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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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer managed a rather extraordinary feat this week -- he forced a Senate floor vote on a bill designed to become campaign ad fodder for Democratic challengers to vulnerable Republicans. This is notable, because normally the Majority Leader Mitch McConnell controls what gets floor votes, not the minority party. And it was even more notable because five Republicans voted for it out of sheer terror of it being used in an ad against them. Three others didn't take the bait, and can now expect such ads to begin airing soon.

The bill would have (if passed and signed into law by President Trump, which would never actually happen, it must be pointed out) banned the federal government from arguing in court to kill the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in court. This is important for three big reasons: (1) the Trump administration has already joined the lawsuit trying to overturn Obamacare in its entirety, (2) the case will be heard before the Supreme Court almost immediately after the election, and (3) Senate Republicans are rushing to get another Supreme Court justice confirmed before the election.

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You know why I want Joe Biden to win this election? Because I long to once again be bored with politics. I pine for those weeks when nothing at all happens -- where I have to think hard to even come up with a subject to write about. This used to happen with regularity, no matter which party was currently in control. But with Donald Trump as our president, it is impossible.

This more than anything else was the takeaway I got from last night's debate. America doesn't so much need a return to normalcy as it does a return to sanity. A return to a time when the president can be counted on not to be a world-class embarrassment. A return to facts meaning something once again. A return to an America where every decent person openly condemns white nationalist groups, without a second thought. Is this really asking too much?

But I'm going to shove all my own feelings about the debate's aftermath aside, because the entire punditocracy is already doing an admirable job surveying the smoking wreckage, for once. Few commentators are resorting to the easy crutch of "both-sides-ism" today, to put it another way. Joe Biden may have made minor misstatements last night, but Donald Trump spewed a pyroclastic flow of lies across the landscape, so the two really aren't comparable in any rational way. This morning, even Fox News was admitting that Donald Trump had had a bad night, and that it would behoove him to dial it back a bit in the next debates (if they even happen, which at this point is not an iron-clad certainty).

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Well, that was downright stunning. And definitely not in a good way ("You look simply stunning tonight!"). More in the literal sense of getting brutally smacked upside your head by a blunt object. In fact, when I sat down to think up a title for this article, the only thing that popped into my mind was the line from the classic Monty Python "Argument" sketch: "It's 'being hit on the head' lessons, in here." Because that's exactly what watching the entire 100 minutes was like, at least to me.

After sitting through all of the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I am even more convinced (as I wrote a while back) that there may wind up being only one such debate this year. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Donald Trump refuses to do a second or third debate, because the reviews are going to be absolutely terrible for him to read. I watched the debate on ABC, and when it was finished George Stephanopoulos immediately summed it up as: "the worst presidential debate I have seen in my entire life." I could not agree more.

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As we get closer to the election, these columns will increase in frequency as well. We haven't decided when to move to a weekly format (every Monday), but it's coming soon, just to let everyone know.

It has been two weeks since the last time we looked at the polls, and not a whole lot has changed. The race tightened a bit in a few states, but overall Biden still has the clear advantage.

Let's begin (as always) by taking a look a the chart of Electoral Votes (EV). Also as always, our polling data comes from the superb site Electoral-Vote.com, which we strongly recommend to people who love numbers and charts. Our first chart shows what percentage each candidate would get if the election were held today and all the polling was perfectly accurate. Joe Biden starts at the bottom in blue, Donald Trump starts at the top in red, and whichever color crosses the 50 percent line will be the winner.

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

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