thebulwark--2020-08-10--What a Weeks-Long ‘Election Night’ Might Look Like

Nearly seven weeks after New York ’ s Democratic primary , the 12th district race between Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Suraj Patel remains uncalled .
Although Patel joined New York voters to sue the New York State Board of Elections over the invalidation of mail-in ballots , the delay is more about logistics than nefariousness : The task of counting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots during a pandemic with outdated equipment , insufficient staffing , and stretched budgets is daunting .
Similar delays will happen across the country in November , thrusting the presidential election into limbo as state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jobs .
There are many possible worst-case permutations here , a number of which were recently war-gamed by the nonpartisan Transition Integrity Project .
But let ’ s assume that New York ’ s experience is a harbinger of what we can expect nationally .
The key deadline to keep in mind for the presidential election is December 14 , the date set by federal law for each state ’ s chosen electors to the Electoral College to “ meet and give their votes.
” What if a state can ’ t get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ span between Election Day and December 14 ?
Or what if lawsuits over the legitimacy of mail-in ballots indefinitely clog the process ?
The same statute has an answer : “ Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors , and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law , the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.
” Translation ?
State legislatures can pass new laws for picking electors if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in time for the December 14 deadline .
But there ’ s more .
The law goes on to require that any alternative method of picking electors must occur at least six days before the December 14 deadline—that is , by December 8 .
The statute specifically contemplates that the final determination could be made “ by judicial or other methods or procedures , ” and that whatever happens “ shall be conclusive , and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution.
” When the electors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supposed to certify their votes—to sign , seal , and deliver official copies of their votes to the president of the U.S. Senate , the archivist of the United States , their own state ’ s secretary of state , and a district judge .
If , by the fourth Wednesday in December , which falls two days before Christmas this year , the Senate and the archivist still haven ’ t received the certified votes , they will demand that the state secretary of state and the district judge immediately send their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ former by registered mail and the latter via a special messenger .
The statute requires that Congress—which is to say , the new Congress—hold a joint session on January 6 to certify the electoral vote based on “ the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes.
” ( Since the sitting vice president of the United States , in his capacity as president of the Senate , is charged with overseeing the counting of the votes , the odd spectacle has occasionally arisen of a vice president formally announcing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ case of George H.W .
Bush , or defeat , as in the case of Al Gore . )
Of course , it is conceivable that a state ’ s slate of electoral votes will remain in dispute even at this point .
Imagine that mail-in ballots aren ’ t fully counted on December 8 in a red state , so the Republican-dominated state legislature steps in to cast its electors for Trump .
Imagine further that the popular vote in that state was leaning heavily in favor of Biden .
Lawsuits are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its electors under its pre-existing winner-takes-all system of casting electoral votes notwithstanding the new legislation .
If , for whatever reason , there is no clear winner of the Electoral College on January 6 , we could wind up in what ’ s known as “ contingent election ” decided by Congress—only three of which have been held throughout American history , all before 1840 .
The first contingent election , in 1800 , resulted when running mates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received an identical number of electoral votes ( the Democratic-Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one more vote than Burr , but something clearly went wrong ) .
Under the original constitutional process then still in place , the House of Representatives was to pick the president from the choice of Jefferson and Burr , with each state ’ s House delegation casting one vote .
A majority of the state delegations—nine at the time—would be required for victory .
But on the first ballot , two delegations deadlocked , submitting blank ballots , so neither candidate got the necessary majority majority .
Eventually , Alexander Hamilton persuaded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jefferson to elect him on the 36th ballot .
End result : Jefferson became our third president , Burr shot Hamilton in a duel , the Twelfth Amendment was ratified in 1804 to keep this from happening again , and Lin-Manuel Miranda would eventually become richer than 61 percent of sovereign nations .
The second such instance—and the only one involving the presidency after ratification of the Twelfth Amendment—occurred as a result of the 1824 election , in which four candidates split the electoral vote , with none of them getting the required @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thus thrown to the House : Andrew Jackson , John Quincy Adams , and William Crawford .
Jackson received a plurality of both electoral and popular votes , but Henry Clay ( who had come in fourth ) threw his considerable weight behind Adams .
That was all the House needed to elect Adams on the first ballot ( 13 votes to Jackson ’ s 7 and Crawford ’ s 4 ) .
Adams promptly repaid Clay by making him his secretary of state , giving rise to accusations of a “ corrupt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he needed to crush Adams in 1828 .
The third contingent election , which followed the vote of 1836 , was to select a vice president , a job quickly dispatched by the Senate , per the Twelfth Amendment .
Today , it is the Twelfth Amendment and the Twentieth Amendment ( mandating that the president ’ s term begin on January 20 ) that set out the procedures for contingent elections , along with the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 and the procedural rules for the House and the Senate .
Under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state delegations in the House must vote in blocks to choose among the top three electoral vote-getters , with each delegation casting a single vote .
An absolute majority of 26 states would be required to elect a president in this scenario .
Right now , Republicans hold a majority of state delegations in the House even though Democrats have a majority of representatives .
If the House configuration changes as a result of the November election , the 26-state majority could shift to Democrats .
Meanwhile , should no candidate for vice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Senate would assume , as it did in 1837 , the role adopted by the House for presidential elections and choose between the top two vote-getters by a majority , with each senator casting one vote .
So if the House can not agree on a president , the Senate could still choose a vice president , who would be sworn in as acting president under the Presidential Succession Act until a president is chosen .
If the Senate remains in Republican hands , then , America could have a Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Electoral College votes for Biden .
We are in largely uncharted territory here .
Although midterm elections went forward during the 1918 pandemic , turnout that year was low .
In the COVID-19 era , it is becoming increasingly clear that laws and lawsuits will not be our way out of this nightmare .
Record numbers of voters must come out to choose one candidate by such huge margins that the news cycle becomes dominated by the new administration ’ s plans for fixing America—rather than obsessing over contested mail-in ballots and related @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the outcome anyway .

Nearly seven weeks after New York’s Democratic primary, the 12th district race between Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Suraj Patel remains uncalled. Although Patel joined New York voters to sue the New York State Board of Elections over the invalidation of mail-in ballots, the delay is more about logistics than nefariousness: The task of counting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots during a pandemic with outdated equipment, insufficient staffing, and stretched budgets is daunting. Similar delays will happen across the country in November, thrusting the presidential election into limbo as state and local officials scramble to do their jobs.
There are many possible worst-case permutations here, a number of which were recently war-gamed by the nonpartisan Transition Integrity Project. But let’s assume that New York’s experience is a harbinger of what we can expect nationally. The key deadline to keep in mind for the presidential election is December 14, the date set by federal law for each state’s chosen electors to the Electoral College to “meet and give their votes.” What if a state can’t get the ballot counting done within the eight-week span between Election Day and December 14? Or what if lawsuits over the legitimacy of mail-in ballots indefinitely clog the process?
The same statute has an answer: “Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” Translation? State legislatures can pass new laws for picking electors if normal vote-counting procedures don’t work in time for the December 14 deadline.
But there’s more. The law goes on to require that any alternative method of picking electors must occur at least six days before the December 14 deadline—that is, by December 8. The statute specifically contemplates that the final determination could be made “by judicial or other methods or procedures,” and that whatever happens “shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution.”
When the electors meet on December 14, they are supposed to certify their votes—to sign, seal, and deliver official copies of their votes to the president of the U.S. Senate, the archivist of the United States, their own state’s secretary of state, and a district judge. If, by the fourth Wednesday in December, which falls two days before Christmas this year, the Senate and the archivist still haven’t received the certified votes, they will demand that the state secretary of state and the district judge immediately send their copies of the electors’ certified votes—the former by registered mail and the latter via a special messenger.
The statute requires that Congress—which is to say, the new Congress—hold a joint session on January 6 to certify the electoral vote based on “the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes.” (Since the sitting vice president of the United States, in his capacity as president of the Senate, is charged with overseeing the counting of the votes, the odd spectacle has occasionally arisen of a vice president formally announcing his own victory, as in the case of George H.W. Bush, or defeat, as in the case of Al Gore.)
Of course, it is conceivable that a state’s slate of electoral votes will remain in dispute even at this point. Imagine that mail-in ballots aren’t fully counted on December 8 in a red state, so the Republican-dominated state legislature steps in to cast its electors for Trump. Imagine further that the popular vote in that state was leaning heavily in favor of Biden. Lawsuits are filed to force the state to certify its electors under its pre-existing winner-takes-all system of casting electoral votes notwithstanding the new legislation.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
If, for whatever reason, there is no clear winner of the Electoral College on January 6, we could wind up in what’s known as “contingent election” decided by Congress—only three of which have been held throughout American history, all before 1840.
The first contingent election, in 1800, resulted when running mates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received an identical number of electoral votes (the Democratic-Republican plan had been to ensure Jefferson received one more vote than Burr, but something clearly went wrong). Under the original constitutional process then still in place, the House of Representatives was to pick the president from the choice of Jefferson and Burr, with each state’s House delegation casting one vote. A majority of the state delegations—nine at the time—would be required for victory. But on the first ballot, two delegations deadlocked, submitting blank ballots, so neither candidate got the necessary majority majority. Eventually, Alexander Hamilton persuaded enough delegations to switch their votes to Jefferson to elect him on the 36th ballot. End result: Jefferson became our third president, Burr shot Hamilton in a duel, the Twelfth Amendment was ratified in 1804 to keep this from happening again, and Lin-Manuel Miranda would eventually become richer than 61 percent of sovereign nations.
The second such instance—and the only one involving the presidency after ratification of the Twelfth Amendment—occurred as a result of the 1824 election, in which four candidates split the electoral vote, with none of them getting the required majority. The top three vote-getters were thus thrown to the House: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford. Jackson received a plurality of both electoral and popular votes, but Henry Clay (who had come in fourth) threw his considerable weight behind Adams. That was all the House needed to elect Adams on the first ballot (13 votes to Jackson’s 7 and Crawford’s 4). Adams promptly repaid Clay by making him his secretary of state, giving rise to accusations of a “corrupt bargain” that gave Jackson the momentum he needed to crush Adams in 1828.
The third contingent election, which followed the vote of 1836, was to select a vice president, a job quickly dispatched by the Senate, per the Twelfth Amendment.
Today, it is the Twelfth Amendment and the Twentieth Amendment (mandating that the president’s term begin on January 20) that set out the procedures for contingent elections, along with the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 and the procedural rules for the House and the Senate.
Under the rules now in place, the state delegations in the House must vote in blocks to choose among the top three electoral vote-getters, with each delegation casting a single vote. An absolute majority of 26 states would be required to elect a president in this scenario. Right now, Republicans hold a majority of state delegations in the House even though Democrats have a majority of representatives. If the House configuration changes as a result of the November election, the 26-state majority could shift to Democrats.
Meanwhile, should no candidate for vice president receive a majority of electoral votes, the Senate would assume, as it did in 1837, the role adopted by the House for presidential elections and choose between the top two vote-getters by a majority, with each senator casting one vote.
So if the House cannot agree on a president, the Senate could still choose a vice president, who would be sworn in as acting president under the Presidential Succession Act until a president is chosen. If the Senate remains in Republican hands, then, America could have a Republican interim president regardless of the popular or Electoral College votes for Biden.
We are in largely uncharted territory here. Although midterm elections went forward during the 1918 pandemic, turnout that year was low. In the COVID-19 era, it is becoming increasingly clear that laws and lawsuits will not be our way out of this nightmare. Record numbers of voters must come out to choose one candidate by such huge margins that the news cycle becomes dominated by the new administration’s plans for fixing America—rather than obsessing over contested mail-in ballots and related electoral details that can’t change the outcome anyway.


