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"As Black folks we have learned that we are running out of resources when it comes to being protected," the organization wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.

"Police are killing us. White nationalists are threatening us. The president is supporting the nationalists. We need to learn how to protect ourselves in a way that keeps us safe."

"It's a really volatile time right now," she said. "We need to be armed. We need to be safe. We are citizens here, we have equal rights here," she said. "The Second Amendment is our right too."

The goal of the fundraiser is to raise $2,000. As of Wednesday, the organization had raised $780.

In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, thousands have made calls for police reform, justice reform and voter action.

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A California Black Lives Matter chapter is fundraising to get some of its members trained in gun safety - CNN

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump still has a path to the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win reelection. But it requires everything to break in his direction a second time.

Persuadable voters in battleground states will need to overwhelmingly swing in his favor. Hell have to win back crucial voting blocs. And his turnout operation will need to dramatically outperform Democrat Joe Bidens in an extraordinarily turbulent year.

In 2016, his chances of winning the election were those of drawing an inside straight in poker. The question this year is whether he can draw an inside straight two hands in a row, said Whit Ayres a veteran Republican pollster. It is theoretically possible but practically difficult.

While Trump has multiple roads to victory, his most likely route hinges on winning two crucial battleground states: Florida and Pennsylvania. If he can claim both and hold onto other Sun Belt states he narrowly carried in 2016 North Carolina and Arizona while playing defense in Georgia and Ohio, which he won handily in 2016 but where Biden is now competitive, he will win.

Trumps campaign is also continuing to pour time and money into Wisconsin and Michigan, longtime Democratic strongholds he flipped his way by the slimmest of margins four years ago, while trying to defend Iowa and Maines second congressional district and grab Nevada and Minnesota, two states his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton narrowly won.

Trumps campaign points to other factors pointing in their favor: The campaign and the Republican Party have spent years investing in a powerful voter outreach operation and have 2.5 million volunteers knocking on millions of doors each week. They have seen spikes in GOP voter registration in several keys states. And Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their candidate than Democrats are about Biden. The Democrats are driven more by their hate for Trump.

We feel better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year, Trumps campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told staff on a conference call this week. And this optimism is based on numbers and data, not feel, not sense.

But polling shows Trump trailing or closely matched in nearly every state he needs to win to reach 270 Electoral College votes. Barring some kind of major upset, Trump needs to hold onto at least one of the three rustbelt states he won in 2016: Pennsylvania Wisconsin or Michigan, said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Wisconsin.

I dont see any other way for Trump to do this, he said.

Fox News polls released Wednesday show Biden with a clear advantage in Michigan and a slight one in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, recent polls show Biden ahead but vary on the size of his lead.

For all of that, though, Trumps team can draw comfort from this historical footnote: In all three states, Clinton led in the polls in the final weeks of 2016.

But Trumps fundamental problem, said Ayres is that a large number of states that he won comfortably last time are currently close.

While Trumps upset win in 2016 still haunts Democrats and has left many voters deeply distrustful of public polls, close watchers of the race stress that 2020 is not 2016.

Biden is better liked than Clinton and polls suggest there are now fewer undecided voters, who broke for Trump in the races final weeks four years ago. And Clinton was hobbled in the final weeks by a series of setbacks including the late reopening of an FBI investigation into her emails. The impact of any additional October surprise this time would be limited by the record number of voters who have already cast their ballots.

Trumps team, for its part, has been working to repair his standing with suburban women and older voters soured by his handling of the pandemic, while trying to boost enthusiasm among targeted groups like Catholic and Second Amendment voters as well as aiming to build support among Black and Latino voters.

Hes again at the thread-the-needle stage, said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. He noted that because Trump won key states by so few votes last time around, he has very little margin for error.

Still, Miringoff stressed that while many polls may favor Biden, they do not account for cataclysmic events, such as potential voter suppression, election interference, or court challenges that could halt votes from being counted. Democrats are expected to cast far more ballots by mail, which are rejected at higher rates than in-person ballots, even in normal years.

The polls could both be right and wrong at the same time, he said, because they could poll those who think they voted but whose votes end up not counted.

With 29 electoral votes, Florida is arguably the most crucial state for Trump. A loss there would make it nearly impossible for him to retain the White House. But the state, which has sided with the winner of nearly every presidential race for decades, is also known for razor-tight elections most notably in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes after a recount.

