Last Call For Biden, His Time, Con't

Biden-Harris are doing juuuuuuuuust fine in the fundraising department, thanks for asking.

Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee reported raising a record $365 million in August, surprising even seasoned party fundraisers and putting to rest fears that President Trump would drown him in campaign spending.

The staggering cash haul coincides with Biden naming Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate before the convention. It more than doubles Trump’s $165 million record, set in July, and also eclipses the $193 million raised by Barack Obama in September 2008. Trump has not yet announced his August numbers.

Biden’s campaign made sure to release the numbers just before he held a press conference about school safety and the coronavirus Wednesday, when he took the relatively rare step of answering questions from reporters.

Asked what he was going to do with the money, Biden was quick with a joke.

“You want to go to dinner?” Biden asked.

“Look, what I'm having to spend a lot of it on is to counter the lies that are being told by Trump's campaign and ‘Swift Boaters’ out there,” Biden said, referring to a new Republican super PAC. “What I'm trying to do is spend most of that, and by the way, I think the average contribution was like $40. We have over 1.6 million people who contributed in the middle of this economic crisis, somewhere between $5, $10, $15. I'd say that shows some genuine enthusiasm about making sure we have a chance at becoming president of the United States.”

Biden’s campaign was already in the midst of increasing his TV media buys. In one new ad, he condemns both “rioting and looting” as well as Trump for fanning “the flames” of the protests. The ad announcement preceded Biden’s decision to travel on Thursday to Kenosha, Wis., which has become ground zero in both the discussion of the protests and the swing state’s politics.

Biden’s campaign anticipated announcing his total on Tuesday, but so many checks from small-dollar donors kept coming in that day that it delayed his team from giving a total until Wednesday.

“We literally couldn’t count the money fast enough. It’s a crazy problem to have,” said one Democratic donor and financier for the Biden campaign who was not authorized to speak on the record.

“Don’t get me wrong: a lot of this is because of Trump. America hates him and people are giving what they can to stop him because they believe,” the donor said. “But you can’t underestimate how well Joe has played this, how important Kamala is to the team or how solid the campaign has been.”

They've got the cash.  Time to use it.  Relentlessly.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime is telling governors to be ready to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine no later than November 1.  You know, 48 hours before the election.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.

The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine against a disease that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out last week, the same day that President Trump said in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.

Over the past week, both Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, who heads the Food and Drug Administration, have said in interviews with news organizations that a vaccine could be available for certain groups before clinical trials have been completed, if the data were overwhelmingly positive.

Public health experts agree that agencies at all levels of government should urgently prepare for what will eventually be a vast, complex effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans. But the possibility of a rollout in late October or early November has also heightened concerns that the Trump administration is seeking to rush the distribution of a vaccine — or simply to suggest that one is possible — before Election Day on Nov. 3.

“This timeline of the initial deployment at the end of October is deeply worrisome for the politicization of public health and the potential safety ramifications,” said Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist in Arizona. “It’s hard not to see this as a push for a pre-election vaccine.”

Three documents were sent to public health officials in all states and territories as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and San Antonio on Aug. 27. They outlined detailed scenarios for distributing two unnamed vaccine candidates — each requiring two doses a few weeks apart — at hospitals, mobile clinics and other facilities offering easy access to the first targeted recipients.

The guidance noted that health care professionals, including long-term-care employees, would be among the first to receive the product, along with other essential workers and national security employees.

People aged 65 or older, as well as those from “racial and ethnic minority populations,” Native Americans and incarcerated individuals — all communities known to be at greater risk of contracting the virus and experiencing severe disease — were also prioritized in the documents.

This is, to put it quite frankly, 100% dangerous bullshit, and nobody should trust these vaccines without absolute proof from somebody well outside the regime. We're going to come to find out in January or so that the vaccine is "not as effective as initially thought" but by then thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans could be hospitalized.

There is no guarantee that a working vaccine would be ready by the election, and it's the height of outright danger to suggest that the nation prepare for a working vaccine.

Oh, and BLACK AMERICA WILL NOT BE YOUR GUINEA PIGS.