thebulwark--2020-08-10--PEN Report Details China’s Malign Influence on Hollywood

PEN America ’ s new report on the influence China has over Hollywood writ large is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how the increasingly global nature of filmmaking has rendered American studios unable to push back against the Middle Kingdom ’ s censoriousness .
The combination of China ’ s growing share of the global box office—before the COVID-19 epidemic kicked into gear it was the world ’ s second-large market , after America , and well on its way to becoming the largest thanks to a burgeoning Chinese middle class—and that country ’ s strict control over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has effectively neutered Hollywood ’ s ability to criticize an autocratic regime standing up concentration camps for persecuted religious minorities .
Americans complaining about the MPAA ’ s rating system sometimes describe it as censorship .
But they ’ ve forgotten that the MPAA was actually a solution to literal censorship—review boards snipping up film reels county-by-county to protect citizens from immoral art .
These folks can be reminded of what actual censorship looks like by learning about the Chinese system : “ The Chinese government imposes a strict pre-publication review system for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to ban any film that does not comply from being shown in theaters—or even from streaming online—within the country.
” The censorship topics are impossibly broad , meaning that virtually anything can be found in violation , but they ’ re all designed to do one thing : protect the ruling party from criticism and dissent .
China occasionally demands edits for a movie to be shown , and folks in Hollywood are usually willing to go along to get along ; this is why Quentin Tarantino deserved so much praise for refusing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after his daughter complained to Chinese censors about the legendary martial artist and actor ’ s portrayal in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .
Other productions were less brave ; ironically , America ’ s greatest fighter pilot , reborn in Top Gun : Maverick , bowed to Chinese pressure by removing the Taiwanese and Japanese flags from Maverick ’ s flight jacket .
But Maverick ’ s preemptive airbrushing might have been an example of another insidious side-effect of China ’ s malign influence .
More dangerous , and harder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are the movies that simply never get made .
Movies that studios pass on for fear of angering Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party .
Movies that would get locked out of the lucrative Chinese market—movies that might even get a studio ’ s whole slate locked out of the Chinese market .
“ The big story is not what ’ s getting changed , but what is not ever even getting greenlit , ” Michael Berry , director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA , told PEN .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Richard Gere , an outspoken advocate for Tibetan rights who hasn ’ t quite disappeared from the big screen but certainly hasn ’ t enjoyed the sort of career an actor of his stature and caliber might expect as he enters his golden years .
“ There are definitely movies that I can ’ t be in because the Chinese will say , ‘ Not with him , ' ” Gere told the Hollywood Reporter in 2017 .
“ I recently had an episode where someone said they could not finance a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Chinese.
” Those who live in China could face more dire consequences for working with him : “ There was something I was going to do with a Chinese director , and two weeks before we were going to shoot , he called saying , ‘ Sorry , I can ’ t do it , ' ” confides Gere .
“ We had a secret phone call on a protected line .
If I had worked with this director , he , his family would never have been allowed to leave the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never work.
” Gere says he has no regrets , snarking that he doesn ’ t want to be the villain in some tentpole or the wizened leader of a space rebellion anyway .
But you have to admire his willingness sacrifice some part of his career—and his audience—in order to stand for something larger .

PEN America’s new report on the influence China has over Hollywood writ large is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how the increasingly global nature of filmmaking has rendered American studios unable to push back against the Middle Kingdom’s censoriousness.
The combination of China’s growing share of the global box office—before the COVID-19 epidemic kicked into gear it was the world’s second-large market, after America, and well on its way to becoming the largest thanks to a burgeoning Chinese middle class—and that country’s strict control over which films get seen by paying audience has effectively neutered Hollywood’s ability to criticize an autocratic regime standing up concentration camps for persecuted religious minorities.
Americans complaining about the MPAA’s rating system sometimes describe it as censorship. But they’ve forgotten that the MPAA was actually a solution to literal censorship—review boards snipping up film reels county-by-county to protect citizens from immoral art. These folks can be reminded of what actual censorship looks like by learning about the Chinese system: “The Chinese government imposes a strict pre-publication review system for all films, and retains the right to ban any film that does not comply from being shown in theaters—or even from streaming online—within the country.” The censorship topics are impossibly broad, meaning that virtually anything can be found in violation, but they’re all designed to do one thing: protect the ruling party from criticism and dissent.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
China occasionally demands edits for a movie to be shown, and folks in Hollywood are usually willing to go along to get along; this is why Quentin Tarantino deserved so much praise for refusing to cut a scene about Bruce Lee after his daughter complained to Chinese censors about the legendary martial artist and actor’s portrayal in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Other productions were less brave; ironically, America’s greatest fighter pilot, reborn in Top Gun: Maverick, bowed to Chinese pressure by removing the Taiwanese and Japanese flags from Maverick’s flight jacket.
But Maverick’s preemptive airbrushing might have been an example of another insidious side-effect of China’s malign influence. More dangerous, and harder to quantify, than the edits demanded are the movies that simply never get made. Movies that studios pass on for fear of angering Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Movies that would get locked out of the lucrative Chinese market—movies that might even get a studio’s whole slate locked out of the Chinese market. “The big story is not what’s getting changed, but what is not ever even getting greenlit,” Michael Berry, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA, told PEN.
That sort of comment always makes me think of Richard Gere, an outspoken advocate for Tibetan rights who hasn’t quite disappeared from the big screen but certainly hasn’t enjoyed the sort of career an actor of his stature and caliber might expect as he enters his golden years.
“There are definitely movies that I can’t be in because the Chinese will say, ‘Not with him,'” Gere told the Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “I recently had an episode where someone said they could not finance a film with me because it would upset the Chinese.” Those who live in China could face more dire consequences for working with him: “There was something I was going to do with a Chinese director, and two weeks before we were going to shoot, he called saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it,'” confides Gere. “We had a secret phone call on a protected line. If I had worked with this director, he, his family would never have been allowed to leave the country ever again, and he would never work.”
Gere says he has no regrets, snarking that he doesn’t want to be the villain in some tentpole or the wizened leader of a space rebellion anyway. But you have to admire his willingness sacrifice some part of his career—and his audience—in order to stand for something larger.


