Early voting numbers are truly astounding

Americans have participated in early voting in record numbers this year. | Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images

It turns out Americans really, really wanted to vote before Election Day.

More than 97 million people have already cast ballots in the 2020 election — an early turnout record that shows this year’s election carries enormous weight with Americans.

In 11 states, the number of votes cast so far in 2020 is at least 90 percent of the total cast in the entire 2016 election.

About 24 hours before polls are set to close on Election Day, the number of votes cast was almost 98 million, about two-thirds of which came via mail-in ballots. The rest of the voters showed up at a polling place to vote in person. The early voting figure is just shy of 71 percent of 2016’s total numbers nationwide.

In some states, the early voting numbers have already cruised past 90 percent of 2016 total voting levels, including several key swing states or states with close Senate races: Montana Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, and Georgia.

In Texas, early voting is even more of a success: Early voting now represents more than 108 percent of 2016’s total number. In Hawaii, the share is more than 110 percent.

It seems likely that 2020’s total voter turnout could be the highest in a century, with some forecasters projecting turnout as high as 65 percent of registered voters casting a ballot. And the reasons are clear to all — chiefly, the current occupant of the White House.

As Vox’s Jen Kirby and Rani Molla put it, “Enthusiasm among both Democratic and Republican voters is high. President Donald Trump is the reason: His supporters are extremely motivated to reelect their guy, and the other side is extremely motivated to vote him out.” Voters who wished to avoid a polling place also may have voted with absentee ballots, though those who went to early voting locations hoping to avoid a crowd during a pandemic may have been confronted with long lines.

These numbers are no crystal ball, however. Nobody knows who is going to win right now. There’s a strong possibility we won’t even know on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, either. But it is clear that Americans are highly motivated to make sure their vote is counted.

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Why countries interfere in elections

Russian president Vladimir Putin in December 2016. | Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

According to an expert.

What Russia — or any other foreign power — might do to disrupt the 2020 US election has loomed over the entire race.

Russia and other actors are using social media to sow discord. US intelligence officials announced in October that Russia (and Iran) had gained access to voter registration data. And the New York Times reported last month that Russia has plans to interfere in the last few days of the election or just after November 3, primarily to help Trump.

How big Russia’s impact will be is impossible to know right now, though it did have an impact on the outcome in 2016, says Dov Levin, an expert on foreign election interference and author of Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions.

Russia and the US have a long history of intervening in each other’s politics, going back and forth dozens and dozens of times since the end of World War II. And foreign attempts to meddle in US elections have occurred since its founding, though that time the blame went to the French.

But whatever the time period, foreign actors rarely just meddle for meddling’s sake. Levin argues that a country’s leaders have to believe that one side’s victory in a particular foreign election would be untenable for their interests — and they need to know that the opponent might be interested in getting their assistance. When those conditions exist, hello foreign interference.

I called up Levin to talk more about why countries decide to intervene in other countries’ elections, how he sees Russian and other foreign interference playing out in 2020, and what kinds of interference we may see more of in the future. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

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Jen Kirby

There’s been such a focus in the United States on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and potential meddling in the 2020 election. But from your book, it sounds like foreign election interference was a pretty common occurrence around the world throughout history.

Dov Levin

Yes, this is a pretty common form of interference that has been going on since national-level elections in the 18th century, and even beforehand, in pre-modern elections for pope or for king, which existed in some countries. And I find that this has been a pretty common phenomenon, using various secret or covert, or public and overt, messaging ever since.

Many major world powers have used that method. Between 1946 and 2000, the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia have intervened in one out of every nine national-level executive elections using this method.

Jen Kirby

In your book, you lay out two conditions that have to be present for a foreign power to interfere in an election. Can you explain them?

Dov Levin

The first one is the great power sees one of the candidates or parties in the target country as a threat to some of its key interests, and the foreign power expects it would be really hard to move the target in this regard. So that is one condition.

The other is that there is another local candidate or party in the target country that is willing to accept such assistance — and it’s usually because they are in deep political trouble. They are willing to bear the cost of such interference, which is, when it is secret, the possibility of exposure and delegitimization. When interference is in public, it’s the possibility of a big backlash, or in the longer term, some voters not being happy that their candidate or party is getting assistance from a foreign power, and, as a result, not voting for them in the next election.

So usually the local actor, when they are willing to accept or ask for such interference, [is] in deep political trouble and this request or agreement to accept such foreign interference on their behalf is, in football terms, a “Hail Mary.” They’re in deep political trouble, and this is meant to save them, so to speak.

Jen Kirby

Your thesis would seem to fit with what we know about Russia’s interference activities in 2016, and the Trump’s campaign’s receptiveness to getting help from Russia. Last week, intelligence officials cited both Iran and Russia as engaging in election interference. Russia, of course, looms large. I’m wondering if, based on your thesis, you think Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus is different in 2020 than it might have been in 2016?

Dov Levin

We do not know yet the thinking of Russia while it’s intervening, and we cannot be 100 percent sure in this regard.

But it seems that it’s a very similar calculus. That is, you know, they are very worried that Democrats will come to power in the 2020 elections, and that they will have a very hardline policy towards Russia, given anger among the Democrats about Russia’s behavior in 2016, Russia’s behavior in Ukraine, its behavior in other countries, like poisoning people, and things like that.

So they are clearly pretty worried of the possibility that [Vice President Joe] Biden and the Democratic Party would come to power and push back against various Russian behaviors and shenanigans around the world.

And while we naturally don’t have any evidence yet of any ties in 2020, we have, as you could see from the Mueller report, and other sources, pretty strong circumstantial evidence that someone in the Trump campaign in 2016 was coordinating with Russia either directly or through WikiLeaks.

Again, we don’t have conclusive evidence that Russia is intervening in 2020. But assuming [the suspected Russian influence operation that involved setting up a fake progressive digital news outlet called] Peacedata and things like that are for this purpose, the calculus seems to be pretty similar to what was in 2016: a very deep Russian fear of the possibility of the Democratic presidential candidate coming to power and pushing back against Russia for its behavior, both towards the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Jen Kirby

We do know that Russia wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton and preferred Trump in 2016. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Russia is denigrating Biden in 2020. But baked into that is this idea that Russia really just wants to foment chaos and undermine democracy, and Trump also advances that goal. We see this very specifically with online propaganda. How do you see that idea — that Russia wants to generate chaos — as fitting into this framework?

Dov Levin

I would separate electoral activities and non-electoral activities. Clearly, from what we know about some of their non-electoral activities — those that are not related to any election — some of them are meant to cause chaos in various ways and disrupt and damage. So about non-electoral activities, I would completely agree with this view of Russian behavior. However, when it comes to their electoral activities, the whole Russian intervention in 2016, all of those leaks that were given to WikiLeaks — the idea that that was only done to sow chaos, I see that as the wrong interpretation.

