With a little more than two weeks to go before Election Day, the national environment continues to look bright for Democrats, who are trying to flip the Senate and grow their House majority -- not to mention kick President Donald Trump out of the White House.

Former Vice President Joe Biden's lead over Trump -- he had an 11-point edge in the CNN poll of Polls as of Friday -- combined with impressive down-ballot Democratic fundraising has helped the party expand their playing field into red states and districts.

Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, a CNN contributor, has shifted the Kansas and Colorado Senate races and 20 House races in Democrats' favor. Even the district once held by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows could now be in play. Just three House races moved toward Republicans.

Inside Elections has also revised upward its projections for how many seats Democrats are likely to pick up in each chamber. In the Senate, it's now a net gain of four to six seats, which puts Democrats well on the path to the majority. They need a net gain of four seats to flip the Senate, or three if they win the White House since the vice president breaks ties in the Senate.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/18/politics/election-2020-house-and-senate-ratings-two-weeks/index.html

The blue wave is coming!

It’s an outcome that practically no one wants, but it’s starting to look like a real possibility: a 50-50 Senate.

An evenly split Senate would make life grueling for whoever is president next year. Any one senator could determine the fate of critical nominations or key pieces of the party’s legislative agenda. And in an era of already deep polarization, it could lead to even worse gridlock, as inconceivable as that sounds.

“A 50-50 Senate makes it really difficult for the party of the president to do everything that they may want to do because party discipline, conference discipline, is very challenging,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).

But if Democrats pick up a net three seats, that’s what happens. Should Joe Biden win the presidency, they’ll hold the majority; if President Donald Trump is reelected, Democrats need four seats to do so. That’s because under an evenly divided chamber, the party that holds the White House runs the Senate, with the vice president casting the deciding 51st vote to break any tie.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/17/50-50-senate-control-416424

I would be overjoyed with a 50-50 Senate and a Biden win. We've been swimming upstream in the Senate all year, and a Democratic takeover there has seemed unlikely. But now it looks like we have a chance.

2020 Senate Election Forecasts

Source: CNN

Given the crisis facing the United States Postal Service before a presidential election, the last thing John Herter expected to receive in the mail Saturday was an absentee ballot request form with President Donald Trump's face on it.

"Is this a joke?" Herter said his wife told him as she opened up the mailer to reveal a photo of Trump grinning underneath the words, "Are you going to let the Democrats silence you? Act now to stand with President Trump."

(snip)

While it is common for candidates and political parties to send mail to voters, especially those who don't have access to TV or the internet, Real Facts NC, a non-profit dedicated to researching and telling the stories about issues facing North Carolinians, has never seen a mailer like this before, messaging director Jazmynne Williams told CNN.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/16/politics/postal-service-trump-absentee-ballot-request-mail-usps/index.html

This is a significant piece of journalism and a long read. Here is my summary:

A national testing program was assembled by the Trump administration. It was torpedoed by Trump because its implementation would be inconsistent with his idiotic rhetoric that the COVID outbreak is a Democrat hoax, will go away, is under control, etc.

Even more sinister, he also rescinded the plan because he thought the national testing and contact tracing program would mostly help blue states - his political enemies.

In the absence of the needed national plan, the Rockefeller Foundation has stepped in to coordinate. But Trump is actively opposing their efforts. He will not lead and he won’t get out of the way.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air/amp

An Auto Zone store was among the Minneapolis buildings looted and damaged on May 27 during the protests against police violence. Police investigators reportedly have a suspect in the vandalism that preceded the burning of the store. Image: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Police say the masked, umbrella-wielding man who smashed windows at a Minneapolis auto parts store two days after George Floyd's death has ties to a white supremacist group and specifically sought to inflame racial tensions.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minneapolis police arson investigator Erika Christensen wrote in a search warrant affidavit filed this week that the man's actions created a hostile atmosphere and sparked a series of events that turned previously peaceful protests chaotic. She said she believed his "sole aim was to incite violence."

Minneapolis police spokesperson John Elder told NPR he is unable to comment on the investigation, which is "open and active." NPR has
not seen the affidavit and is not naming the man because he has not been charged with a crime.

Video of the individual breaking the windows of an AutoZone with a sledgehammer went viral this spring, prompting speculation about the identity of the so-called "Umbrella Man."not seen the affidavit and is not naming the man because he has not been charged with a crime.

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/896515022/minneapolis-police-reportedly-identify-viral-umbrella-man-as-white-supremacist

I saw this guy on TV when he did it. An actual protester tried to stop him but could not.

The Trump administration’s deployment of federal law enforcers in Portland, Oregon, as part of a supposed effort to protect government property has prompted at least two lawsuits alleging that their show of force has resulted in abuses of authority and the unnecessary use of violence against peaceful protesters, journalists and observers.

What has not been reported widely in the media, however, is the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unit that is coordinating the “crowd control” effort — an agency called the Federal Protective Service (FPS) — is composed largely of contract security personnel. Those contractors are being furnished to FPS by major private-sector security companies like Blackwater corporate descendant Triple Canopy as well as dozens of other private security firms.

https://medium.com/wkc6428/the-lead-federal-agency-responding-to-protesters-in-portland-employs-thousands-of-private-db137349f8b0

Looks like those 'federal agents' are actually mercenaries.

ETA: I can't get the link to work right, but if you copy and past it you will get there.

ETA: Link fixed thanks to blogslut

On Sunday, in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Donald Trump refused to commit to recognizing the outcome of the 2020 election. “I’m not going to just say yes,” the President said. “And I didn’t last time, either.” (Back in October, 2016, Trump was proclaiming that the election he went on to win was “rigged” against him.) He wasn’t telling us anything new, and yet we still have not learned to think of ourselves as a country where the President can lose an election and refuse to leave office.

Lawrence Douglas, a legal scholar and a professor at Amherst College, gave himself the task of methodically thinking through the unthinkable. The result is a slim book, “Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.” Douglas begins by taking the President at his word. “While his defeat is far from certain,” he writes, “what is not uncertain is how Donald Trump would react to electoral defeat, especially a narrow one. He will reject the result.”

Douglas argues that Trump’s evident intent to hold on to his office, regardless of the will of the voters, is not the best measure of the damage he has wrought or the power he has accumulated. He writes, “A more powerful authoritarian would never let himself get into this situation in the first place; he would have already so corrupted the process that his chance of losing would have been effectively eliminated.” By the standards of entrenched autocracies, Trump’s grip on power is as weak as his grip on reality. Still, the system of government that he has hijacked is not designed to protect itself against his kind of attack. “Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” Douglas writes. Worse, the peculiar institution of the Electoral College, which separates the outcome of the election from the popular vote, practically invites abuse.

When electoral crises have arisen, past political leaders have stepped up, or stepped aside, to insure the peaceful transfer of power. Al Gore, to take a painful example, did not have to accept the Supreme Court’s order stopping a recount in Florida, in December, 2000, as the last word on that year’s election; Douglas details Constitutional avenues Gore could have pursued to claim victory. Though he had won the popular vote, Gore saw it as his duty to avoid escalating the electoral crisis. The Presidential elections of 1800 and 1876 ended in compromises, too, in the spirit of the Constitution, common cause, and good faith—all things alien to Donald Trump. It’s not the compromise that functions as precedent here but the conflict: election results have been unclear in the past, and they can be unclear again.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-could-happen-if-donald-trump-rejects-electoral-defeat