thebulwark--2020-08-10--Political Polarization Has Hit Medicine, Too

As our national struggle to cope with the coronavirus fractured along partisan lines , we may have hoped that at least medicine remained above the fray , offering unfailingly consistent advice that , while not perfect , was at least driven by the best understanding of the science , and not tainted in some way by partisan affections .
This hope—both idealistic and naïve—was damaged by the astonishing response of many medical leaders in response to the protests that emerged in response to the despicable murder of George Floyd in Minnesota .
As Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in early June @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a central role in legitimizing this “ whiplash-inducing messaging , ” as Williams memorably describes it .
A letter signed by over 1,200 health professionals offered medical cover to the protesters , explaining , “ [ W ] e do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission .
We support them as vital to the national public health.
” As one epidemiologist who attended the protests subsequently confessed to the New York Times , “ I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time , and I ’ m not condemning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with that .
I have a hard time articulating why that is okay.
” We should be disappointed by this response , and concerned by the “ hemorrhaged credibility and authority ” —in Williams ’ words—that health experts squandered .
But perhaps we shouldn ’ t have been surprised .
An evolving body of academic research suggests that medicine as a whole is becoming increasingly progressive , particularly the very people—academic specialists in areas like infectious disease and public health—we ’ re most likely to look to for advice in times like this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a young professor of political science at Stanford , published a paper , “ Mapping the Ideological Marketplace ” in the American Journal of Political Science that introduced an attractive new way of quantifying political ideology at scale .
The methodology leverages the relatively recent public availability of detailed information about campaign contributions , which Bonica , as a graduate student at New York University , had assembled into a massive dataset that at the time contained over 103 million records , detailing contributions made between 1979 and 2012 .
( It has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
The idea is to distill donor political preference into a relatively simple number , reflecting the fraction of political contributions an individual donor makes to candidates of one party or the other , or to political action committees ( PAC ) conspicuously affiliated with one party or another .
To be counted , donors must contribute to at least two recipients .
One benefit of this approach is the detailed information about donors included in the database—their zip code , for example , as well as their occupation and employer .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ data demonstrated a profound liberal skew among academics ( the most progressive ) , the entertainment industry , print journalists , and a category called “ online computer services , ” which encompasses technology companies such as Google , Oracle , and Facebook .
Skewing right : mining , building and construction , agriculture , and oil , gas , and coal ( the most conservative ) .
Lawyers and the pharmaceutical industry emerged with a bimodal pattern skewing slightly left , while real estate and banking and finance also revealed a bimodal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right .
Bonica and several colleagues immediately used this approach to analyze several occupations in greater detail , including law and , of particular interest , medicine .
A remarkable paper , also published in 2014 analyzed the political contributions of a range of medical ( and surgical ) specialties , and found staggering differences .
Surgeons and surgical subspecialists tended to contribute to Republicans , while pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists , as well as psychiatrists and infectious disease doctors , were most likely to contribute to Democrats .
Orthopedic surgeons were the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while pediatric infectious disease specialists were the most liberal .
The authors demonstrated a remarkably close relationship between physician income and political preference , with the relatively lower-paying specialties favoring Democrats , and the more affluent specialties leaning Republican .
The authors noted that traditionally , doctors had been regarded as a right-leaning profession .
And Bonica ’ s data confirm that in the early 1990s , physicians as a whole did , in fact , contribute slightly more to Republicans than Democrats , and thus were slightly more conservative than the average @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , physicians as a group had become more liberal , and now lined up squarely with the average of all donors .
The analysis of physicians also revealed that women were far more liberal than men ; doctors who worked for non-profit organizations ( like universities ) were far more liberal than doctors working in a for-profit environment ; and , pediatricians were far more liberal than surgeons—a split that appeared to be widening over time .
By 2012 , surgeons contributed 48 percent more to Republicans than did pediatricians—a degree of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out , the 39 percent difference in the 2012 presidential vote between “ red ” Wyoming and “ blue ” Vermont .
An follow-up paper , published in 2019 , demonstrated that recent medical school graduates—especially women , but men as well ( though to a slightly smaller degree ) skew much more to the left than their older colleagues , a progressive shift the authors argue is likely to continue , and over time , shift the political balance of the profession as a whole , since “ [ f ] ew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with age , although there is some tendency to moderation of both extremes.
” Even so , it ’ s hardly implausible for the authors to speculate that , Bonica and colleagues have seen the future of American medicine , and it ’ s bright blue .
The liberal evolution of the profession delights some physicians advocating for social change .
One such champion , former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Arnold Relman , took comfort from these data .
In his last published writing before he passed away at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commentary accompanying Bonica ’ s 2014 paper , expressing hope “ that female physicians will expand the social outlook of the profession , encourage it to become more liberal in its political views , and persuade it to consider how to replace the ACA with a better system.
” The potential impact of an ideological shift among physicians is highlighted by a 2016 study by a pair of Yale researchers which compared how doctors who are registered Democrats responded to a set of clinical vignettes , compared to doctors who are registered Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ responded similarly to vignettes around apolitical topics involving alcohol , obesity , and helmet use , the two groups reacted quite differently to cases involving marijuana , firearms , and abortion .
“ Democratic physicians rated the firearms vignette as more concerning , and Republic physicians rated the marijuana and abortion vignettes as more concerning , ” the authors report , noting the size of these differences “ are quite large , and they only appear on the politically salient vignettes.
” The two groups of physicians had divergent views not only on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the vignettes , but also in how they might approach the situations .
In the case of firearms in a house with young children , for instance , Republican doctors might focus their counseling on safe storage , while Democratic doctors are more likely to encourage the patient not to store firearms .
Similarly , the authors write , Republican physicians “ are more likely to discuss the health risks of marijuana , urge the patient to cut down , and discuss legal risks .
Republicans are more likely to discuss the mental @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the patient not to have more abortions.
” In some ways , this is simply the application to medicine of Miles ’ Law— “ where you stand depends on where you sit.
” Of course it does , though these findings run counter to the idea of medicine operating on a pure scientific plane , dispensing science-driven truth uncontaminated by personal ideology .
Just-released findings about physicians by Bonica and his colleagues are in some ways both the least surprising and the most concerning .
Echoing the “ Big Sort ” thesis of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ physicians tend to self-assort , moving to regions and workplaces where their political ideologies are more closely aligned with their neighbors and colleagues .
Which means that Republican-leaning doctors are more likely to practice in areas and organizations with other Republican-leaning doctors , while Democratic physicians tend to work and live with fellow Democrats .
These results suggest that the self-affirming political echo chambers so common in online communities are also a fact of life for physicians .
Doctors who practice in academic centers , generally in left-skewing communities , and researchers who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , may be unwittingly immersed in an environment that reaffirms and even accentuates their generally progressive beliefs and norms .
Similarly , physicians practicing in more conservative settings , in more right-leaning ( often more rural ) communities might find equivalent affirmation from their peers , and find themselves inevitably pushed further right .
One implication of these patterns , as University of Chicago health policy researcher Harold Pollack pointed out in a YouTube interview with Bonica about this study , is that it ’ s increasingly difficult for patients in rural areas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health and social work ( which both skew considerably left on the contribution metric , as apparently do epidemiologists and other public health professionals ) .
Many of these health service providers , Pollack points out , lack the “ cultural competency ” to serve effectively the needs of conservative , rural areas .
This problem is getting worse , he observes , as data from Bonica and others suggest that each new cohort of health providers are more liberal than the previous cohort .
“ Who will provide care ?
” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ value and virtue of viewpoint diversity , then we must be concerned by this increased polarization of medicine , even as we can perhaps make more sense of the underlying dynamics we see playing out before us .
To the extent the media turns to leading academic experts and instinctively valorizes their advice , it would be irresponsible not to worry about the possibility of implicit ideological bias inevitably resulting from statistically left-leaning journalists from left-leaning communities reporting the views of left-leaning academic physicians generally from these same urban centers .
Failing to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but when we deny them , and insist instead that physicians are merely vessels of objective scientific truth , we enter dangerous territory .
It is critical to benefit from the best medical science has to offer—including important , life-saving advice like social distancing , wearing masks , and basing therapeutic choices , such as whether or not to take hydroxychloroquine , on the results of randomized clinical trials , not hearsay and wishful thinking .
Trust will be essential if an effective vaccine is developed and needs to be widely adopted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ merit such trust if , as we rush headlong to recognize , acknowledge , and remediate privilege , we also come to terms with our intrinsic ideological biases , recognize the many ways in which our personal and professional environments may reinforce these divisions , and work actively to empathetically understand , rather than contemptuously dismiss , a broader range of ideological viewpoints .

