vox--2020-03-05--The biggest challenge to America’s coronavirus response? Trump.

President Donald Trump ’ s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States has so far been a disaster .
He initially downplayed the severity of the outbreak at home , directly contradicting his top health officials .
He ’ s displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about basic things like how vaccines work and how quickly a coronavirus vaccine could realistically be developed and distributed to Americans .
And he ’ s publicly spread misinformation about how deadly the disease , officially known as Covid-19 , is .
All of that is extremely counterproductive to effective crisis response @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complicated as the novel coronavirus .
As of March 5 , there are nearly 100,000 confirmed cases around the world , with more than 3,300 dead , mostly in China .
In the US , there are more than 200 total cases — including at least 10 deaths in Washington state and one death in California .
Yet Trump insists the problem is under control and that he ’ s doing a fantastic job .
I called up Jeremy Konyndyk , an expert in outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how Trump ’ s actions have impacted the US response and how he could do better going forward .
As the director of the USAID ’ s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration , Konyndyk managed the US ’ s humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa as well as other disasters including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Typhoon Haiyan , which devastated the Philippines in 2013 .
Konyndyk told me that although the public health officials involved in the administration ’ s response “ are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to deal with the outbreak , Trump ’ s failure to provide effective leadership means that “ they ’ re not working as well as they can.
” “ This isn ’ t a normal crisis , ” Konyndyk said , “ and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve.
” Our interview , lightly edited for length and clarity , is below .
What ’ s your main critique of President Trump ’ s response to the coronavirus outbreak ?
That he ’ s made it primarily about himself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s handled other major crises .
There has been a high degree of chaos , and the focus has been much more on managing the public narrative than addressing the actual crisis itself .
Let ’ s unpack that .
What should he be doing ?
First , he needs to have an accurate understanding of the hazard and a clear-eyed understanding of the tools to deal with it .
That is the starting point for the strategy .
Second , it ’ s extremely important that you have some way of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is actually working .
That ’ s the weakest point for this White House , as we saw with the Puerto Rico response and now with the current coronavirus response .
The reason for that weakness is that the president preemptively declares that whatever he is doing is a success .
That makes it extraordinarily difficult for the people working on the response to then do anything but fall in line with that view .
Dr. Tony Fauci [ the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ] , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s coronavirus response , told Politico recently that there ’ s a big temptation to tell the president what he wants to hear .
That ’ s certainly true .
I ’ ve observed that in my own time in government .
But the other half of what Fauci said is that “ you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.
” What Fauci is conveying there is that telling this president what he wants to hear and telling the truth are in tension @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the fact that the president has decreed the response is a great success .
But if in reality the response is anything less than a great success , it ’ s very , very hard for the government to acknowledge that and adjust accordingly .
Declaring victory early in the fight as Trump has , then , was not the right way to start .
No , that ’ s not a good place to start .
You also have an issue with the president ’ s general knowledge on issues related @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gets to what makes it so much more challenging when the response is under the leadership of someone like Trump .
You want the person running the response to have an accurate understanding of what ’ s going on , and the president clearly doesn ’ t .
He doesn ’ t have an understanding of the basic elements of what needs to happen .
He doesn ’ t have an understanding of the basic tools with which we might fight this .
His recent comments to pharmaceutical executives were just shocking in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a vaccine works .
Obviously , it ’ s understandable if a president doesn ’ t know all the intricacies on things like this — that ’ s why he has advisers .
But he ’ s two months into this crisis .
To still be so ignorant of just basic things like that is extraordinary .
That makes it immeasurably harder for his team to then direct a response in an effective way .
President Barack Obama wasn ’ t an expert on outbreaks , either .
Did he get up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Absolutely , and I have an anecdote from that time to illustrate that .
I , along with others , got to meet President Obama for a few minutes in the Oval Office because of our Ebola work .
The moment I walked in , he started quizzing me about the Ebola burial teams , which was an important but fairly detailed element of the overall response .
The fact that he was aware of those teams , and could ask me detailed questions about them , absolutely blew my mind .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ attention to detail with Trump .
I really sympathize with the people who are working on this response within the government right now .
Remember : It ’ s many of the same people — in fact , it ’ s mostly the same people — that worked on Ebola and other crises .
They ’ re all career people .
What that tells you is that the team isn ’ t a determining variable here .
The president is .
The government is a massive machine , though .
Sure , Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and doesn ’ t show any real inclination to learn about them .
But why can ’ t the government just carry out an effective response despite the president ’ s ignorance ?
