Month: October 2020

Mark Joseph Stern argues in Slate that one of Amy Coney Barrett’s first acts on the Supreme Court may be to disenfranchise voters whose late-arriving ballots will not count even if they are postmarked before Election Day. Voters in Wisconsin are already facing that reality in light of a 5-3 ruling the Roberts Court issued on Monday.

I don’t know what Barrett will do, but she won’t likely be a voice for representative democracy, and even if she’d joined the court in time for the Wisconsin case, she couldn’t have changed the outcome. For now, the Supreme Court has lurched so far to the right that the country will not recognize it, and soon the country will not recognize itself.

Fortunately, Joe Biden looks to have a healthy lead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. He may be able to weather an open coup attempt by the U.S. Supreme Court. The country better hope so, because if Biden loses the election despite winning the popular vote by a wide margin, and it looks like the Court is responsible, that’s going to cause an open revolt.

It’s bad enough to have foreign actors like Russia fucking with the integrity of our elections, but our own high court is too much. And these shenanigans could have an impact even if they don’t hand Trump a second term. The Senate race in North Carolina could hinge on late-arriving ballots, for example, and that race could easily determine which party controls the Senate in the next Congress.

If you haven’t voted yet, I advise you to drop your ballot off in a designated dropbox or election office prior to Election Day. Either that, or take your chances with COVID-19 at your local precinct. It’s too late to rely on the mail.

It’s probably asking too much of 2020 for this election to go smoothly, but I hope most of the drama revolves around getting Trump packed and gone rather than fighting in the streets over another stolen election.

Tim Alberta gives Joe Biden faint praise even as he commends him for running a superb campaign. What I find interesting is how it comes as such a surprise to so many sharp political analysts to discover that Biden is a good fit for our times. This seemed obvious to me from the beginning.

Perhaps this is because I’m a Pennsylvanian and I always saw the 2020 election through the lens of what would help the Democrats recapture this critical and traditionally blue state from Donald Trump. Biden checked most of the boxes for me, and no one else came close. Obviously, it helps that Biden grew up in Scranton and that he’s represented a neighboring state that shares the Philadelphia media market. It also helps that he was Barack Obama’s partner in office rather than part of a political dynasty that Obama vanquished in 2008. He’s also a white man of a certain age, and an Irish Catholic with a certain gritty working man’s appeal. Just on pure self-identification grounds, he has a big advantage in Pennsylvania over Hillary Clinton. Obama loyalists see him as reliable, while white working class Democrats see him as one of their own. Older Americans recognize him as part of their generation. Biden’s main weakness is his disconnect from younger generations, who do not identify with him. Here, he was blessed with an opponent who has even less appeal to young folks, and that somewhat mitigates his inability to create organic excitement.

Both ideologically and by reputation, Biden also fits Pennsylvania. He’s completely acceptable to the suburban voters, especially the former Republicans who have steadily drifted into the blue column in this century. Yet, he accomplishes this without alienating the labor vote in the West or the inner city vote. Collectively, his broad yet shallow appeal more than offsets his blandness, especially because he alienates almost no one.

But it’s really more his ability to offer a contrast to Trump that makes him a good fit for 2020. As Alberta notes, the American people do not want more drama. They want calm and normalcy, or even just competency. They’d like to be able to ignore politics for weeks at a time, and Biden offers them that in a way that someone offering “revolution” would not.

What America wants and what it needs are not necessarily the same thing, which is why Biden wasn’t my first choice for the Democratic nomination. In fact, if not for his very predictable (in my mind) strengths against Trump, Biden wouldn’t have been in my top five. But for the same reasons I predicted he (or Sanders) would win the nomination before he even entered, I knew that he’d be the least risky choice against Trump, and that wasn’t something I could overlook.

The polls look about how I expected them to look, although COVID-19 has shifted things around a bit. I knew Biden would do well with older voters but not this well. I knew he’d make inroads with rural voters, but perhaps not as much as we’re seeing now. I also knew he’d struggle to turn out the youth vote and that this would turn up as well with young voters of color. His selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate is a sensible response to this one weakness.

