theatlantic--2020-04-12--The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve

“ Hindsight these days is not years later ; it ’ s weeks later , ” the senator said .
“ So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart .
She did the right thing at the right time , even though it ’ s not what people wanted to hear.
” To some extent , the divergent paths taken by San Francisco and New York , two cities linked by a lack of affordable housing and yawning wealth gaps , mirror a broader divide between the nation ’ s East and West Coasts .
Washington State , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nursing home made the state the early epicenter of the disease in America , has had more success than many other states containing the outbreak in the month since it first erupted there .
The governors of Oregon and California have even loaned ventilators to New York and the national stockpile since their supplies haven ’ t been depleted .
Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration ’ s late-January restrictions on travel from China , while the president ’ s delay in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t do until mid-March , hit New York hard .
( New research backs this up , indicating that most of New York ’ s early cases came from Europe in mid-February , The New York Times reported on Wednesday . )
Read : How the pandemic will end “ New York was like Italy , and San Francisco and Washington State are more like , not necessarily the South Koreans , but some of the Asian countries that have had slower growth rates , ” Shahpar , a former leader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Disease Control and Prevention , told me .
“ Really , it ’ s about early identification of a problem , saying , ‘ We ’ re going to be more proactive than reactive.
’ ” It ’ s that difference in decision making—proactive versus reactive—that has separated leaders at all levels of government during this crisis .
“ This virus has been ahead of us from day one , ” Cuomo lamented on Thursday , as he announced that , once again , New York had seen a daily record—799—in coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cuomo and de Blasio , who dragged their feet , not to mention Donald Trump .
But it is not true for Breed .
Public-health officials in San Francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in December , Mary Ellen Carroll , who runs the city ’ s Department of Emergency Management , told me .
By late January , Breed had activated San Francisco ’ s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country .
The mayor has since relocated the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing .
Everyone , including Breed , wears a mask when they meet , Carroll said .
Breed told me that what got her attention early on was the ghastly photographs and footage coming out of Wuhan , China , showing the region ’ s hospitals overrun by coronavirus patients .
“ A picture ’ s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mayor said , recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail .
“ We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco .
What do you mean we don ’ t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity ?
” Breed recalled thinking .
“ That ’ s when I was just like , Oh my goodness , this is serious .
And we need to basically sound the alarm in a way that helps us to get ready .
”

London Breed wasn’t going to wait around for COVID-19.
San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February. Two weeks later, Breed’s decision to ban gatherings of more than 1,000 people forced the hand of the Bay Area’s beloved Golden State Warriors, who this year moved into San Francisco’s Chase Center after nearly a half century in Oakland. Her decision, along with the NBA’s first positive case of the coronavirus, set in motion a chain of events that effectively shut down all of the nation’s major sports leagues.
At the time, Breed heard criticism that she was moving too quickly.
“Not anymore!” she told me with a chuckle when we spoke by phone this week.
Nearly a month after those initial orders to enforce social distancing, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have emerged as a national model for how early and aggressive action can prevent the explosive rise in cases that has overwhelmed hospitals in New York, where leaders were slower to respond. San Francisco’s case count of 857 as of April 10—with just 13 recorded deaths due to the coronavirus—is much lower than that in metropolises of comparable size such as New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The city’s curve is low and flattening, and patients are not flooding into its emergency rooms.
“All evidence suggests that they are doing much better, and the simplest explanation for that is that they did take social-distancing measures very seriously and they did it early,” says Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, which has been tracking the global COVID-19 outbreak.
San Francisco and California as a whole have struggled much more than New York to ramp up testing capacity, raising the possibility that the relatively low number of confirmed cases paints an overly rosy picture of the crisis there. But epidemiologists and public-health officials say that while positive cases are surely being undercounted—as they are across the country—San Francisco’s stable public-health system and low death count offer validation of its success so far.
“We’re seeing that our hospital beds are not very full at this point,” Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist at Stanford Medical School, told me. “We’re just not seeing a big spike there.”
“Deaths are hard to hide,” adds Cyrus Shahpar, a San Francisco–based director at Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit that combats global epidemics.
Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases. (California Governor Gavin Newsom followed with a similar statewide order a few days later.) On that date, New York City already had more than 2,000 positive cases. But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, reluctant either to shutter schools or issue a stay-at-home directive for the nation’s largest city, didn’t take similar action for several days. By the time New York City fully shut down on March 22, more than 10,000 cases were reported across its five boroughs.
Read: Cuomo and de Blasio: A tale of two leaders
Breed’s aggressiveness was not initially popular. As she ratcheted up the city’s social-distancing mandates, prominent San Franciscans began calling one of the mayor’s political mentors, Senator Kamala Harris. “London Breed’s about to shut down the city,” they complained, Harris told me. She told them to trust Breed.
“She took incredible political heat and criticism,” Harris said, “and she had the courage to make a decision that she in her gut, based on science and the research she did, told her this was the right thing to do for her people, even when other people couldn’t see it yet.”
The economic hardship a shutdown would cause was not lost on Breed. She was raised in a public-housing project by her grandmother, from whom, Harris said, Breed inherited a practical streak. Breed’s sister died of a drug overdose, while her brother is currently incarcerated on a 44-year sentence for manslaughter. “Her grandmother was a tough lady,” recalled Harris, who has known Breed for years. “She was practical, practical to her core.”
“Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”
To some extent, the divergent paths taken by San Francisco and New York, two cities linked by a lack of affordable housing and yawning wealth gaps, mirror a broader divide between the nation’s East and West Coasts. Washington State, where a cluster of coronavirus cases at a nursing home made the state the early epicenter of the disease in America, has had more success than many other states containing the outbreak in the month since it first erupted there. The governors of Oregon and California have even loaned ventilators to New York and the national stockpile since their supplies haven’t been depleted.
Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration’s late-January restrictions on travel from China, while the president’s delay in banning flights from Europe, which he didn’t do until mid-March, hit New York hard. (New research backs this up, indicating that most of New York’s early cases came from Europe in mid-February, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.)
Read: How the pandemic will end
“New York was like Italy, and San Francisco and Washington State are more like, not necessarily the South Koreans, but some of the Asian countries that have had slower growth rates,” Shahpar, a former leader of global rapid response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Really, it’s about early identification of a problem, saying, ‘We’re going to be more proactive than reactive.’”
It’s that difference in decision making—proactive versus reactive—that has separated leaders at all levels of government during this crisis. “This virus has been ahead of us from day one,” Cuomo lamented on Thursday, as he announced that, once again, New York had seen a daily record—799—in coronavirus deaths.
That may be true for Cuomo and de Blasio, who dragged their feet, not to mention Donald Trump. But it is not true for Breed.
Public-health officials in San Francisco began monitoring the coronavirus outbreak around the holidays in December, Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.
Breed told me that what got her attention early on was the ghastly photographs and footage coming out of Wuhan, China, showing the region’s hospitals overrun by coronavirus patients. “A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious. And we need to basically sound the alarm in a way that helps us to get ready.”
She said that as early as January, she recognized that the federal government was not prepared to offer the needed help to boost the city’s supply of protective equipment. On February 25, a top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, told reporters on a conference call that the coronavirus outbreak in the United States “may be severe” and that people should prepare for disruptions in daily life, including school closures. In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.
A week later, the mayor was urging her constituents on Twitter to “prepare for possible disruption from an outbreak.” That same day, de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers “to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus.”
As mayor of San Francisco, Breed holds a position that two of California’s leading Democrats—Newsom and Senator Dianne Feinstein—have used as a springboard to statewide office. But for Breed, it has not been an easy first two years at city hall. She ascended to the job automatically under city law in December 2017, after Mayor Ed Lee’s unexpected death from a heart attack. At the time, Breed was the only African American woman leading one of the most populous U. S. cities. But six weeks later, the Board of Supervisors ousted her and installed another lawmaker, a white man, in her place. Officially, the board did not want to give her a leg up in the mayoral election over a member who was running for the job. Some of Breed’s supporters, however, say the move smacked of racism.
Read: The white men’s club leading America’s largest cities
Breed, a Democrat aligned with the party’s establishment wing, won the mayoralty in a close special election a few months later, defeating two more progressive candidates with the help of tabulations from San Francisco’s system of ranked-choice voting. She won election to a full term in 2019, but spent much of the year battling progressives on the city’s pervasive homelessness problem and in local elections where candidates she endorsed were defeated. (Breed backed another losing horse in the presidential race, endorsing former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg midway through his short-lived bid.)
“It was a tough year last year,” concedes Andrea Dew Steele, a Breed ally and the founder of Emerge America, a national advocacy group that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for public office. “She didn’t have the coattails that many of us would liked to have seen.”
Breed’s performance responding to the coronavirus outbreak could make those earlier stumbles soon forgotten. Steele bemoans the fact that the mayor has yet to get the credit that “darlings” such as Cuomo have, despite more impressive results. In public, Steele told me, Breed has been both calming and commanding. “She’s quite matter-of-fact about why she did what she did. She listened to the experts and she took action,” Steele said. “She wasn’t equivocating about her decision.”
By her own admission, Breed had no particular experience with pandemic response prior to the coronavirus. The disasters San Francisco spends the most time practicing for are earthquakes and fires, although it did have an epidemic-response plan on hand. “This is not one we had practiced. But it is one that we were prepared for,” Breed said.
Breed may be relatively new to public-health crises, but the officials she has leaned on—Grant Colfax, a former director of HIV/AIDS policy in the Obama administration; Tomás Aragón, the county’s public-health chief; and Carroll—have decades of experience. Colfax began his career in the 1980s during the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and the epidemiologists I spoke with said the lessons from that period likely contributed to the city’s fast response to the current outbreak.
“I think they remember how hard it was when we didn’t close down the bathhouses and saw what happened to the epidemic at that point,” said Maldonado, the Stanford epidemiologist.
Officials in San Francisco are cautious about their initial success, cognizant that it could be fleeting if the city lets up too quickly on social distancing. “We are not in any way breathing a sigh of relief at this point or declaring victory in any way,” Carroll said.
Breed is concerned about the city’s large homeless population, and in particular those addicted to drugs who are not cooperating with social-distancing practices. The city has expanded shelter capacity to spread out people living in them, as well as invested more money in cleaning shelters. But it has not broken up tent cities of homeless people on the advice of the CDC, and Breed said many workers are now more reluctant to interact with homeless people who are refusing to adhere to social distancing. “It’s gonna be difficult,” she said. (Breed was right to be worried: After we spoke, the city announced that an outbreak at one of its largest homeless shelters had infected 70 residents and staff with the coronavirus.)
As for her city’s overall situation, its relative calm in the national storm, Breed is ambivalent, even nervous. She’s worried that good news will beget bad news, that the story of San Francisco’s success will lead its homebound citizens to relax at the very moment they must stay hunkered down. “San Franciscans are complying and people have been incredible with following this order. But on another note, there are a lot of folks who are not,” Breed admitted. “And I am not comfortable letting up.”


