| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. It's not just candidates on the ballot next Tuesday. As usual, there are a host of ballot measures — 120 statewide ones, plus various local questions. Daniel Nichanian's "What's on the Ballot" has a great list of the major issues; for more detail, including why we have fewer initiatives than normal in this cycle, see here. These are the top five I'm watching for this time: - San Francisco is trying once again to lower the voting age to 16 for local elections, after failing to do so in a previous attempt. Across the bay, Oakland is considering doing the same for school-board elections. I've been writing in support of lower voting ages (I'd go to 13 or 14) for some time, during which the issue has gone from totally fringe to … well, a bit less than totally fringe. But the proposal needs a big win somewhere to actually move higher on any party's agenda. A victory in San Francisco might do that — and might then be followed by attempts to go statewide in California or elsewhere.
- Lowering the voting age would be good for democracy; weakening parties is bad for democracy. So I'll be rooting against a Florida attempt to import California's "top two" election system, in which the top two vote-getters in a primary are allowed to advance to the general election, regardless of their party. In addition to weakening parties, such a system is likely to yield all sorts of odd and random results. Some advocates think that it might reduce polarization. But if it has done so at all in California, the effect has been marginal. Taking away a party's ability to select its own candidates is simply a bad idea. Oh, and in the long run it's not likely to work — parties adapt, and if they're prevented by law from formally choosing their nominees, they may learn to do so in less open ways.
- Florida is also considering raising the state minimum wage to $15. This one is important because of the signal it may send to national Democrats if they achieve unified party government. The most likely scenario in which a Senate Democratic majority eliminates the filibuster would be if they can't otherwise pass an economic stimulus measure. But if Republicans cut a deal on that, and Democrats who want to eliminate the filibuster anyway are looking for a popular bill to use as their reason to do so, then raising the minimum wage is a good candidate. And if it wins in Florida (both this measure and the top-two system need a 60% vote to win), then it will seem like an even more obvious choice.
- Marijuana wound up fizzling as a potential 2020 national issue, but it continues to be a significant state issue. Four more states are voting on legalizing recreational weed: Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota. If these measures pass — especially in Arizona, a swing state — it's easy to see Democrats, who already are moving in that direction in their national platform, deciding that the time has come for national legalization. It's possible that quite a few Republicans will join them.
- The proposal for paid family and medical leave in Colorado is also interesting. It includes a new tax to fund the program, so it's a test of whether voters in what is still a swing-ish (if increasingly Democratic) state are willing to pay for popular ideas. If this one passes, expect to see it spread to other states, and to give a boost to national Democrats who want to enact similar policies. Not only that, but it might convince more Democratic politicians (correctly or not) that voters are less tax-averse than they once thought. That's important. National Democrats have been the party of lower federal budget deficits for some 40 years, but a lot of liberals want that to change; one of the things that will determine whether they prevail will be how much Democratic politicians think that raising taxes is inherently dangerous.
1. Michael McDonald's look at the early vote so far. 2. Dan Drezner on Trump's surrender on the pandemic. The truth: Trump really gave up on it in mid-April. 3. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt on democracy in the U.S. I don't agree with everything here, but well worth reading. 4. Eric McGhee on what may be discouraging some California voters. 5. Matt Glassman on adding new states. 6. Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction on nervous Democrats. 7. Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Paru Shah, Bernard L. Fraga and Erika Vallejo at the Monkey Cage on diversity coming to state legislatures. 8. Greg Sargent on how Trump's reputation for dishonesty matters. 9. While Ashley Parker takes a long look at one of Trump's most consistent lies (and given how often it's been corrected, there's no other word for it): Not only that he was supposedly responsible for a veteran's program that actually passed years before he took office, but that he was able to pass it while those who actually did pass it couldn't. 10. And Nate Cohn's daily polling recap continues to be excellent. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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