President Donald Trump, when challenged by Axios reporter Jonathan Swan this week on the fact that over a thousand Americans are dying each and every day from the coronavirus pandemic, callously responded: "It is what it is." Not exactly presidential-caliber leadership, to say the very least. After all, who can forget Abraham Lincoln's stirring: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, because, you know, the Civil War -- it is what it is." Or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's soaring: "Fear? What fear? I mean, the Great Depression... it is what it is."

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Everyone certainly already has a lot to worry about when it comes to the upcoming election. So I apologize in advance for adding another item to that list, but there's something that I've personally been wondering about as we all prepare for the most unique election in modern times. It's a fairly esoteric issue, but it could become a crucial one on the night of the election, as we're all glued to our television sets awaiting the outcome. What I'm wondering is: how will the standard exit polling take place when far fewer voters will be physically exiting the polls?

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We are (hopefully) fast approaching the end of the Kabuki theater currently being played out over the next coronavirus relief bill. Nobody knows how long this will take, but my guess is that by the end of the upcoming weekend (or perhaps by Monday at the latest), Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are going to announce that the White House has agreed to most of what they have been proposing, and the bill will then pass both houses of Congress and be signed by President Trump at some point next week.

This may be overly optimistic, of course. But I am betting that over the course of the next two days, Trump is going to tell his negotiators to just get a bill -- any bill -- onto his desk as soon as possible. I say this because tomorrow we'll get another weekly count of how many people have filed for unemployment over the past week, and then on Friday the official monthly unemployment rate will be announced for July. Both numbers will in all likelihood not be good news for Trump.

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President Donald Trump seems to be shooting himself in the foot in Florida, one of the key states necessary for his own re-election prospects. Or, as he recently called it on Twitter, "Frorida." That'll surely win him some votes in the Sunshine State!

Snarky jokes aside, though, Trump seems to be setting a course for his own electoral disaster in what is now his own home state. By continually casting doubt on the safety of voting by mail, Trump appears to be successfully undermining the longstanding efforts of the Republican Party of Florida to hold an advantage over Democrats on mail-in ballots. And Florida has a whopping 29 Electoral College votes, putting it behind only California and Texas in importance in presidential elections. While Trump could technically win the 270 Electoral College votes he would need to beat Joe Biden without winning Florida, practically it would be almost impossible for him to do so. It's not overstating its importance to say that as Florida goes, so goes Trump's chance of winning. So why is he attacking the very tactic that Florida Republicans have been using to win very close elections?

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Welcome back to the second of our quadrennial Electoral Math column series. The first installment was three weeks ago, which is our standard gap for the start of the contest. As time goes by and things start to move more quickly, we will start doing these every other Monday, right up to Election Day.

Please check that first column for a full explanation of what this series tries to accomplish, as well as my earlier column on the question of the validity of polls after the 2016 election. These two should answer most questions you might have about the series and its meaningfulness.

As always, we are happy to get all our data from the fantastic Electoral-Vote.com site, which has its own series of graphs and interpretations that are well worth checking out. This site has been consistent over the past four election cycles, and stands as a great resource for poll-watchers.

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Let's all keep our eyes on the ball, shall we? The ball, in this case, being the fact that we just suffered the worst economic quarter ever. The gross domestic product dropped by 32.9 percent, or just shy (0.4 points) of one-third. This loss is three times bigger than the worst quarter ever previously measured. New unemployment claims were up again for the second week in a row, perhaps foreshadowing a "double-dip" recession, or even an actual depression.

So, of course, President Donald Trump decided to "win the news cycle" by floating the suggestion that he might just postpone the election:

The U.S. Commerce Department announced Thursday that despite trillions in emergency government spending, the economy shrunk a record 32.9 percent on a year-to-year basis between April and June. The devastating number is three times worse than any previous quarter, putting the U.S. economy on course to shrink more in 2020 than in 1932, at the depth of the [Great] Depression. The global economy was already facing its most severe recession since World War II. Within an hour of the news, President Trump called to delay the Nov. 3 U.S. election, citing, without evidence, the risk of massive voter fraud. Trump's suggestion was quickly rejected by most of his fellow Republicans.