Both sides point to signs of promise in the state, with Republicans saying they see growing support among Hispanics while Democrats focus on seniors. While polling in early October showed Biden with a slight advantage, two recent polls have the two candidates neck and neck.

From everything I can see, its a statistical tie, said Jennifer Krantz, a Tampa native and Republican strategist who has worked on multiple state races. If thats the case, she said, ground game could make the difference.

In 2016, Clinton won more votes in the state than Barack Obama in both his races, with commanding leads in Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade. But Trump ran up the the score with stunning turnout in smaller counties, including across the Florida Panhandle.

Trumps campaign expects do even better this time thanks to a robust turnout operation. Indeed, Republicans say they have registered 146,000 more voters than Democrats since the pandemic hit in March, leaving Democrats with their smallest lead since the state began tracking.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope to run the table when it comes to early voting and vote by mail though some remain cautious after 2016.

I think were all in this collective PTSD panic, said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who runs the pro-Biden super PAC Unite The Country.

Its a similar story in Pennsylvania, where two recent polls show Biden maintaining a clear lead and another suggests a narrow one. Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes last time, powered by an overwhelming showing in rural areas and small towns and cities.

Trumps team is counting on those trends to hold this time around.

Its dj vu all over again, said Robert Gleason, the former chair of Pennsylvanias Republican Party who lives in the city and has been helping Trumps campaign Theres a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Just as in Florida, while Democrats hold a substantial voter registration edge, Republicans have narrowed their gap by about 200,000 from four years ago, thanks in part to Democratic party-switchers. Trump campaign aides stress that number is five times Trumps 2016 vote margin.

But Trumps campaign is also facing grimmer prospects in areas like the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs. And Biden is not Clinton, an historically unpopular candidate who particularly turned off white, working class men. Biden not only comes from the working class bastion of Scranton, but has built his political persona as a champion of those voters and their ideals.

AP writers Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington, Jonathan Lemire in New York and Marc Levy in Harrisburg contributed to this report.

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Road to 270: Trump's best path to victory hinges on FL, PA - The Republic

AP Photo/Evan VucciPresident Donald Trump waves to the crowd as he walks off stage after speaking at a campaign rally at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Wednesday, Oct. 21, in Gastonia, N.C.

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump still has a path to the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win reelection. But it requires everything to break in his direction a second time.

Persuadable voters in battleground states will need to overwhelmingly swing in his favor. Hell have to win back crucial voting blocs. And his turnout operation will need to dramatically outperform Democrat Joe Bidens in an extraordinarily turbulent year.

In 2016, his chances of winning the election were those of drawing an inside straight in poker. The question this year is whether he can draw an inside straight two hands in a row, said Whit Ayres a veteran Republican pollster. It is theoretically possible but practically difficult.

While Trump has multiple roads to victory, his most likely route hinges on winning two crucial battleground states: Florida and Pennsylvania. If he can claim both and hold onto other Sun Belt states he narrowly carried in 2016 North Carolina and Arizona while playing defense in Georgia and Ohio, which he won handily in 2016 but where Biden is now competitive, he will win.

Trumps campaign is also continuing to pour time and money into Wisconsin and Michigan, longtime Democratic strongholds he flipped his way by the slimmest of margins four years ago, while trying to defend Iowa and Maines second congressional district and grab Nevada and Minnesota, two states his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton narrowly won.

Trumps campaign points to other factors pointing in their favor: The campaign and the Republican Party have spent years investing in a powerful voter outreach operation and have 2.5 million volunteers knocking on millions of doors each week. They have seen spikes in GOP voter registration in several keys states. And Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their candidate than Democrats are about Biden. The Democrats are driven more by their hate for Trump.

We feel better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year, Trumps campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told staff on a conference call this week. And this optimism is based on numbers and data, not feel, not sense.

But polling shows Trump trailing or closely matched in nearly every state he needs to win to reach 270 Electoral College votes. Barring some kind of major upset, Trump needs to hold onto at least one of the three rustbelt states he won in 2016: Pennsylvania Wisconsin or Michigan, said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Wisconsin.

I dont see any other way for Trump to do this, he said.

Fox News polls released Wednesday show Biden with a clear advantage in Michigan and a slight one in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, recent polls show Biden ahead but vary on the size of his lead.

For all of that, though, Trumps team can draw comfort from this historical footnote: In all three states, Clinton led in the polls in the final weeks of 2016.

