newyorker--2020-10-21--“Before the Plague Came, I Had It Made”: Trump Strikes a Doubtful Note in Pennsylvania

Trump ’ s fans arrived hours early and were waiting in a line that snaked for blocks outside the airport ’ s gates .
The merchandise venders were doing brisk business .
People had on Trump-branded hats , scarves , sweatshirts , sweat pants , buttons , flags—even face masks , although many went mask-less .
A day earlier , after registering for the event as a reporter , I got an e-mail from the campaign that said , “ By attending the event , you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President , Inc. ” —and a coterie of other event organizers— “ liable for any illness or injury.
” As the fans were being let in , I was standing in a cordoned-off press pen .
An older white woman walked by with an oxygen tube under her nose and a mask under her chin .
The mood was loose .
The polls are what they are—Joe Biden has held a persistent lead over Trump in Pennsylvania since securing the Democratic nomination , in April—yet Democrats don ’ t trust the numbers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his campaign have pushed “ enthusiasm ” as the metric to watch , as opposed to the polls , fund-raising , or early-voting numbers—and the messaging has trickled down .
“ He ’ s going to win Pennsylvania , ” a man in an American-flag hat said suddenly to a stranger standing nearby .
“ The enthusiasm here , compared to the other side ?
” He made a gesture of dismissal with his hand .
Trump , barely two weeks removed from a stay in the hospital after his COVID-19 diagnosis , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Election Day .
His family and members of his Administration are fanning out across the country , headlining events of their own .
Standing in the press pen , I spoke to people across a barricade .
They tended to clam up , suspicious , when I asked for their names .
Eventually , I closed my notebook and let people talk .
A few hours later , as a group , they ’ d be delightedly booing and hissing the crooked media at the President ’ s urging .
One on one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earnestly enough .
Several volunteered that they knew Trump was “ an asshole ” and that his “ tone ” was horrible .
But he was still their guy .
On subjects like immigration , their voices hardened with anger .
And their heads were filled with the minutia of the scandals and subplots of the day as provided to them by conservative media .
“ Have you seen Fox News here ?
” a man said , looking eagerly over my shoulder at the riser filled with television cameras .
A woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going on about Hunter Biden ’ s business dealings abroad .
I was trying to listen without interrupting , but when she began to compare the Hunter Biden situation to the Russia investigation , during which she said no evidence of any wrongdoing was ever found , I couldn ’ t help it—I muttered something about Paul Manafort being a crook .
“ I don ’ t know who that is , ” the woman said , looking me dead in the eye .
As the sun began to go down behind dark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ district includes Erie , got onstage to warm up the crowd .
“ You are going to see the greatest show on Earth tonight !
” he said .
He encouraged people to get ready to “ knock the living heck out of anybody in an opposite-color jersey.
” And he told a story of a recent phone call he had with Trump .
“ The President called me last week , ” Kelly said .
“ He said very clearly , ‘ What the heck do we have to do to win @ @ @ @ @ @ @ habit of making the subtext the text has rubbed off on some of the people around him .
Kelly ’ s tone suggested that he was throwing red meat to the base , but in substance he was acknowledging the state of play : the campaign was scrambling during the closing weeks in a must-win state .
Trump ’ s great campaign innovation of 2020 has been the use of Air Force One as a campaign prop .
The sky was black by the time its lights became visible up above .
People @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the great plane whooshed by , landed , taxied back , and parked itself behind the grandstands .
The jet ’ s exterior gleamed under floodlights , as “ Battle Hymn of the Republic ” played from the P.A .
system .
It ’ s an ethical travesty—any notion of separating the office , the man , and the campaign is quashed .
But it kills with a crowd .
Trump disembarked , walked up to the stage , and got to work .
He bragged ; he defended himself ; he attacked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He made jokes and made fun of people .
“ Kamala , Kamala , ” he said , alternating the syllables , treating the Vice-Presidential nominee ’ s name itself as material .
He called immigrants rapists and murderers , a bit of noxious rhetoric that used to get headlines but now has passed into the background .
In some ways , the rallies are more powerful on television than in person .
Trump kept his back to much of the crowd .
He was facing the cameras , speaking to them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he said at one point , pointing at the row of news cameras . )
He spoke from prepared remarks for much of the time—another recent change .
“ This is going to be bigger than four years ago , ” Trump said .
“ There ’ s more enthusiasm .
The crowds are bigger.
” Trailing Biden in fund-raising and cash on hand , Trump ’ s campaign has notably had to pull back on TV advertising in several battleground states .
At the rally , Trump took advantage of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ad hitting Biden for his position on fracking .
“ Take a look at this clip , ” Trump said , directing the crowd ’ s attention to a pair of giant screens above them .
At one point , Trump ’ s mike malfunctioned and cut out for a few seconds .
“ I wonder who did that to our mike ?
” Trump said .
“ I don ’ t believe it was Joe .
You know who it was ?
Crooked Hillary.
” Like Kelly , Trump betrayed some worry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he went further , building out a whole excuse for his potential electoral defeat , even as he continued to call defeat an impossibility .
“ Before the plague came , I had it made , ” he said .
“ I wasn ’ t coming to Erie .
I have to be honest .
There ’ s no way I was coming .
I didn ’ t have to .
I would have called you and said , ‘ Hey , Erie , you know , if you have a chance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this thing won .
We were so far up .
We had the greatest economy ever , greatest jobs , greatest everything .
And then we got hit with the plague , and I had to go back to work.
” He smiled and struck a pose , adding , “ Hello , Erie , may I please have your vote ?
” On Twitter and elsewhere , Trump has spent much of the summer and fall denouncing mail-in voting as a plot against him , encouraging his supporters to stick with their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Day .
But on Tuesday , talking only to his supporters , he seemed stuck on how to deal with the trends that he had fomented .
“ You tend to vote very late , ” he said .
“ Which is good .
I understand that .
It ’ s just the norms .
And you tend to vote late .
Get out and vote .
Get out and vote.
” By that point in the speech , people on the edges of the crowd were already moving toward the doors .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to go a “ little shorter ” than usual .
His speech ended after less than an hour .
It was cold out , and getting colder .
Read More About the 2020 Election • The fall and rise of Kamala Harris .
• When a sitting President threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual like an election , you should listen .
• To understand the path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election , look at what he has provided the executive class .
• What happens if Trump fights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever .
• Sign up for our election newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before Donald Trump was scheduled to hold a rally on an airport tarmac in Erie, Pennsylvania, a tractor-trailer bearing a jumble of anti-Hillary Clinton slogans was spotted on the city’s streets: “Hillary’s Lying, Crooked World”; “Emails be gone!”; “Hillary for prison.” Nearly forty million Americans have already voted in the 2020 general election. Trump, his campaign, and even his supporters, though, appear increasingly hung up on the way that he won in 2016, and, by extension, on the candidate he defeated. The cargo was delivered four years ago, but the big truck’s owner still feels compelled to drive it around.
Trump’s fans arrived hours early and were waiting in a line that snaked for blocks outside the airport’s gates. The merchandise venders were doing brisk business. People had on Trump-branded hats, scarves, sweatshirts, sweat pants, buttons, flags—even face masks, although many went mask-less. A day earlier, after registering for the event as a reporter, I got an e-mail from the campaign that said, “By attending the event, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.”—and a coterie of other event organizers—“liable for any illness or injury.” As the fans were being let in, I was standing in a cordoned-off press pen. An older white woman walked by with an oxygen tube under her nose and a mask under her chin.
The mood was loose. The polls are what they are—Joe Biden has held a persistent lead over Trump in Pennsylvania since securing the Democratic nomination, in April—yet Democrats don’t trust the numbers, and Republicans dismiss them. Trump and his campaign have pushed “enthusiasm” as the metric to watch, as opposed to the polls, fund-raising, or early-voting numbers—and the messaging has trickled down. “He’s going to win Pennsylvania,” a man in an American-flag hat said suddenly to a stranger standing nearby. “The enthusiasm here, compared to the other side?” He made a gesture of dismissal with his hand. Trump, barely two weeks removed from a stay in the hospital after his COVID-19 diagnosis, has packed his schedule with rallies through Election Day. His family and members of his Administration are fanning out across the country, headlining events of their own.
Standing in the press pen, I spoke to people across a barricade. They tended to clam up, suspicious, when I asked for their names. Eventually, I closed my notebook and let people talk. A few hours later, as a group, they’d be delightedly booing and hissing the crooked media at the President’s urging. One on one, though, they made their arguments earnestly enough. Several volunteered that they knew Trump was “an asshole” and that his “tone” was horrible. But he was still their guy. On subjects like immigration, their voices hardened with anger. And their heads were filled with the minutia of the scandals and subplots of the day as provided to them by conservative media. “Have you seen Fox News here?” a man said, looking eagerly over my shoulder at the riser filled with television cameras. A woman in a red Trump knitted cap was going on about Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad. I was trying to listen without interrupting, but when she began to compare the Hunter Biden situation to the Russia investigation, during which she said no evidence of any wrongdoing was ever found, I couldn’t help it—I muttered something about Paul Manafort being a crook. “I don’t know who that is,” the woman said, looking me dead in the eye.
