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The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and one of her top aides for continuing to investigate war crimes allegations against Americans. The sanctions were immediately denounced by the court, the United Nations and human rights advocates. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the moves as part of the administration’s pushback against the tribunal, based in The Hague, for investigations into the United States and its allies.

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A COVID-19 vaccine could be available earlier than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce overwhelmingly positive results, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

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Abay Holmes, 21, is accused of impersonating a high school student.

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More evidence that six feet may not be enough distance to prevent you from getting the coronavirus, in enclosed spaces with recycled air.

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"Discovering that I was going to become a mother will forever be a moment where time stood still," the daughter of the late Steve Irwin wrote.

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Engineers in Utah fire up a booster rocket that will help send astronauts back to the Moon.

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For all the talk over the past week about President Trump turning his re-election campaign around with the relentless fire-breathing message of the Republican National Convention, there is no evidence yet of it happening. Democratic nominee Joe Biden is ahead in all but one of the top battleground states and his national polling lead is larger and more consistent than Hillary Clinton's was in 2016. That's why Trump-boosters have begun resorting to fanciful thinking about "shy" Trump voters who will mysteriously emerge from the shadows on Election Day to deliver a victory to the president no reputable poll shows him close to earning outright.Yet the fact remains that in most (though not all) of the battleground states Trump is significantly closer than he is nationally. We all know that his coalition is distributed across states with uncanny efficiency, just as the Democratic coalition is distributed with uncanny inefficiency. (Clinton won California in 2016 by more than four million votes. Had just 80,000 of them been distributed across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, she would have won the presidency.) This means that, although no one seriously believes Trump will win more votes overall on Nov. 3, there is a decent chance that he could prevail, yet again, in the Electoral College — and that this could happen despite him losing the nationwide popular vote by an even larger margin than he did the last time.If Trump wins again thanks to the Electoral College, leading members of both parties will follow obvious scripts. Democrats will rail against the structural unfairness of the process, while Republicans will repeat the mantra that the U.S. is a "republic and not a democracy." Both reactions will be civically poisonous and terribly shortsighted. And it's important to understand why.Republicans who would smugly shrug their shoulders at the consternation of Democrats complaining about the injustice of losing the presidency after winning the popular vote for the third time in 20 years would be displaying an almost comical incapacity to place themselves in the shoes of their political opponents. It is simply inconceivable that Republicans would respond so insouciantly if the outcomes were reversed. (Just try to imagine without laughing Tucker Carlson uttering these words on Nov. 4: "Last night Joe Biden beat Donald Trump despite losing the popular vote by three million. Oh well, that sometimes happens when you're a republic and not a democracy.")The fact is that the Electoral College was not designed to work this way. (In fact, it has never functioned as it was designed to, but that's a matter for another time.) For most of American history it has served mainly to amplify the legitimacy of the popular vote winner — creating the illusion that the victor won a greater national mandate than the popular vote would justify. But in the present period, the Electoral College is increasingly functioning in the opposite way, countermanding and thwarting plurality sentiment in the country at large.That's a formula for the rapid undermining of the legitimacy of our institutions — and understandably so, as any and all outside observers instantly recognize. Where else in the free world does the party that wins fewer votes consistently prevail in national elections? It's absurd, it's galling, it's civically corrosive, and it could easily serve as a spark that leads to a revolutionary conflagration in the name of simple justice, especially when (as in the case of Trump) the minoritarian victor governs in a way that displays no modesty or humility about his lack of a popular mandate.Republicans who genuinely care about the future of the party and the country should be deeply troubled by the fact that they no longer seem capable of winning plurality support of the American people, let alone the strong majority support they inspired under Ronald Reagan. Instead, they increasingly depend on a counter-majoritarian quirk of the electoral system to win and hold national power — and seem appallingly indifferent to making a broader and more appealing pitch to a wider swath of the electorate. That is unlikely to end well for anyone concerned.But this doesn't mean that in the event of a Trump victory in the Electoral College the Democrats would be justified in portraying themselves entirely as victims of systematically unfair institutions. After all, Democrats have won plenty of presidential elections, often by wide margins, including in the very recent past, while playing by these very same rules. That points to a change in how these institutions — the rules of the game — have begun to interact with the shape of the party's electoral coalition.If, for the second time in a row, the Democrats lose to Donald Trump while winning the popular vote, many will rail against the Electoral College and call for its abolition in favor of a nationwide popular vote to elect the president. But this will be pointless, since scrapping the country's electoral system would require a constitutional amendment, and it's far more difficult to pass one of those than it is to prevail in a presidential election. That's especially true when many of the states that would be required to pass such an amendment benefit handsomely from the institution the amendment would do away with.A second Electoral College loss to Trump would have to be laid at least in part at the feet of the Democratic Party itself. Its leaders and candidates knew the implications of the rules going in — that winning decisively in the Midwestern "rust belt" swing states depends on staking out more culturally conservative positions. A big reason the party made so much headway in 2018 is that the candidates it ran in the midterm elections did exactly that. If the Democrats lose these crucial states in 2020, it will largely be because they resisted doing the same this cycle in favor of affirming more progressive positions preferred by other factions in the party in other regions of the country.It's been clear for some time that the rules of the game make that approach extremely risky, greatly raising the likelihood that progressives will end up locked out of power altogether. The simple fact is that Democrats can afford to lose up to four million votes in deep-blue, super-progressive California, but they can't afford to lose any votes at all in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.A rational, disciplined party would realize this and change course accordingly. That it's unclear whether the Democrats will do so is a sign that the GOP may not be the only party in our political system too stubborn to do what it takes to win the vote with a degree of decisiveness that would demonstrate its legitimacy to all.More stories from theweek.com CDC 'urgently' tells states to get coronavirus vaccine distribution running by Nov. 1 Pelosi says San Francisco salon 'owes me an apology for setting me up' Nate Silver's analysis of Biden's Electoral College chances renews calls to repeal it altogether

