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Bloomberg: U.S. Supreme Court Temporarily Restores Trump’s Refugee Travel Ban

U.S. Supreme Court Temporarily Restores Trump’s Refugee Travel Ban

Laura Asseo

  • Lower court overruled president’s restrictions on refugees
  • High court to hear arguments Oct. 10 on president’s travel ban

A U.S. Supreme Court justice on Monday issued a short-term order restoring President Donald Trump’s ban on thousands of refugees seeking entry to the country.

The order issued by Justice Anthony Kennedy puts a lower court ruling on hold until the high court decides whether to grant the administration’s request for a longer-term order. Kennedy ordered those opposing the administration to file court papers by noon Tuesday.

A federal appeals court ruled last week that the administration must temporarily admit refugees if a resettlement agency had promised that it would provide basic services for them. That decision was set to take effect Tuesday, and as many as 24,000 refugees have received such assurances, the administration said in papers filed with the high court.

The ruling on refugees “will disrupt the status quo and frustrate orderly implementation of the order’s refugee provisions that this court made clear months ago could take effect,” acting U.S. Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall wrote.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Oct. 10 on President Donald Trump’s overall travel order, which imposed a 90-day ban on people entering the U.S. from six mostly Muslim countries and a 120-day ban on refugees, to give officials time to assess vetting procedures.

The high court on June 26 cleared part of the ban to take effect in the meantime, while saying the U.S. had to admit at least some people with close relatives in the U.S. A series of court decisions since then have said that order must include people with grandparents and cousins in this country.

The administration said Monday that while it disagreed with that part of last week’s ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court, for now it was contesting only the portion of the order related to refugees.

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NYT: Trump and McConnell Locked in a Cold War, Threatening the G.O.P. Agenda

Trump and McConnell Locked in a Cold War, Threatening the G.O.P. Agenda

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin
August 22, 2017

The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.

What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.

The rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell comes at a highly perilous moment for Republicans, who face a number of urgent deadlines when they return to Washington next month. Congress must approve new spending measures and raise the statutory limit on government borrowing within weeks of reconvening, and Republicans are hoping to push through an elaborate rewrite of the federal tax code. There is scant room for legislative error on any front.

A protracted government shutdown or a default on sovereign debt could be disastrous — for the economy and for the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell are locked in a political cold war. Neither man would comment for this story. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, noted that the senator and the president had “shared goals,” and pointed to “tax reform, infrastructure, funding the government, not defaulting on the debt, passing the defense authorization bill.”

Still, the back-and-forth has been dramatic.

In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, then berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.

During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.

Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump’s regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump’s understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.

In off hand remarks, Mr. McConnell has expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump’s presidency may be headed, and has mused about whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year’s elections and beyond, according to people who have spoken to him directly.

While maintaining a pose of public reserve, Mr. McConnell expressed horror to advisers last week after Mr. Trump’s comments equating white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., with protesters who rallied against them. Mr. Trump’s most explosive remarks came at a news conference in Manhattan, where he stood beside Ms. Chao. (Ms. Chao, deflecting a question about the tensions between her husband and the president she serves, told reporters, “I stand by my man — both of them.)

Mr. McConnell signaled to business leaders that he was deeply uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s comments: Several who resigned advisory roles in the Trump administration contacted Mr. McConnell’s office after the fact, and were told that Mr. McConnell fully understood their choices, three people briefed on the conversations said.

Mr. Trump has also continued to badger and threaten Mr. McConnell’s Senate colleagues, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose Republican primary challenger was praised by Mr. Trump last week.

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McClatchy: Trump aides plot a big immigration deal — that breaks a campaign promise

If you’re an immigrant who was unlawfully brought to America as a child, you might be one of the more than 600,000 young adults registered under DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Trump has flip-flopped on whether he will undo the executive action that then-President Obama used to create the program, but now Texas has threatened to sue if Trump doesn’t undo the action. What’s the future look like for DACA? McClatchy White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez explains. Natalie Fertig –McClatchy

Trump aides plot a big immigration deal — that breaks a campaign promise

Anita Kumar
August 22,2017

Donald Trump’s top aides are pushing him to protect young people brought into the country illegally as children — and then use the issue as a bargaining chip for a larger immigration deal — despite the president’s campaign vow to deport so-called Dreamers.

