The sun rose over the Capitol on Monday with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, exhorting an empty Senate chamber to reject Judge Amy Coney Barrett — the culmination of a largely symbolic all-night debate and beginning of a day that will reverberate through the 2020 campaign and far beyond.
Ms. Barrett’s confirmation is a certainty at this point. The only questions are procedural particulars. A vote is expected at around 7:30 p.m., according to the Senate’s administrative staff, followed by her swearing-in.
Early Monday, Senate Democrats asked Vice President Mike Pence not to preside over the final confirmation vote in the chamber after several of his close aides tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Not only would your presence in the Senate Chamber tomorrow be a clear violation of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, it would also be a violation of common decency and courtesy,” they wrote in a letter to the vice president, who said Saturday he would not “miss that vote for the world.”
The stakes of the presidential race, entering its final week, have been magnified by the imminent confirmation of a Supreme Court justice who might be called upon to rule in election cases.
The vote comes a day after Democrats unsuccessfully tried to filibuster the nomination to protest a decision they say should be left to the winner of the presidential election. Their anger rose, and with it grew suggestions from Democrats that they would take dramatic measures, such as adding additional justices to the court, if they reclaimed the Senate and the presidency.
“They expect that they’re going to be able to break the rules with impunity and when the shoe maybe is on the other foot, nothing’s going to happen,” Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who votes with Democrats, said of the Republicans.
The addition of Judge Barrett would give conservatives six of the court’s nine seats. Democrats argue it would threaten legal abortion and protections for millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act.
“A vote for Barrett is a vote to strip health care from millions of people. It’s a vote to turn back the clock on reproductive freedom,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. “To endanger Dreamers and immigrants. To let climate change rampage unchecked. To imperil efforts to address systemic racism. To place workers’ rights, voting rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and gun violence prevention at risk.”
Judge Barrett’s impending confirmation also immediately calls into question whether she would recuse herself from ruling on lawsuits over the election, which seem to grow more likely each time Mr. Trump tries to cast aspersions on the integrity of voting.
“A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said on Sunday. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
If Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court today as expected, she will almost immediately confront a host of issues concerning the election and the policies of President Trump, who placed her on the court. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions.
When can she start?
As soon as she is sworn in, meaning she could be at work on Tuesday. Under the court’s usual practices, she cannot participate in cases that have already been argued. Should the court deadlock in some of those cases, though, the court can set them down for re-argument before the full court.
Must she recuse herself from cases involving President Trump?
The Supreme Court allows justices to decide whether to disqualify themselves. In the past, justices have not hesitated to sit on cases involving the presidents who appointed them.
Are there election disputes awaiting decisions?
Yes. The court will soon act on cases from North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all concerning whether deadlines for receiving mailed ballots may be extended. Two of them are emergency applications, which are decided without arguments. The third is a request to hear the case on the merits, but on a very fast schedule.
When is she likely to hear her first arguments?
Next Monday, when the court returns to the virtual bench for a two-week sitting to hear arguments by telephone.
In the coming months, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the fate of the Affordable Care Act, on two major Trump administration immigration policies, on whether Mr. Trump can exclude undocumented immigrants from the reapportionment of congressional seats and on whether religious groups must comply with government policies barring discrimination against same-sex couples.
President Trump maintains a narrow edge in Texas, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll on Monday, as he faces a rebellion in the state’s once overwhelmingly Republican suburbs.
Mr. Trump leads Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Texas by 47 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, the survey found, which is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The survey of 802 likely voters was mostly conducted before the final presidential debate on Thursday.
In the Senate race, the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, holds a larger lead, 48-38, over the Democrat, M.J. Hegar.
New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in Texas
Trump
47%
Biden
43%
Other/Undecided
10%
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 802 likely voters from Oct. 20-25, 2020.
Polls have shown a competitive race in Texas all cycle, but the Biden campaign has made only limited efforts to contest the state.
The Republican grip on Texas has deteriorated rapidly during the Trump era, as a Democratic breakthrough in the suburbs has endangered more than one-third of the state’s Republican congressional delegation and Republican control of the state House.
In these districts, Republicans face a combination of rapid demographic change and previously unthinkable Democratic gains among white college-educated voters. Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden by just two points among white college graduates in these districts, even though they say they backed Mr. Trump by 24 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The survey suggested that Mr. Biden’s support among Hispanic voters, 57 percent to 34 percent, is weaker than Mrs. Clinton’s was four years ago. The finding broadly tracks with national surveys, which have shown Mr. Trump improving among Hispanic voters compared with his 2016 standing.
