Sen. Loeffler under fire in free-for-all Georgia Senate special election debate
Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins both accused the other of lying and touted their own conservative credentials in their first debate, while Democrat Raphael Warnock assailed Loeffler for associating herself with a congressional candidate who has embraced baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and made racist remarks.
Tense exchanges flew in all directions Monday afternoon, as six top candidates in the crowded special election for the U.S. Senate seat Loeffler was appointed to 10 months ago sparred over President Trump’s coronavirus response, the Black Lives Matter movement, support for police and economic recovery.
Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman, was appointed in part by Gov. Brian Kemp last year to help Republicans in Georgia appeal to moderate suburban voters. But since then she has been running to the far right while trying to fend off the challenge from Collins, one of Trump’s most visible defenders in the U.S. House.
Some states count ballots if voter dies before Election Day
Questions over whether ballots will count if someone votes early but dies before Election Day are especially pressing this year, amid a coronavirus outbreak that has been especially perilous for older Americans.
People 85 years and older represent nearly one in three deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. As an election looms, the odds against older people who contract the virus are on the minds of the elderly and their family members.
Seventeen states prohibit counting ballots cast by someone who subsequently dies before the election, but 10 states specifically allow it. The law is silent in the rest of the country, according to research by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Biden leads Trump in new national poll
Biden top Trump by 9 percentage points, according to a new national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College released Tuesday.
The poll found 50 percent support Biden while 41 percent back Trump. The survey also found that voters prefer Biden over Trump to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and trust him to unite the country, to choose Supreme Court nominees and to maintain law and order.
The survey’s margin of error is +/-3.4 percentage points.
And see the NBC News national polling average in the presidential race here.
Former RNC chair Michael Steele endorses Biden
Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has endorsed Joe Biden, the first such endorsement of a Democratic presidential nominee in the modern era.
Steele was elected party chairman in 2009 as the GOP sought to regroup from President Barack Obama¹s historic victory in 2008 and he presided over the RNC as it marshaled tea party opposition to the Obama-Biden administration to make significant gains in Congress and across the country in the 2010 midterms.
A former lieutenant governor of Maryland, Steele lost a 2006 bid for U.S. Senate in the heavily-Democratic state. He has become an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, serving as a senior adviser of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC. But until Tuesday morning he had not officially endorsed Biden.
His backing comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make inroads among African American voters, especially younger Black men who have tended to support Biden in lower numbers than other age groups.
Because of his role with the Lincoln Project, it’s unlikely Steele would play a direct role in Biden’s campaign or act as a surrogate. But he informed Biden campaign of his plans to publicly support him.
Experts warn of election disinformation aimed at Black and Latino voters
Biden, Trump in dead heat in North Carolina, poll finds
Biden and Trump are in a dead-heat in North Carolina, according to a ABC News/Washington Post poll in the battleground state released Tuesday.
The survey found 49 percent of likely voters back Biden while 48 percent said they support Trump. The competitive Senate race between incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis and Democrat Cal Cunningham is also close, with 49 percent for Cunningham and 47 percent backing Tillis.
The NC poll has a margin of error of +/-4.5 percentage points.
And here’s the latest from the NBC News national polling average in the presidential race.
Scenes from a MAGA
‘A Republican bloodbath’: GOP senators fear painful Trump defeat
Republican senators are increasingly voicing fears that Trump could lose the election, and some are openly fretting that he’ll turn the party’s candidates into electoral roadkill, distancing themselves from him to an unusual extent.
A weekend of agonizing from Republicans did not yield any perceivable course correction from Trump as he continued his inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail and directed some of his fire right back at anxious GOP senators on Twitter.
Trump and Biden will have mics cut during opponent’s answers in final debate
Trump and Biden will have their microphones cut off during Thursday’s final presidential debate while their opponent delivers initial two-minute answers to each debate topic, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Monday.
Trump and Biden’s only previous debate last month was marred by frequent interruptions from Trump, leading to calls for the debate moderator to have the ability to cut off each candidate’s microphone while their opponent spoke.
Trump ramps up rally strategy that may come with more risk than reward
In Trump’s favored narrative of how elections are won and lost, the candidate who holds the most events with the biggest crowds wins.
“He goes out, he gets no people at any of the rallies,” Trump said of Biden at a Sunday campaign event in Nevada. “I go out, we get 35,000. 40,000, 25,000, 15,000. We go boom, 15,000, we get the biggest crowds in the history of politics…We get these massive crowds, he gets nobody and then they say we are tied.”
Now, with two weeks to go, he heads into the final stretch of the race relying heavily on his rallies to change the dynamic of the contest — a risky strategy for a persistently unpopular candidate, and one that has failed to demonstrate success in moving voters into his column.