As the sun began to go down behind dark clouds, Representative Mike Kelly, whose district includes Erie, got onstage to warm up the crowd. “You are going to see the greatest show on Earth tonight!” he said. He encouraged people to get ready to “knock the living heck out of anybody in an opposite-color jersey.” And he told a story of a recent phone call he had with Trump. “The President called me last week,” Kelly said. “He said very clearly, ‘What the heck do we have to do to win Pennsylvania?’ ” Trump’s habit of making the subtext the text has rubbed off on some of the people around him. Kelly’s tone suggested that he was throwing red meat to the base, but in substance he was acknowledging the state of play: the campaign was scrambling during the closing weeks in a must-win state.
Trump’s great campaign innovation of 2020 has been the use of Air Force One as a campaign prop. The sky was black by the time its lights became visible up above. People thrilled and held up their phones as the great plane whooshed by, landed, taxied back, and parked itself behind the grandstands. The jet’s exterior gleamed under floodlights, as “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played from the P.A. system. It’s an ethical travesty—any notion of separating the office, the man, and the campaign is quashed. But it kills with a crowd. Trump disembarked, walked up to the stage, and got to work.
He bragged; he defended himself; he attacked Democrats, the media, the world. He made jokes and made fun of people. “Kamala, Kamala,” he said, alternating the syllables, treating the Vice-Presidential nominee’s name itself as material. He called immigrants rapists and murderers, a bit of noxious rhetoric that used to get headlines but now has passed into the background. In some ways, the rallies are more powerful on television than in person. Trump kept his back to much of the crowd. He was facing the cameras, speaking to them. (“They’re sick,” he said at one point, pointing at the row of news cameras.) He spoke from prepared remarks for much of the time—another recent change. “This is going to be bigger than four years ago,” Trump said. “There’s more enthusiasm. The crowds are bigger.” Trailing Biden in fund-raising and cash on hand, Trump’s campaign has notably had to pull back on TV advertising in several battleground states. At the rally, Trump took advantage of a captive audience and showed them an ad hitting Biden for his position on fracking. “Take a look at this clip,” Trump said, directing the crowd’s attention to a pair of giant screens above them. At one point, Trump’s mike malfunctioned and cut out for a few seconds. “I wonder who did that to our mike?” Trump said. “I don’t believe it was Joe. You know who it was? Crooked Hillary.”
Like Kelly, Trump betrayed some worry about his position in Pennsylvania. But he went further, building out a whole excuse for his potential electoral defeat, even as he continued to call defeat an impossibility. “Before the plague came, I had it made,” he said. “I wasn’t coming to Erie. I have to be honest. There’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to. I would have called you and said, ‘Hey, Erie, you know, if you have a chance, get out and vote.’ We had this thing won. We were so far up. We had the greatest economy ever, greatest jobs, greatest everything. And then we got hit with the plague, and I had to go back to work.” He smiled and struck a pose, adding, “Hello, Erie, may I please have your vote?”
On Twitter and elsewhere, Trump has spent much of the summer and fall denouncing mail-in voting as a plot against him, encouraging his supporters to stick with their plans to vote in person on Election Day. But on Tuesday, talking only to his supporters, he seemed stuck on how to deal with the trends that he had fomented. “You tend to vote very late,” he said. “Which is good. I understand that. It’s just the norms. And you tend to vote late. Get out and vote. Get out and vote.” By that point in the speech, people on the edges of the crowd were already moving toward the doors. Trump had said that he was planning to go a “little shorter” than usual. His speech ended after less than an hour. It was cold out, and getting colder.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-10-21--New Poll Shows Trump Losing to Hunter Biden

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —With less than two weeks until the election , a new poll of likely @ @ @ @ @ losing badly to Hunter Biden .
Though Hunter Biden holds a commanding lead over Trump @ @ @ @ @ that he also trounces the President in such key swing states as Michigan , Wisconsin @ @ @ @ @ preferred Hunter Biden over Trump when asked who would do a better job of “ @ @ @ @ @ “ creating jobs , ” and “ caring about people like me.
” In the @ @ @ @ @ President , if Hunter Biden were somehow prosecuted , convicted , and locked up , @ @ @ @ @ over Trump by a double-digit margin .

Photograph by Kris Connor / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—With less than two weeks until the election, a new poll of likely voters shows Donald J. Trump losing badly to Hunter Biden.
Though Hunter Biden holds a commanding lead over Trump nationally, the poll reveals that he also trounces the President in such key swing states as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Voters preferred Hunter Biden over Trump when asked who would do a better job of “handling the pandemic,” “creating jobs,” and “caring about people like me.”
In the most ominous news for the President, if Hunter Biden were somehow prosecuted, convicted, and locked up, voters would still choose him over Trump by a double-digit margin.


newyorker--2020-10-21--Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax on the Role of Music in Dark Times

At the end of the summer , the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime collaborator , the pianist Emanuel Ax , performed a series of pop-up concerts for essential workers in Pittsfield , Massachusetts .
The first of these took place in late August , in the farming town of Lee , in the Berkshires .
Audience members stood inside carefully spaced hula hoops , in observance of social-distancing guidelines ; in a pen behind the spectators , dairy cows mooed .
Unusual—and absent—audiences have been a feature of the past concert season .
For their New Yorker Festival event @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s music critic , Alex Ross , Ma and Ax performed Beethoven ’ s soaring Cello Sonata No .
3 in A Major from an empty auditorium at the Tanglewood Music Center , in Massachusetts .
You can see excerpts of their performance , and their conversation with Ross , in the video above .
Both musicians were cannily aware of the parallels between our present moment and the history of the sonata .
The piece , perhaps the most well-known of Beethoven ’ s five cello sonatas , could be understood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ darkness with a bit of light .
Beethoven wrote the sonata in 1808 , when , anguished by Napoleon ’ s betrayal of the progressive ideals of the French Revolution , he “ sent his patron a copy of the manuscript with the inscription , ‘ amid tears and sorrow , ’ ” Ax said .
And yet , the sonata is “ hopeful , beautiful , generous , noble—all of those things.
” The discussion occasionally evolved into a masterclass in music theory and interpretation , as Ma and Ax ( “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highlighted the tension and release brought on by a particular motif of chords—a feature of Beethoven ’ s works—or illustrated their points with virtuosic snippets of Beethoven ’ s Fifth Symphony .
In between movements , Ross asked both musicians how their performances had changed in response to the events of the recent months .
Ma and Ax agreed that , in some ways , the imperative to play and perform had grown even stronger .
“ Our circumstances might change , our lives may change , but there ’ s something in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ We should always respond to need .
That ’ s our first job .
”

At the end of the summer, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime collaborator, the pianist Emanuel Ax, performed a series of pop-up concerts for essential workers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The first of these took place in late August, in the farming town of Lee, in the Berkshires. Audience members stood inside carefully spaced hula hoops, in observance of social-distancing guidelines; in a pen behind the spectators, dairy cows mooed.
Unusual—and absent—audiences have been a feature of the past concert season. For their New Yorker Festival event, which was moderated by the magazine’s music critic, Alex Ross, Ma and Ax performed Beethoven’s soaring Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major from an empty auditorium at the Tanglewood Music Center, in Massachusetts. You can see excerpts of their performance, and their conversation with Ross, in the video above.
Both musicians were cannily aware of the parallels between our present moment and the history of the sonata. The piece, perhaps the most well-known of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas, could be understood as a deliberate attempt to counteract encroaching darkness with a bit of light. Beethoven wrote the sonata in 1808, when, anguished by Napoleon’s betrayal of the progressive ideals of the French Revolution, he “sent his patron a copy of the manuscript with the inscription, ‘amid tears and sorrow,’ ” Ax said. And yet, the sonata is “hopeful, beautiful, generous, noble—all of those things.”
The discussion occasionally evolved into a masterclass in music theory and interpretation, as Ma and Ax (“Yo-Yo” and “Manny”) highlighted the tension and release brought on by a particular motif of chords—a feature of Beethoven’s works—or illustrated their points with virtuosic snippets of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
In between movements, Ross asked both musicians how their performances had changed in response to the events of the recent months. Ma and Ax agreed that, in some ways, the imperative to play and perform had grown even stronger. “Our circumstances might change, our lives may change, but there’s something in music that remains constant,” Ma said. “We should always respond to need. That’s our first job.”


newyorker--2020-10-21--How Republican Senators Account for the Trump Presidency

If you ’ re interested in how Republican politicians are talking about Donald Trump in the end phase of his first term and perhaps his Presidency , one good place to look is to the campaigns of the ten Republican senators who are least likely to be reëlected—most of whom represent states that the President won comfortably four years ago .
Judging from current polling in those politicians ’ races , the Democrats may well gain control of the Senate : they need to pick up only two or three of the vulnerable Republican seats , in Arizona , Colorado @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carolina , Iowa , Montana , Alaska , and Georgia ( where two Republican seats are being tightly contested ) .