The White House officials want Trump to strike an ambitious deal with Congress that offers Dreamers protection in exchange for legislation that pays for a border wall and more detention facilities, curbs legal immigration and implements E-verify, an online system that allows businesses to check immigration status, according to a half-dozen people familiar with situation, most involved with the negotiations.

The group includes former and current White House chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John Kelly, the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who both serve as presidential advisers, they said. Others who have not been as vocal publicly about their stance but are thought to agree include Vice President Mike Pence, who as a congressman worked on a failed immigration deal that called for citizenship, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, a Democrat who serves as director of the National Economic Council.

“They are holding this out as a bargaining chip for other things,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman with the Federation for American Reform, a group that opposes protecting Dreamers and is in talks with the administration.

On the other side, a smaller group — including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his former aides, Stephen Miller, who serves as Trump’s senior policy adviser, and Rick Dearborn, White House deputy chief of staff — opposes citizenship, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

 “He getting conflicting advice inside, and that’s caused hesitation,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations of Numbers USA, a group that opposes protecting Dreamers and is in talks with the administration. “Obviously president doesn’t want to make a decision but he has to.”

Miller was ordered not to brief the president on the issue in recent months, according to two of the people. A former campaign and transition aide, Miller has briefed Trump many times on Dreamers so his views are not unknown, but the president has a tendency to side with the last person who speaks to him and Kelly, who became chief of staff three weeks ago, has kept a tight watch on who gets to talk to Trump.

“The president knows where Stephen Miller stands,” said a former Trump adviser familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity. “It was discussed in the primary and general election. A new conversation is not going to change anything.”

The 5-year-old program launched by the Obama administration and known as DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — protects young people brought into the country illegally as children by their undocumented parents from deportation and allows them to attain work permits.

Ten states, led by Texas, have threatened to sue the U.S. government if it does not end the program by Sept. 5. They sent a letter, signed by nine Republican attorneys general and one Republican governor, from states including Kansas, South Carolina and Idaho. Another 20 states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra urged Trump to refuse that request.

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would end the deferred deportation policy, calling it “amnesty” and an abuse of the president’s powers. But after inauguration, he not only failed to act but pledged to treat Dreamers with “great heart.”

“DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me,” he said in February. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids, in many cases not in all cases. In some of the cases they’re having DACA and they’re gang members and they’re drug dealers too. But you have some absolutely incredible kids, I would say mostly.”

Some Trump aides express similar compassion for the Dreamers — roughly 800,000 immigrants currently protected by the Obama-era program — while others fear opposing the popular policy could lead to backlash with voters, business executives and donors.

The administration has continued to allow Dreamers to apply for the program and even renew their permits — at nearly the rate of the Obama administration — much to the dismay of some of his own supporters who want him to make good on his campaign promise.

Groups that support stronger enforcement are nervous about what they describe as “strong forces” from within the White House and throughout the administration that support protections for Dreamers. “That is why the anti-amnesty forces are very nervous about it,” said a source familiar with the discussions. “What’s going to happen?”

In June, the administration rescinded another Obama immigration program — Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, often called DAPA — that allowed parents in the country illegally with children who were citizens or legal residents to be receive renewable work permits.

The program — which could have affected up to 4 million people — had never gone into effect after an appeals court halted its implementation. Kelly, then the secretary of Homeland Security, decided to rescind the DAPA memo “because there is no credible path forward to litigate the currently enjoined policy.”

That decision signaled to advocates on both sides of the issue that while Trump plans to proceed with some of the immigration proposals that powered his 2016 campaign he may not want to rescind DACA.

“When they did not pull the (DACA) memo, many took it a positive sign of the president’s intention as it relates to Dreamers,” said Rob Jesmer, a Republican strategist who has long sought an immigration overhaul and works with FWD.us, an initiative created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that is pushing to save DACA. “Frankly, I think his comments and actions show he wants to find a fair and equitable solution.”

