Vice-presidential debates — like tonight’s — are usually low-voltage affairs. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of spirited argument, but they usually aren’t particularly well watched nor do they have much of an impact on the outcome. People vote for the president.
Consider this: The most famous moment in vice-presidential debating history was arguably the notorious put-down from Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1988, delivered to Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s running mate. “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” he said, after Mr. Quayle had compared himself to John F. Kennedy.
So will the contest between Vice President Mike Pence and Kamala Harris break the mold? It might. It comes at a huge moment in American politics. President Trump recently emerged from the hospital after falling ill with the coronavirus. The disease has swept through the White House.
The debate offers a platform for the vivid divide that has emerged over the past 48 hours between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. on the seriousness of a pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. Mr. Trump left the hospital proclaiming that the virus wasn’t so bad, minimizing its danger and impact. The Pence campaign resisted a debate commission rule to have him and Ms. Harris stand behind a protective plexiglass barrier, before finally acquiescing. Few issues distinguish the presidential candidates as much as the virus.
Mr. Trump said he was well enough to take part in the next presidential debate, on Oct. 15, but anyone who has struggled with this disease can attest to the fact that eight days is a long way away. And the president could still be contagious next week, which would make him a danger to others. Tonight’s debate could conceivably end up being the last one of the campaign, and Ms. Harris and Mr. Pence are certainly aware of the extra burden they carry.
Most vice-presidential debates are a blur of grabby quotations: The candidates will parry between defending their standard-bearer and attacking the opposition. But tonight, perhaps more than ever in a vice-presidential debate, Ms. Harris and Mr. Pence will be standing as proxies for the men who want to be in the White House, and debating at what could well be remembered as one of the most critical junctures in the nation’s history.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Tuesday night that there should not be a presidential debate next week in Miami if President Trump “still has Covid,” just hours after Mr. Trump said he intended to participate in the event.
Asked by reporters on Tuesday night whether he would feel safe debating Mr. Trump, who was hospitalized last week with the coronavirus, Mr. Biden responded: “I think if he still has Covid, we shouldn’t have a debate.”
But Mr. Biden said his decision would be guided by the Cleveland Clinic and doctors.
“I think we were going to have to follow very strict guidelines,” he said. “Too many people have been infected. It’s a very serious problem, so I will be guided by the guidelines of the Cleveland Clinic and what the docs say is the right thing to do.”
Mr. Biden’s remarks introduced new uncertainty into the debate calendar and whether either of the two remaining presidential debates would go forward as scheduled.
People with mild to moderate cases of the illness are likely to “remain infectious no longer than 10 days after symptom onset,” according to guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that period could be doubled in cases of more serious illness.
Mr. Biden, who shared a debate stage with the president a week ago, tested negative for the coronavirus again on Tuesday, his campaign said.
Mr. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that he planned to attend the next presidential debate, even as he remains infectious and doctors warned that the course of his illness is unpredictable.
Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, will face off against Vice President Mike Pence in the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday in Salt Lake City. The two candidates will be 12 feet 3 inches apart, an increase from the seven feet that was originally proposed; they will also be separated by plexiglass, though aides to Mr. Pence said on Tuesday that they thought the barriers were unnecessary.
The Biden-Harris campaign said Wednesday that Ms. Harris tested negative for the virus. on Tuesday.
A box fan, an air filter — and duct tape to attach them. With four such devices cobbled together for a grand total of about $150, the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday night can be made much safer than with the plexiglass barriers being used, according to experts in airborne viruses.
Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris will be seated more than 12 feet apart, with barriers between them. But the barriers will do nothing to protect Ms. Harris if Mr. Pence is infected and exhaling virus that can be carried through the air, experts said.
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines indicating that indoors, the virus can be carried aloft by aerosols — tiny droplets — farther than six feet. In one study in August, scientists found infectious virus at a distance of 16 feet from an infected patient.
Linsey Marr, an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech and an expert in airborne viruses, laughed outright when she saw a picture of the debate setup.
