Wasserman’s data:Florida, since the state’s March primary, added 195,652 Republicans and 98,362 Democrats.Pennsylvania, since June, Republicans plus 135,619, Democrats up 57,985.North Carolina, since March, Republicans up 83,785 to Democrats 38,137.In Arizona, the exception, “Democrats out-registered Republicans 31,139 to 29,667” in recent months.

More worrisome for Biden, the Pew survey shows modestly weakened support among Black women, a key Democratic constituency. Black women supported Clinton over Trump 98 to 1; this year they support Biden over Trump 91-6.

More than twice as many Biden voters as Trump voters — the actual ratio is 2.4 to 1 — plan to cast ballots by mail, according to polling by Pew. So far, however, Democratic requests for absentee ballots have not reached the levels that surveys suggest will be needed for the party to cast votes at full strength on Election Day.

The relatively minor decline in Democratic support among Hispanic Catholics, for example, is more than made up for by Democratic improvement among non-Hispanic white Catholics. In 2016, Trump crushed Clinton among this group, 64-31, or 33 points; now Trump leads Biden by 52-44, or by 8 points.

The fastest growing religious category — atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” — has become an even more rock-solid Democratic constituency. In 2016, the nonreligious voted 65-24 for Clinton; according to the most recent Pew data, Biden leads Trump among these voters 71-22.

“The decline in white identity was driven mostly by whites expressing disgust toward Trump,” they write.

From 2000 to 2016, white Republicans maintained consistently high levels of moral traditionalism, according to Webster’s research, dropping less than a point, from 10.9 to 10.1, over the 16-year period. White Democrats, in contrast, dropped by 3.2 points, from 8.8 to 5.6.

Over time, the two parties have staked out consistently opposing views on these questions, many of which are driven by the views of voters toward immigration and the prospect that whites are projected to become a minority in roughly 25 years.

West Wing aides, shaken by polls showing the president badly trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., worried that they were living through the final days of the Trump administration

Late in the day, the stock market collapsed when Mr. Trump abruptly called off talks for a congressional coronavirus relief bill after the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said such a stimulus was badly needed.

Some White House staff members wondered whether Mr. Trump’s behavior was spurred by a cocktail of drugs he has been taking to treat the coronavirus, including dexamethasone, a steroid that can cause mood swings and can give a false level of energy and a sense of euphoria.

Prominent supporters of the administration said Mr. Trump should have stayed at the hospital until he was no longer infectious or should remain confined to his residence.

There were no answers, either, on when Mr. Trump last tested negative for the virus — a crucial piece of information that the White House and Dr. Conley have refused to answer and would establish the known state of Mr. Trump’s health before the presidential debate last Tuesday or before he attended a fund-raiser in New Jersey on Thursday. The White House first made public that Mr. Trump had tested positive early last Friday.

On the return trip, Mr. Trump slept as some of his advisers spoke about the condition of Ms. Hicks, who was isolated in the back of the plane.

News that Ms. Hicks tested positive for the virus came as Mr. Trump left the White House by helicopter around 1 p.m. for a fund-raiser at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

On a call with Iowa voters and in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Mr. Trump sounded raspy.Later that night, Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said.The president had a mild cough, nasal congestion and fatigue.

Close to 1 a.m., Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Later in the morning, Mr. Trump had a high fever and his oxygen saturation levels dipped below 94 percent, Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, said.

After about a minute on two liters of supplemental oxygen, Mr. Trump’s saturation levels were back over 95 percent, Dr. Conley said. The president stayed on the supplemental oxygen for about an hour at the White House.

Mr. Trump received an 8-gram dose of an experimental polyclonal antibody cocktail. He also took zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and aspirin.

The president also was given his first dose of remdesivir, an antiviral drug that has an emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration as a Covid-19 therapy.

Mr. Trump has mild heart disease, similar to many men in their 70s. He also takes a statin drug to treat high cholesterol and aspirin to prevent heart attacks. His health summary, released in June, showed that he crossed the line into obesity at 244 pounds.

Mr. Trump was given a second dose of remdesivir and did not exhibit any known side effects, doctors said.

Doctors wanted him to eat, drink and be out of bed as much as possible.

Doctors were tracking any damage to his lungs for signs of pneumonia.“There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern,” Dr. Conley said.

