Good morning. A curtain of smoke hangs over California. Pence and Harris visit Wisconsin. And some conservatives rethink the value of unions. |
 | | Union members held a caravan rally in Washington this summer.Drew Angerer/Getty Images |
|
After decades of setbacks, the American labor movement has made some headway in the last few years. |
And Joe Biden has sent signals that, if elected, he may make labor policy a higher priority than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton did. (Biden told A.F.L.-C.I.O. members yesterday that he would be “the strongest labor president you have ever had.”) |
But the most intriguing sign of a potential union resurgence comes from the other side of the political spectrum. As conservative policy experts have begun imagining a post-Trump Republican Party, some are arguing that it should drop its longtime antipathy to unions. |
Republicans now rely on working-class votes, these experts point out, and unions have a long record of lifting workers’ living standards. The decline of unions, on the other hand, has contributed to slow-growing living standards for most Americans. A stronger labor movement, according to this view, would be better than high taxes and big anti-poverty programs. |
“There are a lot of things we like about free markets,” Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass, the think tank that organized the letter, told me. “But at the end of the day, those markets are a means to an actual substantive end — a flourishing society and healthy communities and families and a strong nation. And if markets aren’t doing that, then we have a problem.” |
Cass emphasized that there was a lot he didn’t like about today’s unions. He is instead intrigued by industrywide unions, which negotiate pay for workers across multiple companies and are common in Europe. They can be more efficient than repeated union sign-up drives and contract negotiations at individual companies. |
Whatever the specific approach, Cass said that the key was reducing the power imbalance that exists today between management and workers. |
For now, pro-union conservatives make up a tiny minority of the party’s office holders. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to weaken worker bargaining power, often with support from congressional Republicans. So it is entirely possible that the party will remain opposed to unions for years to come. |
But that’s not the only possible outcome. |
Related: Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford all forged occasional alliances with unions, Steven Greenhouse, a longtime labor journalist, wrote in a Times Op-Ed. |
 | | Senator Kamala Harris toured an electricians’ union facility in Milwaukee on Monday.Taylor Glascock for The New York Times |
|
1. Pence and Harris vie for Wisconsin |
Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris both visited Wisconsin on Monday, a state that many see as essential for President Trump’s electoral map. They each addressed the recent demonstrations against police violence, in starkly different ways. |
Harris went to Milwaukee, where she met privately with the family of Jacob Blake, the Black man whose shooting by a police officer in Kenosha set off the protests. Pence, visiting the city of La Crosse, talked about the protests but not the shooting. |
Wisconsin polls: “Back in the winter/spring and all the way back to 2018, there were plenty of polls showing that the president was highly competitive and even leading in Wisconsin,” The Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted. “Those polls are largely gone — even as the president embraces a strategy purportedly targeted at that state.” Biden leads by about 7 percentage points in Wisconsin, almost identical to his national lead. |
The money race: Trump had a huge financial advantage over Biden just a few months ago, but it has essentially evaporated. A big reason, according to a story by Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman: Lavish spending by the Trump campaign. |
2. The pandemic budget crisis |
Economists warn that could prolong the recession. Local leaders are hoping for aid from the next relief bill in Congress. |
In other virus developments: |
- India has surpassed Brazil as the country with the second-highest number of cases, after the United States. (Here’s a map of case counts from around the world.)
- Sales of used cars have taken off during the pandemic, as many people try to avoid public transit. That’s driving the price up: In July, the average value of used cars jumped more than 16 percent.
|
 | | Battling a blaze in Mariposa County, Calif., on Monday.Noah Berger/Associated Press |
|
Here’s what else is happening |
| IDEA OF THE DAY: IN PRAISE OF MEDIOCRITY |
In his latest column, Ross Douthat of The Times Opinion pages took issue with a recent item in this newsletter. He suggested that it was unfair for me to compare the U.S. share of official coronavirus deaths around the world (22 percent) with the U.S. share of global population (4 percent). |
The U.S. is simply too different from much of the world — like Asia, Africa and Oceania — for global comparisons to be meaningful, Ross argued. To him, the better comparisons are the countries closest or most similar to the U.S., like big countries in Western Europe and the Americas. |
“When you compare deaths as a share of population within that group of peer countries, the U.S. starts to look more mediocre and less uniquely catastrophic,” he wrote. Germany has done better, for instance, while Britain, Spain and Italy have done worse. I encourage you to read Ross’s full column. |
I still think the evidence points to the U.S. being an outlier. It has a per capita death rate 80 percent higher than all of Europe’s and more than twice as high as Canada’s. In many of those other countries, the virus is also well enough under control that more parts of normal daily life — like in-person school and indoor restaurant dining — have returned. |
 | | Julia Gartland for The New York Times |
|
Here’s a festive sheet pan dinner from Melissa Clark that’s as beautiful as it is easy to make: roasted chicken with sweet plums and soft red onions. Add a squeeze of lemon at the end to balance the sweetness, and serve alongside rice, polenta or warm flatbread. |
Preview the 2020 N.F.L. season |
 | | “Tenet” played at an AMC movie theater in Northern Virginia last week.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock |
|
What ‘Tenet’ means for Hollywood |
On a regular opening weekend, a blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan — the filmmaker behind “Inception,” “Dunkirk” and the “Dark Knight” trilogy — might sell more than $50 million worth of tickets in North America. But little about the movie business is normal right now. |
Nolan’s latest movie — the time-bending spy thriller “Tenet” — has turned into a test of Americans’ willingness to go to theaters. The verdict: not great, not terrible. The movie grossed an estimated $20.2 million in North America over the holiday weekend. It was Hollywood’s best domestic result since mid-March, when the pandemic forced cinemas to close. “For now, this is as good as it gets,” one expert told The Times. |
A large share of moviegoers chose to watch it on an Imax screen, Variety’s Rebecca Rubin noted. If they were going to venture out, she explained, they “opted to see it in the best quality possible.” |
 | | The historic Route 66 Motel in Seligman, Ariz., in June.Luke Sharrett for The New York Times |
|
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
P.S. The word “slondok” — a crispy Indonesian snack made from cassava — appeared for the first time in The Times this weekend, as noted by the Twitter bot @NYT_first_said. |
Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the Daniel Prude case in Rochester, N.Y. The latest Book Review podcast features Jeffrey Toobin on writing about Trump. |
Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
|
