So now, Trump is congratulating himself on getting COVID-19 and quickly beating it…and suggesting anyone can do what he did. This might be his new low in presuming total stupidity on the part of the voters. Or maybe it's just his knee-jerk reaction to any kind of negative news to either claim it's fake (which he couldn't very well do after being checked into Walter Reed Hospital) or say, "I meant to do that and I was wildly successful as I always am." One of these days, he's going to trip, fall flat on his face and insist it was all part of his brilliant plan.
Every presidential election, I pick out one of the many Electoral Vote Aggregators to watch and track which states are swinging which way. Last time, I used Nate Silver's 538 which called the election pretty well if you understood that an 80% chance of Hillary winning did not mean a 0% chance of Donald winning.
This year, Mr. Silver has fancied up his site with bells and whistles and I find it awkward to get to the info I want to see so I'm consulting this section over at The Economist. At this moment it says there — I'm cutting and pasting this — "Right now, our model thinks Joe Biden is very likely to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college."
States to watch: They give Biden a 65% chance of winning Arizona, a 70% chance of winning Florida and an 88% chance of winning Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump will have a hard time getting to 270 without all three of those states. Biden, on the other hand, might be able to lose all three and still win.
Lastly for now: This kind of stuff is really silly…
The commission organizing general election debates will allow Mike Pence to participate without plexiglass barriers around him at Wednesday's contest after the vice president's team objected to their planned use, a member of the debate commission tells CNN. But Kamala Harris and the debate moderator will be allowed to erect barriers separating them from the vice president.
In 1960, when it took some technical expertise to make it happen, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon did one of the presidential debates with Kennedy debating from New York, Nixon debating from California and the moderator moderating from Chicago. Today, almost every one of us could set that up with our cellphones and a decent WI-FI connection but still, someone wants to get the combatants into the same studio for no real reason.
Biden should say he will gladly participate in the next two debates as long as the two of them are in separate locations. Trump would no doubt object because (a) he doesn't want to give in to anything Biden wants as a show of macho and (b) he figures to have a better chance of rattling Biden if he can scream directly at him. He might also be afraid of being in a situation where his microphone could cut out. But Biden's way ahead. He doesn't need the debates and frankly, if Trump were to debate an empty podium, he'd lose even worse than he did last time.