Dems urge voters to avoid mailing ballots in final week

With a week to go until Election Day, Democrats are pushing a new get-out-the-vote mantra: There’s still time to vote early, but it is too late to put your ballot in the mail.

Far more Democrats than Republicans plan to vote by mail in 2020, according to polling and ballot request data. That leaves the party more exposed if ballots returned via mail don’t reach election officials until after state deadlines. Now, those deadlines are looming in key battleground states, as are worries about postal delays and new concerns the Supreme Court will change procedures in important states.

The Supreme Court declined on Monday night to reinstate a lower court decision that extended mail ballot return deadlines in Wisconsin. Now, ballots are due in the state by the time the polls close on Nov. 3. The lower court had ordered Wisconsin to count ballots postmarked by Election Day as long as they were received some days later, and the ruling raised Democratic concerns about still-pending Supreme Court cases on extended ballot receipt deadlines in other swing states, like Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

“Bank it, bank it, bank it. Bank it!” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, said in an interview, urging voters to cast their ballots now and to not wait. “If you have a ballot, deliver it to a secure ballot box. Don’t mail it in. I am not advocating at this point to trust mail.”

Fetterman noted he has been calling for this strategy long before the Supreme Court issued its Wisconsin decision on Monday. “That’s the mandate, regardless of what the Supreme Court says or does.”

“We are too close to Election Day, and the right to vote is too important, to rely on the Postal Service to deliver absentee ballots on time,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Citizens who already have an absentee ballot should sign the back of the envelope and hand-deliver it to their city or township clerk’s office or ballot drop box as soon as possible.”

Ballots are due in Michigan by close of polls on Election Day.

In Wisconsin, Democrats are ramping up their get-out-the-vote campaign in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Top Democrats in the state said the ruling didn’t surprise them, and that they were preparing for the eventuality that the Supreme Court would ultimately decline to extend the return deadline in the state.

“We did not put our hopes and dreams for the future in the hands of [Justice] Brett Kavanaugh.” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “We expected and planned for it. If the Supreme Court had done the right thing, it would have been a bonus for democracy. But it wasn’t something we were counting on.”

Wikler noted that before the ruling, the party was already instructing voters to return their ballots via drop boxes instead of the mail. But the messaging will have “new urgency” going forward: “Now we can say the Supreme Court just ruled, you got to get your ballot into the drop box today,” Wikler said.

The Supreme Court’s decision on the Wisconsin case left some hints about how the Court could rule in lingering cases. In a concurring opinion issued Monday night, Kavanaugh argued that there is a role for federal judges to intervene in state courts’ electoral rulings, citing, in part, former Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore. That concurrence, in the case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election, argued the Constitution deferred specifically to state legislatures with setting the terms of elections, and that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped the boundaries of its role.

“Under the U.S. Constitution, the state courts do not have a blank check to rewrite state election laws for federal elections. Article II expressly provides that the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,’” Kavanaugh wrote in a footnote in his decision, emphasizing legislature. “As Chief Justice Rehnquist persuasively explained in Bush v. Gore … the text of the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws.”

Kavanaugh’s footnote laid a marker down for how he would rule in future cases, said Tom Spencer, a Republican lawyer who worked on Bush v. Gore team and is now the vice president of the conservative legal group Lawyers Democracy Fund.

Currently, both North Carolina and Pennsylvania have extended ballot return deadlines due to court orders. In Pennsylvania, ballots that are postmarked by Election Day can count if they arrive within three days (as opposed to being due at close of polls). In North Carolina, Election Day-postmarked ballots can arrive up to nine days later and still be counted (as opposed to three days).

“He specifically said that the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws,” Spencer said. “The sentence could have gone on ‘like Pennsylvania, folks.”

Spencer also said he anticipated that new Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who officially started her duties on Tuesday, ultimately would side with Kavanaugh. Spencer suspected Kavanaugh was writing to her in his Wisconsin opinion.

“My crystal ball says that this last sentence [in Kavanaugh’s footnote] could be a shoutout to Justice Barrett,” Spencer said. “It’s just a prediction — she’s a very careful, brilliant woman — but my view is that she would look at all of this and come down as Kavanaugh did.”

But Democrats say they had already flipped messaging to encouraging voters to vote early in-person or to return their ballot via the drop box, regardless of how the Supreme Court may rule in future cases.

“The second you saw the Supreme Court rule four to four, you knew where it was gonna probably go,” Fetterman said, referring to a divided decision earlier this month where Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal bloc and did not suspend a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order extending ballot return deadlines. “What the Supreme Court does doesn’t matter, if you just get your vote in, the way they need to get in.”

Republicans have again asked the nation's highest court to rule on the Pennsylvania case, this time on the merits and not an emergency attempt to block the state court decision.

Like in Wisconsin, Democrats in North Carolina and Pennsylvania say they aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to potentially hand down a last minute ruling. If anything, they say, the urgency in this year’s election was already incredibly high and the ruling won’t change much.

“There’s no real strategy change, but there will be more urgency, if you can get more urgent in this election cycle,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist in North Carolina who works with Gov. Roy Cooper and Senate candidate Cal Cunningham. “We’re just keeping on keeping on.”

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A Black Pastor’s Zoom Campaign to Save Pennsylvania for Biden

Nine days before Election Day, the Rev. Dr. Alyn Waller, pastor of Philadelphia’s largest Black church, rolled up to City Hall on his Harley-Davidson Tri Glide Ultra. He parked it near the statue of Octavius Valentine Catto, a Black voting-rights activist killed in Philadelphia on Election Day 1871. Waller wore an all-black outfit, including a sleeveless biker jacket covered with patches—“John 3:16,” “Respect all, fear none”—and a black skull cap that read, “Christian biker.” Behind Waller stood a line of socially distanced, masked voters, waiting to enter the early-voting location inside City Hall.

At noon, Waller and two dozen other bikers raised their kickstands and roared off on the Black Bikers Vote ride, a two-hour journey past satellite voting locations in Philly. The ride ended in the vast parking lot of Waller’s Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church, which takes up several city blocks in northwest Philly. Waller’s goal—for this ride, and many of his efforts this year—was to prevent the turnout disaster that happened four years ago and haunts him to this day.

“In 2016, Pennsylvania was settled by 44,000 votes, and there were 240,000 registered African Americans who just didn’t show up,” Waller said. “So we recognize that this thing is in our hands.”

The motorcycle ride is noisy, attention-grabbing and very public, a throwback to the kind of high-visibility get-out-the-vote work that Waller, 56, has done every presidential cycle since 2008. But this year, his most effective outreach is happening on a screen in the basement of his home. With the election’s stakes higher than ever, Waller has been forced by the pandemic to improvise with new organizing tools—and he has found a way to broaden his reach, even as he remains physically distant from his congregation and his community.

In his weekly sermon, broadcast on Vimeo Livestream, Facebook Live, and YouTube; in daily Facebook Live prayer talks, at drive-through food giveaways and health fairs in Enon’s parking lot, Waller has exhorted Enon’s 12,000 congregants and his larger audience of Philadelphians to make a plan to vote. “This year, we are not voting between Democrats and Republicans; we’re voting for the soul of our democracy,” Waller said, echoing one of Joe Biden’s campaign themes.

Philadelphia, the biggest city in 2020’s ultimate swing state, is home to 1.1 million registered voters. More than 40 percent are Black. Many struggled to vote in Pennsylvania’s June 2 primary, due to the pandemic and civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd. Since then, city and state officials, good-government groups, nonprofits, and thought-leader activists such as Waller have joined an intense effort to motivate and help voters. This year, Philadelphians are navigating closed and shifted voting locations (about 15 percent are voting in a new place), as well as a new mail-in ballot system, antiquated voting laws, misinformation and legal challenges to election rules.

Philadelphia will be under pressure on Election Day. Pennsylvania is the Electoral College’s most likely tipping-point state; in a close election, odds are good that it will give either Trump or Biden the winning 270th electoral vote. Yet Pennsylvania will probably be among the last states to finish counting, because its election officials can’t process mail-in ballots until Election Day. So Trump and the GOP have aggressively challenged Pennsylvania’s election laws in court. Trump has coupled his false and misleading attacks on mail-in ballots’ integrity with vague complaints about Philly’s election system, at his Pennsylvania rallies and the first presidential debate: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

So Waller and many others are trying to Trump-proof the election in Philly, warning voters how they could be disenfranchised, and telling them how to ensure that their vote counts. “Because of what we see Donald Trump doing to threaten the legitimacy of the system,” Waller said, “we felt that we had to protect the system from him.”

