What to expect in the next two weeks

As the days wind down to November 3, people who are following this election closely can be excused for getting more tense. In general, opinion polls tend to tighten as election day approaches. The media likes an exciting race so they will greatly highlight any new poll result that shows the underdog gaining ground and the gap closing. For the campaigns, they have to strike a delicate balance between warning their supporters against the danger of complacency with being too alarmist so that their supporters get depressed and think it is hopeless and decide it is not worth voting.
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Denying science can kill you

The US has long had a strain of anti-intellectualism, with some viewing science and expertise with suspicion and as somehow of less value than ‘common sense’ or folklore or one’s own intuition or what your friends tell you or what you read on social media. That attitude can kill as Derek Thompson writes in his examination about why some countries have managed to keep death rates from covid-19 low.
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Early voting patterns

For those political junkies who love data, this website maintains updated totals of early voting state by state, along with weekly analyses of the trends. As of today, over 35 million people have voted early. (I dropped mine in the ballot box in my local city hall yesterday.) To get a sense of scale, this is about 25% of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 election, which was about 138,800,000.
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Trump tone it down? That’s wishful thinking

The debate organizers have made a rule change for the second debate on Thursday between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that includes mute buttons.

When Trump and Biden face off on Thursday for a final televised debate, each candidate will have their microphones cut off while the other is delivering responses to questions.

During the 90-min debate, each candidate will have two minutes of uninterrupted time to respond to questions before they move on to open debate. The rule change from the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) comes after a chaotic first debate during which the presidential conductors spoke over each other, and Trump, especially, interrupted his opponent.

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Bolivia’s return to democracy

Just a year after Evo Morales was forced into exile after he won Bolivia’s presidential election and was replaced by a US-backed puppet, his party and its candidate Luis Arce who served as his economy minister, has won an overwhelming victory in the election, gaining over 50% of the vote and thus winning outright, negating the need for a run-off.

A quick count suggests socialist candidate Luis Arce of the Mas party is set to win Bolivia’s presidential election in the first round.

The second-placed candidate, Carlos Mesa, has conceded defeat and called Mr Arce’s 20-percentage-point lead in the quick-count “unassailable”.
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Sunday’s vote was a re-run of the 2019 election, in which incumbent Evo Morales was declared the winner.

The 2019 vote was followed by mass protests triggered by allegations that Mr Morales’s victory had been rigged.

Following calls from the chiefs of the police and the army for him to resign, Mr Morales went into exile and Senator Jeanine Áñez was sworn in as interim president.

Ms Áñez said a re-run of the election would be held as soon as it was feasible, but amid the coronavirus pandemic the vote was postponed twice before it was finally held on Sunday.

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Film review: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Last Friday, Netflix released the film The Trial of the Chicago 7 and I immediately watched it. For those who are not familiar with the true events that it depicts, this was the infamous trial held in Chicago in 1969 in which eight people (yes, eight initially but it got reduced to seven midway) were accused of conspiracy and inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic Party convention in that city in August 1968. (You can read about the event here.)

That convention was a shambles. Due to the intense opposition to the Vietnam war, president Lyndon Johnson had decided not to seek re-election and the party establishment had decided to force through vice-president Hubert Humphrey as the nominee although he was widely seen as complicit in prosecuting the unpopular war. It was also the year in which Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert K. Kennedy had been murdered, the latter just three days after he had won the California Democratic primary, dashing the hopes that Humphrey would not get the nomination. There were riots all over the country.
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Sadly, this satirical prediction made may well come true

Observers have been warning that given the unprecedented nature of this year’s election with the large numbers of people voting using mail-in ballots instead of in person on election day, previous methods of projecting results are no longer valid and should not be used even if that means the results will not be known until days later instead of on election night.

The media are on course aware of this problem but as this piece from The Onion suggests, they may not be able to withstand the pressure to call the result if they think that another network might be on the verge of doing so. In the media business where ratings is everything, the desire to be first can, sadly, overpower the desire to be right.
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We should not normalize this election

It seems clear that the TV network NBC’s decision on Wednesday to schedule a Trump town hall on Thursday at the same time as the previously scheduled town hall that Joe Biden was having on ABC (which itself was a replacement for the debate that Trump refused to take part in) was due to them caving in to the demand by Trump that it be at the same time. Trump must have been sure that he would get higher ratings than Biden and thus could gloat about it because for him, ratings are everything. But that strategy proved to be a bust because not only was his performance panned, what must have really stung was that the Biden show got better ratings than the Trump show.
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How the CDC was subverted by Trump

ProPublica has another explosive report, this time about how the Centers for Disease Control, once highly admired all around the world for the skill and expertise of its scientists in dealing with global health problems, has become a shadow of its former self, with career scientists dismayed at how the Trump administration has undermined and belittled its efforts. The feckless leadership of Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee, has been ineffective in defending its institutional honor. ProPublica bases its article on internal emails and reports and interviews with CDC officials.
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