“It just went away”: Trump used his son’s positive Covid-19 test to downplay the pandemic

President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

“He was fine,” the president said in Thursday’s debate.

President Trump has long argued that schools in America must reopen, despite the risks of Covid-19. And during the final 2020 presidential debate on Thursday, he used his own son as a talking point to underplay the deadliness of the pandemic.

“We have to open our schools,” Trump said during an exchange about shutdowns. “As an example, I have a young son,” he went on. “He also tested positive. By the time I spoke to the doctor the second time he was fine. It just went away.”

Trump was speaking of his 14-year-old child Barron, who reportedly contracted the novel coronavirus along with the president and first lady, and more than 20 people in and around the White House at the time — a cluster believed to stem from an event celebrating the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

The president himself was hospitalized for several days with Covid-19, but now claims to be “cured,” thanks to an experimental antibody treatment not available to most ordinary Americans. And on Thursday, he used the experience of his son — who also likely had access to extraordinary health care, not to mention swift testing still inaccessible to many Americans — as part of a larger argument that businesses and schools should be open because “we can’t keep this country closed.”

It’s true that children are less likely than adults to become seriously ill from Covid-19. But Trump’s argument is likely to ring hollow to parents whose kids have underlying conditions putting them at higher risk, or to the parents of the 121 children who have died of the disease, 78 percent of whom have been children of color.

The reality is that even though children have not lost their lives to Covid-19 in the same devastating numbers as adults, many parents in America live in fear of their kids catching an illness that has killed 220,000 people — and whose long-term effects are still unknown. Many essential workers go to work every day terrified they will bring home the virus to their kids. By boasting that his son is fine, mere weeks after his infection, Trump risks trivializing not just the pain of those who have lost loved ones to the pandemic, but the fear of millions of everyday Americans who are doing their best to keep their kids safe under conditions that can seem impossible.

Barron “was fine,” but children have died

The fact that children are less likely to become severely ill from Covid-19 is often talked about as one of the few blessings in this pandemic. Children seem to be less likely to contract the virus than adults, and when they do get it, their cases are more likely to be asymptomatic or mild, according to the CDC.

But that doesn’t mean children can’t get the virus, or that their cases can’t be serious. A report published by the CDC in September found 390,000 cases of the virus in people under 21 between February 12 and July 31. And just like among adults, the virus is much more likely to be fatal in children of color, who experience the combined health impacts of systemic racism alongside the dangers of Covid-19. Of the 121 children who died of the virus between February and July, 45 percent were Hispanic, 29 percent were Black, and 4 percent were non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native, NPR reported.

Meanwhile, children who contract the coronavirus can also get an inflammatory condition similar to Kawasaki disease, which can require hospitalization. At least three children have died of this complication, which is not yet fully understood.

Moreover, the long-term impact of Covid-19 — on children and adults — remains unknown.

The debate over schools reopening is a complicated one, and families have gotten encouraging news lately, including the fact that the largest school system in the country, New York City’s, has reopened on a hybrid model with few positive cases so far.

But parents around the country have been faced with wrenching decisions this year — not just whether to send their kids back to school or day care when they can’t be sure it’s safe, but how to balance the possible risk to their children of working at frontline jobs their families need to survive. Many have taken every possible precaution, wearing masks, showering the second they come home, even living away from their families to keep them safe.

The president, meanwhile, has chosen not to wear a mask and to have close contact with other unmasked people, ultimately contracting the virus and potentially transmitting it to his son.

It is good news that Barron experienced no symptoms and soon tested negative. But for the millions of American parents who spend their days worrying about their kids getting Covid-19, for those who have cared for a child sick with Covid-19, and for those who, tragically, have lost a child to the disease, Trump’s use of his son to prove that schools should reopen is unlikely to be reassuring. Instead, it’s likely to seem heartless.

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There’s only one presidential candidate who we know accepts money from foreign sources

US President Donald Trump speaks during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

It’s Donald Trump.

During the presidential debate Thursday, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden argued that their opponent accepted money from foreign sources. But only one candidate is actually known to have done that: Donald Trump.

While president, Trump has continued to own his business, and through his hotels, clubs, and golf courses he’s accepted millions of dollars in payment from foreign entities. Indeed, Trump made more than $200 million in income from his foreign business interests since 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Biden, meanwhile, insisted that “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life” — and as far as we know, that’s correct. Biden has indeed released many years of his tax returns and financial disclosure forms, and as he said, they show no sign of any foreign money going to Joe Biden. (Trump famously has refused to release his tax returns, even though he promised he would back during the 2016 campaign — the New York Times recently disclosed some of them.)

Now, Joe’s son Hunter is a different story. Hunter Biden has in fact been paid millions of dollars from foreign sources. But on the debate stage, Trump repeatedly and misleadingly tried to conflate Hunter Biden’s money and Joe Biden’s money. Often Trump would insist to Biden that “you” got certain payments, before then clarifying he meant “your family.”

Trump’s campaign has been trying desperately to prove that some of Hunter’s money went to Joe — most recently by citing suddenly disclosed emails from or about Hunter — but so far, they have not proven their case. The only candidate known to be taking in lots of money from foreign sources is Donald Trump.

Sorting out the various claims of foreign payments

The exact amount of money Trump is taking in from foreign sources is not known, because the Trump Organization is a private company.

The Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that he made $200 million in income from foreign business interests since 2016, citing tax forms and financial disclosure forms. But that number does not include money that foreign sources pay to Trump’s business interests in the United States. And there’s a lot of it. For instance, delegations from at least 33 foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Kuwait, and Romania booked stays or held events at Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel.

That’s what’s happened since Trump was president, but of course he made lots of money from foreign interests before he was president as well. For instance, he sold a Florida property for the eyebrow-raising sum of $95 million to a Russian oligarch in 2008. He partnered with corrupt oligarchs in Azerbaijan to build a hotel in Baku. And he infamously tasked his lawyer Michael Cohen with trying to strike a deal for him to build a Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign, though the deal didn’t work out.

Joe Biden, by contrast, was in political office from the early 1970s through early 2017. After leaving office, in 2017 and 2018, he and his wife Jill made more than $15 million in 2017 and 2018 — mainly from speaking fees and book payments. But there’s no evidence he received any money from foreign sources.

So Trump’s scrutiny has instead fallen on Joe’s son Hunter, who indeed carried on some business transactions with foreigners that have been criticized. Specifically, Trump focused on payments from a few such foreign sources (though his train of thought was often tough to follow).