Mr. Trump waved to members of the news media beside Mrs. Trump at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, after landing there before the first presidential debate.

Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the debate in Cleveland. Onstage, Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Biden for his habit of wearing a mask in public.

Mr. Trump at a rally in Duluth, Minn.

The president’s physician said Mr. Trump was “well” without saying whether he was experiencing symptoms and added that the president would stay isolated in the White House for now.

During a recent appearance on “The Alex Jones Show,” a far-right radio program that peddles conspiracy theories, Mr. Stone said that ballots in Nevada should be seized by federal marshals, claiming that “they are already corrupted” and that Mr. Trump should consider nationalizing the state police. Mr. Stone, a felon whose sentence was commuted this year by the president, has ties to the Proud Boys.

The Republican National Committee has been allowed to participate in poll watching only because the courts in 2018 lifted a consent decree that had barred them from doing so for three and a half decades, after the party undertook an operation to intimidate New Jersey voters in 1981.

But while the official poll watchers are being schooled in legal procedures, Mr. Trump and some of his closest surrogates, including his longtime confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. and his son Donald Trump Jr., have recently floated conspiracy theories that also sound like calls to arms.

The poll watchers will challenge ballots and the eligibility of voters, but they are not supposed to interact with voters themselves.

“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father, President Donald Trump,” the younger Mr. Trump says on the video, posted on Twitter.

The assessment said that “open-air, publicly accessible parts of physical election infrastructure,” including polling places and voter registration events, could be “flash points for potential violence.”

Both parties recruit volunteer poll watchers, a process Republicans previously led at the state level amid the consent decree. In a new video tailored for Pennsylvania, prospective poll watchers are told they must wear identification and remain outside an enclosed space designated for voting.

he seven locations in Philadelphia were satellite election offices where voters could request, fill out and submit absentee ballots; they were not official polling locations and therefore not open to poll watchers.

Now, however, he effectively controls the party.

Whether Trump means the things he says or not, he’s convincing his most ardent supporters that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”He added, “That’s profoundly destabilizing and scary.”

The results are kind of useful. Historically, the winner of these polls tends to gain in the real polls over the next week. John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton all picked up a couple of points after debate performances that instant polls suggested they won.

The big picture: It’s hard to say anyone clearly won the debate last night, and that’s a win for Mr. Biden. He was the front-runner heading into the debate, and it was the president who needed a win to try to narrow the race. None of the instant poll results, whatever their merit, do much to dispel that view.

“You can prove the story wrong right now by releasing your tax returns. There is nothing preventing you from doing so, including your false assertion that the audit needs to be completed. But you won’t release the returns, and now we all know why.

Mr. Trump’s taxes will further expose what the superrich have been getting away with for years. Perhaps this is one reason he continues to get so much support from them even as he proves just how incompetent and dishonest he is.

Thursday’s announcement was billed as “President Trump’s Healthcare Vision for America” but contained no tangible action. Trump has long promised a “beautiful” and “phenomenal” healthcare plan that provides everyone with better coverage for a lower cost, but his administration never unveiled any comprehensive reform plan, even as it was trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

The plan also promises to ban surprise medical billing, but only after the election.

While widely derided as unethical exploitation of vulnerable patients, surprise billing is nonetheless lucrative business for those doing the billing. Doctors and insurance companies have been in a lobbying war over how to fix the problem, and Congress has done nothing to stop it.

If Congress fails to meet the deadline, Azar will be tasked with exploring other options. Azar did not say what those might be. When asked why they are not taking action now, Azar said the plan "is what it is." Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Copy Copy

For 80 years it has been the practice that the Senate has not confirmed any nomination made during an election year, and we shouldn’t make an exception now.8

Biden — and this is not something we’ve said very often — was absolutely correct.10 It’s a political cauldron to avoid.11 There should be no hearings. There should be no confirmation.12 Not during a presidential election year, with millions of votes having been cast in highly charged contests.13

This year is a tremendous opportunity for our country to have a sincere and honest debate about the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system of government.19

The Supreme Court seat doesn’t belong to any president or any political party.24

Our view is this: Give the people a voice.30

78 percent of white evangelical voters are Republicans or lean Republican. So are 62 percent of white men without a college degree, 60 percent of rural southerners and 57 percent of people who attend religious services weekly.

the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with a religion keeps rising — up 9 percentage points since 2009, to 26 percent in 2019 — and the percentage of people identifying as Christians keeps falling — down 12 percentage points, to 65 percent over the same decade

Lastly, the percentage of Americans with college degrees keeps rising, moving from 4.6 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 2019.