theatlantic--2020-04-11--Voter Suppression by Pandemic

Voter Suppression by Pandemic

Dovere : A lot of your work is in filing paperwork and in the courtroom , but a lot of the overall work around voting rights is , like much activism , rallies and demonstrations .
That doesn ’ t seem like it ’ s going to be part of this year ahead in anything like the way it would have been otherwise , without fears of a pandemic .
How do you go about doing this ?
Ifill : That ’ s absolutely the new normal .
What we do is we work to remove barriers and then we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters about where they can vote , what their rights are , how they can register and so forth .
There ’ s obviously no knocking on doors there .
No question , it ’ s a challenge .
The activism , particularly that exists in the African American community , has always been very strongly premised on our ability to come together and to march and to meet together .
And we won ’ t have that tool available to us .
But we , like everyone else , will have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of ensuring that our communities are well informed , well informed with the adequate tools they need to be able to participate fully in the election and in the political process .
Dovere : November was going to be , in most people ’ s expectations , the highest-turnout election in a long time because of all the interest in the presidential election .
It seems like that ’ s certainly not going to be the case now .
It may actually be a low-turnout election when it all comes down to it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ questions of who got to vote and how the vote happened .
How are we going to have faith no matter who wins ?
Ifill : Well , I don ’ t know that there ’ s very much we can do except try to put in place processes that give those who are open to listening to facts a sense that there is integrity in the election system .
Look , I ’ m not a conspiracy theorist , but I ’ m also not for pretending that voter suppression doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s very important that what we do is we work to make the election as legitimate as possible so that people can have confidence in it .
And if it is not legitimate , people will not have confidence in it .
So it is actually very important for whoever wins , in my view , to be invested in ensuring that the election is legitimate by ensuring that people have access to the ballot , by ensuring that every vote is counted and so forth .
That ’ s how you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that there are those who are working to undermine that , they are creating the context in which people can not have confidence in the election .
When I hear Attorney General Barr saying he has skepticism about mail-in voting—based on what ?
Where does that come from ?
These are the seeds that are being sown to try to create a sense of illegitimacy where one does not exist .
And it is shameful .
It is absolutely a disgrace for the attorney general of the United States , a lawyer of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out those kinds of doubts .
He ’ s a person in a position of tremendous power and leadership .
And when he says he ’ s skeptical , he is making a suggestion to those who are listening to him who can ’ t be expected to do their own research on it , but who are following his lead … that there is something illegitimate about mail-in voting .
It ’ s appalling

