We are entering the homestretch of the presidential election, and who is going to win is anybody's guess. Polling is no real help since it shows many battleground states either perfectly tied or within a point or two. Both candidates are out there campaigning hard, but neither has a clear edge over the other one. It's going to go right down to the wire, that's about the only thing which seems certain at this point.

But that's the sort of thing you've been getting sick of reading, right? Horserace reporting whose only focus is predicting the outcome of the race is rampant at the moment, which seems a little odd after the mainstream media had such a hissy fit over the supposed lack of policy debates between the candidates. Currently, both candidates are announcing new policies (mostly on taxes) almost daily, promising voters things which may or may not ever become reality. Just today Donald Trump promised he'd wave a magic wand and allow hurricane victims to completely write off the purchase of electrical generators, after earlier promising to make interest on car loans deductible as well. Earlier in the week, Kamala Harris promised to make Medicare cover at-home care for seniors, and her campaign put out a fact sheet saying she'd also support Medicare covering vision and hearing benefits -- something Bernie Sanders has been championing for a while.

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America is about to experience a second large hurricane in a short period of time. Florida is battening down in preparation. Hurricane Milton comes on the heels of Hurricane Helene, which devastated communities all across the South. Mountain towns in Georgia and North Carolina were hit particularly hard. But what is absolutely disgraceful in all of this is the storm of lies that has erupted over the recovery and aid efforts.

These lies are not being told by sketchy online characters or your all-too-credulous uncle. They are instead coming from the Republican Party's candidate for president, as well as far too many other Republican politicians. They don't care that hundreds of people have died. They don't care that tens of thousands are in dire straights. They don't care that their lies are making things worse for the survivors of the storm. All they care about is sowing fear and mistrust, in a cynical effort to score some cheap political points.

This is beyond disgraceful, it is downright dangerous. Donald Trump spouting conspiracy theories and outright lies is hampering the ability of FEMA and other disaster responders to do their jobs. Trump and his ilk are exploiting people's distrust of government to make them even more fearful of people who are genuinely just trying to help others.

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Looking at the presidential polling for the past two weeks, I am reminded of a famous line from Western movies (that has now become a total cliché): "It's quiet out there... too quiet."

Normally, by now I would have started writing one of these columns every week, but I decided not to do so last week because... well... nothing much was really happening in the polls. This week is largely the same, but I'm going to start posting these weekly anyway since we're only four weeks away from Election Day.

Things have barely budged in the past two weeks. In these charts, the lines are almost completely flat. There have been a few (very few) minor wiggles, but for the most part the important trendlines haven't budged in either direction. If the polls turn out to be right, this could wind up being yet another extremely close presidential election, hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in a few key states.

That's if the polling is correct, of course. Which it may not be. In the past two presidential elections, the pollsters have underestimated Donald Trump's support. What were supposed to be blowout elections for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden turned out instead to be nail-biters.

If the same thing happens this year, what is supposed to be a nail-biter could turn out to be an easy win for Trump. The margins are so close that if the polling is off by even two or three points in the crucial battleground states in his favor, then Trump could emerge victorious.

But the pollsters are keenly aware of what happened in the past two elections, and they've been diligently working to improve their forecasting models. This was made more difficult by the fact that the 2020 election was held in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, so nobody knows what effect that truly had on voter turnout -- but it's likely it was not insignificant. So none of the pollsters really know if their new-and-improved methodologies really reflect the reality on the ground or not.

In any case, let's look at the state-by-state polling, with data (as always) provided by the fantastic Electoral-Vote.com site. The first of our charts shows the distribution of Electoral College votes based on the current state-level polling. Donald Trump's share of the Electoral Votes (EV) is in red and runs from the top of the graph downwards. Kamala Harris's share of EV is in blue and runs from the bottom up. States that are perfectly tied are shown in white. Whichever color crosses the 50-percent line in the middle will win the election (if all the polling is perfectly correct, of course).

[Click on any of theses graphs to see larger-scale versions.]

This is, you will note, rather static. Nothing much changed.

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The Supreme Court began its new year today. This could wind up being the most consequential term for the high court since they decided Bush v. Gore. Because unless Donald Trump scores a clear win in November -- winning so many of the battleground states that challenging the result would be pointless -- we are likely to see the election results wind up before the Supreme Court in one way or another. Which will give them the power, once again, of determining who will be president for the next four years.