From the point of view of Russia — and I’m giving here the general logic of most interveners in this regard — sowing chaos in an election is not the productive message because it can make their situation worse.

If all they want to do, to quote the Joker, is “see the world burn” — you know, see the United States “burn,” so to speak — then doing that in an election is the wrong way, because you antagonize the side that is suffering from it and incentivize them to harm you even more.

If they’re intervening in elections, it is usually because they don’t want one of the sides to be elected. And only if they see that particular side as so bad from their perspective that they don’t care too much about antagonizing them further will they be willing to do that during the election period.

So I think that the interpretation that Russia intervened in 2016 just to sow chaos and that they didn’t really care who would win is mistaken. They clearly funded activities that were in an organized campaign to lead Hillary Clinton to lose in 2016. They had a pretty clear agenda. They tailored stuff pretty clearly in a way that would help Trump the most.

For example, some of these leaks literally came out a few hours after domestic scandals Trump was involved in like, for example, one of their big leaks [of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails] came out hours after the famous Access Hollywood tape.

Those are activities which are not just meant to sow chaos. They clearly are meant to achieve an agenda — in that particular case, to reduce the damage Trump was suffering that day from that Access Hollywood tape. So from the way Russia acted in 2016, and from the overall behavior of such interveners, I think it is very unlikely that they were doing it in 2016 just to sow chaos. If they wanted to sow chaos, they didn’t need to act in such a purposeful way.

Jen Kirby

I agree that they were intervening on the side of Trump in 2016. But take 2020: The Department of Homeland Security has warned that Russia is amplifying misinformation about voting problems, including claims about mail-in voter fraud. This obviously echoes Trump’s rhetoric, so it’s certainly bolstering his position. But that could also potentially create doubt about the election results. That doesn’t necessarily benefit one particular candidate — it undermines the system as a whole.

Dov Levin

We don’t know exactly what Russia’s strategy is when it comes to 2020. It will take us time to know for sure what it is exactly doing in 2020.

But I would say that some of the negative effects on democracy are, from Russia’s point of view, a useful side effect. They have one major goal, which is to help Trump get reelected. If it harms American democracy in some way — which, by the way, I find in other research that such interference, on average, does in many cases — that’s from their point of view a great side effect. Vladimir Putin is not going to cry, and is not going to in any way feel bad about it, so to speak. But that is not their main goal.

And again, it takes time to see how these activities play out in retrospect. There’s a lot of what you could call, in military terms, the “fog of battle.” But from what we know, from 2016, a lot of the stuff was designed very purposefully to help Donald Trump. And my guess is that when we do have a post-2020 estimate of what exactly Russia did, we will see that most of it was stuff that was meant to help Trump in various ways.

Jen Kirby

You say that one of the reasons Russia wouldn’t intervene unless they think one side is so bad it thinks it’s worth the risk, antagonizing them. In 2016, that was Hillary Clinton. But I wonder if Russian interference would have become such a huge part of the public discourse if Clinton had won — for example, it seems unlikely we would have had the full Mueller investigation.

It seems if Russia reprised what it did in 2016 in 2020, the consequences would be even more profound if there is a Democratic administration. Do you think this affects Russia’s calculus at all this year, that they’ve realized they might have pushed the envelope too far already?

Dov Levin

I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about the Russian intervention in 2016. The Russian intervention in 2016 was meant to be secret. In other words, Russia wanted to keep all of the activities — or more accurately, the hand behind those activities — completely a secret from the American public and the rest of the world.

If it was up to Vladimir Putin, all of those leaks by WikiLeaks, we’d all have been speculating in the following four years, where could they have come from? Was it some kind of disgruntled employee in the DNC? Was it some Trump campaign mole in the Clinton campaign? And Putin would be, you know, like one of those James Bond villains with their cat, watching people speculating where it came from, and no one would notice Russia. You know what I mean?

Jen Kirby

I do, but I have a lot of trouble believing that. They were kind of sloppy. How could Russia have believed that we — or at least US intelligence agencies — would not have figured that out?

Dov Levin

Most covert interference is usually not caught. In my data, only a handful of covert electoral interventions were actually exposed before the election — you know, clear evidence was found that a foreign power was involved, and then literally caught red-handed, so to speak. Such exposure was relatively rare.

The reason why I think Russia was exposed in this regard was simply that the [military intelligence agency] GRU is not — or the Russian intelligence agencies are not — as good as they used to be. They used to be very good at hiding their tracks, but in the last few years, it has become evident that they became very sloppy.

You know, there’s another report that multiple secret agents of the GRU had forged passports with consecutive numbers. It was more like one of those, you know, parodies of James Bond rather than any effective spies.

So, I would say that the reason why it was exposed both in 2016, and to a certain extent in 2020, is simply that the GRU is not as good as it used to be. They did not maintain operational secrecy in 2016. That’s why they were caught. In 2020, they seem to have tried to put even more effort into keeping it secret, but they have, nevertheless, seemed to have been exposed in various ways.

This is not because Vladimir Putin thought that he would be exposed and was wanting everyone to know that he was behind it, but simply because his intelligence agency is not as good as the KGB was during the Cold War. And the United States government, and its intelligence agencies, clearly, have been able to penetrate it in some ways and detect its activities.

Jen Kirby

That makes sense, but even some of its other activities — like outreach from people with links to the Russian government to the Trump campaign — just seemed destined to get discovered.

Dov Levin

I would just add, as you mentioned, that, if not for the intervention itself being exposed, the chances that there would have been so much digging that we would have detected other stuff would have been very unlikely as well.

Jen Kirby

Yes, that’s a good point. As you mentioned in your book, the Soviet Union, and later Russia, and the US have intervened in one out of every nine national-level elections between 1946 and 2000. That obviously peaked during the Cold War. But after the Cold War, I think it’s fair to say that the US and Russia weren’t exactly on equal footing. It seems much more risky for Russia to meddle in the US, than for the US to meddle in Russia. So I’m curious about that calculation — what are the risks for powers when they’re not on equal footing with their intervention target?

Dov Levin

From the point of view of Russia, I would guess that one of the reasons it chose to work covertly was to reduce, a bit, the risks involved. If it isn’t exposed, it is less risky. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, you cannot do something in retaliation.

The second reason is that retaliation in response to such meddling, when it’s known, is relatively rare. Russia’s gamble was probably that they would get away with it.

