Trump, North Korea has relentlessly pursued its military goal of being able to unleash a nuclear strike on the U.S. and its allies. Pyongyang is now believed to have a dozen or more nuclear warheads and an arsenal of several hundred short- and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting South Korea, Japan, and with U.S. military bases and territories in the region.

North Korea also has developed long-range missiles that experts say can strike every major city in the continental United States. On Oct. 10, the nation’s military rolled out a wide range of hardware, including four of the biggest intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) ever seen in North Korea. The ICBMs were hoisted atop truck-based launchers, which indicates they could be rolled into a remote area, blasted off at a moment’s notice, and strike adversaries with little warning.

In a rare pre-dawn military parade, North Korea rolled out four of a new, 11-axle intercontinental ballistic missile.

“These are absolutely massive,” one analyst told us. He called them possibly the “largest road-mobile ICBMs to have ever been built.”https://t.co/WOSJWVjKkK

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) October 10, 2020

The development was deeply concerning to defense analysts who say the new weapons could potentially overwhelm U.S. missile defenses, which include 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California designed to shoot weapons out of the sky. “If each new North Korean ICBM can carry 3-4 warheads, we would need about 12-16 interceptors for each missile,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies Middlebury Institute of Strategic Studies in a tweet.

If each new North Korean ICBM can carry 3-4 warheads, we would need about 12-16 interceptors for each missile. (The GMD system salvo fires 4 interceptors at each warhead.) The last time the US bought 14 interceptors, it cost … $1 billion. https://t.co/SUmIL2P4If

— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) October 10, 2020

Trump did not address the new ICBMs, instead saying his personal relationship with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un was better than President Barack Obama’s—and that’s what has kept the nation safe. Trump added that after he was elected President in 2016, Obama informed him tensions with Pyongyang were nearing a breaking point.

The reason Obama told Trump there might be a war with North Korea was because the U.S. policy of Democrats and Republicans for the past 20 years alike was to prevent North Korea from getting nuclear weapons. The options facing Trump when he took office, were to stick with that policy, and risk war, or accept a nuclear North Korea. Trump chose the latter.

Trump also asserted Obama tried to meet with Kim but was turned down because Kim “didn’t like him.” That’s not true, however. Obama refused to sit down with Kim unless he met specific preconditions related to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

Former Vice President Joe Biden criticized Trump for meeting with Kim without preconditions, saying “he’s legitimized North Korea,” a nation known as the “Hermit Kingdom” because it’s so ostracized by most of the world. “That’s like saying we had a good relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe,” Biden said.

President Trump on North Korea: "Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing."

Joe Biden: "We had a good relationship with Hitler before he in fact invaded…the rest of Europe" #Debates2020 pic.twitter.com/ztcLzANKc5

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 23, 2020

The U.S. and North Korea have engaged in a detente of sorts since the spring 2018 when Trump accepted a proposal to meet Kim face to face. The President took trips to Singapore, Hanoi, and even a presidential walk across the demilitarized zone into North Korea. Yet there is more evidence that Kim has bolstered his nuclear arsenal rather than abandon his weapons programs.

It’s true, however, that Trump’s relationship with Pyongyang has improved since his first years in office when the President’s called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and openly threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” North Korea hasn’t flight tested long-range missiles or conducted a nuclear test since declaring a moratorium in 2018. But, as the parade demonstrated, it hasn’t stopped the nation from expanding stockpiles.

As Joe Biden Touts ‘Bidencare,’ Donald Trump Promises a Health Care Plan That Doesn’t Exist

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 03:37:18 GMT

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have starkly different visions for the future of health care in America, and during Thursday night’s debate they clashed over whose ideas would help more people. The catch? Only one of the candidates actually has a health care plan to talk about.

Trump began this portion of the debate by repeating his usual criticisms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. “I’d like to terminate Obamacare, come up with a brand new, beautiful health care,” the President said.

His administration is currently backing a challenge to the landmark health care law at the Supreme Court. If the high court overturns the ACA—an outcome that is more likely since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died—more than 20 million people would lose their health insurance coverage.

As many as 133 million Americans who have pre-existing conditions could also be denied coverage or charged significantly higher premiums if the law were to be struck down, according to a 2017 analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Trump tried to address this pressing issue for many voters by saying that “pre-existing conditions will always stay.” But Biden pushed back, correctly noting that Trump has not explained how he would do this. Republicans have been promising a replacement for former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law for a decade and have never come up with a comprehensive health care plan of their own.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he too began saying he would propose a new health care plan. Despite continuing this refrain throughout his time in office and even holding an event touted as the unveiling of a plan last month, Trump has not offered any evidence that he would be able to prevent Americans from losing their health care coverage without the ACA.

Biden took the opportunity to plug his own health care plan, which he called “Bidencare” multiple times on stage, a sign that he is growing more confident in the popularity of the proposal. The former Vice President would boost the ACA’s subsidies to help more people buy health coverage and would create a government-run public option.

The idea of a public option for health insurance has gotten significantly more popular in recent months. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that 67% of likely voters support a public option, even more than the 55% who support Obamacare. As millions of Americans have lost their employer-based health insurance during the coronavirus pandemic, the idea of having another option may seem more appealing.

Biden said he views health care as a right, not a privilege—a line that echoes the ideas that Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren frequently advocated during the Democratic primary earlier this year. Biden also took a page from Sanders’ playbook when describing how his proposal would need to more cost money in order to help Americans save more on their premiums.

“The Bidencare proposal will in fact provide for that affordable health care, lower premiums. What we’re going to do is going to cost some money,” Biden said during the debate.

When Trump tried to accuse Biden of promoting socialized medicine, however, Biden explained that his plan does not eliminate private insurance and drew a clear distinction between himself and the more progressive candidates in his own party. “The reason I had such a fight with 20 candidates for the nomination was I support private insurance,” Biden said.

And in true Biden fashion, the former Vice President made sure to remind Trump that he is the one currently deciding the health care plan of the Democratic Party.

“He’s a very confused guy. He thinks he’s running against somebody else. He’s running against Joe Biden,” Biden said. “I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them.”

Presidential Debate Live Updates and Analysis: Final Trump-Biden Matchup

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:45:50 GMT

One way or another, Donald Trump is taking the stage tonight for the last presidential debate of his political career.

The Republican incumbent is meeting former Vice President Joe Biden on the campus of Belmont University in Nashville for the second and final televised debate of this election. The backdrop of a global pandemic, a sour economy and the ongoing national reckoning over racial injustice are all expected to take center stage as the pair of men in their 70s vie for the White House in the final days of an unprecedented election cycle.

The mutual animosity between Trump and Biden is at levels unseen since George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis clashed in 1988. It was clear from their comments and body language in their first head-to-head on Sept. 29 that there is little, if any, respect between the rivals. Trump has seen the campaign slip further from his grip as his campaign funds have dried up and poll numbers have gone south. Biden is coasting on a comfortable lead, even as his own campaign manager warns nothing is certain with a little more than a week of voting to go.