“It’s absurd,” she said. When she first heard there would be a plexiglass barrier, she said, she imagined an enclosure with an open back or top. “But these are even smaller and less adequate than I imagined.”
Other experts said the barriers would have made some sense if the debaters were seated close together.
“Those plexiglass barriers are really only going to be effective if the vice president or Kamala Harris are spitting at each other,” said Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University.
“Those are really just splatter shields.”
“At 12 feet 3 inches apart, spray droplet transmission is not the issue,” said Donald Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland. “What is the ventilation like? What is the direction of the airflow?”
Dr. Milton and his colleagues contacted the debate commission and both campaigns to recommend purchasing plug-and-play air filters — excellent ones run to just about $300 each — or four box fans and air filters taped together. Each debater would have one device positioned to suck up and clean the air exhaled, and another to produce clean air.
In research conducted with singers over the past few months, they have found that this so-called “Corsi box” — named for Richard Corsi, the scientist who cobbled together the first one — can significantly decrease aerosols.
The safest solution, experts said, is to move the debate online.
The debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Kamala Harris takes place on Wednesday night from 9 to 10:30 p.m. Eastern. Here are some of the many ways you can watch it:
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The Times will livestream the debate, and our reporters will provide commentary and analysis.
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The debate will be televised on channels including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News and MSNBC.
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Many news outlets, including ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN, will stream the debate on YouTube.
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The Roku Channel will carry streams from several news outlets.
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The streaming network Newsy will carry the debate on several platforms.
As they prepare for their debate, Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris are confronting an electorate that is more or less divided. About one-fifth of voters say they don’t have much of an opinion of each candidate, but among those who do, strong opinions outnumber mildly favorable or unfavorable views.
Here’s what polling can tell us about the candidates and the debate.
Has Pence’s role in the virus response affected views of him?
Ms. Harris is unlikely to let Mr. Pence easily escape the fact that he was appointed to lead the White House’s coronavirus response — an effort that a wide majority of Americans not only disapprove of, but also have come to resent.
More than two-thirds of Americans said in an Axios/Ipsos poll late last month that they had little confidence in the federal government to look out for their best interests when it comes to the pandemic.
Still, in CNN polling conducted after President Trump announced his positive coronavirus test results on Friday, 62 percent of Americans said they thought Mr. Pence was qualified to serve as president. Just 35 percent said they didn’t think so. (Men were 12 points more likely than women to find him qualified.)
Harris is the only top candidate with net-positive ratings, but not by a lot.
Ms. Harris tends to fare slightly better than Mr. Pence in public perception and, on average, national polling shows that more Americans view her positively than negatively. In a Monmouth poll from early September, 43 percent gave her positive marks, and 37 percent saw her negatively. As with Mr. Pence, one in five said they had no opinion.
How will the fight over the virus and the debate itself play?
Despite widespread concern over the virus, recent polling showed that a large majority of Americans wanted the debates to go forward. More than three-quarters of likely voters in both Pennsylvania and Florida told New York Times/Siena College pollsters last week that they thought the other two presidential debates should go ahead as planned. But many of those respondents were contacted before Mr. Trump announced he had tested positive.
In the CNN poll taken after his diagnosis was made public, 63 percent of Americans said they thought the president had acted irresponsibly toward those around him in handling the risk of infection. That included more than seven in 10 women, and even a majority of white people without college degrees, a core Trump constituency.
While he has tested negative in recent days, Mr. Pence attended a White House event that has been linked to numerous officials who have since tested positive. Medical experts say there is still a chance that he could be carrying the virus.
Americans have consistently said in polls that they preferred to lean toward caution on lifting virus restrictions.
With voting underway in more than 30 states, the Republican National Committee has begun a $60 million digital get-out-the-vote campaign that will harness social media, text messaging, email and other platforms to digitally chase voters.
The expansive effort leverages the vast data operation the party has built over the past three years, and will involve quickly filling the newsfeeds, inboxes and text threads of potential voters with information on how to vote and reminders about key deadlines.