“I don’t make money from China. You do. I don’t make money from Ukraine. You do. I don’t make money from Russia. You made 3 1/2 million dollars, Joe,” Trump said. But none of that is true for Joe, it is only true for Hunter, and even there Trump is exaggerating what is known.

Elena Baturina, the wife of the late former mayor of Moscow, wired $3.5 million to a company associated with Hunter Biden and his business partners for consulting. But it is not clear how much of that money went to Hunter himself. Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company, also paid Hunter hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a board member, as was much discussed during the impeachment inquiry last year.

And when it comes to China, Trump cited a new purported email from one of Hunter’s business associates. “They even have a statement that we have to give 10 percent to the big man,” Trump said. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know. Maybe you’re not. But you’re the big man I think. Your son said we have to get 10 percent to the big man. Joe, what’s that all about? It’s terrible.”

Again, Trump is misdescribing this. There is an apparent email from one of Hunter’s business associates discussing a proposed equity split for a business venture with a Chinese energy tycoon. The associate (not Hunter) wrote “10 held by H for the big guy ?” Trump’s allies have claimed this is a suggestion that Hunter hold 10 percent of the business venture for his father. But there’s no evidence Joe knew about this, and a further email suggests that the proposal fell apart. (However, the Chinese energy tycoon’s associates did later send $5 million to an account held by Hunter, as Hunter tried to negotiate a gas deal for the Chinese company in Louisiana.)

“I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life,” Biden insisted. He responded by pointing out that Trump himself had a “secret bank account with China.” This did come to light in a New York Times report this week, but Trump has said that it was only set up to pay local taxes while he explored business opportunities that didn’t work out, and no evidence has emerged to disprove that claim.

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Trump on Covid-19: “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault.”

President Donald Trump at the final debate against Joe Biden on October 22. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Trump almost took responsibility. Then he didn’t.

President Donald Trump seemed poised to take responsibility for his failure on Covid-19 at Thursday’s presidential debate — and then he didn’t.

“I take full responsibility,” Trump said. He immediately continued: “It’s not my fault it came here. It’s China’s fault.”

It’s a big contradiction, but it’s emblematic of Trump’s approach to the coronavirus. Time and time again, Trump has tried to downplay the coronavirus and dodge responsibility, all while failing to embrace the kind of messaging and policy approach that experts recommend.

Asked about failures on testing early on, Trump said in March, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Asked about the 1,000 Covid-19 deaths a day in the US at the time, Trump said in July, “It is what it is.”

Meanwhile, Trump has deliberately downplayed the pandemic, demanded states reopen too quickly, punted problems with testing and tracing down to local and state governments with more limited resources than the federal government, mocked masks, and tried to politicize public health institutions instead of letting science lead the response.

The result: America is faring much worse than many of its developed peers. The US is in the top 15 percent among developed countries for confirmed Covid-19 deaths, and has almost six times the death rate as the median developed nation. If the US had the same death rate as, for example, Canada, nearly 140,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

Many experts have laid this failure on Trump. “It begins in many ways, and you could argue it ends in many ways, with the Trump administration,” Ashish Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, previously told me. “If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different.”

For more on Trump’s failures on Covid-19, read Vox’s full explainer.

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Swing-state Pennsylvanians are divided on fracking. Here’s why.

A section of the SUNOCO Mariner II East Pipeline construction in Exton, Pennsylvania. Residents and local elected officials have expressed strong opposition to the pipelines. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

Trump keeps promoting fracking, but the industry is struggling.

Natural gas fracking has been getting a lot of air time on the campaign trail in recent weeks.

In front of a crowd of thousands gathered in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, President Donald Trump played a compilation of video clips in which former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris described their plans to transition away from fossil fuels.

“Joe Biden will ban fracking and abolish Pennsylvania energy,” Trump told the crowd, followed by a chorus of boos.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has allowed the US to dramatically increase its oil and gas production in Pennsylvania and various other states over the last decade. Biden’s plan to tackle climate change sets a target for the country to bring greenhouse emissions to zero by 2050, but it doesn’t call for banning fracking. During his town hall last week, Biden reiterated that he doesn’t intend to ban fracking.

Trump, who has no climate plan of his own, has been taking shots at Biden’s climate and energy initiatives as part of a broader effort to attract voters in battleground states. But his campaign has not seen a dramatic turnaround in Pennsylvania. Biden has maintained his lead in the polls — and is currently ahead by 6 percent on average, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Whether Trump’s pro-fracking talk will help his chances of reelection is unclear. Natural gas fracking is concentrated in Pennsylvania’s Republican-leaning counties, and 77 percent of Republicans said they supported the industry in an August CBS/YouGov poll. This means Trump’s rhetoric could energize his base; on the other hand, the same poll showed that 52 percent of sampled registered voters oppose fracking, so it may not win over suburban residents.

What is clear is that even as it’s become a focal point in the election, the fracking industry is struggling. An oversupply of gas has left producers in debt and jobs have declined. Fracking has also caused health and environmental damage in several states across the country, and is likely a major source of emissions of methane, an exceptionally potent greenhouse gas. Clean energy advocates say that a shift to investing in renewables would help to create a stable economy for a state that has long been dominated by the boom and bust cycles of extractive industries.

What happened to the natural gas boom?

Pennsylvania has been a key state in the fracking revolution, as companies have tapped into the Marcellus shale, the largest US gas field by proven reserves, which lies below much of its territory. Over the last 10 years since the boom began, it has become the country’s number two gas producer behind Texas.

In 2019, Pennsylvania produced a record amount of natural gas through fracking, but the growth in production belies the industry’s instability. The glut in gas has driven prices down and left even the top producers saddled with debt.

The fracking boom also has not created a huge number of jobs. According to statistics commissioned by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, the natural gas industry, including extraction, transmission, and electricity generation, employed just under 24,000 people in 2019. Jobs in the sector have shrunk 7 percent since 2017, and only represent a tiny fraction of the state’s overall employment.

Of course, others have also benefitted from fracking, including landowners who have received royalties from companies drilling on their land, and services that support the natural gas industry.

But Rachel Meyer, a teacher who lives in the fracking hotspot of Beaver County along the state’s southwestern border, sees people growing less enamored. She also serves as a volunteer for the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community where she has learned about the environmental, health, and safety risks involved with fracking.

“I feel like we are at a kind of transition point now where people are starting to say, ‘Wait a second you know this seemed like a great thing, and we were really excited about it, but now we’re seeing some of issues and some really bad things starting to happen,’” said Meyer.

