CNBC: Trump underperformed in most counties where he held large rallies

 There were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, according to an NBC News tally, in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic. [...]

Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread. While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light. [...]

To be clear, none of this is provable. These are correlations, not one-for-one causal relationships. Trump’s rallies may have helped him, even in the places where he underperformed in 2020. Maybe they prevented him from doing worse.

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FiveThirtyEight: Election Update: Polls Are Good For Biden Pretty Much Everywhere — Except Florida (SEP. 9, 2020)

 But even though the topline numbers haven’t changed all that much, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some movement at the state level. It’s not super easy to find patterns where Biden is gaining or losing ground — still a lot of noise at this point — but it does seem as if, on the whole, there’s been mostly good news for Biden. Except for Florida, which, as you can see in the chart below, is where Trump has closed the gap the most.

And at this point, though, it’s really only Florida that’s moved all that much. In most other states which have been polled about as much as Florida — there’ve been 12 polls there since the start of the Democratic convention — they’ve seen far less of a change or barely any movement at all. Four other states have at least 10 polls in the same timeframe — Pennsylvania (17 polls), Wisconsin (12), Michigan (10) and North Carolina (10) — yet their numbers have budged only a little.1 What’s more, it’s mostly good news for Biden at this point. [...]

As for what’s happening in Florida, we’re still a little unsure of what to make of it, as we’d expect the numbers in fellow Sun Belt states Arizona and Texas to have moved in similar ways — but they haven’t. Some of this might have to do with Florida’s Hispanic population, however. Whereas Mexican Americans comprise more than 80 percent of the Hispanic population in Arizona and Texas, Cuban Americans form a plurality — 29 percent — of Florida Hispanics, and on the whole they are much more conservative.

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Politico: ‘Hating Joe Biden doesn’t juice up their base’: Key swing state slips away from Trump

It’s a very big problem in a swing state that’s central to his Rust Belt path to victory. Four years ago, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to carry Pennsylvania, in part by winning older and suburban voters, as well as blue-collar white workers in ancestrally Democratic areas. Now, with less than 100 days till Election Day, surveys show those voters are eyeing something different yet again. [...]

“Joe Biden — his party is not in power — so just by definition, he’s the candidate of change. That’s a huge advantage,” said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. “No matter what Hillary Clinton did with her campaign schedule, she was running after eight years of a Democratic president. So when you’re running after eight years of your party, you are not the change candidate.”

Democratic elected officials, party leaders and strategists in Pennsylvania said that Biden is ahead because of Trump’s mishandling of Covid-19 — which is particularly risky to seniors — as well as his broken campaign promises to workers about spending big on infrastructure and rewriting trade deals to benefit them. They believe voters like Biden because he is known as someone who can work across the aisle to solve the nation’s problems. [...]

In a call with reporters last month, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien touted the fact that Republicans have registered more voters than Democrats in Pennsylvania — about five times as many — since 2016. The team said it is working to identify first-time or infrequent voters who support Trump, something it successfully did in 2016.

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FiveThirtyEight: Biden’s Polling Lead Is Big — And Steady

Over the past month, Biden’s lead over Trump has been both incredibly stable and unusually large. Amidst Trump’s unpopular handling of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, Biden’s lead has hovered within a tight band of 8.9 to 9.6 percentage points since mid-June, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average. 

This is a sizable enough lead that Trump’s reelection chances are in a precarious position. Take what CNN analyst and FiveThirtyEight alum Harry Enten found earlier this month when he looked back at presidential elections where an incumbent was running since 1940. He calculated, on average, a 7-point difference between the final national popular vote margin and the polls conducted four months out. That might sound like a lot of movement — and it is — but the problem for Trump is even if the polls swung toward him by 7 points, he would still trail Biden by about 2 to 3 points nationally. The median difference Enten found, 4.5 points, would leave Trump in even worse shape. [...]

Additionally, Trump got a few favorable polls in Florida and Pennsylvania. In surveys conducted just before the Fourth of July, Trafalgar Group found Trump tied with Biden in Florida and trailing Biden by just 5 points in Pennsylvania. That might not sound like particularly good news for Trump in Pennsylvania, but considering Biden’s average lead there is more than 7 points, anything that shows that lead waning is a win for Trump. However, the fact that Trafalgar is a Republican pollster with a slight bias toward the GOP isn’t great news for Trump, as in many ways these polls offer his best-case scenario, and that scenario still isn’t very good. It has Trump either barely breaking even (Florida) or still underwater (Pennsylvania).

