Democrats are ringing alarm bells and coming to the simplest of conclusions: It’s the pandemic, stupid.

In a focus group last week, Pennsylvania Democrats one after another articulated the issue vexing top White House aides, party operatives in Virginia and voters in Georgia: Why isn’t President Joe Biden’s diminished job rating rebounding?

Analysis: 

Among all-important Iowa voters, former President Donald Trump notched his highest favorability rating ever, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

• 53% of Iowans now have a favorable view of Trump.
• 45% now have an unfavorable view of Trump.
• 2% are not sure how they feel.

Among that favorable/unfavorable split, this is Trump’s “best showing ever on either metric in the Iowa Poll,” the Register writes.

I nomi eccellenti sono quelli del presidente del Montenegro Milo Djukanović e del finanziere serbo Siniša Mali

Social Democrat leader Olaf Scholz says he has a “clear mandate” but his rival refuses to give up.

The center-left Social Democrats are ahead of the conservative CDU/CSU bloc by almost 2%, according to initial projected results. In such a tight race, the possibilities for a coalition are still unclear.

With just 23 days until the 2020 election, here’s my latest roundup of the 5 BIG storylines you need to know to understand the upcoming week on the campaign trail. And they’re ranked — so the No. 1 story is the most important of the coming week.

PART ONE
2008: THE CRITICAL ELECTION THAT WASN’T

A touchstone of my thinking is the election of 2008, which in my mind I refer to as “the critical election that wasn’t.”  For historians, the term “critical election” has a special meaning.  It doesn’t mean simply an election that is vital or all-important; it means one that changes the party system itself, by re-defining what one or more of the political parties represents.  In a critical election, the parties themselves undergo significant change, as the central ideas around which they are organized are reformulated in ways that are fundamental, many-sided, and long lasting.

Whereas every presidential election cycle introduces some new ideas and personalities, not every election produces change in the parties’ basic beliefs and ideas.  A critical election is a rare sort of generational event that attains landmark significance because, by aggregating ideas in a new and different way, it charts a new direction for the country and opens up new possibilities.  When such an election occurs, the basic message of an entire political party is transformed.  Political parties sometimes die; new parties emerge.  So, critical elections are about more than…

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Instead, Durham’s authorization and Barr’s decision to release it to Congress ensures a public airing of portions of his investigation, which President Donald Trump has publicly said he hopes would result in prosecutions of his political adversaries and senior intelligence officials.

The newly disclosed evidence, provided to Senate Republican investigators conducting a parallel review of the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe, was declassified Wednesday by Barr, who provided a two-page summary of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Steele’s sub-source, which stretched from 2009 to 2011.

Though a letter from Barr and his two-page summary do not indicate what the FBI did when it discovered that Steele was relying on this sub-source, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) accused the bureau of withholding the information from a federal court when it used the Steele dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide in late 2016.

Barr and Durham’s disclosure to Graham came in response to the senators’ request that the Justice Department declassify a footnote in last year’s report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz documenting significant abuses and missteps in the FBI’s effort to surveil the former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page.

Horowitz learned that the FBI had identified Steele’s primary sub-source as the target of their former counterintelligence investigation in December 2016 — a detail he included in a footnote of his report that had remained classified until Wednesday.

Barr declassified the footnote and included it in a letter to Graham, who is conducting a review of the FBI’s actions during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

The declassified footnote states that Steele’s primary sub-source “was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his/her documented contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers.” It does not, however, say what the FBI ultimately concluded about the sub-source, who has been publicly identified in the New York Times and other outlets.

Though Horowitz’s report found significant errors in the FBI’s applications for those warrants, which were granted and renewed four times, he made no judgment on whether the FBI’s initial request to surveil Page would have survived otherwise. But the Justice Department has since rescinded two of the renewals based on his review.

So far, Durham’s investigation has led to one criminal indictment. An FBI attorney involved in the Page surveillance application, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty last month to doctoring an email used in the bureau’s representations to the court reviewing the request.

Graham said that Thursday’s revelation further underscores that the FBI withheld potentially exculpatory information from the court.

“To me, failure of the FBI to inform the court that the primary sub-source was suspected of being a Russian agent is a breach of every duty owed by law enforcement to the judicial system,” Graham said in a statement, calling it “the most stunning and damning revelation the committee has uncovered.”

According to the summary of the counterintelligence investigation as prepared by Barr and the FBI, the primary sub-source was in contact with known Russian intelligence officers in 2006. The investigation into the primary sub-source was closed in 2011 and “remains closed to this day,” according to the summary.

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Trump’s apparent recognition of the coronavirus threat earlier in the crisis is triggering new charges that he lied to the public at a critical moment.