It is conventional wisdom that Donald Trump’s support has cratered among women, especially suburban women. But is that really true?

This goes through mid-October. Trump’s basic approval rating has been remarkably steady among both men and women.

However, voting intentions have changed a lot—though not in the way you might think. In 2016, Trump lost women by 13 points. According to a recent Pew poll, he’s likely to lose them by 16 points this year. That’s a 3-point drop and it means that Trump is suffering one of the worst blowouts among women of any presidential candidate ever.

Among men, Trump won by 11 points in 2016. This year he’s likely to lose them by 4 points. That’s an astonishing 15-point drop. It’s among men that he’s truly cratered. And this has happened across nearly all demographic and racial groups.

Other polls show things a little differently. A Washington Post poll conducted last week suggests that Trump has lost 11 points among men and 10 points among women. Either way, though, what this shows is that Trump isn’t doing badly just because women have turned against him. Everyone has turned against him, and men have turned as much or more than women.

It’s unclear why this is, since news accounts almost unanimously focus on (a) unhappy women and (b) rural men who remain Trump supporters. What they’re missing is the great mass of men who voted for Trump in 2016 but have become disillusioned with him for talking big but doing nothing to make their lives better. That’s the story of 2020.

This is a brilliant red camellia in my neighbor’s yard—back when my neighbors had such things. These days the whole yard is overrun by weeds. No one lives there, but for some reason they haven’t sold it either. It’s all very strange.

The white background is just the sky, which was so bright it blew out the sensor.

The masters of the universe can never be wrong, they can only be wronged.Kostas Lymperopoulos/CSM via ZUMA

If you win, they pay you big bucks. If you lose, they pay you big bucks:

The coronavirus recession tipped dozens of troubled companies into bankruptcy, setting off a rush of store closures, furloughs and layoffs. But several major brands, including Hertz Global, J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, doled out millions in executive bonuses just before filing for Chapter 11 protection, according to a Washington Post analysis of regulatory filings and court documents.

Since the pandemic took hold in March, at least 18 large companies have rewarded executives with six- and seven-figure payouts before asking bankruptcy courts to shield them from landlords, suppliers and other creditors while they restructured, the Post review found. They collectively meted out more than $135 million, documents show, while listing $79 billion in debts.

The putative reason for this is that all these loser executives will bail out if they don’t get their bonuses. And maybe they would. But it’s telling that apparently the boards of these companies can’t even fathom promoting one of their many vice presidents to take over the job, perhaps with some kind of incentive for negotiating favorable Chapter 11 terms. Nope. It’s the loser CEO or nothing.

I suppose part of this is laziness, but part of it is probably an unwillingness to admit that the CEO they hired has done a bad job. He’s such a great guy! Customers love him! Events just didn’t go our way.

Warning: Don’t try this trick if you are not part of the C-suite. It won’t work.

With seven days to go, the Economist poll aggegrate shows Joe Biden as far ahead of Donald Trump as ever:

Here are their state-level predictions:

I really, really want to see a landslide election. I want Republicans to lose the presidency, lose the Senate, lose the House, and lose a bunch of state legislatures. I want them to be crushed for the sin of supporting Donald Trump for the past four years. I am so looking forward to this.

POSTSCRIPT: Are you still paranoid because of 2016? I don’t blame you. So am I. But 2016 was a massive outlier. And keep in mind that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the 2016 polls weren’t actually very far off. There’s no reason to think this year’s polls will be either.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Ian Millhiser notes a radical assertion from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in the recent Wisconsin voting case:

As Gorsuch notes in his concurring opinion, which is joined by Kavanaugh, the Constitution provides that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” A separate constitutional provision provides that “each State shall appoint” members of the Electoral College “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

According to Gorsuch, the key word in these constitutional provisions is “Legislature.” He claims that the word “Legislature” must be read in a hyper-literal way. “The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” he writes.

Old timers will remember this argument from the 2000 Florida recount debacle. The idea is that the Constitution doesn’t allow state courts to intervene in election rules. What the legislature says, goes.

I’ve never understood this. IANAL, but it’s implicit in the Constitution that all laws are passed by a legislature of one kind or another, and those laws are all subject to judicial review. So why would voting laws be any different? Just because the Constitution actually mentions the word legislature there? This doesn’t make any sense to me. Still, nobody else joined this concurrence, so presumably it’s not likely to affect things much going forward.

I should mention, by the way, that I’m less concerned about court-mandated voting rules being overturned than a lot of people. There are two reasons for this. First, some courts really do seem to be overstepping their bounds on election law this year. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch may be wrong about legislative supremacy, but modifying election law in response to COVID-19 really does seem like it’s a legislative responsibility. Mandating that ballots have to be received by Election Day, for example, is hardly a new or unusual requirement, even if many of us don’t like it.

The other reason is that this year’s setbacks on extended voting pale in comparison to both the advances in many states and the long-term trend:

This is from the MIT Election Data Science Lab, and it shows a very steady increase in early voting since 1992. Modest ups and downs along the way haven’t changed this and aren’t likely to. Early voting is obviously going to skyrocket this year, and it strikes me that the American public has spoken pretty loudly and clearly about its preference for having a choice of when to vote.

In any case, what I’d really like to see is a federal law that sets voting standards across the country. It’s kind of ridiculous for every state to have wildly different laws, often set at the last minute by partisan hacks seeking some tiny electoral advantage. Why not one uniform standard for everyone?

When I was down at the San Diego Zoo a couple of weeks ago, I figured that when I was done I’d head over and try to get a picture of the Coronado Bridge at sunset. Unfortunately, I ran into the same problem I had with the new bridge in Long Beach: it’s in the middle of a harbor and it’s surrounded by harbor stuff. This is the best I could get from the mainland side. The view is considerably better from the Coronado side, but you can’t capture a sunset from over there.

A few days ago I suffered through some kind of terrible stomach bug. Then I got better. Then I got another one. What’s going on? In any case, I feel horrible, which is why today’s charts are so late.

Also too, there’s a wildfire raging about ten miles north of me, helped along by hurricane level Santa Ana winds, and if you go outside it smells like a barbecue and looks like Armageddon. Nevertheless, here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Mark Meadows just doesn't care anymore.Chris Kleponis - Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

Well, this explains a lot:

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has just made one of the most revealing comments to emerge from Trump’s inner circle about the president’s historic mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. On a Sunday political talk show, Meadows admitted that the federal government was not focusing on trying to control the pandemic.

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” he told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union. “We are going to control the fact that we get a vaccine, therapeutics and other mitigation.” Tapper pressed Meadows to explain why the administration was not going to control Covid-19, given the massive surge that is pummeling the Midwest and mountain states. He replied: “Because it is a contagious virus.”

I mean, we all knew they’d given up, but I hardly expected them to just admit it on national TV. It doesn’t seem like a good reelection strategy, does it? I suppose they consider this some kind of sneaky 11th-dimensional chess or something, far beyond the comprehension of mere mortals like you and me.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.