As I mentioned, in most cases, this type of covert election interference is not detected. And if they would have been detected, they would not be likely to be very severely punished. This probably would have been Vladimir Putin’s calculus.

Jen Kirby

Why is punishment so rare?

Dov Levin

Because of two major reasons. One reason is basically that if the side that was being assisted wins, they have no incentive to punish the side that aided them. Why should they bite the hand that just gave them an election victory? I find in my book that in many cases, such interventions are effective and bring to power the assisted side.

And if they lost, again, in many cases, this is done covertly. So if a foreign power leaked incriminating documents, but you don’t know that a foreign power was behind it, you won’t punish them. And in the few cases where it is known [who meddled], the winning party decides to let bygones be bygones and try to open a new page. That is why it usually doesn’t happen.

Jen Kirby

Given this long history of election meddling between the US and Russia, I’m curious if you found that Russia relied on a similar “playbook” in past interventions as they did in 2016. Does Russia revisit the same sort of strategies over and over again, or do they tailor it based on the political climate, the candidate, or political interests?

Dov Levin

I would divide the answer into two parts. What they did in 2016, and what they probably did in 2020, follows tools and techniques that they have used in many countries in the past, including beforehand in the United States and outside of the United States. There’s nothing new about the strategies.

However, when it comes to what they chose, you know, why they chose this method and not that method — that was very well-tailored to the political climate.

Particularly in the United States, in my opinion, that’s one reason why they chose in 2016 to look for emails from the DNC and the Clinton campaign and to leak them. Clearly they believed that such supposed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton would be especially effective.

Jen Kirby

So they figure out what will be the most effective to damage a candidate, and then tailor their methods from there.

Dov Levin

Foreign powers, when they intervene in elections — both Russia and the United States — they tend to tailor very carefully their interventions to the needs of their “client,” or the side that they are assisting, to give them the the maximum assistance they believe is possible, given the circumstances and their capability.

Jen Kirby

In your research, did you come across a tool or method for election interference that tended to be the most effective in swaying an electoral outcome?

Dov Levin

I actually tried to investigate that in my book. I found some preliminary evidence that the size of the intervention matters. If it’s very large, and you’re using multiple methods at the same time, basically throwing the kitchen sink, so to speak, at this particular country, it is more likely to work.

I found also that when it’s done overtly, or in public, it is usually much more effective than covertly, increasing the vote share of the preferred side by 3 percent on average more than a covert operation. As for specific methods, giving money or various dirty tricks like what Russia did in 2016, I could not find conclusive evidence that there is any particular method that is more effective than others.

Jen Kirby

Why is overt intervention more effective?

Dov Levin

I basically argue that overt would usually be more effective because of the way in which it is closely coordinating with the local actor, and the fact that in an overt intervention, a country is able to bring more of its power to bear.

Think about an election as a contest in competitive promise-making. One candidate says, “If you vote for me, you will get a chicken in every pot.” The other candidate says, “No no no, if you vote for me, you’ll get two chickens in every pot.” And basically a great power, because it usually has a resource advantage over any of the other two candidates, it can basically outbid the two sides. The foreign power comes in and says, “If you vote for this guy, all of you get two chickens in every pot, a brand new stove, and a brand new car.”

In other words, a great power can use its resource advantages in order to move the needle by communicating with the voters directly, and bringing all of its resource advantage to bear.

With covert operations, in contrast, you’re trying to intervene ineffectively. You are giving money to the preferred side. But then, they’ll run more ads that hopefully people will watch, or you are hacking and leaking documents that you hope some people will read.

In those cases where there’s a possibility of a backlash, they do it in secret. They only intervene overtly when they know that there will not be a backlash, and it’s likely to be effective.

Jen Kirby

What do you think is the future of foreign meddling?

Dov Levin

Well, I see two directions. One direction is an attempt to “digitize” more traditional intervention techniques and make them more usable in cyberspace. What was done in 2016, when it comes to those leaks and hacks, was basically taking an analog technique and making it digitalized.

I expect other methods of interference would also become digitized. For example, it is possible that, in the future, when a foreign power wants to give campaign funding on the side, they will use cryptocurrencies for this purpose. It makes it much easier to transfer it without anyone in the target country detecting it, and it also reduces the number of meetings needed for this purpose.

Usually for [illicit] campaign funding you need to meet up in some hotel room in secret and give the money in a suitcase or something like that. That’s literally how it was done in some cases, like in one of those crime movies.

Cryptocurrencies make it easier to transfer the money without detection and with less meetings. All you would need to do is be a foreign agent, come into the country with a USB with some cryptocurrency on it, buy a brand-new laptop in a local store, go to your local Starbucks, connect the USB drive with the cryptocurrency on it to your new laptop, log on to the Starbucks wifi, and transfer the money.

So that could be one possible future intervention. Another “digitization” of these interference techniques — not just fake news and then leaks and hacks — would be the return of a very ancient interference technique that existed in the pre-modern world. That would be directly changing the vote tallies.

Before the modern era, for example, if you are, say, the Holy Roman Empire and you wanted to determine who would be the next pope, in some cases, you literally bribed the cardinal in charge of counting the votes, and in that way determined who would be the next pope.

That stopped being possible when we started to have elections with millions of people and thousands of ballot places around the country. But with digital election machines becoming increasingly common, it’s possible that one day a foreign power may try to hack into a voting machine or a central computer in charge of tallying the votes coming all across the country, and literally change the vote count directly.

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Joe Biden has finally disclosed who is raising him big money just days before Election Day

Joe Biden released the list of his general-election fundraisers after 90 million people had already voted. | Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Biden has been sharply breaking from precedent, only releasing the names after 90 million people have already voted.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden finally disclosed the roster of his biggest fundraisers on Saturday, unveiling the names of the 820 people who have helped him build a big-money juggernaut.

The list includes Biden surrogates like former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA); Hollywood filmmakers like Lee Daniels and Jeffrey Katzenberg; Silicon Valley billionaires like Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. The campaign did not specify how much these people raised for Biden efforts beyond that it was more than $100,000.

The release on a Saturday evening came at the last possible moment: Election Day is on Tuesday, and more than 90 million people have already voted, having done so without clarity on who his largest fundraisers are or what influence they may have had on his candidacy. Biden’s last-minute disclosure was a sharp departure from precedent in the Democratic Party, whose presidential candidates have regularly disclosed their so-called “bundlers” in a nod to transparency.

And that’s why campaign-finance reformers had grown concerned that Biden had not yet followed his predecessors Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s lead in releasing his bundlers for the general election.