In the past week , I watched eight of those senators ’ debates , which had a throwback tinge to them : the television graphics were boxy and dated , the questions excellent , and the candidates nimbler than you might expect .
Politicians are charming people who have been operating under a spell of charmlessness for a decade , roughly since Mitch McConnell made it obvious that he was on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mood of wartime enmity suffused the capital .
But the more consequential anachronism of those Senate debates came from the Republican senators themselves , who generally acted as if Donald Trump were not the President and his policies were not the bedrocks of their party—as if , once he leaves office , the dials could be turned back to their 2011 settings and the decade could begin again .
The 2020 drumbeat , for Republicans , has been to warn of an ascendent socialism .
“ You put Nancy Pelosi , Chuck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Washington , you ’ ll see a federal takeover of the health-care system , ” Steve Daines , of Montana , said , in a recent debate against his Democratic opponent , Governor Steve Bullock .
But you don ’ t hear much about immigration , or trade , or any of the other issues that have defined Trump ’ s Presidency .
The longer I watched the Senate debates , the more I found myself rewinding the footage to scan through the Republican candidates ’ responses .
Surely they ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d missed it ?
But often they just hadn ’ t .
In late September , Joni Ernst , the Republican senator from Iowa , made it through an hour-long debate with her Democratic challenger , a real-estate executive named Theresa Greenfield , without mentioning Trump by name .
When asked directly about the Times revelations that the President , while living a billionaire ’ s life , had paid just seven hundred and fifty dollars to the federal government in annual income taxes , Ernst redirected .
“ Many years ago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President to release his tax returns , ” she said .
“ But , bottom line , we would love to see lower taxes for everybody , including all of our hardworking Americans.
” I was watching on YouTube , and in the comments alongside the debate I could see the essentially erratic character of 2020 politics unfolding : viewers were talking about Hunter Biden or “ Putin ’ s puppet ” ( Hillary Clinton ’ s most lasting epithet for the President ) , or exclaiming “ TRUMP TRAIN !
” On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ register , which has fit the pattern ; the Senate debates have been noticed only when someone declared them a rout .
But what I saw in the sedate PBS studio where the Ernst-Greenfield debate was held , with Iowa ’ s veteran political columnist David Yepsen at the helm , was two capable candidates calmly advancing the basic positions of their parties : taxes should be higher , or lower ; billionaires should get a smaller share of the spoils , or about the same amount ; the Supreme Court was bound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it wasn ’ t .
No one owned anyone .
Beneath the madness of Presidential politics , the parties were moving at their usual rate , that of tectonic plates , and the only reasonable posture was to sit at your listening station like a geologist , headphones securely over your ears , waiting for the infinitesimal movement of a needle .
Now and then , there was some movement .
I ’ d been particularly interested to watch John Cornyn , the three-term senator from Texas .
A sixty-eight-year-old former judge with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Cornyn is Mitch McConnell ’ s No .
2 and arguably the closest thing the Republican Party has to a tectonic plate .
He had seemed to luck out when Beto O ’ Rourke declined to challenge him , leaving him with a little-known opponent , a former military-helicopter pilot named M. J. Hegar .
But Hegar turned out to be effective .
When , in an October 9th debate , Cornyn accused Hegar of “ tacitly ” endorsing police defunding , she spat out , “ I never do anything tacitly—I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and then kept muttering about it under her breath .
She ’ s charming !
Cornyn can be charming , too , in a courtly way , but he couldn ’ t quite get around to it because of all the time he had to spend furrowing his brow and reassuring Texans that things were not quite as bad as they appeared .
Midway through the debate , Cornyn got a simple , telling question from the moderator , the excellent Gromer Jeffers , of the Dallas Morning News : Could he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had positively affected the lives of ordinary Texans , in his eighteen years in the Senate ?
Cornyn nodded his long face , and told a story about the aftermath of a mass shooting , in Sutherland Springs , Texas , in 2017 , when an Air Force veteran , who should have been prohibited from owning firearms because of a domestic-violence-related bad-conduct discharge , entered a church and killed twenty-six people .
Cornyn said , “ It occurred because someone who should never have been able to get their hands on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ able to bypass the background-check system because the Air Force had not uploaded those names.
” Cornyn recounted that , four days after the shooting , he introduced a bill that passed with bipartisan majorities , which closed a loophole in gun background checks .
Cornyn said that “ the Attorney General has now made the point in just six months ; six million more people ’ s names are on the background-check system ” to keep arms out of the hands of “ dangerous criminals.
” A bell rang , signalling that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it had the feeling of a record scratch .
Wait , what ?
One of the half-dozen most powerful Republicans in the country , a staunch ally of the National Rifle Association , was being asked to describe how he had improved the lives of ordinary people in the most powerful conservative state in the country , and his best case was that he had strengthened background checks ?
What had he been doing all this time ?
Maybe that was the trouble .
The Senate ’ s agenda , focussed on mollifying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the highest earners , didn ’ t offer much to , as Jeffers had put it , “ ordinary Texans.
” For five years , Republicans have been wearily answering ( or , more often , dodging ) the question of whether they support President Trump .
But in this election they are being asked a deeper question , too , about what they have actually delivered during this decade of steady conservative ascendance .
Across the debates , I could hear the backbeat of “ Montana values ” and “ Arizona @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ conservative judges , ” but there was no melody .
After watching Cornyn and Hegar ’ s debate , I clicked over to a recent Cornyn ad on YouTube .
It features a middle-aged schoolteacher , with blond hair and caring eyes , passing out papers to students while praising the senator for having helped to deliver federal funds to public schools so that they could reopen safely .
Cornyn then appears , nodding thoughtfully , with a mask emblazoned with the Texas state flag covering the lower half of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways that Cornyn is wise to genuflect toward , and this election has the look of a blue wave .
But , at the end of four years of largely unchecked conservative political power , Cornyn has neither a Trumpian case to make for his own reëlection nor a more traditional conservative one .
The background checks , the money for schools—he was simply arguing for the reliability of a longtime incumbent .
The most touted contest right now , and among the best-funded , is taking place in South Carolina , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a close race with Jaime Harrison , the forty-four-year-old associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee .
In the last quarter , Harrison raised fifty-seven million dollars , mostly from liberals outside the state ; with Kelly and Sara Gideon , in Maine , he is one of three Democratic candidates this cycle to raise more money in a quarter than anyone running for the Senate ever had before .
Like Graham , Harrison is an obviously talented politician—he is especially good at concisely telling the stories of ordinary South Carolinians , some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them to point out how little Republican representatives have done to help them .
But the candidates ’ lone debate , on October 3rd , was most interesting because Graham , unlike most other members of his party , did not run from the President .
“ I think President Trump has done a good job .
He rebuilt our military , he ’ s cut our taxes , he ’ s getting trade deals , he ’ s securing our border , ” Graham said , and then tacked on the Party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capitalism versus socialism , conservative judges versus liberal judges , law and order versus chaos.
” The trouble for Graham was that Harrison kept also making the debate about South Carolina , and about how little Republicans had done to help alleviate suffering there , from the disastrous response to the coronavirus to the ideological refusal to accept the Obama Administration ’ s offer to expand Medicaid in the state .
Graham countered by insisting that he knew suffering : his relatives , he kept emphasizing , worked in the textile mills .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ re all one car wreck away from needing help , ” Graham said .
Many Republican incumbents have expressed worry about lockdowns suppressing the economy ; Graham mentioned other side effects of the pandemic , too : “ Alcoholism is up .
Domestic violence.
” He did not win the debate , but he also sounded like he wasn ’ t pretending .
Graham is in many ways a signal figure of the Republican Party , because , rather than represent a single faction , he has , at different times , represented @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his election to the Senate , in 2002 , he was mainly known as John McCain ’ s plainspoken sidekick , and joined McCain as part of the Gang of Eight pushing for immigration reform in 2012 , telling his party ’ s Convention that year that “ we ’ re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
” But , after Trump ’ s election , Graham became a prominent backer of the President ’ s agenda , a transformation that culminated in a fiery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Supreme Court confirmation hearings .
As Jess Bidgood put it recently in a sharp profile of Graham in the Boston Globe , “ the story of Graham ’ s vulnerability in a state he has represented in Congress since 1995 begins not with the left but with his persistent problems on the right—which he attempted to tamp down once and for all through his alliance with Trump.
” Even if you could somehow exclude Trump , and the complications of making alliances with him , the Party ’ s future no longer looks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who seem most likely to run for President in 2024—among them Tom Cotton , Nikki Haley , Josh Hawley , and Marco Rubio—have all oriented themselves to a party that is now dominated by white voters without college degrees , and by what Hawley has described as anti-cosmopolitanism .
If one of these politicians does end up leading the Party , then it will have something to do with how establishment conservatives used their power during the Trump era : to impose tax cuts that exacerbated inequality and weakened the economy , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increasingly support and rely on .
That has left the Republicans—even the Party ’ s central politicians—without much to brag about after years in charge .
Once again , Gromer Jeffers , the journalist who moderated the Texas debate , saw it clearly .