In spite of Biden’s near-ideal fit for Pennsylvania, he still has to worry that rural areas will turn out in huge margins for Trump, as they did four years ago. But this would be even more of a concern if the nominee were more culturally distant or ideologically ill-suited to maintaining suburban support.

As far as I was concerned, all Biden had to do to beat Trump was be himself and not make any truly horrible gaffes. I was never sure any of the other candidates could defeat Trump in Pennsylvania no matter what they said or supported.

Unfortunately, identity currently plays more of a role than the issues in American politics, and this seems to be with the mutual consent of both parties and an assist from the media. An exhausted electorate was never going to want radical change in this election even if the country needs a lot of radical change.

Fortunately, Biden will be positioned, if he wins, to pass more progressive legislation than anyone since his buddy Barack in 2009. If he doesn’t win, I’m pretty sure no one else would have won either.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Jerome, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have made many changes for this week’s cycle. Out in front the line of cars has been revised. I really like the black jeep. Above, the sky has a single prominent cloud. Below that are old telephone wires. The nearby trees and street sign are also changed. In the far distance the blue hills have been repainted.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

What kind of people head up fundraising for the major political parties? They tend to be successful business types like Phil Murphy, the Democratic National Committee’s Finance Chair in the early 2000s. The former Goldman Sachs banker became Ambassador to Germany and is the current governor of New Jersey. There’s Lew Eisenberg, the former Republican Finance Chair, also a Goldman Sachs alumnus with a long career in private equity and management. Finance chairs love the hustle. They’re aggressive, but they try to stay clean, although their work can put them in dicey situations. Richard Sullivan, the DNC Finance Chair in the mid-1990s, got pulled into the contretemps over whether Chinese national money made its way into Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. Sullivan did nothing wrong, but his having to appear before Congress to testify about the matter shows that the top fundraising job comes with risk. That’s to be expected.

Then there’s the Republican National Committee Finance team under Donald Trump. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that this might be a corner of the universe—the crossroads of money and elections—where the Trump-selected leaders of the party might have some problems.

Let’s start shortly after Inauguration Day in 2017. Las Vegas-based gaming mogul Steve Wynn was announced as the new RNC finance chairman. Wynn’s appointment was treated as a bit of surprise since he’d been a long-time and often bitter rival of Trump. “The news suggests even billionaires can bury the hatchet,” The Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote.

In April 2017, Wynn and the new RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, issued a press release (since deleted but still available through the Wayback Machine)  announcing that Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, and Louis DeJoy would serve as National Deputy Finance Chairmen under Wynn. It was an ill-fated coalition: Broidy would wind up pleading guilty to violating lobbying laws on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian clients, Cohen would do time for lying to Congress among other crimes, and DeJoy is postmaster general and accused of deliberately slowing the mail to delay mail-in ballots which, this year, are primarily Democratic owing to the president calling such ballots a “fraud.”

Let’s go back to the winter of 2018. Broidy, who had served as the vice-chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee, was soon embroiled in a controversy over his work with George Nader—an adviser to the United Arab Emirates and a once and soon-to-be again convicted consumer of child pornography.

On January 27, 2018, The Wall Street Journal published a major investigation based on dozens of sources detailing a pattern of sexual misconduct by Wynn. He resigned as RNC finance chair the same day. On February 7, as the stock of Wynn Resorts, Limited tumbled more than 18 percent, Wynn lost control of the business empire he’d spent four decades building as shareholders forced him out as CEO.

The next blow to the RNC finance team came two months later on April 9, 2018, when the FBI exercised search warrants at Michael Cohen’s office at the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, as well as his home, and a Manhattan hotel room where he’d been staying.

Among other things, the Feds were looking for evidence that Cohen, while serving as an employee of the Trump organization and as Trump’s personal attorney, had made hush-money payments to Playboy model Karen McDougal and pornographic actress Stormy Daniels. Cohen paid McDougal $150,000 to remain silent about a ten-month affair she conducted with Trump in 2005 and 2006 while future First Lady Melania Trump was pregnant. Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about a tryst she had with Trump shortly after Melania’s pregnancy resulted in the birth of Trump’s third son, Barron.

