WHAT'S BREWING
REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY GIVES TRUMP SOME TOUGH ELECTION TALK House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he has warned Trump that his repeated attacks on voting by mail could backfire and hurt both his reelection efforts and Republicans in other races. “We could lose based on that,” McCarthy told Axios, saying the result could be that Democrats vote by mail while Republicans don’t ― and because of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump supporters might not vote in person, either. “I tried to show him ... You know who is most afraid of COVID? Seniors,” he said. “And if they’re not going to go vote, period, we’re screwed.” [HuffPost]
NORTH CAROLINA REPUBLICAN ORDERS TRUMP TO WEAR MASK The GOP chairman of a North Carolina county commission has implored Trump to follow local requirements and wear a mask when he makes a campaign stop at Winston-Salem on Tuesday night. “There is no excuse,” Dave Plyler, the chairman of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, told the Winston-Salem Journal. “He just needs to do it.” “It’s been ordered by the governor,” he said. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in North Carolina, do as the governor says.” [HuffPost]
TOP GERMAN OFFICIAL RIPS TRUMP'S CALL TO VOTE TWICE A top German official attacked Trump’s “unscrupulous” and “disturbing” call to Americans to vote twice, calling it an effort to undermine the U.S. presidential election in the event of Trump’s defeat. “We owe an incredible number of things to the United States and the country remains one of our closest partners. But ... it is disturbing to see that an American president thinks he might need such” a strategy, Foreign Affairs Minister Heiko Maas told the Bild newspaper. [HuffPost]
THIS GOVERNOR'S RACE GIVES THE BERNIE MOVEMENT ONE MORE SHOT New Hampshire’s Democratic primary for governor on Tuesday is one of the last chances this year for an activist in the mold of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont to nab a win. Sanders has endorsed Andru Volinsky, an attorney, environmentalist and education activist, in his race against Dan Feltes, New Hampshire’s state Senate majority leader, for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. The winner of Tuesday’s contest will go on to face Republican Gov. Chris Sununu in November. [HuffPost]
REPUBLICANS IN SWING STATES WERE FIXING VOTE-BY-MAIL SYSTEMS. THEN TRUMP TWEETED. Early this year, Michigan advanced a bipartisan measure to let election officials take absentee ballots out of their mailing envelopes — but not to unseal the ballots or count them — the day before Election Day. It was the kind of small, bureaucratic switch that could make the difference between timely results in this fall’s presidential election and chaos. Then, Trump made it clear that he preferred chaos. “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” he tweeted in May. Since then, the bill has barely budged. [HuffPost]
ABSENTEE BALLOT REJECTIONS COULD TRIPLE IN KEY STATES Thousands of absentee ballots get rejected in every presidential election. This year, that problem could be much worse and potentially pivotal in hotly contested battleground states. With the coronavirus creating a surge in mail-in balloting and postal delays reported across the country, the number of rejected ballots in November is projected to be significantly higher than previous elections. If ballots are rejected at the same rate as during this year’s primaries, up to three times as many voters in November could be disenfranchised in key battleground states when compared to the last presidential election. [AP]
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