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The number who favor Trump’s re-election lags his 2016 vote share in each state. 

Biden’s leads are not insurmountable.

However, few voters are up for grabs.  In each of the four states, fewer than 10 percent are undecided or support a third-party candidate.  Plus, roughly equal majorities of Biden and Trump supporters, about 8 in 10, are extremely committed to their candidate. 

It’s tough to overstate how important women voters are to Biden.  They prefer him by 19 points in Michigan, 6 in Ohio, 12 in Pennsylvania, and 17 in Wisconsin. And he trounces Trump among suburban women:  Michigan +35 points, Ohio +18, Pennsylvania +29, and Wisconsin +21.

Trump is the choice among rural voters in each state -- by wide margins in Ohio (+27 points) and Pennsylvania (+21), and smaller spreads in Michigan (+11) and Wisconsin (+6).   In 2016, he won rural voters nationally by 25 points, according to Pew Research Center validated voter data.

White men without a college degree were an important constituency for Trump four years ago, and they are still big supporters.  He leads by double-digit margins among this group in all four states

“Trump is polling behind his 2016 support, but remains competitive across these crucial rust-belt states,” says Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducts the Fox News survey with Republican Daron Shaw.

In the Michigan Senate race, incumbent Democrat Gary Peters has a 49-41 percent edge over Republican John James.  Three percent back a third-party candidate and five percent are undecided.

Seniors in Ohio (+6 points) and Pennsylvania (+1) favor Trump, while they pick Biden in Michigan (+13 points) and Wisconsin (+14). 

Voters under age 35 back the Democrat:  Michigan (by 34 points), Ohio (+17), Pennsylvania (+33), and Wisconsin (+25).

In Michigan, by 8 points, more Democrats support Biden (94 percent) than Republicans back Trump (86 percent).  The loyalty gap is 9 points in Wisconsin, with 96 percent of Democrats for Biden compared to 87 percent of Republicans for Trump. 

On the economy, more trust Trump to do a better job than Biden in Ohio (by 11 points), Pennsylvania (+5), and Wisconsin (+7), while the two tie in Michigan. 

By larger spreads, voters prefer Biden to handle coronavirus in all four states:  Michigan (by 17 points), Ohio (+6), Pennsylvania (+11), and Wisconsin (+13).

“The economy is still the key to success for Trump,” says Shaw. “Voters don’t rate him very favorably on handling the pandemic and that’s a big drag on his re-election chances right now.”

Biden is more popular than Trump.  The former vice president gets net positive favorable ratings

Trump’s ratings are net negative

Trump’s 2016 victory in Ohio was by a wider 8-point margin, which is higher than his current 3-point edge in the Buckeye State (45 percent Biden to 48 percent Trump).  That’s a reversal since last month, when Biden was ahead by 5 points in Ohio (50-45 percent). 

More voters disapprove than approve of President Trump’s job performance in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  In Ohio, they split: 50 approve vs. 49 disapprove.

Voters in each state give their governor better ratings than the president. 

Across these rust-belt states, most voters casting their ballot by mail support Biden (between 61-73 percent), while over half of those voting in person go for Trump (between 55-59 percent).

Conducted October 17-20, 2020 under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R), these Fox News surveys include interviews with likely voters in Michigan (1,032), Ohio (1,018), Pennsylvania (1,045), and Wisconsin (1,037) randomly selected from statewide voter files, who spoke with live interviewers on landlines and cellphones.  In each state, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the total sample of likely voters. 

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.”

concluded that the candidates’ delay in a situation with “very short deadlines” made it impossible to grant the motion without causing “confusion and undue damage to both the Wisconsin electors who want to vote and the other candidates in all the various races on the general election ballot.”

More than a million Wisconsin voters have already requested absentee ballots,

Every voter in Wisconsin who was planning to vote by mail might be affected by a delay in the mailing of ballots,

Mr. Hawkins defended his decision to be represented by a conservative law firm. “Republicans have played these games before,” he said. “If we had the money and we could get a lawyer ourselves, we would do it that way.”

As of this week, 1,013,458 of the state’s 2.7 million active registered voters had requested absentee ballots in Wisconsin for the November election, according to data from the state Elections Commission.

roughly 73,000 ballots had already been sent to voters for November,

The Elections Commission ruled last month that neither Mr. Hawkins nor Mr. West had qualified for the ballot, citing deficiencies in their applications. Late on Friday, a Wisconsin Circuit Court upheld the commission’s decision to keep Mr. West off the ballot.

but those living overseas or serving in the military might face the most severe impact, because of longer delivery times. Under federal law, overseas ballots are supposed to be mailed to voters by Saturday.

