| | | | | |  | | By Marc Caputo and Ryan Lizza | Presented by |  | | With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward TAMPA TWO — Good evening and hello from the state of election cliffhangers, where on Thursday, in a rare crossing of paths, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will campaign in the same city, Tampa. It's the heart of the Tampa Bay media market, which forms the westernmost barbell end of the I-4 Corridor, which is geographically and politically in the center of the state (but more on that later). The dueling visits underscore how the path to the White House runs through the region. Tampa Bay's mix of urban, suburban, rural, white, Black, Hispanic, working-class and retired voters gives Tampa Bay an Everywhere, USA feel. And its central importance to the swing region of the swing state — one Trump needs to win for a second term — heightens the importance of their visits. Trailing by various margins in most polls of most swing states, Trump is still essentially tied with Biden in Florida. If the president is going to have another come-from-behind victory, it starts here. And if Biden wants to kill Trump's chances in one place, Florida is the MAGA horcrux and Tampa is the place to smash it. Beyond location, the similarities end there for the two contrasting presidential campaigns and candidates. Biden is hosting a drive-in rally to ensure social distancing (his campaign won't even announce where it's at yet). Trump is proudly hosting his event in the parking lot of Raymond James Stadium, which as the home of Tampa Bay Buccaneers, fittingly has a pirate ship built in. There's an added benefit for Trump: The stadium is a new site for in-person early voting, and the campaign figures he can seriously juice turnout before, during and after his rally. It's a controversial move that has the Biden campaign privately fuming, because electioneering is prohibited within 150 feet of a polling station, but the rally is technically on the outskirts of the no-electioneering boundary. The Hillsborough County election supervisor issued a statement warning voters of traffic delays. Trump also plans a rally in South Florida this weekend, and Biden has a Thursday event in Democrat-rich Broward County. Florida doesn't so much have Election Day as Election Days. Floridians have three methods of voting: absentee by mail, early in person and on Election Day. Republicans used to dominate absentee voting and Democrats in-person early voting. But during the pandemic Trump demonized the former and Democrats prioritized the latter. So their roles have reversed. So far in 2020, Democrats have rolled up a huge and historic advantage over Republicans in casting absentee ballots. But once in-person early voting started, Republicans stormed back. As of this morning, the Democrats' margin remained huge (246,000), but that's half the size it was eight days ago, according to state data. In all, a record 6.9 million of Florida's 14.4 million registered voters had already cast ballots as of this morning; 2.6 million are Republicans (38 percent); 2.8 million are Democrats (41 percent) and 1.5 million are independents (21 percent). The ballots are counted by party affiliation, but the votes in them aren't tabulated. So we don't know who's actually winning until Election Day. Polls indicate Biden is ahead among independents, which is usually crucial. On Election Day morning in 2016, Democrats had cast 90,000 more early and absentee ballots than Republicans. But those were just the raw ballots cast by party. Once the ballots were opened and the votes were tabulated, they showed Hillary Clinton had a huge pre-Election Day lead of 247,000 votes. But then Election Day happened. And Trump won it by even more. At the end of the day and at the end of the election, he carried Florida by fewer than 113,000 votes. It used to be that whoever won the two media markets of I-4 — Orlando and Tampa Bay — won the state. President Barack Obama disproved that in 2012 when he ran for reelection. He followed a strategy of maximizing votes in the state's big cities (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville), where high Black, Hispanic and youth turnout helped him carry Florida by less than a point over Mitt Romney, who won the Tampa Bay and Orlando media markets by just a point each. Four years later, the old rules held: Trump won Tampa Bay by 8 points, and Orlando's market by 3 points, and he carried the state overall by 1.2 points. It was only a matter of time before Trump and Biden collided in the same city, so it's little surprise it's Tampa. As of this morning, Republicans had cast 39 percent of the early and absentee ballots in the Tampa Bay market and Democrats 40 percent. Which candidate will drive up more turnout? Whoever does could very well win Tampa Bay, win Florida and win the White House. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Check out the town hall that Eugene Daniels and Renu are moderating Thursday about closing the racial health gap. Reach out at mcaputo@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @MarcACaputo and @renurayasam.