She first became involved in advocacy work around fracking when she heard about the explosion of Energy Transfer Corporation pipeline in her county back in 2018. The explosion, which officials linked to a landslide, luckily didn’t cause any casualties but it destroyed a home and left the surrounding area charred. Meyer said for her and many of her neighbors who have pipelines running in close proximity — or even through — their properties the incident was a wake-up call.

Fracking, which uses chemical-laced fluids to break open rock seams, has also led to some cases of water contamination and air pollution.

In late June, the state’s Attorney General Josh Shapiro released the results of a two-year investigation that widely condemned the industry for its pollution, and faulted the government for not holding corporations in check.

“The bottom line is, this was a failure,” Shapiro said at a news conference, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Regulators were supposed to prevent abuse by the big corporations ... but they didn’t.”

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Trump speaks to contractors at the Shell Chemicals Petrochemical Complex on August 13, 2019, in Monaca, Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump delivered a speech on the economy, and focused on manufacturing and energy sector jobs.

Evening out the energy playing field

Despite the downsides of the fracking boom, the state government has propped up the industry, most recently offering a massive tax break to Shell to build a major plastic factory that will make use of some of the extra natural gas in the state.

Josh McNeil, the executive director of Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania, which opposes fracking, said that it is time for the state to break free of extractive industries that have caused boom and bust cycles.

“Two months ago now, the legislature gave away a [$670] million handout to build petrochemical plants in the state, and they did that to create a market for natural gas. I’m not seeing anything like that for solar or wind.”

“We would like to see an even playing field that allows solar and wind, which in many cases are already cheaper than coal and gas, get the same kind of treatment.”

Recent polling shows that Pennsylvanians support increased electricity generation from renewable energy. But Meyer said that managing the transition away from fossil fuels is a concern for some. “Certainly there are people who, with good intentions, are concerned about the fracking industry leaving. And certainly there are communities who think, you know, we need this to come into our communities—there still is that.”

In this election cycle, this has led some workers to vocally support Trump and his pro-fracking stance. The Boilermakers Local 154 union have endorsed Trump and refuted Biden’s assertion in the last town hall that he had the union’s backing.

Other unions have been throwing their weight behind Biden, assuming that he will maintain the status quo.

Shannon Smith, communications and development manager at the nonprofit FracTracker Alliance said, “I’ve heard from union leaders recently that they aren’t going to vote for Trump because they trust that Biden is not going to instate a fracking ban,” which she adds wouldn’t even be feasible.

But ultimately she said natural gas production will have to come down. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon dioxide emissions, including those from burning natural gas, have to be decreased to net zero by 2050 for the world to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. Biden’s climate plan calls for investment in communities that have been dependent on fossil fuels, which she sees as critical.

“We need candidates who are going to help figure out that transition because it will happen.”

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Mysterious emails and convenient leaks: The Trump campaign’s Hunter Biden attacks, explained

In this screenshot from the DNCC’s livestream of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, addresses the virtual convention on August 20, 2020. | DNCC via Getty Images

All of a sudden, people have come out of the woodwork saying they have Hunter Biden emails.

In what’s a remarkable series of coincidences or — more likely — an orchestrated campaign, three separate sources have begun providing emails and text messages involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter to conservative journalists and Republican politicians over the past week.

The contents of what was purportedly Hunter’s laptop were first provided to the New York Post last week by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. A computer repair store owner claimed the laptop was left at his store, but questions have been raised about whether that story is accurate and whether all the information allegedly on the laptop is authentic.

But since then, two disgruntled former business partners of Hunter — Bevan Cooney and Tony Bobulinski — have provided their own emails and texts about Hunter to pro-Trump journalists or GOP politicians. These emails and texts have been quickly tweeted out or published by these outlets (notably Breitbart News, Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Federalist, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page), usually spun in inflammatory ways with a minimum of skeptical or contextual reporting.

And Thursday afternoon, news broke that Bobulinski will attend the final presidential debate as an invited guest of President Donald Trump. (Cooney was evidently unavailable since he is currently serving a sentence in federal prison for securities fraud.)

All this is part of an effort by the Trump campaign to argue that Joe Biden is corruptly tied to his son’s questionable business dealings with overseas interests. And they’ve complained that the mainstream media is trying to ignore or suppress this story.

Yet these emails and texts from Hunter have deliberately been given to staunchly pro-Trump reporters and media outlets unlikely to be skeptical, to question whether they truly prove what their handlers claim, or to publicize data points that don’t fit the Trump campaign’s preferred message.

The particular problem here is that, so far, there is almost nothing from Joe Biden himself in the released messages (other than an exchange where the former vice president comforts his despondent, drug-addicted son). There is a fair amount of Hunter making claims about his father, but that could be Hunter throwing his father’s name around without his father’s knowledge.

Careful investigative journalists would take some time to ascertain what actually happened here, but it certainly seems that much of this material has been deliberately held back for the last few weeks before the election. That, combined with the manner in which it’s being released, makes it all feel a whole lot like a last-minute dirty trick.

There are now three separate batches of Hunter-related emails

Despite the fact that President Donald Trump continues to own a business employing his children that regularly accepts large payments from foreign entities, Trump’s final play in his reelection campaign is to argue that Joe Biden is corrupt because his son Hunter accepted large payments from foreign entities.

This isn’t a new play. Trump’s attempts to drum up dirt on the Bidens related to Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian gas company ended up getting him impeached last year. And for most of 2020, the efforts from various Republicans to revive the attacks on Hunter seemed to flop.

But now, in a manner seemingly intended to echo the leak of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s hacked emails in October 2016, emails, texts, and photos with or about Hunter are being leaked out through several sources in an attempt to generate a barrage of negative stories about the Bidens before Election Day.

Some of this new material has been tied directly to the Trump camp — through Rudy Giuliani, who claimed a computer store owner gave him Hunter’s laptop, which had supposedly been left there. No concrete evidence has yet emerged to disprove that story, but authorities are reportedly investigating whether these emails are tied to a foreign influence campaign.

The newer development is that two former business associates of Hunter have entered the picture, suddenly providing their emails and texts with Hunter to conservative journalists and GOP politicians.

The first, Bevan Cooney, is currently in prison for fraud. The emails he has provided so far — to journalists Matthew Tyrmand and Peter Schweizer — do not actually show him having direct contact with Hunter (Cooney seemed mainly to interact with Hunter’s then-business partner, Devon Archer, who was also convicted of fraud). So Cooney’s emails have gotten less attention.