Tonight’s debate isn’t likely to have much persuasive value. Few voters are truly undecided at this point, and at least 40 million people have already cast their votes. Instead, both candidates will be trying to fire up their bases to get their supporters out to the polls. In other words, this isn’t going to be about Congressional Budget Office scores for legislation, but rather scoring big political points in the campaign’s final days.

Trump has never been one to worry about winning such evenings on merits or minutiae anyway. For him, it’s all about the show. His campaign aides refused to discuss what preparations Trump has made for the evening, which may well be his final chance for such a moment. Even if he wins re-election, he won’t be eligible to run again. And should he lose, there’s little chance he’d ever match the more than 70 million viewers that tuned in for the last debate. This is Trump’s debate finale, and few are expecting him to show restraint.

Here are the key moments from the debate so far.

Is This Thing On?

One of the first moments of interest will be in how debate organizers enforce their rule that only the person being asked the question can speak. The edict emerged after the chaos in Cleveland during the first debate, when candidates repeatedly interrupted his rival, though Trump took the interjections to a class far apart from anything previously seen.

For tonight, organizers said they would be making changes to enforce a format that opens each section with a question posed to one candidate, who then is supposed to get two minutes of uninterrupted time to answer. They have promised to mute the microphones of any cajoling candidate who is ignoring the rules during that time.

Trump has already called this effort a biased move designed to help Biden. For his part, Biden will probably just be happy to have six 120-second windows to talk without Trump’s taunts.

The Presidential Race Dominates Headlines. ...

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 18:00:06 GMT

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

It’s easy to reduce the stakes for any Election Day to the White House race. It feeds a billion-dollar campaign industry, draws the biggest headlines and turns even the most benign of venues, such as front lawns, into public squares for political signalling — and that’s during normal times without this year’s urgencies of pandemic, recession and racial reckoning.

But the vast majority of contests underway right now are at the state and local level. And that’s actually where most Americans’ day-to-day interaction with government takes place. Want your town’s bridge repaired? That’s probably your county engineer. Need your school district to better use learn-from-home technology? See your school board. Utility rates, transit schedules, senior-center hours? Probably more the purview of your local leaders than anything President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will be yammering about tonight at their final debate. The person in the White House has the nuclear launch codes, but your zoning board determines if that deck you want to build next spring passes code.

State races are pivotal to determining the future composition of Congress. That’s why the two major parties are spending tens of millions of dollars in key races there right now. In state legislature races, one Democratic super PAC this week announced it was doubling its investment to $12 million — just to flip just the Texas statehouse. A swing of just nine seats in Texas’ 150-person chamber could put Democrats in control in a state that has been tantalizing close for Democrats in every election in recent memory. More broadly, the Democrats’ main election arm for state legislatures has invested $50 million this cycle to help down-ballot lawmakers.

Their Republican counterparts aren’t publicly announcing their budgets, but in the third fiscal quarter alone, they raised an eye-popping $23 million for state legislative races and have no plans on keeping any of it as a nest-egg for 2022.“There’s been at least $100 million in what we can see from national liberal groups on state legislative races,” says David Abrams, the deputy executive director at the Republican State Leadership Committee, citing the organization’s own tracking and publicly available information. “While we have far out-paced our direct counterparts, we’re up against a huge galaxy of liberal groups that for the first time committed money down the ballot.”

I can see you rolling your eyes at these massive sums of cash on what are largely seen as small-ball jobs. With a few exceptions, the pay is lousy and the work is part-time. (New Mexico’s lawmakers work for free, New Hampshire’s are paid $100 a year, Montana and Kansas pay about $90 per day the legislature is meeting.)

Their power, though, is far-reaching and, by some measure, nothing less than the control of Congress is in play. In more than half of the states, the legislatures draw the U.S. House district lines. As I wrote last year, the battle for the battleground actually unfolds in statehouse races. That’s why big names like former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are leading their respective parties’ efforts to have control over House districts’ borders by securing partisan power in the state legislatures. If you want to take a marker to the borders of your state’s congressional districts, first you have to convince voters to hand your party the Sharpie.

This is the Democrats’ first shot since 2000 to have redistricting and a White House race coincide, says Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. District borders are pegged to the Census, which counts how many people live where and typically forces officials to tinker with boundaries as some areas gain neighbors and others shed populations. The goal, in the ideal, is to have every district have an equal number of people so that every member of Congress has the same number of constituents. “The next time we’ll have time this opportunity is in 2040,” Post tells me by phone. Across the aisle, Republicans also acknowledge the stakes. “If the Republican Party wants any chance of winning a congressional majority in the next 10 years, we have to win in some of these races,” Abrams tells me, also by phone.

Both campaign committees recognize that local state legislative races could end up literally determining who the House Speaker is after 2022. Because so many states let their local lawmakers draw the maps, partisans can orchestrate idiot-proof districts that can protect their allies. In recent years, that has worked in Republicans’ favor. Democrats took their eyes off the ball for state races in recent decades and, as a result, were relegated to impossible-to-win maps. In 2010, Democrats lost almost 700 state legislative seats and gave Republicans the power to draw lopsided maps that gave the GOP a disproportionate number of U.S. House seats in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Only a blue-wave election of 2018 gave Democrats the opportunity to break Republicans’ smartly drawn firewalls in House races.

Republicans still control 59 out of the 99 state legislative chambers in the country and can still scrawl partisan battle lines on maps next year. (Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is the lone that lacks a state house and state senate. Its state capitol also is one of my favorites and worth a visit if ever you find yourself in Lincoln.) If Democrats can net 48 seats in this election — of the 600 races they’re watching — they can flip 10 chambers and take back some measure of power.

Still, the Republicans have for years had the upper hand when it comes to state legislative races. It’s how they dominated most of the 2010s. The state legislative races are relatively cheap and feed the pipeline of future talent. Democrats are playing catch-up. But with Trump in the White House and Biden pulling ahead in polls, there’s a reason why Democrats are feeling better than they have in years. Then again, it’s 2020, and who knows what’s going to happen.

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How Republicans Are Selling the Myth of Rampant Voter Fraud

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 10:03:38 GMT

The story started with little more than a vague rumor. “They found six ballots in an office yesterday in a garbage can,” President Donald Trump told a Fox News radio show on Sept. 24. “They were Trump ballots. Eight ballots in an office yesterday in a certain state.” Four hours later, the White House hinted to reporters that state was Pennsylvania. And by that afternoon, the rumor had become official in the form of an announcement by the U.S. Justice Department. In a press release, federal prosecutors declared that nine discarded ballots had been found in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and that seven of them were votes for Trump.