As our national struggle to cope with the coronavirus fractured along partisan lines, we may have hoped that at least medicine remained above the fray, offering unfailingly consistent advice that, while not perfect, was at least driven by the best understanding of the science, and not tainted in some way by partisan affections.
This hope—both idealistic and naïve—was damaged by the astonishing response of many medical leaders in response to the protests that emerged in response to the despicable murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
As Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in early June in the Guardian,
[I]n the time it takes to upload a black square to your Instagram profile, those of us who move in progressive circles now find ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing is an issue of mere secondary importance. This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution…. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.
Health leaders played a central role in legitimizing this “whiplash-inducing messaging,” as Williams memorably describes it. A letter signed by over 1,200 health professionals offered medical cover to the protesters, explaining, “[W]e do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.”
As one epidemiologist who attended the protests subsequently confessed to the New York Times, “I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that. I have a hard time articulating why that is okay.”
We should be disappointed by this response, and concerned by the “hemorrhaged credibility and authority”—in Williams’ words—that health experts squandered. But perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. An evolving body of academic research suggests that medicine as a whole is becoming increasingly progressive, particularly the very people—academic specialists in areas like infectious disease and public health—we’re most likely to look to for advice in times like this.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
In 2014, Adam Bonica, a young professor of political science at Stanford, published a paper, “Mapping the Ideological Marketplace” in the American Journal of Political Science that introduced an attractive new way of quantifying political ideology at scale.
The methodology leverages the relatively recent public availability of detailed information about campaign contributions, which Bonica, as a graduate student at New York University, had assembled into a massive dataset that at the time contained over 103 million records, detailing contributions made between 1979 and 2012. (It has continued to expand with each election cycle.)
The idea is to distill donor political preference into a relatively simple number, reflecting the fraction of political contributions an individual donor makes to candidates of one party or the other, or to political action committees (PAC) conspicuously affiliated with one party or another. To be counted, donors must contribute to at least two recipients.
One benefit of this approach is the detailed information about donors included in the database—their zip code, for example, as well as their occupation and employer.
This approach proved tremendously powerful. His data demonstrated a profound liberal skew among academics (the most progressive), the entertainment industry, print journalists, and a category called “online computer services,” which encompasses technology companies such as Google, Oracle, and Facebook. Skewing right: mining, building and construction, agriculture, and oil, gas, and coal (the most conservative). Lawyers and the pharmaceutical industry emerged with a bimodal pattern skewing slightly left, while real estate and banking and finance also revealed a bimodal distribution, but tilted slightly to the right.
Bonica and several colleagues immediately used this approach to analyze several occupations in greater detail, including law and, of particular interest, medicine.
A remarkable paper, also published in 2014 analyzed the political contributions of a range of medical (and surgical) specialties, and found staggering differences. Surgeons and surgical subspecialists tended to contribute to Republicans, while pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists, as well as psychiatrists and infectious disease doctors, were most likely to contribute to Democrats. Orthopedic surgeons were the most conservative, by this measure, while pediatric infectious disease specialists were the most liberal. The authors demonstrated a remarkably close relationship between physician income and political preference, with the relatively lower-paying specialties favoring Democrats, and the more affluent specialties leaning Republican.
The authors noted that traditionally, doctors had been regarded as a right-leaning profession. And Bonica’s data confirm that in the early 1990s, physicians as a whole did, in fact, contribute slightly more to Republicans than Democrats, and thus were slightly more conservative than the average of all donors.
By 2012, however, physicians as a group had become more liberal, and now lined up squarely with the average of all donors.
The analysis of physicians also revealed that women were far more liberal than men; doctors who worked for non-profit organizations (like universities) were far more liberal than doctors working in a for-profit environment; and, pediatricians were far more liberal than surgeons—a split that appeared to be widening over time.
By 2012, surgeons contributed 48 percent more to Republicans than did pediatricians—a degree of polarization exceeding, as the authors point out, the 39 percent difference in the 2012 presidential vote between “red” Wyoming and “blue” Vermont.
An follow-up paper, published in 2019, demonstrated that recent medical school graduates—especially women, but men as well (though to a slightly smaller degree) skew much more to the left than their older colleagues, a progressive shift the authors argue is likely to continue, and over time, shift the political balance of the profession as a whole, since “[f]ew physicians change the partisanship of their contributions with age, although there is some tendency to moderation of both extremes.”
(Data supporting this conclusion are unfortunately not presented by the authors, and it’s thus difficult to exclude the obvious alternative possibility, that political affiliations tend to drift from more liberal to more conservative over time, the so-called Burke paradox.)
Even so, it’s hardly implausible for the authors to speculate that,
The liberal activism of recent medical school graduates, both as campaign contributors and as petition signers, suggests that political advocacy by physicians could occupy a still more significant space within medicine. They may also become educators and models for future physicians.
Bonica and colleagues have seen the future of American medicine, and it’s bright blue.
The liberal evolution of the profession delights some physicians advocating for social change. One such champion, former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Arnold Relman, took comfort from these data. In his last published writing before he passed away at the age of 91, Relman penned a commentary accompanying Bonica’s 2014 paper, expressing hope “that female physicians will expand the social outlook of the profession, encourage it to become more liberal in its political views, and persuade it to consider how to replace the ACA with a better system.”
The potential impact of an ideological shift among physicians is highlighted by a 2016 study by a pair of Yale researchers which compared how doctors who are registered Democrats responded to a set of clinical vignettes, compared to doctors who are registered Republicans.
They learned that while all physicians responded similarly to vignettes around apolitical topics involving alcohol, obesity, and helmet use, the two groups reacted quite differently to cases involving marijuana, firearms, and abortion.
“Democratic physicians rated the firearms vignette as more concerning, and Republic physicians rated the marijuana and abortion vignettes as more concerning,” the authors report, noting the size of these differences “are quite large, and they only appear on the politically salient vignettes.”
The two groups of physicians had divergent views not only on the seriousness of the issues raised by the vignettes, but also in how they might approach the situations. In the case of firearms in a house with young children, for instance, Republican doctors might focus their counseling on safe storage, while Democratic doctors are more likely to encourage the patient not to store firearms.
Similarly, the authors write, Republican physicians “are more likely to discuss the health risks of marijuana, urge the patient to cut down, and discuss legal risks. Republicans are more likely to discuss the mental health aspects of abortion and to encourage the patient not to have more abortions.”
In some ways, this is simply the application to medicine of Miles’ Law—“where you stand depends on where you sit.” Of course it does, though these findings run counter to the idea of medicine operating on a pure scientific plane, dispensing science-driven truth uncontaminated by personal ideology.
Just-released findings about physicians by Bonica and his colleagues are in some ways both the least surprising and the most concerning. Echoing the “Big Sort” thesis of Bill Bishop, the researchers discovered that physicians tend to self-assort, moving to regions and workplaces where their political ideologies are more closely aligned with their neighbors and colleagues.
Which means that Republican-leaning doctors are more likely to practice in areas and organizations with other Republican-leaning doctors, while Democratic physicians tend to work and live with fellow Democrats.
These results suggest that the self-affirming political echo chambers so common in online communities are also a fact of life for physicians. Doctors who practice in academic centers, generally in left-skewing communities, and researchers who publish in journals dominated by these academics, may be unwittingly immersed in an environment that reaffirms and even accentuates their generally progressive beliefs and norms. Similarly, physicians practicing in more conservative settings, in more right-leaning (often more rural) communities might find equivalent affirmation from their peers, and find themselves inevitably pushed further right.
One implication of these patterns, as University of Chicago health policy researcher Harold Pollack pointed out in a YouTube interview with Bonica about this study, is that it’s increasingly difficult for patients in rural areas to get adequate health services like mental health and social work (which both skew considerably left on the contribution metric, as apparently do epidemiologists and other public health professionals).
Many of these health service providers, Pollack points out, lack the “cultural competency” to serve effectively the needs of conservative, rural areas. This problem is getting worse, he observes, as data from Bonica and others suggest that each new cohort of health providers are more liberal than the previous cohort. “Who will provide care?” he asks.
If we believe in the value and virtue of viewpoint diversity, then we must be concerned by this increased polarization of medicine, even as we can perhaps make more sense of the underlying dynamics we see playing out before us.
To the extent the media turns to leading academic experts and instinctively valorizes their advice, it would be irresponsible not to worry about the possibility of implicit ideological bias inevitably resulting from statistically left-leaning journalists from left-leaning communities reporting the views of left-leaning academic physicians generally from these same urban centers. Failing to recognize such biases would be concerning enough, but when we deny them, and insist instead that physicians are merely vessels of objective scientific truth, we enter dangerous territory.
It is critical to benefit from the best medical science has to offer—including important, life-saving advice like social distancing, wearing masks, and basing therapeutic choices, such as whether or not to take hydroxychloroquine, on the results of randomized clinical trials, not hearsay and wishful thinking.
Trust will be essential if an effective vaccine is developed and needs to be widely adopted.
But physicians will only earn and merit such trust if, as we rush headlong to recognize, acknowledge, and remediate privilege, we also come to terms with our intrinsic ideological biases, recognize the many ways in which our personal and professional environments may reinforce these divisions, and work actively to empathetically understand, rather than contemptuously dismiss, a broader range of ideological viewpoints.