Waller’s Sunday sermons are getting 30,000 to 50,000 online views during the pandemic, three to four times the number he once preached to in person on an average weekend. “My theology of preaching is, every sermon should have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other,” Waller said. Since April, he’s delivered sermons that touched on the pandemic, George Floyd, reparations, racism and implicit bias. “That’s where I really address the importance of voting,” he said.

Waller’s roots in the Black church’s activist tradition go deep. A photograph taken when Waller was 3 1/2 years old shows him sitting in Martin Luther King Jr.’s lap. It’s from 1967, when Waller’s father, Alfred M. Waller Sr., hosted King at Cleveland’s historic Shiloh Baptist Church during the civil-rights leader’s Cleveland campaign.

“He comes from a tradition, the history of service, of activism, of prophetic preaching,” said state Sen. Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia, who has included Waller in his weekly Zoom calls this year about getting out the vote in Pennsylvania. “Reverend King, Reverend [Jesse] Jackson, Reverend [William] Barber, all of those giants in this space, and his father, are all people who have influenced him.”

Since 1994, when Waller became pastor of Enon Tabernacle at age 29, he has grown his congregation from 360 in Philly’s Germantown neighborhood into a megachurch that includes a second 5,000-seat location in northwest Philly. His influence in the city extends even further: He’s a frequent presence in local news and a confidant of Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney.

In his public work, Waller doesn’t often name Donald Trump as the threat to democracy, but his meaning is clear. “When I think about where we are as a country, we’ve gotten to the place where we normalize lying,” Waller said. “We normalize meanness. We’ve given room to a racist and bigoted and misogynist character, as if it’s okay. It’s being co-signed. And if we elect it again, it’s going to stick. Are we going to allow that to be the character of who we are?”

While Waller has always preached civic engagement from Enon’s pulpit, he has had to expand his presence on social media to make up for the lost opportunity to speak to his flock in person.

He retooled his Righteous Warrior page on Facebook, which he originally set up for his side business as an executive coach and a book he wrote on “moral manhood,” to focus on voting issues. There, since October 5, Waller has recorded daily “30 days to the polls” prayer videos that compare attributes of God with political themes. They attract 3,000 to 5,000 views each.

In the October 10 video, Waller, sitting in his basement and wearing a LeBron James T-shirt and a “Make Hate Wrong Again” ballcap, read six verses from the Psalms describing God as a defender of the afflicted, the fatherless and the oppressed. “How can we be defenders and particularly in this political time?” he asks. He tells his viewers they’re defending against hate, injustice, “the takeover of the Supreme Court,” and “turning our democracy and our democratic institutions into a Russian oligarchy.”

Then, as always, he encourages his viewers to vote. “The same way God is a defender for you, you need to view yourself as a defender of your community and of this land.” The video racks up 3,800 views and 162 comments: “Defend our democracy,” “Mailed in that ballot,” “I voted yesterday—praise God!”

Enon hosted two drive-through voter sign-up days in September, when people, socially distanced in their cars, could register to vote, apply for a mail-in ballot and volunteer as poll workers.

On November 3, for the first time, Enon’s two church properties will become voting locations, replacements for former sites that are too small to allow for social distancing. To keep the site neutral, Waller said, voting will be the only activity at the church that day other than food trucks paid for by the get-out-the-vote fund Black Voters Matter. “This year, our efforts needed to stand up the system, because the system itself is threatened,” Waller said.

Efforts like Waller’s have contributed to a surge of interest in voting across Philadelphia. The city’s voter registration is at a 35-year high, at 1.1 million voters, more than 90 percent of those eligible. In June, the number of polling places in Philly shrank from 831 a year ago to only 190, mostly because older poll workers declined to work during the pandemic. This November, thanks to poll-worker recruitment drives like Enon’s, Philadelphia will have 718 polling locations and a nearly full contingent of 8,200 poll workers, chosen from 20,000 who offered to work. “There was an outpouring of volunteerism,” said Pat Christmas, policy director for the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan good-government group in Philadelphia. Thanks to Pennsylvania’s 2019 law allowing all residents to vote by mail, 429,000 Philadelphians requested mail-in ballots by the October 27 deadline, and 266,000 have already returned them.

Yet mail-in ballots are much more prone to disqualification than votes cast in person. In September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that so-called “naked ballots”—those sent without an inner security envelope, just the outer return envelope—won’t be counted. (Philadelphia counted its naked ballots in the June primary and previous elections, before the ruling, as did many other counties in Pennsylvania.) A Philadelphia elections official has estimated that the naked-ballot ruling could disenfranchise 100,000 mail-in voters statewide.

So Waller is doing his part to keep mail-in and early-ballot mistakes low. He’s appeared in a city-produced video on how to vote at Philadelphia’s early-voting satellite locations. Wearing a “Black Voters Matter” mask, he narrated and acted out putting the ballot inside the two envelopes, in proper order. On Zoom, he held a seminar with the Penn Memory Center on how to help disabled relatives vote absentee.

Despite the pandemic, Waller only recommends mail-in voting for people 60 and older, and he’s advising older voters to take their ballots to a drop box, rather than rely on the postal service. He thinks voters under 60 should vote in person on Election Day. “If you are able-bodied and can go on that day, I suggest that you walk in and do it,” he said.

One reason Waller advises younger voters to cast a ballot in person is to help counter what he expects will be Trump’s plan to prematurely claim victory before Pennsylvania’s count is done. Unlike 46 states, Pennsylvania doesn’t allow election officials to open mail-in ballot envelopes for pre-processing until Election Day. Philadelphia and other counties took two weeks to count the mail-in votes after Pennsylvania’s June 2 primary. Though Philadelphia has since spent $5 million on high-speed sorting and counting machines, officials believe the city may need most of Election Day week to count all ballots.

Trump’s attacks on mail-in balloting have convinced many Republicans to vote in person. Across the state, Democrats requested 1,925,000 mail-in ballots by the October 27 deadline, compared to Republicans’ 775,000. That could create what Democrats are calling a potential “red mirage”—early in-person returns showing a Republican lead before final results confirm a Democratic victory. “Because of the mail-in ballots and the walk-in people, it’s almost as if two elections are going on,” Waller said. “I honestly believe that we’re going to have to win both, or he’s going to try and steal it.”

On Election Day, Waller will step away from his virtual outreach and resume his in-person habits from years past.

Waller will help organize Philadelphians’ participation in Lawyers and Collars, an eight-state election-protection effort that will pair pastors with election lawyers at 15 polling locations around Philly. Four years ago, when Trump first called for his Pennsylvania voters to “watch other polling places,” Waller and his allies braced for possible voter intimidation but encountered no major incidents.

This year, at the first debate, Trump said, “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.” (Poll-watchers are legal in Pennsylvania—but only if they’re certified by their local elections board and watch polls in their home county.)

Waller said he thinks it’s “a probability” that groups such as the Proud Boys, a far-right neo-fascist organization, will come to Philly on Election Day. Trump, he said, “has called up a whole part of our country that wants to do evil.” So Waller said he and others will be ready to show up and defend Philadelphia’s vote from any disruption. “We will, like we did four years ago, have men all around the city,” Waller said, “prepared so that nothing will hamper a free and fair election and someone getting to the polls.”

Waller himself will start the day at a polling place near his church, encouraging voters to vote. Then he’ll travel across Philly’s Black neighborhoods to see if voting is going smoothly, and call ward leaders if it isn’t.

On Election Night 2016, as midnight neared and Trump’s victory grew imminent, Waller spoke to the last 20 congregants lingering at Enon’s deflated watch party. “We’ve lived through bad presidents before,” he reassured them. Today, he offers no such solace.

“There’s a real threat that we didn’t see in ’16,” he said. “The night after Donald Trump won, I felt bad that he won, but you could not tell me that he was going to be as horrible a human being as he has turned out to be. … We’re wrestling with a whole other thing that is below criminal, and that threatens to turn the very country that we built into something that we won’t recognize.”

Biden, by contrast, “is the comfortable shoe that will allow us to get our footing again,” Waller said. “I have not stood up and just said, ‘Vote for Joe Biden.’ But anybody that listens to me knows who I’m saying to vote for.”

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Historic vaccine race meets harsh reality

Pfizer’s admission Monday that it still doesn’t know whether its coronavirus vaccine works is a dose of reality for the historic global vaccine race.

The company’s failure to meet its self-imposed goal — having proof of efficacy in October — is the latest reminder that vaccine development is a long, complicated process that doesn’t stick to political deadlines. Despite the government and drug companies pumping billions of dollars into the vaccine race, getting shots into trials faster than ever before, and enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers in studies, a Covid-19 vaccine could still be months away.

“All [government and drugmaker] timelines assume that we have a vaccine that is actually shown to work and is safe before the end of the year,” says Peter Hotez, a virologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. “But we still have no guarantee.” Vaccines normally take years to produce, he adds.

