| | |  | BY CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO | Presented by The National Council on Election Integrity | With help from Renuka Rayasam DO-OVER — In public, aides to President Donald Trump hailed his “dominating” performance over what they described as a rickety Joe Biden in the first presidential debate. Privately, they acknowledge that voters saw it quite differently. Biden’s average lead in national polls grew to 10 percent from 6 percent in the two weeks after the debate, and to 5 percent from 3.5 percent across six key battleground states tracked by Real Clear Politics. Trump’s post-debate slide has spawned a broad consensus that he dial it way back during tonight’s debate in Nashville. Allow Biden to stagger and stay out of his way, goes this line of thinking. “Let Joe Biden talk,” the sports pundit Jason Whitlock advised Trump during a Wednesday interview. “He’ll do the work for you.” But if Trump does that, he’ll lose again, according to the collective wisdom of about a half-dozen Republican wiseguys and gals whom I spoke with this week — an appraisal that members of Trump’s campaign privately agreed with. So how can Trump win tonight? Biden has demonstrated in dozens of televised town hall forums and primary debates that he can deliver serviceable performances that connect with the public. Tonight, Biden is expected to again try to appeal directly to Americans, looking into the camera and reminding them of the litany of Trump’s failures and his own plans to address them, advisers said. Biden won’t try to “debate” Trump in the traditional sense, which he knows isn’t really possible. What can Trump do, especially with a microphone that’s sometimes muted while Biden speaks? Trump needs to apply controlled pressure to draw him in, the sources argued. In Cleveland, Trump was boorish and petty, deploying frustrated zingers that questioned Biden’s smarts and mental acuity while whiffing at headline-making gimmies, including refusing to condemn a white hate group and failing to urge calm and deter violence around the election. In Nashville tonight, Trump needs to focus more on the issues and less on Biden personally. Republicans want Trump to try to tie the former vice president up on taxes and environmental policies such as fracking and the Green New Deal. Trump’s anticipated criticism of Biden’s son, Hunter, and his alleged business dealings should be part of a broader effort to yoke the former vice president to Washington corruption and self-dealing rather than fixating on personal matters like addiction, they say. Seemingly random figures Trump tends to throw out lose their effectiveness without context. “Biden gets angry when confronted with his flip flops or his family,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who worked for President George W. Bush and is close to the Trump White House. “But Trump has to come prepared with the facts on it all to prosecute the case.” Given Trump’s aversion to debate prep, it’s difficult to imagine him putting it together in the way his supporters want him to. But there’s already a model he could follow, Republicans said. “Put Pence’s performance on a loop and use it for debate prep,” Jennings said. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out at ccadelago@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @ccadelago and @renurayasam.
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| | A message from The National Council on Election Integrity: The National Council on Election Integrity, a bipartisan group of political, government, and civic leaders, was formed to ensure that every American’s vote is counted this November. Stand with the council and demand every vote be counted: take the pledge at CountEveryVote.org. | | | | 
A worker cleans newly installed plexiglass shields on the debate stage inside the Curb Event Center ahead of the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville. The debate commission later removed the plexiglass barriers after consulting their medical advisers. | Getty Images | | | FINAL ROUND — POLITICO will have all your news and analysis before, during and after the debate. For starters: — Biden’s plan to study changes to the judiciary might get him through tonight’s debate or the election, but just about no one seems thrilled with it, writes Burgess Everett. The former vice president’s proposal to create a 180-day commission falls far short of the left’s dreams of adding seats to the Supreme Court. And Republicans continued to allege that Biden will pack the court and is being disingenuous about his real intentions. — Tonight’s presidential debate will have an entire section devoted to climate, a long-neglected issue in American politics that has become an urgent issue in 2020, writes Michael Grunwald. And Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who wasn’t the first choice or even a top choice of most climate activists, seems to have figured out how to make it a winning issue . Biden has emphasized his support for very popular things, like climate science and clean energy, emphasized his opposition to controversial things, like the “Green New Deal” and a fracking ban, and avoided mentioning the parts of his climate policy that could become controversial if people actually knew about them. — Trump has made clear he’s coming after Hunter Biden at tonight’s debate for allegedly profiting off his father’s position. The president and his allies are touting a set of purloined documents to accuse his Democratic opponent of corruption, write Kyle Cheney, Natasha Bertrand and Andrew Desidero. And Joe Biden would seem to have an easy comeback to Trump: Look at what your own kids have done since you became president, writes Natasha Korecki. — As October draws to a close, political junkies are waiting for the traditional October surprise. But, with the maelstrom of news that has been 2020, are October surprises a thing of the past? A cast of all-star POLITICO editors and reporters dives into the history of the late-election events and explains why this year may be different.