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Don't miss tonight's full moon, which has a special twist this year.

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News that Sen. Kamala Harris was Joe Biden’s choice for the 2020 Democratic vice presidential nominee drove speculation and argumentation about her identity. The big question appeared to be, “Is Kamala Harris truly African American?” There were numerous articles and opinion pieces about whether Harris can legitimately claim to be African American; the authenticity of her Black identity if she has an Indian mother; what it means for her to be biracial; and other articles opining and speculating about her racial, ethnic and even national identity. Harris, the daughter of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, identifies as Black/African American while also embracing her Indian heritage. Yet the questions in social media and news outlets swirling around her identities demonstrate a continued misunderstanding of race and mixed-race people. Where do loyalties lie?While the debates about Harris’ racial identities may seem new given the recent media attention focused on her, they are similar to the commentary other high-profile mixed-race people have received. When I did research for my chapter on Tiger Woods in my book “Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture,” I found much criticism of Woods’ calling himself “Cablinasian” (a word Woods made up as a teen to account for his Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian heritages) and for not solely identifying as Black. Several articles expressed confusion about his multiraciality – the uncertainty over the most accurate racial category to fit him into. The discussions of Woods mirror the critiques of Harris. The competing interpretations of Harris’ identity, like with Woods, seem to be a function of her multiple, intersecting identities (including race, class and gender) as well as the public’s deep discomfort with people who don’t fit into fixed boxes. For example, some people want to disavow Harris’ Blackness because of her multiple ethnic and racial affiliations. Others claim her as Jamaican or Indian, which serves as evidence of her success as a member of an ethnic group or which celebrates a shared cultural connection with her. Some see her Jamaican and Indian ethnicities as diminishing her claim to a Black American experience, unlike those who are known as “ADOS,” or American Descendants of Slavery. Because Harris’ ancestors do not include those who were enslaved in the U.S., ADOS’s concern is that neither she nor her family can know the deep historical pain of U.S. anti-Black racism.Embedded in this concern are echoes of the questions Black Americans face who have passed, who chose whiteness to escape slavery or the Jim Crow South or those who choose multiraciality to flee the social stigma of Blackness. Questioning Harris’ bona fides to being a Black American is questioning where her loyalties lie. ‘100% Black and 100% Japanese’There are political reasons why some may want to discredit Harris’ claims to Blackness, believing that saying she’s not truly Black means she shouldn’t be relatable to Black voters.But the desire to see Harris as only Black or worry that she is not truly African American derives from the racist U.S. past of the one-drop rule of racial impurity, which sociologist F. James Wood has described as the idea that “a single drop of ‘black blood’ makes a person a black.” That was an ideology from the majority of U.S. history – from its founding through to the Jim Crow era – when race was firmly believed to be a matter of blood. Scientists for well over half a century have disproven any link between race and genetics. Scholars have been writing and researching, for decades, about how race is a social construction rather than a biological absolute.But in public discussion in the U.S., race is treated as an entity that can be measured and labeled. That is why people are questioning the validity of Harris’ African American identity. They believe that her racial affiliation can somehow be quantified and weighed on a scale of authenticity. Underlying these questions of authenticity are questions of legitimacy. Multiracial people are constantly confronted by those who question their whole selves and their choice to authentically identify with multiple races. For these critics, to qualify for membership in a race or ethnicity means one must be 100% of that group. Anything less means you cannot be a real member of any given culture, ethnicity or race. Yet the reality and experiences of multiracial people’s lives, like that of Harris, suggest that basic math cannot capture the realities of what it means to embody multiple races and ethnicities. As one subject of multiracial artist Kip Fulbeck’s photo installation of mixed-race Asian Americans in The Hapa Project states, “I am 100% Black and 100% Japanese.” [Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.] Evolution of racial categoriesRacial identity is not only about external features (eye shape, hair texture, skin color) and ancestral lines. It is about the cultural and social habits and rituals that people participate in as they claim their affiliations with ethnic and racial groups.The Indian food that Harris consumes speaks volumes about the ethnic influences she embraces, as does the Black sorority she pledged and the historically Black college she attended. Anyone confused about Kamala Harris’ multiraciality may recall that the U.S. is a nation that was not built by a single ethnic or racial group. Indeed, U.S. land was taken from various Indigenous nations and built by the enslaved labor of people from multiple African nations and tribes for the benefit of others who hailed from a variety of European nations. And other immigrants from Latin America and the Pacific Rim settled in North America and made the U.S. their home. Harris, as the U.S.‘s first multiracial, multiethnic female vice presidential candidate, reflects the evolution of racial categories, which coincides with an ever-evolving understanding of race and racism in the 21st century.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Shortened census count will hurt communities of color * When police stop Black men, the effects reach into their homes and familiesJennifer Ho is the current president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