Wisconsin voters faced a choice this week: risk your health or lose your vote.
Those were the stakes on Tuesday, says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “I don’t know that it gets more stark, really more humiliating for us as a democracy,” she tells staff writer Edward-Isaac Dovere on an episode of The Atlantic’s politics podcast The Ticket.
Ifill says that Wisconsin legislators “created a perfect storm where it didn’t have to exist” and that the supreme court’s “terrible decision” allowing the election to proceed needlessly endangered voters. She describes how the current partisan debate around voter suppression obscures its roots as a tool of white supremacy, and she talks about what worries her (and what makes her hopeful) as we look to the election in November.
Listen to their full conversation here:
Subscribe to The Ticket: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts (How to Listen)
What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Edward-Isaac Dovere: Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of moves to change how voting is done in this country, most of it to restrict voting—with voter ID laws and cutting back in various ways to the voting rolls. There have been some moves to expand vote by mail or early voting. But generally, it seems like the direction of voting laws has been to make it trickier for people to vote rather than easier for people.
Sherrilyn Ifill: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve seen a period like this, and in fact that would only make it comparable to the early 1900s, when southern states adopted new constitutions that restricted voting for African Americans. I don’t think we’ve seen a period of sustained retrenchment as we have seen over the past seven or eight years. It’s really quite astonishing. And much of it is steeped in racial voter suppression. Some of it is steeped in partisan voter suppression. And there is an overlap between racial and partisan voter suppression, to be sure. And the willingness of the courts to allow it rather than to see it for what it is.
Dovere: And so it seems like what happened in Wisconsin with the state legislature not moving to change the primary date, it sort of fit into the overall movement that we’ve been seeing around the country—cutting back on voting accessibility—but also in Wisconsin specifically, which has been home to a lot of moves, whether it’s been cutting back the people who are registered to vote or gerrymandering that’s been going on there.
Ifill: When people think about some of the voter suppression that has been most dramatic over the last few years, they think about North Carolina, they think about Georgia. But if I had to pick a northern state, it would certainly be Wisconsin. Wisconsin imposed a voter ID law that a federal court found was created for the purpose of discriminating against African American voters. Wisconsin has a history of partisan gerrymandering that ended up in the United States Supreme Court. So it somehow was not at all shocking that if there was going to be this pandemic voting showdown, that it would happen in Wisconsin.
And I certainly indict the Wisconsin legislature. There is no reason that the Wisconsin primary could not have been postponed. The governor made an attempt to try to unilaterally move the primary and the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, interpreting Wisconsin law—and they are the last word on Wisconsin law—said that the governor did not have that power. So the primary was going to go forward. The question before the supreme court was about absentee ballots, about moving the date as the district court had done, for when absentee ballots could be received back by the Board of Elections, giving people more time.
There was an absentee ballot backlog because of the pandemic. Ten times more voters sought absentee ballots in Wisconsin than had ever done so before. And so the Board of Elections was backlogged and had not had the chance to mail out a lot of absentee ballots. So the very modest adjustment that the district court made in the case was that absentee ballots could be received up until April 13, which is when the election has to be counted and certified. It’s not as though there was some date between now and the 13th that was particularly important.
That’s the only issue that was before the supreme court. And the supreme court was not even willing to allow that very modest adjustment that he made to the process. And that meant that people who had sought an absentee ballot but had not yet received it now felt, if they wanted to vote, that they had to go out and cast their vote on Election Day. And people who had received the absentee ballot and were holding it could not put it in the mail, because it now had to be received on Election Day. And so they now had to go out and drop off their absentee ballot on Election Day. So it created a perfect storm where it didn’t have to exist. The election was going to go forward. But the many people, the tens of thousands of people who had attempted to vote by absentee ballot now were forced out if they wanted to exercise their right to vote. They had a choice between being disenfranchised, not voting, or risking their health and life in the midst of a deadly pandemic. I don’t know that it gets more stark, really more humiliating for us as a democracy, that that was the choice that we confronted voters with this week.
Dovere: When you think about the history of Wisconsin over the past 10 years, in 2010, Scott Walker, a Republican, was elected and there began to be a move toward a larger and larger Republican majority in the state legislature, but also after that, they did redistricting and gerrymandering that essentially ensured the Republican majorities in the state legislature. And then there were these moves along the way to cut back on how voting was done.
Ifill: Well, what you have described is accurate, but what it masks is that our conversation about partisanship and winners and losers has overtaken any conception of democracy. And it troubles me tremendously because that’s where these conversations end up. And we should remember that we’ve come here fairly recently. Of course, there’s always been partisanship and naked partisanship. But it’s also true that there used to be a space to talk about what were shared democratic ideals. The whole point of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the movement to ensure that southern jurisdictions were not able to prevent African Americans from voting was not only because it was nakedly racist, but it was also because of the recognition that we regard voting as a kind of sacred act of citizenship and that there was largely agreement on that. That was not a matter that was controversial.
Dovere: I guess that’s my question. How does this become partisan, the idea of people being able to vote? Because it does seem like at this point, somewhat reliably, if you look at people who want to expand access to voting, it’s Democrats; and people who are looking to do things to restrict access to voting—or what is often talked about as protecting the vote but that ends up being lower voter turnout in practice—are Republicans. And that’s just the fact of it. And it’s kind of stunning to see it fall down almost 100 percent reliably.
Ifill: You know, it’s really interesting you say that, because it’s so true. And I’ll tell you how this plays out very problematically for the work that I do. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is a nonpartisan civil-rights organization. We have been engaged in voting-rights litigation for a very long time, since the 1940s when Thurgood Marshall won Smith v. Allwright in 1944, which was a case in which the Supreme Court struck down the practice of the Democratic Party in Texas, who insisted on all-white primaries. The all-white primary in the South was kind of the way that Democrats controlled the South for many decades. We all know that those were the old Democrats. And we know that, beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s and certainly solidified by the early 1960s, those who were associated with racism and white supremacy flocked to the Republican Party, fleeing from the efforts to ensure that African Americans were true citizens, in opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, in opposition to the Voting Rights Act and so forth.
So we cannot deny the racial dimensions of what you’ve described as a partisan reality. What becomes difficult is when we begin to talk about this as though it is purely partisan and as though the racial dynamic did not drive it first. And so I end up in conversations even like the one I’m having now, even though I am nonpartisan. I don’t work for the Democrats, nor do I try to advance any particular political party. And in fact, I’m old enough to actually—and I won’t say the age—have been a voting-rights lawyer long enough that some of my first cases were suing Democrats, southern Democratic governors. So this has never been a partisan issue for me. But what happens is that the conversation now rests within this framework of partisanship in which I am compelled to say what I just said, offer the disclaimer that I am nonpartisan and the organization I lead is nonpartisan, because we’ve forgotten that race was the engine that drove the whole thing. And that race remains very central to this issue.
When you ask why, it’s about power. It’s about white supremacy and power. In 2013 and 2014, when I would talk about white supremacy in the context of voter ID laws, people would roll their eyes. It sounded like I was being so dramatic. People understood white supremacy to be the march in Charlottesville. It’s Nazi flags. It’s people with Nazi salutes, and using the N-word, and saying racist things. But white supremacy at its core is the effort by whites to hold on to power no matter what. That’s what massive resistance was about. That’s what southern segregation was about. That’s what the denial of the right to vote throughout the South for black people was about. It was about white supremacy, about this fear of sharing power with black and brown people.
And I guess I want to be very clear that that remains at the heart of much of this. To the extent that that correlates with party, that is a complicating factor that I think makes it very difficult for people sometimes to see why voter suppression is so unconscionable, because people say, “Well, partisan politics and, you know, we’ve always had partisan politics.” But if people really wanted to understand why it’s unconscionable, it’s because it is animated by and emanates from the same motivation that kept the South from allowing black people to vote in the years before the civil-rights movement.
When you watch what happened in Wisconsin, it wasn’t just some accident. It wasn’t a confluence of factors that no one could have imagined. You know, it was exactly what you would expect. We know what these things are. We know how they’re going to affect the African American community, just like voter ID. We know how it’s going to affect the African American community and yet we allow it to go forward in any case. So I think this is a really important watershed moment for us to start having the conversation about what voter suppression really is about, who really benefits when we make it harder to vote. When the president suddenly, out of the blue, disparages mail-in voting, which he has used consistently, what is it about? And if we start the conversation by talking about Republicans and Democrats, then we contribute to losing the very core racial dynamics that lie at the heart of all of this.
Dovere: When you think forward to the next few months, especially with what we saw happen in Wisconsin, voters and election administrators will have to address the coronavirus.
Ifill: The position we have taken is that we should be providing a range and as many means for all voters to access the system as possible. I would never have thought that I would have to say this, but we start from the premise that voting should not require you taking your life into your hands.
So we think there has to be a menu. Sure, there should be open polls to the extent possible. Many of the polls were closed, for example, in Milwaukee County because, as we all know, many of our poll workers are elderly. And they began calling out in droves, saying essentially that they weren’t going to work, and appropriately so, on Election Day, because they feared exposing themselves to the virus.
Dovere: Does what happened here become a blueprint for ways that you would fear other states could use to restrict voting?
Ifill: It’s absolutely, for me, a blueprint of what I cannot allow, what those of us who do this work cannot allow to happen in November. And that means we need more early voting so that you don’t have lines, because you have a longer period of early voting. You do need to have drop-off absentee stations. You do need to expand the time for absentee ballots to be returned to the Board of Elections. We need all of this to deal with the challenges of this pandemic. There are ways to manage this. And I think that’s the menu we’re all sitting with right now and are prepared to lean in to, to ensure that in November we don’t have an election that causes people to risk their lives, but we also have an election that we don’t have to be ashamed of, that everyone who is a citizen who wants to participate can participate on November 3.
Dovere: A lot of your work is in filing paperwork and in the courtroom, but a lot of the overall work around voting rights is, like much activism, rallies and demonstrations. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to be part of this year ahead in anything like the way it would have been otherwise, without fears of a pandemic. How do you go about doing this?
Ifill: That’s absolutely the new normal. What we do is we work to remove barriers and then we try to get the information out to voters about where they can vote, what their rights are, how they can register and so forth. There’s obviously no knocking on doors there. No question, it’s a challenge. The activism, particularly that exists in the African American community, has always been very strongly premised on our ability to come together and to march and to meet together. And we won’t have that tool available to us. But we, like everyone else, will have to adjust. And we have every intention of ensuring that our communities are well informed, well informed with the adequate tools they need to be able to participate fully in the election and in the political process.
Dovere: November was going to be, in most people’s expectations, the highest-turnout election in a long time because of all the interest in the presidential election. It seems like that’s certainly not going to be the case now. It may actually be a low-turnout election when it all comes down to it. And there are going to be questions of who got to vote and how the vote happened. How are we going to have faith no matter who wins?
Ifill: Well, I don’t know that there’s very much we can do except try to put in place processes that give those who are open to listening to facts a sense that there is integrity in the election system. Look, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I’m also not for pretending that voter suppression doesn’t exist.
So I think it’s very important that what we do is we work to make the election as legitimate as possible so that people can have confidence in it. And if it is not legitimate, people will not have confidence in it. So it is actually very important for whoever wins, in my view, to be invested in ensuring that the election is legitimate by ensuring that people have access to the ballot, by ensuring that every vote is counted and so forth. That’s how you get legitimacy. And to the extent that there are those who are working to undermine that, they are creating the context in which people cannot have confidence in the election. When I hear Attorney General Barr saying he has skepticism about mail-in voting—based on what? Where does that come from?
These are the seeds that are being sown to try to create a sense of illegitimacy where one does not exist. And it is shameful. It is absolutely a disgrace for the attorney general of the United States, a lawyer of long-standing practice and experience, to throw out those kinds of doubts. He’s a person in a position of tremendous power and leadership. And when he says he’s skeptical, he is making a suggestion to those who are listening to him who can’t be expected to do their own research on it, but who are following his lead … that there is something illegitimate about mail-in voting. It’s appalling
Dovere: How worried are you about where our democracy is headed?
Ifill: Well, this is what I’ve given my life to for 30 years. So my dial is set to worry about our democracy, because that’s what civil-rights work is. It is born of deep concern about our democracy. But you can look at that [Wisconsin] election and what we saw two ways.
One, as I have already expressed, is that it was shameful and a disgrace that we consigned people to have to choose between their health and their right as citizens to participate and vote. No question. But I also am compelled to see the extraordinary, powerful nobility of those people standing—some of them in wheelchairs—staggered and separated from each other as best they could by six feet, for hours on end, determined to participate in the political process. That has to be the power that really fuels us to do the work that we do.