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| | HELP BUILD SOLUTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL HEALTH: POLITICO is a proud partner of the ninth annual Meridian Summit, focused on The Rise of Global Health Diplomacy. The virtual Meridian Summit will engage a global audience and the sharpest minds in diplomacy, business, government and beyond to build a more equitable economic recovery and save more lives. Join the conversation to help secure the future of our global health. | | | | | | | SECRETARY SANDERS? Sen. Bernie Sanders is hoping to be a part of Biden’s potential administration and has expressed a particular interest in becoming Labor secretary, two people familiar with the conversations tell Alice Miranda Ollstein, Megan Cassella and Holly Otterbein. “I can confirm he’s trying to figure out how to land that role or something like it,” said one person close to the Vermont senator. “He, personally, does have an interest in it.” Sanders on Wednesday declined to confirm or deny that he’s putting his name forward for the position. “Right now I am focused on seeing that Biden is elected president,” he told POLITICO. “That’s what my main focus is.” Former Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said Sanders has not talked directly with anyone on the Biden campaign about a future role, but plans to push Biden, his former Senate colleague, to “include progressive voices” in both the transition and in a potential new administration. Yet two other people close to Sanders, including one former aide, said the senator has expressed interest in being in the administration, should Biden win in November. Sanders has been making his push for the top job at the Labor Department in part by reaching out to allies on the transition team, one person familiar with the process said. Want more on the presidential transition? Transition Playbook, which launched today, will track the appointments, the people and the power centers of the next administration. Sign up today and read their first edition.
| | BEYOND THE WATER’S EDGE — The Trump campaign wanted tonight’s debate to focus exclusively on foreign policy. Instead the debate moderator, NBC News Kristen Welker, selected six topics, including national security but also climate change and Covid-19, for discussion by the candidates. If the two men were to talk for 90 minutes about foreign policy, some clear differences would emerge, POLITICO’s foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi told Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam over Slack today. Biden would talk about restoring international alliances and America’s leadership while Trump would argue that he’s stopped the U.S. from being ripped off by allies. Both would keep fact checkers busy. Nahal talked about whether Biden’s foreign policy would differ markedly from Trump and whether a Republican would be in the running for Biden’s secretary of state. This conversation has been edited. In reality, just how different would Biden’s foreign policy be from Trump’s? Biden genuinely is more keen on the need to be nicer to U.S. allies and to work with them to tackle important global challenges. He’s also more determined — or at least he says he is — to promote democracy and human rights than Trump. Those things really do separate the two. Trump views foreign policy on a much more transactional basis: “I got this for that.” But that being said, the two men have similarities on foreign policy, especially now that Biden is more attuned to what progressives in the Democratic Party want. He’s more skeptical of trade deals than he once was. Both will use tough language on how to deal with China. How will Biden bridge the divide between progressives and centrists? I wrote a whole magazine story about it. Progressives — and I’m talking about people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — say they would keep a President Biden on his toes. They’ve already been giving him names of people he should hire and ones he shouldn’t. If you look at Biden’s foreign policy platform and the Democratic Party platform, you can see that progressives have had a lot of impact. For example, Biden puts a lot of emphasis on economic issues in his foreign policy platform. He also wants an end to “endless wars.” Do you know where Biden’s first foreign trip would be? And the first leader he would invite to the White House? It’s fun to speculate. My guess is: His first phone call would be to Mexico; his first trip would be to Canada, and pretty quickly after that to Germany & the U.K. And the first leader he’d invite to the White House? New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. But as far as I know, the Biden team hasn’t settled on anything for these yet. Any thoughts on who would staff his cabinet or ambassadorships? Could we see Mitt Romney as secretary of state? My guess is Biden would draw from a pool that includes some of his former Democratic presidential primary competitors, including Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, for cabinet posts. On ambassadorships, he would probably try to give more to career foreign service officers than Trump did, but also maybe a retired senator or some other big name here and there. No Republicans? I don’t think he’ll put a Republican in the Cabinet. But ambassadorships, maybe. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM — European nations are shutting down. Countries in Asia are tentatively resuming normal life after taking swift action at the start of the pandemic. The U.S.? That’s a different story. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporters Carmen Paun and Dan Diamond break down the state of Covid across the globe.