He put up a graphic from a recent poll of the state in which a strikingly large proportion of respondents had no opinion about Cornyn whatsoever .
Jeffers asked the senator , “ Why is it that nearly a quarter of Texans don ’ t know your name ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ • The fall and rise of Kamala Harris .
• When a sitting President threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual like an election , you should listen .
• To understand the path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election , look at what he has provided the executive class .
• What happens if Trump fights the election results ?
• The refusal by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever .
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If you’re interested in how Republican politicians are talking about Donald Trump in the end phase of his first term and perhaps his Presidency, one good place to look is to the campaigns of the ten Republican senators who are least likely to be reëlected—most of whom represent states that the President won comfortably four years ago. Judging from current polling in those politicians’ races, the Democrats may well gain control of the Senate: they need to pick up only two or three of the vulnerable Republican seats, in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Montana, Alaska, and Georgia (where two Republican seats are being tightly contested). In the past week, I watched eight of those senators’ debates, which had a throwback tinge to them: the television graphics were boxy and dated, the questions excellent, and the candidates nimbler than you might expect. Politicians are charming people who have been operating under a spell of charmlessness for a decade, roughly since Mitch McConnell made it obvious that he was on a mission to thwart the Obama Administration and a mood of wartime enmity suffused the capital. But the more consequential anachronism of those Senate debates came from the Republican senators themselves, who generally acted as if Donald Trump were not the President and his policies were not the bedrocks of their party—as if, once he leaves office, the dials could be turned back to their 2011 settings and the decade could begin again.
The 2020 drumbeat, for Republicans, has been to warn of an ascendent socialism. “You put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden in charge of Washington, you’ll see a federal takeover of the health-care system,” Steve Daines, of Montana, said, in a recent debate against his Democratic opponent, Governor Steve Bullock. But you don’t hear much about immigration, or trade, or any of the other issues that have defined Trump’s Presidency. The longer I watched the Senate debates, the more I found myself rewinding the footage to scan through the Republican candidates’ responses. Surely they’d mentioned the President, and somehow I’d missed it? But often they just hadn’t. In late September, Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, made it through an hour-long debate with her Democratic challenger, a real-estate executive named Theresa Greenfield, without mentioning Trump by name. When asked directly about the Times revelations that the President, while living a billionaire’s life, had paid just seven hundred and fifty dollars to the federal government in annual income taxes, Ernst redirected. “Many years ago, I echoed the call for the President to release his tax returns,” she said. “But, bottom line, we would love to see lower taxes for everybody, including all of our hardworking Americans.”
I was watching on YouTube, and in the comments alongside the debate I could see the essentially erratic character of 2020 politics unfolding: viewers were talking about Hunter Biden or “Putin’s puppet” (Hillary Clinton’s most lasting epithet for the President), or exclaiming “TRUMP TRAIN!” On Twitter the Ernst-Greenfield debate didn’t register, which has fit the pattern; the Senate debates have been noticed only when someone declared them a rout. But what I saw in the sedate PBS studio where the Ernst-Greenfield debate was held, with Iowa’s veteran political columnist David Yepsen at the helm, was two capable candidates calmly advancing the basic positions of their parties: taxes should be higher, or lower; billionaires should get a smaller share of the spoils, or about the same amount; the Supreme Court was bound to dissolve Roe v. Wade, or it wasn’t. No one owned anyone. Beneath the madness of Presidential politics, the parties were moving at their usual rate, that of tectonic plates, and the only reasonable posture was to sit at your listening station like a geologist, headphones securely over your ears, waiting for the infinitesimal movement of a needle.
Now and then, there was some movement. I’d been particularly interested to watch John Cornyn, the three-term senator from Texas. A sixty-eight-year-old former judge with a long face and a formal manner, Cornyn is Mitch McConnell’s No. 2 and arguably the closest thing the Republican Party has to a tectonic plate. He had seemed to luck out when Beto O’Rourke declined to challenge him, leaving him with a little-known opponent, a former military-helicopter pilot named M. J. Hegar. But Hegar turned out to be effective. When, in an October 9th debate, Cornyn accused Hegar of “tacitly” endorsing police defunding, she spat out, “I never do anything tacitly—I’m not a tacit person,” and then kept muttering about it under her breath. She’s charming! Cornyn can be charming, too, in a courtly way, but he couldn’t quite get around to it because of all the time he had to spend furrowing his brow and reassuring Texans that things were not quite as bad as they appeared.
Midway through the debate, Cornyn got a simple, telling question from the moderator, the excellent Gromer Jeffers, of the Dallas Morning News: Could he name a single way in which he had positively affected the lives of ordinary Texans, in his eighteen years in the Senate? Cornyn nodded his long face, and told a story about the aftermath of a mass shooting, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, when an Air Force veteran, who should have been prohibited from owning firearms because of a domestic-violence-related bad-conduct discharge, entered a church and killed twenty-six people. Cornyn said, “It occurred because someone who should never have been able to get their hands on a firearm, a convicted felon, was able to bypass the background-check system because the Air Force had not uploaded those names.” Cornyn recounted that, four days after the shooting, he introduced a bill that passed with bipartisan majorities, which closed a loophole in gun background checks. Cornyn said that “the Attorney General has now made the point in just six months; six million more people’s names are on the background-check system” to keep arms out of the hands of “dangerous criminals.” A bell rang, signalling that Cornyn’s time had expired; it had the feeling of a record scratch. Wait, what? One of the half-dozen most powerful Republicans in the country, a staunch ally of the National Rifle Association, was being asked to describe how he had improved the lives of ordinary people in the most powerful conservative state in the country, and his best case was that he had strengthened background checks? What had he been doing all this time? Maybe that was the trouble. The Senate’s agenda, focussed on mollifying Trump and confirming judges and cutting taxes for the highest earners, didn’t offer much to, as Jeffers had put it, “ordinary Texans.”
For five years, Republicans have been wearily answering (or, more often, dodging) the question of whether they support President Trump. But in this election they are being asked a deeper question, too, about what they have actually delivered during this decade of steady conservative ascendance. Across the debates, I could hear the backbeat of “Montana values” and “Arizona values” and the regular cymbal crash of “conservative judges,” but there was no melody. After watching Cornyn and Hegar’s debate, I clicked over to a recent Cornyn ad on YouTube. It features a middle-aged schoolteacher, with blond hair and caring eyes, passing out papers to students while praising the senator for having helped to deliver federal funds to public schools so that they could reopen safely. Cornyn then appears, nodding thoughtfully, with a mask emblazoned with the Texas state flag covering the lower half of his face. Texas is changing, in ways that Cornyn is wise to genuflect toward, and this election has the look of a blue wave. But, at the end of four years of largely unchecked conservative political power, Cornyn has neither a Trumpian case to make for his own reëlection nor a more traditional conservative one. The background checks, the money for schools—he was simply arguing for the reliability of a longtime incumbent.
The most touted contest right now, and among the best-funded, is taking place in South Carolina, where the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is in a close race with Jaime Harrison, the forty-four-year-old associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the last quarter, Harrison raised fifty-seven million dollars, mostly from liberals outside the state; with Kelly and Sara Gideon, in Maine, he is one of three Democratic candidates this cycle to raise more money in a quarter than anyone running for the Senate ever had before. Like Graham, Harrison is an obviously talented politician—he is especially good at concisely telling the stories of ordinary South Carolinians, some from his own family, and using them to point out how little Republican representatives have done to help them. But the candidates’ lone debate, on October 3rd, was most interesting because Graham, unlike most other members of his party, did not run from the President. “I think President Trump has done a good job. He rebuilt our military, he’s cut our taxes, he’s getting trade deals, he’s securing our border,” Graham said, and then tacked on the Party line. “This race is about capitalism versus socialism, conservative judges versus liberal judges, law and order versus chaos.”
The trouble for Graham was that Harrison kept also making the debate about South Carolina, and about how little Republicans had done to help alleviate suffering there, from the disastrous response to the coronavirus to the ideological refusal to accept the Obama Administration’s offer to expand Medicaid in the state. Graham countered by insisting that he knew suffering: his relatives, he kept emphasizing, worked in the textile mills. “I get it. We’re all one car wreck away from needing help,” Graham said. Many Republican incumbents have expressed worry about lockdowns suppressing the economy; Graham mentioned other side effects of the pandemic, too: “Alcoholism is up. Domestic violence.” He did not win the debate, but he also sounded like he wasn’t pretending.
Graham is in many ways a signal figure of the Republican Party, because, rather than represent a single faction, he has, at different times, represented all of them. From shortly after his election to the Senate, in 2002, he was mainly known as John McCain’s plainspoken sidekick, and joined McCain as part of the Gang of Eight pushing for immigration reform in 2012, telling his party’s Convention that year that “we’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” But, after Trump’s election, Graham became a prominent backer of the President’s agenda, a transformation that culminated in a fiery partisan display during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Jess Bidgood put it recently in a sharp profile of Graham in the Boston Globe, “the story of Graham’s vulnerability in a state he has represented in Congress since 1995 begins not with the left but with his persistent problems on the right—which he attempted to tamp down once and for all through his alliance with Trump.”
