With the third Democratic presidential nomination debate looming, it's time once again to check the polls and see how the field is doing. This week's debate will be hosted by ABC, so we'll all get a chance to see what sorts of questions they'll ask, in the first debate that will feature all the qualified candidates on one stage for only one night.

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The Democratic field continues to slowly contract. Since the last horserace column we wrote, three more candidates have thrown in the towel. This time around, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, and Seth Moulton are the ones making their exit, dropping the entire field down to "only" 20 candidates left. Of the three, Inslee will still be worth watching during the rest of the primary race, because his endorsement is being heavily courted by more than one remaining candidate. Inslee made climate change his signature issue, so having his endorsement would bolster the case for any of the other candidates that they're the most serious about tackling the problem. Sadly, Inslee dropped out before CNN essentially gave him what he had been asking for from the Democratic National Committee -- an entire night devoted to the climate change debate.

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This is, without doubt, the stupidest American political scandal, ever. Its incredible dumbassedness absolutely puts to shame any other possible contender for the title (such as, just to cite one example: "Barack Obama wore a tan suit! Everybody flee!"). We have officially devolved into seriously moronic territory, folks.

Because it was so prominent all week, we are also pre-empting the rest of our recap of politics this week to focus like a laser beam on the storm of stupidity.

Last weekend, President Donald Trump tweeted out erroneous information that caused some of the residents of the state of Alabama to panic, thinking that Hurricane Dorian was heading for them. Weather scientists immediately corrected Trump's error, and told the citizens of Alabama not to panic, because the storm wasn't coming anywhere near them.

That should have been the end of it (well, after the president himself issued a correction and an apology, which any other United States president would have responsibly done). Sadly for us all, it was not the end of it, but merely the beginning of a Category 5 presidential tantrum with hurricane-force bluster and hot air.

This only reinforces our belief that what we suggested a few months ago would be the ideal Democratic campaign slogan: "Do you really want four more years of this?!?"

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Mitch McConnell is upset. He's in a tizzy because mean people keep calling him "Moscow Mitch." Mitch does not like this. He does not like it one tiny bit. In fact, Moscow Mitch is in a snit.

I'm sorry if that sounds a little like a very bad Dr. Seuss rhyme, but that's about the size of our political discourse these days, like it or not. And McConnell is doing nothing to elevate things, because he has taken to accusing his detractors of practicing "McCarthyism."

He's wrong about this, of course. McCarthyism originally meant using the political practices wielded by Senator Joe McCarthy, who accused many of either being communists or having communist sympathies without a shred of actual proof of his accusations. The term has now evolved into meaning any unsubstantiated political attack which is indiscriminate and has no basis in fact. Mitch is right that he's being accused of something similar -- being a puppet of Moscow -- to the accusations McCarthy made. But the term just does not apply, because the accusations against him are very specific indeed -- that his inaction on any election security bills in the Senate is giving Russia green light to attempt to attack our election system once again, in 2020. That's about as specific as it gets, and it is backed up by fact. McConnell has been blocking all such bills from the Senate floor, and he has the ultimate power to do so since he is the majority leader. His refusal to act is indeed aiding and abetting Russia, by any interpretation. Hence, Moscow Mitch is an entirely appropriate moniker.

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I'm going to begin today's column with an extremely dated pop culture reference, just to warn everyone. The show Happy Days was historic for many reasons, but the only one anyone really remembers today is the contribution of a metaphor for "going on longer than it really should have." When faced with something that fits this description (a television show, a politician, just about any fad, etc.), the go-to phrase has now become "it has jumped the shark." I have no idea how many people who use this phrase saw the original Happy Days episode where Fonzie did actually jump over a shark on water skis, but the phrase now lives independently of its television origin in American idiom. But there's one other Happy Days theme that should worry us all, because the two politicians leading the race for president both seem to be afflicted by it. I speak of the inability of the Fonz to ever use the word "wrong" when applied to himself. He just couldn't say "I was wrong," no matter how hard he tried. This was played as a comedy bit, but while it was funny on television it's not such a laughing matter in the real world of politics.

President Donald Trump, who will almost surely be nominated by the Republican Party for a second term, obviously has the same problem Fonzie did. He cannot ever admit that he was wrong about anything, even when the obvious evidence shows that he was, in fact, incorrect. Since Trump is incorrect about so many things (on an hourly basis, at times), we keep seeing this play out over and over again. Trump will say or tweet something monstrously stupid or laughably wrong, and then when his error is pointed out to him he insists that he was in fact right, and that everyone else and all the contradictory facts and data are what is actually wrong.

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Labor Day is the official kickoff of the fall campaign season, when voters increasingly begin to pay attention to the presidential race. Or so the pundits claim, at any rate. Whether this week will be much different than last week is yet to be determined, but I for one am going to hang on to that lazy hazy summer glow for one more day by taking a look much farther into the future and contemplating the start of this cycle's primary calendar in a big-picture sort of fashion.