“We can target you every step of the way,” said Richard Walters, the chief of staff of the R.N.C. “We know when you requested the ballot, and we know to continue following up with you until your ballot has been returned, and until we can see it has been returned.”
The initiative will complement the operations of the Trump campaign’s digital team, which will primarily focus on running persuasion ads, according to officials at the R.N.C.
While a crucial part of the digital get-out-the-vote effort will be persuading Republican voters who have requested an absentee ballot to turn it in, possibly by mail, it is a message that runs counter to President Trump’s frequent and baseless denunciations of mail ballots, which he called a “disaster” in the first presidential debate, suggesting without evidence that they would lead to a “rigged election.”
Mr. Trump has, however, sought to distinguish between mail-in ballots and absentee ballots by arguing, falsely, that the latter is less prone to fraud. (There are no meaningful differences between the two.) To counter any confusion, the R.N.C. has identified which voters are likely to vote by mail, regardless of the public message, and are encouraging them to send in their ballots.
The Manhattan district attorney can enforce a subpoena seeking President Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, a federal appeals panel ruled on Wednesday, dealing yet another blow to the president’s yearlong battle to deny prosecutors his financial records.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel in New York rejected the president’s arguments that the subpoena should be blocked because it was too broad and amounted to political harassment from the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat.
“Grand juries must necessarily paint with a broad brush,” the judges wrote.
They concluded that the president did not show that Mr. Vance had been driven by politics. “None of the president’s allegations, taken together or separately, are sufficient to raise a plausible inference that the subpoena was issued ‘out of malice or an intent to harass,’” they wrote.
Mr. Trump is expected to try to appeal the decision in the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Vance has said that his office will not enforce the subpoena for 12 days in exchange for the president’s lawyers agreeing to move quickly.
The decision marks the fifth time courts have rebuffed the president’s attempts to block the subpoena.
The president and Mr. Vance have been locked in a bitterly contested legal dispute since August 2019, when Mr. Vance’s office first subpoenaed eight years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial records from his accounting firm, Mazars USA. The subpoena is part of an investigation into Mr. Trump and his business practices.
A recent New York Times investigation, based on more than two decades of confidential tax-return data for Mr. Trump and hundreds of his companies, showed that he paid no U.S. income taxes in 11 of the 18 years that The Times examined. He paid only $750 in both 2016 and 2017.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose government was accused by American officials of interfering in the 2016 American election to help the Trump campaign, gave a wide-ranging interview on American politics on Wednesday in which he spoke warmly about Democrats.
It was unclear what his goals were — Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., warned a House committee last month that Russia was actively pursuing a disinformation campaign against Joseph R. Biden Jr. — but one possibility was that Mr. Putin was reaching out in case Mr. Biden, who leads in the polls, wins the election.
In the interview, Mr. Putin criticized Mr. Biden for what he called anti-Russian rhetoric but said he appreciated the candidate’s positions on arms control and went on to suggest some ideological common ground.
The Democratic Party, he said, is “traditionally closer to liberal values, it is close to the ideas of social democracy,” and these positions could help build contacts with Russia. Mr. Putin noted that he was for 18 years a member of the Soviet Communist Party. “Ever since, I have liked many of the leftist values,” he said.
In domestic politics, Mr. Putin and the ruling United Russia party are seen as well to the right of the post-Soviet Russian Communist Party, though these positions matter little as police repression has squelched most real political competition.
Mr. Putin suggested another intersection of interests in the Soviet Union’s traditional support for civil rights for Blacks. This history could “also become a basis for mutual understanding,” he said.
In the interview on state television, Mr. Putin also said that President Trump, though he had advocated warmer ties with Moscow, had not delivered any breakthroughs. “The intentions President Trump spoke of earlier were not realized,” he said, though without blaming Mr. Trump. Mr. Putin said anti-Russian sentiment in both American parties had hindered any warming of relations.
In foreign affairs, analysts of Russian influence operations say Moscow has supported destabilizing political figures or movements on both the left and the right, in the hopes of undermining Western political unity. Moscow has denied meddling in Western elections.
