Well, the numbers are in, so it's time to take another look at the Democratic horserace, after the third debate shook things up a bit. There are new polls out at both the national level and in Iowa, the Democratic National Committee just announced the new criteria for the fifth debate (to happen in November), and the field continues to shrink as time goes by. So a lot's been going on out on the hustings.

Campaign News

We'll begin with the departure from the race of Bill de Blasio, who really had no business running for president in the first place. He has slunk back to New York City, where he's supposed to be in charge of running the city. This still leaves a whopping 19 candidates in the running, but at least that number is now in the teens instead of the twenties.

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We're in the midst of a brand-new breaking scandal -- one that's so new it hasn't even been assigned a "-gate" label yet. Ukraine-gate? Kiev-gate? MassiveTrumpCollusion-gate? As was entirely appropriate, Hillary Clinton had the pithiest tweet of the week: "The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again."

What Trump did, apparently, was to pressure the leader of Ukraine to reopen an investigation into Joe Biden's son. Trump reportedly used the threat of stopping military aid to the country to extort his desired outcome. Then when a whistleblower complained about it, the White House and the Department of Justice conspired to cover it up by withholding the official complaint from Congress. That's the crime and the coverup in a nutshell.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reversed course today and allowed a bill with $250 million in new election security spending to advance. It looks like the "#MoscowMitch" campaign worked, in other words. We got to him, and he finally caved!

It's important to put this issue into some context. While $250 million may sound like a lot of money, in Washington it is absolute peanuts. In terms of the whole federal budget, this is the equivalent of some loose change found in the couch cushions. And not even that much loose change, at that. As the old saying about federal spending goes (a saying so old it was mythically first uttered by a senator who died in 1969): "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Given that bar -- again, set in the 1960s when Dr. Evil thought "one mil-li-on dollars" was a lot of dough -- $250 million only adds up to one-eighth of what was considered "real money" over a half-century ago. Like I said, peanuts. This is what Mitch McConnell was fighting so hard to avoid ponying up.

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This was supposed to be the week when President Donald Trump unveiled his preferred plan for gun safety reform. He still might do so tomorrow. But so far, the entire process on the Republican side of the aisle has appeared rudderless and leaderless, due to Trump's ever-increasing vacillations on what he'd be prepared to support. Mitch McConnell has doubled down on this leaderlessness by insisting that he will not move on any bill until Trump expressly signals his support for it. The buck gets passed back and forth like the political hot potato it is. No Republican wants to be the one with his name associated with an anti-gun law, because they all live in terror of the political power of the National Rifle Association -- which isn't going to support any new gun laws at all. Congressional Republicans are looking for Trump to lead the way out of this conundrum, but Trump seems increasingly incapable of doing so.

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It was little noticed, but last week the U.S. government admitted that this year's budget deficit has already topped the trillion-dollar mark. And the fiscal year won't be over for another month. This will be only the fifth time in American history that the annual deficit has been over a trillion dollars, and the other four years were all in the depths of the Great Recession. We're supposed to have a good economy right now, but we're running a deficit as if we're in some pretty bad times. Of course, all of this proves how both Donald Trump and the Republicans have been lying to the American public all along, and how Democrats can continue to make the rather easy argument that the only time the nation gets its fiscal house in anything resembling good order is when there's a Democrat in the White House.

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It seems like Elizabeth Warren is getting more electable by the day. The more voters see of her, the more they seem to like her, and the more they are tending to support her candidacy. This already has supporters of Joe Biden concerned, although it's not quite a two-person race yet. Bernie Sanders still has virtually the same level of support as Warren, as the two have been locked in a race for second place for months now. But Sanders may not have the ability to broaden his base as much as Warren, who is increasingly seen as somewhat of a compromise between the Democratic Socialism Sanders champions and the incrementalism of Biden.

Statistically, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, Warren won last week's debate. She entered the debate in a strong position, and then improved the most, according to the people polled immediately after watching the debate. On metric after metric, Warren came out in a better position than she had going in, while Biden and Sanders either didn't budge or slipped back a bit. The biggest loser of the debate, according to this polling, was Julián Castro, which isn't all that surprising. Direct attacks on Biden have a way of backfiring, and in Castro's case this backlash was immediate.

Warren is improving on likeability, which is why she seems also to be getting more electable. Of course, "electable" is kind of a fuzzy term, usually meant to indicate how much voters think other voters would support each candidate. Biden's been at the top of the electability heap for a while, but Warren seems to be gaining on him the more voters hear from her.