In 2018, Times/Siena surveys generally underestimated turnout by Hispanics and their support for Democrats in Texas. So far this cycle, polls have varied widely on Mr. Trump’s standing among the group in Texas, with a recent Quinnipiac survey showing Mr. Biden ahead by just eight points, 51-43, while a Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler Texas survey showed him ahead by a far wider margin, 67-20.
President Trump ripped into Senator Kamala Harris in demeaning and personal terms during a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, saying, “She will not be the first woman president — you can’t let that happen” while mocking the way she laughed during her “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday.
During a high-decibel, scattershot speech in Allentown that lasted well over an hour, Mr. Trump repeatedly targeted Ms. Harris — who is running for vice president, not president — in a heckling performance that mirrored his attacks on Hillary Clinton and other female foils over the years.
The president went on to offer caustic negative appraisals of other prominent women he said had treated him badly — the CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Moments later, he trumpeted his appeal to “suburban women,” despite polls showing him trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. among suburban women in battleground states by more than 20 percentage points.
“She will not be the first woman president. You can’t let that happen. You can’t let that happen,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, during the first of three scheduled rallies in the battleground state on Wednesday.
He did not explain what he meant by the comment: In the past he has claimed, without evidence, that Ms. Harris, a California Democrat, would be a de facto president if elected.
At a rally in Florida last week, Mr. Trump also attacked Ms. Harris with a gratuitous reference to her gender, saying the country did not need a socialist president — “especially a female socialist president.”
“Did anybody see ‘60 Minutes’ last night? Did anybody see it?” said Mr. Trump, who stormed out of his own interview with Ms. Stahl, accusing her of asking tough questions while her program lobbed softballs to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris.
“It was a total joke of a show,” he added. “Did you see his performance on that show? The only thing almost as bad was Kamala with the laugh, oh, that’s so funny. She kept laughing. I said, ‘Is there something wrong with her, too?’”
He also criticized Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: “The watermelon head, right?”
Mr. Trump, who faces a widening gender gap, nonetheless defended his standing among women voters — in part, by making a racist appeal based on his opposition to an Obama-era program intended to integrate segregated suburbs.
“I think I’m doing great with suburban women. I am saving the suburbs! I am saving the suburbs. How can I do badly?” he said to wild applause, from the crowd arranged on risers outside an Allentown factory, many of them not wearing masks.
“Here is what I know about suburban women,” he added. “First of all, they are great. Love our country. They want to do things. They want to leave their house alone. They don’t want the five-story project next to them or could be higher. They want to leave their house alone. They want security. OK?”
After the cheering died away, Mr. Trump asked the audience, “Am I that bad? Am I that bad?” — to shouts of ‘no!”
Mr. Trump also repeated falsehoods about the ballot-counting process in Pennsylvania and expressed solidarity with groups of supporters who have been showing up at polling sites to videotape people attempting to vote, a practice the state’s attorney general has called voter intimidation.
“We’re watching you very closely, Philadelphia,” he said.
Mike Espy and Jaime Harrison, two of the five Black Senate candidates in the South this year, may belong to different political generations, but they both came up in a Democratic Party where African-American politicians didn’t talk directly about race in campaigns against white opponents.
But there was Mr. Harrison this month, speaking before more than 250 cars at a drive-in rally in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, explicitly urging a mix of white and Black supporters to right the wrongs of the state’s past.
“The very first state to secede from the union,” Mr. Harrison said to a cacophony of blaring horns, “because we will be the very first state in this great country of ours that has two African-American senators serving at the very same time — and you will make that happen.”
A day later, speaking to an equally diverse audience in northern Mississippi, Mr. Espy called his Republican opponent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, “an anachronism.”
“She is someone who believes in going back to the old days,” he said, lashing his Republican rival for hailing the Civil War-era South and refusing to take a stand in the debate over Mississippi’s state flag, which until this summer included the Confederate battle emblem. “We need a Mississippi that’s more inclusive, that’s more diverse, more welcoming.”
