| | | | | |  | | By Zach Montellaro | Presented by the ACLU | Editor's Note: Weekly Score is a weekly version of POLITICO Pro's daily Campaigns policy newsletter, Morning Score. POLITICO Pro is a policy intelligence platform that combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day's biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro. | | | — Just under 28 million Americans have already voted, with a bit more than two weeks to Election Day. But is it actually getting late early for President Donald Trump? — Former Vice President Joe Biden's historic fundraising has allowed him to crush Trump on the airwaves, and embark on a national advertising campaign to reach a wide swath of voters. — Former President Barack Obama will soon hit the trail for Biden, with Democrats calling in their biggest gun two weeks out from the election. | | | | THIS WEEK - NEW EPISODES OF POLITICO'S GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS PODCAST : The world has long been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, but many of those issues exploded over the past year. Are world leaders and political actors up to the task of solving them? Is the private sector? Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, unpacks the roadblocks to smart policy decisions and examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. Subscribe now for Season Two, launching Oct. 21. | | | | | Good Monday morning. We had a special Sunday Score edition yesterday for Pro subscribers. Two stories we covered that I didn't want you to miss out on: Michigan's ballot-return deadline is now back to close of polls on Election Day, and the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over Trump's plan to block undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count next month. Email me at zmontellaro@politico.com and follow me on Twitter at @ZachMontellaro. Email the rest of the POLITICO Campaigns team at sshepard@politico.com; jarkin@politico.com, amutnick@politico.com and srodriguez@politico.com. Follow them on Twitter: @POLITICO_Steve; @JamesArkin, @allymutnick and @sabrod123. Days until the final presidential debate: 3 Days until the 2020 election: 15 | | | | A message from the ACLU: Two weeks. That's all we have left until the most consequential Election Day in America's history. The ACLU has been at the forefront of pushing back against discriminatory voter suppression tactics, but combating voter suppression is an all-hands-on-deck fight – we cannot do this critical work without action-takers like you with us. Click here to add your name and help ACLU teams across the country as we kick our fight against voter suppression into high gear. | | | | | | LATE, EARLY? — An absolutely astounding number of Americans have already voted: Just under 28 million across the country, according to data collected by University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, which amounts to 20 percent of the total 2016 turnout. Both in terms of raw number of voters and percentage of 2016 turnout, Texas is the leader. Nearly 3.9 million Texans have already cast their ballot, which would equal over 43 percent of the total turnout in 2016. Other crucial battleground states are also pacing ahead of the national average of 2016 turnout, with Georgia at 34.5 percent, North Carolina at 30.1 percent, Wisconsin at 28.9 percent, Michigan at 28.7 percent and Florida at 26.1 percent. To paraphrase a quote from legendary New York Mets manager Yogi Berra, it sure seems like it is getting late early out there for Trump, who has consistently trailed Biden by a sizable margin in national polling (and by a tighter, but still relatively stable, margin in crucial battleground states.) But is it actually? The normative case here is that, well, yes. This has been a remarkable stable race, and one that Biden has led. With tens of millions of Americans having already cast their vote, and maybe as many as 50 percent of Americans expected to do so before Election Day, Biden is locking in support now, and there just isn't enough time in the race for the president to turn it around, especially considering the deficit he faces. But, if there's a glimmer of hope for team red, it comes from who is actually voting early. CNN's Harry Enten makes the case that you shouldn't try to translate the historic early and mail voting numbers into what will actually be the results, because Biden supporters have disproportionately said they'd be voting ahead of Election Day in public polling, while Trump supporters have disproportionately said they'd vote in-person on Nov. 3. This has largely remained true in both national and swing state polls, but to that point: Last week's NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 69 percent of Biden backers said they'd either vote via the