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We have to begin today with an apology. Five years ago, without knowing any better, we erroneously reported in this space that there would not be another Friday the 13th which coincided with a full moon until 2049. So it was much to our surprise that we heard that this week we all were going to see another one, only five short years after we feverishly coined the word "selenofriggatriskaidekaphobia" to describe those with the very specific neurotic fear (-phobia) of both full moons (seleno-) and Fridays (-frigga-) the 13th (-triskaideka-).

In short, we were lied to. Back in 2014, we read in HuffPost (full disclosure: this was when we were still blogging for them) that there was going to be a Friday the 13th full moon, which is what inspired us to write that earlier bit with the word coinage. In the article, HuffPost reported that another such confluence of events wouldn't happen "for 35 years." We naïvely believed them.

But then this week, we read in HuffPost about tonight's "micromoon," and the article stated that such an event hadn't happened "since 2000." We've since gotten them to revise their article with more-correct information, but now we wonder about their prediction that it won't happen again until 2049. In fact, if it happened next year, it wouldn't surprise us a bit. Hey, then we'd get to use the word selenofriggatriskaidekaphobia again, right? Heh.

Enough looniness, though, let's get on with the show. For once (maybe it's the full moon or something?), we are inclined to just totally ignore President Trump and the continuing saga of his endless buffoonery. Trump was fairly quiet this week, as Sharpiegate moved on to the multiple-investigations stage.

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Finally, everyone on one stage! That was my reaction before the third 2020 Democratic presidential debate even began, because for the first time it's a one-night affair. Unfortunately, at least 11 candidates have already qualified for the next debate, with a few other candidates hovering on the brink of qualification, so it's looking like we're going to have to wait for the fifth debate to see all the frontrunners on the same stage together again.

Overall, I would like to address whichever network hosts the next debate, and make one simple plea: more ad breaks, please. The first such break didn't take place until roughly an hour and twenty minutes in, which is too long for those of us viewers who are guzzling caffeine to stay alert. Hmmph.

Also, I'd like to say I'm becoming less of a fan of the format of multiple debate hosts vying for question time with each other. I think these debates would flow a lot better with a single moderator, or perhaps a team of two (at the most). This isn't a direct criticism of ABC, but rather the whole modern debate format everyone seems to have adopted.

Moving on from technical nitpicking, I do think tonight's debate was the best by far. There was very little odor of desperation from the candidates on stage, which was a notable difference from the previous two debates. The candidates weren't striving so hard for that magic "breakout moment" since each of them had qualified to be in the top ten already. The level of flakiness on the stage was also a lot lower, as almost all of the candidates tonight are definitely ready for prime time. This was different than the previous two debates as well, and it was a welcome improvement.

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Tomorrow night, ABC will host the third Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle. For the first time, the top 10 candidates will all be on the same stage together. I have no idea what questions will be asked of the candidates, but if it's anything like the past two debates then they'll probably miss the biggest issue that most Democratic voters are looking to see addressed by the potential nominees. No, I'm not speaking of climate change, or healthcare reform, or gun control, or immigration reform, or any of the other single issues the moderators have used to show the (mostly) minor differences between the various candidates' stances. Instead, I'm speaking of the number one priority that Democratic voters have been telling pollsters throughout the entire contest so far is the most important to them: beating Donald Trump. Which is why what I'd like to see tomorrow night is an entire debate segment devoted to how, exactly, each candidate would take on Trump if they become the one who gets the chance to confront him face-to-face on a general election debate stage.

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There are two special House elections in North Carolina today. Both of them should be foregone conclusions that nobody but political wonks pay attention to, because both of them are such solid-red districts. But while that is true in one of the special House elections tonight, it definitely isn't true in the other. In North Carolina's third district, the Republican candidate is going to chalk up an easy win, and nobody's going to pay any attention. But in the ninth district, Democrats have a real shot at flipping a district that Donald Trump won by 12 points in 2016. Whether they manage to eke out a victory or not, though, the very closeness of the race is making other Republicans increasingly nervous.

This special election is more special than most, because it is a do-over of the 2018 election that was made necessary by rampant election fraud (not voter fraud, mind you, but widespread election fraud, complete with ballot-tampering and all kinds of dirty tricks). The Republican who ran in 2018 cheated, plain and simple, and still only managed to "win" the race by fewer than 1,000 votes. The election results were thrown out, which is why today's special election is happening. So drawing larger conclusions from this race is probably not all that valid (because the circumstances were so unusual). But it certainly isn't going to stop anyone from doing so.

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