Numerous polls this year show support for immigration at record highs with more Americans, including those who backed Trump, favoring a path to legal status for immigrants rather than deportations. Seventy-eight percent of registered voters said Dreamers should be allowed to remain in the United States, according to a Morning Consult poll in April.

Notably, that includes 73 percent of Trump voters.

Trump and his aides are eager for accomplishments while his presidency has been bogged down in multiple controversies, including investigations into the Trump team’s connections to Russian operations that meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s smart for them to use it,” said a Republican who is close to the White House. “If they could use it for a win, that would be good thing.”

Republicans, who control both the White House and Congress for the first time in 10 years, failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — their top priority — and a major immigration deal could be even more difficult.

While Republicans leaders have expressed willingness to begin spending money on a border wall, other pieces of what the White House wants, including curbing legal immigration and implementing e-verify, are unpopular. Some Republicans think that the White House is overly optimistic about the deal it can get done, especially after Trump spent August openly berating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

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Gateway Pundit: ANOTHER RECORD – President Trump Cuts More US Debt

Joe Hoft
August 20, 2017

It’s Now Official – No President in US History has Cut More from the US Federal Debt for a Longer Period of Time than President Donald J. Trump.

President Trump now can claim the longest and largest decrease of US Federal Debt in US history.

When President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 the amount of US Federal Debt owed both externally and internally was over $19 Trillion at $19,947,304,555,212.  As of August 17th the amount of US Debt had decreased by more than $100 Billion to $19,845,188,460,167.

No President in US history has ever cut the amount of US Debt by this amount and no President has resided over a debt cut like this ever. 

History buffs may say that this is incorrect because President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush oversaw US Debt cuts over a period of a few years after the Republican Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich forced Clinton into signing a balanced budget.  We thought the same, but our analysis determined that this is actually not correct.

Congress did push Clinton into signing a balanced budget but the amount of US debt during this period actually increased.  This is confirmed through data maintained by the US Treasury at Treasurydirect.gov.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has performed audits since 1997 of the US Debt amounts outstanding.  In their analysis they show that when accounting for US Debt Held by the Public and US Intergovernmental Debt Holdings, the amount of US Debt has increased every year since their audits began.

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Time: Mitch McConnell Says Most News ‘Is Not Fake’

Maya Rhodan
August 21, 2017

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday addressed the notion of “fake news” — a phrase often appropriated and used incorrectly by President Donald Trump — distancing himself from Trump’s frequent use of the term.

“My view is that most news is not fake, but I do try to look at a variety of sources” McConnell said during a joint appearance with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Trump often dismisses wide swaths of the mainstream media as “fake news,” when the term in fact refers to fabricated news stories.

McConnell and Mnuchin appeared at a Chamber of Commerce event in Louisville, Kentucky, to discuss tax reform and other Republican priorities. It came after Trump thanked Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. for statements he made during an appearance Monday on Fox and Friends. Falwell said Trump “does not have a racist bone in his body.”

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Daily Caller: Missouri Senator: ‘I Hope Trump Is Assassinated!’

 

Chuck Ross
August 17, 2017

A Missouri state senator said in a now-deleted Facebook post that she hopes President Donald Trump is assassinated.

Maria Chappelle-Nadal acknowledged on Thursday that she wrote a post which read: “I hope Trump is assassinated!”

She made the comment in an exchange with a left-wing activist who claimed that his cousin is a Secret Service agent.

 

 

Chappelle-Nadal confirmed to a reporter with St. Louis TV station KMOX that she posted the comment.

“I put something up on my personal Facebook page and it has now been deleted,” she said.

Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat, represents a district in a St. Louis suburb.

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NYT: Why Women Did Not Unite to Vote Against Donald Trump

By Claire Cain Miller

Women were predicted to come out in force to vote for the first female president and against a man who demeaned them and bragged about sexual assault.

Instead, they voted more or less as they always have: along party lines.

The share of women who voted for Donald J. Trump and who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton was, if you look at past data, not all that surprising. For years, political science has shown that party outweighs gender when it comes to voting. This election, despite all the gender ferment, turned out to be little different.

If anything, a small percentage of men who would ordinarily vote Democratic seem to have voted Republican, according to exit polls, which are generally good at capturing gender breakdown of the electorate.

