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Mike Davis on the Trump voters: Latinos in south Texas and white workers in the rust belt—and Biden’s big mistake: allowing Trump to claim “the economy” as his issue, instead of connecting jobs to controlling the pandemic.
Also: Black Lives Matter had massive victories in the elections in America’s biggest county—LA, with 10 million people. They elected a progressive D.A. and passed an initiative to re-imagine public safety by moving 10 per cent of the county’s $5 billion unrestricted budget to alternatives to incarceration, to community services, and barring the county from using the money on prisons, jails ,or law enforcement agencies. Jody Armour explains—his new book is N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law. 11-12-2020

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John Nichols says Joe Biden seems to be headed for a historic win. On Wednesday afternoon he already had more than 70 million votes—the largest number of votes for a president in American history. He’s also above 50 per cent, something no Democrat has done in our lifetimes, except for Barack Obama. So this is likely to be a big victory, except for one thing: The Electoral College. That’s where it’s close, and that’s our problem.
Joan Walsh looks at Trump’s support, and finds it shocking that he did about as well as last time, despite everything that he’s done in the last four years, culminating in the disaster of the pandemic response and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. She concludes that too much of our country consists of racists who prefer white supremacy to equality.  11-4-20

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Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren talk about the changing voter turnout among white men and people of color over the last three presidential elections—and other features of our political system. They are hosting a new podcast for The Nation, “System Check”—checking the systems that hold us back: premiering Friday at TheNation.com, Apple podcasts, and elsewhere.
Also: talking politics, and history, with Sherrod Brown. Of course he’s the senior senator from Ohio, first elected in 2006. He was re-elected in 2018—he won by 7 points—in a state Hillary Clinton had lost—by 8 points—just 2 years earlier. He talks about how he did that, and how Biden has learned the lessons of that campaign.
Plus: disputed elections past and present: Maybe the election next week will have a big enough vote for Biden so that it can’t be challenged in court; maybe the Republicans won’t dispute the outcome. But maybe they will. We’ve had other disputed elections in our history—of course we had the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida in 2000; and there was another one, much less well known—the election of 1876. Historian Eric Foner explains.  10-28-20

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Mike Davis argues that climate change is bringing “extinction events” to native land cover around the world. Extreme fires are one of the main forces bringing this apocalypse—spurred in places like California by white flight among Trump supporters to high-fire-danger areas.
Also: The new Aaron Sorkin film, Trial of the Chicago 7, opened on Netflix this past weekend. Of course it’s about the 1969 trial of leaders of the antiwar movement, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis—and we have Rennie Davis as a guest. He was the New Left’s most talented organizer, and he talks about the film and the real history of those protests—and also politics today.  10-21-20

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A group of scientists are calling it “The Great Barrington declaration”—a strategy to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic by age-targeted reopening. The advocates call it “focused protection”; they say it would create herd immunity. Gregg Gonsalves argues that it will not—and that “we can do better.”
Also: Cell-phone videos of police killing Black people have had an immense political impact over the last couple of years. Allissa Richardson comments on the videos and the new Black protest journalism, based largely on Twitter. Her new book is Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. 10-14-20

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When Trump left Walter Reed hospital, he tweeted “don’t be afraid of Covid-19.” Amy Wilentz disagrees, and argues that, while the president got the best medical care in the world—which we would want for any president—at the same time he’s trying to abolish Obamacare, which provides healthcare for tens of millions of Americans.
Also: Ari Berman talks about voting rights and voter suppression, about the voter protection efforts of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, and about recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights cases.  10-7-2020

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Biden debated Trump on Tuesday night—John Nichols has our analysis, and suggests that it may be the Republicans who pull out of the remaining debates, given the damage their candidate did to his candidacy and the rest of the Republican candidates.
Also: Remember the days of the hashtag “Free Melania”? Remember how we said she was a hostage in the White House? Now there’s a book that says we were all wrong about that—Katha Pollitt talks about Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s “tell-not-quite-all,” Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady.  9/30/2020

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We need at last two more justices on the Supreme Court—and more would be better—as many as ten more.  Elie Mystal explains—he’s the magazine’s justice correspondent.
Also: how climate change is forcing migration out of low lying coastal areas: Sonia Shah reports on what happened in the Bahamian island of Abaco after Hurricane Dorian last September—and what we need to do now about migration forced by climate change. Sonia is an award-winning reporter; her new book is The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. 9-23-2020

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Voting by mail in Wisconsin will not be thrown into chaos by the state supreme court—John Nichols reports on a state Trump needs to win, where Biden is ahead.
Plus: Refugees—after World War II in Europe, and today. Historian David Nasaw explains—his new book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons, from World War to Cold War. 9-17-2020

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We are in “one of the most perilous and fraught moments for American democracy since the mid-nineteenth century,” says Chris Hayes; what’s hopeful is that “the movement we’ve seen in the streets is the largest protest movement in American history.” Chris of course hosts “All In” weeknights on MSNBC; he’s also editor-at-large of The Nation, and he spoke recently with Katrina vanden Heuvel at a Nation magazine online event.
Plus: Politics on TV–in 1968, when Harry Belafonte hosted the Tonight Show, for an entire week—and his guests included Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Also: Aretha Franklin. Joan Walsh, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation, talks about the new documentary, The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show—she’s one of the producers, and it’s streaming now on Peacock. 9-10-2020