theatlantic--2020-04-11--The Most Important 2020 States Already Have Vote by Mail

Marc Elias : How to fix our voting rules before November But experts in voter turnout and mail voting anticipate that however these fights play out , the share of Americans who cast ballots by mail in November may roughly double from the previous presidential election , from just under one-quarter in 2016 to about one-half this year .
Jocelyn Benson , Michigan ’ s secretary of state and a Democrat , expressed a broad consensus among local officials when she told me , “ We will certainly see people voting by mail more than ever before in our state.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenges , particularly in states where relatively few people historically have used the option .
But contrary to the president ’ s warnings , the evidence suggests it is unlikely to provide a clear advantage for either party .
Using data from the large post-election poll known as the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart found that roughly the same share of Republicans and Democrats voted by mail in 2016 .
“ When you have a system of elections that have multiple methods by which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or Election Day—the mail ballots tend to be the most Republican of the group , ” says Michael McDonald , a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout .
This mid-pandemic debate about voting by mail is muddied , in part , because Trump has been so unclear about exactly what form he objects to .
All states allow one of three types .
Five states , the smallest grouping , are “ all mail ” states : Washington , Oregon , Colorado , Utah , and , starting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all eligible voters are mailed a ballot to their home .
( California allows its counties to use such a system , but has not yet applied it statewide . )
These states preserve some in-person options on Election Day , but in those that used this system in 2018 , at least 90 percent of voters cast their ballot by mail .
The largest group is the 28 states that allow for “ no excuse , ” or “ no fault , ” mail balloting .
The procedure still adds one hurdle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But some states in this cohort , such as Arizona , do allow residents to join a list that automatically receives absentee ballots for every election .
The final group , 17 states , allows voters to obtain a mail ballot only for cause .
According to the database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures , eligible causes include age ( about half of the states allow older voters to obtain mail-in ballots on request ) and studying at college outside of one ’ s home county ( also a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states ) .
All 17 also allow residents to request mail ballots because of illness or disability , a provision that could allow for broader access this fall .
But it could also prompt extensive legal fights if election officials resist interpreting such provisions to include the coronavirus outbreak .

