Washington Post: “In competitive Senate races across the country, including states where Trump remains popular, Republican incumbents are facing a conundrum: how to prove their pro-Trump bona fides to a MAGA movement that sees many longtime Republicans as insufficiently pure while stopping the hemorrhaging among suburban moderates who wonder why they have enabled the president. The result for Ernst and as many as a half-dozen of her GOP colleagues may be the worst of both worlds, in which they risk alienating energized Trump backers if they criticize the president but then, if they stick with him, lose some centrist voters who have soured on Trump and are open to voting for a Democrat.”

“PRRI developed two likely voter models to measure potential support for each candidate under two turnout scenarios. If voter turnout looks similar to 2016 (55% turnout), the survey finds Biden besting Trump by 14 percentage points (54% to 40%). If voter turnout is higher (70% turnout), as multiple indicators suggest is likely, Biden leads Trump by 18 percentage points (56% to 38%). The underlying dynamics of Trump’s support has shifted significantly since 2016. About seven in ten Trump supporters (71%) say their vote is more for Trump than against Biden, while 28% say their vote is more against Biden than for Trump” – PRRI.

CNN: “Behind the scenes, Democrats are preparing to confront President Donald Trump if he loses the election next month to Democrat Joe Biden – if Trump claims that the result is rigged, refuses to engage in a peaceful transition or tries to challenge the result through the courts, Congress or statehouses. The Biden campaign and congressional Democrats are strategizing together to wage a post-election response to Trump on two fronts – anticipating both a legal challenge and a messaging war – as Trump’s attacks on the election have only intensified while he’s lagging in the polls two weeks ahead of Election Day, with voting already underway. Outside groups are also mobilizing to try to blunt any efforts to dispute the vote count after November 3.”

“Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that the election will be fraudulent and stolen from him, saying, ‘The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.’ Democratic sources say that they are taking the President at his word. The Biden campaign is preparing for any number of legal contingencies that could arise if the vote is close, while lawmakers are preparing for plausible – and also quite implausible – scenarios that could arise if the presidential election were kicked to Congress to decide a winner. Democrats are also readying a response to Trump’s claims of fraud – which could cause his voters to doubt the legitimacy of the result, even if it’s a Biden landslide – with plans underway for nationwide protests should Trump try to dispute the result. They’re also working with social media companies to try to discourage a premature declaration of victory on election night.”

…yes https://t.co/RzZ3j3zoAL

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 19, 2020

ABC News: “Internally, the Trump campaign is increasingly worried that the president’s chances of winning North Carolina, a state the team has heavily invested in and views as essential for Trump’s path to victory, has all but evaporated. The campaign had viewed the state as ‘super safe’ as recently as just a few weeks ago, sources told ABC News. Advisers now fear that, because the state counts and reports both day-of and mail-in votes together on election night, losing North Carolina could be a clear white flag.”

“Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election. The effort, internally called the ‘Malarkey Factory,’ consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is ‘creepy’ and that he is ‘sleepy’ or senile.”

“In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages. The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state.” – Washington Post.

Forbes: “Whether or not Donald Trump wins the election, lenders will expect his businesses to pay back an estimated $900 million in the next four years, an alarmingly accelerated timetable that involves more than twice as much debt as the president previously indicated. In order to emerge unscathed, Trump will likely have to engage in a series of high-stakes, big-money transactions—deals that could produce arguably the biggest conflicts of interest than an American president has ever had to face. About half of the debt coming due from the start of 2021 to the end of 2024 is secured against assets that the president and his children own outright.”

“He will have to pay back loans against his hotel in Washington, D.C., his golf resort in Miami and his tower in Chicago. He’ll also have to sort out the debt against Trump Tower and Trump Plaza in New York City. The rest of the loans are held against 1290 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan and 555 California Street in San Francisco, office buildings in which the president has a 30% limited partnership interest. Those properties currently have a combined $1.5 billion in debt against them, and Trump’s indirect share of their liabilities adds up to an estimated $447 million. As a limited partner, however, he presumably has less control over those obligations, as well as some protection if the properties fail to pay back their loans. ‘You know what limited means—limited as to liability,’ Trump explained in a 2015 interview with Forbes, adding, ‘Where that is good is in bad times. If the world collapses, I’m not responsible for putting up any money.'”

