Are Republicans getting worried about the outcome of the upcoming election? This is a real possibility at this point, given the polls. After all, if the Democrats have a very big night three weeks from now, Republicans may be cast out into the wilderness for at least the next two years. And just like the robins return in the spring, if there is a Democratic president and the Democrats control both houses of Congress, Republicans are going to try everything in their power to sabotage Joe Biden's first two years in office. They did so before, back in 2009, when Mitch McConnell told his fellow Senate Republicans that their only goal was to "make Barack Obama a one-term president." That didn't really work out for them, but they did manage to claw back majorities in Congress.

There are many reasons why the Senate is moving at lightspeed to confirm President Donald Trump's conservative pick for the Supreme Court, but one of them is surely that they know this could be the last one they get for a while. But more telling, perhaps, is Republicans' newly resuscitated concern for fiscal responsibility, even in the face of the ongoing pandemic crisis and even when the economy quite obviously needs some more stimulus.

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Once again, my time was completely eaten up today by external events, so my apologies for not having a column two days running. I think I'm on track to write a new column tomorrow, so that's the good news.

Since we're smack in the middle of a Supreme Court judicial nomination fight, and since her own religion has come up, I thought it would be a good time to re-run the following column. I wrote it back in 2014, so a few things have changed.

The lineup of the court is the most obvious change. Antonin Scalia died and was eventually replaced by Neil Gorsuch. Anthony Kennedy retired, and was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. And, of course, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is why we're where we are today.

In terms of religion, the eight members of the court currently break down into five Catholics (Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Sotomayor, and Thomas), two Jews (Breyer, Kagan), and one who nobody's really sure what to call, since Gorsuch was raised Catholic but now apparently attends an Episcopal church. If Gorsuch considers himself Episcopalian, then there is one Protestant on the high court now.

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Due to other obligations in the offline world, there will be no column today. I realize it is the high season for the election and I did manage to catch some of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Senate, but just don't have time to write about either.

Instead, in lieu of a column, I'm going to point everyone to a great feel-good story I read early this morning. In these dire times, this is the sort of story guaranteed to put a smile on your face, which is why I thought I'd add the link and the first few paragraphs. The full article ran in the Washington Post.

-- Chris Weigant

World War II-era ‘Candy Bomber’ turns 100. Those who caught his candy — now in their 80s — say thanks.

It was the summer of 1948 when U.S. Air Force pilot Gail “Hal” Halvorsen noticed children clustered around a barbed-wire fence watching military planes at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin.

World War II had ended, and Halvorsen was part of an air mission to deliver food and fuel to desperate Berliners after the Soviet Union had blocked land and water access to areas of the country, leaving millions without access to basic goods.

Halvorsen, then 27, decided to park his plane and say hello to the kids at the fence.

“I saw right away that they had nothing and they were hungry,” he recalled. “So I reached into my pocket and pulled out all that I had: two sticks of gum.”

Halvorsen tore the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum into small strips — one for each child, he said. Then he made the kids a promise: He would return the next day to drop a load of chocolate bars from the sky.

“I told them that I’d ‘wiggle’ my wings so they’d know which pilot had the goods,” he said. “Then I went back to the base and asked all the guys to pool their candy rations for the drop.”

Following his first sweet mission — hundreds of Hershey chocolate bars were wrapped in parachutes made of handkerchiefs — Halvorsen returned again and again during the 15-month humanitarian airlift.

The children of Berlin soon gave him a nickname: the “Candy Bomber.”

[Read the full article for more...]

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

It's Monday, so it is time once again to take a look at the state-level polling for the presidential race. I have to point out as a reminder, right up front, that no matter what the national-level polling shows, it simply does not matter to how we actually elect our presidents, as both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton can easily attest to. This is why I never even mention these numbers in this column series.

Instead, I pay very close attention to the charts provided by the wonderful Electoral-Vote.com site, which allows me to chart over time exactly how the race is shaping up -- in the Electoral College. In fact, it continues to astonish me how many other poll-watchers don't even bother to look closely at the only real way to view the state of the race we have, but that's a subject for another day.

Last week's polling was the first to reflect an event which happened over a week ago now -- President Donald Trump announcing he had tested positive for COVID-19 and then quickly entering the hospital. He didn't stay long, because he wanted to show strength, but all his attempts to do so might have just shown the voters another quality -- recklessness and indifference to the health of those around him.

This has actually caused Trump's numbers to sink in the polls, especially among seniors. Trump is desperately trying to win them back -- he shot a video addressed to seniors right after he returned to the White House, and he is pressing hard for his administration to start sending out $200 prescription drug cards to all of them before the election (which may not actually be possible, for various reasons).

Joe Biden, meanwhile, looks steady and calm. Wearing masks and actually paying attention to the doctors and experts looks very smart and prudent now, despite all the attempts Team Trump has made to paint Biden as "hiding in his basement" for the past few months.

