Good morning. Welcome to Axios Today. It's Monday, October 31st. I'm Erica Pandy and

Ferniala Budu. Here's what you need to know today. A glimmer of good climate news. Plus,

an exclusive preview of musician bono's upcoming memoir. But first, the Pelosi attack Highton's

Election Day fears. That's today's one big thing.

Threats against the lives of lawmakers and their families have been on the rise and fears

that these translate into real violence were realized on Friday with the attack on House

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul. An intruder entered the couple's San Francisco

home yelling quote, where is Nancy? An assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer. He's expected to

recover fully after suffering a skull fracture and other injuries. With just over a week

to the midterms, the attack has Washington and many lawmakers on edge here to help us understand

these threats and the response to them is Axios managing editor for politics Margaret Taliv.

Hi, Margaret. Hi, Erica. We've seen these threats against lawmakers in general going up over

the last few years. Do we know how much they've increased? The US Capitol police is one way that we

can keep track of these rising threats. There have been threats against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Remember Steve Scalice or Republican was almost killed at that softball game not many years ago.

But the US Capitol police statistics and ABC most recently reporting this have said that over the

last five years, those sort of concerning statements and threats against members have more than

doubled from about 4,000 back then to more than 8,600 in 2020, more than 9,600 last year. And in

the first quarter of this year, the US Capitol police, this is just the US Capitol police opened more

than 1,800 cases. Do we know anything about why these threats have gone up so much? We heard from

Pelosi for the first time on Sunday putting out a statement to her colleagues saying we thank

her for the work that you do to strengthen our democracy. So Pelosi obviously making the point

...