Then there’s Tony Bobulinski, who was involved in efforts by Hunter Biden and James Biden (Joe’s brother) to make a business partnership with a Chinese energy tycoon, Ye Jianming, in 2017. Bobulinski released a statement claiming that Joe Biden was involved as well to some extent, and released documents on Wednesday and Thursday to various conservative journalists. Though he claimed to be “not a political person,” the rollout of his material seems awfully politically savvy, and he will be an invited Trump guest at Thursday’s debate.

The two things the Trump campaign wants to prove

The retort from Biden supporters to all this has usually been that Hunter is not running for president — Joe is.

Trump’s team is well aware of that, so their top priority has been to try and tie Hunter’s work to Joe Biden in whatever way they can. And they’ve tried to do so in two main ways.

First, Trump’s team has tried to argue that, as vice president, Joe Biden took action designed to help Hunter’s clients in some way. Their highest-profile example — the vice president urging the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general — was widely debunked last year, since the prosecutor general was himself corrupt and many Western governments and institutions wanted him removed for that reason.

So, more recently, they’ve attempted to argue that Vice President Biden was “soft” on China because Hunter had business ties to Chinese interests. But again, it’s difficult to see how Biden’s views on China differed from the rest of the Obama administration or were out of the norm for his party and the time in any significant way.

Second, Trump’s team has hoped to prove that Joe Biden himself got a share of Hunter’s money. Yet Joe Biden’s tax returns and financial disclosure forms show no sign of any such thing. And after the Obama administration, Joe and Jill Biden made more than $15 million in 2017 and 2018 — mainly from speaking fees and book payments — so they certainly weren’t hurting for cash.

Yet there is an alleged email provided by Tony Bobulinski about the deal with the Chinese energy tycoon, sent by Hunter business associate James Gilliar to Bobulinski and Hunter in May 2017, that suggests a split of equity for their new business venture. In addition for “20 H” (20 percent for Hunter) and “10 Jim” (10 percent for James Biden), it includes the line: “10 held by H for the big guy ?”

Daily Caller

Excerpt of a purported May 2017 email sent among Hunter Biden’s business associates.

Bobulinski claims “the big guy” means Joe Biden. But that line notably ends in a question mark. And if accurate, it is unclear whether Joe Biden himself (by then the former vice president) actually knew about it — or whether Hunter was throwing around his name without his knowledge.

Furthermore, there is also a message six days after this one where Hunter says that his “Chairman” gave him “an emphatic NO.” Fox News claims the “chairman” is Joe Biden, which if true would seem to suggest he turned down Hunter’s offer.

In any case, the deal involving Bobulinski ended up falling apart. Subsequently, entities tied to the Chinese energy tycoon did end up send nearly $5 million to an account held by Hunter — yet, again, there’s no indication this had anything to do with Joe Biden.

“Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever. He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever hold stock for him,” Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said in a statement Thursday.

Actual investigative reporters would put in the time to ascertain, to the best of their ability, what actually happened here. But this is much more akin to an opposition research dump — so it’s just been put out there by conservative journalists with little context or supplementary information, to help Trump make it part of his final campaign push.

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US intelligence officials say Iran and Russia obtained voter registration information to interfere in election

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe arrives to a closed-door briefing on election security at the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on September 23, 2020 in Washington, DC. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Iran is behind intimidating emails sent to some Democratic voters, officials say.

Iran and Russia are using voter registration data to interfere in the US election, top national security officials announced during a surprise press conference Wednesday night.

Iran is behind the spoof emails to some voters, and is spreading disinformation online about sending fraudulent ballots from overseas, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Wednesday. Russia, too, has gotten access to voter registration data, just as it did in 2016, he said.

Both Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray said no votes have been compromised. “Today, that [election] infrastructure remains resilient,” Wray said Wednesday. “You should be confident that your vote votes.”

National security officials didn’t really offer many other details in their abrupt announcement. The spoof emails appear to be those sent to some voters in Alaska and Florida, which claimed to be sent from the Proud Boys, a far-right organization. The emails reportedly targeted Democratic voters, claiming they had access to voting infrastructure and threatening them if they did not vote for Trump.

The Washington Post reported before the press conference that the US government had concluded Iran was behind the emails.

Threatening emails like this -- purporting to be from the Proud Boys -- are being sent to voters in Florida and Alaska.

We do not know who is behind them, but whoever it is is taking a lot of steps to mask their identity. https://t.co/cB3RpocA5i pic.twitter.com/NjYti0ufbe

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) October 21, 2020

Officials did not elaborate on how they concluded Iran was behind the spoof emails and other disinformation, nor did they give many details about Russia’s potential activities. Ratcliffe said that the disinformation promoted by Iran was intended to “incite social unrest” and damage President Donald Trump, though, again he did not offer more details about that conclusion. Neither Ratcliffe nor Wray took questions.

All in all, it was a pretty odd press conference. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has already warned the public against foreign interference in the 2020 election, much of which is designed to sow discord and undermine faith in the democratic process. So this kind of divisive, disinformation campaign was expected.

And as many have pointed out, voter registration data is publicly available, and so it’s not clear what exactly it means when officials say foreign actors obtained voter registration data. In 2016, Russia did target voting systems in all 50 states, though no voter information or votes were changed.

“Voter data, including partisan affiliation, is PUBLIC,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, tweeted “Easy to get and in some cases free. The fact that this data is out there is NOT indication of any data breach.”

The press conference is notable for what officials didn’t say

In August, the ODNI named Russia, China, and Iran as the primary election interference threats. But each have different goals when it comes to foreign interference. As experts told me earlier this year, Russia is very much focused on creating chaos, while Iran and China are less eager to see the US in disarray, and focused on pushing their national objectives.

Still, Iran in the past has used social media to spread propaganda and divisive content, and based on the announcement tonight, they’re seeing an opening to go further in 2020.

“In recent years, Iranian information operations have continued to push boundaries using bold and innovative approaches. However, this incident marks a fundamental shift in our understanding of Iran’s willingness to interfere in the democratic process,” said John Hultquist, senior director of analysis for Mandiant Threat Intelligence, told NPR.

This kind of disinformation campaign doesn’t take a whole lot of sophistication, though Iran’s capabilities, especially when it comes to cyber operations, are not quite at the level of Russia and China.

And while officials did not go into details about what Russia was up to, the Kremlin is very much interfering in the 2020 election, spreading online disinformation and by trying to plant denigrating information about Democratic candidate Joe Biden. And more questions have come up after the New York Post published emails purportedly from Hunter Biden, which were given to the paper by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Those emails were an attempt to drum up a scandal about Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, which has continued to percolate in right-wing circles. Giuliani had also previously worked with Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian politician that the US government sanctioned for interfering in the 2020 election.