While it has been overshadowed by the presidential race, a political shift is underway in the South that could have a lasting impact well past this election. Democrats have nominated several Black Senate candidates in a region where they’ve often preferred to elevate moderate whites, these contenders are running competitively in conservative states, and they’re doing so by talking explicitly about race.
Mr. Harrison, a onetime lobbyist and state party chair; Mr. Espy, the former agriculture secretary; and the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church and a Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia, are each making Republicans nervous about seats that have not been competitive in decades. Black Democratic Senate candidates have also emerged in Tennessee, where Marquita Bradshaw is competing for an open seat, and Louisiana, where Mayor Adrian Perkins of Shreveport entered late in the race.
With two Black Republicans vying for seats in Michigan and Rhode Island, there are a record seven major Black candidates running for the Senate this year.
It’s a remarkable roster in a part of the country that has both the highest concentration of African-American voters and a history of hostility to Black candidates running statewide — a resistance so strong that national Democrats for decades treated Black recruits as an afterthought at best.
The Office of the U.S. Special Counsel has opened a second investigation into whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo violated federal laws by helping President Trump’s campaign in his official duties — including by speaking to the Republican National Convention while on a diplomatic trip to Jerusalem.
Representatives Eliot L. Engel and Nita Lowey, Democrats of New York, confirmed the investigation into Mr. Pompeo’s convention speech on Monday.
One week ago, the independent group American Oversight cited a special counsel investigator who confirmed a separate inquiry into Mr. Pompeo’s pledge to release any additional Hillary Clinton emails that might remain at the State Department, as Mr. Trump has demanded.
At issue in both cases is whether the country’s chief diplomat violated the Hatch Act, a law that bans political activity in the federal workplace. Investigating potential Hatch Act violations is one of the four primary responsibilities of the Office of the U.S. Special Counsel.
“As we get closer to both this year’s election and his own inevitable return to electoral politics, Mike Pompeo has grown even more brazen in misusing the State Department and the taxpayer dollars that fund it as vehicles for the administration’s, and his own, political ambitions,” Mr. Engel, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s chairman, and Ms. Lowey, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement on Monday.
They said the State Department has either withheld or delayed necessary documents the committees have demanded for its own investigations into whether Mr. Pompeo’s speeches to conservative audiences in Florida, Iowa and elsewhere amount to improper political activity.
Mr. Pompeo is widely believed to be courting support for his own political ambitions — including a potential presidential run in 2024 — as well as urging Americans to vote as he extols Trump administration policies.
For nearly a year, Democrats in Congress have accused Mr. Pompeo of using taxpayer-funded government aircraft for speeches in political bellwether states and hosting receptions at the State Department for potential donors and Republican influencers. In January, the Office of Special Counsel, reported that it found no evidence that Mr. Pompeo acted improperly while exploring a Senate run from Kansas last year.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been spearheading the Trump campaign’s outreach to Black voters for over a year, arguing that even if President Trump can increase his support among them by as little as two percentage points, it could sway the election.
On Monday, in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” however, he made comments seeming to question whether Black Americans “want to be successful,” a remark that played into a racist stereotype and was quickly seized on by the Democratic National Committee.
“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Mr. Kushner said. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
The D.N.C. responded to Mr. Kushner’s remarks with a lengthy statement. “According to the Trump administration, when African Americans find fault in policies that have led to historic unemployment for Black families, an explosion of racial inequities and wealth gaps, and an uncontained global pandemic that has taken the lives of over 45,000 Black Americans, it means that we just don’t want to be successful badly enough,” it said.
“This dismissive approach to the issues that Black voters care about is indicative of Trump’s callousness and disregard for the lives of Black people.”
Mr. Kushner’s comments were widely denounced as racist on social media. “We will remember his casual racism,” Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, claimed that Mr. Kushner’s remarks had been taken out of context.
Mr. Kushner’s comment came after a discussion of racial unrest, which he referred to as “the George Floyd situation,” a reference to the Black man who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis this summer.
Mr. Kushner accused many protesters of virtue signaling. “They’d go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey, or write something on a basketball court,” he said. “And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”
He claimed what was more important was policies that have helped Black Americans, like criminal justice reform and the funding Mr. Trump has supported for historically Black colleges and universities. Those have been two of the administration’s main talking points in its outreach to Black voters, even as the president has made it clear in recent months that he believes the country’s real racism problem is bias against white Americans.
