Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: Donald Trump is making modest inroads with Latinos. Polls suggest he’s pulling slightly more Black support than in 2016. But Trump is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states. In Minnesota, where the contest between Trump and Joe Biden had seemed to tighten in recent weeks — and…

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The New York Times reports: Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said on Sunday that it entered September with $466 million in the bank together with the Democratic Party, providing Mr. Biden a vast financial advantage of about $141 million over President Trump heading into the intense final stretch of the campaign. The money edge is a complete reversal from this spring, when Mr. Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee and was $187 million behind Mr. Trump, who began raising money…

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Ishaan Tharoor writes: It was a vintage scene of Trumpist agitprop. Last week, President Trump stood before original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and declared a new national campaign to promote “patriotic education.” He tapped into a long-standing grievance within America’s right wing over supposed “left-wing indoctrination” in the country’s schools and universities, linking the unrest of this past summer to an education system that overly stresses the legacy of slavery, racism and sins of America’s…

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Francis Wilkinson writes: Americans who think the coming election is their last chance to save the republic from authoritarianism — Americans, until recently, like me — are almost certainly wrong. Authoritarianism is already here, and what Americans will decide in November is whether it will grow more deeply entrenched. According to a new report, the U.S. is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — so much so that only one in five similarly damaged democracies has been able to reverse such decline. President…

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Anne Applebaum writes: I know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s empty Supreme Court seat has provoked an epic, long-awaited clash between Democrats and Republicans, that the very principle of judicial independence hangs dangerously in the balance. I realize that the social-media wave cannot be stopped, that the talking heads cannot be silenced, and that Democrats in Congress must fight this nomination. Nevertheless, let me try to convince anyone who will listen: Democrats should not spend the weeks between now and November…

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Tim Alberta writes: If there’s one Republican who could be convinced that filling the sudden Supreme Court vacancy is a bad idea, it’s President Donald Trump. There’s no question that the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the trailblazing liberal justice who died Friday at age 87, gives the GOP an opportunity that appears too good to pass up. By replacing Ginsburg with a conservative jurist, Republicans would cement a durable right-wing majority on the high court, one that could deal…

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