it’s made it so easy to declare war on various chunks of society that your chunk finds irritating, or evil for that matter.

I think it would be a much tighter race right now if Warren were the nominee. A liberal senator who comes in third in the Massachusetts Democratic primary is not the strongest contender to take down Trump.

Sunday’s incidents came a day after a group of Trump supporters in Texas, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and slowed a Biden-Harris campaign bus as it drove on Interstate 35, leading to the cancellation of two planned rallies. The F.B.I. confirmed on Sunday that it was investigating the incident.

On Saturday, President Trump tweeted a video of the incident with a message, “I love Texas!” After the F.B.I. announced it was investigating, he tweeted again, saying, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” and instead “the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA.”

Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

The group settled a lawsuit last month against officials in Graham who they accused of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters.

“We are very concerned about groups lurking and trying to intimidate voters in particular communities,” Ms. Clarke said. Her group’s election protection hotline received calls from nearly a dozen counties in Florida just over the past week, she said, reporting individuals or groups harassing voters at the polls.

A separate set of anti-Trump protesters marched in New York City to counter the pro-Trump caravans, leading to some scuffles and arrests.

Groups that monitor voting have been preparing for intimidation at the polls at least since September, when protesters disrupted voters at a polling location in Fairfax, Va.

Of particular concern are militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose members have lurked on internet chat boards like 4Chan. “We are keeping an eye on them,” said Joanna Lydgate, national director of the Voter Protection Program which works closely with law enforcement on voting issues.

He would need polls to be even worse than they were in the Northern battleground states four years ago. Crucially, he would also need polls to be off to a far greater extent at the national level as well as in the Sun Belt — and those polls have been relatively accurate in recent contests.

The national polls show a decisive Biden win.

Unlike in 2016, the national polls do not foreshadow the gains Mr. Trump made in the Northern battleground states.

This year, the national polls have consistently shown Mr. Biden making big gains among white voters and particularly among white voters without a degree. In this respect, the national polls are quite similar to state polls showing Mr. Biden running well in relatively white Northern battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

There are far fewer undecided or minor-party voters.

Even if these voters broke unanimously to Mr. Trump, he would be far short of victory across the battleground states and nationwide.

Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

In 2020, it’s even harder to rely on polls or previous elections: On top of all the existing problems with surveys in an age of cellphones, push polls and mistrust, we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

Did more Clinton voters stay home, thinking their vote wasn’t necessary? Did more people on the fence feel like casting what they thought would be a protest vote for Donald Trump?

Instead of refreshing the page to update predictions, people should do the only thing that actually affects the outcome: vote, donate and organize. Everything else is within the margin of error.

Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.

Wait, it gets worse. In last week’s debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their naked eyes that it isn’t.

Trump repeatedly claimed that thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.

On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.

That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so he doesn’t.

What’s scary about all this isn’t just the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.

Indeed, current Republican strategy is almost entirely based on trying to scare voters about bad things that aren’t happening —

Democrats have consistently pushed for more lenient rules when it comes to mail-in ballots and how and when they are counted. Republicans have resisted such changes, with many of them arguing that the relaxed rules could open the process to abuse and fraud.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have granted requests from Republican lawmakers and the Trump campaign to block lower court rulings allowing the longer deadline.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party had asked the justices to temporarily block a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that allowed election officials to count some mailed ballots received up to three days after Election Day.

The state court said the extra time was needed because of the coronavirus pandemic and delays in mail service.

“That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”

The state court ordered a three-day extension for ballots clearly mailed on or before Election Day and for those with missing or illegible postmarks “unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day.”

In response, Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a Democrat, said a provision of the State Constitution protecting “free and equal elections” allowed the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to extend the deadline.

“All ballots must still be mailed on or before Election Day,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote. “The change is simply an extension from three to nine days after Election Day for a timely ballot to be received and counted. That is all.”

“In the past three years alone, the board has twice extended the absentee-ballot receipt deadline after hurricanes hit the state’s coast,” its brief said. “No one challenged those extensions.”

Give voters who are on the fence a reason not to support Mr. Biden.

He has the perfect model with the vice president.”