Biden’s campaign had declined to answer inquiries about their bundlers until last week, when it told The New York Times that it would release their names by the end of October (which ended Saturday.) Both Obama and Clinton released updates on the list of people helping them raise big money at consistent intervals; Biden’s only prior update came on a Friday evening just after Christmas in 2019 during the Democratic primary with about 230 names, before his bundling operation beefed up in earnest.

“Congratulations on clearing an artificially low bar they set for themselves that defeats the entire purpose of transparency — allowing voters to know who is funding the campaigns asking for their support before casting their ballots,” said Tyson Brody, a Democratic operative who worked for Bernie Sanders and backs Biden, but is critical of the influence of large campaign contributors.

It makes strategic sense that the Biden campaign would not to draw attention to the bundlers who have helped him turn a lagging fundraising operation into a surprising powerhouse. Biden has worked to position himself as the candidate with the interest of the working and middle classes in mind, giving himself the nickname “Middle-Class Joe,” and casting the general election “as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue.”

And so, the Biden campaign has tried to draw focus to its small-dollar, online fundraising operation, rather than the celebrities, Silicon Valley billionaires, and Wall Street executives whose support undercuts some of the campaign’s messaging. That’s an especially important task for Biden given that many of these characters are prone to draw the scorn of the left, which is already skeptical of Biden and wants to see big campaign contributors play a smaller role in politics.

And the Trump campaign hasn’t been in much of a place to argue for transparency. Trump hasn’t released any information about his own bundlers at all.

So there’s been limited scrutiny. The upshot of that is that the 90 million people who have already cast ballots ended up voting with incomplete information about the people who helped the campaigns raise the money that may have influenced those very votes.

The debate over bundler disclosure reflects a key campaign question of the Trump era: Should Trump’s own tactics set the standard for his Democratic rivals? Or should Democrats — who claim to prioritize reducing the role of money in politics — aspire to a higher, or at least the pre-Trump, standard?

Campaigns are only legally required to disclose bundlers who are registered lobbyists — everything else is voluntary. Trump and his most immediate GOP predecessor at the top of the ticket, Mitt Romney, declined to share any additional information. But prior to their campaigns, there had been a bipartisan tradition of at least offering some information in order to help voters understand who carried unofficial influence in their campaign; that was done by both John McCain and George W. Bush, who pioneered the modern bundling system and made being a bundler into something of a bragging right.

Bundlers do the often painstaking work of soliciting their networks for high-dollar campaign contributions: inviting their business associates to campaign events, making introductions to campaign staffers, and recruiting more bundlers to serve alongside them. Bundling can often end up be fiercely competitive, with campaigns closely tracking how much individuals have raised and bundlers sometimes finding themselves in competition for positions on leaderboards.

Although Biden released just a single tier of information on the amounts that his bundlers raised, the campaign privately has six different levels of membership for its finance committee: ranging from a “Protector” who helps the campaign raise $50,000 to a “Biden Victory Partner” who brings home $2.5 million, according to a campaign document seen by Recode. Mementos that Biden has sent that top level of bundler include a gold-and-blue pin.

The Biden campaign sends out these buttons to the bundlers who have raised over $2.5 million for his bid.

A reminder of how the Joe Biden big-money machine works. pic.twitter.com/GRIYE0Otsl

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) October 26, 2020

Despite his preference to talk about his low-dollar fundraising operation, Biden has built an impressive big-money machine.

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How the polls look on the last weekend of the election

A Joe Biden supporter at a campaign rally on October 27 in Orlando, Florida. | Octavio Jones/Getty Images

Biden will probably win ... but he might not.

Going into the final weekend of the presidential campaign, a trove of new national polling shows Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a comfortable lead.

But, of course, the vote for president is not a national election. It’s a series of state-by-state elections that determine the winner of the Electoral College. Here, Biden’s edge is more muted, but still substantial. And whether looked at nationally or statewide, there’s simply no sign of a late change in either direction. Trump is not suffering from the new spike in Covid-19 cases, nor is he gaining ground based on the final debate or his last-ditch efforts to attack Hunter Biden.

That stability is good news for Biden. He had a solid lead in the polls four months ago, but there was still much uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome. That the many subsequent events — conventions, protest and unrest, multiple debates, the president’s Covid-19 illness and recovery — left the race largely steady means that Biden’s odds of victory have grown substantially, even if his polling lead has not. Trump has a clear path to win, but it’s not especially probable.

On the other hand, the Economist’s super-bullish odds for Biden say that the likelihood of Trump winning is 4 percent, or about as likely as Steph Curry missing a free throw — a rare occurrence, but certainly something that happens. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden about an 11 percent chance; if someone told you a given restaurant gave food poisoning to 11 percent of its clients, you probably would not eat there. In non-election scenarios, the kind of odds Trump is facing would be understood as involving a fair amount of risk.

The national polls show a strong Biden lead

More than a dozen national surveys were released Thursday, all showing Biden in the lead and averaging to something in the high single digits.

His best result came from the USC Dornsife tracking poll (which has a somewhat unorthodox methodology) and registered a gigantic 12-point lead. Trump’s best poll came from Rasmussen, which invariably delivers Republican-leaning results and still showed Biden up 1 point.

All in all, the RealClearPolitics unweighted national average shows Biden up 7.8 points. Crucially, in that average, Biden is over 50 percent — so even if every single undecided voter and third-party supporter decided to flock to Trump in a desperate pro-malarkey surge, Biden would still have the lead.

Remarkably, throughout the entire campaign there’s been essentially no shot of Trump actually winning more votes than his opponent, and that continues to be true on the eve of the election. But it’s the states that matter, and in the states, the race is closer.

Biden has a healthy lead in Pennsylvania

The most likely “tipping point” state — the one that could be decisive if the election is close — is Pennsylvania. And the polling averages there are closer.

RealClearPolitics says Biden is up by 4.3 points, which is a healthy lead, but polling errors of that scale happen. The final RCP average for Pennsylvania in 2016, however, had Clinton up by 1.9 points. Trump won by 0.7 points, for a total polling error of 2.6 points. (FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average currently puts Biden up by 5.2 points.)

In other words, if you think that pollsters have done nothing at all to fix the methodological problems that plagued swing state polling four years ago and that an error of the same magnitude will recur, then Biden would still win Pennsylvania and thus almost certainly win the election.

And the two most recent polls for Biden — +7 from Quinnipiac University and +5 from a firm called Citizen Data that’s not well-known — were actually better for him.

Then there are a bunch of other states where Biden has a lead, but generally a smaller one.

Biden has smaller leads in the other battlegrounds

By the numbers, Biden unquestionably does not “need” to win Pennsylvania.