It’s bad enough that Cohen was a hush-money fixer for Trump before he joined the RNC, but the New York lawyer also did it for Elliot Broidy, too. Cohen had set up a corporation in Delaware to try to conceal the source of hush-money payments to Trump’s paramours. Cohen also used this corporation to help his future colleague on the RNC finance team, Broidy, conceal his own affair.

Former Playboy Bunny Shera Bechard was paid $1.6 million by Cohen in 2017 and 2018 to stay mum about her extramarital affair with Broidy, which she later claimed in court had resulted in physical abuse, pregnancy, and–most inconveniently for the anti-choice Republican Party–pressure from Broidy for her to get an abortion.

Broidy resigned from the finance team on April 13, 2018. Cohen lasted until June 20, mere days after Trump announced that Cohen no longer served as his personal attorney.

But the story wasn’t over. In August 2018, Cohen was indicted on eight felonies involving fraud, tax evasion, and the hush money payments deemed illegal campaign contributions. He later pleaded guilty to perjuring himself before Congress and, as the sentencing judge put it, “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”

After Cohen and Broidy’s mid-2018 resignations from the RNC finance team, only Louis DeJoy, a former logistics company executive, remained from the original group. He departed in May 2019 to serve as the national finance chairman for CLT Host 2020, a supposedly non-profit, non-partisan organization responsible for raising money for the 2020 Republican National Convention, which was then planned for Charlotte, North Carolina.

The New York Times would later report that DeJoy’s businesses “have been the subject of complaints of sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions,” been cited by the National Labor Relations Board for acting with “anti-union animus,” and found guilty in federal court of violating labor laws.

Nonetheless, in May 2020, he was chosen by the Trump-appointed U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to serve as the United States Postmaster General. In that role, he soon caused national controversy, as it became clear that he was using his position to assist Trump’s reelection campaign. As the Monthly’s Eric Cortellessa put it in August, by “removing sorting machines from postal facilities and eliminating mailboxes,” DeJoy was attempting to interfere with the proper delivery and counting of absentee and vote-by-mail ballots in the middle of a global pandemic.

In August 2020, he was hauled before Congress, subjected to withering criticism, and compelled to promise the timely delivery of mail ballots.

Trump was intimately familiar with Cohen’s record and knew full-well that Cohen had committed felonies at his direction. Wynn had expanded his casino operations into Macau, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China in the South China Sea, and unsuccessfully fought a 2017 slander case against accusations he’d violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Broidy, as ProPublica reported at the time, had been convicted in 2009 for “paying nearly $1 million in bribes to officials at New York State’s pension system, in exchange for a $250 million placement in his investment fund.” And, of course, DeJoy had a sketchy business history involving sexual harassment and labor law violations.

There are many other examples of Trump’s failed effort to hire “the best and most serious people” and “drain the swamp,” including convicted felons Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates recently indicted Steve Bannon. But the guilty plea of Elliott Broidy this week will close the chapter on the “top of the line professionals” Trump chose to head the RNC’s fundraising arm.

What’s the deal with Mitch McConnell’s seemingly bruised hands and lips? The fact-checking website, Snopes, confirms the authenticity of this Associated Press-distributed photograph of the 78-year-old Senate Majority Leader’s hands, which was taken on Tuesday after a Senate Republican Conference lunch. In the photograph, both of the Kentucky senator’s hands are bandaged, mottled, purplish, and seemingly swollen. McConnell refuses to provide an explanation, having declined to discuss it in front of reporters. His office has not issued a statement about the disconcerting pictures.

https://twitter.com/anastasiakeeley/status/1318933175436009475?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1318933175436009475%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3%2Ccontainerclick_0&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snopes.com%2Ffact-check%2Fmitch-mcconnells-hands%2F

It’s not just McConnell’s hands that seem worrisome. Close examination of his face reveals discoloration around his mouth.

https://twitter.com/riotwomennn/status/1319029347336978434?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1319029793296363520%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3%2Ccontainerclick_1&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3D3ce26dc7e3454db5820ba084d28b4935schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Friotwomennn%2Fstatus%2F1319029793296363520image%3D

Questioned by reporters on Thursday, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports that McConnell was evasive.

Politico reporter John Bresnahan asked if he had some kind of health issue. McConnell countered by saying he has been worried about Bresnahan’s health and asking how he was feeling.