Last month, in another apparent effort at outreach before the U.S. election, the Kremlin proposed a truce in cyberoperations between the United States and Russia, though without acknowledging cyberattacks in countries from the Ukraine to the United States.
In the final weeks of the election, ads will air across the country attacking President Trump, Joseph R. Biden Jr., incumbent senators and representatives, their challengers — even sheriffs won’t be spared.
But on Wednesday, a political group will take aim at a familiar yet rarely targeted figure in public policy: Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook.
A new ad from Accountable Tech, a nonprofit group that includes former Facebook employees, former election officials and members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, uses Mr. Zuckerberg’s own remarks to highlight what the group sees as Facebook’s failures to protect the country from dangerous disinformation and violent criminals.
“It’s not enough to just give people a voice — we need to make sure that people aren’t using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation,” Mr. Zuckerberg is heard saying in the ad, in remarks from his 2018 testimony before Congress.
As he speaks, scenes of right-wing groups at protests and people clad in gear supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory fill the screen, mixed with headlines like “Facebook Tried to Limit Qanon. It Failed.”
The ads will run nationally on CNN before and after the vice-presidential debate, as well as on digital platforms.
Accountable Tech was founded this year and has pushed social media companies to be more aggressive in policing their platforms for dangerous disinformation and incitements to violence. Most of the group’s efforts have targeted Facebook.
On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it would remove any group, page or Instagram account that openly identified with QAnon.
Ad Watch
With President Trump trailing badly in the polls and garnering single-digit support from Black voters, his campaign broadcast an advertisement on Sunday voiced by a Black former pro football player touting the president’s support for criminal justice reform.
The Message
Jack Brewer, who played for the Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles, touts Mr. Trump’s record on the pre-pandemic economy and criminal justice reform. He gives explicit permission for Black people who, like Mr. Brewer himself, supported Barack Obama’s campaigns to get behind Mr. Trump’s re-election bid.
“Joe Biden’s America was mass-incarcerating Black men,” Mr. Brewer says. “President Trump set them free.”
Fact Check
Mr. Brewer, 41, might not be the best messenger for Mr. Trump. In August, just weeks before he spoke at the Republican convention, Mr. Brewer, who in his post-football life has worked as an investment adviser, was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
There is little to quibble with among the facts Mr. Brewer presents in the ad, but he does omit important context. While Mr. Brewer touts Mr. Trump’s commitment to criminal justice reform, the president is waging a parallel campaign painting protesters against unjust policing as a danger to the country. An ad airing in Michigan features a parade of white police officers bemoaning protesters, with one warning: “Joe Biden empowers these people. The more you empower them, the more crime they go to commit.”
Where It’s Running
The Brewer ad aired twice on Sunday during nationwide broadcasts of National Football League games, according to Advertising Analytics. It is a curious strategic decision to spend money broadcasting a national message rather than focusing resources on the battleground states required to win an Electoral College victory.
The Takeaway
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump’s top aides believed they could peel significant Black support away from Democrats. The campaign spent millions to air a Super Bowl ad touting Mr. Trump’s criminal justice reform record and his commutation of Alice Johnson’s federal prison sentence.
But between the coronavirus hitting Black people at far higher rates than whites and Mr. Trump’s reflexive support of police officers who have shot or killed Black Americans, he has so far failed to win over Black voters who might have been open to his message months ago.
Ballots in Arizona that have missing signatures must be corrected by a voter before Election Day, rather than five days after, in order for their vote to count, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
The decision in Arizona affects what is known as the ballot “curing” process, in which a voter is contacted by an election official if there is an issue with their absentee ballot and given an opportunity to fix the issue. Not all states in the country offer ballot curing.
The ruling from the Ninth District Court of Appeals was a victory for Republicans, who had appealed a decision from a lower court that voters should be given five days after Election Day to fix missing signatures.
“All ballots must have some deadline, and it is reasonable that Arizona has chosen to make that deadline Election Day itself so as to promote its unquestioned interest in administering an orderly election and to facilitate its already burdensome job of collecting, verifying, and counting all of the votes in timely fashion,” the court said in its opinion.