It is exceedingly rare for federal prosecutors to publicize an investigation that has barely started and rarer still for them to reveal politically sensitive details in the process. The case exploded on national news and social media, with Republicans touting it as evidence of a plot to rig the election and Trump arguing the same thing during a national debate watched by 73 million viewers. By the time Pennsylvania’s election chief explained a week later that the discarded ballots were the result of an “error” by a confused temporary employee, not “intentional fraud,” the damage had been done.

Luzerne County is a case study in one of the ugliest developments of the 2020 election, in which the powers of federal, state and local government have become tools of Trump’s voter-fraud disinformation campaign. From formal announcements by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to state-level “election integrity” task forces, the President’s allies are mixing politics and law enforcement to amplify his baseless claim that the election is plagued by rampant voter fraud. “They laundered the information through the Justice Department, they teased it like it’s a PR campaign, and then the story dropped in the form of an official press release,” Ankush Khardori, a former DOJ prosecutor, says of the Luzerne County case. “This piece of information was tossed out and fed to the echo chamber, where it will have a permanent existence.”

Many Americans likely recognize similar stories from the nightly news or their Facebook feeds. The case of three bundles of mail found in a ditch in Wisconsin was touted by Republican candidates in states from Illinois to Colorado. An ICE press release on alleged voter fraud by noncitizens in North Carolina was picked up by conservative groups in California, Ohio and Montana. Allegations of double voting in the Georgia primary were promoted on Facebook by the Texas GOP.

All these stories went viral before they had been properly investigated. None of them has been found by state or federal authorities to have prevented anyone from voting or to have impacted the outcome of an election. None indicates the widespread fraud that Trump and his allies allege. That argument rests “primarily on unsupported speculation and secondarily on isolated instances of voter fraud,” Judge Robert Dow Jr. of the Northern District of Illinois, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his rejection of a GOP effort to block state election officials from sending mail-in ballots to voters. Even the isolated incidents of real fraud, Dow wrote, prove that the phenomenon “remained infinitesimally small.”

But there are signs the campaign to bolster the voter-fraud myth may be achieving its goal. By validating disinformation, government officials are turning falsehoods into truths, at least in the minds of the public. One in four American adults now says voter fraud is a major problem with mail-in voting, according to a Pew Research Center poll. This belief, which state election officials and independent experts categorically reject, could undermine the results of the Nov. 3 election and lend credence to Trump’s claims of a “rigged” contest. It could give rise to a broader push for restrictive voting measures in the future. And it has set a dangerous precedent in which the powers of American government can be bent to disseminate disinformation for the political purposes of those in office.

The day before the Pennsylvania ballot case erupted, a local news station in Wisconsin posted a 107-word story that said the U.S. Postal Service was investigating three trays of mail, including some absentee ballots, found in a ditch along a highway outside the town of Greenville. The sparse report rapidly took on a life of its own. A write-up by the right-wing website Breitbart News, titled mailed-in ballots found tossed in wisconsin ditch, attracted more than 68,000 comments, likes and shares on Facebook, and was shared on Republican Facebook pages in Tennessee, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Washington, North Carolina, California, Utah, Texas and Florida. A summary by the Washington Examiner received more than 250,000 interactions on Facebook. Republican National Committee operatives, White House officials and Trump himself invoked it as an example of pervasive fraud.

When state election officials announced a week later that none of the discovered mail included any ballots from Wisconsin, a crucial swing state, not one of the Republican officials revised their statements. None of these stories amplifying the purported scandal was corrected or updated. Many are still being widely cited as evidence of voter fraud. The Wisconsin station’s follow-up story on the incident was shared just 33 times.

Republicans have spent decades searching for and cataloging purported cases of voter fraud in a push to justify stricter voting laws, which studies show would serve to disenfranchise voters, especially minorities. But even the best-funded efforts have come up short. Using data going back to 1982 on everything from presidential elections to state and local votes–potentially hundreds of millions of ballots cast–the conservative Heritage Foundation found a grand total of 1,298 instances of voter fraud. In a disclaimer, it says its review “does not capture reported instances that are not investigated or prosecuted.”

The 2020 election has provided no shortage of fodder for voter-fraud sleuths. Because of the expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic, there’s an ample supply of confusing postal issues, human errors and lost ballots. More important, federal, state and local authorities increasingly use government agencies as megaphones to elevate local stories into mainstream news.

Often this involves turning small, isolated instances of possible bad behavior into national scandals. In early September, for example, ICE issued a press release announcing charges against 19 noncitizens for allegedly voting illegally in the 2016 election. Republican members of Congress immediately seized on it to make a broader case against mail-in voting. “If universal mail-in ballots are allowed, more of this will happen,” Representative Brian Babin, a Texas Republican, wrote in a Facebook post.

The ICE release mirrored a set of charges against more than a dozen noncitizens announced right before the 2018 midterms, also for allegedly voting two years earlier. “Both sets of indictments came out right before elections,” says Helen Parsonage, an immigration attorney who represents four defendants in the most recent case. “Investigations were apparently commenced in 2017, yet nothing was done with the cases until right before a presidential election. I find the timing of these charges to be highly suspect.”

In several states, Republican government officials have also launched “election integrity” task forces, which critics say spread unfounded fears about participating in the election. After forming such a group in April to investigate voter fraud, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on Sept. 8 announced a probe into 1,000 alleged incidents of people voting twice during the state’s 2020 primaries. He offered no evidence and when pressed by reporters acknowledged he did not know whether any of those cases were intentional.

The claim followed a familiar pattern: fling an explosive rumor into the conservative media ecosystem, where it inevitably circulates and feeds a larger narrative even if it is never borne out. In the end, the Georgia inquiry concluded many double voters likely cast in-person ballots because they thought their absentee ballots didn’t count. “It looks like there’s no conspiracy, no massive intent, no impact on election outcome, and yet it’s baked into the psyche of the Georgia public now,” says Cathy Cox, a Democrat who served as the state’s secretary of state from 1999 to 2007.

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, officials continue to watch Republicans across the country cast the Luzerne case as an example of pervasive voter fraud. In an interview with TIME, the state’s attorney general was blunt. “There is a big difference between a clerical issue and a criminal issue, and it turns out this was a clerical issue,” says Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. “The problem here is you have a President who is trying to create a false narrative to suit his political aims.”

–With reporting by Alana Abramson/Washington and Anna Purna Kambhampaty/New York

U.S. Officials Link Iran to Emails Meant to Intimidate Voters Into Supporting Trump

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 02:42:30 GMT

(WASHINGTON) — U.S. officials accused Iran on Wednesday of being behind a flurry of emails sent to Democratic voters in multiple battleground states that appeared to be aimed at intimidating them into voting for President Donald Trump.

The announcement at a rare, hastily called news conference just two weeks before the election underscored the concern within the U.S. government about efforts by foreign countries to spread false information meant to suppress voter turnout and undermine American confidence in the vote.