Polling averages show him with modest leads in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and even Iowa, so taking even an important state like Pennsylvania off the board isn’t the end of the story. But his leads in all these states are smaller — 1.4 in Florida, for example, and just 0.7 in North Carolina.

If it turns out the polls are badly off in Pennsylvania, one likely scenario is that they were off everywhere, and Trump wins after all. That’s because while polling errors are random, large polling errors can be correlated from place to place. If you undersample white voters with no college degree, as many pollsters did in the 2016 cycle, you end up undersampling them everywhere, so every state where those voters are a large share of the population tips the same way.

But it’s also not out of the question that polling error could go one way in Pennsylvania and another way in a demographically dissimilar state like Arizona or North Carolina.

And in North Carolina, Biden did get late-breaking good news from the very well-regarded New York Times poll, which put him up 3 points, while Citizen Data had him up 7. In Arizona, by contrast, the most recent survey was a Rasmussen poll that had Trump up 4, though on Wednesday, a well-regarded Latino Decisions poll had Biden up 5.

The basic picture, which is really what we’ve seen all year, is that you’d definitely prefer to be in Biden’s shoes. But the odds of a Trump win, though not large, are also not large enough to dismiss out of hand. On the other hand, liberal anxiety and conservative chest-thumping can obscure the fact that mistakes may happen in either direction.

Biden could win in a landslide

Biden definitely doesn’t need to win Texas to win the election, which is good news for him because the latest polls all have him losing the state — whether by 4 points or by just 1. There was a Data for Progress poll on October 26 showing him up 1 point, but the same day the New York Times had him down 4.

The larger significance of all this is that Trump’s polling lead in Texas is actually smaller than Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania.

In other words, while it’s definitely possible that Trump will defy the odds and win, it’s more possible that Biden will win a landslide victory that features a shocking blue Texas scenario. This would almost certainly involve sweeping Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, too, and likely involve Iowa and Ohio as well. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight thinks it’s slightly more likely that Biden will win Alaska than that Trump will win the election.

That doesn’t mean either outcome is likely (though the combined probabilities of one or the other happening are over 25 percent), but it’s a reminder that uncertainty exists in all directions. For now, though, the last week’s flurry of polling mostly confirms what’s been true of this race all along — Biden is up, and the Electoral College helps Trump, but not enough to save him unless the polls are wrong.

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Who the Electoral College really benefits

Why some Americans’ votes count more than others.

In the 2000 US presidential election, the Democratic candidate got half a million more votes than the Republican. The Democrat lost. Sixteen years later, a similar thing happened again. In the US, if you run for president, it does not actually matter how many people in the country vote for you. What matters instead is an arcane system for selecting America’s head of state called the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is the reason the US has something called “swing states,” and it’s the reason those places get to decide the future of the country. It’s the reason presidential candidates rarely campaign in the country’s biggest cities. More recently, it’s also the reason that Republican candidates have been able to eke out victories in the presidential election without actually getting the most votes.

The Electoral College makes some Americans’ votes more powerful than others. In fact, that’s part of the reason we have it to begin with; in the country’s early years, the Electoral College helped give the votes of Southern white people more weight than the votes of Northerners. The idea at its core — that certain votes simply matter more than others — is baked into the American tradition. In the 2020 election, it may decide the winner.

Further reading:

The historian Alexander Keyssar’s book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? takes you through the history and function of the Electoral College:

For the bite-size version of that history, Keyssar also wrote this piece in the New York Times.

The Times has a great interactive feature on where the 2020 candidates actually spent money.

Pew has a breakdown of how democracies around the world elect their head of state, which really shows what an oddball the US is.

More on why today’s Electoral College gives Republican presidential candidates a structural advantage.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

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Trump’s “Sharpiegate” grudge may have cost NOAA’s acting chief scientist his job

President Trump presented a doctored forecast of the path of Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office on September 4, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The scientist who defended forecasters against political pressure during Hurricane Dorian was told to step down for reinforcing scientific integrity.

Remember Sharpiegate?

It turns out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may still be reeling from that episode, when President Trump’s refusal to admit he was wrong ballooned into an actual scandal at one of the nation’s premier scientific institutions.

The New York Times reported this week that NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, who called out political interference during the ordeal, was removed from his post this month when he asked a new political appointee to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity guidelines. The guidelines prohibit manipulating scientific research for political ends.

The appointee, Erik Noble, a former White House adviser, was not pleased, according to the Times:

The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” he wrote, according to a person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated within NOAA.

Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him responsible for ensuring that the agency’s rules on scientific integrity were followed.

The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA,” he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a new chief scientist had already been appointed. “Thank you for your service.”

McLean is still at NOAA, but he’s been replaced as chief scientist by Ryan Maue, a former research meteorologist at the Cato Institute.

It makes sense that scientific integrity was front of mind for McLean when dealing with a political appointee. NOAA in general and McLean in particular have been forced to police the line between science and politics ever since Hurricane Dorian in 2019 galloped toward the Gulf Coast. Trump tweeted at the time that Alabama was one of several states “most likely” to be struck. The National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Alabama, office quickly responded that the state was emphatically not in the path of the storm.

In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2019

Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx

— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) September 1, 2019

A few days later, McLean defended NOAA’s scientists, including researchers at the National Weather Service, and openly decried the interference from the White House in a statement.

It’s rare for a career employee at a government agency to publicly challenge political staff, which may be why a White House appointee at NOAA was so keen to remove him. And while the whole affair may seem silly, it has consequences beyond bruising the president’s ego.

Political interference, or even the appearance thereof, undermines the credibility of an agency like NOAA whose research is used to make life-or-death decisions, like who needs to get out of the path of a dangerous storm.

Now, even before an election, just as Hurricane Zeta, the 27th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, has left 2 million without power along the Gulf Coast, political staff are sidelining scientists at an agency tasked with staying ahead of natural disasters. And it’s likely more manipulation of science is in store if Trump wins a second term in office.

The Trump administration’s repeated attacks on scientific agencies weaken public trust

When his words didn’t match reality, President Trump tried to make reality match his words.

He responded with multiple tweets defending his statement that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. He pressured his Homeland Security adviser to release a statement validating him. NOAA, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, issued a curt statement downplaying comments from its Birmingham station. Then, in the Oval Office, President Trump infamously presented a map of Hurricane Dorian’s path, but the forecast was doctored with a black line to include Alabama.

Altering an official weather forecast is actually illegal for a government employee, though it’s not clear who actually drew the black line on the map (it’s not clear whether it was drawn with a Sharpie, either).

In a September 10, 2019, statement, McLean criticized the decision to use NOAA’s press office to echo Trump and undercut the National Weather Service. “My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political,” he wrote. “If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster’s warnings and products, that specific danger arises.”