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On July 21, two U.S Air Force B-1B bombers took off from Guam and headed west over the Pacific Ocean to the hotly contested South China Sea. The sleek jets made a low-level pass over the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its escorting fleet, which was exercising nearby in the Philippines Sea, according to images released by the U.S. military. The operation was part of the Trump administration's intensifying challenge to China's ruling Communist Party and its sweeping territorial claims over one of the world's most important strategic waterways.

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AstraZeneca announced Monday its vaccine candidate has entered the final testing stage in the U.S.

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Do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris believe that abortion should be legal even late in pregnancy? Here are four pieces of evidence that suggest the answer is yes.First: Biden and Harris are strong supporters of Roe v. Wade.Roe requires that abortion be permissible even at the end of pregnancy whenever a physician believes it necessary to protect a woman’s health. Doe v. Bolton, the companion case to Roe, says that “the medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors -- physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age -- relevant to the well-being of the patient.” While it has sometimes been suggested that Doe did not intend to say a broad health exception is constitutionally required, subsequent court decisions have insisted on it.We have reason to think that each year in America, more than 10,000 abortions take place after the 20th week of pregnancy, and that the bulk of these abortions do not take place because of risks to mothers’ physical health or because of fetal abnormality. Yet prosecutions for violating state statutes that appear to prohibit abortion late in pregnancy are vanishingly rare, perhaps because the Supreme Court appears to have made such laws unenforceable.Biden has said that there will be “a litmus test on abortion” for any Supreme Court justices he nominates. Neither he nor Harris says that the Court should adjust its jurisprudence to allow abortion to be banned late in pregnancy.Second: Biden and Harris have each sponsored bills that appear to keep abortion late in pregnancy legal even if the Supreme Court were to change its mind.Harris has sponsored legislation, the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” that explicitly provides for legal abortion after viability when “the treating health care provider” thinks it necessary for the mother’s “health,” and that later adds that all terms in the law should be construed “liberally.” She has also sponsored separate legislation to provide federal funding for abortion, with no time limitation in the bill text; and to require state governments to pay for abortions, again with no time limitation in the bill text. During her presidential campaign, she said that she would require states to show the Justice Department that any changes in abortion policy they intended to make conformed to the Women’s Health Protection Act.Biden, too, sponsored legislation while in the Senate to make abortion legal after viability when needed to protect “health,” with the text not specifying physical health.Third: The Democratic platform endorses “reproductive health, rights, and justice,” “including safe and legal abortion,” and opposes “federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights.” It endorses taxpayer funding of abortion as well. The endorsements are not qualified, and no limitations based on stage of pregnancy are mentioned.Fourth: Neither Biden nor Harris says that they believe abortions late in pregnancy should be prohibited.I see one piece of evidence that Biden does not believe abortions late in pregnancy should be legal. In 1997, he said explicitly that he would like to ban all abortions after viability. But he was speaking in favor of legislation that a) was, by his account, consistent with Roe v. Wade and b) might not have banned any abortions at all.All in all, then, the evidence justifies the conclusion that Biden and Harris believe abortion should be legal at any stage of pregnancy so long as an abortionist is willing to say it will promote the mother’s emotional health -- and journalists who assert otherwise are creating confusion where none need exist.