thebulwark--2020-08-10--COVID Kills College Football Season

COVID Kills College Football Season

The hot topic on sports talk radio during the past few months has been when and where and how college football will be played this fall .
It has always been talked about as if playing was automatic .
On most shows , no one has prefaced these questions with “ if.
” Commissioners of the five big sports conferences held an emergency meeting on Sunday , due to the growing concern that the football season and other fall sports might need to be put off until spring because of the uncertainty of coronavirus pandemic .
The current state of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next 72 hours college football is going to come to a complete stop , ” one college football industry source told Sports Illustrated .
Several college athletic officials told ESPN over the past few days that the postponement or cancellation of the fall football season seems inevitable , and that either the Big Ten or PAC-12 would probably be the first league to do it .
“ Nobody wanted to be the first to do it , ” a coach told ESPN , “ and now nobody will want to be the last.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Big Ten has moved on cancelling the fall season , and a formal announcement is expected on Tuesday , sources told the Detroit Free Press .
It is also being reported the PAC-12 will cancel their fall season tomorrow as well .
So what happened ?
A few things .
Most importantly , the decline in COVID-19 cases didn ’ t appear as planned .
As infectious-disease specialist Paul Pottinger said in late June , “ What I ’ m really worried about is , campus by campus , across the country , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spreading [ the virus ] like wildfire in their living situations .
.
.
unless we get past that , unless we can break that cycle , then it ’ s hard to imagine campuses even opening up for the fall—for any purpose , much less for athletics.
” But there was also the realization that medical professionals have long warned that college football players—and the students and coaches who help run the programs—would be at a much higher risk for getting the virus than other major sport because of the large numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ huddles , in locker rooms , and—most importantly—at the line of scrimmage where players with a high Body Mass Index ( BMI ) ( e.g .
300-pound linemen ) will , as one expert put it , be “ the ones who are in the trenches getting pelted with respiratory secretions.
” And the high BMI matters for COVID .
Individuals judged to be overweight by BMI “ do tend to have more of a tendency to develop severe infection than someone who is not obese , and that applies whether you ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” says Amesh Adalja , a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins and an expert in infectious disease who is part of the NCAA ’ s coronavirus advisory panel All of which is complicated by the infection probabilities from full-contact practices , the need to quarantine the players and staff throughout the season , and the necessary travel needed to play the schedule .
Dominoes started falling when the Ivy League cancelled their entire fall sports competition in early July .
About a week ago , NCAA Division II and Division III schools—about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all sports until spring .
The University of Connecticut , a major Division I independent school , said it was canceling its season .
This past weekend the 12-school Mid-American Conference postponed all fall sports .
And then the Big-10 announced it was not allowing full-pads contact football practices until further notice .
And if/when the Big-10 announces that it will cancel the fall season , the other Power Five conferences will almost certainly follow .
There may be political ramifications .
The states with huge football programs that sellout 100,000-seat stadiums are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lack of fall football will be one more sign that America has not returned to normal .
The Power Five conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference , Big Ten Conference , Big 12 Conference , Pac-12 Conference , and Southeastern Conference—have 65 teams .
Now look at the states which are in play at the presidential level : Texas and North Carolina are each home to four Power Five schools , Michigan , Iowa , Arizona , and Georgia each have two Power Five schools apiece .
President Trump has long advocated that all sports—college @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall .
If college football is canceled this week , who will he blame ?
He won ’ t be able to hang it on Joe Biden , who has been largely silent on the subject .
Perhaps he could try blaming the schools themselves .
Or the coaches .
Or perhaps the players .
( This last seems like the approach which would be best received by Trump ’ s base . )
But will voters actually buy it ?
Donald Trump ’ s entire pitch to America is that he handled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comeback is well underway .
A nation full of empty stadiums would suggest otherwise .

The hot topic on sports talk radio during the past few months has been when and where and how college football will be played this fall. It has always been talked about as if playing was automatic. On most shows, no one has prefaced these questions with “if.”
Oops.
Commissioners of the five big sports conferences held an emergency meeting on Sunday, due to the growing concern that the football season and other fall sports might need to be put off until spring because of the uncertainty of coronavirus pandemic. The current state of college football is that “In the next 72 hours college football is going to come to a complete stop,” one college football industry source told Sports Illustrated.
Several college athletic officials told ESPN over the past few days that the postponement or cancellation of the fall football season seems inevitable, and that either the Big Ten or PAC-12 would probably be the first league to do it. “Nobody wanted to be the first to do it,” a coach told ESPN, “and now nobody will want to be the last.”
And now preliminary reports indicate the Big Ten has moved on cancelling the fall season, and a formal announcement is expected on Tuesday, sources told the Detroit Free Press. It is also being reported the PAC-12 will cancel their fall season tomorrow as well.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
So what happened? A few things.
Most importantly, the decline in COVID-19 cases didn’t appear as planned. As infectious-disease specialist Paul Pottinger said in late June, “What I’m really worried about is, campus by campus, across the country, students coming back on the campus and spreading [the virus] like wildfire in their living situations . . . unless we get past that, unless we can break that cycle, then it’s hard to imagine campuses even opening up for the fall—for any purpose, much less for athletics.”
But there was also the realization that medical professionals have long warned that college football players—and the students and coaches who help run the programs—would be at a much higher risk for getting the virus than other major sport because of the large numbers and the close physical contact between them—in huddles, in locker rooms, and—most importantly—at the line of scrimmage where players with a high Body Mass Index (BMI) (e.g. 300-pound linemen) will, as one expert put it, be “the ones who are in the trenches getting pelted with respiratory secretions.”
And the high BMI matters for COVID. Individuals judged to be overweight by BMI “do tend to have more of a tendency to develop severe infection than someone who is not obese, and that applies whether you’re an athlete or not an athlete,” says Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins and an expert in infectious disease who is part of the NCAA’s coronavirus advisory panel
All of which is complicated by the infection probabilities from full-contact practices, the need to quarantine the players and staff throughout the season, and the necessary travel needed to play the schedule.
Dominoes started falling when the Ivy League cancelled their entire fall sports competition in early July. About a week ago, NCAA Division II and Division III schools—about 750 universities total—announced they were putting off all sports until spring. The University of Connecticut, a major Division I independent school, said it was canceling its season.
This past weekend the 12-school Mid-American Conference postponed all fall sports. And then the Big-10 announced it was not allowing full-pads contact football practices until further notice. And if/when the Big-10 announces that it will cancel the fall season, the other Power Five conferences will almost certainly follow.
There may be political ramifications. The states with huge football programs that sellout 100,000-seat stadiums are predominantly in swing states. And a lack of fall football will be one more sign that America has not returned to normal.
The Power Five conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten Conference, Big 12 Conference, Pac-12 Conference, and Southeastern Conference—have 65 teams. Now look at the states which are in play at the presidential level: Texas and North Carolina are each home to four Power Five schools, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, and Georgia each have two Power Five schools apiece.
That’s 131 Electoral College votes.
President Trump has long advocated that all sports—college and pro—be up and running in the fall. If college football is canceled this week, who will he blame? He won’t be able to hang it on Joe Biden, who has been largely silent on the subject. Perhaps he could try blaming the schools themselves. Or the coaches. Or perhaps the players. (This last seems like the approach which would be best received by Trump’s base.)
But will voters actually buy it? Donald Trump’s entire pitch to America is that he handled the pandemic well and that the American comeback is well underway.
A nation full of empty stadiums would suggest otherwise.