Four shots are now in late-stage U.S. trials — and while they have faced bumps along the way that derailed President Donald Trump’s promises to have a vaccine before Election Day, all are still on track. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca were forced to pause their trials over safety concerns, but got the all-clear last week from the FDA to resume the studies.

Pfizer, a Trump favorite, held out hope that it would know this month whether its shot worked. That is now all but impossible. Though 36,000 people have received both doses of the vaccine or a placebo, the company has not yet recorded 32 cases of coronaviruses among participants. That is the standard the Pfizer set for its first hotly anticipated look at the trial data, known as an interim analysis.

That could mean that many volunteers in Pfizer’s trial simply have not been exposed to the virus. It could also mean that the vaccine is effective, but there have not been enough infections in the placebo group to prove it. Twenty-six infections among the placebo group and six among the vaccine group would signal that the shot is 77 percent effective, according to the company’s blueprint for its Phase III — or final stage — trial.

Umer Raffat, an analyst at Evercore ISI, says that other vaccine trials could see similarly slower-than-expected rates of infection among participants.

“If people enroll in this vaccine trial and don’t feel fever or major sore arm after the shot, they kinda know they got placebo, so they remain cautious and keep masks on,” he said. That extra caution could depress infection rates, delaying data that reveal whether a vaccine works or not.

The fourth company with a vaccine in a late-stage U.S. trial, Moderna, has been chugging along quietly towards its goal of filing for FDA review in late November. But the company’s vaccine relies on new technology that has never been used in a shot that has reached the market.

Many of the vaccine makers are walking a tightrope between optimism, given the so-far unprecedented pace of their coronavirus work, and caution driven by the knowledge that reaching the final stage of clinical testing doesn’t guarantee success.

J&J’s coronavirus shot relies on a tried-and-true technology that the company used in its recent Ebola vaccine. J&J’s candidate is the only one of the four front-runners that is given as one dose and it does not need as much cold storage as others.

The J&J shot “has some real advantages,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said during a National Press Club event on Friday.

Still, CEO Alex Gorsky has shied away from hard deadlines — saying only that J&J could begin regulatory review for its shot late this year or early next year.

He has also tried to manage expectations that the first vaccine to win emergency authorization would end the pandemic, noting this summer that mass-inoculation efforts would be unprecedented. “The world has never attempted something quite that large or quite that complex,” he said during Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference. “That’s why I think a vaccine, while a very critical element to bringing an end to this pandemic, is part of the puzzle.”

An integral part of the challenge is distributing vaccines, and assuring that people take them. Nine drugmakers including Pfizer, J&J, Moderna and AstraZeneca co-signed an open letter recently pledging to stick to science and put safety first. But public confidence is still sliding.

Nearly half of voters across party lines believe that Trump is pressuring the FDA to deliver a vaccine prematurely, according to a recent POLITICO and Morning Consult poll.

The looming election has only sharpened political rhetoric around vaccines. "I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don't trust Donald Trump,” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said during a debate last month. “And at this point, the American people can't, either.”

Those concerns won't evaporate if Biden wins the presidency. While voters in the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll would rather have him oversee vaccine development instead of Trump, only 47 percent say they trust Biden more. The most trusted official is Anthony Fauci, the top government infectious disease expert that Trump has derided for months. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” the president said weeks ago.

FDA sought to quell public fears with guidance this month that bolsters standards for any vaccine authorized for emergency use. But in a meeting of expert advisors for the agency last week, the question of consumer confidence hung heavy over the panel. Government officials and infectious disease scientists raised the possibility that average Americans would not want to take the first coronavirus vaccine, and that certain communities in particular — including Black Americans historically abused by medical research — would reject an eventual shot.

Then there is the question about when the U.S. might have enough doses of any vaccine to immunize most Americans. The Trump administration has pre-ordered millions of doses of several shots, betting that at least one will prove effective, but those early buys would treat only a fraction of the population.

Coronavirus vaccines will be distributed based on priority groups established, at first, on the federal level to put health care workers, vulnerable people and those likely to spread the virus first. But state and local authorities will ultimately make the call in their areas, especially if there are limited supplies.

“It’s a bit frustrating, but I think it would be unrealistic to expect that this is going to be widely available to older adults and people with high-risk conditions in early ‘21. That’s clearly not going to be the case,” said Edward Belongia, a director at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute who has advised CDC on its vaccine committee.

That is expected. While the first shots could be authorized in the final weeks of 2021, federal health officials, drugmakers and Trump himself have said a stockpile to vaccinate all Americans will not be feasible before April 2021. From there, the arduous task of reaching vulnerable, isolated and skeptical people continues.

“People are watching this process very closely. We have to get it right the first time," Belongia said. "We have already lost a lot of public trust and the process needs to go well, with no hiccups."

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Zeta cuts short early voting in Florida Republican strongholds

TALLAHASSEE — Three counties in Florida’s conservative Panhandle are limiting early voting hours ahead of Hurricane Zeta, which is expected to hit the region Wednesday.

The shortened voting hours in the Republican strongholds come less than a week before Election Day, as millions of votes are being cast in the swing state. Republicans have used in-person early voting to chip into Democrats‘ vote-by-mail lead.

Escambia, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa counties are easy wins for President Donald Trump. Escambia County, the site of a Trump rally just last week, supported the president with 60 percent of the vote in 2016. Trump won 74 percent of the vote in Santa Rosa County and 71 percent in Okaloosa County.

Walton County, another GOP stronghold, has not yet cut early voting hours, but is monitoring the situation, said state Rep. Brad Drake, a Republican who represents the county.

In Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, early voting sites will close at 3 p.m. Wednesday and reopen at 11 a.m. Thursday at the earliest, depending on the storm’s damage. Normal early voting hours are from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., meaning there will be eight fewer hours of early voting in the counties.

Early voting in Okaloosa county will close two hours early Wednesday and open two hours later than normal Thursday, county Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux said.

“It’s an abundance of caution for us,” Lux said in an interview. “Hurricane Sally just in September weakened a bunch of trees and power lines, so we need to be careful, but I do think we will get back up and running quickly.”

It is not the region’s first time dealing with a hurricane during election season. In 2018, Hurricane Michael, which reached Category 5 strength, hammered the Florida Panhandle just a month before Election Day, but voters still turned out in large numbers.

“If we know anything after Hurricane Michael it’s that northwest Florida is so patriotic [its] residents will vote no matter what,” said state Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola). “I’m just worried that a storm will hit a community still reeling from Sally, wildfires and Covid shutdowns.”

In Hurricane Michael's aftermath then-Gov. Rick Scott extended early voting hours, allowing polls to open earlier and stay open through Election Day.

Gov. Ron DeSantis spokesperson Fred Piccolo did not immediately respond to questions about whether the governor is considering any changes.

The storm could complicate the GOP’s emphasis this cycle on early in-person voting, a practice the party traditionally has dominated, but which has fallen off drastically amid persistent criticism from Trump that it is a vehicle for voter fraud.

Democrats have cast 614,547 more mail ballots than Republicans, but the GOP has outpaced Democrats by 315,526 votes since in-person early voting began Oct. 20.

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How the Senate GOP's right turn paved the way for Barrett

One day after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, President Donald Trump told Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that “lots of people” thought Barbara Lagoa would be the best pick for the Supreme Court.

After all, the Cuban American judge from Florida could give a huge political boost to the president in a key swing state.

McConnell had a rebuttal: Pick Amy Coney Barrett instead, according to GOP leadership and White House aides. McConnell argued Barrett, an ardent social conservative, would have the best chance of uniting the party — and if Trump even thought of picking someone else, he needed to call McConnell and give him a chance to change the president’s mind.

The majority leader’s call with the president was sandwiched in between intense lobbying sessions with the president’s top aides on Sept. 19. Before speaking to Trump, McConnell told White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows that Barrett had the strongest shot at confirmation. She was the “obvious” choice, McConnell said, even as Meadows quizzed him on Allison Jones Rushing, an appellate court judge.

On Monday, eight days before the presidential election, Barrett was confirmed. It’s a win not just for McConnell and Trump; it marks a sea change in how Republicans handle judicial nominees amid the decades-long war over abortion rights. Just two years ago, Barrett was seen as possibly too conservative to be confirmed by a narrow Republican Senate majority, and too hostile to Roe v. Wade. This time around, McConnell argued to the White House not to meet with anyone other than Barrett, according to the aides.