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“That’s not a fundamental strategy that we’re using.”

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The timing of a vaccine has taken on political importance as U.S. President Donald Trump seeks re-election in November, after committing billions of federal dollars to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, which has killed more than 180,000 Americans. "For the purpose of initial planning, CDC provided states with certain planning assumptions as they work on state specific plans for vaccine distribution, including possibly having limited quantities of vaccines in October and November," a CDC spokeswoman told Reuters. The New York Times had earlier reported that the CDC had contacted officials in all 50 states and five large cities with the planning information.

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An Anti-Defamation League researcher fears that Aaron Danielson's killing will spur more bloodshed between right- and left-wing groups.

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Democrats condemn "shocking abdication" of responsibility as intelligence officials scale back

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Zhao Lei told Sky News, "I think the government covered up some facts."

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The most active day of the hurricane season is around Sept. 10. As the season's peak nears, forecasters are watching four areas for development.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday green-lighted Florida nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to start allowing residents to have socially distanced visits from loved ones.

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The back-and-forth between the president and his Democratic challenger marked a new phase of the race.

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The blast was equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT — nearly 1,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined.

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Beginning Tuesday, Hawaii will require all visitors to fill out a "Safe Travels" application, including health and contact information, before travel.

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Top White House officials rang the alarm bell during a call with the nation’s governors on Monday, pleading with them to advise college presidents in their states to keep COVID-infected students on campus or risk another major outbreak. “We know that what happened across the South [in June] was primarily driven by 18-to-25 year olds, across the South, with asymptomatic spread,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “Sending these individuals back home in their asymptomatic state to spread the virus in their home town or among their vulnerable households could really recreate what we experienced over the June time frame in the South. So I think every university president should have a plan for not only testing but caring for their students that need to isolate.”The comments represent one of the most explicit acknowledgments to date that the White House’s aggressive push to bring students back to campus this fall has created serious risks for increased COVID transmission. It also underscores just how fragile the current situation is at college campuses across the country. Emails Show Chaos and Confusion at Ole Miss Over Coronavirus ExposureAccording to a New York Times tracker of COVID-19 at American colleges and universities, some 26,000 cases have emerged at over 750 institutions since the novel coronavirus hit the United States early this year. At the University of Alabama system alone, over 1,300 cases have been reported, according to the school’s own coronavirus case tracker.Those spikes in infections have put college and university officials in a difficult position over how to manage community spread on their campuses. On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that students and professors at the University of Mississippi—a state where GOP Gov. Tate Reeves explicitly cited saving college football to justify a mask mandate—felt the administration was pressuring exposed (if not infected) students to return home to their families. Transparency concerns about outbreaks, and the prospect of students bringing coronavirus back to their older, possibly immunocompromised relatives, have also followed outbreaks at other major southern colleges like Alabama. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, meanwhile, shut down in-person instruction for undergrads just one week into the semester last month, and at least some students were reportedly set to head home without being tested for COVID-19. The University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, and Michigan State University also quickly pivoted to online learning last month.Despite these cases, the White House has been adamant that schools not only open their doors to on-campus learning this fall but that fall sports—specifically football—proceed as usual. Justifying this stance, top administration officials have downplayed the severity of transmission and infection among younger populations. President Donald Trump himself has insisted—despite inconclusive evidence, at best, to support his claim—that healthy college athletes are "not going to have a problem” with the disease. In fact, powerhouse college football programs like Texas Tech and Oklahoma have reported recent outbreaks among their active players.University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected ClassmatesSpeaking to governors on the call Monday, Vice President Mike Pence echoed Birx’s admonition that infected students remain isolated on campus for fear that asymptomatic transmission could impact wider populations. “In general, we want to encourage, even when you have test positivity on campuses, we want to encourage universities to have students remain on or near campus and minimize the potential exposure to the larger community,” said Pence. “We really believe—and I spoke to a university president just the other day—in suspending classes for a few weeks, have people study in their rooms, and... that kind of isolation.“We believe, let’s have the testing, let’s have the mitigation efforts, good practices in place,” Pence added. “But we really believe that remaining on or near campus is the best course possible for the overall health and well-being [of the community].”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday it is investigating reports from airline pilots that someone was flying in a jetpack as they approached Los Angeles International Airport to land last weekend. “Tower, American 1997, we just passed a guy in a jetpack,” a pilot said. “We just saw the guy pass by us in the jetpack,” he said.

