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We go on endlessly about how “untrustworthy” she is, while fact checkers rank her as the second-most honest prominent politician in the country. (And her opponent as by far the least.)

History is decidedly unafraid of “the woman card.” It doesn’t care how many people will stand on tables today and swear they’d feel the same if she were a man. It will see us for what we are—a sick society, driven by misogyny and pathetically struggling to come to terms with the fact that women do not exist solely to nurture.

When Mitt Romney wiped servers, sold government hard drives to his closest aides and spent $100,000 in taxpayer money to destroy his administration’s emails, it was barely an issue.

Harris: Even with Mitt Romney’s support, do you think it is something that Congress will do? Where do you place the likelihood of this happening?

Yang: I’m getting more and more encouraged. Because if you look, you see a range of economists from Jason Furman to Nouriel Roubini coming out for it. Commentators from Anand Giridharadas to Geraldo Rivera. And now with Mitt Romney coming out, you have Republicans as well as folks like AOC and Ro Khanna

people are waking up to the common sense that the only way we’re going to help our people manage this crisis is by putting cold, hard cash into our hands as quickly as possible. I’m increasingly optimistic that common sense will prevail and Congress will pass this before too many lives fall apart.

if any group remains singularly loyal to Mr. Trump, it is the small but impassioned number of white voters on the far right, often in rural communities like Golden Valley, who extol him as a cultural champion reclaiming the country from undeserving outsiders.

These voters don’t passively tolerate Mr. Trump’s “build a wall” message or his ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries — they’re what motivates them. They see themselves in his fear-based identity politics, bolstered by conspiratorial rhetoric about caravans of immigrants and Democratic “coups.”

The festival itself was relatively small, drawing about 100 people, though significant enough to attract the likes of Mr. Gosar.

A group of Republicans has announced plans to reject presidential electors from states they consider disputed if Congress doesn't create a commission to investigate their claims of fraud.

The move will not alter Biden's path to assuming the presidency but will draw out a normally routine process.

Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana issued a joint statement Saturday claiming "unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities."

Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate, meaning they can only afford to lose a few votes in their push to confirm a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has touched off a partisan brawl in the Senate to confirm President Trump’s nominee to replace her, a vote that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has vowed to hold.

With Democrats all but certain to unite in opposition to Mr. Trump’s nominee

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said Tuesday he supports voting to fill the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, all but ensuring President Donald Trump has the backing to push his choice to confirmation over Democratic objections that it’s too close to the November election

the Democrats would need four GOP defections to block consideration. Two Republicans have said they oppose taking up a nomination at this time, but no others are in sight

one of the quickest confirmation processes in modern times

statements

For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.

“This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

It’s also the way that many Republican senators hope to deal with the memory of the Trump era

It means that many of them believe that Trump’s election was essentially an accident, a fluke, a temporary hiatus from the kind of conservative politics they’re comfortable practicing,

America is a country where everybody likes to think of himself as middle class. Let’s follow Feldstein’s lead and say that anyone who doesn’t occupy either the bottom or top quintile of the income distribution  (i.e., the bottom or top 20 percent) can plausibly claim membership in the middle class. That means you live in a household whose income lies somewhere between $20,262 and $101,583.

In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012, only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a majority of the white vote

Obama’s track record with white voters is not very different from that of other Democratic candidates.

In the aftermath of Obama’s election, white support for Congressional Democrats collapsed to its lowest level in the history of House exit polling, 38 percent in 2010 —  at once driving and driven by the emerging Tea Party.

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

In most areas of the economy, free-market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals. But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.

the truth is that, despite the rhetoric, Romney’s main concern isn’t to bring down over-all health-care costs. In fact, he has regularly attacked one of the Affordable Care Act’s most aggressive cost-cutting measures—the independent board that can make binding recommendations on how to cut Medicare spending. What he wants is just to have the government less involved in health care. Insofar as his plans would lower federal health-care spending, it’s not because of the power of the free market; it’s because a Romney Administration would simply have the government do less. Romney would eliminate the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance. He would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and trim its annual budget, with the result that its funding would lag behind the rise in health-care costs. And, if he adopts his running mate Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan for Medicare, he would make Medicare recipients pay higher premiums. With these changes, the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.

The real issue, come November 6th, isn’t about who has the best ideas for controlling health-care costs. It’s about who has the right idea of what government should do. ♦

He largely avoided incessant talk about allegations of sexual assault by multiple women and claims that the election is rigged -- both of which made wavering Republicans nervous.

"Just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump," he quipped during a rally in Toledo, Ohio.

But the Fox News poll, like some other recent surveys, suggested Trump is underperforming 2012 nominee Mitt Romney among this core constituency. Romney won white voters by 20 points over Obama according to exit polls, but Trump is only 14 points ahead of Clinton in the poll with the same voting group.

The larger number of white working-class voters implies that Democrats are far more dependent on winning white working-class voters, and therefore more vulnerable to a populist candidate like Mr. Trump.

Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters were white voters without a college degree, compared with 25 percent in the exit polls, according to an Upshot statistical model that integrated census data

the Upshot analysis shows that all of Mr. Obama’s weaknesses were in the South — defined as the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia — where he won just 26 percent.

an examination of what happened when companies Bain controlled wound up in bankruptcy highlights just how different Bain and other private equity firms are from typical denizens of the real economy, from mom-and-pop stores to bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures.

Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds.

this is simply the way private equity works, offering its practitioners myriad ways to extract income and limit their risk. Mr. Romney’s candidacy has helped cast a spotlight on an often-opaque industry.

Romney talked about amending the Constitution to require the president to have business experience. He spoke approvingly of a notion from a store owner who wanted to make anyone who does not have at least three years of business background ineligible to lead the country.“He said, ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States,’” said Romney, cheerfully summarizing this rewrite of the founders’ governing blueprint.

In a scholarly ranking of great presidents, a 2009 survey conducted by C-Span,6 of the 10 best leaders lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s rumination. This list includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, union activist and corporate spokesman, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.

By contrast, two 20th century businessmen — George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover.

Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.

Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power.

Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.

A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude

from 2000 to 2012 the percentage of Republicans who are white has remained relatively steady, about 87 percent. On the other hand, the percentage of Democrats who are white has dropped nine percentage points, from 64 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2012. If current trends persist, in a few years the Democratic Party will be a majority minority party. But the largest drop in the white percentage has been among Independents: they were 79 percent white in 2000, but they are only 67 percent white now.

two bases bring differing sets of concerns to the national debate.

This is not to say that minorities who favor a stronger government want more government handouts. There was very little difference in the percentage of blacks, Hispanics and whites who believed that poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs (it’s pretty high for all three groups, at 70, 69 and 72 percent, respectively).