Mr. Kushner said he has been hearing from Trump campaign state directors across the country about a “groundswell of support in the Black community, because they’re realizing that all of the different bad things that the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true.”
A recent CBS News poll found that 85 percent of registered Black voters felt that as president, Mr. Trump “favors white people.” About 79 percent of those voters said he “worked against” Black people.
Melania Trump, the first lady, is set to return to the campaign trail on Tuesday, headlining an event in Pennsylvania where she will be interviewed by Kellyanne Conway, the former White House official and 2016 Trump campaign manager.
The event, in Atglen, between Philadelphia and Lancaster, was being referred to internally by Trump allies as “the sequel,” a reference to Mrs. Trump’s solo visit to Pennyslvania in the final days of the 2016 presidential race. Four years ago, Mr. Trump won the battleground state by less than a percentage point.
Mrs. Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, had been set to make her first appearance after receiving a negative test last week, at a rally in Erie, Pa., with her husband. It would have been her first rally in over a year, since she accompanied her husband to the official “kick-off” event of his re-election campaign in Orlando, Fla., in June 2019.
But at the last minute, Mrs. Trump canceled her trip because of a lingering cough. She has since appeared at the final presidential debate last week, where she wore a face mask, and at a Halloween event for children at the White House, where she did not.
Ms. Conway also tested positive for the virus earlier this month, after attending the Rose Garden ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and has not been seen on the campaign trail since leaving her position at the White House in August.
Mrs. Trump is viewed as a compelling surrogate for her husband, but she has always been loath to give over too much of her schedule to the campaign. She has taken an even more cautious approach since the pandemic hit in March, refusing to attend fund-raising luncheons.
With about a week until Election Day, labeling opponents as radicals has become the closing message for Republicans in tight races around the country. While Democrats have focused on health care access and getting the coronavirus pandemic under control, most Republicans have settled on a message of grievance — that Democratic governance would bring socialism and left-wing extremism.
Like Democratic candidates for the Senate in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, Theresa Greenfield of Iowa has balked at progressive issues like single-payer health insurance, adding seats to the Supreme Court and defunding the police.
On a recent tour of Southeast Iowa, she talked about expanding job training programs and health care coverage through a public insurance option. She criticized Democrats for not prioritizing an infrastructure bill and vocational education.
She has rejected the Green New Deal, the expansive piece of climate legislation backed by two progressive lawmakers, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
But that has not stopped her opponent, the Republican incumbent Joni Ernst, from casting her as a secret socialist, or someone who will become one once in Washington.
When Ms. Ocasio-Cortez mentioned the Iowa race on Sunday in an interview with CNN, Ms. Ernst’s campaign immediately sought to weaponize the comment.
“Theresa Greenfield is a liberal who has the full support of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the author of the Green New Deal,” a spokesman for Ms. Ernst, Brendan Conley, said in a statement. “Theresa Greenfield supports extreme new environmental rules that would kill American jobs and hurt Iowa farmers, making clear that Greenfield is perfect for New York or California, but wrong for Iowa.”
The Republican strategy was also on display during a recent debate. At times, Ms. Ernst focused on her record, trying to project the strength of an incumbent front-runner. At other times, she accused Ms. Greenfield of calling police officers “racist” and supporting “Medicare for all,” which led to some pointed exchanges in which the candidates talked over each other.
“I don’t support Medicare for all, but I do support strengthening and enhancing the Affordable Care Act,” Ms. Greenfield said.
In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, right-leaning news sites with millions of readers have published dozens of false or misleading headlines and articles that effectively back unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and his allies that mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of the election.
The Washington Examiner, Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit and The Washington Times are among the sites that have posted articles with headlines giving weight to the conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data.
Major polls have shown Mr. Trump lagging behind the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an election that will have significantly more people than usual voting by mail because of the coronavirus. False claims about mail-in voting have been a staple of the president’s campaign. At last month’s debate, he claimed without evidence, “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”
In August, The New York Post published an article that relied on one anonymous source, identified as a Democratic operative, who claimed that he had engaged in voter fraud for decades. The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller, FoxNews.com and The Washington Examiner posted their own versions of the article. It was also promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric, the Trump campaign’s communications team, the “Fox & Friends” television program and Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, according to a recent Harvard University study.
