“Polls show that roughly a third of voters have no opinion or have never heard of each running mate.” The NYT invites you to take the quiz: How Well Do You Know Tim Kaine and Mike Pence? I don’t want to suggest that anticipation is low for tonight’s VP debate, but Elvis just shot his TV preemptively.

+ “Trump has chosen not to release his returns. And I doubt he ever will, because they would reveal that the career he boasts so much about is built on sand. That’s just one reason the 1995 tax return anonymously sent to the Times is so valuable.” Timothy L. O’Brien in Bloomberg: Searching for the Truth in Trump’s 1995 Tax Return.

+ I wonder if Trump’s big loss isn’t one controversy that we should just write off.

+ The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar with a very interesting look at opinions in the heart of Trump country: “When people talk about Trump, they talk about how they don’t like the establishment or the élites. When they say that, they mean who they see on television — they envision people in New York City making fun of them and calling them stupid. Every time you leave the state, you get it — someone will say, Oh, you’re from West Virginia, do you date your cousin? Wow, you have shoes, wow you have teeth, are you sure you’re from West Virginia? So when they see that the media élite is driven out of their mind at the success of Donald Trump it makes them want to root for him. It’s like giving the middle finger to the rest of the country.” (A middle finger we can take. Trump is a whole fist.)