The activities attributed to Iran would mark a significant escalation for a nation that some cybersecurity experts regard as a second-rate player in online espionage, with the announcement coming as most public discussion surrounding election interference has centered on Russia, which hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 election, and China, a Trump administration adversary.

“These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” said John Ratcliffe, the government’s top intelligence official, who, along with FBI Director Chris Wray, insisted the U.S. would impose costs on any foreign countries that interfere in the 2020 U.S. election and that the integrity of the election is still sound.

“You should be confident that your vote counts,” Wray said. “Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.”

Wray and Ratcliffe did not describe the emails linked to Iran, but officials familiar with the matter said the U.S. has linked Tehran to messages sent to Democratic voters in at least four battleground states that falsely purported to be from the neo-fascist group Proud Boys and that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.

The officials also said Iran and Russia had obtained voter registration data, though such data is considered easily, publicly accessible. Tehran used the information to send out the spoofed emails, which were sent to voters in states including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Ratcliffe said the spoofed emails were intended to hurt Trump, though he did not elaborate on how. An intelligence assessment released in August said: “Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections. Iran’s efforts along these lines probably will focus on online influence, such as spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-U.S. content.”

Trump, speaking at a rally in North Carolina, made no reference to the press conference but repeated a familiar campaign assertion that Iran is opposed to his reelection. He promised that if he wins another term he will swiftly reach a new accord with Iran over its nuclear program.

“Iran doesn’t want to let me win. China doesn’t want to let me win,” Trump said. “The first call I’ll get after we win, the first call I’ll get will be from Iran saying let’s make a deal.”

Both Russia and Iran also obtained voter registration information, though such data is considered easily, publicly accessible. Tehran used the information to send out the spoofed emails, which were sent to voters in states including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Asked about the emails during an online forum Wednesday, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said she lacked specific information. “I am aware that they were sent to voters in multiple swing states and we are working closely with the attorney general on these types of things and others,” she said.

While state-backed Russian hackers are known to have infiltrated U.S. election infrastructure in 2016, there is no evidence that Iran has ever done so.

The voter intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the Nov. 3 election, for which early voting is ongoing.

Federal officials have long warned about the possibility of this type of operation, as such registration lists are not difficult to obtain.

“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” Christopher Krebs, the top election security official at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Tuesday night after reports of the emails first surfaced.

_____

Bajak reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta and Michael Balsamo, Colleen Long and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

‘A Litigation Arms Race.’ Why The 2020 Election Could Come Down To The Courts

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 01:51:12 GMT

When Chief Justice John Roberts joined his three liberal colleagues on Monday to uphold Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court decision extending the deadline for accepting absentee ballots, Democrats were ecstatic. It was the third time Republicans had unsuccessfully attempted to limit mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, and the ruling will likely result in thousands more ballots being counted. That’s a big deal in the crucial swing state that President Donald Trump won by just over 44,000 votes four years ago.

But Democrats’ excitement was tempered by a lingering anxiety that their victory may be short-lived. The ruling remains in place only because the U.S. Supreme Court is deadlocked. With the Senate poised to confirm Trump nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the ninth justice, Democrats are well aware that a similar decision, regarding Pennsylvania’s rules or any future election-related case, may not break in their favor.

“While this decision was a victory for democracy it was a disturbing reminder of what’s at stake if the Republicans have their way and fill this vacancy on the Supreme Court,” Democratic Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin said on a phone call with reporters Wednesday. “With one more vote they would have succeeded [in halting the ruling]. With Amy Coney Barrett, they might have succeeded.”

This past year, Democratic and Republican lawyers have filed hundreds of election-related lawsuits in state and federal courts, putting this election on track to become the most litigated in history. One reason for the deluge is COVID-19, which compelled most states to expand access to absentee and mail-in voting, add ballot drop boxes, or tweak deadlines and other requirements. Nearly every time states have implemented a change, it’s been followed by a lawsuit. There have been at least 380 election-related lawsuits solely stemming from the pandemic, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. In 2016, there were 337 lawsuits total, according to data compiled by Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine. Ned Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, has described this year as “a litigation arms race.”

Pitched partisanship has become a hallmark of most of the on-going litigation. Democrats, usually joined by voting rights groups, are fighting to make it easier for voters to fill out and send in mail ballots; to expand the amount of time election officials have to count ballots; and to reduce the number of reasons that mail ballots can be thrown out. Republicans are pushing for the opposite. They argue that making it easier to apply for, vote, deliver, and count mail ballots facilitates fraud, thereby diluting the votes of those who play by the rules. So far, the rival teams appear to be in a dead heat. “Depending on the week, you may say it’s a very good Democratic week or a very good Republican week,” says Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford Law Professor.

The majority of cases grapple with mundane details, like voting deadlines and ballot envelopes, but taken together they carry outsized importance—and not just because they determine how many ballots get tallied and whose votes count. In an election year defined by distrust of the electoral process. An NBC News/Surveymonkey poll this month found that just over half of Americans lacked confidence that this election will be conducted fairly. This is in no small part because of the President, who has insisted, without evidence, that there is widespread voter fraud; refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power; and suggested that the Senate has to move quickly to confirm Barrett, in case the election ends up before the Supreme Court.

If the final vote tally ends up being close, election experts say that both Democrats and Republicans will likely take the matter to court—increasing the possibility of another Bush v. Gore-style stand-off in which lawyers and judges, rather than the voters, ultimately determine the next President. Both sides see the stakes as so high, says Foley, that they are likely to “to try and fight over the outcome as long as they can.”

The litigation landscape

To the extent that it can be simplified, this year’s election-related legal brawls can be distilled into two groups: a push to eliminate expanded mail-in voting policies on the basis that they would produce unprecedented fraud, and a push to ease the restrictions already in place.

The first battle, waged by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, has largely failed. Lawsuits on this theme filed in Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were all dismissed because of a lack of evidence. In Pennsylvania, federal Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who was appointed by Trump, dismissed the Trump campaign’s case on the grounds that their allegations of fraud were “speculative”—the same word invoked by federal district Judge James C. Mahan, who was nominated by George W. Bush, in dismissing a similar case in Nevada. In Montana, federal district judge Dana Christensen described the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations as “a fiction.”

The second battle—the fight over the weedy regulations governing voting by mail—has had more grist. Democrats have banked key victories in lower courts, while Republicans have gotten at least half a dozen of these decisions either reversed on appeals or put on hold pending further consideration. “It’s not the score at the end of the first quarter that counts, and there is a lot of game left in most of these cases,” says an aide at the Republican National Committee.

Take, for example, a South Carolina case weighing a state regulation requiring those voting by mail to have a witness signature. The rule was waived during this year’s primary after Democrats challenged it in court. (The state legislature had left it intact). In late September, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the provision should be eliminated for November, arguing that reinstating it would “unconstitutionally burden the fundamental right to vote.” Less than a week later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision. (The Court said the requirement did not apply to ballots that had already been mailed or would be received within two days of its ruling.) The decision marked a significant win for Republicans.