The shift comes after Republicans picked up two seats in the 2018 midterms along with a harder-right turn in the conference's center of gravity. Soon Barrett began climbing the charts among Republicans to the point that when Ginsburg died in late September, she seemed almost inevitable. This spring, McConnell and Andrew Ferguson, his chief counsel, began discussing who they might have fill Ginsburg’s vacancy if it arose in the waning weeks of Trump’s term. In that meeting, the GOP leader and his top staffers settled on Barrett, according to the leadership aide.

By the time she was confirmed 52-48, every Republican other than Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted for her, with Collins only expressing opposition to confirming a high court nominee in an election year. There wasn’t even much drama in the end.

“We did a lot of outreach to find out where people were, who they liked. And by the time this one became vacant, there were a lot of unsolicited [requests from senators]: ‘I want Barrett,’” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “The calculus going into this was probably a little different than it was before.”

With their majority in danger and Trump now an underdog in his reelection campaign, it could be years before Republicans can put another stamp on the high court. But they might not need to: they’ve clinched a conservative majority for perhaps decades. And Republicans are confident that Barrett will be a rock-ribbed majority-maker for the right that does not deviate from the conservative line like some other justices appointed by Republican presidents.

Still, there was plenty of maneuvering behind the scenes in the days after Ginsburg’s death. Lagoa, for one, had surfaced as a potentially more mainstream alternative to Barrett.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appealed to Trump on Lagoa’s behalf and Trump responded that he “heard great things about her and liked her a lot,” Rubio recounted. But the Appeals Court judge was also seen as a gamble.

“Lagoa is a great judge but just no real paper trail, no real sense of what she would do even as a circuit judge,” said a person familiar with the nomination process. “Amy had three years under her belt. It seemed like the White House was running around trying to do anything but Amy.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had pledged that he would only support a Supreme Court nominee that understands “that Roe was wrongly decided.” Two days after Ginsburg’s death, Hawley raised concerns to Cipollone about Lagoa’s lack of record on Roe, raising the prospect of a difficult confirmation hearing.

“I’m not asking you to confirm or deny if these are the two final contenders. But I’ll just tell you right now, if it’s Barbara Lagoa … my problem with her is that I don’t see anything when it comes to Roe,” Hawley said he told told Cipollone of Lagoa and Barrett.

Trump offered the job to Barrett one day later, just three days after Ginsburg’s death. One other question still remained for the GOP: should the confirmation be jammed in before the presidential election?

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) immediately began to call his colleagues after Ginsburg’s passing about their preferred timing. Lee favored confirming her before the election; he found many agreed.

“I did not see a lot of debate occurring within the conference,” Lee said in an interview.

But despite the lightning quick vote, Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was years in the making.

Former White House Counsel Don McGahn played a key role in pushing Barrett’s nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and even attended her confirmation hearing and swearing in.

Barrett particularly impressed conservatives with her handling of questions about her Catholic faith from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said at a 2017 hearing that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”

“Because of the skill and the aplomb with which she responded, I think that might have been one of the moments that caused people to start thinking of her as a Supreme Court nominee,” Lee recalled. “She would have been fully justified in responding much more angrily than she did.”

Shortly after her confirmation to the Appeals court, Barrett was added to Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist and she was widely viewed as the runner-up to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

Trump at the time made it clear to several individuals that he would save Barrett for a potential Ginsburg vacancy, according to Leonard Leo, the former executive vice president of the Federalist Society who has played a key role in advising Trump’s nominees.

But at the time, Trump’s sentiment seemed somewhat divorced from reality on Capitol Hill. Barrett’s personal opposition to abortion rights would likely lose Collins and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the thinking went, dividing the party on one of the few unifying priorities: judges.

Yet the arrival of Hawley and other conservatives on the Judiciary Committee along with the departure of Trump critic Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) set the stage for Barrett’s ascendance. Hawley was emblematic of how quickly the party had shifted.

He had spent a year and a half on the warpath against what he saw as squishy vetting of the party’s judicial nominees, beginning in 2019 with Neomi Rao, a nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court who was viewed with suspicion by anti-abortion groups. Eventually Rao was confirmed with Hawley’s support, but conservatives warned if she were picked for the Supreme Court it would be an entirely different situation.

Over the summer, Cipollone asked Leo about Rao in a call. Leo responded that if she were included on Trump’s next list of potential Supreme Court picks, she could be attacked by some conservatives and that may not be good for her or the president, according to an individual close to the White House.

The list released in September 2020 included Hawley’s name, along with Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). One name was notably not on the list: Rao.

Even after Barrett was nominated there was still discomfort among some Republicans with emphasizing her conservative personal views on social issues, particularly her opposition to abortion. In their fight against Barrett, Democrats warned she could overturn the landmark Roe decision if confirmed.

Throughout her confirmation process, Republicans insisted Barrett could separate her personal views from her judicial decisions, though most avoided talking about how she might rule on abortion cases. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) even approached Hawley on the Senate floor and urged him to focus on the legalese “substantive due process as a legal process” as an alternative to abortion.

Hawley wasn’t persuaded.

“I want to try and do my part to make it okay for people to be openly pro-life to be openly critical of Roe, to be a religious conservative,” Hawley said in an interview. “I think that’s okay. You don't have to hide that.”

And by the time she was nearing confirmation, most Republicans weren’t shying away from her anti-abortion stance — they were embracing it. Now involved in a tough race for reelection, Graham saw the issue as a cudgel to use against his opponent.

“This is the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life,” Graham said during Barrett’s confirmation hearing. “And she is going to the court.”

During those hearings, Barrett frustrated Democrats by declining to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act, abortion or the upcoming election. But even under normal circumstances, her conservative views would have been too much for all but perhaps one or two Democratic senators.

In the end, even Murkowski was swayed, perhaps the most shocking event during the entire confirmation process. She had opposed confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to the presidential election, but said on Saturday that she didn’t hold it against Barrett, who she said had “navigated the gauntlet with grace, skill and humility.”

“Political consultants are always trying to say, ‘I did this and I did that and I should take credit.’ That’s how they earn their living,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Judiciary Committee. “Judge Barrett won this one.”

John Bresnahan and Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.

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In Wisconsin decision, Supreme Court foreshadows election night cliffhanger

As a divided Supreme Court on Monday resolved a fight over absentee voting rules in Wisconsin, the justices exchanged warnings about a troublesome scenario: the possibility that next week’s presidential election leads to days or even weeks of legal maneuvering and uncertainty about the winner.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh conjured up the specter of such a protracted battle as he argued in favor of allowing states to maintain firm deadlines requiring absentee ballots to be received by election officials on Election Day.

“Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion released Monday night. “And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”

Kavanaugh also quoted a prominent law professor’s caution that allowing the election to drag out could fuel claims of foul play.

“Late-arriving ballots open up one of the greatest risks of what might, in our era of hyperpolarized political parties and existential politics, destabilize the election result,” New York University Professor Richard Pildes wrote in a June law review article about the challenges posed by this year’s election. “If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode. The longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry that the election has been stolen.”

Kavanaugh, an appointee of President Donald Trump, did not mention any prominent politicians already stoking such fears. But one is Trump himself.

Indeed, just about 10 minutes after the justices issued their decision in the Wisconsin dispute, Trump tweeted out his latest warning that any results that come in after election night should be considered illegitimate.

“Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA,” Trump wrote, without offering evidence for his assertion. “Must have final total on November 3^rd.” (Twitter labeled the post “disputed,” saying it “might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process.”)

Republicans and Trump’s campaign have taken a series of legal actions to enforce ballot-receipt deadlines and are even arguing that federal law requires that every ballot counted come in by Election Day. Democrats and civil rights groups have pressed for extensions of the deadlines in various states, citing postal delays and the massive surge in people seeking to use mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Justice Elena Kagan used her dissenting opinion in the Wisconsin case on Monday to deliver a tart reply to Kavanaugh’s stated fears about a drawn-out vote-counting process. She also signaled that if a legal fight erupted after Election Day, the court’s liberals would be inclined to make sure every vote was counted and would look with disfavor on arbitrary deadlines that nullify some votes.

“Justice Kavanaugh alleges that ‘suspicions of impropriety’ will result if ‘absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,’” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“But there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted. And nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or ‘improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”

Zach Montellaro contributed to this report.

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Twitter labels Trump post about mail ballots as ‘disputed’ and ‘misleading’

Twitter blocked a post by President Donald Trump on Monday that claimed, without evidence, there were “problems and discrepancies” with mail-in ballots “all over the USA.”

“Must have final total on November 3rd,” Trump wrote at the end of his post.

The social media company said the tweet was “disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process.”

The president’s tweet came as the Supreme Court rejected a six-day extension for absentee ballots in Wisconsin amid the coronavirus pandemic, with the court siding with Republicans and splitting 5-3 along ideological lines. The court’s order came just minutes before the Senate voted to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as Trump’s third nominee to the high court.