The Harvard researchers described a “propaganda feedback loop” in right-wing media. The authors of the study, published this month through the school’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, reported that popular news outlets, rather than social media platforms, were the main drivers of a disinformation campaign meant to sow doubts about the integrity of the election.
The news over the weekend that another coronavirus outbreak had struck the White House, infecting Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and four other top aides, further underscored the Trump administration’s cavalier approach to the worst health crisis in a century.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning, essentially offering a verbal shrug in response to any effort to prevent an outbreak in the top echelon of the nation’s leaders. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations, because it is a contagious virus — just like the flu.”
The in-house outbreak, playing against the national backdrop of the biggest three-day total of new infections in the entire course of the pandemic, is also making it harder for the president to change the subject as he dashes through swing states in a bid to mount a come-from-behind victory.
“Covid, Covid. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Mr. Trump had groused at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, hours before the revelation of the infections on his running mate’s staff. He made up a scenario: “A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’”
Mr. Trump made no reference to the new cases during campaign rallies in New Hampshire and Maine on Sunday.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday that the statement by Mr. Meadows was “an acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
“It’s sadly no surprise then that this virus continues to rage unchecked across the country and even in the White House itself,” said Mr. Biden, who has sought to make the administration’s handling of the coronavirus the centerpiece of his campaign.
The head of a federal panel that advises the White House on compensation issues resigned on Monday to protest President Trump’s new executive order that could wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of federal workers.
Ronald P. Sanders, the chairman of the Federal Salary Council, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2017, said that the new executive order would replace “political expertise with political obeisance.”
The order, signed last week, gives Mr. Trump and his political appointees the power to hire and fire certain federal civil servants who now hold jobs that are supposed to be exempt from political influence.
“The Executive Order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process,” Mr. Sanders, who called himself a lifelong Republican, wrote in his resignation letter, dated today and sent to the White House. “I have concluded that as a matter of conscience, I can no longer serve him or his administration.”
The president’s executive order has already provoked protests by federal labor unions and some Democrats in Congress. If Mr. Trump is not re-elected, the next administration could repeal the measure.
Mr. Sanders wrote of civil servants, “The only ‘boss’ that they serve is the public,” adding, “No president should be able to remove career civil servants whose only sin is that they may speak such a truth to him.” The board Mr. Sanders resigned from is made up of experts in labor relations and representatives of federal labor unions.
A White House official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The White House, in a statement that accompanied the executive order, said the new employee classification was justified because under current rules “removing poor performers, even from these critical positions, is time-consuming and difficult.”
As the presidential campaign begins its final week, early voting is shattering records, and some experts are predicting the highest turnout in decades. But if history is any indication, a significant portion of Americans will not participate, a signal of distrust and disillusionment with the political system that spans the partisan divide.
Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. But since the 1960s, between a third and a half of eligible voters have stayed home during presidential elections, giving America one of the lowest rates of national-election participation in the developed world.
Since the early 1900s, the high point for presidential turnout was in 1960, when 64 percent of eligible adults voted, according to the United States Elections Project, which tracks voting data back to 1789. Most recently, the highest peak was in 2008, when 62 percent turned out.
An analysis of Census Bureau survey data from the 2016 election shows a deep class divide: Americans who did not vote were more likely to be poor or unemployed, less likely to have college degrees, and more likely to be single parents compared to people who voted.
Not voting has been a feature of the American political landscape for decades. But with razor-slim margins in a number of swing states in 2016, nonvoters have taken on an outsize importance. For instance, in Pennsylvania, more than 3.5 million eligible voters in the state did not cast ballots for president in the 2016 election, a number that dwarfed Mr. Trump’s 44,000-vote margin of victory.
Keyana Fedrick of East Stroudsburg, Pa., in the northeast part of the state, sat out the 2016 elections and plans to again this year. She said not voting is something that she and a friend have started to hide from people they know.
“We said we’re just going to lie, like, ‘Oh yeah, I voted,’” said Ms. Fedrick, 31, who works two jobs, at a hotel and a department store, and said she did not trust Democrats or Republicans. “I don’t feel like getting crucified for what I think.”
Watch the final episode in the Stressed Election series, which examines how Americans are borrowing from Russia’s 2016 playbook, using disinformation on social media against each other.
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transcript
How Homegrown Disinformation Could Disrupt This U.S. Election
In 2016, Russia developed a simple, effective playbook to undermine U.S. elections with disinformation on social media. Four years later, Americans are using the same playbook on each other.
