Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

“Typically, there are 78 days between the election and inauguration,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a practitioner senior fellow at the Miller Center and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That is not a lot of time to stand up a government, and I think many people in the U.S. and in Washington, D.C., do not realize how important that time is, and how short it is.”

At a week before the election, who will win? Joe Biden is solidly ahead of Donald Trump in the national polls, and less solidly but still notably ahead in most battleground state polls. In most cases, his lead exceeds the stated margin of error in the polls. But few Democrats, still shell-shocked over 2016 (to say nothing of 2000), really want to believe these polls. Are they just superstitious or are they right to be nervous?

Begun in 1998, the White House Transition Project provides information about individual offices for staff coming into the White House to help streamline the process of transition from one administration to the next. A nonpartisan, nonprofit group, the WHTP brings together political science scholars who study the presidency and White House operations to write analytical pieces on relevant topics about presidential transitions, residential appointments, and crisis management.

Joe Biden left the Democratic Party convention in August with the nomination and a “build-back-better” plan for clean energy, new jobs, closing the racial wealth gap, and economic renewal. He also left with the 110-page Biden-Sanders plan to restore Donald Trump’s budget cuts, reverse his regulatory rollbacks, attack corporate greed, combat the climate crisis, confront COVID-19, pursue environmental justice, repair the infrastructure, create jobs, and raise the minimum wage. “Folks, it’s not sufficient to build back,” Biden said in early July. “That’s why my plan is to build back better.” Join the NYU Brademas Center in welcoming Professor Paul C. Light as he makes a case for a fix-government-fast reform agenda that provides a framework and game plan for a first Biden administration. Trump could adopt the agenda, too, but would need discipline to make it work. Joining the Dialogue will be Kathryn Tenpas from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia and Brookings Institution, Danielle Brian from the Project on Government Oversight, and Tom Shoop from Government Executive, who will act as moderator.

Will the raucous and undignified first 2020 US Presidential debate sway the few Americans who say they are undecided between Trump and Biden? Dr Kathryn Tenpas says debates generally reinforce predispositions. But it's also a question of whether voters are watching in the first place. Dr Tenpas says the inability of the moderator to quiet Trump in particular, made it difficult to follow points that were being made, so viewers would have struggled in the muddied waters. She says the issues being thrown up in the campaign, like the revelation that Trump likely paid just $US750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, make it difficult to predict where the vote will go, as Biden continues to lead in polls. She also says Donald Trump is setting the stage to cry foul if he doesn't win, as he continues to claim the mail-in ballot system is rigged.