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was expected to report a record fundraising haul of more than $300 million for the month of August, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Biden, who is leading Republican incumbent President Donald Trump in most national opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election, raised $140 million in July. The campaign was expected to see a boost from the Democratic National Convention and the naming of his vice presidential pick, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California, in August.

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Portland Police declared a riot Monday evening after about 200 demonstrators marched to Mayor Ted Wheeler's residence to demand that he resign.Police reported that an "arson fire" was started in the area. Rioters also broke windows and attempted to set a store on the ground floor of the Democratic mayor's condominium building on fire."It was critical to secure the area to allow firefighters to respond to this dangerous situation," police said.Oregon State Police were also sent to Portland on Monday after a weekend of violence that saw one pro-Trump demonstrator fatally shot as Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with Trump supporters downtown.Democratic Governor Kate Brown on Sunday announced a plan to quell the nightly violence while still allowing peaceful protests, saying state police troopers and officers from several surrounding areas will be called in to assist Portland's police force. Meanwhile, the FBI and federal prosecutors will commit more resources to prosecute criminal offenses that arise from the demonstrations, she said.“We all must come together—elected officials, community leaders, all of us—to stop the cycle of violence,” Brown said in a statement. “But this is only the first step. Real change will come from the hard work to achieve racial justice."A pro-Trump demonstrator was shot and killed Saturday night during clashes in Portland between Black Lives Matter protesters and a caravan of Trump supporters who drove trucks through the downtown streets. The man wore a hat with the logo for the right-wing group Patriot Prayer. The male suspect reportedly under investigation for the fatal shooting declared his allegiance to Antifa on social media before the incident.“Every Oregonian has the right to freely express their views without fear of deadly violence. I will not allow Patriot Prayer and armed white supremacists to bring more bloodshed to our streets,” Brown said. “Time and again, from Charlottesville to Kenosha to Portland, we have seen the tragic outcome when armed right-wing vigilantes take matters into their own hands."Protests and rioting have been ongoing in Portland for more than 90 days since the police custody death of George Floyd in May.

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Motion-detection cameras could also show officers' locations in a standoff or compromise officer safety, the FBI report said.

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A viral post uses an image of a woman from a different day and time but claims that the armed protester is Kyle Rittenhouse's mother.

