America in Focus

North Carolina is the first battleground state to begin the voting process, sending out absentee by mail ballots on Friday. Delaware is also first in the nation with a law of “60 days before Election Day.” The number of days ahead of the election to send out absentee by mail ballots in the other consensus battleground states is 50 in Pennsylvania, 47 in Wisconsin, 45 in Michigan, 25 to 29 in Georgia, and 24 to 27 in Arizona. In Nevada, it is not specified. The seven states represent 93 electoral college votes among them. Pennsylvania has 19, North Carolina and Georgia 16 each, Michigan 15, Arizona 11, Wisconsin 10 and Nevada six.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a firestorm of controversy this week when he sent a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee admitting his mistake in caving to pressure from the Biden administration to censor Americans’ posts that contradicted the administration’s viewpoints on COVID-19. "In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," the letter said. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook made posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop harder to see during the 2020 election at the request of the FBI, the latest evidence of coordinated social media censorship driven by the federal government.

New polling on Thursday showed Kamala Harris with a widening margin over former President Donald Trump in Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday. It found Harris leaders Trump 45% to 41%. Among registered voters, the four-percentage point lead was more significant than the one-point lead Harris had over Trump in the outfit's last poll in July. The poll had a 2% margin of error. Over in polling guru Nate Sliver's latest models, Harris didn't fare as well. "Although we wouldn't advise worrying too much about the difference between a 52/48 race one way versus a 48/52 race the other way – it's not a big difference – this wasn't a good day for Kamala Harris in our model, as Donald Trump is the slight favorite for the first time since August 3," Silver wrote in the Silver Bulletin. "There's one big reason for that – Pennsylvania, which is the tipping-point state more than one-third of the time and where it's been quite a while since we've seen a poll showing Harris leading."

President Joe Biden explained to reporters Tuesday in more detail his rationale for suddenly ending his reelection bid earlier this year. Biden told reporters that his race against former President Donald Trump would have been close and that he “could have won.” Biden said he wasn’t “that far behind” but that he was worried that he would hurt Senate and House Democrats running for their seats. “What have happened though, if the discussion had been, was I going to cost seats for Democrats, that would have been the whole subject matter for the remainder of the campaign,” Biden told reporters at Chicago O'Hare International Airport before boarding Air Force One. “You'd have to cover it, that would be the issue, and it would give him an advantage.”

Vice President and now-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination on the final day of the Democratic National Convention Thursday night in Chicago. Harris’ comments come after several days of speeches at the convention from party leaders, including former President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden. The event sets the stage for the remaining weeks in the race with Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump heading into November. Harris began her speech by telling her life story, from her Indian mother and Jamaican father meeting, to moving often as a child, including a handful of family anecdotes.