Trump’s misleading claim on Monday added to his continued assault on mail-in voting. While mail-in ballots have proved to be secure and are already used broadly in several states, the president has issued false and misleading information about the process.

In the first presidential debate last month, the president challenged the security of the November election, claiming mail ballots might be “manipulated.”

“This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen,” the president said of the expansion of mail voting during the pandemic, without offering any evidence to support such a broad assertion.

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Civil rights groups sue de Blasio, NYPD over protest response

NEW YORK — The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society are suing Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYPD brass, charging they are responsible for the “indiscriminate brutalizing of peaceful protestors” during a wave of demonstrations that swept the city earlier this year.

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday morning in Manhattan argues the city’s treatment of protesters who turned out after the killing of George Floyd violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights. De Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea drew widespread condemnation for police aggression during the demonstrations.

“The police response to the protests was brutal, and the wanton display of brute force against people who were out there protesting non-violently was shocking,” NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman said in an interview. “It was harmful. It was traumatic. And it was unlawful.”

News of the lawsuit was first reported by POLITICO.

Eleven plaintiffs named in the complaint say that while participating in protests between May 28 and June 28, they were beaten with batons, hit with pepper spray or subjected to “kettling” — a tactic in which police hemmed in and charged protesters. One protester’s arm was broken.

Some protesters said they were arrested and jailed without food, water or medical care, in crowded conditions that put them at risk for Covid-19. They also say police failed to wear masks as required by state law.

The suit charges that de Blasio, who publicly defended the NYPD’s response to the protests, maintained a de facto policy of allowing police officers to violently target protesters by approving forceful deployments and failing to discipline officers for their actions. In addition to the mayor, Shea and Chief of Department Terence Monahan are named as defendants.

“The Mayor of New York and the NYPD’s leadership condoned and even promoted that violence,” the lawsuit says. “As the protests continued and well documented, indisputable patterns of unlawful use of force emerged, the Mayor, the Commissioner, and Chief Monahan deliberately did not take steps to prevent police from using those tactics again and again. Instead, they repeatedly praised the actions of the NYPD, promoting, authorizing, sanctioning and encouraging further violence.”

De Blasio instituted a curfew in the city for the first time in decades in response to incidents of looting and vandalism.

In the face of outcry over police officers using force to disperse peaceful protesters, including from many of his own former aides and supporters, de Blasio mostly defended the NYPD — maintaining that the police force “uses as light a touch as possible,” though he acknowledged he had not seen widely circulated videos of cops rushing protesters and striking them with batons.

“He’s the apologist in chief,” Lieberman said.

The suit says the attacks on protesters were directed by NYPD supervising officers, including the highest ranks of police leadership, and carried out in retaliation for the demonstrators’ anti-police message.

The actions of de Blasio, Monahan and Shea "constitute a City policy to engage in excessive force, discriminate on the basis of viewpoint against those fighting for greater police accountability for brutality, and retaliate against people engaged in their constitutionally protected right to protest," the suit says.

The NYPD said it would review the suit. The mayor's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Bronx resident Vidal Guzman, one of the plaintiffs, said he was pepper sprayed in the face while protesting on the Lower East Side at the end of May and fell to the ground when hit with the spray, injuring his leg.

“A lot of people got injured that day,” he said. “It felt more like World War III, and the people they were going against were their own citizens.”

The suit asks a judge to rule that the city violated the First Amendment, which protects the right to protest, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and to award damages to the plaintiffs.

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Progressive Caucus eyes shakeup to boost power next Congress

Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are plotting a major overhaul of the group, aiming to leverage the power of the House’s most left-leaning faction in a way it never has before.

But the proposed changes have set off panic with several members who expressed concerns that the CPC is quickly morphing into a “Freedom Caucus of the left.” Others are worried the moves are designed to consolidate power behind current co-chair Pramila Jayapal — who is expected to be the sole leader next year — with multiple lawmakers going so far as to privately describe the changes as a “power grab” by the Washington Democrat.

It’s a charge Jayapal fiercely disputed in an interview Monday, saying the proposed changes are reforms to make the group more democratic internally and more effective within the broader House Democratic Caucus. The ability to move swiftly and aggressively, Jayapal and other progressives said, could be particularly important next year, when Democrats are expected to grow their ranks in the House and could also control the White House and Senate.

“The goal is really to make the CPC more member-driven and also more effective and more nimble,” Jayapal said. “I just don’t think there’s anyone who knows who would question all of the different ways that I’ve worked to help strengthen the progressive caucus and this is just a continuation of that.”

“The whole idea of a power grab is really silly,” she added, noting that the reforms package was assembled by a group of a dozen CPC members who held multiple meetings at both the member and staff level over the past two months.

The proposed overhaul comes as the CPC has emerged as a significant bloc within the broader Democratic Caucus and with its membership expected to expand next Congress. Backers of the changes say they’re intended to unify the group and strengthen its power as a liberal force, particularly if the party holds all the levers of power in Washington.

The tensions within the CPC are likely to come to a head on Tuesday, when the roughly 100-member caucus will hold a phone conference to consider the proposed reform package.

Over the past Congress, the progressive caucus has been led by Jayapal and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), but Pocan is stepping down from the post.

The two co-chairs have often operated within the conventional power structure of the House, working privately with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make progressive changes to high-priority legislation including prescription drug and immigration bills. That’s been much to the dismay of some of the caucus’ higher-profile members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who would prefer a more public — and aggressive — pushback to leadership.

The biggest revision being considered would move the CPC from two chairs to one. This would be seen as boosting Jayapal’s profile within the House, said several Democratic lawmakers and aides who speculated it could be a launching pad for future leadership ambitions. Jayapal laughed off the claim, saying she’s running to be the chair of the CPC and nothing more.

Other potential changes include new policies for attendance and voting requirements that could result in some lawmakers being put on probation by the group if they don’t meet certain thresholds, including on caucus unity. CPC leaders say those reforms — including having a single chair — would put them in line with virtually every other Democratic caucus within the House.

Lawmakers who are unhappy with the proposed changes declined to go on the record for fear of a backlash. But some of the internal friction over the rules changes have boiled over in recent days. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a leader of the task force in charge of the reforms package, resigned as chairman over the weekend, though he remains part of the panel.

“I am still a member of the task force, but I did resign as the chairman of the task force on reform,” Raskin confirmed in an interview Monday. “The co-chairs of the CPC — Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal — have really taken the lead on the bylaw reforms, and they are much better spokespeople for the proposed changes.”

Raskin was expected to run for the co-chair position being vacated by Pocan but is not going to challenge Jayapal for the sole chairmanship if the reforms package is enacted, according to multiple CPC members. The Maryland Democrat said while “many” of his ideas have been incorporated into the proposal, he “had a different perspective” about part of it, but he declined to be specific.

Among the proposed changes is an attendance mandate, which would require members to be present for at least 50 percent of meetings, with exceptions for congressional duties like committee hearings and family emergencies.

Another new policy would allow any member to seek a formal CPC position on a bill, putting the caucus on the record for or against any legislation as long as two-thirds of the members agree.

That’s a major departure from the current policy, under which Jayapal and Pocan would simply decide whether the caucus should take a formal stance on a bill. Members will also be expected to vote with the CPC two-thirds of the time on the House floor whenever the group takes an official position or risk probation.

“It’s not us deciding what we’re whipping on. It’s the members deciding. So we’ve taken away the ability for one or two people to have the solitary say of the entire caucus,” Pocan said in an interview Monday.

Pocan, who said he “self term-limited” after two terms leading the caucus, also backed Jayapal in the decision to consolidate leadership into a single post, rather than two co-chairs. Asked about some members’ concerns that it centralized too much power in one person, Pocan argued: “It actually does the opposite of that. ... The heart of this is really around empowering members to be more active.”

Several progressives acknowledged that the stricter rules may upset some within the diverse group, with a few lawmakers telling POLITICO they may choose to leave all together.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), a senior progressive who helped shape the changes, said the biggest concerns she’s heard so far are over the attendance policy and expects a "vigorous dialogue" on Tuesday, though she thinks people will be on board when they read the details.

Several CPC leaders, including Jayapal and Pocan, added that the intention is for members to be more involved within the group, not to shrink the roster.

“We are the progressive caucus, the intent is to have people who are intentional in being part of the progressive caucus,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who serves as CPC whip, said in an interview.

Omar added that she’s been hearing positive feedback from many potential incoming progressives, as well as the caucus’ current members, as she has whipped for the proposed changes in recent days.

Already one of the largest Democratic caucuses, the CPC is expected to gain prominent members, including two progressives who ousted long-time Democratic incumbents — Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. Other rising liberal stars, Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones in New York, are also expected to join once elected in November.

