The Board of Visitors of the Virginia Military Institute voted unanimously Thursday to remove the statue of secessionist Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from the campus, the Washington Post reports.

Two board members abruptly resigned from the board prior to the vote.  They did not publicly comment on their resignations.

VMI has been under pressure to review its heritage and traditions, specifically regarding its history of ignoring or downplaying racism in those practices.  Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, a 1981 graduate of VMI, called for a independent investigation into the school.

VMI’s longtime superintendent, retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, resigned at the beginning of the week following a Washington Post report about the school’s continuing discrimination.

The United States has set another record for the number of new coronavirus cases reported in a single day, with one stat aggregator, worldometers.info, putting the number over 100,000 for the first time since the pandemic began.

Even the more conservative aggregator, the COVID Tracking Project, put the daily tally over 97,000.  Worldometers set the daily count over 101,300.

The nation also experienced close to 1,000 fatalities Friday, marking the fifth consecutive day over 900 deaths.  According to the COVID Tracking Project, the number of people hospitalized with coronavirus-related illness has jumped by 5,000 in one week.

“So I think you have a story that would start with the fact that maybe pollsters were not prepared for this early voting surge. You have likely voters in polls. That’s based on some combination of their vote history and responses. Well, some of those people won’t vote. Their car won’t start on Election Day, or they will have a Covid outbreak in their area. However, if you’ve actually already voted, then you’re 100 percent likely to vote. So it may be that Democrats weren’t given enough extra credit for early voting. It’s also worth thinking about incentives here.”

“Imagine you’re a pollster and you have a choice between two turnout models. One is a newfangled turnout model that accounts for early voting. The other is a more traditional, conservative model. One of them has Biden up 6 points in Wisconsin. And one has him up 10 points. There’s not much incentive to publish the 10-point lead. If Biden wins by 10 when you had him up by 6, people will say it was a pretty good poll nevertheless. But if Trump wins, you’re going to look that much worse. So I think there are a lot of incentives to be sure that you’re not missing the white working-class voters that may not apply to Hispanic voters in Arizona or to younger voters who have not been reliable voters in the past but are evidently turning out this year” – FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver as interviewed by Ezra Klien at Vox.

One predictor of presidential campaigns has been accurate 88% for nearly a century:  the S&P 500.  According to Fortune, since 1928, a three-month decline in the stock index prior to a presidential election means the incumbent party loses the White House.

Well, the S&P has spoken, and it’s not good news for Donald Trump.

Over the past three months, the S&P 500 fell a net 0.6% from August through October, making the “presidential predictor,” as its known, signaling a switch in the White House.

“Unfortunately for the President, the feed cut out momentarily and static has been broadcasting from his rally since” reports Twitter video guy Acyn Torabi. Apparently Trump only spoke for 21 minutes, per CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins. The rally was limited to 250 MAGA fans on the governor’s order and the weather was 37 degrees out, so it sucked for everyone there.

Daily Beast: “When Jordan Klepper returned to The Last Laugh podcast this month, he revealed that the biggest difference between Trump rallies in 2016 and 2020 is the ‘desperation’ in the air. ‘It’s hard to keep the party going with 200,000 dead,’ he said. ‘There are smaller numbers, partially because you could die going to these now. But there’s also a different feeling than there was before.’ It seems to be getting worse. In his final dispatch for The Daily Show before the election next week, Klepper went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was immediately struck by how ‘subdued’ the crowd in the parking lot was. ‘In this rally, in the final week of election season, I noticed something different,’ he said. ‘It was quiet.’ Klepper even got some Trump fans to admit that they were ‘exhausted’ and ‘ready to move on.’ Or as he put it, ‘It’s eerily quiet. You can hear a QAnon push notification ding in someone’s pocket.'”

“Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump has narrowed a touch to 8 points from a 10-point advantage in early October, according to a Fox News national survey of likely voters. Biden is ahead by a 52-44 percent margin. It was 53-43 percent three weeks ago. His lead is outside the poll’s margin of sampling error. Two percent back a third-party candidate and 2 percent are undecided” – Fox News.

Nate Silver: “In the course of our reporting on Trafalgar Group—part of the due diligence we often do while entering polls—we’ve learned that some of their polling was done for partisan clients that weren’t clearly disclosed. This doesn’t neatly fit into any of our current policies, although it goes against the transparency that we generally ask of pollsters. It’s important to know the sponsor/client for many reasons, including that our averages handle partisan/internal polls slightly differently. Therefore, in cases where a firm is doing a substantial amount of polling for partisan sponsors but has not been transparent about which polls are done for which clients, we’ll have to go ahead and label all of their polls as partisan. We’ve updated our policy to make this more explicit. But we’ll plan to revisit things after the election. We’ve been pretty relaxed in the past (i.e. not classifying polls as partisan when most others would) and we may need to get stricter.”