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As the end of convention season brings with it the final stretch of a years-long presidential campaign, a hauntingly familiar feeling is in the air in Minnesota, slowly alarming Democrats as November approaches—the chill of 2016.Four years ago, Minnesota was supposed to be a breezy, no-drama pickup for Hillary Clinton. Neither the Clinton nor Trump campaigns bothered investing any significant resources there, and certainly not much in-person time—Trump flew in for a last-minute rally days before Election Day; Clinton never set foot in the state as the Democratic nominee.Clinton won Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes by a mere 1.5 percent, or some 44,000 votes out of 2,944,813 cast. As Democrats were giddily investing precious resources to “expand the map” and compete in historically conservative states like Arizona and Texas, they nearly lost the state with history’s longest streak of voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.Part of what made Minnesota such a nail-biter was an unexpected surge of Trump votes from the state’s rural areas, among people who were not reliable GOP voters or not reliable voters to begin with.This shift, similar to what happened in other states—neighboring Wisconsin most excruciatingly—has not gone unnoticed by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Over the course of the 2020 presidential cycle, Trump has visited Minnesota several times—Vice President Mike Pence visited Duluth just this weekend—and his campaign has reserved over $14 million in TV ads through November so far. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, has reserved roughly a quarter of that. A marquee ad from Biden meant to rebut Trump’s convention speech on Thursday is running in a slate of key swing states. Minnesota wasn’t one of them, though Biden is planning to hit the state, for the first time as a 2020 candidate, in an in-person campaign swing that Biden himself teased last week.  Now, among Democrats in Minnesota the concerned chatter is growing that Biden, like Clinton, might overlook the state as he focuses on recapturing ones Trump won in 2016, from Wisconsin and Michigan to more “reach” states like Arizona and Georgia. Of course, there are clear signs of Biden’s strengths in Minnesota; most recent polls have shown Biden ahead anywhere from 3 to 10 points. Still, a scenario where Biden wins Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes after heavy investment from the party—but loses Minnesota’s 10—has crossed the minds of more than a few Democrats here. “There’s so much optimism bias in planning that only positive trends will happen,” sighed a Democratic operative in Minnesota, who requested anonymity to discuss the presidential race candidly. “We’ve looked at some people who voted in 2016, but didn’t vote in 2018, and we have Biden underwater by double digits with those people,” explained the operative. The same big-picture demographic trends that put Wisconsin in play for Trump—and that make the state worth fighting out and investing in for Biden—are undoubtedly at work in Minnesota too, they argued.“We know marginal effects are strongest when one side is spending a lot, and that’s the kind of dynamic we’re looking at in Minnesota, where Trump is set to outspend Biden by a substantial sum of money,” said the operative. “There are definitely warning signs in here. It’s not a ‘for sure’ win without involvement—this isn’t a gimme.”“The president is going to be competitive in Minnesota. He’s spending enough to make sure of it,” said another longtime Minnesota Democratic operative, who said the state could provide a chance for Trump to break a venerable Democratic coalition as he did in Wisconsin and Michigan four years ago. “Biden has some work to do with the young progressive voters in the cities to make sure they turn out… it’s not clear that the campaign understands that they still need to convince them to show up and cast a vote against President Trump.” Democrats in Minnesota aren’t the only ones trying to keep down rising anxiety that, despite unemployment rates skyrocketing in response to a pandemic that’s on track to claim as many as a quarter-million American lives by Election Day, Trump might actually pull it off.Biden Campaign Aims to Show Wisconsin They’ve Learned From Hillary’s Mistake In Nevada and New Hampshire, another pair of states Clinton narrowly won in 2016, Biden is considered the favorite. In New Hampshire, the average of his lead in polls is nearly 10 points. For Trump, adding a state he didn’t win last time to his column this year is sure to be an uphill battle. But 2020 may present new challenges for Democrats, giving pause to Biden backers in three states he absolutely must win. “We’re just not as organized in 2020 as we were in 2016—that’s just a fact,” an official with the influential Culinary Workers Union in Nevada told The Daily Beast, citing the devastation that the pandemic and economic shutdowns have had on union members. Four out of five Local 226 workers are still out of work due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, which the official said has hampered everything from raising funds for get-out-the-vote efforts to providing food assistance for members.Nevada is another state that Democrats appear to be banking on, despite Clinton’s comparatively narrow margin of victory—a mere 2.4 percent, a 4-point drop from President Barack Obama’s margin of victory in 2012—and the pandemic’s impact on the state’s most powerful political organizer.The realities of the pandemic, which has halted in-person political outreach nationwide at the same time as it has affected the health and livelihoods of the workers that unions represent, has also hampered the ability of the state’s powerful labor unions to boost civic engagement among a loyal Democratic constituency.