DNI Ratcliffe previously said that “there is no intelligence that supports” that the Hunter Biden emails were “part of a Russian disinformation campaign.” The FBI has told Congress it has “nothing to add” to Ratcliffe’s statement.

But the authenticity and actual source of the emails (the story given to the New York Post about where the laptop came from, is well, something) is still unclear, and dozens of former intelligence officials have said the emails have all the “earmarks” of classic Russian disinformation.

Officials did not specify what Russia, especially, was doing, and didn’t address anything related to the Hunter Biden emails. But given the lingering questions around them, the timing of a press conference to call out Iran and Russia does seem a bit strange. The Trump administration is also engage in a maximum pressure campaign against Iran, and has consistently called out Iran’s misdeeds as justification for sanctions and other tough measures against the regime.

Still, all threats to intervene or meddle in the US elections are serious. Iran, or Russia, or anyone else are exploiting the divisions and partisan tensions already in US society, and with just two weeks before Election Day, much of it will be geared toward depressing turnout. As FBI Director Wray said Wednesday, and the best place for accurate, up-to-date voter information is your state election officials. Because voters should know that it’s only going to get worse from here until Election Day.

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Texas Sen. John Cornyn is facing his first real challenge from newcomer MJ Hegar

Republican Sen. John Cornyn is facing a tough reelection in Texas. | Ken Cedeno-Pool/Getty Images

Texas’s competitive Senate race is an omen of political change.

For the second election cycle in a row, a prominent Senate Republican is facing a tough reelection campaign in Texas — a state that was once regarded as reliably red but has become one of the nation’s biggest battlegrounds. But unlike in 2018, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke became a cause célèbre for his near-miss against the incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, this year’s Senate race hasn’t captured the national spotlight.

That’s the way the two candidates — Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican seeking a fourth term, and his nascent Democratic challenger MJ Hegar — would probably prefer it. They have sought to make this race about Texas, rather than President Donald Trump. But in an especially polarized election year, national politics has nevertheless seeped into the race.

Cornyn, who has a reputation for being a bipartisan dealmaker in the Senate, has distanced himself from Trump, whose approval ratings have dropped in Texas since 2016 and who has only a slight edge over former Vice President Joe Biden in Texas polls. Rather than staking his candidacy on the president’s record, Cornyn has framed his reelection campaign as a fight to save Texas from coastal liberals.

“I think this election presents a clear choice between the people who recruited and supported MJ’s campaign, which want to make Texas more like California and New York,” he said during a televised debate earlier this month. “I want to make the rest of the country more like Texas.”

Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images

MJ Hegar speaks to voters in 2018.

Hegar, who ran for Congress in 2018 but has never held elected office before, has portrayed herself as an outsider who eschews political labels. She has resisted pressure to opine on what role she would play in her party if elected, while Cornyn has tried to paint her as someone who would help further the agenda of Democratic leaders. She has been clear that, unlike other Democratic candidates nationwide, she’s not running against Trump. Rather, she’s gone on the offensive against Cornyn, who she says has lost touch with his constituents over his 18 years in the Senate.

“I’m not running for president. I’m running for Senate,” she told Vox in an interview. “The problem of John Cornyn to Texas is a thorn in our side that predates Donald Trump.”

Cornyn’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Cornyn is still favored to win, with the latest polls showing him with anywhere from a 1- to 10-point lead, driven in part by his ability to compete with suburban and urban voters who have appeared to turn against Trump. Hegar is within firing distance and could still make up ground in the final weeks before Election Day, though early voting in Texas is already underway and will conclude on October 30.

The Cook Political Report recently shifted its race ratings in Hegar’s favor from Likely Republican to Leans Republican. Hegar, a former Air Force helicopter pilot, is leading among both Black and Hispanic voters, though she isn’t matching Biden’s support among those groups. She raised $13.5 million in the third quarter, outpacing Cornyn by a 2-1 ratio, and snagged an endorsement from former President Barack Obama. And the Democratic group Majority PAC made a late-stage $8.6 million ad buy on her behalf.

It’s also possible that, as was the case with O’Rourke, the polls are underestimating Hegar, who could benefit from record turnout. The secretary of state’s office has reported that about 16.9 million Texans have registered to vote this year, up almost 2 million since 2016 — in part a result of the efforts of O’Rourke’s campaign and grassroots organizers to expand the state’s electorate.

“There is a decade more of base-building that MJ is running on top of, including the work that she’s doing to activate her own voters,” Tory Gavito, a Democratic strategist and president of the donor network Way to Win, said. “Even if we don’t take the top of the ticket, we need to look for signs of growth. There’s no doubt that Texas is still on the purple trajectory.”

Hegar is asking voters not to trust Cornyn’s promises on health care

Hegar has made her health care plan a central pillar of her platform, and she’s hoping that resonates with voters in the middle of a pandemic that has hit Texans especially hard. Coronavirus hospitalizations peaked over the summer after Texas became one of the first states to reopen its economy, and there have been concerning signs that Texas is due for another surge as cases have recently spiked in El Paso and North Texas.

But pandemic or not, access to health care is an issue that looms large in Texas, which has the highest uninsured rate nationwide and is one of 12 states that have yet to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act’s joint state-federal program that has offered health care coverage to individuals with incomes below 138 percent of the poverty line (about $17,600 for a single adult) since 2016.

Hegar, who worked for a Texas hospital system for five years, has embraced a “Medicare-for-all-who-want-it” system modeled after the health care system in the military. That’s in line with Biden’s health care plan but doesn’t go as far as the Medicare-for-all proposal championed by progressives.

“I believe that individuals should have the choice to stay on private insurance if they prefer or opt in to Medicare,” Hegar told Vox. “We must protect the progress made by the Affordable Care Act while making much-needed improvements. We cannot go back to the past when insurance companies were able to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions or sell junk plans that leave folks vulnerable when serious health issues or injuries occur.”

This year, Democratic candidates across the nation have similarly run on health care, an issue that was critical to the party’s success in the 2018 midterms and that more than a quarter of voters, regardless of party affiliation, say is the most important issue in this presidential election.

Bob Daemmrich/Nexstar/AP

MJ Hegar debates Sen. John Cornyn in Austin, Texas, on October 9.