In the states that will likely decide the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump has already lost his newly declared war against voting by mail.
All six of the swing states that both sides see as the most probable tipping points allow their residents to vote by mail for any reason, and there’s virtually no chance that any of them will retrench their existing laws this year. That means that, however much Trump rages, the legal structure is in place for a mail-voting surge in those decisive states: Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona in the Sun Belt and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt.
Such an increase “is going to happen” in states across the country this year, says Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The president can’t prevent it from happening, his protestations notwithstanding. Voters are going to choose that option, and jurisdictions are going to need to make that option widely available in order to protect public health and administer their elections.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s new crusade will have no effect. It’s so far stiffening Republican opposition to plans for furthering expand mail-voting access in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Those proposals include calls from Democrats and election-law reformers to preemptively mail all eligible voters a ballot, as five states do now, or to require all states to allow their residents to vote absentee for any reason. In the 28 states that already allow this “no excuse” absentee balloting, partisan struggles are nevertheless looming over whether to make the voting process easier.
Marc Elias: How to fix our voting rules before November
But experts in voter turnout and mail voting anticipate that however these fights play out, the share of Americans who cast ballots by mail in November may roughly double from the previous presidential election, from just under one-quarter in 2016 to about one-half this year. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state and a Democrat, expressed a broad consensus among local officials when she told me, “We will certainly see people voting by mail more than ever before in our state.”
This shift will create enormous logistical challenges, particularly in states where relatively few people historically have used the option. But contrary to the president’s warnings, the evidence suggests it is unlikely to provide a clear advantage for either party. Using data from the large post-election poll known as the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart found that roughly the same share of Republicans and Democrats voted by mail in 2016.
“When you have a system of elections that have multiple methods by which people can vote—mail, in-person early voting, or Election Day—the mail ballots tend to be the most Republican of the group,” says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout.
This mid-pandemic debate about voting by mail is muddied, in part, because Trump has been so unclear about exactly what form he objects to. All states allow one of three types.
Five states, the smallest grouping, are “all mail” states: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and, starting this year, Hawaii. There, all eligible voters are mailed a ballot to their home. (California allows its counties to use such a system, but has not yet applied it statewide.) These states preserve some in-person options on Election Day, but in those that used this system in 2018, at least 90 percent of voters cast their ballot by mail.
The largest group is the 28 states that allow for “no excuse,” or “no fault,” mail balloting. The procedure still adds one hurdle: Voters must affirmatively request a ballot. But some states in this cohort, such as Arizona, do allow residents to join a list that automatically receives absentee ballots for every election.
The final group, 17 states, allows voters to obtain a mail ballot only for cause. According to the database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures, eligible causes include age (about half of the states allow older voters to obtain mail-in ballots on request) and studying at college outside of one’s home county (also a justifiable reason in roughly half of the states). All 17 also allow residents to request mail ballots because of illness or disability, a provision that could allow for broader access this fall. But it could also prompt extensive legal fights if election officials resist interpreting such provisions to include the coronavirus outbreak.
None of the five all-mail states (or California) are expected to be close in the coming contest between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, though the Trump campaign holds distant hopes of contesting Colorado. Of the 17 states that require voters to justify an absentee ballot, only New Hampshire and Texas could fit the category of potentially competitive states in the presidential race; the former still clearly leans toward Democrats, while Republicans remain favored in the latter.
The genuinely key states for November all fall into the middle category, allowing no-excuse mail balloting. They include not only the six noted above, but even a second tier of possibly competitive states, such as Iowa, Georgia, and Ohio (which Democrats might try to contest with smaller chances of success), and Minnesota, Nevada, and New Mexico (which Trump still hopes, at long odds, to contest).
The entire debate over voter access this fall would probably look very different without big recent changes to the law in two of the most crucial swing states: Michigan and Pennsylvania. Both states used to require voters to have an excuse for requesting a mail ballot. In November, both will use a no-excuse vote-by-mail system for the first time in a general election.
The irony in the president’s new offensive is that in many of the no-excuse states, Republicans have historically outpaced Democrats in organizing their supporters, especially older white voters, to vote by mail. In Arizona, for instance, Republicans outnumber Democrats on the state rolls of voters who have signed up to automatically receive a mail ballot. Arizonans over 50, a conservative-leaning bloc, also significantly outnumber those under 40. Voting by mail there has traditionally been “a Republican advantage,” Charles Coughlin, a veteran GOP consultant in the state, told me. “It was a program we have perfected over time because we chased it, and we made it happen.” The same is true in Florida.
Leah Litman: The Supreme Court’s Wisconsin decision is a terrible sign for November
Operatives in both parties say Democrats have narrowed the gap with Republicans since Barack Obama promoted voting by mail in his two presidential campaigns. For instance, armed with the new no-excuses law in Pennsylvania, the state Democratic Party is “turning our entire organizing effort into encouraging people to vote by mail,” says Brendan Welch, the party’s communications director. “It’s very clear that it is the safest way for people to vote in these circumstances.”
But generally speaking, Democrats have prioritized in-person early voting instead of mail balloting, such as the traditional “souls to the polls” pushes at African American churches the Sunday before Election Day. Seth Morris, the voter-protection director for the North Carolina Democratic Party, told me Democrats there are determined to preserve these practices. They aren’t seeking a complete shift to voting by mail in response to the outbreak.
“We don’t really want that to happen,” he said. “Particularly in African American communities, people like to go vote, and they trust that process a lot. In the states that have gone to universal vote by mail, it took them years … And I don’t think anyone here wants to do that.”
Congressional Democrats want to set national rules for November’s election—to require all states to either permit no-excuse absentee voting, or mail ballots to every eligible voter if a national health emergency is declared close to Election Day. But given that such legislation has virtually no chance of clearing the Republican Senate—much less winning Trump’s signature—the partisan battles to come will play out primarily in the states and the courts. Early signs indicate that this struggle will unfold along three broad fronts.
The first front is about whether states should expand access to mail ballots at all. In states that require a justification for voting absentee, Democrats could press to allow no-excuse access to mail ballots. And in states that already permit no-excuse absentee voting, reform advocates like Weiser expect many officials to advocate for mailing all voters a ballot, eliminating the intermediate step of requiring voters to request one. Earlier this week, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, proposed such a step. Benson, Simon’s counterpart in Michigan, told me that many states may ultimately conclude that this is the safest way to conduct a mid-pandemic election.
“The ultimate efficiency—if you have the infrastructure to support it, and you have the voter will and demand behind it—is eliminating the request and enabling citizens to just receive their ballot based on being registered,” she said. Benson acknowledged that “it does take some time for the voters’ will to get there,” especially “if you have leaders questioning the sanctity of the process.“ But, she added, “I do think, in this unique moment, all [options] need to be considered and on the table in order to be sure that the voters’ will is heard in November.”
A small number of Republican governors, such as Ohio’s Mike DeWine, might pursue automatic mail voting for the general election, but most—if not all—are likely to be dubious. Florida, for instance, “has always been ahead of the curve on the vote-by-mail trend, and we already have a very high utilization,” says the GOP consultant Brad Herold, a former executive director of that state’s Republican Party. “I don’t think there is going to be widespread calls for the state to do more than we are already doing,”
In states with Democratic governors, Republicans are likely to fiercely oppose any efforts to move to an all-mail system, especially if governors try to use executive orders on public-health grounds. Minnesota’s Republican Party chairwoman, Jennifer Carnahan, responded to the all-mail proposal there by immediately declaring, “The apocalypse has arrived.” The plan is “simply a path to steal the elections in Minnesota this year,” she said in a statement this week.
Weiser told me that a preliminary Brennan Center review of state laws shows that most governors “have broad emergency powers” that authorize them to impose “these kind of changes.” But Republicans are unlikely to agree and would be sure to fight such declarations in state courts. (If cases reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the same five GOP-appointed justices who stymied Wisconsin’s efforts to extend mail voting in its primary this week could eventually vote to block other states’ moves too.) A compromise some states could strike is to send all voters a notice reminding them that they can apply for an absentee ballot; Ohio did that for its primary later this month, and Arizona is discussing this approach ahead of the general election.
The second front of conflict will be over the extensive rules surrounding the vote-by-mail process, even in the states with no-excuse absentee voting. “The details matter a ton at the state level,” says Phil Keisling, a former Democratic secretary of state of Oregon and the chair of the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group.
Partisan conflicts could erupt over how exactly citizens can request absentee ballots (many don’t allow them to do so online); whether the state will pay the postage to return the ballot (Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania are among those that don’t); and whether, amid the outbreak, states should still require voters to obtain witness signatures before submitting their ballot (as North Carolina and Wisconsin, among others, do). “Probably … tens of thousands of people will have difficulty getting those witnesses,” Morris said.
The most contentious subject will be the standards used to judge which ballots are rejected, particularly on the grounds that a voter’s signature doesn’t match records on file.
Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, has found that mail ballots in that state from young people and minorities are rejected at higher rates than those from older people and white voters—a dynamic that has obvious benefits for Republicans. In some states, Weiser noted, the election officials determining whether to accept a ballot can see on their screen the age and partisan affiliation of the voter they are assessing. Stewart told me he anticipates “a lot of litigation about the rejection of absentee ballots.”
Finally, the third front of conflict that experts foresee is not ideological but logistical: whether states have enough money and staff to handle increased demand. Even no-excuse states vary enormously in the use of mail balloting. In Arizona, about three-fourths of votes are cast by mail. In Michigan and Minnesota, it’s about one-fourth. In other no-excuse states, the number is far, far lower: Six percent or less of votes in 2018 were cast by mail in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Jeffrey Davis: How Donald Trump could steal the election
This week’s primary election in Wisconsin, which has no-excuse mail balloting, previewed the chaos that could be ahead. In both 2016 and 2018, only about 5 percent of the state’s votes were cast by mail. Final figures aren’t yet available, but preliminary results leave no doubt that amid the widespread health concerns, mail ballots accounted for a significant majority of the total primary vote. That demand overwhelmed the state’s system—to the point that thousands of voters apparently did not receive their ballots until it was too late to return them. (The U.S. Supreme Court’s late-in-game ruling required that all ballots be postmarked by Election Day.)
States “are not going to be able to manage just the mass requests that are going to come in and then the massive ballots that are going to be sent out,” McDonald says. “It’s going to be a mess. Wisconsin is the canary in the coal mine. In November, we are going to have a whole flock of dead canaries.”
McDonald and other experts say that to handle the increased workload—reflected in everything from the number of ballots a state prints to the number of workers it will need to review them—states will need a lot more than the $400 million Congress has already appropriated to expand access.
And, he added, Republicans resistant to increased funding or other reforms could be too clever by half. There’s no evidence that their base, which includes an increasing number of white voters with less education, will easily navigate a complicated vote-by-mail process. “I think Republicans could overthink this and they could hurt themselves come November,” he told me. “I hope they come around and realize their voters are at risk as much as the Democrats’ are.”


