Good morning. Trump and Biden respond to the chaos in Portland, Ore. U.S. virus cases top six million. And some people are jumping to premature conclusions about the presidential race. |
The rush to polling judgment |
 | | A polling station in Louisville, Ky., in June.Erik Branch for The New York Times |
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Four years ago, Donald Trump rallied from a summer deficit in the polls to win the presidency. In the wake of this year’s Republican convention and the continuing chaos in some cities, many people — both his supporters and detractors — seem obsessed with the notion that he will do so again. |
And he may. Trump could certainly win re-election, especially because he would not need to win the national popular vote to do so. |
But there also seems to be a rush to declare that he has emerged from his convention in a much stronger position than he was before it. As G. Elliott Morris, who writes about polling for The Economist, tweeted over the weekend, “I see that people desperately want a post-RNC bounce news cycle.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote, “There is a lot of ‘the pendulum is swinging away from Biden’ speculation based on rather little actual evidence.” |
The pioneering psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman came up with an idea decades ago that explains the rush to declare a Trump surge: availability. |
The idea of availability is that people assess the likelihood of an event occurring based on how easy it is to imagine. And that often leads to errors. |
Since Trump won a comeback victory in the most recent presidential election, it’s very easy to imagine him doing so again. The possibility is highly available to our brains. |
In truth, the evidence of a recent Trump bounce is somewhere between mixed and weak. In two polls — by Morning Consult and Yahoo News/YouGov — Joe Biden’s lead over Trump has shrunk modestly (to six percentage points, in both). But an ABC News-Ipsos poll found no change, and a poll by the University of Southern California showed that Biden’s lead had grown slightly. In FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Biden leads by 8.2 percentage points. |
I often rely on Nate Cohn — who writes about polling and helps design Times polls — to help make sense of confusing times, and here’s his advice: |
1. Trump has a serious chance to win re-election. (Most people seem to be doing a good job of remembering this.) |
2. Post-convention polling bounces usually fade. So for a post-convention bounce to be good for Trump, it would probably need to show that he was doing better than trailing Biden by six points. |
3. Polling is often messy immediately after the conventions, and you’d be wise to wait until after Labor Day to come to any conclusions about whether the campaign had changed. |
Last night, Nate tweeted: “I think people sense that the issue environment has changed in a way that *could* benefit Trump: crime/unrest is more salient; COVID less salient. I think that’s plausible. Whether it’s true, consequential, or lasting is all speculation.” |
1. A weekend of protests in Portland |
 | | Emergency workers attend to a person who was shot during the protests in Portland, Ore., on Saturday night.Mason Trinca for The New York Times |
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A pro-Trump, pro-police caravan traveled through the city on Saturday, clashing with counterprotesters at times. People shot paintball guns from trucks in the caravan, and protesters threw objects at them. The man who died, from a gunshot wound to the chest, has not been identified; he was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a local far-right group. |
The responses: “Do you seriously wonder, Mr. President, why this is the first time in decades that America has seen this level of violence?” Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said on Sunday. “It’s you who have created the hate and the division.” |
Trump responded on Twitter, calling Wheeler “weak and pathetic.” The president also praised the caravan’s members as “great patriots” and accused the protesters — without any evidence — of trying to stage a “coup attempt.” |
Biden said Sunday: “I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same.” |
2. New Trump-Russia details |
Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, curtailed the F.B.I.’s investigation into President Trump’s personal and financial relationship with Russia, The Times’s Michael Schmidt reports in a forthcoming book. |
Rosenstein limited the investigation, even though some career officials thought Trump’s Russia ties posed a national security threat. And Rosenstein instructed Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, to conduct an inquiry into election interference, but not into the president’s affinity for Russia. |
3. The plan to send more plastic to Africa |
 | | A recycling station in Nairobi, Kenya.Khadija M. Farah for The New York Times |
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The U.S. fossil fuel industry faces an existential crisis as the planet grows warmer and renewable energy becomes more common. In response, oil companies have spent billions to pivot to producing plastics, which are made from the same chemicals. |
But who wants all that plastic? Documents obtained by The Times show that the industry is hoping to send much of it to Kenya — and to weaken the country’s environmental laws in the process. |
Test your knowledge: Our Climate team has put together a quiz on the most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint. |
Here’s what else is happening |
 | | Opposition supporters at a rally in Minsk, Belarus, on Sunday.Associated Press |
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- Lives Lived: Larry Pardey and his wife, Lin, twice circumnavigated the world on wooden boats he had built over their more than 30 years of adventurous life at sea. Pardey died last month at 80.
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| IDEA OF THE DAY: SPEAKERS VS. VOTERS |
With the Democratic and Republican National Conventions now over, it’s possible to compare the full lineup of speakers from both. And there are a couple of striking patterns. |
At both conventions, the parties offered a roster of speakers that was more diverse — with a greater share of speakers of color — than their voters are. About 48 percent of Democratic speakers were Asian, Black, Hispanic or Native American, compared with 41 percent of Democratic voters, according to an analysis by Ian Prasad Philbrick of The Times. |
 | | By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center, 2019 |
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But the gap was even larger at the Republican convention: |
 | | By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center, 2019 |
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| PLAY, WATCH, EAT, REMEMBER |
 | | Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times |
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There is still a week until Labor Day — enough time to make pickles, an excellent accompaniment to grilled main dishes, for the long weekend’s festivities. |
The philharmonic hits the road |
For the next eight weekends, a Ford F-250 decorated in red, white and black will shuttle musicians from the New York Philharmonic to three unannounced locations in New York City for impromptu performances. The Philharmonic is calling the pop-up concert series NY Phil Bandwagon. |
“This is the thing, to groove off each other,” one Philharmonic musician said of playing with her colleagues again. “It’s not the same when we’re at home doing things over the internet.” |
Remembering Chadwick Boseman |
 | | Chadwick Boseman died on Friday after a yearslong battle with colon cancer.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times |
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The death of the actor Chadwick Boseman at age 43 has prompted an outpouring of tributes from Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington and many others. “To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years,” former President Barack Obama wrote. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the experience of one Black police officer in Flint, Mich. On the latest Book Review podcast, Kurt Andersen discusses his new book about the political hijacking of America. |
Lalena Fisher, Carole Landry, Amelia Nierenberg, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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