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FiveThirtyEight: New Polling Shows Trump’s Electoral College Advantage Is Slipping

The Times/Siena is one of the most highly-rated pollsters in FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Ratings — one of six with an A+ mark — so these new surveys did adjust our averages a bit, most notably in Pennsylvania. There had been few high-quality polls conducted in the Keystone State, so our polling average did shift roughly 1.5 points in Biden’s favor because of the Times/Siena survey, which found Biden up by 10 points.

It wasn’t just the Times/Siena survey that found Biden up, either. We got two more polls of Pennsylvania today that showed Biden with double-digit leads. One from GOP pollster Hodas & Associates gave Biden a 12-point lead, and one from Redfield & Wilton Strategies put him up 10 points. [...]

But perhaps what’s even more significant about this batch of recent polls is that Trump’s possible Electoral College advantage is slipping. Biden doesn’t lead by as much in most of the battleground states as he does nationally, but his leads are big enough — anywhere from 5 points in Arizona to 9 points in Nevada — that it won’t matter that many battleground states lean to the right of the country.[...]

And the fact that Biden now has multiple paths to the White House is the biggest problem facing Trump. He needs a notable shift in voter sentiment that makes the national environment less favorable for Biden. With four months to go, that’s quite possible, but at the moment, our polling averages suggest that he’s in a lot of trouble.

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Mish Talk: Trump is Trailing Badly in All Recent Florida Polls: Why?

Biden tops Trump by 9 points, 49-40 percent, in a Fox News survey of Florida registered voters. That’s up from a 3-point edge in April (46-43 percent). [...]

The former vice president owes his advantage to the backing of Hispanics (+17 points), women (+18 points), and Millennials born between 1981 and 1996 (+30).

Some groups that are key to a Trump reelection split down the middle, including men (46 Biden vs. 44 Trump) and voters ages 65 and over (47-48 percent) -- Trump’s 8-point edge among white voters (42-50 percent) also trails expectations. [...]

It is by no means impossible for Trump to win. I have Trump's odds at about 30%.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Latest Swing State Polls Look Good For Biden

In Michigan, the most notable result comes from long-time Michigan pollster EPIC/MRA, which found Biden up by 12 points in a poll conducted between late May and early June, 53 percent to 41 percent. For context, in 2016 the pollster never found Hillary Clinton with more than 47 percent in a single general election poll. However, in Wisconsin, Biden’s lead might not be that secure. The Marquette Law School Poll — often seen as the gold standard in the Badger State — had Biden up only 3 points in early May, 46 percent to 43 percent. Biden and Trump also ran about even in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state in 2016, which might seem at odds with the data from Michigan and Wisconsin. But unlike those states, Pennsylvania didn’t have any surveys from highly rated pollsters, and what they found was a bit noisy — two put Trump up by 4 to 5 points, while another put Biden ahead by 9 points. We wouldn’t read too much into this yet without higher quality polling, but the inconsistent results here could be evidence that Pennsylvania will remain competitive.

As for the polling picture in the Sun Belt states — Arizona, Georgia and Texas — they all seemed more or less in line with what you would expect, once you account for Biden’s lead in the national polls and how these states voted in 2016. But they do signal potential trouble for Trump. For instance, the fact that Trump carried Arizona by 3.5 points in 2016 seems to have been erased by Biden’s polling lead. On average, Biden led by 3 points, including a high-quality early June survey from Fox News that showed him up 4 points. In Georgia and Texas, on the other hand, Trump was still in the lead, by 1 and 2 points, respectively. Yet this is not as cushy of a margin as one would expect for Trump, considering he carried Georgia by 5 points and Texas by 9 points in 2016. If this trio of states are all in play — and Arizona is possibly even leaning Democratic — that would give Biden many additional paths to 270 electoral votes. [...]

There are two big takeaways here. One, Biden is in an enviable position in many of these battleground states. However, the second takeaway — which is the caveat we mentioned earlier — is that all of these battleground states save Michigan are more Republican-leaning than the national average. In other words, most of the states that will decide the presidential election are to the right of the country as a whole, and that speaks to Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College. Should Biden continue to hold a sizable lead, the chances of an Electoral College-popular vote split will probably be low. But if the polls get closer, the odds will increase because the eventual tipping point state is almost certainly among these eight states. But as it stands now, if Trump carries Arizona along with every state that’s more Republican-leaning in those recent polls, he would almost certainly win the presidency.