thebulwark--2020-08-11--Belarus Is About to Explode

Belarus Is About to Explode

Kiev Reports are at least one protester has been killed in a night of demonstrations and clashes with security forces in the Belarus capital city of Minsk following the presidential vote on Sunday , August 9 .
On Monday night , protesters engaged in a second night of demonstrations , refusing to accept the officially announced vote results from what the opposition camp charges has been rigged balloting rife with widespread falsification .
The death was confirmed on Tuesday morning by the Belarus Interior Ministry .
On one side in the election was the long-time strongman president of Belarus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ labelled “ Europe ’ s last dictator.
” Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and was running for a sixth term in office .
On the other side was Svetlana Tikhanovskaya , a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother of two and the wife of Sergei Tikahnovskiy , who had been one of the three most credible challengers to Lukashenko until he was jailed in May .
Belarus opposition figures who have fled Kiev in order to avoid a similar fate had expected Lukashenko ’ s regime to rig the election and no independent or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Belarus to observe the balloting .
( Not a single election since Lukashenko came to power in 1994 has been recognised by international observers as fair or legitimate . )
However , no one expected the degree to which the opposition vote was suppressed this time around .
Election day began with the Belarus security forces raiding Tikhanovskaya ’ s campaign headquarters , prompting her to go into hiding until she surfaced a few hours later to cast her ballot .
The internet in Belarus was shut down during the day and almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lukashenko even went so far as to bring in help from the Chinese , who know something about crushing dissident movements .
Over the past several years there has been a slowly expanding presence in Belarus from Chinese defense and security firms in Belarus .
And on election day , Lukashenko ’ s special operations units that were sent into Minsk arrived mounted on the Dongfeng Mengshi PRC-manufactured copy of the US-made AM General HMMWV and on the NORINCO-Poly Technologies CS/VN3 Dajiang ( Dragon ) 4×4 armoured personnel carrier .
“ This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Belarus opposition leaders in Kiev .
“ Pre-election support for Lukashenko was so low that he had to be prepared to resort to the most brutal measures possible—in order to shut down a protest movement before it gains momentum .
The Chinese working with the Belarus authorities are giving them the benefit of their own experience at Tiananmen Square .
The overall lesson they teach is that you can not allow a protest camp to be established and grow out of control—you have to crush it as soon as possible and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ official results had been announced , Tikhanovskaya ’ s campaign declared her the winner based on the results from dozens of polling stations where she was pulling in two to three times as many votes as Lukashenko .
Some of the individual polling stations releasing numbers prior to the “ official ” results were : • Polling Station 37/1ST of May district in the city of Minsk : Tikhanovskaya 848 votes , Lukashenko 297 • Polling Station 70/1ST of May district in the city of Minsk : Tikhanovskaya 1,023 votes , Lukashenko 686 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city of Minski : Tikhanovskaya 1,226 votes , Lukashenko 394 Shortly after these results were released Tikhanovskaya ’ s campaign announced that she had carried 20 other electoral districts in the capitol of Minsk and in surrounding municipalities .
Later results had her winning in more than 80 different precincts in this nation of only 9.5 million ( with some 6.5 million eligible voters ) .
In voting abroad among the Belarus diaspora the first-time opposition candidate had polled as high as 93 percent .
And yet , shortly after the polls closed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lukashenko had won 80 percent while Tikhanovskaya finished with less than 10 percent .
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin quickly phoned Lukashenko to offer him their congratulations .
“ I will believe my eyes—the majority was for us , ” Tikhanovskaya said on Sunday after the voting .
Her remarks were in reference to visible measures that the opposition had taken during the day of voting .
The anti-Lukashenko voters wore special white bracelets on the left hand and folded their ballots in a segmented , “ oriental fan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the standard , centerfold ballot placed in the polling box .
“ Final vote results ” are supposed to be released on Friday , and the opposition movement is prepared for what they term a “ prolonged period of protests.
” The actions of Lukashenko ’ s government have been denounced by the foreign ministries of Poland , the Czech Republic , Slovakia , Sweden , and Ukraine .
“ The harsh reaction , the use of force against peaceful protesters , and arbitrary arrests are unacceptable , ” read the uncharacteristically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which also called for the European Union to convene an impromptu summit on the situation in Belarus .
However , there has been no statement from the other major regional E.U .
member , Hungary , nor from Germany .
Both Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and Chancellor Angela Merkel have long shown a marked reticence for taking action that they believe could be seen as an affront to Russia ’ s Putin .
So what comes next ?
Upon the announcement that Lukashenko was declared the winner , the city of Minsk exploded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They were met by water cannons , stun grenades , and rubber bullets .
Spent stun grenade cartridges later shown on Belarus opposition channels showed them to be military-grade explosives made in the Czech Republic .
These grenades pose real danger to unhelmeted pedestrians without protective gear ( this is in comparison to the garden variety “ M80-Silver Salute ” stun charge normally favored by riot police ) .
By the end of Sunday evening a riot police van had ploughed into a crowd of protesters and there were no confirmed fatalities from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported to be in intensive care .
There is video footage showing body-armoured and well-armed riot units on the streets of Minsk .
In the meantime , the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya disappeared after a three-hour meeting she attended at the Central Election Commission on Monday .
Her own staff were not sure where she was , and she had stopped answering calls and texts from foreign ministers of other countries .
She was last heard saying that she had “ made a decision ” before she left unescorted through a side door @ @ @ @ @ @ @ known early Tuesday morning when it was announced by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius that she had arrived in the capitol , Vilnius and was now “ safe.
” It is not yet known how she crossed the border , but her decision to leave for the E.U .
came after she had been detained for seven hours in Belarus , Linkevicius told Lithuanian radio , although he did not say under what circumstances .
E.U .
diplomats who spoke to The Bulwark on Tuesday state that they expect Tikhanovskaya to establish a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about whether or not—in addition to the Chinese technical assistance—Russian special services are involved .
On Monday night multiple reports surfaced of riot control detachments on Kalvarinskaya Street in Minsk wearing uniforms with no insignia , an echo of the “ little green men ” who invaded Ukraine ’ s Crimea region in 2014 .
But , later eyewitness accounts were that these were Belarus units engaged in what appeared to be a “ false-flag ” manoeuvre to sow confusion and deflect criticism from Lukashenko ’ s security forces .
Nothing about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this crisis will soon recede .
The election was clearly rigged .
The opposition in Belarus seems to have reached a tipping point .
And the savagery of Lukashenko ’ s security forces is escalating .
The Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 required the intervention of the foreign ministers of Poland , France , and Germany to negotiate a peaceful exit for the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych in order to avert a full-blown civil war .
Without some equivalent effort on the part of foreign ( meaning non-Russian ) intermediaries , the situation in Belarus @ @ @ @ @ @

Kiev—Reports are at least one protester has been killed in a night of demonstrations and clashes with security forces in the Belarus capital city of Minsk following the presidential vote on Sunday, August 9. On Monday night, protesters engaged in a second night of demonstrations, refusing to accept the officially announced vote results from what the opposition camp charges has been rigged balloting rife with widespread falsification. The death was confirmed on Tuesday morning by the Belarus Interior Ministry.
On one side in the election was the long-time strongman president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has long been labelled “Europe’s last dictator.” Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and was running for a sixth term in office.
On the other side was Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother of two and the wife of Sergei Tikahnovskiy, who had been one of the three most credible challengers to Lukashenko until he was jailed in May.
Belarus opposition figures who have fled Kiev in order to avoid a similar fate had expected Lukashenko’s regime to rig the election and no independent or international election monitors were given entry into Belarus to observe the balloting. (Not a single election since Lukashenko came to power in 1994 has been recognised by international observers as fair or legitimate.)
However, no one expected the degree to which the opposition vote was suppressed this time around.
Election day began with the Belarus security forces raiding Tikhanovskaya’s campaign headquarters, prompting her to go into hiding until she surfaced a few hours later to cast her ballot.
The internet in Belarus was shut down during the day and almost all mobile phone networks were disabled. Lukashenko even went so far as to bring in help from the Chinese, who know something about crushing dissident movements. Over the past several years there has been a slowly expanding presence of Chinese defense and security firms in Belarus. And on election day, Lukashenko’s special operations units that were sent into Minsk arrived mounted on the Dongfeng Mengshi PRC-manufactured copy of the US-made AM General HMMWV and on the NORINCO-Poly Technologies CS/VN3 Dajiang (Dragon) 4×4 armoured personnel carrier.
“This is what we expected,” said one of the Belarus opposition leaders in Kiev. “Pre-election support for Lukashenko was so low that he had to be prepared to resort to the most brutal measures possible—in order to shut down a protest movement before it gains momentum. The Chinese working with the Belarus authorities are giving them the benefit of their own experience at Tiananmen Square. The overall lesson they teach is that you cannot allow a protest camp to be established and grow out of control—you have to crush it as soon as possible and with all possible force.”
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Before the official results had been announced, Tikhanovskaya’s campaign declared her the winner based on the results from dozens of polling stations where she was pulling in two to three times as many votes as Lukashenko.
Some of the individual polling stations releasing numbers prior to the “official” results were:
Polling Station 37/1ST of May district in the city of Minsk: Tikhanovskaya 848 votes, Lukashenko 297
Polling Station 70/1ST of May district in the city of Minsk: Tikhanovskaya 1,023 votes, Lukashenko 686
Polling Station 50/Village of Kolodishchi: Tikhanovskaya 719 votes, Lukashenko 497
Polling Station 54/Village of Kolodishchi: Tikhanovskaya 1,230 votes, Lukashenko 277
Polling Station 51/October district in the city of Minski: Tikhanovskaya 1,226 votes, Lukashenko 394
Shortly after these results were released Tikhanovskaya’s campaign announced that she had carried 20 other electoral districts in the capitol of Minsk and in surrounding municipalities. Later results had her winning in more than 80 different precincts in this nation of only 9.5 million (with some 6.5 million eligible voters). In voting abroad among the Belarus diaspora the first-time opposition candidate had polled as high as 93 percent.
And yet, shortly after the polls closed, the Belarus electoral commission announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent while Tikhanovskaya finished with less than 10 percent.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin quickly phoned Lukashenko to offer him their congratulations.
“I will believe my eyes—the majority was for us,” Tikhanovskaya said on Sunday after the voting. Her remarks were in reference to visible measures that the opposition had taken during the day of voting. The anti-Lukashenko voters wore special white bracelets on the left hand and folded their ballots in a segmented, “oriental fan” pattern so they would stand out from the standard, centerfold ballot placed in the polling box.
“Final vote results” are supposed to be released on Friday, and the opposition movement is prepared for what they term a “prolonged period of protests.”
The actions of Lukashenko’s government have been denounced by the foreign ministries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine. “The harsh reaction, the use of force against peaceful protesters, and arbitrary arrests are unacceptable,” read the uncharacteristically blunt statement from the Polish government, which also called for the European Union to convene an impromptu summit on the situation in Belarus.
However, there has been no statement from the other major regional E.U. member, Hungary, nor from Germany. Both Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and Chancellor Angela Merkel have long shown a marked reticence for taking action that they believe could be seen as an affront to Russia’s Putin.
So what comes next?
Upon the announcement that Lukashenko was declared the winner, the city of Minsk exploded with crowds numbering more than 100,000. They were met by water cannons, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. Spent stun grenade cartridges later shown on Belarus opposition channels showed them to be military-grade explosives made in the Czech Republic. These grenades pose real danger to unhelmeted pedestrians without protective gear (this is in comparison to the garden variety “M80-Silver Salute” stun charge normally favored by riot police).
By the end of Sunday evening a riot police van had ploughed into a crowd of protesters and there were no confirmed fatalities from this incident, but one protestor is reported to be in intensive care. There is video footage showing body-armoured and well-armed riot units on the streets of Minsk.
In the meantime, the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya disappeared after a three-hour meeting she attended at the Central Election Commission on Monday. Her own staff were not sure where she was, and she had stopped answering calls and texts from foreign ministers of other countries. She was last heard saying that she had “made a decision” before she left unescorted through a side door of the building.
That decision became known early Tuesday morning when it was announced by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius that she had arrived in the capitol, Vilnius and was now “safe.” It is not yet known how she crossed the border, but her decision to leave for the E.U. came after she had been detained for seven hours in Belarus, Linkevicius told Lithuanian radio, although he did not say under what circumstances.
EU diplomats who spoke to The Bulwark on Tuesday state that they expect Tikhanovskaya to establish a government-in-exile in Lithuania.
Speculation runs rampant about whether or not—in addition to the Chinese technical assistance—Russian special services are involved. On Monday night multiple reports surfaced of riot control detachments on Kalvarinskaya Street in Minsk wearing uniforms with no insignia, an echo of the “little green men” who invaded Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014. But, later eyewitness accounts were that these were Belarus units engaged in what appeared to be a “false-flag” manoeuvre to sow confusion and deflect criticism from Lukashenko’s security forces.
Nothing about the current state of play between suggests that this crisis will soon recede. The election was clearly rigged. The opposition in Belarus seems to have reached a tipping point. And the savagery of Lukashenko’s security forces is escalating.
The Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 required the intervention of the foreign ministers of Poland, France, and Germany to negotiate a peaceful exit for the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych in order to avert a full-blown civil war.
Without some equivalent effort on the part of foreign (meaning non-Russian) intermediaries, the situation in Belarus could spiral out of control.


