President Trump’s China bashing as he seeks re-election is oddly reminiscent of Herbert Hoover’s strategy of blaming Europe for the Great Depression when he sought a second term (it didn’t work).

July's unemployment rate of 10.2% (while better than June's) hasn't been seen in the USA since 1941. For four months now, the country has endured late Depression-era rates of unemployment; will August's figure be any better?

Kamala Harris is the first Californian to appear on a Democratic national ticket, reflecting the Golden State’s transformation from strongly Republican to strongly Democratic.

Review in ⁦The Wall Street Journal⁩ of timely new book on middle class by ⁦david stebenne⁩ wsj.com/amp/articles/p…

No sitting president seeking re-election has ever fallen as far behind in the polls as Donald Trump has and still won re-election. George Bush Sr. was farther behind at one point in 1988, but he wasn’t the incumbent president then.

The drop in the unemployment rate (to 8.4 percent in August) is good news, but even that level is remarkably high for a presidential election year. No incumbent seeking a second term has ever won (in modern U.S. history) when unemployment was that high.

If one’s definition of modern U.S. history goes back as far as 1936, then FDR was the one incumbent president seeking a second term who won when unemployment was as high or higher as it has been recently.

Whither the middle class? Biden, Trump have wildly different ideas about what “middle class” means ift.tt/3j55g2N

Over the past six months the official unemployment rate has averaged almost 11 percent. Persistent high unemployment discourages would-be workers, but if they stop looking for jobs they no longer count as unemployed (even though that’s what they really are).

For an incumbent officeholder, one’s job approval rating in an election year is generally seen as the ceiling of one’s support on Election Day. Donald Trump’s job approval rating has been stable at around 42-43 percent for months, suggesting a landslide victory by Joe Biden.

1968's presidential election looks a lot like today's – but it was very different bit.ly/3m9Vv4q

Donald Trump’s claims that the country has turned the corner on the pandemic even as the number of infections soars is strangely reminiscent of Herbert Hoover’s claims toward the end of the 1932 campaign that the Depression was bottoming out despite ever worsening economic news.

Ohio and Florida are the states to watch tonight. Donald Trump needs to win both in order to have a chance to win the election. If Joe Biden is leading in either state by a substantial margin by 11:00 p.m. EST, that should tell the tale of this election.

Today’s report that unemployment fell to 6.9 percent in October is an improvement, but over the past seven months it has averaged over 10 percent; which is as high as it was in the last few years of the Great Depression.

The pollsters in this presidential race were right about the likely outcome and wrong about the margin; but the first of those two is by far the more important.

Joe Biden is the first person to come to the presidency in the usual way (i.e., by being elected to it) who earned a college degree at a public university since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 (who was a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, OH).

In another parallel with 1932, state governors now (as in that worst year of the Great Depression) are pleading for more financial help from the federal government. None was forthcoming in the holiday season of 1932; will this holiday season be any different?

Joe Biden’s picks for his economic team suggest that his administration will be the most pro-union one since John F. Kennedy’s.

Like Ronald Reagan before him, it took Joe Biden three tries to win the presidency. Whether he will make as much of a difference as Reagan did (or more) remains to be seen.

Up next on the podcast: david stebenne, an Expert on modern U.S. politics and political and legal history & the author of "Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968" Listen & subscribe starting tomorrow (1/28): americatrendspodcast.com