Bresnahan said he was feeling OK. “Good for you,” McConnell replied.

“But I’m serious, is there anything going on we should know about?” Bresnahan followed up.

“Of course not,” McConnell said.

Another journalist asked about the bruising, too, and McConnell said there were no concerns. He did not respond when asked if he was being treated by a doctor.

Aside from being the most powerful member of the U.S. Senate, McConnell is up for reelection in 11 days. As he seeks a sixth six-year term against challenger Amy McGrath, Democrats see an opening. Marisa McNee, a Kentucky Democratic Party spokesperson, told Buzzfeed News, “It’s understandable that Sen. McConnell might not want to discuss questions about his health so close to an election. But as Senate Majority Leader, he is a public figure which requires more disclosure and transparency than just the average private person.”

In the absence of an explanation, online speculation has been rampant. Print articles have explored the possibilities, too. Bruce Y. Lee of Forbes collated some of the theories, which include bruising from an injury or intravenous line, lack of blood oxygenation, poor blood circulation, blood thinning and anti-clotting medications, and lymphatic disorders. Many of those are consistent with a COVID-19 infection. But it could be none of those. We don’t know.

October polling of the McConnell-McGrath race shows the Majority Leader comfortably ahead of the former Marine pilot by nine or ten points. FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of being reelected. But he can’t be complacent. Newsweek reports that McGrath has raised $82.3 million to his $52 million and outspent him $62.4 million to $38.2 million.

Perhaps McConnell’s reticence will help him protect his solid lead. Yet, in failing to be transparent, he’s giving Kentuckians a reason to vote against him. Evasiveness and visible bruising are a bad combination for a politician. Even worse, McConnell has been cagey about COVID-19 testing, saying he had been tested but refusing to say when. Giving a 78-year-old Senator a six-year term is a modest gamble, as an actuarial table will show you. Kentucky voters deserve the facts before they vote.

One thing I’m not sure about is if President Trump has ever understood, even if he subsequently forgot, why people keep asking him about pre-existing conditions. Every single time the question comes up, he treats it exactly like any student who gets called on in class, doesn’t know the answer, and then tries to bullshit their way through.

The issue shouldn’t be overly hard to grasp. It makes no sense to insure people against getting ill if they’re already ill. It’s like selling flood insurance to someone whose property is already flooded or fire insurance to someone whose business is already on fire.  So, in order to convince insurance companies to cover people who are clearly going to be unprofitable, the government forces tons of young, healthy people to get insurance, and this offsets the losses.

None of this is necessary if you eliminate private for-profit health insurance and go to a fully government-run plan, but it’s an unavoidable fix for the problem described above. Of course, this means that everyone is mandated to get health insurance, even if they’d prefer to risk going without it.

Eliminating the Affordable Care Act takes away the legal mechanisms that make this work, and leaves insurance companies in an unsustainable position. They can’t continue to give sick people health coverage if they’re not getting a lot of healthy customers to compensate them. They also can’t get nearly as many customers without generous government subsidies (the “affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act).

Republicans don’t like mandating that people buy insurance, and they’ve already zeroed out the tax penalty that is supposed to work as the incentive enforcement mechanism. They don’t like paying out the subsidies. But eliminating the Affordable Care Act doesn’t change anything about how this all has to work if private health insurance companies are going to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Getting the Supreme Court to rule the law unconstitutional, as the administration is attempting to do at the moment, would likely make it even harder for the Republicans to find some alternative way to cover sick people.

So, when Trump is asked how he plans to cover pre-existing conditions, what people are really wondering is how he can convince an insurance company to insure someone with cancer or diabetes or cerebral palsy when they know they’ll pay out possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they’ll ever bring in in premiums. President Obama had an answer for that question, and it’s called the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans in Congress tried and failed to find some alternative way of converting pre-existing conditions and they failed. Trump has no answer, because there is no answer.

People will keep asking him this question straight through Election Day, because it’s very important to millions of Americans. Maybe he hems and haws about this because he hasn’t done his homework, or maybe it’s because there’s just nothing he, or any other Republican can say to reassure the electorate.