“Anything Trump does now that doesn’t seek to make Biden an unacceptable alternative is a waste for Trump,”

suggestion by Mr. Trump that Mr. Biden at 77 was getting slow with age. (Mr. Trump is 74.) By every account, Mr. Biden crossed that barrier.

Mr. Trump will be taking the stage this time as someone who has been a coronavirus patient, announcing he had the virus shortly after the first debate.

He has struggled, in interviews and the last debate, to defend his response to the crisis and suggest that many people, including Mr. Biden, also failed to appreciate the gravity of the threat in the early days. But Mr. Trump’s personal experience — the widespread criticism that his lack of precautions contributed to the outbreak at the White House — will be a subtext for at least part of the debate.

Iran, had tried to influence the election by sending intimidating emails was a stark warning. Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Iran is building upon Russian techniques and trying to demonstrate that it, too, is capable of being a force in the election.

Iran opposes Mr. Trump’s re-election because its leaders believe that under a Biden administration, they might be able to revive their nuclear deal reached in 2015 with six world powers and restart international investment.

Mr. Ratcliffe has been attacked by intelligence officials and Democrats for being overly partisan and Mr. Wray has been the target of Mr. Trump’s fury, including for his repeated insistence that Russia was a threat to the election.

Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year they stepped up their game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.

“But they have gone from propaganda to deliberate interference in this election,

“Their focus here is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation,” he said.

The officials also did not make clear whether either nation hacked into voter registration systems.The material obtained by Iran and Russia was mostly public, according to an intelligence official, and Iran was using it as an opposing political campaign might. Some voter information, including party registration, is publicly available, and voters’ names may have been merged with other identifying material like email addresses from other databases, according to intelligence officials, including some sold by criminal hacking networks on the “dark web.”

Some spoofed emails sent to voters contained links to a false and deceptive video that attempted to scare voters into believing the senders were also capable of manipulating the mail-in vote process, playing on fears that Mr. Trump has fanned with his insistence that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud.

“It’s not over because you’re over it,” she said.

“I didn’t want my kid to have a full year out,” he said. “I thought if I didn’t put him in now, I might not get the chance, especially with a mayor with an itchy trigger to pull them out.”

Biden suggested making masks and vaccines mandatory.

Mr. Trump minimized the danger of the virus, despite having been hospitalized after falling ill with it. He has poked fun at Mr. Biden for wearing a mask and has resisted the idea of making masks mandatory. Mr. Trump has theatrically removed his mask at his campaign rallies; Mr. Biden disclosed that before walking onstage, he had been wearing two masks, a preventive measure that some doctors say is effective.

Trump clung to an unpopular posture on masks and the pandemic.

He tried to twist the position of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, on masks. And he dismissed the scientific consensus.

refusal to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate

Election Day whether he supports expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. But he said he wanted to wait until after the Senate had acted on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Mr. Biden has made it clear in the past that he did not support the idea. He has avoided the question during the campaign by saying he didn’t want to play into Mr. Trump’s hands and turn attention away from what Republicans were doing with the Ginsburg vacancy. But he agreed with the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, that voters had a right to know his views, and he set out a schedule for disclosing them.

“So, he says that the voters should know his position on this issue, but not until the confirmation process has concluded. By that time, a majority of voters will have already voted, including this voter.”

Still M.I.A.: a second-term Trump agenda.

But the lack of a vision for the next four years — and for navigating the remaining months and years of the pandemic — is a glaring and unaddressed weakness for Mr. Trump. When Ms. Guthrie gave him a chance to make his closing pitch for another four years, he began, “Because I’ve done a great job.” There were few other specifics beyond the classic Trumpian boast. “Next year,” he promised, “is going to be better than ever before.”

What if Biden loses?

Americans are simply growing bored with The Trump Show.

Mr. Trump is known for his sexist remarks, and the clips the ad shows are real. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, has long styled himself a champion of women. He still refers to the Violence Against Women Act as his proudest legislative achievement and he said months before he selected Ms. Harris as his running mate that he would name a woman to his ticket.

President Trump’s rude and demeaning comments to and about women are no secret. Just last week, he called Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, a “monster.” A new ad from the Lincoln Project urges voters to consider what it would be like to have a different kind of president — a man, it suggests, who actually respects women.