While wildfires can occur at anytime of the year, the department said, the majority of fires happen between March and May, making spring the most critical fire season in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin has seen its share of destructive wildfires in the past 20 years. In 2013, a logging crew unintentionally started a fire that destroyed nearly 7,500 acres, including 23 residences, the department said. In 2005, a fire burned 3,410 acres and destroyed at least 30 residences.

But exhaustion is one of the few things that crosses those hardened party lines. Even people who voted for Trump four years ago and top Republican operatives in the area told CNN that the chaos surrounding the President has left voters beleaguered weeks out from the 2020 election.

The first presidential debate, which was dominated by Trump angrily yelling and interrupting and Democratic nominee Joe Biden firing back by calling Trump a "clown," did nothing but cement those feelings.

Lawler and the county party paid to have a large billboard put up between the towns of Viroqua and Westby that simply reads "Had Enough" in block letters before directing people to "Vote Blue" in November.

"It just makes you tired," Seeley said of Trump the day after the first debate. "He's like a kid in a candy store. If he can't have a piece, he breaks everything in the store."

"Richland Center is the dipstick of the country," Daniel Miller, the owner of Ocooch Books & Libations, said about the seat of Richland County. "Anything that is going on anywhere else is going on here in some ratio that is matching the country."

The area has long, according to local candidates, been home to high concentrations of ticket splitters, people who may vote for Democrats atop the ticket, but back Republicans in local races.

"Most people don't want the ugliness of the political world to be front and center in their news every day and in their conversations and in their drive to work," he said. "A lot of people are just fed up with the constant barrage of whatever the scandal of the day is."

"The key for Republicans is keeping the focus a lot more on kitchen table issues, focused on taxes and health care and education and what we think we can do differently," said Andrew Hitt, the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party, who grew up in Richland Center.

"If Southwest Wisconsin looks more like an Obama map, it's going to be hard for the President to win," said Hitt. "If it looks like a Trump 2016 map and everything else kind of stays about where it is, then that that means the President is probably going to win (the state) again."

"It is exhausting to put up with all the complete bickering that is going on for four years," said Biefer. "This constant getting nothing done. I don't think it is helping any party."

"It makes you feel like doomsday is coming," Murphy-Lopez said of the tenor Trump has struck in recent weeks. "And the top thing I hear from independents or people who are on the fence is they want politicians who are going to work for the people, not the party. They are tired of elected officials going after each other, they are tired of people making each other look bad."

"If we walked up and down this main street right now, there are multiple vacancies," he said, pointing down Wisconsin Avenue from the back porch of Timber Lane Coffee in Boscobel. "You go to some of the smaller villages and they're almost dead. Their business districts are gone."

"I really don't like the two of them," Adams said of Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris. But Trump, Adams said, "is a liar. He has no care outside of his own image. He doesn't care about any of the people. His rhetoric is reprehensible. He is an embarrassment."

"There is a logjam in Washington, there is a logjam in Wisconsin and people feel quite hopeless," said the Democrat running to represent parts of Richland and Sauk counties in the state assembly. "And you layer that on top of the hopelessness that people have about the farm economy and the hollowness that people feel about small towns, that is a lot of exhaustion."

"I am tired of it and I am not going to sit back and let it happen anymore," Volenec said of the downturn in rural America and the farming that is shifting to larger and larger corporate farms. "A lot of these things, were set into motion prior to Trump, but he has had a steroid effect on things."

Mr. Bangstad has made little effort to win over voters who aren’t already appalled by Republicans’ handling of the coronavirus.

“A lot of them, I feel, haven’t been equipped with the tools of media literacy or critical thinking skills to be able to discern if they’re being told something that doesn’t quite jell or is not true,”

On Tuesday, as the state set records for the most new cases and deaths, Gov. Tony Evers said Wisconsin faces an “urgent crisis” and urged citizens to stay home.

“The day after my dad passed, Governor Evers put in the 25 percent capacity limit, and they weren’t abiding by it,” Ms. Schulz said of the Al-Gen. “People were posting pictures of themselves there on Facebook and it was pretty busy for a Friday night.”

He said his restaurant is not responsible for employees who caught the coronavirus.

Of all the places where Democrats barely bothered to compete in 2016, Wisconsin’s Northwoods may have been the most neglected.