There are legitimate questions about how effective television advertisements are in our current political environment where so few people seem undecided between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but they’re unlikely to hurt unless they’re poorly designed. Michael Bloomberg has put $100 million into ads in Florida, and this has forced Trump to respond. The problem is, he doesn’t have enough money to keep up the pace in the Sunshine State without withdrawing planned ad buys in places like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Former Republican strategist Mike Murphy captured the situation well in describing the Trump campaign’s spending habits, “You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.” Frank Luntz says Trump is running the worst campaign he’s ever seen and that his advisers should be “brought up on charges of political malpractice.”

The ominous signs are everywhere for Trump (there are some for Biden, too, if you’re willing to search for them), but one in particular should carry a little extra weight. Four years ago, signs of Trump’s coming rural romp began showing up first in congressional race polling, where the Republican challenger’s district-level lead ballooned between Labor Day and mid-October. As Dave Wasserman explains (behind a firewall at Cook Political Report):

“Fast forward to 2020: district-level polls are full of danger signs for Trump. In both parties’ private surveys — used to make key resource allocation decisions — he’s routinely underperforming his 2016 margins by eight to ten points, consistent with national polls. As a result, one well-placed GOP member told us this week ‘it would be a pleasant surprise if we only lost ten House seats.’”

Any idea the Republicans had of picking up House seats seems to have evaporated, but it’s also a strong signal that the national polls aren’t skewed or biased against Trump. Democrats were too busy having fun with the Access Hollywood tape in mid-October 2016 to notice that things were going squirrelly in rural and small-town America, but people know now to look for this type of omen.

Part of the strategy behind making Trump fight in Florida is that it prevents him from defending other turf, so it’s not premised or reliant on actually carrying the state. Having said that, of the 35 October polls of Florida collected by FiveThirtyEight, Biden has led in 26, trailed in four, and been tied in five. They give him a 70 percent chance of winning there.

Trump currently trails in the FiveThirtyEight projections for Wisconsin (88 percent Biden win), Michigan (93 percent Biden win), and Pennsylvania (87 percent Biden win), and is struggling in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia. A Data for Progress survey released Tuesday had Biden up by one point in Texas, and SurveyMonkey poll released on Wednesday has the the race tied with likely voters.

As Astead Herndon explains in the New York Times, this positive landscape has the Democrats cautiously talking about a landslide victory.

For some Democrats, Mr. Trump’s attention to red states is also a sign of something else — something few in the party want to discuss out loud, given their scars from Mr. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. It’s an indication that Mr. Biden could pull off a landslide in November, achieving an ambitious and rare electoral blowout that some Democrats think is necessary to quell any doubts — or disputes by Mr. Trump — that Mr. Biden won the election.

On one level, such a scenario is entirely plausible based on the weeks and the breadth of public polls that show Mr. Biden with leads or edges in key states. But this possibility runs headlong into the political difficulties of pulling off such a win, and perhaps even more, the psychological hurdles for Democrats to entertain the idea. Many think that Mr. Trump, having pulled off a stunning win before, could do it again, even if there are differences from 2016 that hurt his chances.

With the stakes in this election so high, there’s no room for overconfidence or complacency, but there’s no denying that Trump has placed himself behind the eight-ball. The rest of the Republican Party is trapped there, too.

Hey everyone! It’s another day ending in Y. Somehow I managed to leave the last cafe and lounge in draft mode for a couple days. Oops. I will try not to repeat that again.

Sarah Cooper is graced TikTok and Twitter with her latest impersonation, this time of Don Jr.:

https://twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1318188081229553664

John Oliver is back explaining WHO and its importance:

Seth Meyers has fun covering Trump’s continued meltdown:

Now if Trump is serious about leaving the country, we’re here for it. I hear that Siberia is very lovely in January.

While I’m at it, I’ve become a fan of Brent Terhune this year. I’m wishing I knew about his comedy before this year, but better late than never. Someone else I followed on Twitter quote tweeted a video of Brent’s and added some comments about being outraged by whatever it was Brent was up to that day. Folks really ought to read the bio before they get outraged. He’s a comedian. Satire is his thing. And he does it well. His impersonation of a MAGAt is hilarious, especially for those of us who’ve spent significant parts of our lives in the South or were otherwise raised Southern. Here’s his latest:

https://twitter.com/BrentTerhune/status/1318656622042976261

Alright y’all. Going to end on that note. Bar’s open. Drink responsibly. The jukebox really works now. Give it a whirl.