The 90-second ad opens with two directives: “Imagine a young girl looking in the mirror, searching for role models in the world to give her hope that one day she, too, can make a difference. Now imagine how she feels when she watches women being verbally attacked.” Cue a series of clips that show Mr. Trump belittling women, including female reporters. “Your daughters are listening,” the ad says.

North Carolina may have broken a record for first-day, early-voting turnout on Thursday, when more than 333,000 people showed up in person to cast their ballots, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault proves that my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, warranted.

Instead, it happens because too many men treat all women as objects, which helps them to justify inflicting abuse against us when we choose to exercise our own free will.

Black women, who struggle against stereotypes and are seen as angry or threatening when we try to stand up for ourselves and our sisters.

Daniel Cameron, for his appalling conduct in denying Breonna Taylor and her family justice.

the simple phrase “Protect Black women” is controversial. We deserve to be protected as human beings. And we are entitled to our anger about a laundry list of mistreatment and neglect that we suffer.

racial bias in health care.

If we dress in fitted clothing, our curves become a topic of conversation not only on social media, but also in the workplace. The fact that Serena Williams, the greatest athlete in any sport ever, had to defend herself for wearing a bodysuit at the 2018 French Open is proof positive of how misguided the obsession with Black women’s bodies is.

Countless times, people have tried to pit me against Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, two incredible entertainers and strong women.

Or that Black women, too often in the shadows of such accomplishments, actually powered the civil rights movement

Pence absolutely won the debate

Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has established her credentials as a tough interrogator with her questioning of officials like William P. Barr, the attorney general. She knows how to make a case. But can she attack Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus — which has come to define his presidency — without veering toward an overly personal attack on a president battling a potentially lethal disease?

Mrs. Clinton, the only woman to serve as a major-party presidential nominee, warned Ms. Harris, in so many words, about the corrosive role that sexism will play onstage.

Mr. Pence is also likely to be pressed to defend Mr. Trump’s actions since his illness was diagnosed — leaving the hospital against the counsel of many medical professionals, minimizing the threat of the virus and dramatically removing his mask when he returned to the White House. The president has offered himself as evidence that Covid-19 can be beaten; does Mr. Pence agree with that?

Ms. Harris is not just a woman but also the first woman of color on a major-party ticket.

Don’t look too angry’ line,” Ms. Lawless said. “These are cliché. But they’re cliché because they’re true.”

“She symbolizes everything that ‘Make America Great Again’ wants to push back on by virtue of being a Black woman,” Ms. Lawless said.

(Step 1); moved quickly to talk about the aspirations of a Trump presidency (Step 2); and swung into an attack on the Democrats (Step 3).

because so many vice presidents, and vice-presidential candidates, eventually run for president.

“I like my freedom” on leaving the store, and pronounced Covid-19 as “nothing more than a flu, really.’’

Scoffing at masks, social distancing and crowd avoidance — all measures recommended by health experts, including in the Trump administration — has become a test of loyalty for fervent supporters of the president, who mocked Mr. Biden’s masks during their debate last week and, on returning to the White House on Monday from the hospital, ripped his off, despite being highly contagious.

“Say I have it and I get tested five times, that’s five new cases,” he said. “I know for sure, through E.M.T.s, they count it separately.” (This misconception, spread on social media, has been rebutted; the C.D.C. reports total cases and total tests separately.)

In a Quinnipiac University national poll last month, four out of five likely voters said they believed masks to be effective at slowing the spread of the virus. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., told Congress that wide use of face masks would bring the pandemic under control and might offer more protection than a vaccine.

Doubts about the C.D.C. figures trace back at least to August, when Mr. Trump retweeted a post by a follower of the QAnon conspiracy. Twitter later removed the president’s retweet for violating its rules about sharing disinformation. The false claim arose because doubters of the C.D.C. argued that deaths in people with underlying health problems, such as diabetes or heart disease, were not deaths from Covid-19 — whereas experts said they were.

Far from having vanquished Covid-19, the outside doctors said, Mr. Trump is most likely still struggling with it and entering a pivotal phase — seven to 10 days after the onset of symptoms — in which he could rapidly take a turn for the worse. He’s 74, male and moderately obese, factors that put him at risk for severe disease.

