A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Sunday showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leading President Trump by 8 percentage points, 51 percent to 43 percent, among registered voters — the same margin the poll showed in February, before COVID-19, the economic swoon, the anti-racism protests following George Floyd's death, and all the other craziness of 2020.

"Simply put: In 2020, the fundamentals of our country have been shaken to our core, while the fundamentals of the election have not," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted the survey with Republican Bill McInturff. NBC's Chuck Todd made a smiler point on Sunday's Meet the Press.

But one thing has changed: money. Biden and the Democratic National Committee entered September with $466 million in the bank, a cash advantage of $141 million over Trump and the Republican National Committee's $325 million, The New York Times reported Sunday night, citing newly released campaign finance reports. In the spring, Trump and the RNC had a $187 million lead over Biden and the DNC.

In August alone, the joint Biden-DNC committee brought in a record $364.5 million while the Trump-RNC committee raised $210 million. The Biden campaign alone raised $212 million and spent $130.3 million; the Trump campaign raised $61.7 million, spent $61.2 million, and added about $900,000 in debt. "Money in the candidate's own committees, as opposed to the political party's account, is the most valuable of funds because election rules require those accounts to pay for certain types of spending, such as television ads," the Times reports.

Some Republicans are baffled at Trump's financial disadvantage, given that he and the RNC raised $1.3 billion since 2018. Trump's campaign says it invested heavily in a ground campaign it says Biden can never match.

The WSJ/NBC poll found a record 75 percent of voters rating their interest in the election a 10 out of 10, and more than 70 percent say the debates won't sway their decision much or at all. In another sign the electorate is pretty set, 38 percent said they won't vote for Biden under any circumstances versus 47 percent who said the same of Trump. The poll was conducted Sept. 13-16 among 1,000 voters, and its martin of error is ± 3.1 percentage points.

RealClearPolitics gives Biden a 6.5-point lead it its aggregate of polls; FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a 6.7-point lead and 77 percent odds to win the Electoral College. Peter Weber

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been critical of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over the years, but he recently told The New Yorker's Jane Meyer that he was pleasantly surprised by how the senator has responded to former President Donald Trump in the wake of the deadly riot at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6. McConnell's comments have been "more forthright than I expected," Ornstein said. "Good for him!"

Still, he doesn't consider the split with Trump a "genuine moral reckoning," Meyer writes. "There is no way that McConnell has had an epiphany and will now change his fundamental approach," Ornstein said. "He will always act ruthlessly when it serves his own interest."

Other sources agreed, telling Meyer that McConnell's partnership with Trump was always self-serving. "Three years ago, I said he'd wait until Trump was an existential threat to the" GOP and "then cut him loose," Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), who has known McConnell for decades, said. "He's been furious with Trump for a long time. Many who know him have talked about how much he hates Trump." It was the promise of Republican judicial appointments that kept McConnell on board, Yarmuth said.

McConnell also kept quiet for weeks while Trump pushed unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election because the Georgia Senate runoffs were still at stake, a former Trump administration official told Meyer.

Chistopher Browning, a historian, suggested that McConnell was mostly freed up by Trump's defeat, which "opened an escape hatch" for him. "If Trump had won the election, Mitch would not be jumping ship," he said. Read more at The New Yorker. Tim O'Donnell

President Biden reeled in a record-breaking $145 million in so-called dark money from anonymous donors during his presidential campaign, topping the $113 million that went to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) before his failed presidential bid in 2012, Bloomberg reports.

It's not surprising that Biden set the mark given that the $1.5 billion he hauled in overall was the most ever for a challenger to an incumbent president, but it's notable in large part because Democrats have been at the forefront of a movement to ban dark money in politics since it means that supporters can back a candidate without scrutiny. Plus, Bloomberg notes, anonymous donors "will have the same access to decision makers as those whose names were disclosed, but without public awareness of who they are or what influence they might wield." As Meredith McGehee, the executive director of campaign finance reform advocacy group Issue One, told Bloomberg, "the whole point of dark money is to avoid public disclosure while getting private credit."