Hegar’s strategy has been not only to highlight how Texans would benefit if the US expanded health care access, but also to draw attention to Cornyn’s history as a leading proponent of repealing and replacing the ACA in the Senate and of receiving campaign contributions from pharmaceutical executives. Cornyn claims that, even if the ACA were repealed, he would still preserve the law’s protections for Americans with preexisting conditions, which most Americans support, and allow people under the age of 26 to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.

“You know, preexisting conditions is something we all agree should be covered,” he said in a campaign ad that aired earlier this month, echoing other Republican senators in close races.

But he supported the Republican-led Better Care Reconciliation Act in 2017, which would have allowed insurers selling plans on the individual market to deny coverage or increase costs for people with preexisting conditions. He also supported the Protect Act in 2019, which, despite Senate Republicans’ efforts to bill it otherwise, would allow insurers to offer “thin coverage aimed at healthy customers, and considerably more expensive policies with comprehensive coverage for people who might actually need costly care,” according to the LA Times.

“It blows my mind that John Cornyn can sleep at night after trying to rip away care from millions of Texans,” Hegar told Vox.

Texas’s changing electorate is driving Cornyn to the middle

Texas is at a political turning point, largely brought on by demographic change. The state last backed a Democrat for president in 1976, and Republicans have held state legislative chambers and the governorship since 2003. But the state is becoming increasingly urban, and Hispanics are on track to become its largest population group by mid-2021, two trends that generally favor Democrats.

That long-promised transformation has been slow to arrive, in part because state Republicans have sought to curb voter participation: Just this year, they have banned counties from sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, limited the number of ballot drop-off locations to just one per county, and tried to stop drive-through voting. Nevertheless, Texas Republicans are in real strife this year up and down the ballot.

Cornyn, for his part, has been forced to shift to the center on some issues as Hegar has climbed in the polls. That’s been particularly clear in the way he talks about his immigration policy.

Graeme Jennings/Getty Images

Cornyn meets with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on September 29.

Though the Republican Party has largely mirrored Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, Cornyn made a Spanish-language ad buy in September touting his support for the DREAM Act, which would offer a path to citizenship for 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants nationwide who came to the US as children. The bill, which is some two decades in the making, has been blocked repeatedly in Congress, sometimes with his support and sometimes without.

He voted against versions of the bill in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2018, which immigrant advocates cite as evidence that he is no ally of so-called DREAMers. If he really supported young unauthorized immigrants, he would have called for a vote on a standalone bill to legalize them that passed the House in 2019, Mario Carrillo, a Texas-based spokesperson for the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said in a statement.

But Cornyn’s aides have touted his support for other versions of the bill, including a 2018 proposal that coupled permanent protections for DREAMers with $25 billion in funding for Trump’s border wall and other border security measures.

Cornyn’s decision to tout that vote suggests he’s struggling with key demographics, Gavito said.

“Even if he emerges as the victor, there is no doubt that the organizing that has gone into Texas has pulled him to the left,” she said. “It’s because he’s feeling heat, specifically among young voters, Latino voters, and multiracial suburban voters.”

Hegar and Cornyn are not O’Rourke and Cruz — but they still can’t escape national politics entirely

This Senate race isn’t a repeat of 2018: Neither of the candidates has the star power of O’Rourke and Cruz, and they’re defending their records to a Texas audience, not a national one.

In 2018, O’Rourke, then a three-term Congress member, traveled to all 254 counties in Texas and livestreamed the whole journey, drawing a national following and breaking fundraising records. Hegar, a political newcomer, had planned to do the same to get her name out there, but that wasn’t possible this year due to the pandemic.

“Hegar is plagued by what any Democrat running statewide in Texas would be plagued by, which is just scale of name recognition,” Gavito said.

Eric Gay/AP

MJ Hegar heads to an early polling site after talking with reporters in Austin on July 9.

Though Hegar is still at a relative disadvantage, Cornyn suffers from his own lack of name recognition in his home state: As of late August, more than a quarter of voters had no opinion of him or didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion. His approval ratings are also lower than those of Cruz, a much more fiery, divisive personality in the Senate.

Both candidates have tried to tailor their messaging to Texans: Cornyn has framed the race as a battle for Texas’s conservative values, arguing that Hegar’s policies are “too liberal for Texas.” Hegar, for her part, has cast him as a career politician who is too steeped in Washington politics to fight for Texans.

But national politics are still playing a role as Cornyn, despite his best efforts, cannot escape association with a polarizing president.

He has become more outspoken in distinguishing his politics from Trump’s in the final stretch before Election Day — what some have criticized as an about-face. In a recent interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he said that he disagreed with the president on issues including budget deficits, tariffs, trade agreements, and border security, but chose to voice those differences of opinion in private.

Speaking about his relationship with Trump, he likened himself to a “lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well.”

“I think what we found is that we’re not going to change President Trump,” he added. “He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between. What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”

In practice, Cornyn has frequently sided with the White House on issues ranging from trying to push through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court before the election to acquitting the president in his impeachment trial earlier this year.

Cornyn shouldn’t be able to escape that record, Hegar said.

“What a Texan needs to be successful here is to show that they’re a damn Texan and not a DC spineless bootlicker,” she told Vox. “That is not John Cornyn’s seat. It’s not my seat. It is Texas’s seat, and it should be filled by a Texan who is going to fight for regular working families across the state and for Texas values like integrity and grit and backbone.”

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The battle for Latino voters in Arizona and Florida, explained

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Trump is trying to win over Latinos in two key states. Is it working?

In early September, Democrats picked up signs of a worrying new weakness in Joe Biden’s coalition: Latino voters.

Nationally, Trump was polling 2 points higher among Latinos than he did in 2016. A series of polls released in September suggested that he and Biden were neck-and-neck among Latino voters in Florida, where Trump had been trying to woo conservative Cuban Americans and Venezuelans. And it seemed that a subset of Latino men were gravitating toward Trump in Arizona.

The Latino vote in America often defies simple explanations. But these gains for Trump, while small, could be the difference between winning and losing in tight contests — not just in Florida and Arizona, but in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

It was clear that the Biden campaign had “work to do” with Latinos, senior adviser Symone Sanders said on September 13. Democrats sounded the alarm in the media, again and again.

“It seems like the Latino vote is not being taken seriously,” Chuck Rocha, a former senior campaign adviser for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox at the time. “Latino organizations are still not being funded to get out the vote and to maximize our input. Why are we spending 99 cents of every dollar on white suburban voters and not on Black or brown voters?”

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Cubans for Biden gather in Miramar, Florida on October 13.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump arrives for a rally with Latino supporters in Phoenix, Arizona on September 14.

