YUGE: Trump Campaign’s Internal Numbers Explain Why Team Biden Is Freaking Out About Election Day.

“Election day is going to look like a Trump rally,” Nick Trainer, the campaign’s director of battleground strategy said on the press call.

“Democrat are really panicking because Joe Biden hasn’t run up a large enough lead” in absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in order to counter the expected Trump turnout on Election Day, Deputy Campaign Manager Justin Clark said. “They know that Trump’s margin on Election Day will make up the difference for victory.”

Therefore, Democrats are working to delegitimize the Election Day results as a “red mirage,” claiming that postal delays with mail-in ballots are giving a false impression of a Trump victory. “None of this will be true,” Clark argued.

Read the whole thing — and don’t get cocky.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Oakland pledged to cut its police budget in half. Then homicides surged.

Then a wave of gun violence engulfed the flatlands in East Oakland, home to the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Homicides spiked. Policymakers — and even the most devoted reformers — had to confront a paradox: that the Black and Latino neighborhoods most threatened by police violence are also the ones demanding better and more consistent law enforcement.

Task force members agreed that police brutality against Black and brown people is too common, that gun violence needs to end and that the city needs more services to address the underlying causes of crime. But while advocates wanted swift, dramatic change, others felt conflicted. In neighborhoods with high crime and slow police response times, Black residents winced at what sometimes felt like preaching from outsiders.

A poll released last week by the Chamber of Commerce showed that, citywide, 58% of residents want to either maintain or increase the size of the police force. That figure climbs to 75% in District 7, an area of East Oakland where gunfire exploded this summer.

Notably, the poll showed that support for increasing the size of the police force is higher among Black voters, at 38%, than white voters, at 27%.

It’s a “paradox!” San Francisco Chronicle columnists and Minneapolis City Council members must be shaking their heads at all of the white privilege in Oakland’s black and Latino neighborhoods.

LUCKILY FOR THE DEMS, THE PANDEMIC LET THEM GET THAT UNDER CONTROL BEFORE THE ELECTION: The Higher Wages of Growth: Before the pandemic, income growth soared and poverty fell to the lowest rate since 1959.

In case you missed it, and most of the media did, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the median household income in 2019 grew a whopping 6.8%—the largest annual increase on record. While this year’s government-ordered lockdowns will erase these gains in the short term at least, it’s still worth highlighting how lower-income workers and minorities benefited from faster growth and a tighter labor market before the pandemic.

Real median U.S. household income last year rose by $4,379 to $68,709. In dollar amounts, this is nearly 50% more than during the eight years of Barack Obama’s Presidency. The wealthy last year benefited from a roaring stock market, as they did during most of the Obama years.

But lower and middle-income folks were also finally sharing more in the country’s growing wealth. Notably, median household incomes increased more among Hispanics (7.1%), blacks (7.9%), Asians (10.6%) and foreign-born workers (8.5%) versus whites (5.7%) and native-born Americans (6.2%). One reason is more Americans with lower education levels were working.

But don’t worry. If Biden gets elected, they’ll make sure this never happens again.

I’M NOT SURE IF TRUMP CAN WIN WITHOUT IRAN’S ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES: Why Iran sees Biden as the “more promising” candidate in the U.S. election.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has indicated to CBS News that the Islamic Republic’s leadership would prefer Joe Biden win the U.S. election. It was a first for a country that has been reluctant to tip its hand.

Zarif first insisted that Iran‘s government has no preference between President Donald Trump or Biden, but pushed to respond, Zarif said that “the statements by the Biden camp have been more promising, but we will have to wait and see.”

He stressed, however, that it’s not what the new administration says during the campaign that counts, but what it does in office.

CTRL-F “Pallet” not found in the above CBS News article. Flashback: $400 million sent to Iran as U.S. prisoners released, raising questions.

The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

Also not mentioned at the first link:

Ben Rhodes, whose brother was the president of CBS News from 2011-2018, smiles.

QUESTION ASKED: Will America succumb to safetyism?

Some parts of it are already way ahead of the curve: Seattle students and workers given a ‘flex day’ to be sad if Trump wins.

DEVELOPING: Seven reported dead in suspected Vienna terror attack also said to target synagogue.

UPDATE: “Austria’s Krone Zeitung reports one of the attackers blowing up his suicide vest.”

(Updated and bumped.)

BIG, IF TRUE: Joe Biden: ‘I think we can win back the House!’

FROM 2016, BUT EVEN MORE TRUE TODAY: This Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism.. “This election has exposed as never before that there is indeed a media elite, bound together by class and geography, that is utterly clueless about its own biases and filters.”

CAN THE RIGHT WIN A 2020 ELECTION STREET FIGHT? Two of my former students are already in Wisconsin as part of a corps of volunteer lawyers for the Trump campaign.

And the RNC is no longer shackled by that old consent decree, as it has been in every past election cycle for decades.