Still, it seems the Democratic Party was willing to embrace the strategy in the hopes of defeating former President Donald Trump, who only brought in $28.4 million from anonymous donors. Read more at Bloomberg. Tim O'Donnell

It's not unusual for China to conduct military flights between the southern part of Taiwan — which it claims as its territory — and the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the South China Sea, Reuters reports. In fact, the flights have occurred on a daily basis in recent months. But what happened Saturday does appear out of the ordinary.

Eight nuclear-capable Chinese bombers and four fighter jets entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan's air defense identifications zone, Taiwan's defense ministry said. Normally, China deploys just one or two reconnaissance aircraft at a time, so Saturday's event was somewhat startling. Taiwan's air force was able to warn the aircraft away and deployed missiles to monitor them.

While there's been no word from Beijing yet, the seemingly aggressive move comes at a time when tensions between China and the United States are rising, with Washington's strengthening support for Taiwan playing a significant role. The Trump administration, which left office last week, was particularly committed to a closer relationship with Taiwan, and the Biden administration doesn't appear likely to reverse course on the issue, at least not drastically. Read more at Reuters. Tim O'Donnell

Former President Donald Trump worked with a Justice Department lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, on a plan to oust former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and have Clark replace him, The New York Times reports. The strategy reportedly stemmed from the fact that Rosen had rebuffed Trump's pleas to use the Justice Department's power to cast doubt on and ultimately overturn Georgia's presidential election results, though it likely would have been unsuccessful in achieving the latter goal.

Regardless, Trump reportedly held a meeting that two officials compared to an episode of The Apprentice because he had Rosen and Clark — who denies devising any plan to oust Rosen — make their separate cases to him. Rosen eventually won out after nearly three hours, the Times reports, largely due to an informal pact among other Justice Department officials who unanimously decided to resign should Rosen get dismissed. In addition to potential chaos at the Justice Department, though, Trump was also reportedly swayed by the idea that firing Rosen could lead to congressional investigations and recriminations from other Republicans. Read more at The New York Times. Tim O'Donnell

Russian police have reportedly detained more than 1,000 people across the country who took to the streets in support of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, a top rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was detained last week when he returned to Moscow from Berlin, where he had spent months recovering from a poisoning allegedly carried out by Russia's FSB spy agency. He was handed a 30-day jail term.

Among those reportedly detained at Saturday's rallies was Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who had previously said she's been under surveillance since her husband's arrest. She posted a picture of herself inside a police van to her Instagram account, while CNN reports a video on social media shows her being stopped by officers at the entrance to a metro station in Moscow and led to the van. Lyubov Sobol, a prominent activist and lawyer for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, was also reportedly detained, per Deutsche Welle.

The demonstrations began in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok and spread west throughout the day, with protesters in some cities bracing frigid temperatures.

Reuters estimates 40,000 people gathered in central Moscow, where mass arrests reportedly began before the protest officially started, DW reports.

Still, the demonstrators remained on the street for what appears to be one of the largest anti-Putin rallies in years. Read more at Deutsche Welle and CNN. Tim O'Donnell

Larry King, the longtime radio and television broadcaster, died Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his production studio and television network, Ora Media, announced. He was 87. No cause of death was given, but CNN previously reported that King had been hospitalized with COVID-19 earlier this month.

King is perhaps best-known for his 25-year run hosting CNN's nightly Larry King Live, which ran from 1985 to 2010, though he continued working after that.

The Associated Press estimates King conducted somewhere around 50,000 on-air interviews, which included guests from all walks of life. Per AP, he claimed he never prepared for his interviews, delivering them in a non-confrontational style that "relaxed his guests," many of whom reportedly sought out his show because of his "middle-of-the-road" stance. The statement from Ora Media said King "always viewed his interview subjects as the true stars of his programs, and himself as merely an unbiased conduit between the guest and the audience." Read more at The Associated Press. Tim O'Donnell