Conservatives see all of these trends, and they are alarmed. So, they want to freeze time, or even turn it back. Their reading of the Constitution is stuck in the understanding of it when it was written. It is the same for religious texts. They want to return to a pre-1960s era, before the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement and the gay rights movement, before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and Roe v. Wade, before the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, before there was a Black president and a browning country.

This is why they happily cheer Trump’s attack on immigrants — both legal and undocumented. It is why they encourage efforts to disenfranchise voters. It is why Trump’s attacks on cities resonate, as does his MAGA mantra.

Social progress is now on the chopping block. In this way, for many of us, Donald Trump’s legacy will likely be with us for the rest of our lives.

The most important part of an effective response is to finally, at long last, forge a genuinely bipartisan effort to save our democracy, rejecting the vicious partisanship that has disabled and destabilized government for too long. If we cannot find common ground now, on this core issue at the very heart of our endangered system, we never will.

I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election. This commission would not circumvent existing electoral reporting systems or those that tabulate, evaluate or certify the results. But it would monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party.

If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that.

Battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina are no-excuse absentee states.

“We certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,”

Amy Dorris, a former model, alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her at the U.S. Open.

Arizona, the poll found, is one of the few battlegrounds in which a third-party candidate is likely to play a significant role on the presidential level. The Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen gets between 3 and 4 percent of the presidential vote, depending on the turnout model used.

“Look at her. … I don’t think so,” he said.

All of this rancor comes as absentee voting is already underway in multiple states. By the end of this week, voters will be able to cast in-person ballots in eight states.

Mr. Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who fiercely defended the president during the Russia investigation, has downplayed such threats, an approach the president prefers.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a four-point edge over President Trump among registered voters in Arizona, though that advantage fades when the sample focuses only on likely voters, according to a Monmouth University poll released Thursday.

The woman, Amy Dorris, a former model, said she was invited, along with her boyfriend at the time, to Mr. Trump’s private box to watch the tennis match. Ms. Dorris was 24.

In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Mr. Biden held a 6-point lead among likely voters — a nine-point swing from 2016, when Mr. Trump won the county by 3 percentage points.

The news for Mr. Biden was a little rosier when the poll examined critical regions in the state.

Only one Democratic presidential candidate has prevailed in Arizona in the past 70 years: Bill Clinton in 1996.

“Joe Biden just has a fundamentally different view of what it means for the economy to be doing well than Donald Trump does,” she continued. “Joe Biden believes the economy is not doing well unless middle-class families and working people are doing well.”

“If Joe Biden gets elected, we can kiss goodbye to the economy that we’ve been enjoying,” a woman who describes herself as a small-business owner says in one ad. “He’s going to raise taxes, he’s already said that.”

On Tuesday night, President Trump returned to the theme during a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on ABC, where he was taken to task by Ellesia Blaque, an assistant professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She told him she had a congenital illness, demanded to know what he would do to keep “people like me who work hard” insured.

“We’re going to be doing a health care plan very strongly, and protect people with pre-existing conditions,” Mr. Trump told her, adding, “I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you, and it’s a much better plan.”

And with tens of thousands of Americans losing their coverage to a coronavirus-induced economic turndown, fears of inadequate or nonexistent health insurance have never been greater.

MIAMI — Jeff Gruver voted for the first time ever in March, casting an enthusiastic ballot for Bernie Sanders in Florida’s presidential primary.

Mr. Gruver does not have the money. And he does not want to take any risk that his vote could be deemed illegal. Like more than a million other ex-felons, he has learned that even an overwhelming 2018 vote approving a state referendum to restore voting rights to most people who had served their sentences does not necessarily mean that they will ever get to vote.

Mike PenceTo be determined.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.” A vaccine would go “to the general public immediately,” the president insisted, and “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.” As for Dr. Redfield’s conclusion that masks may be more useful than a vaccine, Mr. Trump said that “he made a mistake,” maintaining that a “vaccine is much more effective than the masks.”

“So let me be clear. I trust vaccines. I trust the scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Mr. Biden said. “And at this moment, the American people can’t either.”