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Time: The coronavirus is causing Trump's supporters to abandon him

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona. [...]

Republican strategists note the pendulum could easily swing back in Trump’s direction before the election. “Three months ago we were all certain that this election was going to be about impeachment, and three months before that it was all going to be about the border wall,” says Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt. But he sees signs of trouble in the polling of voters who dislike both candidates. In 2016, those voters picked Trump; in 2020, they favor Biden. “It is a warning sign” for Trump, Todd says.

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The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings

Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]

The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.

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Politico: Trump campaign plunges into brawl to control Pennsylvania GOP

The showdown highlights the importance of Pennsylvania to the presidential race in 2020 — and the determination of Trump's reelection team to quash any potential dissension within the party heading into next year. Trump’s aides have intervened in a number of states besides Pennsylvania toward that end. [...]

If Trump's team is successful in both electing Comfort and uniting the party, it would be a major victory. But the campaign is taking a risk by jumping into the race. If Comfort loses, Trump’s aides will have to work with a party chairman they actively opposed. And despite their best efforts, the election is exposing old divides within the state party. [...]

The race has also pitted two of the party's donors against each other. Wagner, who is behind Tabas, shot off an email to supporters assailing the pro-Comfort Republican National Committee member Bob Asher for "working the phones calling people to influence who becomes the next party chairman," and saying his "politics have left our party bitterly fractured and highly dysfunctional." Wagner is calling for Asher to be removed from his position in the party.

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Salon: Donald Trump’s electoral map has shifted dramatically. How does it bode for his 2020 chances?

“Even small movement among these voters — who represented 9 percent of voters in 2016 — may prove significant heading into the 2020 presidential election,” wrote Robert Griffin of the Voter Study Group. “Obama-Trump voters are also disproportionately white, non-college educated and, as a result, are likely to be well distributed geographically for the purpose of electoral impact.” [...]

Of course, these numbers will continue to vary, as they have throughout his presidency. And heading into 2020, Trump will have the advantage of incumbency, which confers a sense of legitimacy and stability to even someone as erratic as the current president. But even with a strong economy, Trump has been unable to lift his numbers in these key states back to the level they were at in early 2017. And on a broad scale, Trump has never broken 50 percent approval nationally. [...]

Trump still has about another year and a half before November 2020, so his fate is certainly not sealed. Democrats should not be overconfident, and there is still a significant possibility they could lose. Trump’s approval going forward is dependent on a range of factors. And his ultimate re-election fate may hinge on who his opponent in the Democratic Party turns out to be (though, it may not — it could be that nearly any of the potential Democratic contenders would end up doing about equally as well as one another). But the Republican Party should not be assured of its chances for victory. And if Trump loses in 2020, many people looking backward will say it was inevitable.

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CityLab: What Cities Are Getting Wrong About Public Transportation

If you peruse this data-dump every year, you’ll probably notice something: Despite the tireless efforts of transit planners, bike-lane boosters, and other actors in the mobility arena, the mode-share percentages don’t seem to budge much in the any given growing city as they add more people, despite massive investments in transit infrastructure. Take Dallas, Texas, for example: In 1996, that city opened the first stage of its light-rail network, which has since grown into the largest system in the U.S., at a total cost of something around $5 billion. But the share of commuters in the city who ride transit has remained below 6 percent since 1990. [...]

A weighted-index does not quite get at why only 30 percent of Seattleites took sustainable transportation in 2015 when 91 percent of its jobs are within 10 minutes of what the report considers “frequent service,” where any stop is serviced an average of 5 times an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. But there’s a mismatch in accessibility: Only 10 percent of Seattle residents were reachable within 60 minutes by walking, biking, or public transit. Even the city’s successful rapid-transit options only reach 7 percent of its population. [...]

But making progress on these indicators does not necessarily mean having to overhaul your public transit options or build new systems from scratch. Consider Minneapolis and its progress on biking. If you factor in improvements in bike infrastructure, the population living near frequent transit jumps 9 percent, rising from 64 to 73 percent. “We only included protected bike lanes as a way to travel by bike in the transportation network,” says Chestnut. “It goes to show that number of people who have access to frequent transit can be improved without having to put in vast sums of money.”[...]

