Via Dave Wasserman, here are the crosstabs from an average of the most recent polls:

Compared to 2016, Trump has massively lost support in virtually every demographic group. Nine points among seniors! What’s equally interesting is that all of this happened by mid-2020 and there’s been very little movement since. Everyone outside of his most committed followers got tired of Trump long ago.

Tonight is the third and final presidential debate. Or maybe the second and final. In any case, I answer all your questions about the debate below:

When is it?
9 pm to 10:30 pm Eastern time.

Where is it?
On your TV. Or your laptop. Or your phone. Hell, maybe on your refrigerator and your Xbox too. Do you expect me to do all your work for you?

Will Donald Trump do better than he did in the first debate?
Yes. Considering his world historically bad performance in the first debate, he really has no choice.

Will Trump learn his lesson and project a more caring, empathetic persona?
Oh please. How many times have we asked this question over the past four years? He will be the usual Trump because he has no choice. That’s the only thing he’s capable of being.

Any other questions?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

FBI Director Christopher Wray.Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

This again?

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher A. Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William P. Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter.

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden or other Biden associates are under investigation, these people say. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

If he loses the election, will Trump go on a rampage and fire everyone that he blames for not helping him out enough? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Just your basic suburb.Kevin Drum

In the New York Times recently, we got the following advice from an expert in “retrofitting” suburbs to make them, among other things, more walkable:

Which retrofitting interventions provide the greatest benefits at the least cost?

Ms. Dunham-Jones: Right now, 46 percent of trips from predominantly single-family-home suburban neighborhoods are three miles or less. Which would be perfectly fine for a bike ride, a scooter ride, or a walk in many of those trips, if there was adequate infrastructure to make that a safe choice. That would have enormous impact.

Here’s the question: Am I nuts or are they? I’ve lived in suburbs all my life, and no one makes a walk of three miles. For that matter, no one makes a walk of two miles or one mile, either. There’s a shopping center about half a mile from my house (and half a mile from perhaps a thousand other houses), and unless I miss my guess by a lot, at least 90 percent of the people who shop there arrive by car even though safety is a non-issue. In a suburban environment, people just don’t walk.

In theory, you could force them to walk more by taking away all the parking spaces, but good luck with that. No politician in her right mind would even suggest a small reduction in parking, let alone anything that might have a real effect.

There are places that have successfully combined city-like shopping streets with suburban-like housing, but even after decades of pressure from the urbanist movement there aren’t a lot of them. For one thing, they require denser housing, and there’s a limited appetite for that. Some people are happy with it, but a huge number of people aren’t. They want the classic suburban detached house with a yard, and that’s fundamentally non-dense.

I dunno. It sure seems like there’s a lot of talk about how to make suburbs denser that doesn’t account for human nature even slightly. I’m a longtime suburbanite who could happily live anywhere since I don’t really care about detached houses and yards, but I know my neighbors pretty well. You can hit them with all the logical arguments for denser development in your arsenal and it won’t affect them even slightly. They don’t want to live in condos; they don’t want to walk three miles to the grocery store; they don’t want lots of traffic; and they don’t want to take a bus everywhere. They just don’t. Offer them all jetpacks and maybe they’ll change their minds. Short of that, your white papers will never make more than the tiniest inroads.

I love this picture of a gorilla at the San Diego Zoo. He looks like he’s totally blissed out on the aroma of the latest batch of greenery from his favorite supplier.

This is from the New York Times today:

Whispering? Democrats ought to be yelling it from the rooftops.

There is a strange belief among political consultants that if you express optimism you are likely to make people complacent. Hey, my guy is going to win, so I guess there’s no point in doing any more phone banking. But this is ridiculous. It’s a fundamental of human nature that people like to back winners. If you promise them that they’re part of a history-making landslide that will rid the country of its worst president ever, the result will be more energy, not less. What’s more, it’s actually true that Biden is expanding his lead:

I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s a mistake to let the trauma of 2016 color everything. Right now, nothing is going Trump’s way. His attempted smear of Hunter Biden has mostly just aroused disgust. His rallies are feeble replays of 2016. He personally hosted an infamous superspreader event at the White House and still refuses to take COVID-19 seriously. He’s losing the support of women in droves. His attack on Biden as a pawn of AOC and the extremist wing of the Democratic Party is so absurd that people just laugh at it. Senate Republicans have all but abandoned him as a sure loser. He’s behind in national polling by an astonishing ten percentage points.

So could Biden win in a landslide? Sure he could. In fact, I’d guess that with a big last-minute push it’s close to a certainty.

POSTSCRIPT: Just remember: 2016 was a fluke, not a harbinger of the future. Trump is a buffoon and after four years in office most of the country knows it.

I have two health updates today. First, at this very moment, I am recovering from an explosive bout of stomach something or other. I don’t know what I ate to bring that on, but I sure want to avoid it ever again.

But you don’t care about that. You’re here for the monthly multiple myeloma update, and the news there is very good. My latest M-protein number is the lowest it’s been in two years:

In addition, my white count numbers are good and my other immune system markers are pretty good too. All in all, a lousy morning but a very good month.

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Like everyone in the writing biz, we rely heavily on Facebook to drive traffic to our site. Nobody really likes this, but it’s just the way things are these days. So when Facebook made some changes to its algorithms a couple of years ago that were supposed to have a modest effect, we were pretty stunned when our reach plummeted. A few days ago the Wall Street Journal told us how this had happened:

In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans.

This would be easier to take if Facebook really did have a liberal tilt that needed correction. But it doesn’t. Its daily top ten list of news posts routinely includes something like seven or eight conservative sites. Its own videos warning against fake news provide examples solely of conservative misconduct. The problem is not that Facebook underrepresents conservatives. The problem is that it’s under constant assault from conservative politicians who make up weepy—and ridiculously fanciful—stories about how they’re discriminated against.

For Mother Jones, the result of all this has been a big loss of revenue, probably something on the order of half a million dollars. This is one of the reasons we do regular fundraisers: it costs a lot to produce our website and our magazine, and we have to make up for the loss of traffic that was deliberately engineered by Facebook two years ago. That’s why we’re doing one now.

I’m going to keep bugging you about this, because the world needs more outlets like MoJo, and I get that everyone might be a little fundraised out toward the end of an election season. But we’re a continuous operation, and we need to keep the doors open 365 days a year. So how about a little help making up for what Facebook did to us? Here’s the link for contributions:

https://secure.motherjones.com/flex/mj/key/7LIGHTB/src/7AHCK02|PAHCK02

You can contribute once or sign up for a monthly donation. And it’s tax deductible. The more you donate, the more you save!

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.