Similar examples of litigation whiplash have played out across the country—each time banking a victory for the GOP. In Wisconsin, a federal appeals court reversed a lower court decision to extend the state’s voter registration and ballot receipt deadlines. In Georgia, a federal appeals court reversed a lower court decision to allow the state to count ballots received by November 6. And in Arizona, a federal appeals reversed a lower court decision extending the number of days voters had to fix missing signatures on their ballots. While not every lower court decision has been overturned, it’s a “pattern that’s starting to emerge,” says New York University Law Professor Rick Pildes.

Progressive watchdogs also point to another factor. Since taking office, Trump has appointed 53 appellate court judges, according to July data from the Pew Research Center, most of whom are reliably conservative and tend to sympathize with the Republicans’ legal positions. The two appellate judges who ruled to overturn the Georgia ballot receipt extension for instance, Britt C. Grant and Barbara Lagoa, were both nominated by Trump. (Lagoa was floated as a possible nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg).

But it’s not clear cut along partisan lines. Judges nominated by Trump have ruled against the campaign, like Ranjan in Pennsylvania. And in several of these cases, dissenting judges, including those nominated by Republican presidents, have warned these decisions could disenfranchise voters. In Wisconsin, Judge Ilana Rovner, who was nominated by George H.W. Bush, wrote that as a result of her colleagues’ decision, “many thousands of Wisconsin citizens will lose their right to vote, despite doing everything they reasonably can to exercise it.”

Pildes says the spate of recent rulings and reversals has the effect of injecting uncertainty into an already-tense election. “If you’re telling voters on one day that absentee ballots have to be postmarked on such-and-such a day, and you’re telling them the next day it can be postmarked on this day, it gets very difficult to communicate a clear messages to voters so they understand what their rights are,” he says.

The battle to come

For both the Biden and Trump campaigns, the ideal scenario is for their respective candidates to win the popular vote and electoral college by such indisputable margins that post-Election Day litigation becomes moot. Current polling indicates it is much likelier for Biden to accomplish this objective than Trump. But polling suggests that there are plenty of ways that this one could be a squeaker. While Biden leads in national polls, the margins are much tighter in several swing states, and his campaign is openly saying the race is closer than the numbers indicate. “The closer the outcome, the easier it is to litigate,” says Foley, of Ohio State University.

Both Republicans and Democrats are actively preparing for the possibility of a pitched, multi-front court battle after Nov. 3. “We have been planning for any post-election litigation and recounts for well over a year and are extraordinarily well-positioned,” Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee’s chief legal counsel said in a statement to TIME. “With the help of our national network of attorneys, the RNC has been beating the Democrats in court for the last several months and that will continue should they attempt to sue their way to victory in November.” The RNC also said they intend to train thousands of lawyers to handle litigation surrounding Election day, post-Election canvassing, and possible recounts. (The Trump campaign declined to comment when asked which lawyers would be involved; the RNC did not respond to a request for further comment.)

The Biden campaign is amassing its own team of lawyers—a force it describes as the largest election protection program in presidential campaign history. “We can and will be able to hold a free and fair election this November and we’re putting in place an unprecedented voter protection effort with thousands of lawyers and volunteers around the country to ensure that voting goes smoothly,” said Dana Remus, general counsel for the campaign, in a statement. The team, led by Remus, includes former Solicitors General Donald Verrilli and Walter Dellinger, and former Attorney General Eric Holder. Marc Elias, who has led the pre-election fight for Democrats, will run any post-Election Day legal contests over state vote counts.

Any post-Election Day litigation is most likely to involve swing states, crucial to determining the Electoral College winner, that end up having tight vote counts. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina are all high on the list of possibilities, and top election officials in these states are girding for battle.

In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro says his office has “a team of lawyers in place ready to beat back any attempt by the president and his enablers.” On Nov. 3, the office plans on deploying attorneys and investigators in every region of the state in anticipation of possible legal action regarding intimidation, interference or fraud.

But for now, all eyes are on Election Day. If one candidate wins in a landslide, all of this could be moot. “I tell the voters in Pennsylvania, ‘Ignore the noise, don’t worry about the lawsuits filed by the President – I’ve got your back,'” says Shapiro. “What you need to do is make a plan to vote.'”

Exclusive: Alleged Hunter Biden Emails Circulated in Ukraine as Rudy Giuliani Dug for Dirt ...

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:38:57 GMT

Explicit photos and emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden were circulating in Ukraine last year at the same time that Rudy Giuliani was searching for dirt there on former Vice President Joe Biden, two people approached about the material during that period tell TIME.

The emails’ alleged availability, which has not been previously reported, comes to light in the wake of Giuliani’s recent claims that he obtained private photos and emails of Hunter Biden from a broken laptop abandoned in Delaware. Giuliani, who is President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has passed this material to right-wing news outlets, which began publishing it last week. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment on the origins of the material he obtained.

Over the past year, the practice of selling or leaking private communications has become so common in Ukraine that the government has announced plans to pass a law against it. Igor Novikov, a former adviser to Ukraine’s President who now researches disinformation, referred to the practice as Ukraine’s “national sport” in a recent interview with the Washington Post.

The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real and they declined to identify who was behind the offers, the first of which came in late May 2019 and the second in mid-September 2019. The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.

Last week the New York Post began publishing the material they obtained from Giuliani, and the sources and authenticity of the published emails has been hotly debated ever since. Hunter Biden and his father’s presidential campaign have declined to comment on the leaks in detail or to address whether any of the published emails are genuine. Hunter Biden has been unable to figure out where the material could have originated, says a person familiar with the situation.

Over the past week, Trump has used the leaks from Giuliani to fuel his claims of corruption against the Biden family. The President called on Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the material in the recent reports. “We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Trump said in an interview with Fox on Tuesday, two days before he faces Biden in the final debate of the presidential race. “He’s got to appoint somebody. This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election.”

One mystery that has surrounded Giuliani’s effort to aid Trump’s re-election bid is the original source of the photos and emails he has leaked to the New York Post. No other news organization has been able to verify the contents of the leak. The Biden campaign, along with U.S. national security officials and social media platforms, have warned that the leaked files could include forgeries meant to confuse or mislead voters in the final weeks of the campaign. Experts on disinformation have also raised serious concerns about the leaks.

The two people who said they were approached about Hunter Biden’s photos and emails last year did not know whether they originated from the same source as those that Giuliani has since leaked to the media. When the New York Post first published photos of Hunter Biden last week, “It brought back memories of the same information that was being introduced to us a year ago,” says the first person informed about the existence of this material.

In an interview with TIME, a second person described an offer that was made to him in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in mid-September 2019. This person declined the offer, he says, and only recalled it in detail when familiar-looking material was published in the New York Post last week. This person alleges that the people offering this material had a buyer in mind for it: they said they wanted to sell it to Republican allies of President Trump. Their asking price was $5 million, he says, adding: “I walked away from it, because it smelled awful.”