Cheers!

This week’s Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows Joe Biden doing three percentage points better than last week’s Yahoo News/YouGov poll. This isn’t the most bullish survey for the Democratic nominee, but it now shows Biden with all-time high 11 -point (51-40) national lead over the liar-in-chief.

Their explanation?

The president has struggled to rebound over the past three weeks from a widely panned first debate performance and a COVID-19 outbreak that sent him to the hospital and sickened others in and around the White House. Yet the main reason Trump appears to have fallen even further behind Biden in recent days is that coronavirus cases are peaking just as the campaign is coming to a close. On Friday, new daily cases cleared 70,000 nationwide for the first time since July; hospitalizations are increasing in 39 states, and are at or near their all-time peak in 16 states.

They forgot to mention that even before the debate, there was that little thing where people finally got to see his financial records and learned that Trump pays no taxes even when he owes them, that he’s completely broke, and that he’s been lying his ass off about his net worth.

The news has been unrelentingly bad for Trump and he’s been acting like even more of an irresponsible and deranged lunatic than normal. But it’s interesting to see that this particular pollster is seeing a direct hit from the new spike in COVID-19 cases.

That is exactly how things should be. He’s working on a quarter million unnecessary deaths on his bloody hands, and it’d be a shame if he wasn’t paying a price for it. People can clearly see that the pandemic is nowhere near under control, and he’s doing phone calls with his peeps where he says, “People are tired of covid. I have the biggest rallies I’ve ever had. And we have covid. People are saying, ‘Whatever — just leave us alone.’”

The polls suggest people are indeed tired of Covid, but their message may be a bit different. It looks like they want someone who takes the problem seriously, and that’s not good news for the president.

Did Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election? We can’t know for sure because so many factors could have led to her defeat. But it’s certainly plausible that this third-party bid delivered us four years of Donald Trump. The wound is still raw: Trump won the Electoral College buoyed by three traditionally Democratic states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which he won by a mere 78,000 votes. If every Stein voter in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin had cast a vote for Clinton, Trump would have lost.

It’s hard to imagine a third-party candidacy derailing Joe Biden, although it’s remotely possible if the race tightens. Unlike 2016, Democrats have aggressively exploited legal technicalities to keep Green Party candidates—many of whom have been helped by the GOP–off the ballot in pivotal states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. While the Libertarian Party announced in September that its presidential ticket would appear on the ballot in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., the Green Party’s candidates will do so in only 30.

The Green Party will be an option in Florida and other battleground states, such as Minnesota and Ohio, drawing at least some Biden votes. But this year’s Green Party ticket of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker—have you heard of them?—seems less likely to tip the scales than Stein’s did.

Third-Party candidates’ real effect could be in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans control the chamber 53-47. Democrats wresting it from them could come down to two states, South Carolina and Georgia, where third-party voting could prove pivotal.

If you have any doubt about that, look at Jaime Harrison, the Democratic nominee in South Carolina challenging three-term incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham. This month, Harrison began running ads that touted a far-right Third-Party conservative candidate to peel votes away from Graham. It’s a jarring and, some might say, brilliant gambit. The ad touts the Constitution Party’s Bill Bledsoe in a manner designed to pet the erogenous zones of conservatives. It notes that Bledsoe has “always supported Donald Trump” (unlike Graham) and is a fervent supporter of gun rights. It also states that Bledsoe is “on the ballot,” which is technically correct. Even though Bledsoe dropped out of the race on October 1, he did so after the deadline had passed to have his name removed from the ballot, and he didn’t bother to submit the paperwork to get that done. There’s even a picture in the ad showing a ballot where a Palmetto State Republican could check his name. If the image of Harrison (an African-American Yale grad with a genial and gentle mien) seems incongruous in an ad that all but spouts a Confederate Flag, that’s because it is. (A candidate’s image is required by law at the end of a broadcast ad.)

Democrats’ efforts to cause such rifts on the other side of the ideological divide are relatively rare, and so are Republican ones, but they can work. In 2012, then Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, ran ads touting Todd Akin, a contender for the GOP nomination to challenge her, believing he’d be a weaker general election candidate. That proved to be a smart bet. Akin won his primary and then imploded in the general election following his infamous quip about abortion and “legitimate rape.”