But Trumps fundamental problem, said Ayres is that a large number of states that he won comfortably last time are currently close.

While Trumps upset win in 2016 still haunts Democrats and has left many voters deeply distrustful of public polls, close watchers of the race stress that 2020 is not 2016.

Biden is better liked than Clinton and polls suggest there are now fewer undecided voters, who broke for Trump in the races final weeks four years ago. And Clinton was hobbled in the final weeks by a series of setbacks including the late reopening of an FBI investigation into her emails. The impact of any additional October surprise this time would be limited by the record number of voters who have already cast their ballots.

Trumps team, for its part, has been working to repair his standing with suburban women and older voters soured by his handling of the pandemic, while trying to boost enthusiasm among targeted groups like Catholic and Second Amendment voters as well as aiming to build support among Black and Latino voters.

Hes again at the thread-the-needle stage, said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. He noted that because Trump won key states by so few votes last time around, he has very little margin for error.

Still, Miringoff stressed that while many polls may favor Biden, they do not account for cataclysmic events, such as potential voter suppression, election interference, or court challenges that could halt votes from being counted. Democrats are expected to cast far more ballots by mail, which are rejected at higher rates than in-person ballots, even in normal years.

The polls could both be right and wrong at the same time, he said, because they could poll those who think they voted but whose votes end up not counted.

With 29 electoral votes, Florida is arguably the most crucial state for Trump. A loss there would make it nearly impossible for him to retain the White House. But the state, which has sided with the winner of nearly every presidential race for decades, is also known for razor-tight elections most notably in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes after a recount.

Both sides point to signs of promise in the state, with Republicans saying they see growing support among Hispanics while Democrats focus on seniors. While polling in early October showed Biden with a slight advantage, two recent polls have the two candidates neck and neck.

From everything I can see, its a statistical tie, said Jennifer Krantz, a Tampa native and Republican strategist who has worked on multiple state races. If thats the case, she said, ground game could make the difference.

In 2016, Clinton won more votes in the state than Barack Obama in both his races, with commanding leads in Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade. But Trump ran up the the score with stunning turnout in smaller counties, including across the Florida Panhandle.

Trumps campaign expects do even better this time thanks to a robust turnout operation. Indeed, Republicans say they have registered 146,000 more voters than Democrats since the pandemic hit in March, leaving Democrats with their smallest lead since the state began tracking.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope to run the table when it comes to early voting and vote by mail though some remain cautious after 2016.

I think were all in this collective PTSD panic, said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who runs the pro-Biden super PAC Unite The Country.

Its a similar story in Pennsylvania, where two recent polls show Biden maintaining a clear lead and another suggests a narrow one. Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes last time, powered by an overwhelming showing in rural areas and small towns and cities.

Trumps team is counting on those trends to hold this time around.

Its deja vu all over again, said Robert Gleason, the former chair of Pennsylvanias Republican Party who lives in the city and has been helping Trumps campaign Theres a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Just as in Florida, while Democrats hold a substantial voter registration edge, Republicans have narrowed their gap by about 200,000 from four years ago, thanks in part to Democratic party-switchers. Trump campaign aides stress that number is five times Trumps 2016 vote margin.

But Trumps campaign is also facing grimmer prospects in areas like the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs. And Biden is not Clinton, an historically unpopular candidate who particularly turned off white, working class men. Biden not only comes from the working class bastion of Scranton, but has built his political persona as a champion of those voters and their ideals.

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Trump's best path to victory hinges on Pennsylvania - Lock Haven Express

By Carl P. Leubsdorf Dallas Morning News

Despite the polls, President Donald Trump is predicting an Election Day wave like youve never seen before. But his allies and associates in all three branches of government are hedging their bets with actions designed to extend his sway in key areas, even if he loses.

On Capitol Hill, the Republican-controlled Senate is moving to cement conservative control of the Supreme Court by confirming Trumps nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Executive branch officials are rushing to extend his deregulation efforts and fill many vacant jobs.

And the administration hopes the high court will help it complete the 2020 census under rules that would bolster Republican voting and financial power for the next decade. At stake is how congressional representation is calculated and billions of dollars in federal aid are allocated to states and localities.