In its first report about Hunter Biden on Oct. 14, the New York Post published what it described in a headline as a “smoking gun email” dated April 2015 between Hunter Biden and an adviser to Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden held a lucrative board seat while his father was Vice President. The email, whose authenticity could not be independently confirmed, appeared to suggest that the adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi, had met and “spent some time” with Joe Biden, thanks to an introduction from Hunter Biden. If the alleged meeting took place, it would seem to undercut the repeated claims from Biden and his son that they never discussed Burisma.

The Biden campaign has denied that any such meeting happened. Amos Hochstein, who served as an adviser to Joe Biden on Ukrainian affairs in 2015, said the then-Vice President did not attend a meeting with Pozharskyi. “He never met with Biden. Never,” Hochstein tells TIME.

During his travels in Europe last year, Giuliani met with a variety of Ukrainian politicians, businessmen and former law enforcement officers whom he has since described as “whistleblowers” and witnesses to the Biden family’s alleged corruption in Ukraine. None of the accusations these sources made via Giuliani has stood up to public scrutiny, and no evidence has emerged of wrongdoing by Joe Biden in Ukraine.

When TIME asked Novikov, the former adviser to Ukraine’s President, about the alleged offers of access to Hunter Biden’s emails, Novikov said it would be “nothing new” for someone in Ukraine to market such material. The trade in kompromat—a Russian word for “compromising material”—has gone into overdrive in Ukraine since last year, when the country became entangled in internal U.S. politics, especially during the impeachment inquiry against President Trump, Novikov says. Various political operatives have rushed to answer Giuliani’s call for dirt on the Bidens, creating what Novikov called a “catalyst for disinformation.” Any documents emerging from this trade should be treated with caution, he adds, because they are “extremely hard to verify, yet very easy to fake.”

Since the New York Post began publishing the purported emails and photos of Hunter Biden, federal investigators have tried to determine where the emails came from and whether they are linked to a foreign effort to influence the U.S. elections, according to an NBC News report published Oct. 15.

At the end of last year, Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the GRU, hacked into the computer systems of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company, apparently aiming to steal its internal documents and communications, according to a report released by cyber security experts in January. “It is significant because Burisma Holdings is publicly entangled in U.S. foreign and domestic politics,” wrote the experts from Area 1, a cyber security firm that was co-founded by a former hacker for the U.S. National Security Agency. The January report warned that the hack of Burisma could be an “early warning” of Russia’s plans to interfere in the 2020 elections using the same techniques it used in 2016.

During a trip to Ukraine in December, Giuliani met with a Ukrainian lawmaker who has since been identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as an “active Russian agent” with longstanding ties to Russian intelligence services. The lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In a social media post on Monday, Derkach claimed that the “scandalous investigation” published in the New York Post would soon have a sequel based on a “second laptop” purportedly containing the private emails and photos of Hunter Biden. “The facts confirming international corruption are stored on a second laptop,” Derkach wrote. “These are not the last witnesses or the last laptop.”

With Dwindling Time to Turn the Race Around, Donald Trump Taps into Positive Thinking

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 21:00:40 GMT

Donald Trump was raised in the chapel of positive thoughts. While he was growing up, Trump’s family attended the Manhattan church of Norman Vincent Peale, the evangelist who preached self-realization and wrote the 1952 best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking. Trump rarely talks about losing anything.

That’s why aides were puzzled late last week when the President, during a blitz of rallies in battleground states, repeatedly brought up the possibility of losing to former Vice President Joe Biden. Running against Biden “puts such pressure,” Trump said in Janesville, Wis. on Saturday, Oct. 17. “I’m running against the worst in the history of presidential — and now if I lose, can you imagine?”

The boss clearly needed to be bucked up a bit.

Over the weekend, campaign officials took Trump aside and briefed him on data that shows a narrow path to victory, anchored in an uptick in Republican voter registration since 2016 and doubling down on their strategy to super-charge Republican voter turnout on election day.

Since then, Trump’s stopped talking about losing. Instead, he’s been dancing. He shimmied to the Village People’s YMCA in Carson City, Nevada on Sunday. On Monday, he pumped his fists to the same song in Tucson, Arizona. Tuesday night in Erie, Pennsylvania, he moved his arms back and forth to the beat as the familiar lyrics played: “Young man. Get yourself off the ground. I said, young man, there’s no need to feel down.”

His advisors say it’s not just a show. Trump’s feeling it. “The dancing — it’s legit. He feels good,” says a White House official. “He physically feels good, and it’s the state of the race,” the official says.

Trump campaign officials and close aides are banking on the fact that public polling isn’t capturing all of the unusual factors this year that play into how people decide to vote, including the pandemic. “We’re flying blind more this year than ever before,” says the official. On top of that uncertainty, they see positive signs, such as recent Republican voter registration being higher than expected in swing states like Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. “We feel like we’re in a good spot,” the official says.

Aides around Trump believe there are very few undecided voters at this point in the race, and the final two weeks of the campaign is simply about convincing people who support Trump to cast a ballot. “Everybody’s made up their mind at this point…Everybody has an opinion of Trump,” the official says. With two weeks until Election Day, the campaign is working to motivate Trump voters to show up. “Are you going to give your people an excuse to turn out? Are you going to give them that one last little bit of juice that encourages them to show up? And that’s where the intensity of (Trump’s) support really matters,” the official says.

The campaign is betting that the vast network of on-the-ground campaign volunteers they’ve built over the past year, and the massive amount of data they’ve collected on individual voters, will lead to a surge in Republicans turning out on Nov. 3. They also think Trump’s fast-paced travel schedule and the media attention it drives in the next two weeks will motivate Trump supporters to go to their polling stations.

“He’s having fun on the campaign trail,” says a former White House aide in close touch with Trump campaign officials. “I feel good about the election suddenly. I was feeling all down in the dumps. Now I’m back in a positive mood,” the former official says, noting “the old adage that the guy who has the most fun wins.”

Campaign officials pushed that optimistic tone on a call with reporters Monday. “We feel better about our pathway to victory than we have at any point in the campaign this year,” said campaign manager Bill Stepien.

“I’ve never seen energy like this. I’ve never seen momentum like this,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said.

But even if he’s dancing, Trump acknowledges he’s facing an uphill climb. Trump is trailing Biden in national polls by a wide margin, and has had to campaign in states that his advisors forecast he would have sewn up by now. Trump believes his path to victory would have been a lot easier if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t tanked the economy, leaving him with a muddled economic message that voters should return to him to bring jobs and growth back.

During his Tuesday night rally speech in Erie, Trump blamed the pandemic for forcing him to campaign in more states. “Before the plague came in, I had it made. I wasn’t coming to Erie. I have to be honest. There was no way I was coming. I didn’t have to,” Trump said. ”We had this thing won.”