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With Trump on board, Air Force One lands at Phoenix Goodyear Airport for a campaign rally in Arizona. | Getty Images | | | | A BREWING BIDEN BACKLASH — Good evening from I-20 in West Texas in between Abilene and Dallas, where Ryan Lizza writes from his latest road trip. He emails Nightly: I've been touring the Sun Belt swing states. After Nevada, Arizona and Texas, I'm heading to Georgia and North Carolina — I won't make it to Florida but Marc Caputo has that covered above — before returning to Washington for Election Day. Over the weekend, in between Arizona and Texas, I stopped in Santa Fe, N.M., a swing state in recent memory that is now solidly Democratic, and I believe I caught a glimpse of what could be waiting for Biden if he wins on Tuesday. In neighboring Arizona and Texas, Republican governors have opened up their states, with relatively few Covid restrictions left in place. As coronavirus has spiked in those places, it's been left to local jurisdictions to tighten things up again. For instance, in El Paso, which is experiencing a sharp rise in cases, a county-wide 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew was put into effect Sunday along with a two-week stay at home order. But in New Mexico, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has left in place statewide public health restrictions reminiscent of what most states had earlier this year. As with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, the tough response has been met with a backlash from the right. On Saturday several hundred protesters, many from the more conservative southern part of the state, gathered at Santa Fe's circular state capitol building, known as the Roundhouse. I stumbled upon the group walking around downtown. (Even on a day off in a non-swing state you can't escape politics in 2020.) At first I thought it was a Trump rally, and while there was a Trump campaign presence there and plenty of pro-Trump sentiment, the crowd was there to protest lockdowns and mask-wearing. There were anti-vax protesters, QAnon diehards, and several Christian groups. When it was over many lined up to sign a petition to recall Lujan Grisham. While this libertarian-infused anti-lockdown ideology has been bubbling on the right all year, we should expect it to become turbocharged if Biden takes office, just as it has in states with Democratic governors, especially if he pushes national policies on mask wearing and lockdowns. The circumstances of a Biden presidency would be remarkably similar to those of the last two Democratic presidents, when they took over after Republicans in 1993 and 2009. Just like Bill Clinton and Obama, Biden would inherit a weak economy, massive budget deficits, and he will almost certainly be pushing an ambitious progressive agenda. We know what happens to the Republican opposition in Washington under those circumstances: They become obsessed with austerity, they withdraw support from legislation they might have embraced under a Republican president, and they focus on crippling the agenda of the new Democratic president as a means of winning the midterm elections. We also know what happens at the Republican grassroots under these circumstances: Money from well-funded libertarians like the Kochs flows into whatever the next version of the Tea Party is, conspiratorial scandals about the new president — often based on a germ of truth but radically exaggerated — metastasize, and the federal government becomes the main political boogeyman if not an outright enemy. We saw all of this in 1993 and 1994 with Clinton and again in 2009 and 2010 with Obama. And you could usually see it coming. All of these currents stirred on the right in the 2008 campaign, at the end when it looked like Republicans would lose, and especially at rallies for Sarah Palin. I glimpsed it again in Santa Fe last weekend. As I left the rally, I heard one activist tell another that the coronavirus pandemic was "a political hoax" stoked by Democrats to control people.
| | | GET IN THE VOTE — Trump won the presidency with 46 percent of the popular vote. His approval rating, according to Gallup, has never hit 50 percent. He remains under 50 percent in national polling averages. The president's inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map — a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximize Trump's chances of winning a contest in which he's all but certain to win less than 50 percent of the vote, national political reporter David Siders writes. In Philadelphia, his campaign is videotaping voters as they return ballots. In Nevada, it's suing to force elections officials in Nevada's Democratic-heavy Clark County to more rigorously examine ballot signatures for discrepancies that could disqualify them. And that's just a few of its efforts. Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump. For Trump, the math makes sense. In 2016, he won Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — five of this year's most important swing states — with under 50 percent of the vote. In two others — Georgia and North Carolina — he captured exactly half the votes. Having failed to expand his base beyond a committed — and sizable — core in his first term, the president stands to gain from a diminished turnout, particularly among voters of color.
| | | |   | | | | | | Nightly asks you: What is the most important issue no one is talking about in the 2020 elections? Use our form to send in your answer, and we'll include select responses in our Friday edition.
| | | BIDEN IS HOW FAR AHEAD? This morning, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found Biden up an eye-popping 17 points in Wisconsin, leading the president 57 percent to 40 percent. But a poll from the Marquette University Law School released later in the afternoon found Biden ahead by a much smaller margin, 47 percent to 43 percent, with Libertarian Jo Jorgensen sitting at 2 percent. Both polls come from respected, high-quality pollsters. So who do you believe? The answer from Morning Score author Zach Montellaro : Neither — kinda. He emails Nightly: Most public polling agrees that Biden leads in Wisconsin. The first thing you should do with any poll, whether it confirms your prior beliefs or not, is consider it as merely one datapoint in a universe of them. Even this close to the election, the best thing to consider is a polling average rather than each individual poll. The folks at FiveThirtyEight, for example, have Biden with an average lead of 8.5 points in Wisconsin. That's probably closer to the truth. And it is OK when polls disagree. Everything from how samples are constructed to who a pollster believes is a likely voter comes into play. Polls are not exact predictions of what will happen on Election Day. They're both a snapshot of that particular moment and time, and they aren't pinpoint accurate (hence margins of error, and the less publicized confidence interval!). KEYSTONE — Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 1 percentage point in 2016. The 2020 polls show Biden is up in the Rust Belt state by nearly 4 points, according to the Real Clear Politics average. But Hillary Clinton was also famously up in Pennsylvania polls. Biden and Trump tore through Pennsylvania earlier this week, and the race seems to be tightening there. Nightly's Renuka Rayasam reached out to Shrewsbury's finest, Holly Otterbein, over Slack to talk about what to watch for in the state. This conversation has been edited. Where are the places that matter? What should we be watching for on election night? In 2020, Biden is looking to turn out the Democratic base in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, and perhaps get even bigger turnout there than Hillary Clinton did. He also wants to flip or make headway in areas in northeastern Pennsylvania that went from supporting Obama to Trump. And he wants to tamp down Trump's margin of victory in western Pennsylvania. Trump, meanwhile, is hoping to find more voters in Trump strongholds in the state, in places such as western and northeastern Pennsylvania. I should also add: We almost certainly won't know who won Pennsylvania on election night because officials can't begin counting mail ballots until Tuesday by law. But in the days that follow, one bellwether to watch is Erie County. It was an Obama-Trump county, was decided by less than 2 percentage points in 2016, and swung back to Democrats in 2018. Do you trust these polls that say Biden is up, in some cases by double digits? I don't know anyone in Pennsylvania, Republican or Democrat, who thinks Biden is actually ahead here by double digits. Former Gov. Ed Rendell told me recently he thinks Biden is up by 5 or 6 percentage points. Some people think it's closer than that. Will this election tell us anything about which way Pennsylvania will tilt long term? Until Trump, no Republican presidential nominee had won here since 1988. But we go back and forth between Republican and Democratic governors regularly, and often have divided government. Right now Democrat Tom Wolf is the governor, and the state legislature is controlled by Republicans. Regardless of what happens next week, Pennsylvania's swinginess will not change. The election is a referendum on Trump, here and around the country. It will tell us what Pennsylvanians think of his job performance.