thebulwark--2020-08-11--Congress AWOL on National Security

Congress AWOL on National Security

Let ’ s get this out of the way : Donald Trump is a threat to U.S. national security .
He tramples alliances , pals around with dictators , exploits official U.S. relations with other countries as a tool for personal gain , and is remarkably stupid and dishonest .
But Congress , through its inaction , is also a threat to national security .
On matters of foreign policy and national security , the Constitution divides control between the two political branches .
The president can make treaties , but they can only be ratified by a Senate supermajority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the military , but Congress controls the purse strings .
The president can raise or lower tariffs and can restrict imports , but only because he has been granted those powers by Congress , which can revoke them .
By populating the Departments of State and Defense and other agencies with political appointees , the president controls the broad direction of U.S. foreign affairs , but Congress must first confirm those appointees .
The president formulates policy and strategy , but Congress wields considerable influence by controlling the allocation of funds .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congress has , since the founding , conducted various forms of oversight of the executive branch : investigations , hearings , line-by-line budget reviews , decisions about the structure of executive branch departments .
Using these and other tools , Congress not only checks and balances the actions of a given administration but holds accountable the executive branch across administrations .
For the last several years , however , Congress has failed to conduct oversight in a responsible way .
This is part of a broader trend of congressional dereliction of duties , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since President Trump came to office .
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have been dissatisfied with President Trump ’ s actions on national security issues—from pardons of war criminals to troubling appointments to the Syria pullout to the reduction of U.S. forces in Germany .
But neither Democrats nor Republicans have done much of anything about it .
In the case of Republicans , their cowardly tactic has been “ We don ’ t like it , Mr. President , but we will let you do it as long as you don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” As for the Democrats , with the important exception of the impeachment over the Ukraine scandal , they are forceful in rhetoric but weak in practice .
They go on talk shows and give interviews and make statements and write strongly worded letters to condemn the president ’ s actions , but use no other tool they possess .
“ We will just have to defeat him in 2020 , ” the Democrats say to themselves .
Because of this dynamic among the two parties , every time Trump has overreached his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last three and a half years , Congress has let him get away with it .
The most recent example is the appointment of Anthony Tata to an important policy position in the Pentagon .
After the president nominated Tata to be the under secretary of defense for policy ( USD ( P ) ) , news stories came to light making clear how deeply unsuited he is for the position .
But the Republican-controlled Senate , instead of rejecting his nomination , decided not to hold a hearing .
And the president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the USD ( P ) —sidestepping the required Senate confirmation process by appointing him only in a “ temporary ” capacity .
So Tata is now the acting principal deputy USD ( P ) .
And he will be reporting to an acting USD ( P ) .
Both Republicans and Democrats dislike Tata , but they haven ’ t sought aggressively to stop his ascent .
Donald Trump is a very unpopular president .
He always has been .
Democrats , though , had a landslide in the 2018 midterms , taking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use the power of the purse strings to influence the president ’ s reckless national security policy ?
Congressional Democrats could go out and explain to the American people that it is Donald Trump who is forcing them to take such actions .
They could subpoena civilian officials—and maybe even senior military officers—from the Department of Defense to testify under oath on their views on Tata ’ s qualifications .
They could—and should—do the same with other controversial Trump actions .
Do you not like the reduction of forces in Germany ?
Well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
How about you not fund it ?
How about Congress doesn ’ t pass a National Defense Authorization Act until Trump restores the troops to Germany ?
Are members of Congress scared about the bad coverage they would get for not paying the troops ’ salaries ?
Okay .
Pass a bill that only compensates the troops but funds nothing else .
Let Trump veto compensation for the troops .
How about a veto-proof majority vote to restore the number of troops in Germany by law ?
Even if it doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the record on the wrong side of a policy .
How about subpoenaing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper , the acting Assistant Secretary for International Security Michael C. Ryan , Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley , U.S. European Command Commander Gen. Tod Wolters , and U.S. Army Europe Commander Lt. General Christopher Cavoli to publicly express their opinions about the Trump decision on Germany ?
Members of Congress won ’ t do any of this , however , because they are cowardly and lazy .
Such actions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effort—not to mention a basic interest in actually governing .
Unfortunately , all of these qualities are in short supply .
The Constitution does not leave Congress powerless in foreign policy .
Congress has simply decided to disarm itself .