Because this isn ’ t a normal crisis , and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve .
Think back to when Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma hit the US in 2017 .
Both of those were standard-issue , major hurricane events .
They hit states in the mainland United States that were well prepared and had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response therefore was mostly fine — bureaucracies were set up for moments like that .
But when you have nonstandard crises — like what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico or this coronavirus outbreak — they require a president to get the government out of its comfort zone , to push it to do something it is not built to do .
There ’ s really no one else in the government to do that .
Did you learn that lesson during the Ebola response ?
Totally .
There were all these different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parts of the federal government .
They weren ’ t put together to facilitate a coherent response .
It really took presidential leadership and the installation of a “ czar ” to finally bring order to that chaos .
Ultimately , it was President Obama making very abundantly clear , to the entire federal bureaucracy , that this was a first-tier priority for him and that everyone needed to step up .
The other really important element to that was also not accepting business-as-usual rationales from the agencies .
There were many times @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I , on behalf of my team , or others in the government , would be getting pressed by the White House to do something .
We would say , “ Look , we can ’ t do that , ” or , “ We ’ re working as hard as we can.
” And the White House , to their credit , would come back with some variation of , “ Well , that ’ s all well and good , but it ’ s not getting the job done.
” What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president ’ s rhetoric around the coronavirus is him pushing back on any notion the job isn ’ t getting done .
He just notes everyone ’ s working as hard as they can .
And , to be fair , they are working as hard as they can — but they ’ re not working as well as they can , in a strategically coherent way , and with the leadership that they need .
To recap so far , Trump ’ s failures so far are 1 ) he declared victory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t pushing his administration hard to develop a coordinated , effective response .
Is that it , or are there other metrics one should consider when evaluating Trump ’ s handling of the crisis ?
President Trump ’ s insistence that the strategy of keeping the disease out of the country was succeeding really handicapped the rest of the response .
Here ’ s why : It makes it harder for the government to plan for the moment the strategy stops working .
That ’ s critical in this kind of situation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ strategy is to buy you time .
It delays the arrival of an outbreak in a country , but it can not ultimately stop it .
You ’ re not , or you shouldn ’ t be , hoping that that will be all that you need to do .
I don ’ t think the president understands that , and I don ’ t know how openly his team dissuades him of that view .
This makes sense to me , because most of what I feel like I ’ ve been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s tweets is language about containment .
Exactly — there ’ s an almost exclusive focus on containment and very little discussion at all of domestic preparedness .
The first time a US official talked about a pivot to preparedness was when the Centers for Disease Control ’ s Nancy Messonnier detailed last month how she ’ d started talking to her kids about the disruption they might face in their lives .
And the president and his allies went ballistic .
It ’ s a microcosm of the dynamic at play @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that this strategy might not fully work or might not be fully sufficient set the president off .
It ’ s very hard to acclimate the country to the idea of a coming pandemic and to begin triggering the tools that you need to be ready for that pandemic if you can ’ t even publicly acknowledge that possibility .
Is America ’ s ability to combat coronavirus a lost cause , or is there a way to rectify these major stumbles ?
There are three ways to get back on track .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re facing .
The overseas containment phase is coming to a close .
The disease is here , and it is spreading .
Travel bans and overseas quarantines and travel screening , and so on , are not going to offer us much protection anymore .
The main driver of transmission now is going to be community transmission , which is likely already ongoing in numerous places around the country .
That needs to be the central focus of the policy now .
Second , there needs to be actual transparency — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about what ’ s coming .
That means not trying to argue , as the president repeatedly has , that this is under control and it ’ s about to wrap up and we ’ ll be fine in April .
That ’ s not accurate .
We need the administration to be real with us going forward .
Any lies , half-truths , or exaggerations undermine trust , and trust is the engine of outbreak response .
If there isn ’ t trust between the population and the people leading the outbreak @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difficult to succeed .
Third , the president has to stop making it about himself and about the election , but I don ’ t know if he can do that .
The irony here is that the more he overtly does that , the worse it looks for him politically .
The smartest move for him politically would be to put the politics aside , take this seriously , and let the chips fall where they may .
In other words , to show real leadership .
We haven ’ t seen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s capable of it .

President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States has so far been a disaster.
He initially downplayed the severity of the outbreak at home, directly contradicting his top health officials. He’s displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about basic things like how vaccines work and how quickly a coronavirus vaccine could realistically be developed and distributed to Americans. And he’s publicly spread misinformation about how deadly the disease, officially known as Covid-19, is.