Arizona had recently passed a law allowing voters who had “mismatched” signatures — ones that didn’t match the ones on file — to fix their ballots up to five days after Election Day, but the law did not extend to missing signatures.
The Arizona Democratic Party sued, and a lower court ruled in their favor. But the Ninth Circuit found that “a five-day grace period beyond Election Day to supply missing signatures would indeed increase the administrative burdens on the State to some extent.”
The decision comes as hundreds of cases are still pending around the country, leaving the rules and regulations by which ballots will be cast and counted in November uncertain.
Senator Martha McSally, Republican of Arizona, and her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, attempted to shed their party labels Tuesday night and reach out to independent voters in their only debate for the seat Ms. McSally was appointed to in 2018.
Ms. McSally, a former fighter pilot who has consistently trailed Mr. Kelly in the polls, refused to say whether she was proud of her support for President Trump and whether she would want to serve under him in the Air Force. Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut, refused to say whether he would support Senator Chuck Schumer as the Senate majority leader.
The special election is being watched closely, not just because it is for one of a handful of seats Democrats hope to flip in their bid to gain control of the Senate, but because if Mr. Kelly wins, he could conceivably be seated in time to vote on President Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
The candidates sparred over the coronavirus as Mr. Kelly attempted to make the debate a referendum on the president and health care, arguing that Ms. McSally voted to undermine or eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions while the president has bungled the nation’s response to the virus.
“I can’t think of one instance where Senator McSally has stood up when the president has made a mistake or when the governor did something that wasn’t right,” Mr. Kelly said, referring to Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey.
While acknowledging that “mistakes were made at all levels,” Ms. McSally attempted to use the virus to pivot to Mr. Kelly’s business ties to China, saying he was too beholden to the communist country to hold it accountable for “unleashing” the virus on the world.
“While I’m standing up to China to hold them accountable, my opponent, starting in 2003 while he was serving in the U.S. Navy, went over to China on an all-expenses paid junket paid for by the Chinese Communist Party to help influence elites in America,” she said.
Both candidates emphasized their support for law enforcement, border security and the Second Amendment.
Commiserating over their narrow defeats in the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams warned Democrats that history could repeat itself if they are not prepared to combat voter suppression tactics by the Trump campaign.
In a virtual fund-raising event for their political organizations on Tuesday night, both accused Republicans of trying to intimidate voters into not voting in the upcoming election and said there was a strong probability that Republicans would mount challenges in court if they lose.
“This is what they do,” Mrs. Clinton said. “They try to shrink the electorate.”
Ms. Abrams, a former Georgia legislator whose candidacy for governor made her a star of the Democratic Party, said that the Trump campaign’s recruitment of poll watchers was nothing more than an attempt to disenfranchise minority voters.
“They have recruited 50,000 people who will be deployed as intimidators,” Ms. Abrams said. “Let’s be clear, this isn’t paranoia. They are enemies of democracy.”
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, dismissed the accusations and said that Democrats were glossing over the record of Joseph R. Biden Jr., their party’s presidential nominee, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1994 crime bill that disproportionately hurt Black Americans, and giving Mr. Biden a pass on his old alliances with segregationist senators.
“That’s an absurd claim,” Mr. Murtaugh said in response to Ms. Abrams’s assertion. “President Trump has made tremendous inroads in the Black community and will vastly increase the percentage of the vote he earns. Joe Biden’s record is one of failure and empty promises, even as he takes Black voters for granted.”
The virtual fund-raiser, moderated by the actress and singer Audra McDonald, supported Onward Together and Fair Fight, political organizations started by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abrams.
Ms. Abrams said that Mrs. Clinton, who won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the election, would be president if not for the “racist” and “classist” Electoral College system.
Mrs. Clinton said that Democrats cannot afford to get complacent.
“We know the next 28 days there are going to be a lot of desperate people doing desperate things,” she said. “Fool me once, shame on you. We’re not going to be fooled twice.”