This is Trump trying to win by duping the American public, and it's reason #19,037 he should resign.

Get Uff Da Vote, Ya?

FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich warns that like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana, Minnesota is trending red and Biden and the Dems need to do everything he can to hold on to Land of 10,000 Lakes. (and yes, I lived in Minnesota, I know I'm misusing "Uff Da", deal with it.)

In the fabled “blue wall” — the collection of historically Democratic states that pundits (wrongly) assumed gave Hillary Clinton an Electoral College advantage in 2016 — Minnesota is the cornerstone. The Democratic candidate has won Minnesota in 11 straight presidential elections, the longest active streak in the country. What’s more, no Republican has won any statewide election in Minnesota since 2006 — not for Senate, not for governor, not even for state auditor.

It’s tempting to conclude from this that Minnesota is a safe Democratic state. But Minnesota is much more evenly divided than that record suggests: For example, it came within a couple percentage points of voting for now-President Trump in 2016. And as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012 — showed in 2016, streaks are meant to be broken.1

Most ominously for Democrats, there is evidence that Minnesota is becoming redder over time, with 2016 being a particular inflection point. In 1984, the state was 18.2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. But in 2016, for the first time since 1952, Minnesota voted more Republican than the rest of the U.S.

And Minnesota may be even further right in 2020. According to the current2 FiveThirtyEight forecast, Joe Biden is on track to defeat Trump by 4.2 points in Minnesota — 1.9 points better for Trump than our forecast for the national popular vote.

What explains Minnesota’s rightward shift? Fifty-three percent of the population age 25 and older are non-Hispanic white and lack a bachelor’s degree, a demographic with which Republicans — and especially Trump — have been gaining ground. Historically, though, Minnesota’s predominantly white, working-class population has actually been quite progressive: The state’s many German and Scandinavian immigrants (the biggest ethnic groups in Minnesota are German Americans, at 33 percent of the population, and Norwegian Americans, at 15 percent) brought with them their progressive values and faith in government, and its active labor movement (in 1983, more than 23 percent of Minnesota employees were members of a union) rallied blue-collar workers around the Democratic Party. In fact, Minnesota’s Democratic Party isn’t called the Democratic Party at all — it is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, reflecting its historical growth out of those two constituencies.

But in recent elections, Democrats’ pro-environment and anti-gun positions have alienated these voters in places like the Iron Range, an ancestrally Democratic mining region, and in 2016 Trump was able to tap into their racial and economic grievances as well. Democrats went from carrying Minnesota by 7.7 points in 2012 to carrying it by just 1.5 in 2016. Tellingly, the counties that shifted the most toward Trump were also the counties with the highest concentrations of white people without a college degree.

Demographics, demographics, demographics.  While Texas, Florida, Georgia, and NC are red heading for purple, the Upper Midwest is trending older, whiter, and towards the GOP. Trump came within 1.5% of taking Minnesota, and the state's been trending red for the last several years.

I hate to say it, but Biden has to win the state. A 4.2% win would definitely be a good thing, but if I'm Trump, I'm playing my cards here.

Look at it this way: if the only changes from 2016 are that Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but he loses Minnesota in a nail-biter, Trump still wins 270-268.

Yeah, I'm worried. All of us should be. Minnesota to the Democrats is what Arizona is to the GOP, the break in the wall that signals a loss.

StupidiNews!

• A California judge has ruled that the state's "test optional" policy involving the SAT/ACT is discriminatory towards students with disabilities that prevent them from taking the tests.
• The CDC has extended its health-based moratorium guidelines on eviction from federal housing until the end of the year, but states are not required to follow the guidelines.
• Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey has beaten back a primary challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, marking the first time the Kennedy dynasty has lost a congressional race in the state.
• House Ways And Means Committee Chair Richard Neal easily survived his primary challenge from Holyoak Mayor Alex Morse, Morse fell short by nearly 20 points.
• The Trump regime is rejecting a global COVID-19 vaccine plan involving more than 170 countries, saying any vaccine distribution effort administered by the WHO and involving China is corrupt.