| | | SINCE YOU ALL TWEETED ABOUT IT — Miles Taylor has come forward and revealed himself to be Anonymous , the mysterious New York Times op-ed-writing Washington official who claimed to be working within the administration to restrain Trump's impulses for the good of the country.
| | | WESTERN EUROPE CLOSES UP SHOP — With all of Europe struggling to control a second wave of Covid-19, France and Germany announced a second round of shutdowns. In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a national lockdown starting Friday, with many businesses, including restaurants and bars, to be closed. Schools, public services and some factories will remain open. "The virus is circulating in France at a speed that even the most pessimistic predictions had not anticipated," Macron said in a televised address this evening. "We are all in Europe surprised by the speed of spread of the virus ... We are overwhelmed by a second wave that will be harder and more fatal than the first." German leaders agreed to mandate the closure of bars, restaurants and many non-essential businesses nationwide while limiting contact between households as part of efforts to halt a surge in coronavirus cases, Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "We have to act now to avoid an acute national emergency," said Merkel, pointing to increased admissions to intensive care units and 14,964 new infections recorded across Germany during the preceding 24 hours.
| | | SUBTWEET — CEO Jack Dorsey is synonymous with Twitter. But when it comes to the policies that could affect next week's election, Vijaya Gadde is the most important Silicon Valley executive you've never heard of. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, senior technology reporter Nancy Scola reports on the woman behind Twitter's biggest decisions — and more on today's hearing with big tech leaders.
| | | | | | HOW THE WORLD DRAWS 2020 — Matt Wuerker talks to three international cartoonists about the U.S. elections: Cathy Wilcox (Australia), Patrick Gathara (Kenya) and Sabir Nazar (Pakistan) in the latest Punchlines. They discuss issues ranging from media censorship, global populism and voter suppression. Gathara jokes with Matt that the 2020 election looks a lot like a Kenyan election: "That is not meant to be a compliment."
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| | | | | | 5.6 percent The decrease in the S&P 500 index this week. The benchmark slid 3.5 percent today, its third straight loss and its biggest drop since June. | | | | | HEALTHY HALLOWEEN — Executive health editor Joanne Kenen emails us: Health reporters' inboxes are being flooded with tips about how to safely celebrate Halloween, including whether or how to trick or treat. The CDC has Halloween advice, including safety warnings about multiple layers of masks and best practices for distributing candy. Here's another tip: Don't dress up as the coronavirus. There's nothing funny about it — although there's probably a psych grad student out there somewhere writing a dissertation on spiky virus costumes as an empowering anti-anxiety self-care tool. Instead, here are seven mask-focused suggestions culled from a brainstorming Slack session by POLITICO's health care team for your Covid-safe costume parade. 1) The White House coronavirus task force is the perfect group costume. "Deborah Birx" is simple, with color-coordinated scarves and statement earrings. "Anthony Fauci" can wear aviators and a Nats mask. On second thought, scratch that. It might be hard to find enough of those Harry Potter invisibility cloaks to do a good impersonation of the task force. 2) A vaccine vial. The cap can be a mask that says "NOT QUITE YET" or "TESTING ONE, TWO, THREE." 3) Bleach. 'Nuf said. The white mask will blend right in. 4) A package delivery person — FedEx, Amazon, UPS and of course, a U.S. mail carrier, reverently carrying our ballots. 5) A Zoom mute button — the true star of the pandemic. 6) It's a good year to be any masked superhero — except the Lone Ranger. His eyes-only mask doesn't cut it. 7) On second thought — If you really want to dress like a superhero, be a first responder. They've earned way more than our candy.
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