‘Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.

We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.

The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched….’ (David Brooks via The New York Times)

‘In 2020, when donald trump questioned the results of the election, the courts decisively rejected his efforts, over and over again. In 2024, the judicial branch may be unable to save our democracy.

The rogues are no longer amateurs. They have spent the last four years going pro, meticulously devising a strategy across multiple fronts — state legislatures, Congress, executive branches and elected judges — to overturn any close election.

The new challenges will take place in forums that have increasingly purged officials who put country over party. They may take place against the backdrop of razor-thin election margins in key swing states, meaning that any successful challenge could change the election.

We have just a few short weeks to understand these challenges so that we can be vigilant about them….’ (Neal Katyal, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, via The New York Times)

‘Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former president donald trump has done this week:

• Sunday: trump says the US military should be deployed against “the enemy within” on Election Day. It’s unclear who exactly he’s talking about, but he does refer to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview.

• Monday: trump stops a town hall to conduct a 40-minute impromptu dance party, where he plays songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R).

• Tuesday: When asked during a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, trump responds with an extended riff on an election lawsuit in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, trump launches into a rant about critical stories appearing on Google News, said he’d called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response.

• Also Tuesday: trump warns that “hydrogen is the new car,” and tells a story about a man who died in a hydrogen car explosion near a tree and could not be identified by his wife. Hydrogen-fueled cars are in fact a 10-year-old technology with a small and declining global market share. There is no evidence that they can explode like the Hindenburg, as a car with hydrogen fuel cells is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas.

• Wednesday: Asked about the “enemy within” comments from Sunday, trump doubles down — saying Democrats like Schiff are indeed such an enemy, that they are “Marxists” and “fascists” who are “so evil” and “dangerous for our country.”

Throughout these events, trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens.

Yet the two trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness….’ (via Vox)