But the CPC at times has struggled to wield its influence since Democrats recaptured the House majority in 2018, even after the emergence of Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” — Omar and Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — brought unprecedented national attention to the rising left.

House progressives were always going to struggle to enact their agenda in a divided Congress with a Republican-controlled White House and Senate. Still, Pelosi has paid heed to the left wing of her caucus — tucking their priorities into the House’s coronavirus response bills, for example, or teeing up liberal messaging bills on the floor.

At the same time, Pelosi has sought to balance competing demands from her centrist members — a far smaller group, but one that tends to be more willing to vote as a bloc and which delivered Democrats the majority in 2018.

Jayapal and Pocan have been careful to avoid the “Freedom Caucus” label, even as many in their caucus felt emboldened by the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House. The conservative group frequently tormented GOP speakers and became known as hard-liners who could shut down the government but rarely implement their agenda.

The two progressive co-chiefs usually raised issues with Pelosi privately, rather than make demands or threats through the press, with exceptions for high-profile battles with moderates over the budget and immigration.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the reforms task force, said he doesn’t expect the CPC to suddenly transform into a left-leaning group of bomb-throwers, even with the new caucus changes.

“We could never be — nor do we aspire to be — the Freedom Caucus,” Khanna said Monday. “The reason for that is we’re trying to build something, not tear something down.”

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Supreme Court won't extend Wisconsin ballot deadline

The Supreme Court has declined to reinstate a court-ordered extension of the deadline for the receipt of absentee ballots in Wisconsin, siding with Republicans in a pitched battle over election procedures amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The justices split, 5-3, along ideological lines, with all the court’s Republican appointees voting to reject the six-day extension a U.S. District Court judge issued last month in the key presidential swing state.

The high court brushed aside complaints from Democrats and civil rights groups that enforcing the usual deadline of Election Day could leave thousands of ballots uncounted due to postal service changes and the massive number of voters seeking to vote by mail instead of in person.

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Biden flips script on Trump in campaign’s final week

Donald Trump is chasing every possible opening across the electoral map. Joe Biden is sitting on his lead, carefully surveying the landscape for states that might serve as insurance policies.

It’s a jarring flip of the script for an incumbent president and his challenger eight days before Election Day. Trump, in the last gasp of his campaign, is barreling across the country, hoping large rallies and bets placed across the board will pay off for his underdog campaign. Biden is doing fewer and smaller events — and even peering past the election toward governing.

“To say it’s a role reversal is an understatement,” said Kelly Dietrich, a former Democratic fundraiser and founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country.

Trump’s frenetic campaigning is occurring as the fates continue to defy his reelection campaign. Weeks after the president’s own hospitalization for Covid-19, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, tested positive on Saturday for the coronavirus amid spiking cases nationwide, even as Trump continued to downplay the pandemic. And what would normally be a signature achievement for an incumbent president, the imminent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court was largely lost in the noise.

The heightened focus on the coronavirus comes at the worst possible time for Trump, providing a fresh hook for Biden to continue lacerating the Republican president for his handling of the coronavirus and the economy.

Incumbent presidents have only been denied reelection two times in the post-World War II era — the last to lose was George H.W. Bush in 1992. But as Trump enters the final week down 8 percentage points nationally — and vulnerable not only in traditional swing states, but in conservative strongholds such as Texas — he is stumping with the fierce desperation of a challenger. There were five appearances in five different states across two time zones over the weekend; he’s back out again to a sixth state on Monday morning, this time to Pennsylvania.

On Tuesday, Trump will appear in Wisconsin and Michigan — but also in Omaha, competing for a single Electoral College vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. The next day it’s Arizona and Nevada.

With Trump at risk on so many varied fronts, there is no single, obvious place for him to go to stanch the bleeding. Instead, he is seeking to prop up his base in as many states as possible, while Republicans hope unfavorable polls and turnout models are off, just as in 2016.

Trump’s campaign said he will focus intently in the final days of the campaign on the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where in-person voting on Election Day is expected to be especially heavy.

Biden is stumping at a more measured pace. His weekend featured just two events in one swing state. On Tuesday, he’ll visit Georgia — a red state Trump is at risk of losing — a luxury play for a Democratic nominee, enabled by Biden’s solid positioning elsewhere.

Trump’s advisers maintain they are confident Republicans will turn out in heavy numbers on Election Day. The president himself continues to express unalloyed optimism about his chances. He derides Biden as a creature of Washington, often referring to his “47 years” of government experience. Yet as the current occupant of the White House — as opposed to the candidate who had never before held elected office, as in 2016 — he is laboring under the weight of incumbency.

Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign's director of battleground strategy, said the distinction is not so much incumbent-challenger as, “It’s insider versus outsider. It’s someone who sat in the United States Senate for decades, and most of what he did there was not helpful for the American people, and as vice president, a lot of things that he’s now saying he would do were never considered.”

“They think they can run this race solely on COVID,” he said. “But I think as a general rule, voters want to vote for something, and not against something.”

But Trump’s messaging is far less focused and disciplined than a traditional incumbent’s would be in the closing days of a campaign — ranging from revived allegations against Biden’s son Hunter over his work for an overseas energy company, to Trump’s prosecution of the “fraudulent media” to his indictments against Barack Obama and “crooked” Hillary Clinton, two Democrats he isn’t running against.

Against that backdrop, many of Trump’s most potent policy positions from his tenure in office have been largely subordinated, such as immigration and trade.

Even if Trump could narrow his argument to a pure repudiation of Biden’s decades in government, there is little evidence it would work. Trump is in danger of losing the election precisely because it has been a referendum on his presidency, and Biden is not letting up in the final week. He is skewering Trump for his handling of the pandemic, which campaign aides say he will continue to emphasize in the closing days of the campaign.

On Friday, the United States hit a new single-day record of 83,010 new coronavirus cases. On Sunday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows acknowledged "we're not going to control the pandemic.” And as the final full week of the campaign opens, Trump cannot seem to escape that.

“Looking at Trump’s approval numbers, they are not moving,” said Hari Sevugan, a Democratic strategist who worked for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign and is an Obama veteran. “If you’re the incumbent and you’re 10 days out and you’ve failed that test, it is really hard to come back.”

In contrast, Sevugan said, “If [Biden] comports himself like a president, he’s doing the campaign work, he’s offering the strongest contrast he can … that is the thing that people want to see more than anything else, especially amongst independent voters, amongst undecided voters and amongst Democrats.”

Trump’s campaign is not without life. Republicans have cut significantly into Democrats’ early-vote lead in Florida. Democrats are still wary of a surge of late voting by rural, white voters in the upper Midwest, and Trump is drawing energetic crowds of supporters to his rallies, which could have at least a marginal impact on turnout. Though Biden is vastly out-raising Trump, his reelection effort announced it raised $26 million after last week’s final presidential debate, the Trump campaign’s largest digital fundraising day on record.

“He’s running, from an event standpoint, the same campaign” that he ran in 2016, said Bill McCoshen, a Republican strategist based in Madison, Wis. Trump has “a real shot to win the Electoral College,” McCoshen said, in part because Trump’s rallies help him to sign up new voters who did not participate in 2016 — and who can still vote on Election Day.

Even so, the challenges for Trump remain severe. Outside the underlying horserace data heading into the final week before Election Day, congressional district and even county-by-county polling data in battleground states suggest Trump continues to languish across key parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Iowa, a welcome sign for his detractors in the final days.

Trump’s numbers are down from 2016, even in places where he continues to lead Biden. And the rising number of coronavirus cases has served as a reminder of Trump’s uneven approach to the pandemic, undercutting his late assurances that the nation has rounded the corner on the virus. Hinting at the prospect of a post-Trump reality in Wilmington, Del., Biden said he will talk with state and local leaders during a prospective transition period to develop a coronavirus relief bill that he could sign by the end of January, just days after he would take office.

Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and Trump critic who has been focused on peeling away a sliver of Trump’s GOP support through his work with the Lincoln Project, said it’s already too late for any last-minute developments that could shift momentum in Trump’s favor.

“All of his base is going to show up on Election Day, so whatever October surprise or whatever money he’s got, he needed to spend yesterday,” Madrid said in response to late ad-buying by the Trump campaign as it pushes back into states like Minnesota. “He’s got a bigger time problem than a money problem and he’s got a huge money problem. It’s time. He’s running out of time.”

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Georgia’s legacy of voter suppression is driving historic Black turnout

ATLANTA — Almost every Black Georgia voter queuing up at the polls has a story about 2018.

Most waited for hours in lines that wrapped around their voting locations. Some were removed from the voter rolls arbitrarily, forcing them to fill out confusing provisional ballots on Election Day. Others stayed home altogether and — after watching Democrat Stacey Abrams lose the gubernatorial race by fewer than 60,000 votes — regretted that decision.