The gender gap — the difference in the share of men and women who vote for a candidate — was 11 percentage points for Mr. Trump (53-42), similar to the gender gap for Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012, and in line with the gender breakdown of Republican voters.

Fifty-four percent of Mrs. Clinton’s voters were women, and 42 percent of Mr. Trump’s, an overall change of only one percentage point in Mrs. Clinton’s favor compared with 2012. Forty-one percent of her voters and 53 percent of Mr. Trump’s were men, an overall change of five percentage points in his favor.

Typically, at least 90 percent of voters in each party vote for that party’s candidate, according to Kathleen Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who studies women in politics.

Of Republican women, that appears to have happened for Mr. Trump. Fifty-three percent of white women voted for him, just as the majority of white women have voted Republican in recent elections. The only potential aberration is that only 87 percent of Democratic white men voted for Mrs. Clinton, slightly less than would be expected, Ms. Dolan said. There could be various reasons for that, and she said we did not yet know how significant it was.

The results show how deep party affiliation runs, even in the most atypical of elections, when gender played a bigger role than usual in the campaigns.

“We know this, yet we have this expectation from living in the world that sex really matters,” Ms. Dolan said. “It does not change things at all. What matters 99.9 percent of the time is their political party.”

In her research, she asked voters during congressional and governors’ elections in 2010 and 2014 about male and female candidates in general, and found that they held gender stereotypes about their strengths and weaknesses, like women excelling at health policy and men at crime policy. Two months later, she interviewed the same voters, this time using the names of the male and female candidates running. Gender stereotypes evaporated, and people chose candidates based on party, not gender.

Other research has come to similar conclusions.

There is very little evidence that women vote for women because of their sex, Ms. Dolan said. The reason it can seem that female voters are voting for female candidates is that both are more likely to be Democrats, so they’re actually voting along party lines.

Continue reading at The New York Times.

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Observer: 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election

Unearthed tape: ‘We should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win’

By Ken Kurson

On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.

The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer.

The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”

Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Chomsky recalls being taken aback that “anyone could support the idea—offered by a national political leader, no less—that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”

Some eyebrows were also raised when then-Senator Clinton appeared to make a questionable moral equivalency.

Continue reading at Observer.

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Politico: FBI reviewing new evidence in Clinton email probe

The FBI doesn’t yet know if the new material is ‘significant,’ Comey writes.

By Madeline Conway

The FBI on Friday dropped a bombshell on Hillary Clinton’s campaign less than two weeks before Election Day, announcing that it is reviewing new evidence in its investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

In a letter to several congressional committee chairmen, FBI Director James Comey wrote that, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to this investigation.”

Comey said he was briefed on those emails on Thursday and that he “agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”

He did not specify where the additional emails came from.

Comey wrote that the FBI does not yet know if the new material is “significant” and did not provide a timeframe for investigating.

In July, Comey said the FBI was not recommending charges against Clinton, saying “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring such a case. But he did chastise her for being “extremely careless” in her handling of sensitive information. The controversy over Clinton’s use of the server, reported for the first time by The New York Times in March 2015, has dogged her presidential run since its beginning.

While Clinton said her decision to use a private email server was a “mistake,” she has steadfastly said that she violated no laws.

The news broke as Clinton was en route to a campaign event. As she got off the plane, she smiled and waved — and ignored all questions by the press around her.

But her campaign appeared blindsided by the development. When asked by NBC News to respond to the revelation, a top Clinton campaign spokesperson said, “No idea.”

Donald Trump immediately celebrated the FBI’s move.

“I need to open with a very critical, breaking news announcement,” Trump said at the start of a rally in New Hampshire. “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale that we have never seen before. We must not let her take her are criminal scheme into the Oval Office. I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the department of justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”

“This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood,” he continued. “And it is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, also cheered the news. “A great day in our campaign just got even better. FBI reviewing new emails in Clinton probe,” Conway tweeted.

A spokesman from the Senate Judiciary panel said they only learned of the new evidence on Friday from Comey’s letter. They were unsure what emails the FBI had discovered and did not know what the “unrelated case” pertained to. However, the aide said the panels will likely seek to find out more in the coming days.