That "within an hour" was generous, even. Others noted that Trump tweeted only sixteen minutes after the disastrous economic news was released. But again, let's not take his bait, at least for now.

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This is going to be a very short column, because today is a national day of mourning the loss of a civil rights giant, John Lewis -- and I do not wish to detract from this at all.

I watched some of the funeral service, and was impressed with the oratory, especially from former presidents (our current president was nowhere to be seen, of course).

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Rampant Republican incompetence is now on full display in Washington, once again taking center stage as multiple deadlines approach and measures meant to provide some sort of safety net during the most dire medical emergency in the past 100 years are running out. What's astonishing is that their very incompetence right now might just guarantee that the GOP loses control of the Senate in November -- the very chamber which cannot now get its legislative act together. In other words, it might be an entirely appropriate consequence.

The timeline is a simple one for voters to understand. Several rounds of coronavirus relief bills passed earlier this year, which staved off the worst of the economic collapse (things got very bad indeed, but they could have been a lot worse). This provided a lifeline for millions of American families. In each of these bills, Democrats were told by Republicans that very important issues (such as ensuring the safety of the upcoming election, for instance) "could wait until the next round" and thus got kicked down the road.

Over two months ago, Nancy Pelosi's House of Representatives passed the most recent of these bills, which both built on the previous bills and contained all the provisions which had been previously punted. It passed, with only a single Republican joining in the majority. Again, this happened over two months ago.

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President Donald Trump just finished giving a press briefing, ostensibly about the coronavirus pandemic, and in the short question period that followed, gave the most pathetic "poor me" performance I've ever seen a president give. Why, Trump mused, is Dr. Anthony Fauci so gosh-darned popular, and why am I not? That sounds like an oversimplification or snarky version of what the president said, but it's really not. If anything, it's an understatement. I don't have the actual transcript yet, so I can't reproduce Trump's actual phrasing. But I will certainly be seeking it out later today, because it truly was the most whiny display of envy ever seen from a presidential podium.

There may be other news from the press conference -- Trump also answered questions about DACA and his upcoming convention speech and other normal issues, but of course he veered off on a couple of others. When asked why the pharmaceutical industry leaders had refused to meet with him today, Trump was mystified that such a meeting had ever been planned, and seemed to think it might happen later in the week. So much for Joe Biden "not being all there" -- this was Trump's one big meeting of the day, and apparently he had already forgotten it was supposed to take place. He also -- once again -- touted hydroxychloroquine as the magical drug that would save everyone, in response to a question as to why he had promoted a social media video by a doctor who has some other (shall we say) strange notions. Such as: we already have a cure for the coronavirus, and nobody needs to wear masks. Trump was directly asked why he was retweeting a woman who also has spoken out about "alien D.N.A.," which may be the clip we seen on the late-night shows (for sheer entertainment value alone).

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In less than 100 days, America will vote. In other words, there is finally a light at the end of this long and dark tunnel we've all been going through. And unless things drastically change for the worse, that light might shine very bright indeed.

Pretty much every poll under the sun now shows Democrats with the upper hand in the campaign. Joe Biden is doing better -- at both the national level and the state level -- than either of Barack Obama's winning years, as well being better positioned than Hillary Clinton was the last time around. In fact, Biden's poll numbers across the Electoral College are now higher than Obama or Clinton ever reached at any point in their respective campaigns. Public opinion of the coronavirus and President Donald Trump's pitifully inadequate reaction to it has hardened like cement. No wonder he's trying a new tactic ("OK, I'll pretend like I care about it for a week, how's that?") and reversing course on his disastrously self-centered plan for his big convention speech. And it's now looking like he won't be able to hold any rallies at all for the foreseeable future, especially when you consider that the hardest-hit areas of the country right now are either solidly Republican or the battleground states Trump's going to need. No rallies means depriving Trump's massive ego of the attention it so desperately craves.

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