First Thing election special: Biden survives the last debate unscathed

Good morning,

Donald Trump reined in his worst instincts in the second and final presidential debate in Nashville on Thursday, but the president failed to land any blows on Joe Biden that might realistically reset a race in which polls put him well behind with less than two weeks to election day – and with 40 million Americans having voted already.

Trump tried to revert to his 2016 playbook, accusing Biden of corruption based on supposedly incriminating emails. “But 2020 is not 2016 and his accusations fell flat,” writes David Smith. The president believes he is “an elite political athlete,” says Richard Wolffe:

After the candidates clashed over topics including racism and Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, our panellists agreed with the snap polls: Biden had the best of another unsatisfying night – unless you counted the moderator, Kristen Welker, as the debate’s real winner.

• Five key takeaways. Daniel Strauss tries to wring some details from a combative debate that was more about optics than policy argument.

• The climate question. Scientists say the world has less than a decade to bring the climate crisis under control, and judging by the candidates’ debate answers, only one of them would come close to addressing the issue, as Emily Holden reports.

Biden proposed a commission to reform the supreme court

Biden has announced he would appoint a special commission to study the US courts if he is elected president, saying the judicial system is “getting out of whack”. The commission would be given 180 days to come up with recommendations for reforms, including to the supreme court. The Democratic nominee suggested there were “a number of alternatives” to the idea of “packing” the court to redress its political imbalance.

• Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court confirmation will advance to a full Senate ballot, after Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee voted unilaterally to approve her nomination, despite the committee’s Democrats boycotting the vote.

Trump leaked his own unedited 60 Minutes interview

Hours before the debate, Trump posted the full, unedited footage from his recent interview with 60 Minutes, tweeting about the “bias, hatred and rudeness” of his CBS interlocutor, Lesley Stahl, and boasting of his “full, flowing and ‘magnificently brilliant’ answers.”

In fact, the interview – due to be broadcast by CBS on Sunday, alongside a similar interview with Biden – showed the president growing increasingly bad-tempered as Stahl pressed him on issues including the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout, before he ultimately cut the planned hour-long exchange short after 45 minutes.

• Trump’s Twitter account was reportedly hacked by a Dutch researcher who guessed the president’s password: “maga2020!” The same researcher also reportedly gained access to Trump’s Twitter account in 2016 by guessing his previous password: “yourefired”.

Biden holds a historic lead among women

Trump has explicitly begged suburban women for their votes, but among many of those who gave him a chance in 2016, his pleas are falling on deaf ears. With polls putting Biden an unprecedented 25 points ahead among women, 2020 could see the largest gender gap of any presidential election in modern history. Amanda Holpuch spoke to some of the women who voted for Trump four years ago but are now backing Biden.

In other election news …

• ‘Russia is the villain’ when it comes to election interference, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday, contradicting Trump administration claims of Iranian meddling by arguing that Iran was a “bad actor” but “in no way equivalent”.

• The FDA has approved its first Covid-19 treatment, the antiviral remdesivir, as coronavirus cases continue to surge across the US, particularly in the upper midwest.

• Rightwing extremists have been behind two-thirds of US domestic terror attacks in 2020 so far, according to a thinktank’s analysis, despite the Trump administration’s repeated warnings about the threat of leftwing violence.

Stat of the day

Joe Biden is leading by double digits in national polls, but the race could still be a nail-biter because the electoral college is weighted in Republicans’ favour, as our data visualisation team explains. California, for example, has a bigger population than the 22 smallest US states combined, but has 55 electoral college votes compared to their total of 96.

View from the right

Stuart Stevens is a longstanding Republican consultant who served as an adviser to several presidential campaigns, most notably Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Writing for the Bulwark, he explains why, for the first time, he’s fighting for the other side.

Don’t miss this

The US on Thursday signed an international declaration calling on states to promote women’s rights and health, but without access to abortion, reports Julian Borger.

The other 32 signatories to the declaration – part of a campaign led by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to reorient US foreign policy in a more socially conservative direction – are largely illiberal or authoritarian governments. More than a dozen of them are among the 20 worst countries in which to be a woman, according to Georgetown University’s Women, Peace and Security Index.

Last Thing: J-Law didn’t vote for Obama

The Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence has said she voted for John McCain and not Barack Obama in 2008, the first presidential election for which she was eligible to vote. She grew up a Republican, but Lawrence told the Absolutely Not podcast that Trump’s election in 2016 “changed everything”.

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