“TikTok is toughening its stance against the QAnon conspiracy theory, expanding its ban to all content or accounts that promote videos advancing baseless ideas from the far-right online movement. The action hardens the video-sharing app’s previous enforcement against QAnon that targeted specific hashtags on the app that QAnon supporters have used to spread unfounded theories. Now, users that share QAnon-related content on TikTok will have their accounts deleted from the app” reports NPR.

“‘Content and accounts that promote QAnon violate our disinformation policy and we remove them from our platform,’ a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to NPR. ‘We’ve also taken significant steps to make this content harder to find across search and hashtags by redirecting associated terms to our Community Guidelines.’ TikTok’s sweeping action against QAnon comes just as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other technology giants have announced bans on content from the Trump-supporting conspiracy theory. QAnon started in October 2017 and has amassed an enormous following online thanks largely to social media companies.”

“Over the past four years, experts reached an academic consensus about [2016 state-level] polls’ biggest flaw: a failure by many to ‘weight for education.’ ‘Weighting for education’ is an attempt to compensate for the fact that college-educated people are both more likely to respond to polls and more likely to be Democrats. A poll that’s weighted for education takes responses from people without college degrees and gives them more ‘weight,’ so the poll more accurately represents the demographics of the place it’s trying to survey.”

“For example, here’s how a Wisconsin poll that’s weighted for education would play out: Pollsters call thousands of people, but many don’t answer their phones. Of those who do answer and take the survey, 60 percent have a college degree. But here’s the problem: only about 30 percent of Wisconsin’s population has a college degree, according to the U.S. Census. If the poll published those results without any adjustments, it would disproportionately represent the opinions of college-educated voters, who tend to be more liberal than their neighbors without college educations. So, the poll takes the responses from the people without college degrees and gives them more ‘weight,’ until the demographic ratios in the poll align with the demographics of the state. According to Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation and a member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s poll transparency project, a number of state-level polls didn’t weight for education in 2016. But she said many have now course-corrected. ‘If polls get it wrong this year, it’s not going to be because they weren’t weighting for education'” – Wisconsin Public Radio.

Fox News: “Conservative activist Charlie Kirk blasted Twitter after the social media giant blocked the Turning Point USA founder for ‘violating rules against posting misleading information about voting.’ ‘I’m kind of in a hostage situation with Twitter,’ Kirk said Sunday on Fox News. ‘I do not have access to my Twitter account because I tweeted a widely reported story.’ The social media platform – which has been lambasted by conservative lawmakers and pundits over the last week for blocking users from sharing a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s alleged emails – blocked Kirk from using the site after he tweeted a story about mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania in which he incorrectly stated that people had requested multiple ballots.”

“By almost every measure that political operatives, academics and handicappers use to forecast elections, the likely outcome is that Joe Biden will win the White House. Yet two weeks before Election Day, the unfolding reality of 2020 is that it’s harder than ever to be sure. And Democrats are scrambling to account for the hidden variables that could still sink their nominee — or what you might call the known unknowns.”

“Republican registration has ticked up in key states at the same time Democratic field operations were in hibernation. Democratic turnout is surging in the early vote. But it’s unclear whether it will be enough to overcome an expected rush of ballots that Republicans, leerier of mail voting, will cast in person on Election Day. There is uncertainty about the accuracy of polling in certain swing states, the efficacy of GOP voter suppression efforts and even the number of mail-in ballots that for one reason or another will be disqualified” – Politico.

