Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh needed, among other things, a copy editor while writing his concurring opinion on the Supreme Court ruling this week on mail-in ballot deadline extensions in Wisconsin.

This has been building for a while. But it’s really something and fully out loud now, an embattled President openly mocking and deriding a loyalist Senator struggling to defend her seat in state critical to the President’s own electoral fortunes. “You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on, Martha. Let’s go. Quick, quick.” Zoë Richards has the story.

I got asked yesterday what Trump’s deal is with McSally. I think he’s told us, ironically about another Arizona Senate. As he said, he likes heroes who don’t get captured. Yes, McSally has awkwardly tried to separate herself from some of the President’s most extreme antics. And Trump had various sources of bitterness with John McCain. But neither really captures this part of Trump.

We’re less than a week out from Election Day and today we’re launching a daily liveblog to keep you updated on all the latest election-related news — everything from shifting polls, campaign rally flubs, early voting numbers, voter intimidation and everything in between.

How we make sense of probabilities in math and science is one thing. But as humans we can never separate probabilities from stakes. If the consequences of one outcome are sufficiently dire that factors inevitably into our experience of the question, even bleeding into our perception of the chances of that dark outcome occurring. Here I’ve noticed a subtle shift in recent days in people’s discussions about the outcome of next week’s election. It seems to have shifted from ‘Who’s going to win?’ or ‘Who’s likely to win?’ to ‘Can Trump still win?’

The answer to that last questions is clearly “Yes”. But the question itself is an important shift driven by the fact that in likelihood terms the evidence is now pointing overwhelmingly against the President.

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine looked at the current COVID outbreak in Tennessee and broke the hospitalization numbers down by the counties patients were coming from and whether those counties had masking mandates. The results are stark. The growth in hospitalizations is greatest in counties without masking requirements. Indeed, the inverse relationship between masking and hospitalization lines up across the spectrum from areas with little masking to those where mandates are widespread. You can see the discussion of the study here.

But this chart tells the story pretty clearly.

If you needed to know anything more about Amy Coney Barrett – I didn’t, but if you did – she made her first act last night appearing at a splashy campaign event for President Trump. Once the Senate voted to confirm her on a party line vote, she had a lifetime appointment and literally no need for anything from President Trump. Indeed, she would quite likely have marginally improved the odds that the corrupt conservative Court majority would remain in place by declining such an appearance.

She did it anyway and that was a choice.

The news out of the Supreme Court and the Senate last night fans flames of uncertainty about what might happen if the outcome of the election is disputed in the days after November 3.

Vice President Mike Pence won’t be around for tonight’s confirmation vote in the Senate. Republicans are clearly unconcerned that they will need him to break any sort of tie.

We’re all in the final stretch of the big contest. But I wanted to flag your attention to a column in the Post about some new peer-reviewed research about Facebook and its effect on political polarization. Unsurprisingly the more time someone spends on Facebook the more polarized their beliefs become. But it’s five times more polarizing for conservatives than for liberals. And that’s not the most telling data.

President Trump has had an issue with career professionals since he took office.