The court recently overturned a lower court ruling, allowing more time for completing the census and minimizing a potential undercount of minorities and younger Americans. The court also scheduled a Nov. 30 hearing on the administrations latest effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the count, which could cost three states, including Texas, one member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The court vacancy that prompted the Barrett nomination is unique, the closest to a pending presidential election such a vacancy has been filled (though several were approved soon after elections). Filling lesser jobs and taking administrative actions is less unusual, though it usually occurs at the end of a second term, not during a re-election campaign.

The administrations most questionable act is its effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the census, which is constitutionally mandated every 10 years to determine population changes used to update allocation of U.S. House seats and federal funds.

A three-judge federal court in New York, in a unanimous decision by two appointees of President George W. Bush and one of President Barack Obama, said Trump exceeded his authority in directing the Commerce Department to provide two sets of numbers, one excluding the millions of unauthorized immigrants. The Constitution says the census should provide the whole number of persons in each State.

A study by Dudley Poston of Texas A&M and Teresa Sullivan for the University of Virginias Center for Politics concluded their exclusion could cost California, Texas and New Jersey one House seat each, and similarly benefit Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio. It could also cost big states with large numbers of undocumented persons substantial amounts of federal funds.

By law, the census must be finished by Dec. 31, with the president then required to notify Congress the whole number of persons in each State and the number of representatives to which each is entitled. The House clerk, in turn, is required to pass the latter number to each state.

But the administration is already hinting it may not complete its work until early 2021. More important, it is unclear if the new House, almost certain to be controlled again by the Democrats, can reject Trump proposals that benefit Republicans.

Earlier this year, fearing delays in part from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Commerce Department urged extending the census deadline until April 30, 2021, allowing more time to count those inhabitants who are traditionally harder to reach, mostly young people, minorities and poor people.

But the White House rejected an extension, presumably because that could give the final decision to the next administration if Trump loses re-election. Then, it decided to halt the count, lest it be unable to complete its calculations by Dec. 31.

Besides determining how many House seats each state will get for the next 10 years, the census guides legislative decisions on representation within the states and determines the location of recipients for the billions of dollars in annual federal aid, much of it for people below certain income levels.

The Nov. 30 hearing is the second time possible exclusion of illegals has reached the Supreme Court. Last year, it voted 5-4 to block the initial administration effort on grounds it failed to use the proper procedures.

But that could change this time, since the court will likely include Judge Barrett, named by Trump to succeed the late Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of the prior five-justice majority. The case may provide an early sign of whether Democratic concerns about her potential impact are justified.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that officials throughout the administration are rushing to fill jobs and extending efforts to revise or scrap regulations deemed to be anti-business. They include everything from easing restrictions for carrying highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains to requiring sponsors of candidates for immigration to provide detailed proof they can support the newcomers financially.

Many of these actions could be subject to congressional review under a procedure the GOP used four years ago to overturn some regulations implemented in the final weeks of the Obama administration. Overturning regulations requires a majority vote of both houses, plus the presidents signature, a possibility if Democrats sweep the board Nov. 3.

As with the census, this suggests that battles over Trumps initiatives wont necessarily end if or when he leaves office.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Write to him via email at: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

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Carl P. Leubsdorf: Hedging their bets, Trump allies look to cement gains - The Spokesman-Review

For more than five decades now, fear of migration from Bangladesh (and earlier Pakistans East Bengal province) has influenced the politics of Assam. To justify this, very high estimates of numbers of Bangladeshi migrants have been put out in the public domain in India.

In 1997, Union Home Minister Indrajit Gupta stated in Parliament that there were 10 million illegal Bangladeshi migrants residing in India. In 2016, the Modi government declared in Parliament that there were as many as 20 million Bangladeshis living in India illegally (which would mean nearly 2% of Indias population was actually Bangladeshi).

Indias Supreme Court, which has been a strong driver of nativist sentiment on this issue, went on to assume that the number of illegal migrants runs into millions and is in fact an aggression on the State of Assam.

One part of this nativist sentiment is ethnic with Assamese nationalists opposing the migration of both Hindus and Muslims from Bangladesh. The other part of this is communal with Hindu nationalist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party painting this as an influx of Muslims.

Adding to this is the pan-Indian stereotype of Bangladesh being much poorer than India, which drives Bangladeshis to across the border to find work.

This politics led to the Supreme Court in 2014 to mandate that the National Register of Citizens a list of bonafide Indian citizens be updated for the state of Assam. The process for verifying citizenship invented by the court was strict. Based on documents often generations-old, it had never used in any other part of the world.