theatlantic--2020-04-10--Gary Locke Is Mad About That Trump Ad

Gary Locke Is Mad About That Trump Ad

In other words : Locke is not a Chinese official , as the Trump campaign made him out to be , apparently because of the way he looks and because he was standing next to a Chinese flag .
“ It is racial stereotyping at its worst .
Asian Americans—whether you ’ re second- , third- , or fourth-generation , will always be viewed as foreigners , ” Locke told me today .
“ We don ’ t say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans .
No one would even think to include them in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foreign government officials.
” Locke is justifiably bewildered by being thrown into the middle of the campaign .
“ For a lot of Asian Americans , it ’ s not surprising , but it is disheartening , ” he said .
Locke ’ s father was part of the Normandy invasion , then was ordered along with the rest of the Fifth Armored Division to the Battle of the Bulge .
When Locke watched Band of Brothers , he says , he recognized his father ’ s story in it .
He grew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and went on to a long political career that took him through the state legislature , county government , two terms as governor , three years as Barack Obama ’ s commerce secretary and then two years as Obama ’ s ambassador to China , from 2011 to 2013 .
These days , he ’ s back home , watching the coronavirus crisis unfold in his own state and using his down time in self-isolation to build a second-story deck on his house and finish up some gardening projects .
His grown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to fall and break his back , like he did 20 years ago , when he was in the middle of budget negotiations with the legislature in Olympia .
One of Locke ’ s friends has already died of COVID-19 .
His first campaign treasurer is in the hospital .
And now he ’ s suddenly been pulled into the presidential campaign by an inadvertent cameo—which he said fits into a long history of racism against Asians in America , stretching from the Chinese Exclusion Act , to the internment of Japanese Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increase in anti-Asian hate crimes as the president and his allies repeatedly refer to the pandemic as the “ Chinese virus.
” In a statement he scrambled to put out this afternoon , Locke said Trump was “ fanning hatred.
” He said with hate crimes and discrimination on the rise across the country , “ the Trump team is making it worse .
Asian Americans are Americans .
Period.
” In what seems like both an obvious continuation of past behavior and a sign of what ’ s to come , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Locke was intentional , serving a political purpose that would have been recognizable only to the president ’ s super fans : that it was actually a subliminal nod to the conspiracy theory that Biden helped his son secure a business deal by bringing him on an official trip .
( Hunter Biden did fly to China on Air Force Two and has said he did have a few business meetings while there , but aside from a brief handshake that the vice president shared with one of his son ’ s business @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s business dealings and his father ’ s position has ever been shown . )
“ The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013 .
It ’ s for a reason .
That ’ s the Hunter Biden trip .
Memory Lane for ol ’ Joe , ” the Trump campaign ’ s communications director , Tim Murtaugh , tweeted .
Later , the Republican National Committee ’ s rapid-response director defensively tweeted a screenshot of the clip that included only Biden and the Chinese flag , not Locke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too .

It was getting late in the afternoon, but Gary Locke hadn’t had time for breakfast or lunch. Too many emails, phone calls, and texts had been coming in from friends, family, former aides. The former Washington governor’s friends were indignant. They wanted to know if he had seen President Donald Trump’s campaign ad featuring him. He had. His reaction? “It’s more anger,” he said. He paused. He’s a pretty mild guy, generally. “It’s anger.”
Locke endorsed Joe Biden for president last summer, but he hadn’t expected to be featured in an attack ad. The Trump campaign probably never expected to feature him either. But there he is, in a brief clip included in a montage of the former vice president meeting with various Chinese officials. Locke is standing between two Chinese flags (and next to an American one). Biden is walking toward him, with his head bowed in a way that makes him look deferential.
It’s a standard theatrical move that Biden often does when he sees old political allies. And Locke is an old Biden ally. But he isn’t Chinese. He’s Chinese American. And though the photo was taken at an event in Beijing, it was taken while Locke was serving in the same administration as Biden—as the American ambassador to China. Before that, he was the first Asian American governor of a state not called Hawaii. A section of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle is devoted to him.
Read: Meet Gary Locke, America’s new ambassador to China
In other words: Locke is not a Chinese official, as the Trump campaign made him out to be, apparently because of the way he looks and because he was standing next to a Chinese flag.
“It is racial stereotyping at its worst. Asian Americans—whether you’re second-, third-, or fourth-generation, will always be viewed as foreigners,” Locke told me today. “We don’t say that about second- or third-generation Irish Americans or Polish Americans. No one would even think to include them in a picture when you’re talking about foreign government officials.”
Locke is justifiably bewildered by being thrown into the middle of the campaign. “For a lot of Asian Americans, it’s not surprising, but it is disheartening,” he said.
Read: The other problematic outbreak
Locke’s father was part of the Normandy invasion, then was ordered along with the rest of the Fifth Armored Division to the Battle of the Bulge. When Locke watched Band of Brothers, he says, he recognized his father’s story in it. He grew up in a housing project in Seattle, and went on to a long political career that took him through the state legislature, county government, two terms as governor, three years as Barack Obama’s commerce secretary and then two years as Obama’s ambassador to China, from 2011 to 2013. These days, he’s back home, watching the coronavirus crisis unfold in his own state and using his down time in self-isolation to build a second-story deck on his house and finish up some gardening projects. His grown kids are worried he’s going to fall and break his back, like he did 20 years ago, when he was in the middle of budget negotiations with the legislature in Olympia.
One of Locke’s friends has already died of COVID-19. His first campaign treasurer is in the hospital. And now he’s suddenly been pulled into the presidential campaign by an inadvertent cameo—which he said fits into a long history of racism against Asians in America, stretching from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes as the president and his allies repeatedly refer to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus.”
In a statement he scrambled to put out this afternoon, Locke said Trump was “fanning hatred.” He said with hate crimes and discrimination on the rise across the country, “the Trump team is making it worse. Asian Americans are Americans. Period.”
In what seems like both an obvious continuation of past behavior and a sign of what’s to come, the Trump campaign responded by insisting that including Locke was intentional, serving a political purpose that would have been recognizable only to the president’s super fans: that it was actually a subliminal nod to the conspiracy theory that Biden helped his son secure a business deal by bringing him on an official trip. (Hunter Biden did fly to China on Air Force Two and has said he did have a few business meetings while there, but aside from a brief handshake that the vice president shared with one of his son’s business partners, no connection between Hunter’s business dealings and his father’s position has ever been shown.) “The shot with the flags specifically places Biden in Beijing in 2013. It’s for a reason. That’s the Hunter Biden trip. Memory Lane for ol’ Joe,” the Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, tweeted. Later, the Republican National Committee’s rapid-response director defensively tweeted a screenshot of the clip that included only Biden and the Chinese flag, not Locke or the American flag that was onstage too.
Chris Lu, who became friends with Locke when they served together under Obama (Lu was the secretary of the Cabinet and, later, the deputy labor secretary), told me that his assessment of that defense was simple: “It’s bullshit.”
“It’s sort of comical that they think all Chinese people look alike, but more broadly, it’s part of an attack on Asian Americans as others,” Lu said. And it’s part of a pattern, Lu argued. Trump has attacked a Mexican American judge as “Mexican” and concluded that the judge was therefore biased against him, and he has suggested that Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-born former White House national-security official who testified as part of the impeachment hearings, held dual loyalties.
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, whose parents immigrated to America from Taiwan, said on Twitter: “Goddamn this shit is infuriating. Gary Locke is as American as the day is long. Trump rewriting history as if he effectively responded to the virus is utter garbage. We lost 70 days and thousands of lives due to his incompetence and disregard for what was happening overseas.”
The ad as a whole makes a confusing argument: that Biden is soft on China because of his own good relationships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and others, and that this makes him somehow culpable for decisions related to the pandemic. Trump has made overtures to Xi himself, including inviting the leader to Mar-a-Lago and having Ivanka Trump’s daughter perform a song for him in Mandarin; tweeting that they’ll “always be friends”; and taking his word on supposed efforts to contain the coronavirus—all mixed in with his trade-war rattling and posturing on currency manipulation. (The Locke appearance also isn’t the only factual problem with this ad.)
When I asked Murtaugh to explain the ad, he sent me a statement that was a slightly longer version of what he’d tweeted last night. He provided no answers to specific questions, no explanation, and no response to Locke’s concerns about stoking division, xenophobia, and potentially more hate crimes. There was certainly no apology.
“I don’t expect an apology from them,” Locke told me. “It is so characteristic of their view toward people of color.”