The inspector general of the US Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, agreed. A report from the inspector general this summer found that NOAA’s credibility “took a serious hit” when top officials at the agency contradicted the National Weather Service’s Birmingham office:

The Statement undercut the NWS’s forecasts and potentially undercut public trust in NOAA’s and the NWS’s science and the apolitical nature of that science. By requiring NOAA to issue an unattributed statement related to a then-5-day-old tweet, while an active hurricane continued to exist off the east coast of the United States, the Department displayed poor judgment in exercising its authority over NOAA.

But the political pressure on NOAA was mounting before Sharpiegate and has been aimed at influencing the science that drives policy, particularly around climate change.

Since Trump took office, NOAA has not had a Senate-confirmed leader. Currently, Neil Jacobs, the acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, is serving as NOAA’s interim administrator. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly made his disdain for climate change science clear. Shortly after taking office, federal agencies began removing references to climate change from their websites.

For the most part, scientists at NOAA continued doing their jobs but have collided with the White House at times. NOAA is one of the contributing agencies to the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress to assess the impacts of climate change on the United States. After the last installment highlighted the economic costs of climate change, Trump said he didn’t believe the findings — likely because they undermined his administration’s policies to boost fossil fuels and relax greenhouse gas restrictions.

Since the report is foundational to how the government plans for the future, the Trump administration is aiming to alter it during a second term by “removing longtime authors of the climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy,” according to the New York Times.

The Trump administration has already pursued a similar tack at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA ousted numerous independent scientific advisers and instead brought in researchers from the industries it’s supposed to regulate. The agency also placed additional restrictions on what kinds of research could be used to develop environmental regulations, making it easier to roll back restrictions and harder to come up with new rules to govern hazards to air, water, and soil.

And now we’re also seeing this manipulation play out in the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House has repeatedly interfered with and undermined guidance from public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because Trump talked them up, the FDA granted emergency use authorizations to therapies like hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma despite weak evidence for their effectiveness.

The net result of all this manipulation is a loss of public trust, making it less likely that people will adhere to guidelines to protect them from disease or environmental dangers. And with the science itself being twisted to meet political ends, dirtier air and water due to weaker regulations, communities left more vulnerable in a disaster, as well as unready and risky approaches being deployed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic may result.

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We have to accelerate clean energy innovation to curb the climate crisis. Here’s how.

A solar photovoltaic power plant farm installation in New York. | Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

A detailed road map for building a US energy innovation ecosystem.

“Innovation” is a fraught concept in climate politics. For years, it was used as a kind of fig leaf to cover for delaying tactics, as though climate progress must wait on some kind of technological breakthrough or miracle. That left climate advocates with an enduring suspicion toward the notion, and hostility toward those championing it.

Lately, though, that has changed. Arguably, some Republicans in Congress are still using innovation as a way to create the illusion of climate concern (without any conflict with fossil fuel companies). But among people serious about the climate crisis, it is now widely acknowledged that hitting the world’s ambitious emissions targets will require decreasing resource consumption, aggressively deploying existing technologies, and an equally aggressive push to improve those technologies and develop nascent ones.

There is legitimate disagreement about the ratio — about how far and how fast existing, mature technologies can go — but there is virtually no analyst who thinks the current energy innovation system in the US is adequate to decarbonize the country by midcentury. It needs reform.

What kind of reform? Here, as in other areas of climate policy, there is increasing alignment across the left-of-center spectrum. Two recent reports illustrate this.

The first — a report so long they’re calling it a book — is from a group of scholars at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), led by energy scholar Varun Sivaram; it is the first in what will be three volumes on what CGEP is calling a “National Energy Innovation Mission.” The second is from the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on “A Progressive Climate Innovation Agenda,” accompanied by a policy brief and some polling.

Both reports accept the International Energy Agency (IEA) conclusion that “roughly half of the reductions that the world needs to swiftly achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decades must come from technologies that have not yet reached the market today.” There are reasons to think this might be an overly gloomy assessment, but whether it’s 20 percent or 50 percent, aggressive innovation will be required to pull it off.

Both reports set out to put some meat on the bones of a clean energy innovation agenda. And they both end up in roughly the same place, with roughly the same set of policy recommendations. With a bigger team and more resources, the CGEP report is inevitably bulkier and more comprehensive, so I’ll mostly follow along with it, but the Data for Progress report adds a few key elements that we’ll touch on below.

There are five basic reforms involved in developing an innovation system that can decarbonize the US by midcentury: It needs to be bigger, better targeted, broader, more stable, and more equitable. But the politics of clean energy innovation matter too, and so we’ll also look at the prospects for a potential President Joe Biden administration.

US public spending on energy innovation is paltry

Today, the federal government spends less than $9 billion annually on energy innovation, “less than a quarter of what it invests in health innovation and less than a tenth of what it invests in defense innovation,” says CGEP.

CGEP

Roughly 80 percent of the money goes to the Department of Energy; the rest goes to a grab bag of agencies including the Department of Agriculture and NASA.

US energy research and development (R&D) spending spiked after the 1970s oil crisis, but when oil prices fell and President Reagan came along, it plunged, and as a percentage of US GDP, it has never recovered.

ITIF

And just as public R&D spending “crowds in” private investment in a virtuous cycle, the loss of funding leads to a vicious cycle. “Starting in 1984,” CGEP writes, “private funding for energy RD&D [research, design, and development] and US energy patents declined for the next two decades.”

Still today, what private investment there is in clean energy is overwhelmingly focused on mature technologies that are market competitive. In 2019, just 10 percent of private investment in clean energy went to innovative companies; the bulk was financing for projects like wind and solar farms, from established market players.

And venture capital isn’t stepping up either. “In 2019, VCs invested just $1 billion into US energy companies,” CGEP writes, “compared with about $20 billion for health care deals and $70 billion for information technology firms.”

In 2015, the US made a promise to the world, as part of the international Mission Innovation compact, to raise energy R&D spending to $12.8 billion annually by 2021. It remains billions of dollars short.

As IEA’s report makes clear, even the Mission Innovation target is grossly inadequate to the task. The US is only about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. One of its primary roles in the climate fight must be putting its incredible intellectual and engineering might behind innovation, to drive down the costs of technologies other countries need to get on a sustainable path.

“The single most important thing that the United States can do to advance progress on climate change,” Sivaram says, “is launch a national energy innovation mission.”

UCS

The US energy innovation budget should triple or quadruple

One of the primary lessons CGEP draws from historical examples of government R&D is that “scale matters.” It cites defense and health spending, which have created expansive innovation ecosystems that encompass the entire development process, from lab to market, and are at least somewhat self-sustaining and insulated from ongoing political interference.

