Industries that once were expected to recover after the initial coronavirus lockdowns lifted are now unlikely to bounce back until a vaccine arrives, Sara Fischer and Courtenay Brown write.

• With the exception of the health care industry, the industrial sector (airlines, commercial services, manufacturing) has made the most references to a vaccine in earnings calls over the past seven months, according to data provided to Axios by research firm Sentieo.

In the absence of a widely adopted vaccine, businesses are struggling to overcome consumer skepticism about indoor activities — even with new safety protocols in place:

• Entertainment: The movie industry hoped big hits like "Tenet" would lure people back to theaters when they began to reopen this summer. But a poor showing for "Tenet" forced studios to delay big hits until 2021 and 2022.
• Travel and tourism: Cruise lines last week extended their no-sail mode, some into 2021, and airlines are furloughing thousands of employees.
• Food and beverage: While restaurants have successfully lured back customers, they are enduring state and city capacity caps. Thousands of bars are closing, as research shows they're one of the fastest COVID spreaders.
• Recreation: Gyms and boutique fitness classes have begun to reopen with restrictions across the country, but many have been forced to permanently shutter due to the coronavirus.

🥊 COVID may permanently shutter a museum in England dedicated to vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

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Fears that armed militia, police or COVID-19 await them at the polls are disproportionately shaping how Americans of color think about in-person voting, Margaret Talev writes from an Ipsos poll for Axios.

• Why it matters: The poll shows the lasting effects of voter suppression and disenfranchisement — and why people of color crave expansions of mail-in ballots, same-day registration and restoration of voting rights.

32% of Black respondents and 30% of Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans — but only one in five white respondents — are concerned about physical violence or armed militias at their voting locations.

• One-third of Black respondents, 29% of Asian Americans and 24% of Hispanic Americans worry the government could use in-person voting to serve warrants or arrest people — compared with just 14% of white respondents.
• 29% of Black Americans said they're "very concerned" about voter suppression in their home states — roughly twice the rate of the other racial and ethnic groups.

Between the lines: There are huge differences in the views of white Republicans and white Democrats.

• There's a 20-point gap between white Democrats and white Republicans who say they're concerned about voter suppression in their state.

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Joe Biden not only crushed President Trump in ratings for their head-to-head town halls, Biden was a bigger draw for an earlier pairing of network town halls.

• Biden had a bigger combined audience for town halls on ABC + NBC than Trump did for his ABC and NBC town halls.

Biden drew 20.8 million for the two town halls combined, while Trump had 17.3 million.

Here's the breakdown, from Nielsen, via AP (omits streaming):

• Biden's ABC town hall with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday reached 14.1 million people between 8 and 9 p.m. (when the 90-minute event was head to head with NBC).
• Trump's NBC town hall with Savannah Guthrie on Thursday had 13.5 million viewers (NBC: 10.9 million, MSNBC: 1.8 million, CNBC: 720,000).
• Biden's NBC town hall with Lester Holt on Oct. 5: 6.7 million (includes NBC, MSNBC, CNBC; NBC only was 3.85 million).
• Trump's ABC town hall with Stephanopoulos on Sept. 15: 3.8 million people.

Axios' Sara Fischer, who tracks this closely, notes: Biden's town hall with CNN on Sept. 17, two days after Trump's ABC town hall, drew fewer viewers than Trump — 3.3 million, to Trump's 3.8 million on the broadcast network.

At a rally in last night in Macon, Ga., President Trump was mocking Joe Biden — "The mask is always so large!" — when he added:

I shouldn’t joke because you know what? Running against the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics puts pressure on me. Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna say: "I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics." I'm not gonna feel so good. Maybe I'll have to leave the country — I don't know.

At the warmup for Trump's rally, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) "intentionally flubbed the name of Joe Biden’s running-mate, ... drawing immediate criticism from his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff and others who called it a 'racist tactic,'" as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it.

• Perdue, to laughter: "Kamala? Or Kamala? Or Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know. Whatever!"

Don't forget: The two have been colleagues in the Senate for four years, and serve on the Budget Committee together.

• Pro tip: Try "Senator Harris."
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"Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges," the N.Y. Times' Eric Lipton reports.

• Some examples: "easing limits on how many hours some truckers can spend behind the wheel, giving the government more freedom to collect biometric data and setting federal standards for when workers can be classified as independent contractors rather than employees."

Keep reading (subscription).

In Bangkok, the Thai capital, pro-democracy protesters give the three-finger "Hunger Games" salute during an anti-government rally today.

"The U.S. budget deficit tripled to a record $3.1 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 as the government battled the global coronavirus pandemic," The Wall Street Journal's lead story reads (subscription).

• "As a share of economic output, the budget gap in fiscal year 2020 hit roughly 16.1%, the largest since 1945."

"Federal debt totaled 102% of gross domestic product, the first time it has exceeded the size of the economy for the full fiscal year in more than 70 years, according to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget," The Journal adds.

• "That has put the U.S. in a league with Greece, Italy and Japan among the most heavily indebted nations."

The wisdom of the crowd can predict coming changes to the tech-security landscape over the next five years, Bryan Walsh writes in Axios Future.

• Axios was given an early look at a report out Monday from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology's (CSET) Foretell crowd forecasting pilot project.

Why it matters: Crowdsourcing is good at placing clear probabilities on near-term events, but has struggled with big questions that matter to policymakers.

• To overcome that, CSET broke down the scenarios into shorter-term predictors, like the level of U.S.-China trade and the size of Defense Department AI grants.

🔮 See the (Axios) Future, with Bryan Walsh's twice-weekly newsletter.