Right now this is all hypothetical, of course. But it could get very real very fast. The last time around, Trump filed over 60 court cases challenging the election results. The effort was led by a clown car full of lawyers, led by the likes of Rudy Giuliani (who has since been disbarred). This time could be different, though -- Trump may actually convince some lawyers with a wee bit more talent and a whole lot less craziness to lead his legal team.

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There were two major events in the presidential race this week, but we are left wondering if either one of them is going to make much of a difference one way or the other. Perhaps we're getting a bit jaded by it all....

The first was the one-and-only vice-presidential debate, held on CBS this Tuesday. Republican JD Vance faced off with Democrat Tim Walz, and it was watched by 43 million people as it aired. The second was the public release of a document prosecutor Jack Smith had previously filed with the court in Donald Trump's January 6th case. It laid out Smith's basic case, in great detail (165 pages' worth).

In a normal campaign season, either one of these would have been impactful, perhaps shifting the polling in significant ways. But in our hunkered-down tribalistic politics, the needle barely quivered. Maybe we're all getting a bit jaded?

There were two other rather large events that could affect politics this week: the massive damage Hurricane Helene did -- especially in the Appalachian Mountain region -- and an East Coast dockworkers' strike. The first shouldn't really have been political, and the second was over almost before anyone was aware it was happening.

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The makeup of next year's incoming Senate is anybody's guess, at this point. Republicans could wind up winning control, Democrats could wind up maintaining their control, and it all might come down to who wins the White House (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie for control). From the way things look, there are a handful of states which will determine who winds up with a majority.

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After what were arguably the two most consequential presidential debates since at least the Nixon-Kennedy debate (which launched the era of televised debates), last night's vice-presidential debate was pretty... well, normal. It harkened back to the age before Donald Trump entered the political scene, when two candidates would debate political issues without getting overly vicious or personal in their attacks, in the hopes of presenting themselves to the public as acceptable leaders of the country. That was really the striking takeaway from last night -- a return to normalcy, in the midst of yet another Trumpian rollercoaster of a presidential campaign. In fact, this normalcy stuck out as completely abnormal to the bizarre political landscape Trump has dragged us all into for the past nine years.

There was no playground-bully name-calling. Instead of viciousness, the dominating vibe was affability. It was all very Midwestern. Neither candidate pressed the attack on the other in a "go for the jugular" sort of way. They ignored opportunities to get the other candidate on the ropes, in favor of appearing to strive for bipartisan agreement. As I mentioned, this was all very weird, since it was so jarringly different from the entire rest of the campaign so far.

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While waiting for tonight's vice-presidential debate I find myself reflecting on a question I've been occasionally wondering about over the past few years: what will a post-Trump Republican Party look like? We'll all be seeing one possibility tonight, as JD Vance takes the stage to debate Tim Walz. Because whether Donald Trump wins or loses the presidential race this time around, Vance seems poised to perhaps move into a sort of "MAGA heir apparent" role within his party. After all, Trump picked him to put on the ticket, which is more than anyone else can say (other than Mike Pence, of course, but the less said about him the better). But he'll likely have some challengers for the mantle of party leader once Trump somehow exits the scene.

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Tomorrow night might be the last big television event of the 2024 presidential race. JD Vance and Tim Walz will debate each other, and since Donald Trump is so far resisting the idea of having a third presidential debate, this may be it for face-to-face encounters between the two campaigns. So I found myself wondering what I would ask the two candidates, if I had the chance.

Vice-presidential debates are interesting mostly because: (1) they never amount to much, in terms of having an impact on the voters, but also: (2) it is a showdown between the two "attack dogs" (the traditional role of vice-presidential candidates). So sparks do occasionally fly, even if few voters wind up changing their minds.

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Donald Trump got his start in politics by infamously pushing the "birtherism" lie about Barack Obama. Now he's pushing what might be called a "burgerism" lie about Kamala Harris -- that she somehow just made up the fact that she worked at McDonald's back when she was a student. It's all a measure of the desperation Trump finds himself now wallowing in, since to date none of his attacks against Harris have even come close to landing.

If you are thinking to yourself how monumentally stupid this all is, you are not alone. It is so monumentally stupid that it's not even worth going down the twisted rabbit hole Trump and his minions followed to come up with the lie, in fact. Suffice it to say they are grasping at straws... milkshake straws, perhaps?

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