“Federal support for energy innovation has not attained this scale,” CGEP writes, “and as a result, enjoys neither a thriving and self-sustaining innovation ecosystem nor sufficient political independence to tolerate failures in the portfolio.” (Imagine how the health system would look if every failed drug were treated like Solyndra.)

The first order of business in creating an adequate innovation ecosystem is simply spending more money on it.

Data for Progress recommends “slightly more than a three-fold increase in R&D spending and a four-fold increase in RD&D spending by 2030.”

Data for Progress

CGEP emphasizes a more specific near-term target: $25 billion by 2025 (roughly tripling the current budget, which would still put energy innovation at about half what the US spends on health innovation).

That target is high enough to bulk up the energy R&D portfolio, CGEP argues. It matches a bottom-up analysis of funding needs; research shows that “funding in roughly this range will translate into net economic benefits and rapid technological progress”; and it would bring US public investment in energy R&D to roughly the same percentage of GDP as China’s. At the same time, history shows that spending of that level can be profitably and economically deployed by agencies to accelerate innovation. Contrary to conservative myth, the federal government is pretty good at this.

The previously mentioned health and defense innovations ecosystems have produced dozens of products and services that have spilled over into other sectors. Defense R&D yielded semiconductors, computers, and GPS systems. Biomedical R&D produced the biotech industry. “Science supported by NIH,” CGEP writes, “underpinned every single one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2016.”

Federal R&D spending works. And it draws in private capital. “It’s been shown that government R&D in clean energy technologies redirects private R&D away from fossil fuel technologies and into clean energy,” Sivaram says.

But the full potential of federal innovation spending is only unlocked at scale. That means lots more money, quickly.

Federal innovation money should be targeted at the neediest sectors

Data for Progress is blunt: “Existing innovation programs are not designed to address climate change,” but rather to boost US fossil fuel supply.

For one thing, Department of Energy (DOE) R&D spending is concentrated on the power sector, while the bulk of US emissions come from fossil fuel combustion in transportation, buildings, and industry.

CGEP

(Note, in particular, the low spending on industry, where high-temperature processes like steel and concrete manufacture promise to be one of the most difficult areas to decarbonize.)

What’s more, the bulk of DOE R&D spending goes to nuclear power and fossil fuels, despite the fact that the IPCC (and everyone else) expects renewable energy to be the backbone of a decarbonized energy system.

Data for Progress

Both Data for Progress and CGEP recommend that funding priorities shift away from individual fuels, especially fossil fuels, toward energy applications with large potential emission reductions.

CGEP suggests a focus on 10 particular “technology pillars.” (In the report, each pillar is accompanied by a helpful summary of recent initiatives around it and some recommendations for new initiatives to boost it.)

1. Foundational science and platform technologies
2. Clean electricity generation
3. Advanced transportation systems
4. Clean fuels
5. Modern electric power systems
6. Clean and efficient buildings
7. Industrial decarbonization
8. Carbon capture, use, and sequestration
9. Clean agricultural systems
10. Carbon dioxide removal

One could argue about the relative weighting of these pillars — I have contended for a while that smaller, more distributed, modular, and digital technologies are better suited to America’s strengths — but as an initial list, it is solid. And it overlaps almost entirely with Data for Progress’s similar list of tech priorities.

CGEP

It will not be enough, however, to target money at early-stage research alone.

Federal innovation money should be spread out more broadly

Too often, those who tout “innovation” seek to confine R&D money to early-stage research, as though the market will take it from there. Extensive experience and analysis shows that is false.

In fact, research shows that R&D is vital to driving technologies down the cost curve, not only in the lab stage, but when crossing the “valley of death” between lab and market and when scaling up to full market maturity. All those graphs you see of solar, wind, and battery costs falling? It’s not just scale, or “learning by doing,” that’s driving those cost reductions. The graphs rarely show it, but behind almost every new technology that reaches broad market scale there is consistent innovation-boosting policy help, at every stage.

Different policies help more during different stages, as the stylized chart below shows.

CGEP

Today, public funding for innovation is overwhelmingly focused on early-stage research.

The underfunding of demonstration projects is particularly acute, since private capital is often leery of investing in high-risk projects where knowledge spillovers make it difficult to capture all the benefits. “As a result,” CGEP writes, “a yawning valley of death can swallow firms that lack the capital to demonstrate promising clean energy technologies that they have developed.”

Right now only 5 percent of federal energy R&D spending goes to demonstration projects, and most of that is for advanced nuclear. CGEP recommends that the government “fund demonstration projects across the ten technology pillars at a level of at least $5 billion per year by 2025.”

To spend this money, the government should create a central financing authority. Data for Progress recommends a national Green Bank; CGEP mentions a possible Clean Energy Deployment Administration. Either way, a central, accountable authority should dispense and track grants and loans.

And the government should join “technology push” policies focused on early research with “market pull” policies that draw demonstrated technologies into market scale. Options include “carbon pricing, clean electricity standards, fuel economy standards, targeted tax incentives, and more,” CGEP says. This will help government spread investment more broadly across the technology development curve.

The funding should also be spread more broadly across agencies and programs to exploit synergies among agencies and better protect funding from political interference. “Many other federal agencies have missions that align with advancing energy innovation,” CGEP notes. It cites the Department of Defense, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (within the Commerce Department), and the Department of Agriculture, among others.

And finally, funding should be spread across institutions, from national laboratories to universities, private sector companies, and state and local governments. Government partnerships with industry are a major feature of the German innovation system, which features 66 German Fraunhofer Institutes that focus practical research on various industrial challenges. And it is well understood that innovation proceeds faster in research “clusters,” where labs, universities, and firms work in close proximity. The federal government can work with local and regional authorities to help build those clusters.

And again, it comes back to scale. “To sustain academic, industrial, and federal laboratory complexes,” Sivaram says, “a threshold level of investment is needed across all parts of the chain, to support this interplay between R&D and manufacturing.”

Federal innovation funding should be steady and flexible

The scale of US defense and health R&D spending produces predictability — the institutions it has created are at least somewhat self-sustaining. Energy R&D, on the other hand, has been subject to continual boom and bust cycles, which inevitably disrupt research.

To scale up innovation as fast as needed, the government should “signal its long-term commitment to increasing annual energy RD&D funding over the next decade, even after reaching the target of $25 billion by 2025.” Researchers and industries need to be able to rely on it.

And agencies should rigorously collect and analyze information, to foster transparency and increase trust among policymakers and the public so that funding survives swings in politics.