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Quick, think about disinformation. What comes to mind? “Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.” But in 2020, many experts are more concerned with disinformation coming from our very own backyard. Like this guy, who, with a single tweet, disrupted a governor’s race in Kentucky. “Oh I’m just a broke college student, basically.” “He had 19 followers. It’s slightly absurd. But it’s also slightly terrifying.” What makes misinformation truly dangerous is that it doesn’t need to hack into the actual infrastructure of an election. It only needs to hack the brains of voters. “A seed of doubt is sowed into the democratic process of elections. People just don’t trust the process anymore.” “The purpose is to confuse people, to cause chaos and to cause division. The hope with disinformation is that a country will kind of fall in on itself.” And the coronavirus pandemic has made things even worse. To understand how we got here, we have to go to a key battleground in this election, one that has no state boundary. The internet. Remember the internet in 2016? The year that gave us these? “Damn, Daniel.” “What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs?” Well, it also gave us a flood of election disinformation created by a Russian troll factory, a.k.a. a Kremlin-linked company called the Internet Research Agency. “It was essentially a gray office building in St. Petersburg in Russia.” This is Claire Wardle. She’s a disinformation expert and educator. “People were paid to sit all day, pretending to be Americans, creating social posts and memes and videos, and pushing that out. They could just throw spaghetti at the wall. Many of the posts didn’t succeed, but other things really did.” Russians developed a simple, but effective playbook. “They basically inflamed existing American divisions. A lot of these accounts actually got in the hundreds of thousands of followers.” By the end of the 2016 election, Russian trolls could reach millions of Americans through their social media accounts. Crucially, what they managed to do was use online disinformation to organize dozens of real-life political rallies. Attendees had no idea they’d been set up by Russians. This was one of them, filmed by a Houston TV station. “I’m in downtown Houston right by the Islamic Da’hwa Center. There’s protests going on, on both sides of the street.” Russian trolls did all of this, not with particularly sophisticated spycraft, but with tools available to everyone. Pretty soon, their disinformation, spread with the intent to deceive, became misinformation, as real people unwittingly started engaging with the material. All the while, social media companies denied there was a problem. Speaking days after the 2016 election, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerburg struggled to articulate a defense. “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — of which, you know, it’s a very small amount of the content — influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea.” In the years since, there has been a slow recognition. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I’m sorry.” “We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems that we’ve acknowledged. And we take the full responsibility to fix it.” Some lessons were learned. “The companies have been a lot tougher on election misinformation, especially when they can tie it to foreign interference.” But those policies aren’t applied in the same way when the source of the misinformation is within U.S. borders. In certain cases, like with an unsubstantiated New York Post report, some platforms have taken drastic measures to restrict access, and face charges of censorship. But generally, the platforms try to avoid being seen as arbiters of truth. “When it comes to domestic and homegrown misinformation, social media companies still do err on the side of free speech.” So in the last four years, America’s election disinformation problem didn’t go away. It evolved. “Unfortunately, the landscape looks and feels very different now, because you’ve got all sorts of actors using the platforms in the ways that we learned the Russians did in 2016. And we see that playbook being used by political operatives in the U.S. And we see that same playbook being used by individuals in their basements who are angry and frustrated with life.” Sometimes it’s just one guy, sending one tweet from hundreds of miles away. That actually happened in 2019 in Kentucky. To tell this story, let’s first meet three people. The New York Times reporter who covered the Kentucky election. “My name is Nick Corasaniti.” The election administrator. “My name is Jared Dearing.” And the internet troll. “I am @Overlordkraken1.” We’re not showing his face, and only using his first name, because he says he’s afraid for his safety. On Nov. 5, 2019, Kentucky voters went to the polls to pick their next governor. “The race for governor in Kentucky in 2019 featured a very unpopular governor, Matt Bevin, who is a Republican.” “We’re just getting started.” “Facing off against Andy Beshear, the Democratic attorney general.” “We can’t take four more years.” “Every Democrat in the country was viewing the opportunity to deliver a blow to Mitch McConnell, and give him a Democratic governor as a real win. National money flooded this election.” “The day started well. I drove in around 4 a.m. Election Day is more like game day for me.” “I woke up, got ready for school, went