Let’s get this out of the way: Donald Trump is a threat to U.S. national security. He tramples alliances, pals around with dictators, exploits official U.S. relations with other countries as a tool for personal gain, and is remarkably stupid and dishonest.
But Congress, through its inaction, is also a threat to national security.
On matters of foreign policy and national security, the Constitution divides control between the two political branches. The president can make treaties, but they can only be ratified by a Senate supermajority. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, but Congress controls the purse strings. The president can raise or lower tariffs and can restrict imports, but only because he has been granted those powers by Congress, which can revoke them. By populating the Departments of State and Defense and other agencies with political appointees, the president controls the broad direction of U.S. foreign affairs, but Congress must first confirm those appointees. The president formulates policy and strategy, but Congress wields considerable influence by controlling the allocation of funds.
In the course of exercising its powers, Congress has, since the founding, conducted various forms of oversight of the executive branch: investigations, hearings, line-by-line budget reviews, decisions about the structure of executive branch departments. Using these and other tools, Congress not only checks and balances the actions of a given administration but holds accountable the executive branch across administrations.
For the last several years, however, Congress has failed to conduct oversight in a responsible way. This is part of a broader trend of congressional dereliction of duties, but the problem has become distinctively worse since President Trump came to office.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have been dissatisfied with President Trump’s actions on national security issues—from pardons of war criminals to troubling appointments to the Syria pullout to the reduction of U.S. forces in Germany. But neither Democrats nor Republicans have done much of anything about it.
In the case of Republicans, their cowardly tactic has been “We don’t like it, Mr. President, but we will let you do it as long as you don’t make us publicly take a side.”
As for the Democrats, with the important exception of the impeachment over the Ukraine scandal, they are forceful in rhetoric but weak in practice. They go on talk shows and give interviews and make statements and write strongly worded letters to condemn the president’s actions, but use no other tool they possess. “We will just have to defeat him in 2020,” the Democrats say to themselves.
Because of this dynamic among the two parties, every time Trump has overreached his powers on national security matters during the last three and a half years, Congress has let him get away with it.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
The most recent example is the appointment of Anthony Tata to an important policy position in the Pentagon. After the president nominated Tata to be the under secretary of defense for policy (USD(P)), news stories came to light making clear how deeply unsuited he is for the position. But the Republican-controlled Senate, instead of rejecting his nomination, decided not to hold a hearing. And the president named him to the position immediately underneath the USD(P)—sidestepping the required Senate confirmation process by appointing him only in a “temporary” capacity. So Tata is now the acting principal deputy USD(P). And he will be reporting to an acting USD(P). Both Republicans and Democrats dislike Tata, but they haven’t sought aggressively to stop his ascent.
Donald Trump is a very unpopular president. He always has been. Democrats, though, had a landslide in the 2018 midterms, taking control of the House. Why not use the power of the purse strings to influence the president’s reckless national security policy? Congressional Democrats could go out and explain to the American people that it is Donald Trump who is forcing them to take such actions.
They could subpoena civilian officials—and maybe even senior military officers—from the Department of Defense to testify under oath on their views on Tata’s qualifications.
They could—and should—do the same with other controversial Trump actions. Do you not like the reduction of forces in Germany? Well, relocation of those forces requires money. How about you not fund it? How about Congress doesn’t pass a National Defense Authorization Act until Trump restores the troops to Germany? Are members of Congress scared about the bad coverage they would get for not paying the troops’ salaries? Okay. Pass a bill that only compensates the troops but funds nothing else. Let Trump veto compensation for the troops. How about a veto-proof majority vote to restore the number of troops in Germany by law? Even if it doesn’t pass, it will put Republicans on the record on the wrong side of a policy. How about subpoenaing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, the acting Assistant Secretary for International Security Michael C. Ryan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, U.S. European Command Commander Gen. Tod Wolters, and U.S. Army Europe Commander Lt. General Christopher Cavoli to publicly express their opinions about the Trump decision on Germany?
Members of Congress won’t do any of this, however, because they are cowardly and lazy. Such actions require risk, moral courage, and effort—not to mention a basic interest in actually governing. Unfortunately, all of these qualities are in short supply.
The Constitution does not leave Congress powerless in foreign policy. Congress has simply decided to disarm itself.


thebulwark--2020-08-11--A Brief History of the Future

A Brief History of the Future

( 1 ) People know what they don ’ t want .
Not everyone who wins in politics deserves to win , but pretty much everyone who loses deserves to lose , because it means they have lost the confidence of the electorate .
Donald Trump is losing in the polls because he deserves to lose .
Trump has spent several years cultivating unlikeability and it has paid off .
People do not like him .
COVID and the economy mean this dislike has metastasized into a broader lack of confidence in him as president .
( 2 ) But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He is well-poised to do so , but paradoxically for Biden to win , he must keep the spotlight on Trump and not spend time talking about himself .
Similarly , for Trump to win he must raise doubts about Biden .
Biden is wisely playing a subdued role and letting Trump ’ s need for attention and inability to manage major challenges drive his own numbers down .
Biden is heeding Napoleon ’ s advice : “ Never murder a man who is committing suicide.
” Most of the election—let ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ structural factors : the economy and COVID .
The United States doesn ’ t need a full recovery in either for Trump to benefit .
As long as there is a positive trend , people will feel better .
It is plausible that by Election Day we could have had two months of improving economic numbers and this scenario could provide what Trump needs to win , even if the recovery is only partial .
But time is not on Trump ’ s side .
The 1.8 million new jobs in the July @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a good start but one month of strong economic numbers before an election is probably insufficient , as George H.W .
Bush learned in 1992 .
And it will take a few weeks of stable or improving COVID numbers to bring back business confidence .
Early voting means the curtain starts coming down in September .
( 4 ) This leaves 25 percent to be determined by behavioral and situational activity .
Meaning : campaign strategy and execution and candidate performance .
Which includes the party conventions , Biden ’ s VP selection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are more likely to be a series of one-day stories that do not materially change the polls .
A candidate has to dramatically underperform during a debate ( Gerald Ford ’ s discussion of Poland in 1976 ) for it to be consequential .
It ’ s best to analyze these behavioral events as threshold activities , meaning as long as a candidate hits a level of acceptable behavior , his base is happy .
He ’ s the challenger and he will get to define himself to the American public through his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a wide audience and it ’ s the kind of scripted event where he tends to perform well .
The Trump scenario is that the economy sees modest improvement in September and some stability in the COVID numbers .
Even if this is too little , too late , don ’ t be surprised if he closes his gap with Biden a bit .
Races tend to tighten .
( 7 ) Regression to the mean is not momentum .
Trump has hit lowest-low over the last eight weeks because even his numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he firms his base up in September , then the race will tighten .
But that would not really be electoral momentum .
His base disliking him less is different than the public liking him more .
In order for Trump to start gaining momentum , he ’ d have to start moving independents .
Which he has been unable to do over the course of four years .
( 8 ) We finish where we start .
There are always anomalies .
Candidates will have good days and bad days ; strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grammatical mis-statements ; tactical shrewdness and incompetence—and all of this will drive the public conversation on the race .
But there is no reason to believe that sheer competency and mental acuity are not evenly split in this race and that the net effect of these news items over the final three months is close to zero .
The voters might not be sure what they want .
But they ’ re damn sure what they don ’ t want .
And they ’ ve been certain of that since about March of @ @

(1) People know what they don’t want.
Not everyone who wins in politics deserves to win, but pretty much everyone who loses deserves to lose, because it means they have lost the confidence of the electorate. Donald Trump is losing in the polls because he deserves to lose.
Trump has spent several years cultivating unlikeability and it has paid off. People do not like him. COVID and the economy mean this dislike has metastasized into a broader lack of confidence in him as president.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
(2) But does Joe Biden deserve to win?
He is well-poised to do so, but paradoxically for Biden to win, he must keep the spotlight on Trump and not spend time talking about himself. Similarly, for Trump to win he must raise doubts about Biden. Biden is wisely playing a subdued role and letting Trump’s need for attention and inability to manage major challenges drive his own numbers down.
Biden is heeding Napoleon’s advice: “Never murder a man who is committing suicide.”
(3) Structure beats behavior.
Most of the election—let’s call it 75 percent—will be determined by structural factors: the economy and COVID.
The United States doesn’t need a full recovery in either for Trump to benefit. As long as there is a positive trend, people will feel better. It is plausible that by Election Day we could have had two months of improving economic numbers and this scenario could provide what Trump needs to win, even if the recovery is only partial.
But time is not on Trump’s side. The 1.8 million new jobs in the July numbers (released in August) are a good start but one month of strong economic numbers before an election is probably insufficient, as George H.W. Bush learned in 1992.
And it will take a few weeks of stable or improving COVID numbers to bring back business confidence. Early voting means the curtain starts coming down in September.
(4) This leaves 25 percent to be determined by behavioral and situational activity.
Meaning: campaign strategy and execution and candidate performance. Which includes the party conventions, Biden’s VP selection, and the debates. These events are more likely to be a series of one-day stories that do not materially change the polls. A candidate has to dramatically underperform during a debate (Gerald Ford’s discussion of Poland in 1976) for it to be consequential.
It’s best to analyze these behavioral events as threshold activities, meaning as long as a candidate hits a level of acceptable behavior, his base is happy.
(5) Biden wins August by default.
He’s the challenger and he will get to define himself to the American public through his acceptance speech. The speech will attract a wide audience and it’s the kind of scripted event where he tends to perform well.
(6) But Trump can win September.
The Trump scenario is that the economy sees modest improvement in September and some stability in the COVID numbers. Even if this is too little, too late, don’t be surprised if he closes his gap with Biden a bit. Races tend to tighten.
(7) Regression to the mean is not momentum.
Trump has hit lowest-low over the last eight weeks because even his numbers among Republicans have ticked downward. If he firms his base up in September, then the race will tighten.
But that would not really be electoral momentum. His base disliking him less is different than the public liking him more. In order for Trump to start gaining momentum, he’d have to start moving independents. Which he has been unable to do over the course of four years.
(8) We finish where we start.
There are always anomalies. Candidates will have good days and bad days; strong and weak debate performances; factual and grammatical mis-statements; tactical shrewdness and incompetence—and all of this will drive the public conversation on the race.
But there is no reason to believe that sheer competency and mental acuity are not evenly split in this race and that the net effect of these news items over the final three months is close to zero.
The voters might not be sure what they want. But they’re damn sure what they don’t want. And they’ve been certain of that since about March of 2017.