Now, voter enthusiasm among all races is at an all-time high in one of the most consequential battleground states in the country. So is voter anxiety.

In the shadows of billboards along I-85 and I-20 encouraging Atlantans to “VOTE EARLY,” barriers to that act loom large. There were reminders of this again during June’s egregious primary election: In populous, rapidly diversifying metro Atlanta counties like Fulton and Cobb, wait times extended up to six hours after polling locations were consolidated during the pandemic. The state’s new electronic voting machines also frequently malfunctioned, further slowing the ballot casting process.

Voters interviewed by POLITICO said anger over perceived voter suppression tactics is fueling their eagerness to cast early ballots. And indeed, Georgians are voting in numbers never seen before in the state’s history. Since Oct. 12, the first day of early voting, a staggering 2.7 million voters have cast a ballot — a nearly 110 percent increase from 2016. Beyond that, Democrats are organizing caravans, volunteering as election workers and serving as poll watchers. This level of enthusiasm is also a reflection of apprehension about the election: Voters here are turning out in waves.

Georgia “has been a solid red state,” said LaTosha Brown, a Georgia native and co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which has mobilized African American voters across the South. But now, she said, “It's a purple state. You're seeing a rapid shift in the demographics. So this isn't about just partisanship. This is about power.”

‘Y'all Need Some Help’

Aurelia Gray, a lifelong Georgia voter, signed up to be an election volunteer for the first time following her experience at the polls in her suburban Stonewall Tell community, located in Fulton County, during the June primary. After waiting four hours in line to vote, she said, she was inspired to act.

“I said, ‘If I don’t do nothing else, I’m going to sign up to work the polls,’” said Gray, who is African American. She told poll workers in her neighborhood, “It seems like y’all need some help.”

Gray wasn’t the only one moved to volunteer. So many people signed up to help at Gray’s troubled polling place she was assigned to a different location. The precinct where she works now has wait times under an hour since the second week of early voting, thanks to a lower volume of voters and slew of young poll workers hired in Fulton County in response to June's debacle.

“You can’t sit and complain. You’ve got to do something to help and assist. And that’s what I did,” she said. “I just made up my mind to do something,”

Still, even with reinforcements, in the first week of early voting in the general election, Georgians waited as long as 11 hours to vote in some precincts. Others were in and out in 10 minutes.

Election officials scurried to fix the disparities. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, recruited 10,000 voters to work the polls. The state also commissioned buses stocked with voting machines, which allowed for drive-up voting around Fulton County and opened the 680,000-square-foot State Farm Arena with an additional 300 machines.

And now, as the state begins its last week of early voting, lines at the polls are moving much faster.

In Fulton County, which includes both the city of Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, wait times rarely exceeded 30 minutes since the first day of early voting — a far cry from the primary, where some voters did not leave precincts until the early hours of the following day. Suburban Cobb County is showing similar signs of improvement.

“You know, so far, we haven't had issues this week,” said Janine Eveler, the county’s director of elections and voter registration, on Thursday. “I'm hopeful that whenever [state officials] did to improve the system will continue to hold the increased demand.”

Troubles at the ballot box are propelling engagement, particularly among Black voters. An analysis from ProPublica’s Electionland found that predominantly Black precincts in the state were more likely to have the longest wait times, despite a surge in voter registrations there.

At the same time, participation even among Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc has soared ahead of the general election. More than 737,000 African Americans have already voted in Georgia. Black voting is on track to eclipse its 2008 record, when turnout increased by 8 percentage points among Black Georgians hyped to vote for Barack Obama.

“The thing is, this is the largest turnout, I think, statewide that I have ever seen,” said former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, noting a similar pattern nationwide. “And that's usually a very good sign. It's a good sign for democracy. Whoever they voted for.”

The former congressman, now 88, was recently named to a statewide elections improvement task force formed by Raffensperger. And, thanks to voter enthusiasm, he’s optimistic about Democrats’ chances.

“The candidates now have more confidence, and more money, and more organization,” Young said. “And some of the best commercials I have ever seen in my life.”

‘The stakes feel extraordinarily high’

The high level of Black voter engagement is the result of years of grassroots organizing, with a particular focus on mobilizing new voters — and protecting the vote. The New Georgia Project, which is marshaling young people of color across the state, averages a half-million calls and texts to millennial and Gen Z voters per week, according to its CEO, Nse Ufot.

“People are understanding that they are doing what they have to do, that the stakes feel extraordinarily high,” Ufot said.

Georgia Democrats are building their hopes for a blue Georgia on record early voting numbers and turnout. Early voting among Georgians under 40 is more than three times what it was in 2016, as nearly 600,000 young voters in the state have cast a ballot, according to the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group that registers new voters.

And while Black voters are setting records, Asian American and Latino voters in particular will make the difference in the racially diverse Atlanta suburbs. According to data from APIAVote, which mobilizes Asian American voters, the number of AAPI voters in Georgia grew by 43 percent between 2010 and 2016. The Latino population in the state is one of the fastest-growing in the nation, swelling by 118 percent over the last two decades, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

Despite partisan gerrymandering that contributed to leaving more than 80 percent of Georgia’s state legislative races uncontested in 2016, demographic shifts are turning those suburban Atlanta counties increasingly Democratic.

Johns Creek, an affluent suburb just north of Atlanta and one-time Republican stronghold, which is now nearly a quarter Asian, voted blue in 2018. Gun control activist Lucy McBath, a Democrat and the mother of murdered Black teen Jordan Davis, defeated the Republican incumbent for the 6th Congressional District seat, which includes Johns Creek and other Atlanta suburbs.

“They're really doing the work,” said Abigail Collazo, a Georgia-based Democratic strategist and former Stacey Abrams spokesperson, of Asian American voters. “They're not automatically Biden's supporters. So you're talking like, not just, ‘Oh, let's just turn out the AAPI vote. It's persuasion. It's mobilization, its representation — and Kamala [Harris].’”

Still, President Donald Trump maintains a hold on his base in rural Georgia counties and whiter Atlanta suburbs, where voter skepticism has also driven an uptick in early votes by absentee ballot. A New York Times/Siena College poll out earlier this month shows Trump and Biden locked in a tie among Georgia voters, as did a CBS News Battleground Tracker poll released Sunday.

It’s led state Rep. Matthew Gambill, a Republican whose district includes Cartersville, a northern city in metro Atlanta, to doubt reports of a Democratic sweep next month.

“I think in my area that [voting] has gone very well,” he said, noting improvements in the state’s electronic voting system. “I still don’t see Georgia as a blue state, as some are saying that it is. I’m not 100 percent sure about that. I do still think that Georgia is more of a red state.”

‘A form of voter suppression’

Still, some problems persist — and threaten to make a compound difference in the outcome of the election. The online reporting software that allows voters to view wait times at their nearest polling location have proven faulty, with fast-moving lines falsely showing wait times above 60 and 90 minutes. And despite the state’s mandate to send absentee ballots to all Georgia voters who request them, some at the polls said they haven’t received theirs yet.

Jonie Blount, a Cobb County voter, said she received her absentee ballot in the mail but was wary of mailing it in due to Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Postal Service. But due to an injury, she was unable to wait in line so decided to drop off her ballot in person. She’s still concerned about the safety of her vote. In June, she learned her mail-in ballot for the Democratic primary was not accepted because it didn’t reach her assigned precinct in time.

“I hope that the ballot boxes are secure and there’s no way that anyone can get in and tamper or take out [my ballot],” said Blount, who is Black.

And while lines are faster moving, state officials have yet to designate the adequate amount of voting locations in keeping with state regulations. While Georgia law mandates that voting locations cap the number of people served at 2,000, counties serve well above 3,000 daily in some places, according to data from independent data analyst Ryan Anderson.

“It is a form of voter suppression to massively underfund and understaff and [under]prepare for the turnout that we have. After what we saw in June no one should have been caught off guard that we were going to have a massive, massive early vote turnout,” said state Rep. Erick Allen, one of a handful of Democratic legislators representing Smyrna, an Atlanta suburb. His district saw some of the longest wait times at the polls one week into early voting.

“Either it’s voter suppression or complete incompetence on the planning,” Allen said.

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As Covid threat surges, Trump and Pence try 2 acts to save GOP ticket

On election night 2016, as vote counts began trickling in from the first swing states, Marc Short texted his boss a warning.

Alarmed by the exit-poll data lighting up his phone, which reporters had sent alongside predictions of the Republican ticket’s resounding defeat, Short suggested to then-vice presidential nominee Mike Pence it would be wise to start thinking about how and when he and Donald Trump would concede. “I had texted that to Mike to help get him in the mindset,” recalled Short, one of several campaign aides who entered election day deeply skeptical of a positive outcome.