Even if you could somehow exclude Trump, and the complications of making alliances with him, the Party’s future no longer looks much like its past. Those Republicans who seem most likely to run for President in 2024—among them Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio—have all oriented themselves to a party that is now dominated by white voters without college degrees, and by what Hawley has described as anti-cosmopolitanism. If one of these politicians does end up leading the Party, then it will have something to do with how establishment conservatives used their power during the Trump era: to impose tax cuts that exacerbated inequality and weakened the economy, and to undermine a health-care policy that Americans increasingly support and rely on. That has left the Republicans—even the Party’s central politicians—without much to brag about after years in charge. Once again, Gromer Jeffers, the journalist who moderated the Texas debate, saw it clearly. He put up a graphic from a recent poll of the state in which a strikingly large proportion of respondents had no opinion about Cornyn whatsoever. Jeffers asked the senator, “Why is it that nearly a quarter of Texans don’t know your name?”
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newyorker--2020-10-20--Trump Collides with the World of Baseball

It ’ s hard these days to be a sports fan and not get embroiled in questions of politics .
Ricketts ’ s spin in Trump ’ s orbit has already faced pushback in Chicago .
After a Trump fund-raiser last summer , where Ricketts invited big donors to Wrigley Field for a game against the St. Louis Cardinals , Eric Zorn , a columnist at the Chicago Tribune , explained why he had renounced his support for the team , writing , “ I 'm not mentally gymnastic enough to believe I can support the Cubs but not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who was hired by the Cubs to create a photo book on the history of Wrigley Field , told me he ’ s boycotting the team .
“ If you support the Cubs at this point , ” he said .
“ You ’ re putting money in the Rickettses ’ pockets which they ’ re using to help get Trump reëlected.
” And this past June , the Chicago Sun-Times , in an editorial titled “ A Cubs Fan ’ s Dilemma , ” wrote , “ What are you to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Chicago Cubs but the team ’ s owners include a guy who ’ s leading the effort to reëlect the most divisive , destructive and incompetent president in modern American history ?
We ’ d say there ’ s always the White Sox.
” On the national stage , Ricketts , who ’ s fifty-one , avoids the limelight .
After some deliberation , he declined to talk with me .
His public-relations person—whom Ricketts hired shortly after I reached out for an interview—told me that he ’ s not “ an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so far under the radar that when I called a major Republican donor and told him what I was working on , he said , “ Todd Ricketts ?
Who ’ s that ?
” It took him a minute to place the name .
Indeed , since taking his role as Trump ’ s chief fund-raiser , he ’ s made only one public appearance that I could find : on local radio—and part of that event was to talk about the Cubs .
One person described his role “ like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make headlines it ’ s a bad thing.
” By then , Pete , the eldest sibling , had moved back to Nebraska , where , as a conservative Republican , he won election as governor .
Two years later , he would win a second term , and soon stepped down from his position on the board of the Cubs .
Laura , the lone sister , is an outlier in the family ; she ’ s a major Democratic donor and contributed to Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign .
Tom , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politics and runs the day-to-day operations of the Cubs as the club ’ s chairman .
Todd , the youngest , has at times felt overlooked .
Shortly after the Rickettses bought the team , Todd e-mailed his father and older brother Pete complaining that Tom seemed to be getting all the credit .
Deadspin published the missive : “ My kids live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school as Tom ’ s kids , and I don ’ t want them to have to constantly [ be ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they are told that their uncle owns the Cubs .
The reason I am so sensitive to this is that even today I feel as though my input and ideas are disregarded among our family , just as they were when we were kids.
” As if to underscore his relative anonymity , a year later , Todd starred in an episode of “ Undercover Boss , ” growing a beard and taking odd jobs at Wrigley Field .
No employees recognized him .
Todd Ricketts became deeply involved in Republican politics by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ staked out a position as a big conservative donor .
( One of Todd Ricketts ’ s friends told me that Todd wanted to talk politics so much that it became difficult to spend time with him . )
In 2013 , Todd became the C.E.O .
of one of the nation ’ s wealthiest political-action committees , Ending Spending , which his father founded and whose mission is to take on what it deems wasteful government funding .
He and his father were , in many ways , a smaller version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reportedly called “ great heroes.
” In 2013 , Ricketts made a political decision that suggested the kind of compromises he was willing to make .
That year , the PAC Ending Spending spent four hundred thousand dollars on ads for the Virginia gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli , who would ultimately lose to Terry McAuliffe , a Democrat .
Cucinnelli , who is now the acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security , spoke to Ricketts ’ s belief in limited government—especially his opposition to the Affordable Care Act—but he also adamantly opposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against nature and harmful to society.
” For Ricketts , whose sister is gay and active in L.G.B.T .
advocacy—and whose uncle was gay and died of AIDS—Cuccinelli seemed like an odd political bedfellow .
Moreover , that same year , Ricketts personally lobbied four key Republican state legislators to vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois .
“ Todd is not a ‘ single-issue ’ voter , ” Danny Diaz , Ricketts ’ s spokesperson , told me in an e-mail .
“ Todd obviously does not agree with Cuccinelli ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Ricketts ’ s calls him “ a principled pragmatist.
” Scott Walker , the former Wisconsin governor , is close to Ricketts .
They bonded at an event at the American Enterprise Institute shortly after Walker signed Act 10 in Wisconsin , which reduced collective-bargaining rights for most state and municipal workers , including all teachers .
Ricketts told Walker he admired what he was doing in Wisconsin—and so , when Walker faced a recall , Ricketts and his parents came to Walker ’ s aid .
Ricketts held a fund-raiser , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home in a suburb north of Chicago .
“ We get wonky , geeky , about policy , ” Walker told me .
Ricketts and Walker , it turned out , also shared a love for baseball and for Harley-Davidsons .
Walker described Ricketts as “ low-key , ” someone with a modest demeanor .
He recalled a time during his short-lived Presidential campaign , in 2016 , when Ricketts , who was co-chair of Walker ’ s fund-raising efforts , joined Walker in the campaign ’ s Winnebago , electioneering in Iowa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to a rally at a minor-league baseball park , Ricketts got out to take photographs of a river .
When they arrived at the stadium , a staffer realized that they ’ d left Ricketts behind .
“ Instead of being ticked off about it , Todd thought it was just hilarious , ” Walker told me .
He also remembered hearing Ricketts had invested in bikes .
“ I ’ m thinking , O.K.
, did he buy a manufacturing company ?
” Walker recalled .
And then he laughed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ owned a pizza parlor , had bought a local bike shop .
After Walker ended his run for the Republican nomination , Ricketts reportedly helped raise money for a political-action committee called Our Principles , which was established with the singular purpose of derailing Trump ’ s nomination .
Ricketts ’ s parents contributed $ 5.5 million to the PAC , which ran a particularly scathing ad ; it featured women reading sexist comments uttered by Trump .
( “ Look at that face .
Would anyone vote for that ?
” ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you dropping to your knees.
” ) Trump , as he ’ s apt to do , fired back in a tweet : “ I hear the Rickets [ sic ] family , who own the Chicago Cubs , are secretly spending $ ’ s against me .
They better be careful , they have a lot to hide !
” But , as with many who opposed Trump ’ s nomination , the Rickettses came around .
Walker told me that he and Ricketts are thrilled with what Trump has delivered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appointments , and pushing for deregulation .
“ This is precisely where Todd ’ s heart is at , ” Walker , who also ended up supporting Trump , told me .
“ I may not always agree with what he says or tweets but , hey , the guy ’ s done things he said he ’ d do.
” Walker also pointedly warned that the upcoming election is a stark choice between free enterprise and socialism .
“ Todd and I have talked about this , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bread lines there .
We ’ ve talked about how these socialist policies failed.
” Jimmy Kemp , who runs the Jack Kemp Foundation , which is named after his father , the late congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary , told me , “ One of the top things Todd agrees with the President about is the belief in the free-enterprise system—as opposed to socialism.
” A friend of Ricketts ’ s told me that he has praised Augusto Pinochet , who in 1973 overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me that Ricketts was dismissive of Pinochet ’ s ruthlessness .
“ People die every day , ” Ricketts had told the friend .
Ricketts appears to share some of Trump ’ s rough-edged sensibilities .
He ’ s gone on long rants with friends about Barack Obama being a socialist .
He recently appeared maskless at Trump ’ s indoor rally in Henderson , Nevada .
And , earlier this month , the Associated Press reported that Ricketts , along with Vice-President Mike Pence , had been scheduled to attend a fund-raiser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ QAnon-conspiracy supporters .
“ Todd was not scheduled to attend that event , ” Diaz , Ricketts ’ s spokesperson , told me .
“ The finance chairman ’ s name has been listed on every single invite issued by the R.N.C .
or Trump Victory since he was named to those positions , regardless of whether he plans to attend.
” Diaz declined to convey Ricketts ’ s feelings about QAnon .
Last year , the online publication Splinter published e-mails from Joe Ricketts to his children .
In one , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trafficker and sex worker .
Another e-mail read , “ I think Islam is a cult and not a religion .