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It seems that it is now time to ask a very strange question: Is Donald Trump actually trying to lose the election?

As astounding a question that is, there are really only two answers to it: yes or no. Either Trump is intentionally torpedoing his chances of re-election, or he is just trying to re-run his 2016 playbook in the hopes that it'll produce the same miraculous victory for him. But either way, what is becoming more and move evident is that President Donald Trump is currently losing. Bigly.

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Today, I'd like to step back from the fray of the current political campaign season. I know, I should be racking my brains for "fly in the ointment" or "waiter, there's a fly in my soupy Vice President" jokes right now, but today I will leave that sort of thing to others. Because instead I'd like to pull back to 30,000 feet and take a much wider and longer view of the shifting political landscape in this country. Because there seems to be some slow-moving tectonic shifts at work which might influence our politics long beyond this November's election.

When you look at a map of America painted blue and red, it is usually for one specific purpose (such as: "Who will win each state's Electoral College votes for president?"). But the question I'd like to examine today is which direction some of those states are moving. Where are they on the pendulum ride between red and blue? If they are purple, which direction might they take in the next election?

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Two down, two to go.

Continuing my "I watch them so you don't have to" commitment, tonight I watched the vice-presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris in full. Boiled down to one thought, my main takeaway was that I seriously doubt that tonight changed any voter's mind out there.

I thought both candidates did OK -- not great, not bad, just OK. I thought that they both had a gameplan and pretty much stuck to it, and I thought both had weak moments as well as strong. All in all, I'd largely call it a draw, although my personal bias would have to give Kamala Harris the edge, in the end.

As for the question of who won and who lost, well, tonight had one clear loser: moderator Susan Page, of USA Today. Page was worse than Chris Wallace, and that's saying something. Mike Pence, throughout the night, used a "filibuster" tactic that he's perfected during television interviews, of spinning out an answer about seven or eight paragraphs longer than he's given time for. When Page tried to remind him his time was up, Pence just absolutely ignored her and just bulled forward with the rest of his long-winded answer. Each and every time.

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Last night, Joe Biden gave the debate performance we all wished we had seen last week. Now, that statement isn't strictly accurate, since the event Biden appeared at last night was a townhall meeting with undecided voters and not an actual presidential debate. Also, the reason we didn't see this performance last week was because the incessant noise and bluster from Donald Trump made it all but impossible to hear what Biden was actually saying. Nevertheless, last night's performance was indeed what most voters should have watched instead of last Tuesday's debate.

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Any given week of the presidency of Donald Trump can feel like an eternity. Last week was no different. We started with the revelation that Trump only paid $750 in federal income taxes for two years running, then we all saw the worst presidential debate in American history, then at the end of the week Trump announced he had tested positive for COVID-19 and entered the hospital. All in one week. This is why we are now moving to a weekly schedule for these "Electoral Math" columns. We'll post a new numbers-crunching column every week until the Monday before Election Day (which is now only four weeks from tomorrow).

The last time we took a look at the state of the state polls, none of the above had happened. This time around, some polling which took place after the disastrous debate is starting to be announced, however no polling to date has taken Trump's coronavirus diagnosis into account (that'll happen with next week's numbers).

Let's get right to it, starting (as always) with the chart of the overall Electoral Vote (EV) totals. Our data is provided by the great folks at Electoral-Vote.com, who tirelessly chart and map the all the state polling data on a daily basis.

This chart is read from the bottom (in blue) for Joe Biden, and from the top (in red) for Donald Trump. Whichever area crosses the 50-percent mark in the middle signifies who would win if the election were held today and all the polling was perfectly accurate.

[Click on any of theses graphs to see larger-scale versions.]

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It's October... surprise!

The thing about October surprises is that they're always, well, surprising. No one expects them, and no one can predict their coming. That's the nature of any true surprise.

Late last night, the political world began reeling from what could be the biggest October surprise in a generation (at the very least), as the White House announced that President Donald Trump and his wife First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19.

This was greeted in some quarters as not so much an October surprise as (to coin a term) an October schadenfreudefest. If there is any one individual who richly deserves to contract the coronavirus, after all, it is Donald Trump. Trump has pooh-poohed the virus from the very first, insisting that it will magically go away ("by April, when the weather warms up"), that it isn't that big a deal ("it's like the flu"), that testing is unnecessary, that it affects "almost no one," that most people get a mild case and recover, that many don't even know they've got it, that children "get the sniffles" (no big deal), that we've already defeated it ("we've turned the corner"), that it's all in the past, that getting the economy going again and getting kids back to school is more important than any imagined risk, and -- worst of all -- that wearing masks and social distancing and all that stuff is for sissies and definitely not for real macho men like him. Or to put it another way, the karma wasn't instant, but it caught up to Trump in the end.

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