The moment the polls closed, Pence replied with an iconic picture: President Harry Truman holding up a Chicago Tribune newspaper with the erroneous headline “Dewey defeats Truman,” two days after Truman pulled off a history-making upset in the 1948 election.

“That’s all he texted back. He was always so convinced we were going to win and I think he has the same confidence right now,” recalled Short, who now serves as the vice president’s chief of staff.

Pence, a movement conservative with presidential ambitions of his own, is approaching the current race with similarly outsized optimism. He’s convinced the come-from-behind dream, which is animating the Trump campaign’s truest believers in the last eight days of the 2020 race, remains feasible — even as a growing cluster of Covid-19 infections among the vice president’s staff draws renewed attention to his administration’s inability to control the pandemic. Despite the blow to Pence’s credibility, as his own team is hobbled by the virus that he was supposed to contain nationwide, the vice president’s aides and allies said he remains hopeful he can still be useful in the final sprint to Election Day as he defies concerns about exposure risks and continues to campaign.

After polls last week showed the race tightening in some battleground states, Pence was left with no illusion about his delicate role — of shifting the focus away from Trump’s personality without irritating his boss or MAGA devotees — in the remaining days before the final voters cast their ballots.

“He did this in 2016, where he successfully signaled to conservatives it was OK to be for Trump. Now the target audience is suburban Republicans who aren’t comfortable with [the president’s] style, but care about the policy issues,” said Club for Growth president David McIntosh. “While Trump talks about law and order like ‘the gangs are coming, be careful,’ Pence is more nuanced and talks about how we need police to guard our schools in case there’s a shooting, or we need people to answer 911 calls.”

For the vice president today, the 2020 election is more important to his political future than the race he ran four years ago — a contest that could facilitate a future White House bid or complicate his path to higher office depending on the outcome. If Trump wins reelection, it’s plausible his ultra-loyal vice president inherits at least part of the MAGA base heading into the 2024 GOP primary — buoyed by a bond to Trump for four more years. But if voters emphatically reject the president on Nov. 3, the unavoidable traces of Trumpism in a Pence presidential campaign could be politically toxic, possibly even fatal.

“There’s a lot riding on the outcome for him,” said McIntosh, a longtime friend of Pence’s who has been in touch with the vice president in recent weeks. “He’ll either continue on as the sitting vice president or be a former vice president. Both of those are really important posts in American political life, but I know he has a preferred outcome.”

Hoping to dodge the ex-VP scenario, Pence has spent the final weeks of the 2020 race operating at full speed — a pace he plans to maintain this week without his top lieutenants. Late Saturday, Pence’s office confirmed that Short, his chief of staff, had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and would spend much of the final countdown to Election Day quarantining at his home. Longtime Pence political adviser Marty Obst, who has frequently accompanied him on campaign trips, also tested positive, along with at least two other staffers inside the vice president’s office, according to a senior administration official. The sudden outbreak set off alarm bells inside the Trump campaign late Saturday night, as aides wondered whether they should scrap the vice president’s schedule — an idea White House officials and Pence himself flatly rejected.

In the industrial Midwest, Pence has worked to court swing voters who have turned on Trump four years after he won them over with messaging on the economy, trade and the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he leads as head of the federal government’s Covid-19 task force. In Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, and other states with large swaths of Catholic and evangelical voters, he has held rallies and attended faith-based conferences to animate religious conservatives, whose turnout could be the deciding factor in Trump’s quest for reelection. In Arizona, a state long considered a GOP stronghold, Pence and his wife Karen have chased Latino voters and military veterans as part of a push to prevent the state from turning blue.

And in ways only the vice president can manage, he has ably defended Trump — for holding massive rallies that flout public health guidelines, delivering a pugnacious performance in the first presidential debate and nominating a Supreme Court justice one month before Election Day — with little evidence of damage to himself or their campaign’s overall efforts so far.

That could change this week as Pence faces fresh scrutiny over his and the president’s handling of Covid-19 in battleground states like North Carolina, where the state’s department of health and human services recently reported its highest single-day increase in new coronavirus cases since the disease first arrived in the United States.

Pence will spend the next week splitting his time between areas where “he can help with a lot of the faith community” and areas where voters care deeply about economic conditions and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to Short, who spoke with POLITICO before his positive diagnosis.

As Trump prepared for the final presidential debate Thursday in Nashville, Pence hosted a rally in Oakland County, Mich., focused on trade, fracking and how the president’s economic agenda differs from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s. On Friday, Pence visited Ohio, where the latest polling has shown Trump with a slight edge over Biden, and Pennsylvania, where Roman Catholics have long played a pivotal role in the swing vote.

“There’s a level of excitement you want and in a year where you have a pandemic, turnout is going to be important,” Short said, adding that Pence wants to ensure religious conservatives are “excited to come out and vote” for the Republican ticket.

The final stretch of the 2020 race has had no shortage of obstacles for Pence, who had already become the top surrogate for the Trump campaign when the president, his campaign manager Bill Stepien and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tested positive for Covid-19 at the beginning of the October. Following Trump’s performance in the first debate, where his incessant interruptions of Biden and moderator Chris Wallace led to bipartisan criticism, the vice president was forced to oversee a course-correction in his own debate against Kamala Harris.

“The first debate with the presidential candidates became a personality clash and nobody felt good about it once it was over,” said McIntosh, who was pleased with how the vice presidential debate subsequently unfolded. “Pence kind of refocused the election to be about policy differences and he did that in a sharp, but polite way.”

Then there was the president’s Oct. 9 appearance on The Rush Limbaugh Show, where he warned Iran not to “f— around” with the United States. One person familiar with the situation said the vice president’s team was annoyed by Trump’s profanity, which drew private criticism from evangelical leaders and prominent conservative Christians. Despite being chided for irreverent and coarse language at his rallies last year, Trump has continued to swear in front of audiences at some of his recent campaign stops. On a conference call with campaign staff last week, the president told his team to get off their “asses” and work as hard as possible in the final sprint to Election Day.

“The culture is coarse enough, especially for parents bringing up kids, without the POTUS further coarsening it,” tweeted Robert George, a prominent Catholic conservative and Princeton University professor, following Trump’s appearance on Limbaugh’s program.

Now, Pence is left with a barebones staff at the height of the 2020 race and renewed interest in the Covid-19 pandemic — one of the leading causes of the exodus of senior voters and suburban Americans from the Republican party.

Other moments on the campaign trail have underscored the disconnect between Pence’s careful handling of controversial topics and Trump’s tendency to stir further controversy. At a recent town hall in Miami, the president repeatedly insisted he didn’t know enough about the QAnon conspiracy theory movement to denounce it. Though Pence similarly said he didn’t “know anything about that” during a CNN appearance in August, he went a step further than his boss to say, “We dismiss conspiracy theories around here out of hand,” and canceled a Montana fundraiser in September after learning that the couple hosting it were unabashed QAnon supporters.

Pence has also defended Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, despite the president’s recent efforts to play down its severity by claiming infection rates are “rounding the turn” even as daily case counts hit fresh records, and expressed empathy in a manner that has escaped his boss for Americans grappling with the virus’ toll.

“Our nation’s gone through a very challenging time this year,” Pence said at the Oct. 7 vice presidential debate.

As much as Pence’s messaging and congested campaign schedule in the countdown to the November election are born out of a desire to secure victory, people close to the vice president acknowledge that there are also long-term advantages at play.

Through his face time with seniors, women, and suburban Americans — voting blocs that are trending away from the GOP — they say Pence is forging relationships that could prove valuable four years from now. And with his visible role on the campaign trail, where most of the president’s other top surrogates are members of the first family, Pence is reinforcing his image as the ultimate Trump loyalist for base voters who might prioritize loyalty to the president when the 2024 primary kicks into full gear.

“He’ll have a soapbox to stand on while so many others are scrambling to figure out what the Republican party should look like after Trump,” said Jon Thompson, a former Trump campaign aide. “Pence can really excel at walking both lines because the Trump base could support him, but so could the old guard and establishment Republicans who were very turned off by Trump.”

Should Trump fail to defeat his Democratic opponent on Nov. 3, Pence aides said they expect the vice president to spend 2021 quietly watching how the public responds to a Biden administration before reentering the political scene in 2022 to lend a fundraising hand to GOP governors and congressional hopefuls in their races and lay the groundwork for a potential White House bid two years later.

“In a very personal way he and Karen believe that come what may, things are going to be fine,” said McIntosh. “They have done what they were called to do and done it well, but they will be ready to pick up and move onto the next part of life.”

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