Christianity and Judaism are based on love whereas Islam is based on ‘ kill the infidel ’ a thing of evil.
” At a press conference , Todd ’ s brother Tom said , “ Honestly , I was surprised by those e-mails .
Those are not the values our family was raised with.
” Joe Ricketts later apologized for his e-mails .
Despite his father ’ s experience , Todd Ricketts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on his Facebook page , Todd referred to COVID-19 as the “ the kung flu ” —weeks before Trump used the demeaning phrase at a rally in Tulsa .
In a post of a video in which New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to call the city if they witnessed large gatherings of people , Ricketts commented , “ All snitches will be given priority when applying for jobs as security guards at the concentration camps that will be opening later this year.
” Trump , of course , has regularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2017 , he called any athlete who takes a knee to protest racial inequity a “ son of a bitch.
” Nearly a third of baseball players are foreign-born—though most have remained silent on matters of public concern .
An official at the Major League Baseball Players Association told me that many foreign-born players , given the times , fear that if they speak out , immigration authorities will come after their families .
The league has fallen woefully short in hiring Black managers and front-office executives .
Black players make up only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lowest numbers in twenty-nine years ; the Cubs , who lost in the first round of the playoffs this year , had four African-American players on their playoff roster .
Ricketts ’ s spokesperson periodically sent me clippings about all that the Cubs were doing for social justice , including a photo the team tweeted out of players in Black Lives Matters T-shirts .
The President , of course , has called Black Lives Matter “ a symbol of hate.
” I asked where Ricketts stood on the Black Lives Matter movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ I support the Cubs players and the things they ’ re doing to promote unity—and that includes supporting their efforts on Opening Day to bring people together.
” When I received this statement , I was reminded of what Doug Glanville , a former Cubs outfielder who regularly comments on the intersection of politics and culture , had written in an essay for the New York Times : “ Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.
” As for the Cubs , their spokesman , in an effort to presumably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political activities , simply said , “ Tom [ Todd ’ s brother ] is the executive chairman.
” Maze Jackson , who hosted a talk show on Chicago ’ s WVON , a radio station with a predominantly Black audience , met Ricketts two years ago , at a reception at a Wrigley Field skybox .
As Jackson tells it , he and Ricketts immediately connected .
“ Todd is pretty direct , ” Jackson told me .
“ He ’ s a down-to-earth guy , not a lot of pretense—and pretty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One of the things we agree on is that there needs to be a different path to revive the Black community.
” Ricketts is a big booster of Opportunity Zones , which have been championed by Kemp and which Trump included in his tax cuts ; they offer financial incentives in the form of tax breaks for people willing to invest in certain distressed neighborhoods .
“ The challenge in our conversations , ” Jackson told me , “ is how do you address the systemic racism .
Sometimes Todd would say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t just .
.
.
?
’ and I ’ d explain we haven ’ t had the opportunities.
” Recently , the players on the W.N.B.A.
’ s Atlanta Dream have pointedly taken on one of the team ’ s owners , Senator Kelly Loeffler , who chided the team for honoring the Black Lives Matter movement .
No one expects that to happen here in Chicago , especially because , unlike Loeffler , Ricketts has avoided public appearances , let alone public confrontations .
Even if Ricketts doesn ’ t face @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forever be associated with a President who by most measures has set aside any sense of decency and has insistently kicked at the very legs of our democracy .
( When asked whether he agrees with Trump ’ s assertion that if he loses , the election was rigged , Ricketts declined to respond . )
“ If you ’ re publicly on the record for Trump , you can not walk that back , ” Joe Walsh , a former Republican congressman who is regretful about initially embracing Trump , told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accountable .
Forever.
” Last summer , Ricketts appeared on Jackson ’ s radio show , shortly before he hosted a big fund-raiser for Trump .
Jackson pressed him on his embrace of the President .
“ A lot of people get hung up on the rhetoric and twitter and things , ” Ricketts told Jackson .
“ But when you drill down on the policy he ’ s executing on , you know , most of the people in this country feel like we need to reform our immigration process , most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reform our trade agreements , most of the people are in favor of rethinking how we do our tax policy.
” It ’ s as if Ricketts is asking us not to listen to the words of our President .
Earlier this summer , Ricketts had much to feel good about .
Trump raised a hundred and sixty-five million dollars in July , about twenty-five million dollars more than Biden and the Democrats .
It ’ s difficult to know what role Ricketts played in this haul , but in an e-mail Ronna @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called him “ a fantastic fundraising partner.
” Recent weeks have brought some undoubtedly sobering news .
In August and September , the Biden campaign posted back-to-back record-breaking fund-raising totals , outraising Trump by nearly three hundred million dollars .
And in a front-page story last month , the Times reported that the Trump campaign had spent so much money in the first half of the year that it had little left to spend on television advertisements .
There are also reports that some big donors who had contributed to Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out or giving less .
One big-monied donor , Thomas Peterffy , told me he worries Trump has become “ concerned more about his success and achievements than he is about the country .
”

If you live outside of Chicago, you probably haven’t heard of Todd Ricketts. But we in the city know him well. He’s a member of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs; he and two siblings make up the board. He also happens to be the finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, a joint effort of the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, which makes him the chief fund-raiser for Donald Trump’s reëlection. At one point while reporting this story, I reached out to a friend of the Ricketts family, who chided me in an e-mail. “No one wants to say anything good about the Rickettses,” he wrote. “They are rich and republican. Is there a combination that more connotes evil in the imagination of progressive news readers?” But this is not about being rich or a Republican—though those are part of who Ricketts is. It’s an effort to understand an owner of a major-league baseball team who has chosen to work for the reëlection of a President who refuses to condemn white supremacists, and routinely stokes animus toward Black people and immigrants. It feels antithetical to everything the sport is—or, at least, what it aspires to be.
It’s hard these days to be a sports fan and not get embroiled in questions of politics. Ricketts’s spin in Trump’s orbit has already faced pushback in Chicago. After a Trump fund-raiser last summer, where Ricketts invited big donors to Wrigley Field for a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, explained why he had renounced his support for the team, writing, “I'm not mentally gymnastic enough to believe I can support the Cubs but not the Ricketts family agenda.” Mark Jacob, who was hired by the Cubs to create a photo book on the history of Wrigley Field, told me he’s boycotting the team. “If you support the Cubs at this point,” he said. “You’re putting money in the Rickettses’ pockets which they’re using to help get Trump reëlected.” And this past June, the Chicago Sun-Times, in an editorial titled “A Cubs Fan’s Dilemma,” wrote, “What are you to do if you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs but the team’s owners include a guy who’s leading the effort to reëlect the most divisive, destructive and incompetent president in modern American history? We’d say there’s always the White Sox.”
On the national stage, Ricketts, who’s fifty-one, avoids the limelight. After some deliberation, he declined to talk with me. His public-relations person—whom Ricketts hired shortly after I reached out for an interview—told me that he’s not “an outward person.” He’s flown so far under the radar that when I called a major Republican donor and told him what I was working on, he said, “Todd Ricketts? Who’s that?” It took him a minute to place the name. Indeed, since taking his role as Trump’s chief fund-raiser, he’s made only one public appearance that I could find: on local radio—and part of that event was to talk about the Cubs. One person described his role “like the professional insider”: “If you make headlines it’s a bad thing.”
Ricketts grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in a family of modest means. According to a memoir written by his father, Joe, they didn’t have money for extended vacations—once, when Todd asked for sixty-nine cents to get a hamburger at Burger King with his friends, his father told him that they needed to eat what they had at home. The family’s economic fortunes changed, though, when their father founded what would become Ameritrade, an early entrant in the field of companies that allowed everyday investors to buy and sell stocks. He ultimately took the company public, in 1997, and became a billionaire. In 2009, Ricketts and his three siblings purchased the Chicago Cubs, for roughly nine hundred million dollars, with money they received from their father. Seven years later, when the Cubs won their first World Series in a hundred and eight years, an estimated five million revellers celebrated in downtown Chicago, the seventh-largest human gathering in world history. The Ricketts were local heroes.
By then, Pete, the eldest sibling, had moved back to Nebraska, where, as a conservative Republican, he won election as governor. Two years later, he would win a second term, and soon stepped down from his position on the board of the Cubs. Laura, the lone sister, is an outlier in the family; she’s a major Democratic donor and contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Tom, the second-oldest, has remained out of politics and runs the day-to-day operations of the Cubs as the club’s chairman. Todd, the youngest, has at times felt overlooked. Shortly after the Rickettses bought the team, Todd e-mailed his father and older brother Pete complaining that Tom seemed to be getting all the credit. Deadspin published the missive: “My kids live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school as Tom’s kids, and I don’t want them to have to constantly [be] explaining that there are equal owners when they are told that their uncle owns the Cubs. The reason I am so sensitive to this is that even today I feel as though my input and ideas are disregarded among our family, just as they were when we were kids.” As if to underscore his relative anonymity, a year later, Todd starred in an episode of “Undercover Boss,” growing a beard and taking odd jobs at Wrigley Field. No employees recognized him.