Attorney General William P. Barr has ratcheted up his involvement in partisan politics in recent days, floating federal sedition charges against violent protesters and the prosecution of a Democratic mayor; asserting his right to intervene in Justice Department investigations; warning of dire consequences for the nation if President Trump is not re-elected; and comparing coronavirus restrictions to slavery.

“Because I am ultimately accountable for every decision the department makes, I have an obligation to ensure we make the correct ones,” he said.

But the thin agenda also underscored how thoroughly congressional Republicans have transformed themselves in the age of Mr. Trump even from the recent days when, under Speaker Paul D. Ryan, they prided themselves on being the intellectual engine of their party.

Four years into his presidency, the party has followed his lead and shied away from stances on the nation’s biggest, most intractable problems, like how to fix a broken health care system or address the ballooning national debt, that were once considered Republican orthodoxy.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming — the party’s highest-ranking woman, who has made a point of separating herself from some of Mr. Trump’s policies and is widely considered to be jockeying for a top leadership position beyond his presidency — spent most of her time blaming Democrats for forest fires raging across the West and the fires set by mobs in America’s cities.

“Every day you see the damage of years of Democrat policies,” Ms. Cheney said. She had little to say about Republican alternatives.

“A lot of this document can be summarized by saying, ‘Let’s delete the last seven months in our country,’ because Republicans were certainly, at least from an economic perspective, feeling bullish about their chances this year,”

The fact that Republicans in the House felt a need to produce their own platform at all, in a presidential election year when the top of the ticket typically sets the agenda, underscores the party’s unique predicament under Mr. Trump, a leader who has never been guided by much of a policy vision.

“Trump is talking about fake news, rigged elections, players kneeling, ‘Sleepy Joe,’ Antifa invasions and whether dead soldiers are losers,” said Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Mr. Ryan. “Whatever policy he’s ostensibly for, he’s not running on an agenda. And for House members in marginal districts, you need more than the stream of consciousness that he’s offering every day.”

voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.

“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said

“As an historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor

The president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are later enacted.

“In both cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.

the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.

At the event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a great environmentalist.”

The report is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.

he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.

And Mr. Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific consensus.

He said Mr. Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and environment clean.”

Taken together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.Now they are in shambles.

If Mr. Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2 trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.

“I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”

Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.

Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.

Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”

“I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.

Fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL oil pipeline would have free rein, undaunted by court challenges that ruled the Trump administration didn’t properly consider climate change when analyzing the pipeline’s impact.

It’s important to understand that the shredding of environmental regulations is not something that would have been unique to a Trump presidency, unlike his Twitter inanities or nonstop campaign rallies.

Four years of damage can be undone. Eight is far more difficult.

The new restrictions were first announced as Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, a federal relief for distressed farmers, that included stricter work requirements. Those requirements were ultimately dropped.

“When you’re in your 50s and you want to save this thing, it seems like the greatest idea. You’re full of fire,” said Cuthbert. “But when you’re in your 70s? Well, it’s a bit of a different story.”

“Driving across the flat parts of Canada and being able to see these architectural elements juxtaposed against the landscape, it really is magical,” said Piwowar.

On the final day, a small crowd lined the train tracks and highway to watch a sliver of town’s history collapse into a cloud of grain dust.

Khamenei called the downing of the plane a “bitter accident” that saddened Iran as much as it made its enemies happy. He said Iran’s enemies had seized on the crash to question the Islamic Republic, the Revolutionary Guards and the armed forc

After Suleimani was killed, Iran announced it would no longer be bound by the limitations in the nuclear agreement. European countries who have been trying to salvage the deal responded earlier this week by invoking a dispute mechanism that could result in even more sanctions.

The two candidates have until recently refused to criticize each other on the trail. Finding themselves neck-and-neck in Iowa polls, both appear to have sharpened their barbs.

On Monday night, Warren released a statement confirming a report from CNN that Sanders told her at a private 2018 meeting – before either had declared their candidacy – that he believed a woman couldn’t win in 2020. Sanders and his campaign have repeatedly denied that he said this.

Before the debate, Varshini Prakash, the director of the progressive Sunrise movement, summed up the ickiness with an analogy: “Mom and dad are fighting and all I wanna do is go to my room and put my headphones on.”