DAVE FROM AT&T TECH-SUPPORT VOTING BIDEN: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris Got a Big Social Media Boost from Indian Troll Farms.

No word yet if it will help Biden recover from this infamous foot-in-mouth gaffe:

(Classical reference in headline.)

FINAL EDITION: Wargaming the Electoral College: Crunch Time.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Many Perils of the UK’s Return to Lockdown.

Related: Why have No. 10’s Covid forecasts changed so much?

When we printed the above chart, it looked bad enough. Now it looks tame by comparison of the new studies. And there’s no mention of ‘worst-case’ scenarios: these are billed only as ‘winter scenarios’. But who drew them up? What are the assumptions? And how robust are they? The leak this morning told us who did the modelling: Cambridge, Imperial, etc. Just as an Imperial study made the case for the first lockdown, these four studies make the case for the second. So they ought to be published, together with the assumptions behind them. It would help explain how we get from the data we’ve seen in recent weeks to the scenarios shown to us now, which suggest a tsunami.

I hope whoever is doing the modelling at the Imperial College is more focused on his job than his predecessor.

Flashback: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics. “It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us.”

NOT A CULT: At Reuters, ‘You are no longer my mother’: How the election is dividing American families.

When lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election, he cut her out of his life.

“He specifically told me, ‘You are no longer my mother, because you are voting for Trump’,” Gomez, 41, a personal care worker in Milwaukee, told Reuters. Their last conversation was so bitter that she is not sure they can reconcile, even if Trump loses his re-election bid.

As Mark Krikorian tweets, “If your politics ever lead you to utter the words ‘You are no longer my mother, because you are voting for Trump’, you need to change your approach to politics.” Of course, as Noah Blum suggests, “I’m sure he’s still on her health insurance.”

Further thoughts from Rod Dreher: Hating Your Mama Over Politics.

Smartphones were introduced in 2007; social media soon followed. Whenever I talk to middle school and high school teachers, I hear the same thing: there is nothing that competes with the power of social media to socialize young people (or rather, un-socialize them) — and it is tearing these kids up inside. 

That’s young people — but what about the elderly woman who leaves her husband because he voted for Trump? What’s her excuse? What about the man in his twenties to cuts his mother off because she voted for Trump? What about the middle-aged man who turns family members against each other by going to holiday gatherings and not shutting his big fat mouth about how the “Demonrats” are going to be the death of us all?

What do we do about a person like this?:

Bandy X. Lee isn’t some nobody. She is a Yale University psychiatrist and holder of a master’s of divinity degree from Yale. And she believes that Trump supporters can only be persuaded to abandon their support for the sitting President of the United States by having some immense trauma visited upon them, along the lines of the firebombing of Dresden.

How does someone come to believe that their countrymen need to be treated that way — need to see their cities leveled! — because of their politics? Again, I remind you: this isn’t some fringe nut, but a Yale-trained psychiatrist and religious thinker. This is the kind of elite figure who will usher in soft totalitarianism because she does not think her fellow Americans are simply wrong, but evil.

Interesting analogy – and possibly projection – coming from Lee (who’s certainly been redlining the Godwin Meter as of late) considering this week’s headlines: NYC businesses board up shops ahead of 2020 presidential election. “Meanwhile, shops in other cities across the US, including San Francisco, as well as in the nation’s capital, have also placed boards over their storefronts in anticipation of election-related chaos and turmoil. It was reported Monday that crews at the White House will build a ‘non-scalable’ fence around the entire complex ahead of the election.”

Earlier: CNN’s Don Lemon Brags About Abandoning His Friends for Disagreeing With Him.

Related: Media’s favorite ‘resistance’ mental health quack goes full Hitler apologist.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Polling Well Among Pentecostals After He Speaks In Tongues, America’s Newspaper of Record reports.

ON FIRE: Rubio Rallies Florida Latinos Against Socialism, Mocks Biden, Triggers AOC.

Are we witnessing the birth of Rubio 2.0?

I SHOULD LEARN OLD-FASHIONED ONE-HAND POINTING TECHNIQUE: Profile: Jelly Bryce—Oklahoma Gunfighter.

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Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

TYLER O’NEIL: Here’s How Google Can Shift 15 Million Votes Without Anyone Realizing It.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Is it Trump or Biden That Has an Anti-Semitism Problem?

A READER SENDS THIS: “Curious, is the FBI going to investigate Shut Down DC like they are investigating the Biden bus Trump crowd? Ha ha, just kidding.”

MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNOR ISSUES STAY-AT-HOME ADVISORY BETWEEN 10 P.M. AND 5 A.M. AS CORONAVIRUS CASES CLIMB.

SKYNET SMILES: This robotic hawk can shape-shift as it flies.

KAMALA HARRIS’S SOCIAL(IST) MEDIA: In campaign’s final hours, Dems release Twitter clip revealing Marxist vision for equality of outcome.

DON’T GET COCKY: If New Batch of Polls are Correct, Trump Will Soar Past 300 Electoral Votes.