Todd Ricketts became deeply involved in Republican politics by working alongside his dad, who had staked out a position as a big conservative donor. (One of Todd Ricketts’s friends told me that Todd wanted to talk politics so much that it became difficult to spend time with him.) In 2013, Todd became the C.E.O. of one of the nation’s wealthiest political-action committees, Ending Spending, which his father founded and whose mission is to take on what it deems wasteful government funding. He and his father were, in many ways, a smaller version of the Koch brothers, whom Joe once reportedly called “great heroes.”
In 2013, Ricketts made a political decision that suggested the kind of compromises he was willing to make. That year, the PAC Ending Spending spent four hundred thousand dollars on ads for the Virginia gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli, who would ultimately lose to Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. Cucinnelli, who is now the acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, spoke to Ricketts’s belief in limited government—especially his opposition to the Affordable Care Act—but he also adamantly opposed same-sex marriage and said homosexuality was “against nature and harmful to society.” For Ricketts, whose sister is gay and active in L.G.B.T. advocacy—and whose uncle was gay and died of AIDS—Cuccinelli seemed like an odd political bedfellow. Moreover, that same year, Ricketts personally lobbied four key Republican state legislators to vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois. “Todd is not a ‘single-issue’ voter,” Danny Diaz, Ricketts’s spokesperson, told me in an e-mail. “Todd obviously does not agree with Cuccinelli’s position on same-sex marriage.” One friend of Ricketts’s calls him “a principled pragmatist.”
Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, is close to Ricketts. They bonded at an event at the American Enterprise Institute shortly after Walker signed Act 10 in Wisconsin, which reduced collective-bargaining rights for most state and municipal workers, including all teachers. Ricketts told Walker he admired what he was doing in Wisconsin—and so, when Walker faced a recall, Ricketts and his parents came to Walker’s aid. Ricketts held a fund-raiser, serving Wisconsin beer and bratwurst at his home in a suburb north of Chicago. “We get wonky, geeky, about policy,” Walker told me.
Ricketts and Walker, it turned out, also shared a love for baseball and for Harley-Davidsons. Walker described Ricketts as “low-key,” someone with a modest demeanor. He recalled a time during his short-lived Presidential campaign, in 2016, when Ricketts, who was co-chair of Walker’s fund-raising efforts, joined Walker in the campaign’s Winnebago, electioneering in Iowa. At one point, on the way to a rally at a minor-league baseball park, Ricketts got out to take photographs of a river. When they arrived at the stadium, a staffer realized that they’d left Ricketts behind. “Instead of being ticked off about it, Todd thought it was just hilarious,” Walker told me. He also remembered hearing Ricketts had invested in bikes. “I’m thinking, O.K., did he buy a manufacturing company?” Walker recalled. And then he laughed. He discovered that Ricketts, who already owned a pizza parlor, had bought a local bike shop.
After Walker ended his run for the Republican nomination, Ricketts reportedly helped raise money for a political-action committee called Our Principles, which was established with the singular purpose of derailing Trump’s nomination. Ricketts’s parents contributed $5.5 million to the PAC, which ran a particularly scathing ad; it featured women reading sexist comments uttered by Trump. (“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”; “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”) Trump, as he’s apt to do, fired back in a tweet: “I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” But, as with many who opposed Trump’s nomination, the Rickettses came around.
During Trump’s campaign, Todd Ricketts spearheaded fund-raising for the super PAC Future 45 and for a like-minded nonprofit, 45Committee, which together raised $73.6 million and which produced ads, not without irony, attacking Hillary Clinton for betraying women. Politico reported that 45Committee targeted donors who felt uncomfortable supporting Trump publicly. “Ricketts’ pitch to these donors,” according to the story, “focuses on the fact that one of the pro-Trump groups he’s fronting can accept unlimited checks while keeping its donors’ names secret.” Early in his term, Trump rewarded Ricketts for his support, nominating him to become the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, but Ricketts, unable to disentangle his financial interests to satisfy ethics rules, withdrew his name from consideration.
Walker told me that he and Ricketts are thrilled with what Trump has delivered: cutting taxes, making conservative judicial appointments, and pushing for deregulation. “This is precisely where Todd’s heart is at,” Walker, who also ended up supporting Trump, told me. “I may not always agree with what he says or tweets but, hey, the guy’s done things he said he’d do.” Walker also pointedly warned that the upcoming election is a stark choice between free enterprise and socialism. “Todd and I have talked about this,” he said. “Look at Venezuela. Look at the bread lines there. We’ve talked about how these socialist policies failed.” Jimmy Kemp, who runs the Jack Kemp Foundation, which is named after his father, the late congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary, told me, “One of the top things Todd agrees with the President about is the belief in the free-enterprise system—as opposed to socialism.” A friend of Ricketts’s told me that he has praised Augusto Pinochet, who in 1973 overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, in Chile. The friend told me that Ricketts was dismissive of Pinochet’s ruthlessness. “People die every day,” Ricketts had told the friend.
Ricketts appears to share some of Trump’s rough-edged sensibilities. He’s gone on long rants with friends about Barack Obama being a socialist. He recently appeared maskless at Trump’s indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada. And, earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that Ricketts, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, had been scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in Montana at the home of two QAnon-conspiracy supporters. “Todd was not scheduled to attend that event,” Diaz, Ricketts’s spokesperson, told me. “The finance chairman’s name has been listed on every single invite issued by the R.N.C. or Trump Victory since he was named to those positions, regardless of whether he plans to attend.” Diaz declined to convey Ricketts’s feelings about QAnon.
Last year, the online publication Splinter published e-mails from Joe Ricketts to his children. In one, he suggested that President Obama was a drug trafficker and sex worker. Another e-mail read, “I think Islam is a cult and not a religion. Christianity and Judaism are based on love whereas Islam is based on ‘kill the infidel’ a thing of evil.” At a press conference, Todd’s brother Tom said, “Honestly, I was surprised by those e-mails. Those are not the values our family was raised with.” Joe Ricketts later apologized for his e-mails.
Despite his father’s experience, Todd Ricketts can be surprisingly unfiltered. In comments on his Facebook page, Todd referred to COVID-19 as the “the kung flu”—weeks before Trump used the demeaning phrase at a rally in Tulsa. In a post of a video in which New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to call the city if they witnessed large gatherings of people, Ricketts commented, “All snitches will be given priority when applying for jobs as security guards at the concentration camps that will be opening later this year.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a hundred and fifty current and former Black baseball players formed the Players Alliance, in large part to address the lack of racial diversity in the sport. When I reached out to players associated with the alliance about Ricketts, no one would talk. A spokesperson told me that they declined my calls because the players want to maintain good relations with the owners. On opening night, players for the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees took a knee, this in a sport that unlike, say, basketball, has remained pointedly apolitical. The Cubs, as an organization, has shown support for the alliance’s goals. The club’s president, Theo Epstein, has publicly acknowledged the need to hire more Black people in front-office and coaching positions, and, on the marquee outside the stadium, the club displayed the plea “End Racism.”
Trump, of course, has regularly denigrated immigrants and Black people. In 2017, he called any athlete who takes a knee to protest racial inequity a “son of a bitch.” Nearly a third of baseball players are foreign-born—though most have remained silent on matters of public concern. An official at the Major League Baseball Players Association told me that many foreign-born players, given the times, fear that if they speak out, immigration authorities will come after their families. The league has fallen woefully short in hiring Black managers and front-office executives. Black players make up only 7.5 per cent of major-league rosters, the lowest numbers in twenty-nine years; the Cubs, who lost in the first round of the playoffs this year, had four African-American players on their playoff roster.
Ricketts’s spokesperson periodically sent me clippings about all that the Cubs were doing for social justice, including a photo the team tweeted out of players in Black Lives Matters T-shirts. The President, of course, has called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate.” I asked where Ricketts stood on the Black Lives Matter movement. Through his spokesman, Ricketts said, “I support the Cubs players and the things they’re doing to promote unity—and that includes supporting their efforts on Opening Day to bring people together.” When I received this statement, I was reminded of what Doug Glanville, a former Cubs outfielder who regularly comments on the intersection of politics and culture, had written in an essay for the New York Times: “Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.” As for the Cubs, their spokesman, in an effort to presumably distance the team from Ricketts’s political activities, simply said, “Tom [Todd’s brother] is the executive chairman.”
Maze Jackson, who hosted a talk show on Chicago’s WVON, a radio station with a predominantly Black audience, met Ricketts two years ago, at a reception at a Wrigley Field skybox. As Jackson tells it, he and Ricketts immediately connected. “Todd is pretty direct,” Jackson told me. “He’s a down-to-earth guy, not a lot of pretense—and pretty open to listening. . . . One of the things we agree on is that there needs to be a different path to revive the Black community.” Ricketts is a big booster of Opportunity Zones, which have been championed by Kemp and which Trump included in his tax cuts; they offer financial incentives in the form of tax breaks for people willing to invest in certain distressed neighborhoods. “The challenge in our conversations,” Jackson told me, “is how do you address the systemic racism. Sometimes Todd would say, ‘How come you guys can’t just . . .?’ and I’d explain we haven’t had the opportunities.”