Another avenue where each city has room for improvement is with providing better transit service to people living in low-income households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Los Angeles may not reach as much large of a share of its total population with frequent transit in its car-centric sprawl, but where it does reach matters to a larger share of low-income households that rely on it compared to say, Atlanta. The indicators make that task appear not as difficult as you might think: Transit networks do reach where low-income people live; it is just that service needs to be more reliable.

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CNN: How 2018 became the Catholic Church's year from hell

The church's institutional crisis was mirrored by individual soul-searching, as American Catholics questioned whether to stay in the church. 2018 saw parents challenging priests at Mass, prominent Catholics urging the faithful to withhold donations and parents worrying whether their children are safe in the sacristy. [...]

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former Archbishop of Washington and an influential voice in the church and international politics, is removed from public ministry by Pope Francis after a church investigation finds an allegation that McCarrick sexually abused a minor in the 1970s "credible and substantiated." McCarrick said he had "no recollection" of the alleged abuse. [...]

Pope Francis accepts the resignation of Australian Archbishop Philip Wilson, the highest-ranking Catholic official ever to be convicted of covering up sex abuse. [...]

In an 11-page "testimony" released to conservative Catholic media, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, accuses Francis of ignoring his warnings about McCarrick's conduct and calls on the Pope to resign.

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Politico: Pennsylvania meltdown triggers Republican alarms

The chaos threatens the president’s chances in a state where there’s no room for error. Trump, the first Republican presidential nominee to carry the state since 1988, won by less than a percentage point.

“He has to win Pennsylvania in order to win the presidency,” said Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, a one-time rising star from the Philadelphia suburbs who is retiring from Congress after just two terms. “And I don’t think he’s the favorite to win against a generic Democrat.”

Since Trump’s stunning 2016 win, Pennsylvania Republicans have gotten almost exclusively bad news. First, Democrats in the Philadelphia suburbs flipped seats in 2017 local elections for the first time in decades — and in some cases, in history. Then came an election year from hell, beginning with Democrat Conor Lamb’s House special election victory smack dab in the middle of western Pennsylvania’s Trump Country. [...]

The Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania only has $94,000 on hand, according to campaign finance reports — almost $1 million less than the party had at the same point four years ago. The party’s headquarters staff has shrunk from between 16 employees in 2014, according to the previous chairman, to seven. DiGiorgio said he prefers "we put money into the field."

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Politico: Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid

Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.

Some of Democrats’ biggest gains came in the states that powered Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while a president’s base has stayed home in previous midterm elections, leading to losses, the record turnout in this year’s races suggests 2018 was more like a 2016 re-run than Trump voters standing on the sidelines. [...]

Barack Obama’s Democratic Party lost 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in 2010, but Obama defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. Republicans flipped both the House, where they netted 52 seats, and Senate in 1994, but Bill Clinton slaughtered former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in 1996. Ronald Reagan’s GOP lost 26 House seats in 1982 — and picked up a seat in the Senate — but Reagan nearly swept the Electoral College against former Vice President Walter Mondale two years later, winning a 49-state landslide.

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CityLab: The New Metropolitan Majority

To understand what happened on Tuesday, you have to begin by acknowledging that the fight for control of the Senate was a home game for President Donald Trump—and he won it, as expected. The real battlegrounds were the House of Representatives and the gubernatorial contests in states the president won in 2016, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.[...]

Gratifying as that may be, Democrats shouldn’t misinterpret the results. The voters who wrote off Democrats two years ago haven’t retroactively endorsed the party’s 2016 agenda. Their votes in 2018 were driven by their antipathy for Trump. That’s an important distinction because it suggests they won’t automatically stick with the Democratic Party in 2020. So how can Democrats turn this onetime rejection of Trump into a long-term realignment?

Here’s the political reality. In 2016, Democrats suffered because too many Americans viewed us as the urban-enclave party. I’m a big-city mayor—these are my people. But I’m experienced enough to know that the fate of Democratic candidates in 2020’s nationwide and statewide contests depends on their ability to win the hearts and minds of the new “Metropolitan Majority,” a bloc encompassing both the progressives who came out for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the swing voters who live in the suburban and exurban communities that recently turned from red to blue. [...]

Here’s the crucial takeaway. Over the next two years, Republicans will try to cleave the suburbs from the Democrats’ urban base, pulling swing voters into a coalition with rural conservatives. To build the new “Metropolitan Majority,” Democrats will have to do the opposite, building ties between voters in cities and those in the suburbs that surround them. The election two years from now will hinge on which party is more successful. If Republicans prevail, we’re likely to face a second term of President Trump. If Democrats succeed, we may remember Tuesday as the moment the Democratic Party began building a durable coalition.