| | OBSERVE AND REPORT — The first 2020 U.S. election report by international observers makes for sober reading, Ryan Heath emails us. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — which has 47 member countries including the U.S. — has deployed 30 experts around the U.S. to monitor all aspects of the election through October. While that’s well short of the 500 the organization hoped to bring (thanks Covid-19!), they’ll be joined by another 100 members of Parliament for the week of Election Day, Nov. 3. Among the report’s observations: Around 9.8 million Americans citizens can’t vote for their representatives. “Citizens resident in the District of Columbia and in U.S. territories are not fully represented in the Congress,” the report notes. “Some 5.2 million citizens, about half of whom have served their sentences, are disenfranchised due to criminal convictions. These restrictions disproportionally affect racial minorities.” In addition, “campaign expenditure is unrestrained” — thanks to court decisions and lack of a Federal Election Commission quorum — and will total around $11 billion. OSCE concluded that although America’s news media is “highly polarized,” the country’s 1,758 television stations, 15,460 radio stations and 1,300 news print publications help us wade through rising misinformation.
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| | | | | RAW FOOTAGE — Trump released video footage today of the tense interviews he and Vice President Mike Pence had separately with “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, including a particularly combative exchange in which Stahl accuses both men of having “insulted” her and the news program.
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| | GLOBAL PULSE, GLOBAL PURPOSE: At a high-stakes moment when global health has become a household concern, it is pivotal to keep up with the politics and policy driving change. Global Pulse connects leaders, policymakers and advocates to the people and politics driving global health. Join the conversation and subscribe today for this new weekly newsletter. | | | | | | | RED VIRUS, BLUE VIRUS — Through the lens of the presidential election, May’s initial spike in U.S. coronavirus cases took place predominantly in solid-blue and Democratic-leaning states, while states currently considered tossups led summer’s record number of new Covid-19 cases. October’s surge in cases, however, seems to be shared almost equally by all states.
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Patterson Clark | POLITICO | | | | |
50-50 The probability, according to a source familiar with the exchange who was not permitted to speak on the record, Trump gave Gov. Gavin Newsom last month in California that climate change had a significant role in driving historic wildfires, moments after casting doubt on whether that was the case. (h/t Jeremy B. White) |
| | | A TRANSLATOR’S NIGHTMARE — If the last debate between Trump and Biden was a mess and at times tough to follow in English, just picture it in Spanish, Sabrina Rodriguez emails us. The interjections, the speaking over one another, the half-sentences: That’s what Telemundo’s interpreters had to translate in real-time for the Spanish-language news service’s more than 6 million debate viewers. Now, Telemundo executives and interpreters are gearing up for what they expect to be another unpredictable night. Telemundo executives say it’s a huge challenge to follow Trump in real-time and accurately convey his tone to viewers. “Trump doesn’t even answer in complete sentences, so you have to be on your toes — for that person to be able to think quickly and translate it accurately for live television,” said Leticia Herrera, Telemundo’s vice president of news specials. She’s optimistic this final debate will be easier for the interpreters to translate and viewers to follow given that the candidates will have their microphones muted for parts of the debate. César Cardozo, Telemundo’s lead translator, said he has grown accustomed to anticipating what Trump is going to say, but he’s not as confident that tonight will go smoothly. Cardozo, who has interpreted Trump several times, has been translating politicians since the Reagan administration in the 1980s. The Spanish voice of Trump said his goal tonight is to not let his translation become noise for viewers. “You try to be prepared for all the contingencies — and pray,” said Cardozo. “It’s like jumping from a plane. You carry your parachute, but the only thing you know for certain is you have to hit the ground.”
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| | A message from The National Council on Election Integrity: The National Council on Election Integrity is a bipartisan group of political, government, and civic leaders united around protecting the integrity of our elections. Our country has held successful elections through good times and bad, and this November is no different. Individual voters, the media, candidates, and the political parties have a duty to be patient while local election officials count every vote. Because no matter who we choose to represent us, in America we count every vote. Stand with the National Council on Election Integrity: take the pledge at CountEveryVote.org. | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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