theatlantic--2020-04-10--What Easter Can Teach Us About Suffering

Read : The ancient math that sets the date of Easter and Passover Easter weekend is usually a celebratory and social time of year , with pastel outfits and egg hunts and elaborate family brunches .
The story it marks is one of joy for Christians : Jesus ’ s resurrection , offering the fulfillment of a promise and the hope of human salvation .
This year , most people will spend the holiday alone , maybe tuning in to an online worship service or communicating with family members over Zoom .
Many Christians will carry sorrow and worry , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighbors or friends in big cities .
But perhaps there ’ s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter .
“ Most of us have taken the shallow way—we want to have Jesus as savior and get to heaven .
They ’ re missing the Gospel , ” Dorrell said .
“ It ’ s entering the pain , getting off of my place of safety and security , moving in among the poor , working among the broken , suffering with people.
” In a time when many Americans are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a season of clarity about what it means to be a person of faith .
At the end of March , as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths was sharply rising , President Donald Trump declared that he wanted “ the country opened up ” by Easter .
When a reporter asked why he had selected that date , he replied , “ I just thought it was a beautiful time.
” Public-health officials were quick to caution that lifting restrictions so soon would be dangerous , and the president soon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comments illustrate how unthinkable this moment is : Most of the country will be shut down through one of the biggest Christian holidays of the year .
It ’ s hard for anyone not to yearn for a different reality .
While Dorrell would never wish a pandemic on the world , in a certain sense he seems to relish the normal ways of religious life getting turned upside down .
“ I grew up in that religious culture where we all had to have new clothes , and we all had to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Easter , he said .
This is “ the superficiality of most of the Christian Church in America : It ’ s pretty .
We have a big building and a gorgeous place with choir robes and stuff.
” Dorrell , who refers to himself as “ a recovering Baptist , ” describes his congregation , the Church Under the Bridge , as nondenominational in every sense of the word : middle-class and poor ; black , white , and brown ; ex-offenders and the homeless .
“ I ’ ve got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ and I ’ ve got wild-eyed charismatics.
” In recent months , the group has been meeting in Waco ’ s Silos—the headquarters of the home-decor empire run by Chip and Joanna Gaines—while the I-35 bridge is under construction .
The pandemic has derailed its typical 300-person worship services , however .
Now each week consists of cooking burgers for the homeless , calling and visiting congregants who live alone or don ’ t have internet access , and trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy during this unusual Lent .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Church Under the Bridge involves Jesus riding in on a motorcycle—it ’ s a long story involving an intransigent donkey—and it kept that up this year , with a guy on a hog riding around a block away from its socially distanced gathering .