For many, it was a political stunt. For Dr. King of UCSF, who was watching on C-SPAN, the return to the White House was an opportunity to observe how the president breathed.

Some experts said that the decision to give Mr. Trump dexamethasone could be a sign that he was struggling with more serious Covid-19 than his doctors were revealing, or that his doctors had inappropriately prescribed him the drug.

severe form of Covid-19, with impairment of the lungs and a blood oxygen level below 94 percent, which is a cutoff for severe disease.

paused twice while walking across the lawn — whether to wave to cameras or to catch his breath, he said was not clear — and then appeared to be gasping for breath at the top of the stairs. He and others said Mr. Trump used his neck muscles to help him breathe, a classic sign that someone’s lungs are not taking in enough oxygen.

the president did not mention the hardship the virus had caused to others or that anyone had suffered greatly from it. Nor did he mention the White House staff members who had fallen sick.

almost immediately ripped off his mask for the cameras once there. He then filmed a campaign-style video from the balcony, saying that he was “better” and that “maybe I’m immune, I don’t know” to the ravages of the virus.

“I feel better than I did 20 years ago,” framed the virus as something akin to a weekend at a spa

“You would hope someone who has been in serious health crisis would have a bit of an awakening, find a little religion on this, but he seems incapable of doing that.”

“He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual,” said Erin Perrine, a campaign spokeswoman. “Joe Biden doesn’t have that.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers are also trying to paint the virus as one in a long string of fights he has overcome, in line with the investigation into whether his campaign had ties with Russia or the impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Trump has lowered the bar so far — even demanding Mr. Biden take some kind of drug test

Mr. Biden wants to avoid that — and he has been stress-tested by advisers not to respond to Mr. Trump’s obvious provocations if they are not central to his own message.

Will Mr. Trump successfully goad Mr. Biden into losing his temper? Or will Mr. Biden be able to avoid walking into the trap?

(For those who don’t know, his first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash nearly 50 years ago. His two sons survived but one of them, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.)

For those wondering how far Mr. Trump might go down this road, it’s worth taking a look at when he debated Mrs. Clinton. Pressed on allegations of his own sexual misconduct — this was right after the “Access Hollywood” recording was released capturing him making vulgar remarks about groping women — he simply turned the spotlight to Mrs. Clinton’s husband.

When provoked, Mr. Biden is prone to getting rattled and angry and to losing his train of thought, and he risks coming across as condescending.

“The only analogy I can think of is, Joe Biden would hold a funeral for a squirrel he hit on the highway,” Mr. Luntz said.

In 2016, Mr. Trump was relentless at the debates in his attacks and claims, many of them false or at least inaccurate. Mrs. Clinton tried to respond by urging viewers to go look at the fact-checking feature on her website. That proved ineffective.

“Despite a global pandemic, despite an economic calamity, despite these seismic civil rights protests, nothing has changed,” Ms. Smith said. “If people have lost their job, lost their ability to go outside, can’t send their kids to school, then what is a one-hour televised debate of political talking points going to matter to them?”

researchers found that people with obesity who caught the coronavirus were more than twice as likely to end up in the hospital and nearly 50 percent more likely to die of Covid-19. Another study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, showed that among nearly 17,000 hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States, more than 77 percent had excess weight or obesity.

When obesity enters the picture, Dr. Beck said, some of the immune cells found in 30-year-old people “look like those of an 80-year-old.”

Large amounts of fat, for instance, can compress the lower parts of the lungs, making it harder for them to expand when people breathe in.

Similar links were unmasked during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, when researchers began to notice that infected people with obesity were more likely to wind up in the hospital and to die. Flu vaccines administered in subsequent years performed poorly in individuals with extra weight, who fell ill more often than their peers even after getting their shots

If the immune systems of people with obesity are more prone to pathogen amnesia, then they may need different dosages of a vaccine. Some products might not work at all in people carrying extra weight

Ms. Franklin’s case of Covid-19 was more moderate than her sister’s. But she still deteriorated quickly, to the point where she could no longer reach the bathroom without assistance.