to school.” “When the polls close at 6, the day’s not even halfway through at that point.” “I got on Twitter, and I saw the Kentucky election, what’s going on. And then I saw that the race was very close.” “It was neck and neck. They were maybe 1,000 votes here, 100 votes there, separating them.” “When an election is close, there’s a lot of pressure and stress that’s put onto the system.” “As soon as Republicans in the state started to see the possibility that they might lose the Statehouse, social media kind of erupted a little bit. People were looking for reasons as to how this could possibly be happening. How could a Democrat be winning in deeply red Kentucky? Emotions were high. It was kind of the perfect environment for any kind of disinformation or misinformation about the results to take hold.” “I decided that it would be a funny idea that if I made a fake tweet, spread it out to bigger accounts. I thought it was the perfect situation for it to go viral. I don’t remember how many followers I had, but I know it was less than 20.” “He had 19 followers.” “I set my geolocation to Louisville, Ky.” “He claimed he was from Louisville, but it was misspelled.” “It was just a typo. I’ve never been to Kentucky.” “And he sent out a simple tweet that said, ‘Just shredded a box of — ” “‘Republican mail-in ballots. Bye bye Bevin.’” “There’s so many checks and balances that we’ve built into the system over the past decades that we kind of know where all the ballots are at all times. So this is obviously a false claim.” “I’ve never seen a mail-in ballot.” “I probably never will know what their intentions were.” “All I really wanted to do was just get a few reactions out of some Boomers.” “Irresponsible. Frustrating. Damaging. Not helpful.” “I just thought it was funny.” “So Kentucky election officials found this tweet about an hour after polls closed, and they immediately notified Twitter.” And like that, the tweet was gone. But the story didn’t end there. It had actually just begun. “A few conservative accounts began screenshotting the tweet. And and when they screenshot that tweet and sent it around to their tens of thousands of followers, hundreds of thousands of followers, it was like a spark in a brushfire. And the tweet was everywhere.” “When we called Twitter to then take those screengrabs down, Twitter then said that it was commentary on the original tweet itself, and were unwilling to take the screengrabs down. So it’s a pretty big loophole, as far as I’m concerned.” “Election security officials kind of refer to these networks of accounts as a Trump core. And what they do is they wait until there is a debate, or a discussion, or a controversy, and they will immediately go to the conservative side and amplify it.” Throughout the evening, a single atom of disinformation opened the door for more stories that muddied the waters in an already close election. “While this was happening, it was now reaching a pretty broad narrative. It wasn’t only restricted to the conservative internet. There were normal voters who were seeing this, there was news outlets who were seeing this.” At the end of the night, Matt Bevin, who was trailing behind his opponent by just 5,000 votes, contested the results. “There have been more than a few irregularities.” “He didn’t offer any evidence. He didn’t say what those irregularities were. But it was because of those irregularities that he requested a re-canvass of all of the vote.” Bevin never specifically mentioned the tweet, but it was one of the most viral pieces of disinformation raising doubts about the election. “Bevin basically refused to concede, and left the election in question.” “My intention was never for it to get as big as it did. But I guess it was a lot easier than I thought.” For the next few days, talks of election fraud hurting Bevin kept going. “There was a time in the middle there, where there was a lot of squoosh. Both sides had the opportunity to create their own narrative. And unfortunately, part of that narrative was being driven by misinformation.” Bevin’s supporters staged a press conference, alleging fraud. But again, offered no evidence. “Are you really under the belief that hackers couldn’t hack our votes that are uploaded to a cloud?” “There is no cloud involved in the election tabulations in Kentucky.” Eventually, after re-canvassing of the results concluded nine days later, Bevin conceded the race. “We’re going to have a change in the governorship, based on the vote of the people.” Andy Beshear is now the governor of Kentucky. But it’s hard to remove the various claims casting doubt on the election, once they’re out there. Videos alleging fraud in Kentucky’s governor’s race are still gaining more views and comments. Fast forward to 2020. “I don’t think the question of misinformation is whether it’s going to happen. It will happen.” Election officials across the country are gearing up for a difficult fight against disinformation ahead of the election. Like in Michigan. “We anticipate challenges coming from multiple different angles. Whether they come from the White House, whether they come from foreign entities, whether they come from social media voices.” And Colorado. “We really need federal leadership. There’s bills just sitting in the House and in the Senate that are never going to get heard, never going to get their chance. And meanwhile, our democracy is under attack.” After countless investigations, hearings and public grillings of social media executives