What does this have to do with politics or real world news? Jack shit. Why is National Zero reporting this? No really good reason. Is that Boba Fett? Fuck you. No it’s not Boba Fett. And no that’s not Yoda there either. It doesn’t have a name. Some people call it “Baby Yoda” because Yoda’s species was never named in the Star Wars films and they don’t have a better name for it. The official name of the character is “The Child”, per merchandising I saw at Target. Yeah, I know Star Wars always has to put some cutesy characters in so they can sell kids toys. First it was the Ewoks, then the Gungans, the Porgs (the little penguin-y things from The Last Jedi), and now The Child.

Did that make you forget about the election for ten seconds?

Wisconsin Public Radio: “An Illinois judge has ordered the extradition of the 17-year-old accused in the fatal shooting of two demonstrators in Kenosha. The ruling against Kyle Rittenhouse came Friday after a hearing in Waukegan, Illinois. Defense lawyers sought to convince the judge to block their client’s transfer to Wisconsin to face homicide charges. Rittenhouse’s attorneys say he acted in self-defense when he opened fire during unrest following the shooting of a Black man by a white Kenosha police officer.”

I want to create an ice cream flavor called ‘corruption’ just to finally hear the media ask Joe Biden about it.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 30, 2020

“The waxwork museum Madame Tussauds in Berlin loaded its effigy of TV star-turned Republican president Donald Trump into a dumpster on Friday, a move apparently intended to reflect its expectations of next Tuesday’s presidential election. In what seemed a further calculated insult, the statue of his predecessor and nemesis Barack Obama, who counted Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel among his closest allies, remained in place, beaming and besuited. ‘Today’s activity is rather of a symbolic character ahead of the elections in the United States,’ said the museum’s marketing manager Orkide Yalcindag. ‘We here at Madame Tussauds Berlin removed Donald Trump’s waxwork as a preparatory measure'” – Reuters.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “An Alabama county plans to spend more than $3,000 building a fence to protect a Confederate monument and rebel banner that have been the subject of repeated demonstrations outside the courthouse since summer, the commission chairman said. The stone marker and battle flag outside the Marshall County Courthouse have been the scene of repeated protests during national demonstrations against the death of George Floyd. Opponents want both removed. Commission Chair James Hutcheson told WAFF-TV that leaders plan to erect a fence around the monument to protect it and a war memorial outside the building in Albertville.”

“Work will begin within a month, he said, and the fence will cost about $3,500. ‘So, I say it’s been in the planning since 2017, and we just wanted to finish it up. It will have a gate so we will have access to it, and so it’s just finishing the renovations and projects at the courthouse,’ Hutcheson said. A Confederate heritage group installed the Civil War monument in 1996. Located northeast of Birmingham, Marshall County has a population of 97,000 that’s about 93% white.”

Axios: “Early voting in the 2020 election across the U.S. on Friday had already reached 61.7% of 2016’s total turnout, according to state data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project. The coronavirus pandemic and its resultant social-distancing measures prompted a massive uptick in both mail-in ballots and early voting nationwide, setting up an unprecedented and potentially tumultuous count in the hours and days after the polls close on Nov. 3. Both Hawaii (104.5%) and Texas (100.4%) have already surpassed 2016’s total turnout via early voting. The latter has morphed into a key swing state that could allow Joe Biden to land a knockout blow on Trump’s re-election chances.”

“Experts say it is essentially impossible to read anything into 2020’s unprecedented turnout at the current moment. While high-turnout elections traditionally favor Democrats, the pandemic’s effects have caused traditional models to be cast aside — making it difficult to draw any conclusions about the possible outcome of the election from these historic numbers.”

This is definitely what a winning team sounds like when they feel they’re about to win. Definitely.

Ron Brownstein: “If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump decisively next week, this election may be remembered as a hinge point in American history: the moment when a clear majority of voters acknowledged that there’s no turning back from America’s transformation into a nation of kaleidoscopic diversity, a future that doesn’t rely on a backward-facing promise to make America great again. But that doesn’t mean the voters who embody the nation’s future are guaranteed a lasting victory over those who feel threatened by it.”

“With Biden embracing America’s evolution and Trump appealing unrestrainedly to the white voters most fearful of it, the 2020 campaign marks a new peak in the most powerful trend shaping politics in this century. Over the past two decades, and especially since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters have re-sorted among the parties and thus reconfigured the central fault line between them. Today Republicans and Democrats are divided less by class or region than by attitudes toward the propulsive demographic, cultural, and economic shifts remaking 21st-century America. On one side, Republicans now mobilize what I’ve called a ‘coalition of restoration’; on the other, Democrats assemble a ‘coalition of transformation’… A Republican Party deepening its reliance on the most racially resentful white voters, as Democrats more thoroughly represent the nation’s accelerating diversity, could test the bonds of the union to the greatest extent since the Civil War… The 2020 election has been among the most vitriolic and divisive America has ever experienced, with the prospect of further disruption and even violence still lingering in its aftermath. But all of that may be just the opening bell for a decade that tests the nation’s cohesion like few others ever have.”

Lefty pollster but they have a B at FiveThirtyEight. Read the Pennsylvania poll here, Florida here.