The Morning Dispatch: Fat Lady, Warming Up

Happy Friday! We know. We wish it was over too. (On the bright side, there will be no shortage of things to discuss at our What’s Next event next week. You can find more of what to expect over at the event site: An election post-op featuring Karl Rove and Joe Trippi, a look forward at the future of the GOP and American evangelicalism with Reince Priebus and Russell Moore, an examination of the state of American institutions with Yuval Levin, Jack Goldsmith, and Andy Smarick … and a lot more! We hope we’ll see you there!)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden overtook President Donald Trump’s narrow lead in Georgia overnight, holding a 917-vote advantage as we publish. Biden has also narrowed the gap in Pennsylvania on the strength of mail-in and absentee ballots that skew heavily in the Democrat’s favor and is expected to cruise into the lead there today when new votes are added to the tally. If Biden wins both states, and holds his narrow leads in Arizona and Nevada, he will win with 306 electoral votes—the same number Donald Trump won in 2016.

  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday emphasized the need for a coronavirus stimulus package by the end of 2020. “Hopefully the partisan passions that prevented us from doing another rescue package will subside with the election and I think we need to do it,” he said. “I think we need to do it before the end of the year.”

  • Initial unemployment claims fell last week by 7,000 week-over-week to 751,000, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. A total of 21,508,662 continued to claim some sort of unemployment benefits during the week ending October 17, a decrease of 1,152,854 from the previous week.

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