The revelation comes less than two weeks before Election Day and has the potential to change the dynamic of the race, in which Clinton had pulled away from Trump in recent weeks.

Republicans, many of whom had become increasingly resigned to the idea that Clinton was running away with the election, appeared buoyed by the FBI’s decision to take another look at Clinton’s handling of classified materials.

House Speaker Paul Ryan called the FBI’s move “long overdue.” “Yes again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,” he said in a statement. “She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information.”

Continue reading at Politico.

 

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Fox News: Early voting suggests tight race in key states despite Clinton camp boast

By FoxNews.com

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is touting some “eye-popping” advantages in early voting, in an apparent effort to energize Democratic voters, but preliminary figures suggest the race remains tighter than her aides acknowledge.

The preliminary numbers appear to show Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, with an edge in several of the roughly 10 battleground states that will decide the 2016 White House race.

“We’re seeing eye-popping vote-by-mail application numbers,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on “Fox News Sunday.”

In Arizona and North Carolina, for example, more registered Democrats than Republicans have indeed cast early ballots.

But such numbers are open to interpretation, including how many Democrats in those two states voted for Clinton.

Meanwhile, early data shows Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with potential advantages of his own in battleground states Florida, Ohio and elsewhere.

Only some of the 37 states that allow early voting make public the number of registered Democrats and Republicans who requested early ballots and voted early, so final numbers won’t be known until Election Day.

Still, the Clinton campaign seemed bolstered in recent days by mail-in balloting in battleground Florida, where in-person voting started Monday in a majority of counties.

Early Florida numbers showed about an equal number of Democrats and Republicans had requested a record 3.1 million early ballots, compared with 2008 when Republicans led 49-to-32 percent and President Obama still won the state.

However, registered Republicans now have a slight lead — 1.8 percentage points — in the nearly 1 million ballots received by Friday.

Trump, on a swing through Florida on Monday, made another push for supporters to cast their votes now.

“You got to get out there. Who’s voted already?” Trump asked a cheering crowd in St. Augustine. “If you’re not feeling well on Nov. 8, we don’t want to take a chance.”

Clinton said in battleground North Carolina on Sunday: “From now until Nov. 5, you can vote early. It’s a big deal. You get to vote today, right after this event.”

Mook also pointed out Sunday that in Nevada, officials saw a “record turnout” in Democratic stronghold Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

However, Trump has throughout the campaign appeared to have the support of some potential crossover voters, including Latino immigrants who back his tough message on illegal immigration.

A recent CNN/ORC poll, for example, found 33 percent of registered Latino voters in Nevada support Trump, compared to 54 percent for Clinton.

The Clinton campaign declined Monday to provide details on the states to which Mook and vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine referred Sunday.

Kaine told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the campaign “like(s) the early voting activity and the absentee-ballot requests coming in.”

Kendra Stewart, College of Charleston political science professor, said Monday that Kaine and Mook are “doing exactly what they should be doing by trying to use this as an opportunity to create enthusiasm within the party in the hopes of a bandwagon effect.”

However, she cautioned about the effort perhaps “leaving some Democratic voters less motivated to vote if they feel like their candidate doesn’t really need them” and giving the Trump campaign the opportunity to use the underdog strategy to try to rally supporters to get out and vote.

Elliott Fullmer, a Randolph-Macon College political science professor, suggested either camp could play up select early-vote trends.

“I don’t think it would be a surprise for a campaign to think any positive momentum would play well,” Fullmer said Monday. “And the more they can discuss an advantage in early voting, they will.”

According to the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project, roughly 6 million Americans have already cast early votes, which do not include absentee ballots.

More than 46 million people are expected to vote before Election Day — or as much as 40 percent of all votes cast.

The District of Columbia also allows early voting. Included in the 37 states that allow early voting are Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which have only mail-in balloting.

Clinton holds a 6 percentage point lead over Trump in national polls, according to the Real Clear Politics average.

Clinton — who has been the frontrunner for the entire race — also has leads in battlegrounds states New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Trump leads in battlegrounds Georgia, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio.

Though neither Georgia nor Ohio break down early balloting by party affiliation, Trump appears to have an advantage in both states.

Continue reading at FoxNews.com.

 

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