Four years later, Mr. Bangstad has few expectations that he will win. He sees his campaign largely as an effort to increase Democratic turnout for Mr. Biden and cut into Mr. Trump’s margins

At the same time, the Biden campaign and local Democrats have put far more resources into northern Wisconsin than they did four years ago.

“We distributed approximately 50 Hillary yard signs four years ago, and we’re at more than 1,200 so far for Joe,”

The Assembly race has engendered hurt feelings and worsened political divisions in Minocqua, a town of about 4,000 full-time residents.

“On his Facebook, he’s calling all of us up here idiots, like a mini Joe Biden,’’ said Ms. Grigus, who doesn’t wear a mask in her store and doesn’t ask her customers to do so.

Mr. Swearingen said he had little doubt that Mr. Trump would do just as well in the Northwoods on Tuesday as he did in 2016.

For Mr. Bangstad, shaming Mr. Swearingen and other Republicans who have fought against public health guidelines is exactly the point.

Mr. Biden is also poised to become the first Democrat in 20 years to carry older adults, the voters who are most at risk with the coronavirus.

But the president is facing an even larger gender gap in the Hispanic community than he is over all: Latinas favor Mr. Biden by 39 points.

Mr. Biden’s performance across the electoral map appears to put him in a stronger position heading into Election Day than any presidential candidate since at least 2008

His strength is most pronounced in Wisconsin, where he has an outright majority of the vote and leads Mr. Trump by 11 points, 52 percent to 41 percent.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a clear advantage over President Trump across four of the most important presidential swing states, a new poll shows, bolstered by the support of voters who did not participate in the 2016 election and who now appear to be turning out in large numbers to cast their ballots, mainly for the Democrat.

Should Mr. Biden’s lead hold in three of the four states tested in the survey, it would almost certainly be enough to win, and if he were to carry Florida, he would most likely need to flip just one more large state that Mr. Trump won in 2016 to clinch the presidency.

In the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Biden has a modest advantage in Florida, where he is ahead of Mr. Trump by three points, 47 percent to 44 percent, a lead that is within the margin of error.

The numbers on new voters represent a setback for the president, whose advisers have long contended he would outperform his polling numbers because of the support he would receive from infrequent or inconsistent voters

Mr. Trump has continued to hold onto most of the coalition that elected him in the first place, made up chiefly of rural conservatives and white voters who did not attend college.

More broadly, Mr. Trump is facing an avalanche of opposition nationally from women, people of color, voters in the cities and the suburbs, young people, seniors and, notably, new voters. In all four states, voters who did not participate in 2016, but who have already voted this time or plan to do so, said they support Mr. Biden by wide margins.

In Wisconsin, voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016 favor Mr. Biden by 19 points. They have a similarly lopsided preference in Florida, where Mr. Biden leads by 17 points. His advantage with people who did not vote in 2016 is 12 points in Pennsylvania and 7 points in Arizona.

While that advantage has varied over time, and has differed from state to state, he has at no point slipped behind Mr. Trump in any of the swing states that are likeliest to decide the election.

Mr. Trump’s apparent weakness in many of the country’s largest electoral prizes leaves him with a narrow path to the 270 Electoral College votes required to claim victory, short of a major upset or a systemic error in opinion polling surpassing even the missteps preceding the 2016 election.

The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.Mr. Biden has consistently held the upper hand over Mr. Trump across the electoral map in polling conducted by The Times since late last spring.

Amid that bleak outlook, the president has continued to baselessly cast doubt on the integrity of the election. On Saturday in Pennsylvania, he told supporters that the nation could be waiting for weeks to learn of a winner and that “very bad things” could happen as ballots are counted in the days after the election.

Many of the those who said they did not vote in 2016 said they had already voted this year. In Florida and Arizona, more than two thirds of nonvoters in 2016 who were identified as likely voters this year said that they had already cast a ballot. That figure was 56 percent in Wisconsin and 36 percent in Pennsylvania.

Based on the poll, however, it seems that Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Trump could be the beneficiary of record-busting turnout.

If the president is defeated, the most obvious explanation may be his weakness with women. Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by double digits among female voters in each of the four states, and in some states the advantage was so significant that it offset Mr. Trump’s strength among men.

Top Republicans in Wisconsin aren’t disguising the partisan aims of their legislation, which drew protesters to the state’s capitol building on Monday. “Most of these items are things that either we never really had to kind of address because, guess what? We trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back-and-forth with the legislature,” Scott Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Senate’s majority leader, said in an interview with a conservative talk-radio host. “We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas.”

This approach to governance was devastating enough in North Carolina. Its spread to other states is a grim sign for purple and red states. If Republicans are unwilling to be governed by another political party, one need not be a political scientist to understand how harmful that will be to democracy itself.

Gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself, and neither party’s hands are clean when it comes to drawing legislative districts for partisan advantage. What distinguished the post-2010 wave of Republican gerrymandering was its sheer aggressiveness. In Wisconsin, the GOP commands near-supermajorities in the state assembly and state senate despite drawing roughly even with Democrats in the statewide popular vote. North Carolina Democrats won nearly half of the statewide popular vote in congressional races but captured only three of the state’s House seats.

Democracy, both as a system of government and as a way of life, needs more than just legislation and constitutions to function. It also requires a shared understanding of the bounds of acceptable political action. Without that shared understanding, the laboratories of democracy, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, become breeding grounds for oligarchical rule

“The only permanent rule in Calvinball,” Calvin exclaims in one strip, “is that you can’t play it the same way twice!” That may work with an imaginary friend, but it’s a dangerous way to run a country

In February, Schroeder refused to issue a new arrest warrant or increase Rittenhouse's bail, after he failed to update his current address with the court. But he did prohibit the shooter from associating with white supremacists.

On Wednesday, Rittenhouse's lawyers said they needed extra time to finish up a public opinion poll "to get a feel for whether Rittenhouse can expect to get a fair trial in the county, or if there might be reason to seek a change of venue or a jury pool from another county," the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.

The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.

More broadly, Mr. Trump is facing an avalanche of opposition nationally from women, people of color, voters in the cities and the suburbs, young people, seniors and, notably, new voters. In all four states, voters who did not participate in 2016, but who have already voted this time or plan to do so, said they support Mr. Biden by wide margins. That group includes both infrequent voters and young people who were not yet eligible to vote four years ago.

Vince Kowalewski, 73, of Muhlenberg Township, Pa., said he had never voted in his life but was intent on voting against Mr. Trump, whom he called “the worst president we’ve ever had.”“I have to go in there and vote against him,” Mr. Kowalewski said.But Mr. Kowalewski said he also appreciated Mr. Biden’s health care policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which he credited with helping his daughter receive lifesaving cancer treatment.

Melissa Dibble, 47, of Boynton Beach, Fla., is one of those newly active voters. A registered independent, Ms. Dibble said she did not vote in 2016 because she did not believe Mrs. Clinton was “the right president for our country” and found Mr. Trump “laughable.” She said on Friday that she planned to vote for Mr. Biden that afternoon.

Based on the poll, however, it seems that Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Trump could be the beneficiary of record-busting turnout.

In Arizona, for example, the president had an eight-point advantage with men but Mr. Biden was the overwhelming favorite of women, winning 56 percent of them compared with Mr. Trump’s 38 percent.

The other group that is propelling Mr. Biden is college-educated white voters, a traditionally Republican bloc that has fled the Trump-era party. The former vice president is leading by double digits among white voters with college degrees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona and beating him, 48 percent to 45 percent, with that constituency in Florida.

But Ms. Robles also said she believed there was a larger issue at stake in the vote.“I don’t want to be dramatic,” she said, “but I’m voting this year because it feels like democracy is at stake.”

Signs of a Biden win: If the polls are right and the count is on track, Mr. Biden is probably getting a Wisconsin and Nevada call on election night. Georgia’s another possibility — if Mr. Biden is going to win the state, he has probably caught up to Mr. Trump by now. If the night’s going really well for Mr. Biden, maybe he’s still competitive or even leading in Iowa, Ohio or Texas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMichigan and Pennsylvania? Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see. Of the two, Michigan seems more plausible.Exactly where will the count stand in Michigan and Pennsylvania if Mr. Biden’s on track for victory? It depends on how many absentee ballots they get through, of course. If they haven’t counted many mail ballots, Mr. Trump could even lead by double digits.The better measure: Focus on any counties that manage to wrap up their count. I’d guess some will get pretty close. If Mr. Biden’s winning, he will start to outrun Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 showing in the counties that get through their mail votes. That could be the tell.Signs of a Trump win: If the president’s on track, the race in Nevada and Wisconsin might be too close to call. Even if he eventually loses Wisconsin, he might hold on to the lead all the way until we get the absentees from Milwaukee. He probably already got the call in that long list of states where Mr. Biden’s hoping to squeak out a win, like Ohio and so on.The most important sign would be a lead in Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Pennsylvania, it could easily be a double-digit lead, depending on just how many absentee ballots have been counted. With Mr. Biden holding such a commanding lead among the third of the electorate that voted early, a Trump win most likely involves a double-digit victory on Election Day — and a double-digit lead in the count, late into the night.

he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i

was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.

he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,

Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.

appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.

Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”

“The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’

Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.

that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots

Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.

Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”

“in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”

the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.

It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).

Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.

On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.

but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.

Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.

Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.

But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.

It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.

A recount would have to reverse the results in all three states to get Clinton to two hundred and seventy. And, as fivethirtyeight.com noted, this has never happened in cases where the margins are as large as those in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania; even Michigan would be at the edge of past experience.

Stein’s Wisconsin application lists a number of reasons for a recount, most of which are paraphrases of a single thought: the Russians might, just might, have fixed the election

The only example of observable irregularities that Stein cites is an uptick in absentee voting, something that may have many causes.

There have also been reports pointing to a weaker performance for Clinton in counties with paperless balloting; however, as both fivethirtyeight.com and the Upshot have pointed out, any difference disappears when one controls for demographics.

It has been widely noted that Clinton did not visit Wisconsin in the general election. The results may have been “surprising,” but they are not mysterious.

Nate Silver gave Trump close to a one-in-three chance of winning. And, as the Obama Administration confirmed this weekend, there is no sign of interference in the balloting.

written by its attorney Marc Elias, which said that the campaign took concerns about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “very seriously,” especially given that “this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign.”

“lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result”; of meetings with data scientists; of researching recount and audit rules; of an attempt “to systematically catalogue and investigate every theory that has been presented to us.”

On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, responded to the recount calls by pointing to how outraged the Clinton campaign was when Trump said, during the debates, that he couldn’t say whether he’d accept the results.

When it comes to combating Trump, one must take particular care not to join him in the land of conspiracies, however intellectually engaging or emotionally satisfying that may be. One has to start, instead, by holding fast to the truth.

Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results.

Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing

During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape.

The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.

The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological.

conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas.

The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.

modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them.

The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich

Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?

Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative

Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party.

In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence.

Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights.

In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.

Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

"All of a sudden we hear a massive flurry of gunshots — 20 to 30 gunshots for sure," Westphal told WBAY-TV. "We took off running towards the highway ... There had to have been 50 cop cars that came by on the highway. It was honestly insane."

The Oneida tribe's reservation lies on the west side of the Green Bay area.

Police later explained that they didn't arrest him at the scene because it was chaotic.

“The defendant doesn't want to be here and if released won't come back,” Binger said.

A legal defense fund for Rittenhouse has attracted millions of dollars in donations.

“Kyle Rittenhouse thinks he's above the law,” Huber said. “He's been treated as much by law enforcement. For him to run wouldn't surprise me.”

President Donald Trump has said Rittenhouse's actions might have been warranted, suggesting that the protesters might have killed him.

Grosskreutz's attorney, Kimberley Motley, asked for $4 million bail, calling Rittenhouse's behavior “inexcusable.”

Keating set bail at $2 million, saying Rittenhouse has no ties to Kenosha, he fled the state after the shootings and he faces life in prison if convicted.

The shootings happened two days after a white police officer trying to arrest Jacob Blake shot the 29-year-old Black man seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. Video of the shooting sparked several nights of protests in Kenosha, a city of about 100,000 on the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

Biden is also in better position than Clinton was in swing states – and could even win the race on or shortly after election night if his large leads hold – but pathways to a Trump victory remain. 

The simplest pathway for Biden to win the election is through Big Ten country, by winning three states that Trump won in 2016 by razor-thin margins: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

If Biden wins all three and carries each of the states that Clinton won, he's the next president.

"You've got almost a counter-trend going in those battlegrounds states where the average is going up for Biden. Trump has to break into one of those three states unless he can pick up a Clinton state from 2016,

"The blue wall has to be reestablished,” he said.

"That (Rust Belt) wall is really the first line of defense for Biden, and right now that looks pretty solid, but anything could change," Paleologos said.

The reason: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don't allow the processing of mail-in ballots to begin until Election Day and Michigan only has a 10-hour start, compared to other states that start that can start the process days or weeks in advance

Trump won each of these states in 2016 by less than 4 percentage points. But Biden has polling leads, albeit small, in all three.

Conversely, Biden would still have life if Trump were to carry Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. The former vice president would need to carry every state that Clinton won in 2016 and flip Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Texas and Georgia have long been targets of Democrats because of diverse demographics and growing populations in suburbs.

Minnesota, with 10 delegates just like neighboring Wisconsin, last voted for a Republican president in 1972, but the Trump campaign continues to tout its chances there.