Many long-time Republican strategists believe that Trump’s instinct to attack perceived enemies and air grievances is also getting in the way of his campaign sending a clear message to voters in the final stretch. This week, he’s insulted Dr. Anthony Fauci, the popular head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who gets higher marks in recent polling for his handling of the pandemic that the President. And he’s continued his war with the press by criticizing 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl after taping an interview that is set to air Sunday.

As election day nears, Trump threatens to wear out the political playbook he’s been using all along. He’s not trying to reach more Americans. He wants to motivate those who already like him to get to the polls in key states and deliver an electoral college victory, even if he loses the popular vote like he did in 2016.

“From day one of his inauguration, Trump has never sought to expand his base,” says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University. “He wants the system to deliver a victory even though most Americans will reject him. That’s what his campaign is about, to make sure he can exploit the existing system to deliver a minority victory.”

What nobody knows is how many voters will turn out on Nov. 3 in the middle of a pandemic, Naftali says. That will determine whether Trump is dancing on election night, or losing.

Over 400,000 People Watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar Play Among Us on Twitch

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:30:12 GMT

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar shook things up on Twitch on Tuesday with a livestream of the hugely popular video game Among Us that drew over 400,000 viewers at its peak.

In an effort to encourage people to vote in the 2020 election, the two Democratic congresswomen played the online murder mystery game that has risen in popularity alongside Twitch stars like pokimane, HasanAbi and Myth.

Join me, @pokimanelol, @hasanthehun, & more on Twitch TONIGHT as we help folks make a voting plan at https://t.co/TskRLfhCt3 and officially declare orange sus on Among Us 🍊

Tune in 9pm tonight at https://t.co/nZap5fuerN https://t.co/HeKMeDDjXf

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 20, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez’s livestream, her first on Twitch and one of the most-watched streams in the service’s history, lasted for over three hours and garnered nearly 4.8 million total views. It was reportedly the lead referrer to IWillVote.com for at least part of its duration.

there are 405k people watching this livestream, which is currently the #1 driver of traffic to https://t.co/WLqdQA15BJ https://t.co/QhPPPErMCA

— Patrick Stevenson (@stevensonpj) October 21, 2020

On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez put out an open call on Twitter for players to join her in Tuesday’s game. “Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun),” she wrote, garnering replies from Omar, HasanAbi and thousands of others.

Among Us is a covert multiplayer game, similar to Mafia, that takes places on an alien spaceship and has skyrocketed in popularity amid the pandemic. Although it was originally released in 2018, it wasn’t until the past few months that the multiplayer social deduction game exploded in the charts—as of Oct. 1, it had been downloaded over 100 million times, according to its U.S.-based developer, InnerSloth. In addition to its simple premise, some of the game’s appeal stems from the fact that it supports cross-play across multiple platforms—including Android and iOS—making it easy for groups of friends to play with each other while staying distanced.

Because of the popularity of the stream, Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel now has more than 584,000 followers. Both President Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders also have accounts on the platform, but only have 143,000 and 159,000 followers, respectively.

Twitch has seen marked growth in recent years, and especially since the start of the pandemic. According to TwitchTracker.com, the streaming website boasts an average of over 2 million concurrent viewers in 2020, almost double what it recorded in 2019.

👋🏽

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 19, 2020

today. i was killed by @AOC in among us within the first five minutes. pic.twitter.com/W1Uf17o34K

— maia (@mxmtoon) October 21, 2020

As Ocasio-Cortez mentioned in her tweets, the goal of the livestream was to spur potential voters to register and get to the polls. “I’m so excited by this upcoming election,” she said during the stream. “We can overwhelm the polls, and we can get things back on track.”

When you’re winning: pic.twitter.com/Fu7CMyCQDA

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 21, 2020

Following the game, Myth, a Twitch streamer with over 7 million followers, shared on Twitter that he was planning on voting for the first time in the 2020 election. “Remember to vote this election as well,” he wrote. “This election is my first time voting and its super easy to do so do it.”

Thank you so much for joining, Myth! I’m so excited this is your first time voting!

I had a blast. Thanks @IlhanMN, @pokimanelol, @hasanthehun, @DisguisedToast, @mxmtoon, @Jack_Septic_Eye, @Hbomberguy, @DrLupo, @Valkyrae, @Gusbuckets, @Corpse_Husband, @MoistCr1TiKaL & @israhirsi https://t.co/L02lZwWpjz

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 21, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez has often used alternative methods to reach out to potential voters. She has previously made appeals to millennial and Gen Z gamers with a foray into the world of 2020’s hit game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. She has also connected with younger voters by talking politics on Instagram live while doing things like assembling IKEA furniture and cooking dinner.

Muted Microphones and Lots of Interruptions: What To Watch In 2020’s Final Debate

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 17:38:11 GMT

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

For at least 12 minutes during the final presidential debate tomorrow night, Joe Biden should be able to answer the debate moderator’s questions directly and without heckling from Donald Trump’s muted microphone. Those may be the only moments of the event that the former Vice President should expect that kind of reprieve from the incumbent President who is showing signs of fraying nerves, finite patience and creeping self-doubt.

When the organizers announced on Monday they were introducing a mute button for each candidate at the start of each of six segments, Trump’s campaign had the expected freak-out, alleging it was an attempt to put a thumb on the scale to help Biden’s bid. The complaints didn’t move the organizers, who acknowledged almost immediately after the first debate that the format simply doesn’t work when one side clearly has no intentions of following the rules. (Trump pulled out of the second scheduled debate when organizers said it would have to take place remotely, given the President’s own COVID-19 diagnosis posed a health risk to everyone involved.)

Now, on what should have been a third debate night in America in 2020, Trump will have to stand there with a muted mic and listen to Biden answer six direct questions, for two minutes each, without any ability to interject himself with interruptions, insults or inquiries. (After each candidate has a clean two minutes to answer, the rest of the section will revert back to shouting and cajoling that rendered the first debate something of an embarrassment.) The forced civility atop each section is unlikely to sit well with a President who has shown his skills as a debater are rooted in throwing his opponents off their rhythm, not actually winning any argument based in substance.

That’s not to say Trump might not try to shout loudly enough to get picked up on Biden’s mic. Or simply add noise that throws Biden off his game. As a child, Biden overcame a stutter, and interruptions or hectoring can trigger its fleeting return. With Trump and his allies hinting — without medical evidence — that Biden’s mental acuity is lapsed, even the smallest of hiccups could hurt the 77-year-old former Senator. Slinging the unproven allegations against son Hunter Biden and his business dealings are unlikely to change voters’ minds but they may do the trick and knock Biden off-balance. In recent days, Trump has been ranting that Attorney General Bill Barr hasn’t taken steps to prosecute the Bidens for crimes that have not been proven.

