Health News at Your Fingertips

The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports:

Black Americans could decide the 2020 presidential election, particularly in key battleground states like Wisconsin and Florida. The battle for the White House approaches as Black Americans face the brunt of an unprecedented national crisis – one in 1,000 have died of the virus and African Americans are twice as likely to have lost a job.

Joe Biden’s road to the White House could hang on Democrats’ ability to turn out their most loyal bloc.

Although they have maintained a sizable advantage among African Americans over Republicans counterparts for decades, support for Democrats has slowly declined since the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency. That complicates Democratic efforts to court these 30 million eligible voters ahead of 3 November.

African Americans are often depicted as a single, unified bloc, and many analysts warn Democrats that therein lies the problem. As experts debunk the myth of the Black voter monolith, the path to victory may be dependent on Democrats’ ability to speak to Black voters’ diversity.

Here are factors that will shape Black voting turnout on election day, and their political power well beyond:

Trump suggested he wanted courts to stop states from counting votes after election day, even though the tabulation of ballots is often a days-long process for election officials.

“We’ll see what happens at the end of [election day],” Trump said at his press conference in Las Vegas this afternoon.

“Hopefully it won’t go longer than that. Hopefully the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3rd to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts,” the president added.

In reality, states officially have until December 8 (known as the “safe harbor” deadline) to tabulate their final election results.

Several polls of battleground states were just released, so the blog is going to sum them up.

First up is Georgia, where Biden has pulled slightly ahead of Trump, according to Monmouth University.

A new Monmouth poll found that Biden has a 5-point advantage over Trump among Georgia’s registered voters, 50%-45%. Biden’s lead among the state’s likely voters shrinks to between 2 and 4 points, depending on the level of turnout, which means Biden’s likely voter lead is within the poll’s margin of error.

Trump won Georgia by 5 points in 2016, and the president almost certainly must win the state again in order to secure a second term.

Two other polls also showed Biden leading in the Midwestern battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan, both of which Trump won by less than 1 point in 2016.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Biden leads Trump by 8 points among likely voters in Michigan, 49%-41%.

A new Marquette Law School poll also found Biden has a 5-point advantage among likely voters in Wisconsin, 48%-43%. That is a very different result from the Washington Post-ABC News poll of Wisconsin released this morning, which showed Trump trailing Biden by 17 points among likely voters in the state, 57%-40%.

Reminder: we are just six days from election day.

Trump predicted he would “over-perform” on election day, as polls show him trailing nationally and in key battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“I’m calling it a ‘great red wave,’ and I think you’re going to see something that’s going to be amazing,” Trump said at his press conference in Las Vegas.

“I think on Tuesday, we’re going to over-perform,” the president added.

FiveThirtyEight currently gives Trump a 12% chance of winning reelection, and the president is trailing Biden in national polls by an average of about 9 points.

Trump is now holding a press conference at his Las Vegas hotel, before he heads to Arizona for two campaign rallies today.

The president used the unexpected press conference to spotlight endorsements from several Nevada business groups, such as the Nevada Trucking Association and the Retail Association of Nevada.

Trump also took the opportunity to dispute a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that showed him trailing Biden by 17 points among likely voters in Wisconsin, 57%-40%.

The president claimed he had an internal poll showing him leading by 1 point in Wisconsin. The FiveThirtyEight polling average of Wisconsin shows Biden up by about 8 points.

Joe Biden and Barack Obama will campaign together in the swing state of Michigan on Saturday, just three days before election day.

“On Saturday, October 31, President Obama will join Joe Biden in Michigan to discuss bringing Americans together to address the crises facing the country and win the battle for the soul of the nation,” the Biden campaign said in a press release.

Obama has been hitting the campaign trail for his former running mate in recent days, holding a drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida, yesterday.

Addressing the Orlando crowd, Obama once again sharply criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying, “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

Joe and Jill Biden voted early by appointment in Delaware, becoming two of the more than 74 million Americans who have already cast their ballots in the election.

Sporting an “I Voted” sticker on his jacket, the Democratic nominee briefly spoke to reporters at the polling station after casting his ballot.

Biden briefly addressed the unrest in Philadelphia over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr, defending demonstrators’ right to protest but saying, “There is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence.”

Biden has concluded his remarks on the coronavirus pandemic and the Affordable Care Act in Wilmington.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• Biden emphasized the coronavirus pandemic would not come to an immediate end if he wins the presidency. “Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” the Democratic nominee said. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”
• The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before the Senate on Section 230, a federal law that provides liability protections to internet companies. The hearing comes as Republicans have accused social media platforms of censorship, allegations that the CEOs have ardently denied.
• Trump once again complained about the extensive news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed more than 226,000 American lives. “Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media,” the president said in a tweet this morning. Campaigning for Biden in Florida yesterday, Barack Obama accused Trump of being “jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Biden issued a warning about the potentially disastrous consequences of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, as the Trump administration has called for.

Speaking in Wilmington, Biden again noted that scrapping the ACA could force Americans to pay for the coronavirus vaccine once it becomes available.

But Biden emphasized the pandemic would not come to an immediate end if he is elected president.

“Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” Biden said. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”

Joe Biden is now delivering a speech on the coronavirus pandemic and the Affordable Care Act in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Democratic nominee once again urged Americans to wear face masks to limit the spread of coronavirus.

“This is not political, it’s patriotic, wearing a mask. Wear one, period,” Biden said.

The presidential candidate received a briefing from his public health advisers earlier today, and he and his wife, Jill Biden, plan to cast their ballots in Delaware after the speech.

Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly bragged in April about Trump having cut health experts out of conversations about the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

CNN reports:

In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was ‘getting the country back from the doctors’ in what he called a ‘negotiated settlement.’ Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the ‘panic phase’ and ‘pain phase’ of the pandemic and that the country was at the ‘beginning of the comeback phase.’

‘That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,’ Kushner said. ‘Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.’

About a week after after that interview, Trump infamously suggested Americans could protect themselves from coronavirus by ingesting disinfectants, a dangerous recommendation that was not backed up by any science.

And since Kushner made those comments to Woodward in April, nearly 200,000 additional Americans have died of coronavirus.

Senator Marco Rubio sent a warning about disinformation attacks in the days immediately before and after election day.

“WARNING[:] The bulk of disinformation attacks prepared by our adversaries were designed for the days before & just after Election Day … They may come faster than they can be spotted & called out,so word to the wise,the more outlandish the claim,the likelier it’s foreign influence,” the Florida Republican said in a tweet.

Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, issued a joint statement with Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the panel, last week after the director of national intelligence announced Russia and Iran had gained access to US voter registration data.

The two senators said in the statement, “Republicans and Democrats are united when we say that continued attempts to sow dissent, cast doubt on election results, or disrupt our election systems and infrastructure will necessitate a severe response.”

Hillary Clinton said she will be one of the electors for Joe Biden in her home state of New York.

“I’m pretty sure I’ll get to vote for Joe and Kamala in New York, so that’s pretty exciting,” Clinton told SiriusXM. “I can’t wait.”

The former presidential nominee said she had not yet had the chance to vote because lines at polling stations have been so long in New York.

“So I’m waiting for either a break in the line so I can vote early, or I’ll just take a bag lunch and go stand in line to vote on election day, depending upon what I can get done,” Clinton said.

Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, said she does not allow herself to think about the possibility of him being reelected.

“I cannot imagine that he would be reelected after the damage that’s he caused, and I can’t imagine four more years of this abuse and destruction,” Clinton said. “So no, I don’t think about it. I refuse to.”