If enough votes go to Bledsoe, it could make a decisive difference in the Harrison-Graham race, which is tight. The latest survey, taken by GBAO Strategies from September 23 to September 28, has Harrison beating Graham 48 percent to 47, with Bledsoe pulling a potentially game-changing three percent.

Bledsoe is a character, the kind who Harrison can exploit. A veterinarian from Spartanburg, Bledsoe ran for the South Carolina’s other U.S. Senate seat in 2018 on both the Constitution Party and Libertarian Party lines. He got just 2 percent but demonstrated a flair for attracting cameras–even brandishing a Revolutionary War-era musket to show he was the staunchest opponent of gun restrictions. But incumbent Tim Scott won that race by 23 points, so Bledsoe’s single-digit showing meant nothing to the outcome of the race. By contrast, Harrison can win buoyed by a charismatic style, Graham fatigue, astronomical fundraising, and, perhaps, leveraging Bledsoe’s name. Not surprisingly, Graham welcomed Bledsoe’s endorsement with the same kind of obsequiousness he’s shown President Trump since the days when the former Air Force lawyer called Candidate Trump “crazy” and “a religious bigot” among other epithets.

Georgia is another state where a Third-Party candidate could make a real difference. Georgia has two Senate elections this year. In one, which features numerous Democrats and Republicans vying to fill the seat of retired GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson, don’t look for Third-Party candidates to play much of a role. It’s the contest between incumbent Republican Sen. David Purdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, where the GOP and Democrats are concerned about Third-Party voters’ potential impact.

The latest public survey, conducted by Public Policy Polling on October 8-9, has Ossoff, who lost a much-publicized bid for Congress in 2018, leading 44-43 percent. The Libertarian Party candidate, Marine Corp veteran Shane Hazel, clocks in at four percent. A Landmark Communications poll conducted exclusively on October 7 shows Perdue ahead 47-46, with Hazel at two.

Carrying a legacy from the Jim Crow era, Georgia, like a few other states, including Louisiana, requires a runoff election if no candidate reaches a certain threshold. Georgia’s is the only one that requires a majority to avoid a runoff. In 1966, the law’s authors intended it to safeguard against a unified black vote overcoming a divided white vote.

In the Purdue-Ossoff race, this law could help Ossoff initially but perhaps not in the runoff. Since the Libertarian Party typically pulls more support from the right, Hazel’s candidacy could prevent Purdue from winning a majority and avoiding the runoff on January 5, two days after the Senate is seated. Avoiding flat-out defeat would give Ossoff a chance to contend in a runoff. But Democrats still smart from 1992 when a Libertarian’s strong showing forced a runoff between the incumbent U.S. Senator, Democrat Wyche Fowler, and his Republican challenger Paul Coverdell. Fowler lost in what was perhaps a harbinger of a very tough 1993 and 1994 for the new president-elect Bill Clinton.

Ossoff has a shot, though a distant one, at winning a majority outright. The state is trending blue. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a 46 percent chance of winning there, and it’s telling that Trump visited Macon, Ga. last week, a once impossible-to-imagine sign of desperation for a GOP nominee late trying to hold on to a red state. With control of the Senate on the line, the November 3 contest between Perdue and Ossoff will get enormous national attention and atypically high voter participation but maybe not enough to put Ossoff over the 50 percent threshold.

Democrats haven’t historically fared well in Georgia’s runoff elections, primarily because they’re typically low-turnout affairs. And Democrats need large turnouts. They get their base excited leading up to Election Day for candidates up and down the ballot. Getting them to come back some 11 weeks later for just one race is a heavy lift. The best chance for that to happen would be if, after November 3, neither party is in firm control of the Senate and the Ossoff-Perdue runoff becomes the deciding factor.

Third parties may win less support his time around. There are no high-profile figures atop the Green Party ticket such as Ralph Nader in 2000 or Stein in 2016. There are no high-profile Libertarian nominees for president and vice-president like former Republican Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, and his 2016 running mate Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. But Third Parties still have the potential to change everything in the Senate.