While the push to update the NRC was powered by high estimates of illegal migrant numbers, the final result published in 2019 ironically ended up disproving them. The number of people who were found not to be verifiable Indian citizens was around 1.9 million more than ten times lower than the figure put out by the Modi government in 2016.

This gap between the estimates and final NRC figures caused shock in Assam. We are disappointed as the figure of 1.9 million exclusion is nowhere close to earlier figures of illegal immigrants, the All Assam Students Associations Samujjal Bhattacharya admitted.

In addition, the NRCs final list seemed to belie another enduring myth: that of mass Muslim migration from Bangladesh. While there is no official religious breakup in the list (and will probably never will be), senior BJP leaders from Assam have admitted that in reality Bengali-speaking Hindus and not Muslims had been the community most prominent in the NRCs final list of exclusions.

As a consequence, from being a strong supporter of the NRC, the BJP morphed overnight into a trenchant critic, even going so far as to petition the Supreme Court to re-verify the final list. The other side of the coin is that Assams Muslims of Bengali-origin largely support the current NRC and oppose plans to redo the process.

What explains this massive gap between projections and actuals when it comes to the magnitude and nature of migration?

Part of the answer might lie in a new economic projection put out by the International Monetary Fund on October 13 that shows Indias per capita gross domestic product will slip below Bangladeshs for 2020. In other words, Bangladeshis will soon be, on an average, (marginally) richer than Indians.

If this is the Bangladesh-India comparison, its not too difficult to work out what it would be with Assam, one of the Indian Unions poorest states. Currently Bangladeshs per capita GDP is around 1.5 times that of Assam. Moreover, it has been significantly higher since 1971 the year Bangladesh became independent as well as the cut-off year for the NRC.

Living standards diverge even further if measured using human development indicators. The average life expectancy of a Bangladeshi is nearly a decade more than that of a resident of Assam. At 41, Assams infant mortality rate the number of infants who die before the age of one per 1,000 births is 1.5 times that of Bangladeshs (26). In Bangladesh, the maternal mortality rate the number of mothers who die for every 1 lakh childbirths is 173 but jumps to 215 in Assam.

It is thus hardly surprising that the politically-driven estimates of massive economic migration were not borne out by the actual NRC figures.

Instead, what is often elided in this discussion is that one of the main drivers of migration from Bangladesh has been religious persecution. It is well established that the 1971 Liberation War was the peak period of migration from Bangladesh. Much of this was driven by the fact that the Pakistan Army specifically targeted Bangladeshi Hindus. As many as 90% of refugees who fled Bangladesh during the war were Hindu.

And 1971 wasnt the only instance of religious persecution within Bangladesh driving outmigration. Many of the other triggers for migration from Bangladesh post 1971 were also communally charged, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 (after which Bangladesh declared itself an Islamic state), riots in the early 1990s related to the Babri Masjid in India and communal violence after the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party took power in 2001.

This history means that the proportion of Hindus in Bangladesh has decreased by more than half from 20% in 1970 to a little above 8% today. Rana Dasgupta, general secretary of the Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Unity Council, a Bangladeshi human rights group, says that this precipitous fall is explained by the mass migration of Bangladeshi Hindus to India.

Bangladeshs political trajectory and the quantum of Hindu outmigration since 1971 thus might explain the NRCs religious breakup. It would also help make sense of why the three Muslim-majority border district of Assam have actually seen an NRC-exclusion rate less than the state average even as that of the Hindu-majority border district of Cachar is higher.

This modern Bangladeshi history is often unknown or skipped when Indians talk of illegal immigration so much so that Scroll.in had to publish a factual rebuttal to the widespread myth that the Assam NRC is anti-Muslim after the final list was published in 2019.

Nativist politics that targets immigrants is a regular feature of rich, developed Western countries such as the United States or Great Britain. However, this is much rarer in a poor country of Indias income level. Assams politics, where there are fears of mass economic migration from a richer country, might thus be unique.

The final NRC data has thrown the BJP into a tizzy with the party now scrambling to change the final list. To add to that, with Bangladesh now approximately as rich as India and growing much faster Indian politicians might find the narrative of a massive influx of economic refugees more difficult to push.

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Has Bangladeshs economic rise taken the wind out of the NRC narrative? - Scroll.in