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Politico: How everything became the culture war

The Republicans clamoring for drilling that day in Pennsylvania weren’t reacting to the science of global warming or the economics of petroleum or the geopolitics of energy policy. They loved the idea of drilling now, and drilling everywhere, because their political enemies hated it. They were enjoying the primal experience of owning the libs, lashing out at the smug Democratic hippies who wanted to take away their SUVs and guns and Big Gulps. Oil exploration is a complex issue, but in the arena it was just another blunt-force weapon in a simple culture war.[...]

President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponizing policy to mobilize his base rather than mobilizing his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder.[...]

Politics has always been adversarial. Traditionally, though, we’ve had a fairly robust national consensus about a fairly broad set of goals — a strong defense, a decent safety net, freedom from excessive government interference — even though we’ve squabbled over how to achieve them. What’s different about drill-baby-drill politics is the transformation of even nonpartisan issues into mad-as-hell battles of the bases, which makes it virtually impossible for politicians to solve problems in a two-party system. Cooperation and compromise start to look like capitulation, or even treasonous collusion with the enemy. [...]

It’s probably not a coincidence that this shift is happening at a time when college-educated voters are trending Democratic and noncollege whites have been Trump’s most reliable constituency. Policies that hurt colleges, like policies that hurt cities, are policies that hurt Democrats. To listen to pols talk about college these days is to watch a wedge issue in its embryonic stage, as substantive questions about the cost and relevance of higher ed, the burdens of student debt, the adequacy of worker training and the power of political correctness on campus start to morph into red-meat attacks on pointy-headed elitists who look down on ironworkers and brainwash America’s youth. Republicans are starting to fit the Democratic push for universal free college into their larger critique of the Democratic urge to hand out free stuff to Democratic voters. And they’re portraying a liberal arts education as a culturally liberal thing, like kale or Kwanzaa or reusable shopping bags.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Are Democrats Looking So Strong In The Midwest?

It’s not just the House, either. Democratic incumbents are clear favorites to win their Senate races in Michigan, Minnesota (two races there, actually), Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are modest favorites to hold on to seats in Indiana and Missouri — which were very red in 2016. Democrats are favored to win gubernatorial races in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. The gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Wisconsin are toss-ups, and Democrats even have a chance in two very conservative states, Kansas and South Dakota. A win by Tony Evers in Wisconsin would be particularly significant for Democrats, who have failed in three different attempts to defeat Gov. Scott Walker.[...]

But why are the biggest gains likely to come in the Midwest? First of all, 2018 is confirming what previous election cycles had suggested — this is an area that swings a lot between the two parties. Democrats made major gains in the Midwest in 2006, then faltered in the Obama years and look to be having a revival now. And because Democrats lost in many key races in the Midwest in 2010 and 2014, there was some low-hanging fruit for Democrats to pick off in a year like this. (Like the governor’s mansion in traditionally-Democratic Illinois, for example.) Contrast the Midwest with the South, where Republicans have steadily gained ground for two decades and are likely to lose relatively few seats even in what appears to be a Democratic wave year.

Secondly and relatedly, national polls suggest that white voters without college degrees favor Republicans in 2018, but the margin between the two parties is likely to narrow compared to 2016, when Clinton lost that bloc by more than 30 percentage points. That shift has outsized influence in the Midwest, which has higher populations of white voters without college degrees than many other parts of the country. So the Democrats’ problem with white working-class voters may not be as severe as it looked on Election Day 2016 — which perhaps had more to do with the conditions in that election than the party overall. What we are seeing in 2018 suggests that working-class whites are not a single national bloc, but still vote much differently by state and region. Working-class whites in Southern states like Georgia and Texas are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic candidates in key races this year, but they are less GOP-leaning in Midwest states like Ohio and Wisconsin.

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VICE: The Horrific Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is About to Get a Lot Worse

So what's different about this, than any of those I just mentioned, is that there was really no effort in any of those evolutions to do anything but prosecute predator priests. For example, law enforcement had Mahony in their sights—they could have indicted him. And Steve Cooley, who was the district attorney in Los Angeles County at the time, didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it because the Church—the hierarchy of the Church—still had a significant amount of influence. What's happened, as time has gone on, is the individuals who hold elected office have had less and less exposure to a Church that's had the sort of political power it did 30 years ago. The Church, now, simply has less political influence now, and can't stop it.

