The Countdown: Kellyanne Conway, Miles Taylor and the speculation game
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And although we do now know the identity of the "insider" who wrote Anonymous - the famous takedown of the Trump administration - looking at who didn't write it is just as revealing.
The news in four sentences
1. Donald Trump is
doubling down on his message that coronavirus is almost at an end, telling one rally "we are rounding the turn". US cases have risen sharply in the past two weeks.2. Joe Biden did the opposite, saying the president was being reckless: "I'm not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch."
3. Two Supreme Court rulings went the way of Democrats, so now Pennsylvania and North Carolina can accept mail-in ballots for several days after polling day - although some argue that one of those decisions might not be the win it seems.
4. More celebrities are speaking up for their candidates. Alicia Keys (pictured below) spoke to the crowd at an event for Democrat running mate Kamala Harris in Phoenix, Arizona, while golfer Jack Nicklaus gave his vote to Mr Trump.
It wasn't Kellyanne - what does that tell us?
Late on Wednesday, the name Kellyanne Conway - Donald Trump's close former adviser - began to trend on Twitter.
It began after her husband, George Conway, an anti-Trump Republican, posted about an "amazing conversation" he had just had with the until-now anonymous insider who famously wrote this scathing takedown of the Trump administration in 2018.
I had an amazing conversation this morning with ... Anonymous.
Anonymous is a true patriot.
We'll all be hearing a lot more from this person very, very soon.https://t.co/M8CgEc8hAT
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 28, 2020
Many then revived the idea that "Anonymous" was in fact Kellyanne Conway.
Turns out, the amazing conversation was not with his wife, but with Miles Taylor, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security.
But assumptions about who it was not tells us a lot, as our reporter Tara McKelvey says:
"The speculation about Kellyanne Conway feeds in to a fantasy of betrayal, but even though her own family is politically divided, nobody could seriously believe it.
For White House officials, Anonymous was seen as Someone Who Is Not Like Us. One suspect was a deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates. A cultural historian and intellectual, she was seen as a likely traitor. On Wednesday she came out with a statement to say she was pleased that the "bizarre and malicious" allegation was cleared.
For Democrats, Anonymous was seen as Someone Who Was Not Part of the White House Crowd. Anyone with a traditional conservative background would not do this. Instead, it had to be someone like Guy Snodgrass, an "apolitical" former Navy commander. Or Jon Huntsman, an ambassador who speaks some Mandarin.
Mr Taylor was not an intellectual or an unconventional conservative: he had been an aide to a Republican congressman and held the same views as others at the White House.
His saga shows that those here who claim to know things are often wrong, some people do act on principle, and everyone is quick to define an outsider.
If it had been Kellyanne Conway, as one Twitter user said, we would have found out months ago on her daughter's TikTok."
Donald Trump's 'housewives'
At one Arizona rally Mr Trump said he would win a historic share of women - and some certainly do support him.
Despite the "housewives for Trump" who turned out for him in Arizona, recent polling on the gender gap shows he has not been doing well.
This piece from CNN picks him up for telling a recent rally he was "getting your husbands back to work", and points out that many women - 70% of them with children under 18 - were working when he took office.
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