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She says it’s the profanity that really gets to her, like the truck emblazoned with the slogan “Trump 2020 — [expletive] Your Feelings” in the pickup line at school.

Since the beginning of the election, the campaigns have lavished close to $200 million on Pennsylvania — $121.5 million from Team Biden, $74.2 million from Team Trump.

If you’ve ever felt starved for attention, ignored by the good and the great, come sit by me in Pennsylvania.

“It’s like being the most popular kid in high school,” a political ad maker, J.J. Balaban, said in an interview. “Everyone wants to talk to you.”

When I stay happily in my bubble in Center City, where the Biden posters are rivaled only by the “Black Lives Matter” signs, it’s hard not to be lulled into a sense of security, to think that the polls are right and that the Democrats have it in the bag.

Then I drive my teenager to the D.M.V. in Dublin, an hour north, and find the roads lined with cheering, honking, whooping Trump supporters, and I remember that there is another Pennsylvania.

Not all hunters vote Republican. Not all city dwellers vote Democratic. There are Biden signs on the lawns of a few brave Democrats in red neighborhoods. There are, undoubtedly, some quiet Trump voters, even in bluer-than-blue Center City.

I’ve already sent in my ballot, and per the state’s website (not that I was obsessively checking or anything), it has been received.

Trump faced his own charges of racism in the 1970s when Richard Nixon's Justice Department sued the Trump family's real estate firm for discriminatory rental practices against black people. Instead of working to make things right, Trump employed what became his signature move: he went on the attack. He hired the notorious Roy Cohn -- a defense attorney who had been Sen. Joseph McCarthy's top aide during his red-baiting campaign -- to file a $100 million countersuit for making false statements (those allegations were dismissed by the court). The original lawsuit was eventually settled and the Trumps signed a consent decree.

From the White House, Trump has made his attitudes on race clear with his comments about "s**thole countries." He also targeted Democratic congresswomen of color and said that they should "go back and help fix the crime infested places from which they came" (three of the four women were born in the US).

Now, in 2020, Donald Trump is a President whose re-election prospects are burdened by the weight of his failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 100,000 Americans were killed by the virus while Trump denied the severity of the public health threat, boosted an unproven treatment that studies suggest could be dangerous, and mused about quack cures involving household cleaners and light. Though his rival Joe Biden has, for the most part, remained at home in Delaware, the former VP has managed to build a lead in many polls, causing Trump's advisers to warn he is in trouble with the voters.

Pence absolutely won the debate

Black women have elevated the “Mama don’t take no mess” expression to a form of high art — a narrowing of the eye, a lift of the eyebrow, a tilt of the head. Sometimes there is a sideways arch of the neck, a molasses-slow movement of the jaw that says, without speaking, “You’ve got exactly 10 seconds to pick up your feet and run for the hills.”

Some of this is the stuff of caricature. The kind of thing that leads Black women to be called sassy, volatile, aggressive or angry. All of that is an effort to dismiss or demean. But that attempted erasure is the very reason Black women — indeed, most women — have some version of The Look in their arsenal.

Women often can’t get a word in edgewise in the workplace — or, really, any place where they share a room with men. This phenomenon is universal and documented in a large body of research.

Women have long had to adorn their actual language with body language to be heard. Sometimes it is through protest, but often it is much more subtle than that. Lowering or adjusting the pitch of one’s voice. Fixing one’s gaze. A posture that says “I mean business” when the world isn’t interested in allowing you to run a business.

President Trump, who could have benefited from being on the receiving end of more Looks, on Thursday called Harris “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” It’s an ugly insult from a president who always manages to reveal himself, even or especially when trying to target others.

A smiling woman stands her ground and shoots a forceful look that requires a man to follow the rules. She only seems monstrous if progress is what you really find scary.

Biden announced Harris as his choice for vice president on August 11, and in interviews, some Democratic women donors described a concerted effort to flood the campaign with cash in support of Biden's choice

Harris' sorority sisters, who have made more than 22,000 donations in increments of $19.08 -- marking the year, 1908, that Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. was founded at Howard University.

Polls show Trump consistently lagging behind Biden in surveys of women voters.

The cash infusion in August helped Biden and his aligned party committees shatter the single-month fundraising record for a presidential contender and helped fuel an advertising blitz for the former vice president as the fall campaign swung into view.

The lopsided support for the Biden-Harris ticket among female donors who give in larger amounts comes as women have stepped up their political activity more broadly. This year, a record 298 women are running in the general election for US House seats, topping the previous record of 234, set during the 2018 midterms, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

And women have contributed $2 billion to federal candidates in this cycle, surpassing the $1.3 billion they donated in 2016 when Democrat Hillary Clinton sought the presidency, according to the Center for Responsive Politics

"They realized they need to have a role and a voice because this was a place affecting their lives and the lives of their families, and they couldn't sit on the sidelines," she said.

The gap has only grown wider as Biden has outpaced the President in overall fundraising.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money in politics, identifies donors' gender by applying an algorithm that compares the most popular US Census names to the names of donors reported to the Federal Election Commission

The growing influence of women donors is no accident. Donors and strategists have worked for years help direct political money to female candidates.