With just 12 days to go until the votes start to be counted, Trump desperately needs a show in Nashville to turn his campaign around. His final campaign finance report shows him bleeding cash, public and private polls show him shedding votes, and his own rhetoric seems to betray deep doubts about his prospects of winning. Biden and his allies are spending $140 million on broadcast and cable ads across the final two weeks — twice as much as the Republicans. Trump has largely abandoned airwaves across the Midwest to reinforce a firewall in places like Georgia, Florida and Arizona — states that were once seem as dreams for Democrats but now have the potential to be the icing on their cake.

Still, Trump’s team is not ready to concede. On a call with staffers on Monday, Trump said he wants to hold five rallies a day in the final stretch, a breakneck pace that isn’t unheard of, but certainly challenging and risky during a pandemic. To Trump’s mind, more is better, and no one exceeds Trump’s excesses.

That’s particularly true when it comes to interrupting, it seems. During their first debate, Trump interrupted Biden or the moderator 128 times, according to Slate’s math. (Trump interrupted 2016 rival Hillary Clinton a more modest 51 times when they first met, Slate tallies.) At his town hall last week with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, he often tried to talk over Guthrie’s questions, which were sharp and to-the-point. He responded by cutting off the anchor, who is also a lawyer who aced her bar exam.

Tomorrow’s questions, from NBC’s Kristen Welker, are expected to be just as direct. And, true to form, the White House has already started smearing Welker as a partisan activist. One official asserted — without evidence — that Welker is a Nancy Pelosi acolyte masquerading behind her press pass.

Not a particularly dignified approach, but that’s never been a motivating factor for this President. Four years ago, after the bombshell “Access Hollywood” tape came out two days ahead of the second-of-three debates and threatened to throw Trump off-balance, he dug up three women who had accused the Democratic nominee’s husband of sexual misconduct between 1978 and 1993, and a fourth whose alleged rapist had been legally represented by Clinton herself, who helped him with a plea deal for reduced charges as part of her work at a free legal clinic.

I remember sitting in the press workspace in St. Louis as seemingly every reporter sent to cover the debate was watching the pregame spectacle unfold on a Facebook livestream. Trump knew he was going to face tough questions about his admission on tape to sexual assault. Instead, he sought to insulate himself in an armor of a rival’s spouse.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. It is precisely what he is doing again: At the precise moment that The New York Times reports Trump has previously secret accounts in China, Trump is expected to allege it is Hunter Biden who is exploiting his family’s name to collect Chinese cash. If he can shout it loudly enough into the ether in the non-muted 78 minutes of his time on stage, it may cause enough confusion that voters are left with a déja vu hangover from Clinton’s emails.

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‘It’s Easy to Feel Invisible.’ Why Some Young Americans of Color Are Sitting This Election Out

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 15:16:15 GMT

During his televised town hall on Oct. 15, Joe Biden was asked a pointed question by a young man who identified himself as an undecided Black voter.

“Many people believe that the true swing demographic in this election will be Black voters under the age of 30 — not because they’ll be voting for Trump, but because they won’t vote at all,” said Cedric Humphrey. “What do you have to say to young Black voters who see voting for you as further participation in a system that continually fails to protect them?”

Biden offered a practiced response, encouraging young Black Americans like Humphrey to vote — while also squeezing in a mention of his campaign’s commitment to increasing the Black community’s access to education, fair housing and entrepreneurship.

What the Democratic candidate didn’t have a good answer for was the very real conundrum that Humphrey described. While plenty of young Americans are embracing their vote in this year’s election for its potential to impact the climate crisis, social justice and the government’s handling of the pandemic, for many young people of color in the U.S., who are disproportionately affected by all of these problems, deciding not to participate in the 2020 presidential election has become its own call-to-action.

A recent survey conducted by hip-hop media company REVOLT of its audience, which is predominantly Black, found half of respondents between the age of 18 to 34 were either battling high barriers to get to the ballot box, or were choosing not to participate in this year’s polls. The survey, which included over 1,000 respondents and was part of the network’s VOTE or DIE! youth voting initiative, was conducted in September in partnership with First & First Consulting to better understand the anti-voter youth movement, according to Lynzie Riebling, head of the group’s youth culture insights.

For many respondents, the candidates themselves are the problem: they said they felt no connection to the two white men in their 70s who are competing for their vote. “We have nothing in common. I don’t feel they have the best interest of me or my community in mind,” a respondent named Tiffani T., 28, wrote on REVOLT’s survey. “There’s nothing and no one to be excited for.”

Others have lost faith in the U.S. election system. For young Black voters who cast their first ballots for former President Barack Obama in 2012, “it’s just gone downhill for them,” says Riebling. “They weren’t excited in the last election. They saw what happened with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote and not the electoral college. And so they’re just feeling helpless.”

When REVOLT’s VOTE or DIE! Campaign was first launched by Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2004, the goal was to make voting “cool” for minority groups, says Riebling. Now, given both the intense discouragement that many Black youth have felt during Trump’s first term and their ability to impact this election, the stakes feel much higher, she says.

On Oct. 16, Combs, who is REVOLT’s chairman, launched Our Black Party, a new political party that aims to empower Black Americans. In a series of tweets, Combs encouraged both Democrats and Republicans to join in the new party’s mission to “help advance a political agenda that addresses the needs of Black people.” With fears that another victory for Trump could result in a “race war” amongst Americans, he made it clear that the party’s “NUMBER ONE priority is to get Trump out of office.”

But as Humphrey pointed out at the town hall, Biden and the Black community also have a complex relationship. In 2008 and 2012, Black Americans played a pivotal role in the election and re-election of the Obama-Biden ticket. But being the deputy to the first Black president doesn’t give Biden a guaranteed in with this dynamic part of the electorate, young voters say.

In May, Biden apologized to Black voters for saying they “ain’t black” if they plan to vote for Trump. Many frustrated observers felt the comment suggested that the Black community are seen as a one-dimensional voting bloc in the eyes of the political elite. “We’re not a monolith and we’re not all going to vote one way,” says Torian Swayne, a 28-year-old Oregon resident who is part of the REVOLT online community. “By saying that, you’re dismissing any autonomy that we have altogether.”

Swayne says she chose not to vote in 2016 because she didn’t see any good choices in that election cycle. She is reluctantly planning to vote for Biden this year because, she says, “I don’t really feel like there’s a choice not to.”

As many Black youth struggle to navigate politicians’ intentions, the candidates continue to fight for their votes. Black and other minority turnout was lower in the national statistics and in key swing states during the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institute. If just as many Black youth stay home this time around, the absence of their vote will hold just as much impact in determining what the next four years will look like as if they showed up to the polls.

And that’s precisely what REVOLT is trying to get young voters of color to do in two weeks’ time. “I think it’s easy to feel invisible in this world if you are Black and young,” says REVOLT COO Detavio Samuels. “But the people who are put in office today are literally going to determine your fate.”