The Guardian: “Rightwing nationalist politicians around the globe are abandoning the usual diplomatic etiquette of hedging bets before foreign elections and instead are throwing their support firmly behind Trump in November’s US vote in the hope that he can confound the pollsters for a second time and win another four years in power. While surveys suggest that a comfortable majority of the global population disapproves of Trump, insurgent far-right movements are wary of a return to geopolitics as usual if he leaves the White House.”

“‘We are very familiar with the foreign policy of US Democratic administrations, built as it is on moral imperialism,’ [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán, who has positioned himself as Europe’s leading proponent of ‘illiberal democracy’, wrote in a recent essay. ‘We have tasted it – albeit under duress. We didn’t like it and we don’t want a second helping.’ Last week Trump’s challenger, Joe Biden, said ‘all the thugs in the world’ were drawing inspiration from Trump, name-checking the governments in Hungary and Poland and drawing a furious response from Hungarian officials. For Orbán and other nationalist leaders, there may be concrete policy benefits in a second Trump term, but the biggest draw would be the immeasurable psychological benefit of having a politician like Trump occupying the world’s most important office. If Biden wins, it may be taken as a sign that the populist moment is over.”

“A phone call to an Internet provider in Oregon on Sunday evening was all it took to briefly sideline multiple websites related to 8chan/8kun… A large number of 8kun and QAnon-related sites are connected to the Web via a single Internet provider in Vancouver, Wash. called VanwaTech. Previous appeals to VanwaTech to disconnect these sites have fallen on deaf ears, as the company’s owner Nick Lim reportedly has been working with 8kun’s administrators to keep the sites online in the name of protecting free speech” reports KrebsOnSecurity.

“But VanwaTech also had a single point of failure on its end: The swath of Internet addresses serving the various 8kun/QAnon sites were being protected from otherwise crippling and incessant distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by Hillsboro, Ore. based CNServers LLC. On Sunday evening, security researcher Ron Guilmette placed a phone call to CNServers’ owner, who professed to be shocked by revelations that his company was helping QAnon and 8kun keep the lights on. Within minutes of that call, CNServers told its customer — Spartan Host Ltd., which is registered in Belfast, Northern Ireland — that it would no longer be providing DDoS protection for the set of 254 Internet addresses that Spartan Host was routing on behalf of VanwaTech.”

AP: “President Donald Trump stood before a crowd in a state that had once been firmly in his grasp. There were fewer than three weeks left in the campaign, one reshaped by a virus that has killed more than 215,000 Americans, and he was running out of time to change the trajectory of the race. He posed a question. ‘Did you hear the news?’ the president asked the hopeful crowd. ‘Bruce Ohr is finally out of the Department of Justice.'”

“There were scattered cheers in the crowd as the president then detailed the fate of a mostly forgotten, minor figure in the Russia probe that feels like a lifetime of news cycles ago. That moment Wednesday in Iowa, a state Trump won comfortably four years ago but is now seen as competitive, underscored a fundamental challenge facing his reelection campaign: It’s not 2016. The president’s attempts to recycle attacks he used on Hillary Clinton that year have so far failed to effectively damage Democrat Joe Biden. And Trump has found himself dwelling more and more in the conservative media echo chamber, talking to an increasingly smaller portion of the electorate.”

Could be his posts are whiny and creepy as shit.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGgfP_zgJGK/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

The Chinese economy recorded a 4.9% growth rate in the July through September quarter over the same period last year, demonstrating that following strict coronavirus protocols can quicky quell the economic impact of the pandemic, the New York Times reports.

The Chinese numbers show growth, not just a recovery, from the economic slowdown brought on by the coronavirus.  The rapid recovery positions China to continue its increasing influence on  world economics. 

Ewic Trump, reportedly the executive running the failing Trump Organization, made a vague threat of retaliation against Twitter because he and his bro-bro aren’t getting enough retweets of their garbage.

I have noticed the same. Don’t worry… they will have to answer for all of this and it won’t work out well for them… https://t.co/tMZMaSRiJz

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 18, 2020

Given that Ewic has no legal authority and has absolutely no role in government, it’s unclear who he thinks Twitter will “have to answer” to.