For instance, Electing Women Bay Area -- a "giving group" with 100 members in Northern California -- financially supports Democratic women in competitive races

"One of the things we have long stressed ... is this idea that men are used to writing the checks, and it's a muscle that has to be exercised," said Alexandra Acker-Lyons, who is Electing Women Bay Area's political director and runs her own philanthropic and political consulting firm. "Much like being a voter is a habit, being a donor is a habit."

Once it became clear that Biden intended to pick a female vice presidential nominee, some donors timed their contributions to make a big splash

"The fact that it was Kamala made it even made it even more intentional," she said, "because we were, and obviously still are, in a moment in our country where we particularly wanted to show up for a black woman nominee."

"Almost immediately, I started to see $19.08, $19.08, $19.08 on repeat," Clayton Cox, the Democratic National Committee's finance director, said of the stream of new donations that began popping up the day Harris joined the ticket.

More than 22,500 donations in increments of $19.08 have flowed into the Biden Victory Fund-- bringing in more than $430,000,

Michelle Arrington, an Atlanta attorney who pledged AKA at Howard a decade after Harris, has long supported Harris' political campaigns, dating back to her bid for California attorney general. Harris' push to promote research into uterine fibroids -- a condition Arrington has faced and that disproportionately afflicts Black women -- underscores the value of broad representation in government, she said.

But the informal movement to donate in amounts that reflects sorority's founding date was no surprise, she said. "It's indicative of the types of things we do: We'll start meetings at 12:08 or 7:08 p.m."

Harris came out on top -- 59% said that she won, while 38% thought that Pence triumphed.

Not since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 run had the state gone for the GOP nominee.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker, after all, had a lock on the state for years, and proved that the GOP could prevail there with the right mix of muscle, moxie and money.

His message to white, working-class voters plainly resonated. Clinton, notably, never visited the state as the nominee. Black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee sank through the basement.

“But Wisconsin!” was only second to “But her emails!” in the annoying outbursts political reporters have been using as shorthand for the last four years.

Heading into 2020, Democrats knew they needed to offset the Republican suburban counties northwest of Milwaukee, but not by much. Trump in 2016 underperformed Mitt Romney’s numbers in those suburbs by 7 percentage points.

Biden appears on better footing than Clinton — in no small part due to his running mate Kamala Harris whose historic run is expected to energize Black voters.

Clinton at this point four years ago was up 6.5 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages. Biden is up 6.4 percentage points in the same meta-analysis. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll released yesterday suggested Biden’s lead to be an actual 17 percentage points.

Very, very few political pros believe this to be the case, citing the fact no other polls show it to be that much of a runaway for the former VP. The most plausible reason Republicans aren’t despondent about Wisconsin comes down to who is expected to show up: While Democrats have almost doubled their early voting numbers from 2016, Republicans are up four-fold.

That year, they had a three-point increase in their support of Obama over 2008. But, according to one study, Black voter participation in Wisconsin fell 20 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In August, police responding to reports of a domestic incident shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back four times, leaving him paralyzed. Deep unrest followed in Kenosha, about 45 minutes south of Milwaukee. Protestors took to the streets, demanding justice for Blake.

Both Trump and Biden visited the state after the shooting, giving Black voters a clear view of what their choices were come November. Trump stood with the police, who say they were responding to a call about someone with an outstanding arrest warrant and, they say, had a knife. Biden called for compassion and police reform.

“Everybody says your vote is your voice, so I feel like if you don’t vote, you are comfortable being silenced.”

I confess that by the end of the week, the tiniest shadow of doubt had invaded my own mind. And no wonder: The usual inference that even young children are able to draw from experience — “This has never happened before so it’s very unlikely to be happening now” — has proved of dubious utility.

Dana Nessel,

The court, she said, delivered “an important reminder that we are a nation of laws, and though some may bend to the desire of a single individual, the courts may not.”

The Supreme Court was never going to hear, let alone grant, the request by red-state attorneys general and the White House to overturn the election results in four battleground states that went for Joe Biden.

And celebrating the court for its restraint in the election cases may be premature. The 2020-21 term, nearly three months in, is still unfolding.

The one or two such cases the court decides in a typical year have a certain charm despite their obscurity.

n June, the justices took the somewhat surprising step of asking the Trump administration for the federal government’s view on the dispute.

Early this month, the Office of the Solicitor General filed the government’s brief, urging the court to accept the case and noting that “resolving such conflicts among sovereigns falls within the core of this court’s original and exclusive jurisdiction.” The court will probably announce early in the new year whether it will assume jurisdiction.

In July, Federal District Judge Theodore Chuang, who sits in Greenbelt, Md., issued an injunction requiring the agency to permit doctors, for the duration of the pandemic, to mail or deliver the medication. In October, the Supreme Court responded to the Trump administration’s request for a stay of the injunction by sending the case back to Judge Chuang, telling him to permit the government to argue among other points, that improvements in the Covid-19 situation since the spring meant that visiting a doctor’s office was no longer a sufficient obstacle to merit relaxing the rule for mifepristone.