As Biden’s poll numbers have improved, he’s caught up at least somewhat among Hispanics (a term that is often used interchangeably with “Latino” but refers specifically to anyone who descended from Spanish-speaking populations, as opposed to people of Latin American origin, including non-Spanish speakers).

Biden now has support of 63 percent of Latinos nationally, according to an October 14 Latino Decisions poll — roughly on par with Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016, though still short of the 71 percent of their support for President Barack Obama in 2012. (Some other surveys have shown a persistent gap for Biden compared to Hillary Clinton’s Latino support.) Recent polls also signal that he’s also gaining ground among Arizona and Florida Latinos specifically but still isn’t quite where Democratic pollsters hoped he would be.

Any erosion should be concerning for Democrats. Latinos are the nation’s largest and fastest-growing contingent of nonwhite voters, and the Democratic coalition has historically depended on their overwhelming support.

To take Florida — Trump’s adopted home and a historical bellwether of who has won presidential contests — Democrats need to run up big margins in diverse, heavily Latino districts from Palm Beach to Miami, where Biden has been underperforming compared to previous candidates. As in previous years, Florida is the narrowest contest nationwide, but with 29 electoral votes at stake and a robust infrastructure to handle mail-in ballots, it could be a source of clarity about the winner on election night.

Arizona, which has 11 electoral votes, is another top prize for Trump and a state that the Republican candidate has carried every year but one since 1952. But large Latino populations of predominantly Mexican origin in districts encompassing Tucson, Phoenix, and Maricopa County could help flip the state, if Biden can inspire them to show up in the numbers necessary and overcome an apparent weakness among Latino men in particular.

“If we allow a narrative to take shape that somehow the issues of concern to this growing community are not prioritized, then we risk backsliding in the years to come,” Julián Castro, who ran against Biden in the primary, told the Washington Post.

Trump sought to pick up Latino votes as Biden delayed outreach

During the primaries, Biden had a poor showing among Latinos relative to Sanders, especially in states where Latinos make up a large portion of the electorate, including California, Nevada, and Texas.

Critics of Biden’s strategy argued he had neglected the Latino vote, failing to advertise early and often in Spanish-language media, show up for in-person outreach in Latino communities, or deliver a major address speaking to the concerns of Latino voters directly. And Biden’s Latino outreach efforts were slow even after he secured the nomination, ramping up only in late August.

By then, the Trump campaign had spent months investing heavily in eroding Biden’s margins in Florida, casting him as a socialist and capitalizing on the fears of Latinos from failed socialist regimes. (Biden has run as a center-left moderate, and even Sanders’s brand of democratic socialism has little relationship to the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.)

Among a subset of Latinos — whose political leanings vary across gender, generation, country of origin, and how long they have lived in the US — Trump might be an attractive option. Latinos don’t reliably back Democrats in the kinds of overwhelming numbers that Black voters do, and a significant proportion of Latinos (about a third right now) identify as Republicans.

In Florida, Latinos’ political leanings are particularly diverse, with populations hailing from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Mexico and from other parts of Latin America. Democrats have struggled to make inroads among the Cuban American community, which has historically leaned more Republican than Latinos from other countries of origin, embittered by John F. Kennedy’s withdrawal of support for an operation against dictator Fidel Castro at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs decades ago.

What’s more, disinformation campaigns have permeated Florida Latinos’ WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds, and radio programs, falsely claiming, for example, that Biden has a pedophilia problem. Trump’s Spanish-language ads, which began airing in Florida as early as June, liken Biden to ruthless Latin American caudillos like Castro and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

One 30-second ad, narrated by a Cuban actress, paints Biden and the Democrats as extremists, playing images of Cuban refugee flights, a 2015 photo of Biden with Maduro in Brazil, and a red flag emblazoned with an image of Che Guevara, the communist Cuban revolutionary:

Trump has pursued policies designed to keep Venezuelan refugees out of the US. But the ad portrays him as an ally of Latinos for earning the support of the CEO of Goya Foods, the nation’s largest Hispanic-owned food company, which Democrats consequently sought to boycott.

“We sacrificed so much to be free and respected,” the narrator says in Spanish. “Joe Biden and the Democrats are too extreme. ... [He] is too weak to defend us.”

Biden was still fighting that narrative in early October, saying, “I’m the guy who ran against a socialist” at a campaign event in Miami on October 5. But for some voters, the characterization has stuck:

Little Havana, Miami politics in a nutshell. Translation to the Spanish below:

Trump supporter: "Go back to Cuba, you socialist! Since you like communism, go wash Raul Castro's feet."

Biden supporter: "You go back since I was born here! I'm not a socialist." https://t.co/ns1YrLcpdR

— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaNBCNews) October 5, 2020

Biden’s September crisis among Latino voters in Florida might have been overstated. The former vice president trailed in three polls in the state, but by less than the margin of error. And the Latino sample size of each poll was also relatively small, which could have distorted the results. Casting a wide net is particularly necessary in Florida in order to accurately capture voters of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian, and Mexican descent and from other parts of Latin America.

So it’s possible the polls had overstated the depths of Biden’s crisis among Latinos, Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“I think the polling in Florida on Latinos has not been great,” he said. “I wouldn’t put a huge amount of weight on it.”

Another September 4 poll by the Democratic firm Equis Research showed Biden with a 16-point lead, and veteran Florida Democratic political strategist Steven Schale told the Washington Post he found that poll credible.

On September 15, Biden made his first visit of the general election to Florida with the mission of making his case to Latino voters. He criticized Trump’s policies on immigration, his abandonment of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and his failures to protect workers from the coronavirus, which has killed a disproportionate number of Latinos nationwide. He made subsequent visits to the state on October 5 and 13, stopping in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.

More recent Florida polls show Biden leading among Latinos — earning 52 percent support in a September 28 Univision poll, 58 percent in an October 5 New York Times-Siena College poll, and 55 percent in an October 14 Latino Decisions poll. But he’s still trailing Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory among Hispanics: She won 62 percent of Hispanics but still lost the state, according to exit polls. College-educated Hispanics in the state appear to be an enduring weak spot for the former vice president.

Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis, said in a press call that Biden still might win the state if he can do as well with white voters as he was polling during the summer, regardless of his performance with Latino voters, according to his firm’s simulations. But if Biden doesn’t maintain those numbers with white voters, his path to victory would substantially narrow without robust support from Latinos, including Cuban Americans, who backed him 52 percent to 35 in the Latino Decisions poll.

“He needs to get over the 60 percent threshold of [total] Latino support,” Odio said. “To get there, he will need to maximize his support among non-Cuban Hispanic voters, even if he earns a high level of support from Cubans.”

