Once again, it is time for our Monday rundown of the state-level polling in the presidential race. Since last week, Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail in a big way, after his quick recovery from COVID-19. His rallies are (as usual) packed shoulder-to-shoulder with nary a mask in sight, even though we're on the leading edge of the next big wave of infections across the country (indeed, in many of the states Trump is travelling through).

This is Trump's final message -- ignore the disease, and maybe it'll go away. This is reckless and irresponsible, but it is also classic Trumpian behavior. One does wonder how many independents (especially out in the suburbs) this is going to turn off, but Trump really doesn't seem to care at this point.

Last week, instead of the second scheduled presidential debate, we got duelling townhalls on different television channels. Joe Biden appeared calm and collected and downright presidential. Donald Trump got grilled mercilessly by Savannah Guthrie (of all people), and reacted with his usual bombast and falsehoods and gaslighting. This week, we'll have what was supposed to be the third presidential debate (which is now the second), which will be the last real chance Trump will have to turn his campaign around. This chance has already shrunk considerably, since almost 30 million people have already cast their ballots.

Trump is trying to push an "October surprise" based on dubious emails about Hunter Biden, but at this point nobody (outside of Fox News) really cares. It is not going to have the same impact as Hillary Clinton's email revelations late in the game, but that's not going to stop Trump from trying. Trump is also going to crow about confirming another Supreme Court justice, but again this is not likely to resonate outside of his own base voters.

Instead, the real October surprise isn't all that surprising, because the experts have been predicting it for months now. The pandemic is beginning to rage across the country once again, and we're seeing numbers we haven't seen since the last wave hit at the beginning of the summer. If these numbers keep going up for the next week or so, it will almost certainly be the biggest issue on voters' minds in the election. Trump, astonishingly, is out there ridiculing Joe Biden for listening to the doctors and the experts, ridiculing Anthony Fauci (who is much more trusted by the public than Trump), while continuing to hold "superspreader" events at all his rallies. The disconnect between Trump's "we're turning the corner" gaslighting and Joe Biden taking the crisis very seriously is downright jarring.

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The second wave of the pandemic now appears to be upon us. Yesterday, over 60,000 new coronavirus cases were reported in the U.S. That number has been heading upward all week, in fact. And it's higher than it has been since the last wave hit (some call the impending wave the third wave, due to the two previous spikes, we should point out). And we are less than three weeks away from the presidential election.

This, more than any other factor, may become the key reason Donald Trump loses. Sure, we're all tired of hearing about the pandemic (and have been for quite some time). But then Trump caught it, which relaunched it back onto center stage in the political arena. Although he quickly recovered, for once Trump could not manage to change the storyline. And now it looks like the fall/winter wave is here. This will mean COVID-19 will, once again, lead most news coverage. For the next week (at the very least), stories will again appear about overwhelmed doctors and hospitals. It will be on everyone's mind.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is increasingly astonished that everyone else in the country does not actually inhabit the fantasy world he has created inside his own head, where we're "turning the corner" and the pandemic will just magically go away. Trump's been hoping for this magical retreat since the start of the pandemic, but these days it sounds downright delusional. This is far beyond a normal politician sounding "out of touch," in other words. People are dying out there, and Trump doesn't seem to even grasp that. Not exactly a portrait of a strong leader, in other words. Or a sane one, for that matter.

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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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