mail or at an early voting location, while 65 percent of Trump supporters said they planned on voting in-person on Election Day. (The poll also gave Biden a sizable lead overall.) | | | |   | | | | | | ON THE AIRWAVES — Biden's historic fundraising has allowed the campaign to push into expensive TV buys often out of reach for campaigns. "Of the $421 million Biden has spent and reserved on TV, a higher portion than usual for campaigns — 15 percent — is on nationwide cable and broadcast TV programs," POLITICO's Marc Caputo wrote. "Biden's national buys are seen as a key ingredient in making former swing states like Ohio and Iowa look like battlegrounds again. The campaign is advertising heavily on shows such as 'Wheel of Fortune' and 'Jeopardy!', which are popular among seniors, and older people especially are watching more TV during the pandemic." — Some more interesting TV stories: The Biden campaign is rushing NFL games with a series of ads, CNN's Dan Merica reported, traditionally an expensive buy. (One pro-tip to avoiding political ads during football season: Be a fan of the Jets like me, so you're under no obligation to watch games.) And as far as the content of said ads goes, here's an interesting stat from The New York Times' Nick Corasaniti, Weiyi Cai and Denise Lu : "Roughly 80 percent of the Trump campaign's ads have been either negative or what's called a contrast ad, a mix of criticism of the opponent and self-promotion. Of those, 62 percent were all-out attacks. For Mr. Biden, about 60 percent of campaign ads have been negative or contrast, with just 7 percent outright negative." (Their story also has interesting charts visualizing the ad spending disparity.) THE BIGGEST GUN — Biden has called in his biggest gun: The campaign announced on Friday that Obama would travel to Philadelphia on Wednesday for a campaign stop, but it hasn't announced any additional details. | 
J. Scott Applewhite - Pool/Getty Images | KNOWN UNKNOWNS — A note of caution for the general electorate (and a source of agony for Democrats) is the known unknowns in the election, POLITICO's David Siders writes . "There are more known unknowns than we've ever had at any point," Tom Bonier, CEO of the Democratic data firm TargetSmar, told Siderst. "The instruments we have to gauge this race, the polling, our predictive models … the problem is all those tools are built around quote-unquote normal elections. And this is anything but a normal election." THE CASH DASH — Biden's campaign isn't done raising money yet. A memo from campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, obtained by The New York Times' Katie Glueck and Shane Goldmacher, says the campaign is budgeting to raise an additional $234 million from supporters in the home stretch. — A big fundraising day for WinRed on Oct. 15, which was both the final day of Amy Coney Barrett's nomination hearing and Trump's NBC News town hall, processing $24 million in donations. THE PROCESS — After a couple of last minute failures of voter registration systems in both Florida and Virginia, how are officials feeling in states whose deadlines are rapidly approaching? POLITICO's Nolan McCaskill: "POLITICO reached out to elections offices in five states with registration deadlines in the next week — four battlegrounds and California. Two expressed confidence in their systems to withstand any surge, and one said the issue needed to be discussed internally before commenting publicly." — Pennsylvania rejected over 372,000 mail ballot applications, with the vast majority of them being duplicate applications. ProPublica's Ryan McCarthy and Derek Willis and The Philadelphia Inquirer's Jonathan Lai : "More than 90% of those applications, or about 336,000, were denied as duplicates, primarily because people who had requested mail-in ballots for the state's June 2 primary did not realize that they had checked a box to be sent ballots for the general election, too. Voters have also been baffled by unclear or inaccurate information on the state's ballot-tracking website, and by a wave of mail ballot applications from political parties and get-out-the-vote groups." (This story bounced around certain pro-Trump corners of the internet as the state rejected 372,000 ballots, which is untrue.) | | | | THE PLAY-BY-PLAY GUIDE TO CAPITOL HILL: With the Senate up for grabs, members of Congress are hitting the campaign trail in the final weeks of a historic election. How are the pivotal races playing out? Will control of the Senate flip? Keep up to speed on the people and politics of Capitol Hill with our Huddle newsletter, a play-by-play guide to all things Congress. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | | A LITTLE BREATHING ROOM — Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the number-two Senate Republican who is in a battle with Democrat MJ Hegar where he's seen as a narrow favorite, is trying to draw a distinction between himself and the president. "Cornyn initially described his relationship with Trump as 'maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they're going to change their spouse, and that doesn't usually work out very well,'" the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Gordon Dickson wrote. (Cornyn was interviewed by the paper's editorial board.) "'But when I have had differences of opinion, which I have, [I] do that privately,' Cornyn said. 'I have found that has allowed me to be much more effective, I believe, than to satisfy those who say I ought to call him out or get into a public fight with him.'" THE HOUSE BATTLEGROUND — Some local coverage of top battleground House races for your perusal. In SC-01, The Post and Courier's Thomas Novelley profiles the race between Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham and Republican Nancy Mace and focuses on both candidates' personal stories. The Arkansas Democrat Gazette's Frank Lockwood looks at the race between GOP Rep. French Hill and Democrat Joyce Elliott in AR-02, while The Charlotte Observer's Danielle Chemtob looks at the surprisingly competitive race between Republican Madison Cawthorn and Democrat Moe Davis, in a race in NC-11 that was once seen as solidly Republican. THANKS, BUT NO THANKS — To the extent you think that newspaper endorsements matter, a brutal non-endorsement in the North Carolina Senate race between GOP Sen. Thom Tillis and Democrat Cal Cunningham from the joint editorial board of the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. The board said it was prepared to back Cunnigham, because Tillis has let down the state, but cannot do so in light of how Cunningham has handled the response to his affair, saying he has "avoided questions" about his actions. "Cal Cunningham may win this U.S. Senate election, and that may be best for North Carolina," the board writes. "But the Editorial Board was unable to reach a consensus on recommending him." | | | | A message from the ACLU: This is the most dangerous time in the 2020 election season because we know that many politicians will stop at nothing to hold on to power – including doing everything they can in these final weeks to callously suppress the vote and force voters to choose between their health and their fundamental right to cast a ballot.
The ACLU has been at the forefront of pushing back against discriminatory voter suppression tactics, but in these final weeks we're all going to have to dig a little deeper to keep up the fight to protect our voting rights in this crucial election. The stakes could not be higher. We cannot do this critical work, or any work to defend civil liberties, without you with us. Click here to add your name and help ACLU teams across the country as we kick our fight against voter suppression into high gear. | | | FIRST IN SCORE — (INTERNAL) POLL POSITION — A new poll from Democratic Rep. Sean Maloney has him with a comfortable lead in NY-18 over his Republican challenge Chele Farley. The poll from Global Strategy Group has him at 53 percent to Farley's 35 percent, with Libertarian Party candidate Scott Smith at 5 percent (400 likely voters; Oct. 6-11; +/- 4.9 percentage point MOE). The district is an interesting one: Trump carried it by about 2 points in 2016 even while Maloney cruised to reelection. In the GSG poll, Biden leads Trump, 50 percent to 43 percent. POLITICO currently forecasts it as lean Democratic. THE DEBATE STAGE — Some weekend House debates: In NE-02 between GOP Rep. Don Bacon and Democrat Kara Eastman (from KETV); in PA-08 between Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright and Republican Jim Bognet (video from WVIA); In TX-32, Democratic Rep. Colin Allred and Republican Genevieve Collins (The Dallas Morning News' Gromer Jeffers Jr.). And there was a Senate debate in New Mexico between Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Luján and Republican Mark Ronchetti (video from New Mexico PBS). (Plus, a weekly link to Bloomberg Government's Greg Giroux invaluable spreadsheet tracking congressional debates.) FIRST IN SCORE — ENDORSEMENT CORNER — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is backing Rep. Mike Garcia in his bid for a full term in CA-25. CODA — QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Oh, no, there's none of that going on. I assure you. Oh, my gosh, no. Oh, no, not at all." Republican Jeanne Ives, who is running in IL-06, on if she was paying for positive coverage, after The New York Times reported she had paid companies owned by a man who runs pay-for-play local "news sites." | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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