Today's column is written in snap response to the introductory speeches just given by Joe Biden and his newly-named running mate Kamala Harris. I just finished watching them, and I wanted to share my initial reactions.

However, as I am sometimes wont to do, I am going to begin with a somewhat-related but entirely tangential discussion on grammar, before I get to my thoughts on the speeches. Partly, this is to let my first impressions percolate for a bit, but mostly this is because there are a few editorial nits I have been feeling the need to pick recently. If this sort of thing doesn't interest you, I would advise just skipping forward a few paragraphs and ignoring my pedantry. [I will even aid this by providing subheadings to allow for a quick jump to be more easily made.]

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The waiting game is over. Joe Biden announced today that Senator Kamala Harris will be his running mate. For better or for worse, the 2020 Democratic ticket is set. The Biden-Harris team will take on Trump-Pence (assuming Pence isn't replaced in some surprise last-minute move).

How will this affect the dynamics of the race? Well, at this point, that's really anyone's guess. The conventional wisdom says that vice presidential candidates rarely (if ever) move the needle all that much, although there have been exceptions to this rule of thumb. It can be argued that John McCain's "maverick" pick of Sarah Palin harmed his chances in the end, because many voters simply could not see her as presidential material (especially after Tina Fey's brutal portrayal of her on Saturday Night Live). But even that's debatable. For the most part, the effects of naming this person or that as running mate largely prove to be marginal, at best.

Biden's pick will be seen as historic, but he already pretty much guaranteed this by limiting his choices only to women. Senator Kamala Harris is now only the third woman ever named as a running mate in a presidential contest, after Geraldine Ferraro and the aforementioned Sarah Palin. Harris is now also the first African-American woman to be elevated to a national ticket, and only the second African-American to make it onto a national presidential ticket in American history. That is groundbreaking.

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I have to admit up front that I'm not a real big fan of the "veepstakes" guessing game. It all usually turns out to be pointless in the end, although it does give the pundits something to feverishly write about in the run-up to the conventions, I suppose. I am [checks thermometer] not currently feverish, but I suppose I'll write one article today about the subject that is consuming so many right now. I realize I should really be writing about the breakdown in the pandemic relief bill negotiations (while apologizing for being so optimistic last Wednesday, when I confidently predicted that we'd certainly have a deal by today... whoops!); but hey, it's Monday and I feel lazy, so as our president says: "it is what it is."

That was not exactly a rousing start to a column, I will freely admit. We'll see if it gets any better as we go along. I am going to limit myself (mostly for reasons of space) to only taking an extended look at the top three that others have identified as being the frontrunners for the job of sharing the ticket with Joe Biden: Kamala Harris, Susan Rice, and Elizabeth Warren. Let's take them one by one, in alphabetical order.

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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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