Finally, innovation funding should be flexible and adaptive, based on ongoing research, forecasting, and expert opinion. If some technologies fall in cost faster (or slower) than expected, agencies should be able to course-correct and redirect funding.

“If, for example, the commercial cost of producing clean hydrogen falls rapidly over the next decade,” CGEP writes, “it could make sense to redouble investments in RD&D to use hydrogen as a feedstock to decarbonize industrial processes.” Conversely, if hydrogen proves resistant to cost declines, it might make sense to channel more money to biofuels and battery chemistries.

Steadiness and predictability are the key, though: “At a high level,” CGEP says, “policymakers must stick to their roadmap for ramping up the federal budget for energy innovation.”

Federal innovation funding should be spent equitably

The CGEP report contains several references to “inclusive economic growth” and lots of ideas for how federal partnerships with states and localities could foster it, but the Data for Progress report has a full and separate section on equity, which gathers key recommendations in one place, so let’s take a look at them.

The first and arguably most important recommendation is that federal innovation programs be explicitly redirected toward addressing the climate crisis, which crucially involves environmental justice. Energy innovation programs should “prioritize projects that improve social and economic equity, including through business models that allow for communities to lead, own, and benefit from clean energy projects,” Data for Progress writes. And it should seek to avoid exacerbating other inequitable environmental hazards in its quest to reduce emissions.

Second, Data for Progress argues that the federal government should direct at least 40 percent of climate-related investments (including those on innovation) to “disproportionately burdened communities” that have historically suffered from “systemic racism and structural inequity.”

Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

A sign reading “Climate Justice Now” is placed in front of the Citgo Sign in Kenmore Square on August 10, 2020, at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts.

Third, it argues that the government should prioritize projects in communities dependent on the fossil fuel economy, which could be hard hit by a wholesale transition to clean energy. When DOE is making research grants or funding demonstration projects, it should “consider the extent to which these programs can enable communities historically dependent on fossil fuels to benefit and diversify their economies.”

Fourth, the government should bulk up workforce redevelopment efforts aimed at clean energy jobs. And fifth, it should expand international cooperation on climate initiatives that can help address global inequities.

This focus on equity throughout the innovation ecosystem, says Jake Higdon, a climate analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the authors of the Data for Progress report, is crucial to “garnering more engagement and ownership over innovation from the progressive caucus.”

The politics of clean energy innovation in 2020

Another difference between the two reports is that Data for Progress’s is explicitly framed as advice to Democrats for when and if they get power.

As it shows in its accompanying polling, this is good politics for Dems. A narrow (51 percent) majority of the public supports investing $1 trillion in green energy innovation.

Data for Progress

(Note how big the “don’t know” category is, especially among independents. There is lots of room for persuasion here.)

And larger majorities would prefer to invest in clean energy tech over more military weaponry.

Data for Progress

Bipartisan public support, Higdon says, “is all the more reason for progressives, who are concerned about the climate crisis and see it as an intersectional issue, to be engaging very deeply on setting the terms of the innovation agenda.”

CGEP, by contrast, is insistent that for public innovation spending to reach the scale, breadth, and resilience it needs, there must be a bipartisan consensus supporting it. “Any policy that is to last for decades in the United States must withstand shifts in partisan control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives,” it writes, “not to mention periods of divided government.” It cites the Cold War consensus and the more recent consensus around biomedical research.

No such consensus has formed around energy — Reagan theatrically rejected Carter’s calls for more thoughtful energy policy — but CGEP claims the outlines of one are beginning to take shape.

“This is a pocket of resistance among congressional Republicans against the Trump administration,” Sivaram says. In each of the last four years, the Trump budget proposed significant cuts in clean energy programs, including Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy; each time, cuts were rejected. “Instead,” CGEP writes, “federal funding for clean energy RD&D has risen by about one-third during this period.”

The report also cites the American Energy Innovation Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat. As chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, they wrangled the interests of some 70 senators into a single bill that boosts R&D funding for a range of technologies and funds 17 demonstration projects. (Sivaram says he was “dismayed” when the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists denounced the bill for directing too much funding to fossil fuel technologies.)

Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), left, speaks to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the FY2021 Interior Department budget in Washington, DC, on March 10, 2020.

There’s a bipartisan group of legislators behind the “Endless Frontier Act,” which would set up a directorate in the National Science Foundation to fund 10 technology research areas (including advanced energy) to the tune of $20 billion a year, and another bipartisan group behind the House Nuclear Energy R&D Act, which would refocus DOE’s nuclear energy program on next-gen reactors.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) called for a “New Manhattan Project” for clean energy research. Even Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has hopped on board the innovation train. The Bipartisan Policy Center has an American Energy Innovation Council stocked with CEOs who support energy innovation.

It’s not so much the climate angle that draws conservative support, Sivaram says, as the economic development angle and the competition-with-China angle. And that might be enough. “The whole reason I devoted the last six months to doing this is I think it can actually happen,” he says, “and it’s not going to require a signal change in how the government works, compared with all the other climate plans.”

He acknowledges that implementing the recommendations in CGEP’s report will probably require a new presidential administration, but he insists that it “does not require a substantial change in the makeup of Congress.”

I do not share Sivaram’s optimism. CGEP’s report concludes with three recommendations for immediate action: The president should launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, Congress should increase energy RD&D funding by 30 percent in 2021, and the US should reassert its international leadership on energy innovation.

If I were a gambling man, I would bet that US conservatives will condemn any mission launched by a President Joe Biden as a wasteful government boondoggle. I would bet that, to the extent they are capable, they will deny him any major legislative victories in Congress, including a big clean energy bill. And I would bet that any attempts to reestablish US commitment to clean energy on the international stage will be dogged by Republican assurances that, should they retake power, fossil fuels will once again be in the driver’s seat.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Republican loyalties are not subtle.

The political history of the past few decades reveals that the far right’s hold on the GOP and its near-religious devotion to opposing anything Democrats do or say steamroll any glimmers of bipartisan consensus. Partisanship is stronger than any other force in US life.

Republicans may support channeling federal energy innovation money to fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel communities, but recent history suggests that they simply will not go beyond that to any perceived progressive priority. Bipartisanship, with today’s GOP, means the portion of Republican priorities that Democrats are willing to support.

But I am a pessimist! Perhaps Sivaram is right. There’s no harm in trying.

Either way, it is good to see the left side of the aisle getting serious about the details of a federal energy agenda. And it is good to see that on this subject, as in other parts of climate policy, there is substantial overlap among centrists and progressives. If Biden finds himself in the Oval Office, he will have a broadly popular and extremely detailed road map.

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