Jimmy Dorrell is the kind of Texas pastor who slips into preaching mode within the first five minutes of conversation, who has to tell two stories before finishing the first. His jokes can skip right past you if you’re not paying attention. On Palm Sunday, the fast-talking 70-year-old stood in the middle of Waco’s Webster Avenue, near Baylor University, wearing a light-blue face mask and a black hoodie, surrounded at six-foot intervals by homeless men and women waving palm fronds. Beside the street’s double yellow lines, a tattooed Jesus washed the feet of one of the men, while volunteers in masks and gloves waited on the sidewalk to put food from a slow cooker onto Styrofoam trays.
This is what church looks like during a pandemic: distanced, clouded by the threat of disease, but stubbornly persistent. Dorrell, whose congregation started meeting under a bridge close to I-35 nearly 30 years ago, is sad that his people can’t meet the way they used to on Sundays, that the crews who cook for the homeless are limited to 10 to 15 people at a time. As weird as this time is, though, remaining faithful through a period of fear and illness is exactly what faith is about, he says. “Protestants, we don’t do very well when it comes to dealing with the suffering of Christ,” he told me. Despite the many parts of the Bible that depict intense pain, “we middle-class Christians don’t like those passages, because we don’t want to suffer. We just want the good stuff.”
Read: The ancient math that sets the date of Easter and Passover
Easter weekend is usually a celebratory and social time of year, with pastel outfits and egg hunts and elaborate family brunches. The story it marks is one of joy for Christians: Jesus’s resurrection, offering the fulfillment of a promise and the hope of human salvation. This year, most people will spend the holiday alone, maybe tuning in to an online worship service or communicating with family members over Zoom. Many Christians will carry sorrow and worry, wondering about the health of their elderly neighbors or friends in big cities. But perhaps there’s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter. “Most of us have taken the shallow way—we want to have Jesus as savior and get to heaven. They’re missing the Gospel,” Dorrell said. “It’s entering the pain, getting off of my place of safety and security, moving in among the poor, working among the broken, suffering with people.” In a time when many Americans are mourning their usual life, this may be a season of clarity about what it means to be a person of faith.
At the end of March, as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths was sharply rising, President Donald Trump declared that he wanted “the country opened up” by Easter. When a reporter asked why he had selected that date, he replied, “I just thought it was a beautiful time.” Public-health officials were quick to caution that lifting restrictions so soon would be dangerous, and the president soon backed off his statements. But his comments illustrate how unthinkable this moment is: Most of the country will be shut down through one of the biggest Christian holidays of the year. It’s hard for anyone not to yearn for a different reality.
While Dorrell would never wish a pandemic on the world, in a certain sense he seems to relish the normal ways of religious life getting turned upside down. “I grew up in that religious culture where we all had to have new clothes, and we all had to sit in the family row together” on Easter, he said. This is “the superficiality of most of the Christian Church in America: It’s pretty. We have a big building and a gorgeous place with choir robes and stuff.” Dorrell, who refers to himself as “a recovering Baptist,” describes his congregation, the Church Under the Bridge, as nondenominational in every sense of the word: middle-class and poor; black, white, and brown; ex-offenders and the homeless. “I’ve got Lutherans and Episcopalians,” he said, “and I’ve got wild-eyed charismatics.”
(Courtesy of Jimmy Dorrell)
In recent months, the group has been meeting in Waco’s Silos—the headquarters of the home-decor empire run by Chip and Joanna Gaines—while the I-35 bridge is under construction. The pandemic has derailed its typical 300-person worship services, however. Now each week consists of cooking burgers for the homeless, calling and visiting congregants who live alone or don’t have internet access, and trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy during this unusual Lent. A traditional Palm Sunday celebration for the Church Under the Bridge involves Jesus riding in on a motorcycle—it’s a long story involving an intransigent donkey—and it kept that up this year, with a guy on a hog riding around a block away from its socially distanced gathering.
Dorrell delights in this kind of weirdness, which underscores how different his community is from the typical American church. Just as Dorrell is critical of the version of Christianity that hawks salvation at no cost, he’s skeptical of pastors who have refused to cancel church services during the pandemic. “I think a lot of times, it’s egocentric leadership that has this pulpit that says, ‘God will conquer everything. We’ll just get together, and we’ll show them that we’re not going to get sick,’” he said. “They really don’t love their people as much as they act like they do on the pulpit.”
Read: How are parents supposed to deal with joint custody right now?
The overwhelming majority of churches in America have shut down in accordance with government guidelines, with many putting their services online and guiding people on rites, such as taking Communion, at home. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, for example, will live-stream its 10 a.m. Easter Sunday Mass. Lakewood Church in Houston will feature remote performances and comments from Mariah Carey, Kanye West, and Tyler Perry. These styles are very different from Dorrell’s, but each is a way of working around the quarantine to keep church going. “How can we break from the single-mindedness of ‘We all can’t get together in one big room’?” he said. “We can figure out ways to follow the guidelines and not be stupid.”
Even still, he’s disappointed that his congregation won’t be able to celebrate Easter the way it normally does. In other years, his members all drive out to a camp about 40 minutes from Waco, where they worship outside. They perform baptisms in a river, just as the Bible describes Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan. They eat together and pray together. It’s this joy in gathering, similarly cherished by Jews at Passover and Muslims during Ramadan, that will be missing for so many Americans this spring.
And there will be other losses. Dorrell said his congregants are already starting to feel the effects of the pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown: a job that wasn’t great to begin with disappearing, bills piling up, families unsure of whether they can stay in their home. It’s one thing to read the Bible with a theoretical understanding of tremendous loss. It’s another to do so while living through it. “The theology of suffering is: God, if you’ve got to make me walk through those tough times for me to be closer to you and more faithful in my walk, I’m willing to let you do that,” Dorrell said. This may be an Easter of solitude. But Easter by the river will return again. “We’ll go back out,” Dorrell said, “and have baptism there when this thing cleans out.”


theatlantic--2020-04-10--The Atlantic Politics Daily: Which Version of the Pandemic Will You Experience?

It ’ s Friday , April 10 .
In today ’ s newsletter : After the pandemic , two Americas .
Plus : Why the U.S. is running out of masks .
Some will emerge from this crisis disrupted and shaken , but ultimately stable .
Others will come out of it with much more lasting scars .
Which of these two pandemics any given American will experience will be determined by a morbid mix of a sort of demographic predestination—shaped strongly by inequality—and purely random chance , Joe Pinsker reports : Two important predictors of an American ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that person has COVID-19 , are the answers they and others in their household would give to two questions : Are you still able to work ?
And if so , can you work without risking exposure to the virus ?
For a rapidly growing portion of the country , the answer to the first question is no .
Three weeks ago , some 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in a single week , a record-breaking total that was nearly five times as large as the previous recorded high .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claims was twice as high—6.9 million .
Still another 6.6 million claims were filed last week , bringing the recent three-week total to nearly 17 million—an enormous figure that likely still understates how many Americans are actually out of work right now .
The most important holiday on the Christian calendar feels foreign and unfamiliar this year , Emma Green writes .
“ But perhaps there ’ s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter.
” Among the related questions displayed on Google ’ s search-results page for the word are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ word ?
” ( HOSSEIN FATEMI / PANOS PICTURES / REDUX )

Any given Americans’ experience will be determined by a mix of a sort of demographic predestination—and purely random chance. Plus: Why the U.S. is short on masks.
The Atlantic Politics Daily: Which Version of the Pandemic Will You Experience?
It’s Friday, April 10. In today’s newsletter: After the pandemic, two Americas. Plus: Why the U.S. is running out of masks.
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« TODAY IN POLITICS »
(Getty / The Atlantic)
Tale of Two Pandemics
Some will emerge from this crisis disrupted and shaken, but ultimately stable. Others will come out of it with much more lasting scars.
Which of these two pandemics any given American will experience will be determined by a morbid mix of a sort of demographic predestination—shaped strongly by inequality—and purely random chance, Joe Pinsker reports:
Two important predictors of an American’s well-being right now, other than whether that person has COVID-19, are the answers they and others in their household would give to two questions: Are you still able to work? And if so, can you work without risking exposure to the virus? For a rapidly growing portion of the country, the answer to the first question is no. Three weeks ago, some 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in a single week, a record-breaking total that was nearly five times as large as the previous recorded high. The following week, the number of new claims was twice as high—6.9 million. Still another 6.6 million claims were filed last week, bringing the recent three-week total to nearly 17 million—an enormous figure that likely still understates how many Americans are actually out of work right now.
Read Joe’s full story.
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« SNAPSHOT »
(CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP VIA GETTY)
The most important holiday on the Christian calendar feels foreign and unfamiliar this year, Emma Green writes. “But perhaps there’s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter.”
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« THE CORONAVIRUS READER »
Among the related questions displayed on Google’s search-results page for the word are “Is ‘normalcy’ a real word?” (HOSSEIN FATEMI / PANOS PICTURES / REDUX)
+ A recent uptick in Google searches for the term signals a longing for the usual state of affairs. Our resident linguist writes about how normalcy went from misnomer to safe word.
+ Attempting to translate your old social habits to Zoom or FaceTime is like going vegetarian and proceeding to glumly eat a diet of just tofurkey, Ashley Fetters argues. Stop trying to replicate the life you had, virtually.
+ Joe Biden’s minimalist version of the presidency could be a blessing in disguise, Nathan Schneider argues:
The imagination phase of the 2020 presidential campaign was interesting, but so too might be the ascent of Biden-esque minimalism. It might be just what American politics needs. It might even be good for the imagination of the American left.
+ The United States’ secretive medical stockpile was prepped for a bombing, not a pandemic. We’re running out of masks.
You can keep up with The Atlantic’s most crucial coronavirus coverage here.
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