Recently, the players on the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream have pointedly taken on one of the team’s owners, Senator Kelly Loeffler, who chided the team for honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. No one expects that to happen here in Chicago, especially because, unlike Loeffler, Ricketts has avoided public appearances, let alone public confrontations. Even if Ricketts doesn’t face that kind of reckoning, he will forever be associated with a President who by most measures has set aside any sense of decency and has insistently kicked at the very legs of our democracy. (When asked whether he agrees with Trump’s assertion that if he loses, the election was rigged, Ricketts declined to respond.) “If you’re publicly on the record for Trump, you cannot walk that back,” Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who is regretful about initially embracing Trump, told me. “You need to be held accountable. Forever.”


newyorker--2020-10-22--Complete Registry of Undecided Voters

Complete Registry of Undecided Voters

Bob Lamp ( age 43 ) : Six months out of the year , Bob Lamp , a.k.a .
Rob Lamp , lives in Niagara , New York , where he works as an electrician .
Bob is color-blind , which makes telling hot wires from the ground wire difficult .
He doesn ’ t let this get in the way of his passion ( sparks ) and is electrocuted several times a year .
When spring hits upstate New York , in July , Bob heads down to Arizona , just in time for the arid season .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and rabbit petting zoo .
It ’ s a financial and leporine disaster .
Bob also belongs to a fantasy-football league that no longer does the fantasy part .
It ’ s just a league that watches football .
Bob will vote for whichever candidate reminds him the most of Bill Belichick .
Richard Sweater ( 47 ) : Dick is a professional investor who lives in a refurbished prewar church in a wealthy Chicago suburb .
To preserve the masonry of the church , Dick left it uninsulated , making it astronomically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lasts nine months .
Dick made his fortune during the tech boom and has since mostly invested in “ passion projects , ” such as an acoustic keyboard and edible soap .
If Dick ’ s tech money ever dries up ( it will ) , he plans to sell his castle mansion and move onto his yacht .
Dick does not actually know how to care for or pilot the boat himself , but he does have a really nice nautical-knot coffee-table book that he does coke off of while listening to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hasn ’ t voted in the last four elections on account of Tuesday being his “ me day.
” Sally Finger ( 27 ) : Sally is a sandwich artist living in Toronto , Ontario , Canada .
She is under the impression that she will be able to vote in the next U.S. Presidential election .
She is unaware that Toronto is not a U.S. city .
She has never actually crossed the Canada-U.S. border .
She considers herself a moderate centrist .
Kip Parakeet ( 74 ) : Kip is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his job after surviving a cruise-ship accident .
The cruise ship was fine , but Kip fell into a chocolate fountain , scalding his right arm , the one he used for his balloon-animal performance .
He now runs a business that sells balloon animals on Etsy .
So far , he ’ s had to refund three balloon poodles and two balloon giraffes .
The business has cost him six hundred and twelve dollars in refunds and shipping fees .
His three ex-wives all went on to eventually marry more stable people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kip has never registered to vote , because “ that ’ s how they get you.
” Khristyn Brick ( 33 ) : Khristyn does marketing for an artisanal meat shop in the Hamptons .
She also runs a highly trafficked vegan blog on Instagram .
She has spent the COVID-19 pandemic “ focussing on the positive.
” She doesn ’ t believe in masks— “ either medical or subconscious.
” She is currently recovering from an infection that she acquired after her body rejected a lip-filler injection .
Instead of using antibiotics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infection with raw , unpasteurized milk that she rubs all over her mouth .
She believes that there is no difference between the two political parties and that every politician is a pedophile .
( She doesn ’ t know what a pedophile is . )
Bill Hair ( 46 ) : Bill sells experimental tents out of a van that he parks in a mall parking lot .
His business is called Two Tents , though unironically .
He ’ s had “ the tent joke ” retold to him many , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t get it .
But if you want to talk experimental tents , he ’ s your guy !
Bill has murdered four people .
He has much more pressing things to worry about than an election .
David Juice ( 35 ) : David is a full-time student at Frostburg State University .
He has changed majors many , many times .
His stepdad has told him that , as long as he is attending school , his expenses will be paid , so David has been enrolled in college @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first year he ’ s lived off campus , after being told that he ’ s too old to be in a dorm .
David has never tried cilantro or performed oral sex because they “ seem weird.
” David identifies as an independent , but he doesn ’ t vote , because it “ seems like something that ’ s just for grownups.
” Tammy Basket ( 54 ) : Tammy is a decorating coach in Disney Village , Florida .
Mostly her job is encouraging middle-aged divorcées to invest in more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her downtime , Tammy likes to visit Disney World , for which she has a year-round pass .
She ’ s been on every ride except the Haunted Mansion , because Tammy is not comfortable with the occult .
Tammy usually votes the way she imagines Dick Van Dyke ( in “ Mary Poppins ” ) would vote , but she is uncertain which way that would be in this election , so she plans to sit this one out .
She rationalizes not voting by saying , “ Florida ’ s not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is it ?
”

Bob Lamp (age 43): Six months out of the year, Bob Lamp, a.k.a. Rob Lamp, lives in Niagara, New York, where he works as an electrician. Bob is color-blind, which makes telling hot wires from the ground wire difficult. He doesn’t let this get in the way of his passion (sparks) and is electrocuted several times a year. When spring hits upstate New York, in July, Bob heads down to Arizona, just in time for the arid season. There, he manages a combination putt-putt course and rabbit petting zoo. It’s a financial and leporine disaster. Bob also belongs to a fantasy-football league that no longer does the fantasy part. It’s just a league that watches football. Bob will vote for whichever candidate reminds him the most of Bill Belichick.
Richard Sweater (47): Dick is a professional investor who lives in a refurbished prewar church in a wealthy Chicago suburb. To preserve the masonry of the church, Dick left it uninsulated, making it astronomically expensive to heat each winter, which lasts nine months. Dick made his fortune during the tech boom and has since mostly invested in “passion projects,” such as an acoustic keyboard and edible soap. If Dick’s tech money ever dries up (it will), he plans to sell his castle mansion and move onto his yacht. Dick does not actually know how to care for or pilot the boat himself, but he does have a really nice nautical-knot coffee-table book that he does coke off of while listening to “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Dick hasn’t voted in the last four elections on account of Tuesday being his “me day.”
Sally Finger (27): Sally is a sandwich artist living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is under the impression that she will be able to vote in the next U.S. Presidential election. She is unaware that Toronto is not a U.S. city. She has never actually crossed the Canada-U.S. border. She considers herself a moderate centrist.
Kip Parakeet (74): Kip is a retiree from the travel-and-entertainment industry who lost his job after surviving a cruise-ship accident. The cruise ship was fine, but Kip fell into a chocolate fountain, scalding his right arm, the one he used for his balloon-animal performance. He now runs a business that sells balloon animals on Etsy. So far, he’s had to refund three balloon poodles and two balloon giraffes. The business has cost him six hundred and twelve dollars in refunds and shipping fees. His three ex-wives all went on to eventually marry more stable people and are much happier for it. Kip has never registered to vote, because “that’s how they get you.”
Khristyn Brick (33): Khristyn does marketing for an artisanal meat shop in the Hamptons. She also runs a highly trafficked vegan blog on Instagram. She has spent the COVID-19 pandemic “focussing on the positive.” She doesn’t believe in masks—“either medical or subconscious.” She is currently recovering from an infection that she acquired after her body rejected a lip-filler injection. Instead of using antibiotics, she has opted to treat the infection with raw, unpasteurized milk that she rubs all over her mouth. She believes that there is no difference between the two political parties and that every politician is a pedophile. (She doesn’t know what a pedophile is.)
Bill Hair (46): Bill sells experimental tents out of a van that he parks in a mall parking lot. His business is called Two Tents, though unironically. He’s had “the tent joke” retold to him many, many times, and he still just doesn’t get it. But if you want to talk experimental tents, he’s your guy! Bill has murdered four people. He has much more pressing things to worry about than an election.
David Juice (35): David is a full-time student at Frostburg State University. He has changed majors many, many times. His stepdad has told him that, as long as he is attending school, his expenses will be paid, so David has been enrolled in college for seventeen years. This is the first year he’s lived off campus, after being told that he’s too old to be in a dorm. David has never tried cilantro or performed oral sex because they “seem weird.” David identifies as an independent, but he doesn’t vote, because it “seems like something that’s just for grownups.”
Tammy Basket (54): Tammy is a decorating coach in Disney Village, Florida. Mostly her job is encouraging middle-aged divorcées to invest in more seashell-themed décor from Home Goods. In her downtime, Tammy likes to visit Disney World, for which she has a year-round pass. She’s been on every ride except the Haunted Mansion, because Tammy is not comfortable with the occult. Tammy usually votes the way she imagines Dick Van Dyke (in “Mary Poppins”) would vote, but she is uncertain which way that would be in this election, so she plans to sit this one out. She rationalizes not voting by saying, “Florida’s not that important of a state anyway, is it?”