Of course, that's not as far into the future as it once was. The first presidential nominating votes will be cast (or caucused, at any rate) less than six months from now. What the race will look like then is anyone's guess, since virtually anything could happen between now and then. But there are things which will not change, most prominent among them the actual primary calendar.

The 2020 Democratic primary season is going to have two rather large changes, both the culmination of decades-long trends. The first is the virtual disappearance of the caucus. In 2020, only three states will hold Democratic caucuses: Iowa, Nevada, and Wyoming. The other 47 will hold primaries -- many of them for the first time. Caucuses have been scrapped in an increasing number of states, mostly because they are such an outdated and time-consuming way to pick a nominee.

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First of all: Happy Labor Day to everyone!

On yesterday's Sunday morning political shows, you might not have even realized it was Labor Day weekend. There was a big hurricane to cover, and yet another shooting to argue about. What with all of that going on, Labor Day was barely mentioned, except on one network. Much to my surprise, Fox News Sunday was the only show to have an actual Union leader on as a guest. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, spoke on all sorts of topics near and dear to Labor's heart: the trade war with China, the plight of farmers who are paying the price, the minimum wage, health insurance, and the politics surrounding all of them.

Trumka was also asked about trade agreements, and he didn't have any warm words for the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which he called "unenforceable." But this reminded me of something I've been meaning to write about for a while, and Labor Day seemed to be a good time to do so. While the U.S.M.C.A. has been negotiated between the three countries, it has yet to receive congressional approval here. At some point during the next few months (or even next year), the White House will be making a big push to get a vote on the new agreement in Congress. So sooner or later, it'll be what people are talking about inside the Beltway.

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You know things are getting bad in Trumpland when Our Dear Leader is openly attacking Fox News for not being servile enough.

In a series of angry tweets, Trump this week called Fox News "HOPELESS & CLUELESS" and ended his rant with:

The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn't working for us anymore!

What set him off, apparently, was the fact that a Democratic party official was interviewed on Fox, and the host didn't immediately drive her from the stage with a pitchfork or burning torch. Or something -- with Trump, it's always hard to guess what he's thinking.

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While almost all the election attention from the media so far has been on the presidential race (and, more specifically, the Democratic nomination race), there are other races out there which might be more important in the grand scheme of things, because the fight for the Senate is really the determining factor for what will get done in the two years after the presidency is decided. This holds true no matter who wins the White House, in fact, because if Trump gets a second term, facing a Democratic Senate and House would severely constrain his ability to enact his agenda. If Trump loses to a Democrat, it won't matter how many sweeping campaign promises get him or her elected, because control of the Senate will determine whether any of it will get a chance.

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Barring any surprise last-minute polls, the stage is now set for the third round of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates. Note that singular "stage" in there, because for the first time the debate will only take place on a single night, with 10 candidates appearing together onstage while 11 others got shut out in the cold. Yes, the time of the Great Winnowing is upon us.

Again, barring any last-minute surprises (the deadline for polling results isn't until midnight tonight), the candidates who will be facing off against each other are (roughly in descending order of support in the polls): Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Julián Castro, and Beto O'Rourke. Those last five names are really kind of interchangeable in position, since they're all struggling to even hit three percent in the polls -- only the top five are regularly polling above five percent.

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It should be taken as a given that the current president of the United States is crazy as a loon. I mean, it's pretty obvious for those who have eyes to see. In the past few days, he boasted of two phone calls from the Chinese to resume trade negotiations. It turns out, though, that these phone calls did not actually happen. The stock market didn't seem to care, and reacted the way Trump wanted, so nobody's making that big a deal of the fact that Trump just made up some (as he would call it) self-serving "fake news." Trump also lied repeatedly about what was talked about during the G-7 meetings, saying that all the other leaders agreed with him on various things like readmitting Russia to the group, the meanness of the American media towards Trump, Trump's stance on Iran, and anything else he dreamed up that he thought he could get away with bragging about. Of course, none of the other world leaders agreed with him on any of it, and a few actually dared to say so. Trump barely even noticed, because he obviously lives in his own personal fantasyland where contradictions and criticisms magically turn into laudatory personal praise. But while all of that is run-of-the-mill craziness for Trump, the wilder story that broke was that Trump has repeatedly suggested that the way American can avoid massive hurricane damage is to just drop nuclear weapons right in the middle of them before they get to our shores.

The Axios story that broke this news is pretty jaw-dropping (containing quotes from White House aides such as: "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting"), but if the report is to be believed, all of this happened just after Trump took office, so perhaps with enough time he's been convinced that this is a monumentally stupid idea. Or maybe not -- the article doesn't make clear whether Trump has actually given up on the notion or perhaps just forgot he ever had it in the first place.

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