“We actually have members that we have to serve and we have to get contracts with them and so that’s the priority,” said one SEUI official. “Obviously, normally we would do an extensive field program and be knocking on doors, we would be doing rallies, but with COVID-19 that’s not going to happen.”But other union officials cautioned that while the pandemic has thrown the old political organizing rulebook out the window, Nevada Democrats can still expect organized labor to help.“This is a global pandemic. Everyone around the world has been deeply impacted, but Culinary Union members are resilient,” said Bethany Khan, the Culinary Union’s director of communications and digital strategy, who pointed to a COVID-19 safety bill passed with the union’s support as proof that labor is still a force to be reckoned with in the state. “The Culinary Union is 85 years old and we are the best positioned to continue the fight to protect Nevada workers.”In New Hampshire, the ghosts of 2016 aren’t quite haunting Democrats in the same way as out West, but they also haven’t been forgotten. Biden finds himself facing a similar test in the Granite State, a state with few electoral votes but one that Trump has shown an eagerness to bring back into the red this election cycle. While county Democratic chairs were quick to sound at least cautiously optimistic about Biden holding the state, that hasn’t stopped one county party leader in an area Trump won by 586 votes in 2016 from making it clear that she wants to see added effort from the Biden campaign. “I think they need to do more,” said Judith Kaufman, the chair of the Sullivan County Democratic Committee. “I think they need more visibility.” Trump lost New Hampshire to former Secretary of State Clinton in 2016 by around 2,700 votes, and held two major rallies in Manchester as the state’s 2020 Democratic primary played out. That narrow margin however, has not helped make Trump’s path in the state appear much easier. A late July poll by the Granite State Panel via the University of New Hampshire Survey Center found Biden with a 13-point lead on Trump. And after abandoning a planned rally in Portsmouth last month, an in-person rally was held in the state on Friday. That same day, absentee ballot mailers that had been sent earlier by the state GOP led to a cease and desist order from the New Hampshire Department of Justice because they “may cause voter confusion and frustration,” in the lead-up to the state’s September primary, according to New Hampshire Public Radio. New Hampshire GOP chairman Stephen Stepanek emphasized that Republicans are a united front in the state unlike in 2016. Trump suffered a major blow when then Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who was running for re-election at the time, announced following Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape that she wouldn’t be voting for the GOP nominee. Ayotte would go on to lose her seat to Democrat Maggie Hassan the next month. "The president is competitive, will be competitive and will win," Stepanek said. But a Republican strategist in the state who worked for a different primary candidate in 2016 had less optimism for Trump’s chances in the state, calling the president an underdog at the moment. “Smart Democrats that I know are running like their hair's on fire,” the strategist said. “They're not taking this for granted.”Following his 2016 loss in New Hampshire it appears that Trump has had the state in mind as one he can flip, the strategist said, and the campaign's activity in the state reflects that. “My perspective is that Trump's ground game here is strong, and even though he is unpopular here and even though his numbers are weak, Biden is a frontrunner who could cough up that lead at any time,” they said. Biden campaigned sporadically in the state ahead of its February primary, but fled New England to campaign in South Carolina on the night of the state’s primary. As he rallied with the southern voters that would come to resurrect his campaign, the former Vice President came in fifth in New Hampshire with around 8.5 percent of the vote. Despite failing to be a significant force in the primary, Democrats in New Hampshire don’t anticipate Biden’s poor performance in February hurting his odds in November. But there is a sense that Biden is benefiting from an anti-Trump fervor that has further strengthened his chances. “There's both. There's people who are very enthusiastic for Biden and Harris and there's people who are just like, ‘We can't stand four more years of this other guy,’” said Carl DeMatteo, the head of the Cheshire County Democratic Committee. And from his view in Rockingham County, where Trump won in 2016 by more than 10,000 votes, the county’s Democratic party chairman, Larry Drake, said the specter of the president has been even more of a driving factor. “There are certainly Biden supporters, and I think he's well-liked and everything, but I think the main thing is the opposition to Trump," Drake said. “...I think that's the strongest motivating thing for people to vote for Biden.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Black grievances put Harris on the ticket; her's is the face of leadership the country is demanding now.

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