over the past four years, the U.S. is still ill-equipped to deal with the problem. “I feel like the analogy here is someone taking a bucket of water and throwing it in the ocean.” Election officials are competing on social media against people with larger followings, like President Donald Trump himself. “President Trump has used his Twitter account and his Facebook account to spread falsehoods about voting.” In 2020, President Trump has tweeted election misinformation or claims about rigged elections about 120 times. Twitter has put warnings on some of President Trump’s tweets and Facebook has added labels that direct people to accurate election information. “There really isn’t a uniform policy that they apply evenly across the different social media companies.” “It’s pretty depressing to sit where we sit right now, heading into this election. We have failed to do enough to secure the election in a way that we needed to.” On top of that, the Covid-19 pandemic is making the misinformation problem even worse. For example, the pandemic has forced many states to expand vote-by-mail on a large scale for the first time. And that’s resulted in a surge in false or misleading claims about mail-in voting, according to media insights company Zignal Labs. Of the 13.4 million mentions of vote-by-mail between January and September, nearly one-quarter were likely misinformation. The pandemic has led to another important shift, as different conspiracy communities are emerging and working together. Here’s a look at how domestic misinformation gained more reach on Facebook during a single month this summer. These are groups that are prone to share misinformation about the election. These are anti-mask groups that tend to share content like this. Then there are the QAnon groups, a pro-Trump conspiracy group that promotes, among other things, the false idea that America is controlled by a cabal of globalist pedophiles. Facebook says all QAnon on accounts would be banned on its platforms. But what we found is these seemingly disparate conspiracy groups are increasingly connected by crossposting the same content, forming — “A huge tent conspiracy.” For example, this piece of disinformation, claiming that Barack Obama created antifa, was shared in all three types of communities. “A lot of people who will believe that the coronavirus is a hoax will also believe that the elections process is not to be trusted.” “The theme here is that more and more Americans feel like they cannot trust institutions.” And that could have serious consequences around Election Day. “What that does is that will create a big uncertainty, and allow any bad actors to spread more disinformation in an already charged electorate. It will also give people the opportunity to say they’ve rigged an election, when it’s so much harder to actually rig an election.” Social media companies are preparing for the scenario that President Trump, or other candidates, will falsely declare victory. Or worse, where the losing candidate refuses to concede, and claims election fraud. The 2019 Kentucky election avoided that, but the 2020 presidential election may not. “If we were to insert President Trump and months of undermining the electoral process into the Kentucky election, there probably would have been even more users who believed @Overlordkraken1’s tweet that he shredded ballots. It could have gone from thousands to millions.” “Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?” “I hope it’s going to be a fair election. If it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.” “It’s something we’ve never seen before, and it sets a runway for the kind of disinformation that has disrupted other elections to really take off at a level we’ve never seen.” “I’m Isabelle Niu, one of the producers of this episode. There’s a lot going on in this election, and we want to make sure we take a deep dive into the major issues. Check out the other episodes of Stressed Election. We cover voting rights, voting technology and vote-by-mail.”
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump on all but two days in the last two months, according to a New York Times analysis of $1.8 billion donated by 7.6 million people since April.
The data reveals, for the first time, not only when Mr. Biden decisively overtook Mr. Trump in the money race — it happened the day Senator Kamala Harris joined the ticket — but also which corners of the country, geographically and demographically, powered his remarkable surge.
The findings paint a portrait of two candidates who are, in many ways, financing their campaigns from two different Americas.
It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does. Or that Mr. Trump’s financial base is in Texas, which it is. It is that across the country, down to the ZIP code level, some of the same cleavages that are driving the 2020 election — along class and education lines — are also fundamentally reshaping how the two parties pay for their campaigns.
DAILY SCHEDULES
There are eight days until Election Day. Here are the schedules of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates for Monday, Oct. 26. All times are Eastern time.
President Trump
11 a.m.: Speaks to workers in Allentown, Pa.
1:30 p.m.: Holds a rally in Lititz, Pa.
4:30 p.m.: Holds a rally in Martinsburg, Pa.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
No events announced.
Vice President Mike Pence
2 p.m.: Holds a rally in Hibbing, Minn.
Senator Kamala Harris
No events announced.