Frankly, if you're the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and you begin getting these calls, and you see the scope of this, why wouldn't you investigate it? It's criminality, really, on a scale that's unheard of. In California, the Church paid $1 billion to settle cases in the mid 2000s. A diocese went bankrupt. And it's not just the number of perpetrators. The real criminal conspiracy, and the real criminality, is the effort to cover it up, and conceal it as a matter of policy and practice. I think a lot of people still want to believe that something like what happened in Pennsylvania is an anomaly. It's not. It's the norm. Every diocese is the same—and the reason for that is the Church is a hierarchal organization, managed from the top-down.  [...]

I think the next step—and I do think it's going to happen—is a federal investigation. Catholic institutions are not only religious, but they're massive receivers of federal, state, and local financial aid through charity and other organizations. And, more than anything else, they're a tax-exempt organization. If Scientology, which is tiny sect, [eventually loses] its tax-empt status because of criminality, then isn't a fair discussion to have that for the Catholic Church [too]? Can you imagine, say, if you found out that 300 United Airlines flight attendants were molesting children, what would happen to United Airlines? And we don't have 300—[we have even more] priests who have been removed for this behavior since the early 2000s. The only reason they haven't been held to the same standard that everyone else has been is the religious works in front of them. [...]

Me too. So the difference between Catholicism and basically any other Protestant sect is that the only way to salvation in the Church is through the sacramental life. And the only way to participate fully in the sacramental life is to go through all seven sacraments, one of them being to become a priest. And the victims that priests typically target are almost always the most devout kids who truly in their heart believe.

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The New York Review of Books: The Priesthood of The Big Crazy

A wise man once told me that we humans are all at one time or another a little crazy on the subject of sex. A little crazy, yes. But Catholic priests are charged with maintaining The Big Crazy on sex all the time. These functionaries of the church are formally supposed to believe and preach sexual sillinesses, from gross denial to outright absurdity, on the broadest range of issues—masturbation, artificial insemination, contraception, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, homosexuality, gender choice, abortion, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests—and uphold the church’s “doctrines,” no matter how demented.

Some priests are humane or common-sensible enough to ignore some parts of this impossibly severe set of rules, which gives them reason to be selective about sexual matters. Since scripture says nothing about most of these subjects, popes have claimed a power to define “natural law.” But the nineteenth-century English theologian John Henry Newman was right when he said, “The Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.” That would be true even if the natural law being invoked had some philosophical depth, but Catholics are asked to accept childish versions of “natural law.” For instance, since the “natural” use of sex is to beget children, any use apart from that is sinful, and mortally sinful. Masturbate and you go to hell (unless, of course, you confess the sin to a priest, which gives an ordained predator the chance to be “comforting” about masturbation).

Contraception prevents the “natural” begetting? Condoms are a ticket to damnation. Homosexuality gives no “natural” progeny? Straight to hell! This is like saying that the “natural” aim of eating is for maintenance of life, so any eating that is not necessary for bodily preservation is a sin. Toast someone with champagne and you go to hell. “The church” adopted this simpleton’s view of natural law only after it had to abandon an equally childish argument from scripture. Pope Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii noted that Onan was condemned to death for coitus interruptus with his brother’s widow, when “he spilled it [his seed] on the ground” (Genesis 38: 9-10). Dorothy Parker said she called her parrot Onan because it certainly spilled its seed on the ground. When Bible scholars pointed out that the Genesis passage concerned levirate marriage, later popes had to invent a lame natural law argument to replace the lame scriptural argument. [...]

Many victims of abuse by priests have made the mistake of reporting their charges to a bishop. They should have gone straight to a secular authority. To expect from the celibate clergy either candor or good sense on sexual matters is a fool’s game. The Vatican II Council proclaimed that the church is the people of God, not their rulers. The hierarchy, when it opposes the laity, makes itself the enemy of the church, not its embodiment. There are no priests in the Gospels (except Jewish priests at the Temple). Peter and Paul never called themselves or anyone else a priest. Jesus is not called a priest in the New Testament apart from a goofy claim in the late and suspect “Letter to the Hebrews,” in which Jesus is said to be a priest not in any Jewish line, but in that of a non-Jewish, so-called priest named Melchizedek, who can never die.

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