Latinos could help Biden flip Arizona — but older men are a soft spot

Biden is counting on Latino support to win in Arizona this year, aiming to win 70 percent of the Latino vote — the same percentage that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Arizona in decades, won in her 2018 race.

Most Latinos in Arizona are of Mexican descent, and Trump has openly derided Mexicans while pursuing immigration policies designed to keep them out of the US.

On the campaign trail in 2016, he claimed the US needed to keep out “bad hombres” from Mexico, suggested that Mexicans were overwhelmingly criminals, and promised his supporters that he would build a “big, beautiful wall” across the entire southern border. And in the years since the 2016 election, racial justice has become a top motivating issue for young Latino voters generally.

But Trump has nevertheless tried to make inroads among Latinos in Arizona, making five trips to Phoenix over the course of the 2020 campaign to make his case. His supporters cite his business policies, from reducing corporate taxes to deregulation, and conservative social values, including his opposition to abortion, as reasons they are drawn to him.

In September, a trend emerged in Arizona that didn’t bode well for Biden: Trump’s support among Latinos has actually grown by 8 percent since 2019, and the most significant boost has come from Latino men under the age of 50, a mid-September Equis poll found.

Trump also appears to have generated particular interest among some young Latino men. Rocha, who led Sanders’s Latino outreach efforts, told Vox in early September that he had observed in focus groups commissioned by Nuestro PAC, a Democratic super PAC focused on Latino outreach, that Latino men were a “soft spot.”

“They just weren’t as convinced [as women] about Joe Biden,” he said. “Some of this ‘law and order’ stuff, about having safe streets for your kids and your family, works with Latino men. Not a majority of them. Not even 30 percent. But he [Trump] only needs to skim off 4 or 5 percent of Latino men, and it changes the entire electorate.”

Trump’s allure among these men is rooted in his machismo. As the New York Times’s Jennifer Medina writes, they may be drawn to him because he is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

That’s not entirely surprising: Across nearly every demographic group, Trump performs better among men than he does among women. The gender gap among voters outside the Latino community is actually higher than it is within the Latino community, Jones-Correa said.

“There is a gender gap,” he said. “But it’s a bit more muted than within the general public. I wouldn’t overemphasize the gender gap here as something more profound for the Latino community.”

Still, Biden is currently performing well among white voters in the state — but he still needs Latinos to win, Odio said.

Biden has a 4-point edge on average in Arizona as of October 6, and a Biden also has a sizable lead among Latinos, who backed him 62-29 percent in the Equis poll.

That’s roughly on par with Clinton’s performance in 2016, but still short of the campaign’s goal.

“We are urging folks not to be complacent, but ... to push for those levels now, so that we don’t find that it’s too late in October,” Odio said.

Biden is pushing to win in Florida and Arizona

Latinos tend to remain undecided for longer than other ethnic groups. That could be to Biden’s advantage as his campaign has substantially ramped up its outreach efforts in the Latino community, particularly in Florida, in the final weeks before Election Day.

“Progressives consistently get in this boat where we’re a month away from Election Day and there’s a sudden realization that we’ve got to spend big in Florida,” Tory Gavito, president of the Democratic donor group Way to Win, said. “It’s a historic pattern within the Democratic establishment.”

Biden has also hired a slew of new campaign staffers in Florida and in Arizona to support his outreach efforts, including a veteran political operative who handled Spanish-language media for Democrat Andrew Gillum’s 2018 gubernatorial run in Florida. And his campaign, which had a record fundraising bump in September, has been pouring money into reaching out to voters virtually in the interest of protecting campaign staff and the public amid the pandemic. (Trump, on the other hand, has hosted indoor rallies.)

“I’m starting to see in the data that more people are reporting they’re being contacted, and more people are reporting seeing and hearing positive news about Biden, so I don’t think we’re behind any sort of marker,” Matt Barreto, the co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions and a pollster for the Biden campaign, said.

The campaign says being unable to canvass in person amid the pandemic hasn’t put Biden at a significant disadvantage among young Latinos, who are accessible online.

“Our population is exceptionally young,” Barreto said. “It’s a population that’s already in social media, in digital, on texting. And so for a high percentage of people, this is a natural transition for the campaign — to be able to continue that sort of outreach in a medium where lots of Latinos are already living.”

Among older Latinos and immigrants, the campaign is also seeing high rates of television viewership, Barreto said. Biden has consequently outspent Trump in Spanish-language television ads in recent months by a margin of $6.7 million to $4.9 million across heavily Latino cities including Miami, Orlando, and Phoenix. He has also topped Trump’s Spanish-language radio ads, investing about $885,000 compared to Trump’s $32,500.

His messaging is consistent, but delivered in different accents designed to microtarget Latino populations across the country: In Phoenix, it’s a Mexican accent, whereas in Miami, it’s Cuban.

One ad, titled “A Good Plan,” says the president has mishandled the ongoing pandemic, in which Latinos have suffered immensely, and if elected, Biden would deliver much-needed aid to their communities:

Biden surrogates are also pouring dollars into ads targeting Latinos. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg underwrote a $13.4 million ad buy in Florida with Priorities USA Action and Latino Victory Fund designed to air in both Spanish and English. Priorities USA and People for the American Way also announced smaller, six-figure buys in Arizona media markets.

“President Trump has fueled division in our country including through his relentless attacks on the Hispanic community,” Bloomberg said in a statement at the time. “I’m supporting Latino Victory Fund and Priorities USA Action to persuade and mobilize as many voters as possible and make sure that Hispanic voices are heard — and their votes counted.”

Indeed, there’s no question that the investment in the Latino vote has been substantial over the past month. It has resulted in what appears to be significant growth in his support among Latinos, though still not quite reaching the thresholds that would put Biden in safe territory.

There may still be a window of opportunity for Biden to sway more voters at this late stage, but it’s not clear whether continuing to inundate them with more TV and radio ads will make a difference.

Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic strategist who produced ads for President Barack Obama in 2012, has questioned whether that strategy will continue to pay dividends for Biden.

“If we are not there already, we are quickly approaching the point of diminishing returns,” Amandi told Politico.

And given that many Floridians have already received their first mail-in ballots, Biden is running out of time to change their minds. He is nevertheless continuing to make his case.

“More than any other time, the Hispanic community, Latino community holds in the palm of their hand the destiny of this country,” Biden said during an event in Kissimmee, Florida, last month. “You can decide the direction of this country.”

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The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

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