All of that is extremely counterproductive to effective crisis response, especially for dealing with something so complicated as the novel coronavirus. As of March 5, there are nearly 100,000 confirmed cases around the world, with more than 3,300 dead, mostly in China. In the US, there are more than 200 total cases — including at least 10 deaths in Washington state and one death in California.
Yet Trump insists the problem is under control and that he’s doing a fantastic job.
Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled. Ask MSDNC & lightweight Washington failure @RonaldKlain, who the President was then? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2020
I called up Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, to get a better sense of exactly how Trump’s actions have impacted the US response and how he could do better going forward.
As the director of the USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration, Konyndyk managed the US’s humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa as well as other disasters including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013.
Konyndyk told me that although the public health officials involved in the administration’s response “are working as hard as they can” to deal with the outbreak, Trump’s failure to provide effective leadership means that “they’re not working as well as they can.”
“This isn’t a normal crisis,” Konyndyk said, “and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve.”
Our interview, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Alex Ward
What’s your main critique of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak?
Jeremy Konyndyk
That he’s made it primarily about himself, which is consistent with how he’s handled other major crises. There has been a high degree of chaos, and the focus has been much more on managing the public narrative than addressing the actual crisis itself.
Alex Ward
Let’s unpack that. What should he be doing?
Jeremy Konyndyk
First, he needs to have an accurate understanding of the hazard and a clear-eyed understanding of the tools to deal with it. That is the starting point for the strategy.
Second, it’s extremely important that you have some way of getting real-time feedback on whether your strategy is actually working. That’s the weakest point for this White House, as we saw with the Puerto Rico response and now with the current coronavirus response.
The reason for that weakness is that the president preemptively declares that whatever he is doing is a success. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for the people working on the response to then do anything but fall in line with that view.
Dr. Tony Fauci [the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], who’s helping to lead the administration’s coronavirus response, told Politico recently that there’s a big temptation to tell the president what he wants to hear.
That’s certainly true. I’ve observed that in my own time in government. But the other half of what Fauci said is that “you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
What Fauci is conveying there is that telling this president what he wants to hear and telling the truth are in tension with each other. That flows naturally from the fact that the president has decreed the response is a great success. But if in reality the response is anything less than a great success, it’s very, very hard for the government to acknowledge that and adjust accordingly.
Alex Ward
Declaring victory early in the fight as Trump has, then, was not the right way to start.
Jeremy Konyndyk
No, that’s not a good place to start.
Alex Ward
You also have an issue with the president’s general knowledge on issues related to the coronavirus.
Jeremy Konyndyk
Yeah, this gets to what makes it so much more challenging when the response is under the leadership of someone like Trump. You want the person running the response to have an accurate understanding of what’s going on, and the president clearly doesn’t.
He doesn’t have an understanding of the basic elements of what needs to happen. He doesn’t have an understanding of the basic tools with which we might fight this. His recent comments to pharmaceutical executives were just shocking in showing basic ignorance of things like how a vaccine works.
Obviously, it’s understandable if a president doesn’t know all the intricacies on things like this — that’s why he has advisers. But he’s two months into this crisis. To still be so ignorant of just basic things like that is extraordinary. That makes it immeasurably harder for his team to then direct a response in an effective way.
Alex Ward
President Barack Obama wasn’t an expert on outbreaks, either. Did he get up to speed quickly during the 2014 Ebola response?
Jeremy Konyndyk
Absolutely, and I have an anecdote from that time to illustrate that.
I, along with others, got to meet President Obama for a few minutes in the Oval Office because of our Ebola work. The moment I walked in, he started quizzing me about the Ebola burial teams, which was an important but fairly detailed element of the overall response. The fact that he was aware of those teams, and could ask me detailed questions about them, absolutely blew my mind.
You just don’t see that attention to detail with Trump. I really sympathize with the people who are working on this response within the government right now. Remember: It’s many of the same people — in fact, it’s mostly the same people — that worked on Ebola and other crises. They’re all career people.
What that tells you is that the team isn’t a determining variable here. The president is.
Alex Ward
The government is a massive machine, though. Sure, Trump isn’t well-read on these issues and doesn’t show any real inclination to learn about them. But why can’t the government just carry out an effective response despite the president’s ignorance?
Jeremy Konyndyk
Because this isn’t a normal crisis, and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve.
Think back to when Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma hit the US in 2017. Both of those were standard-issue, major hurricane events. They hit states in the mainland United States that were well prepared and had strong disaster management agencies. The government response therefore was mostly fine — bureaucracies were set up for moments like that.
But when you have nonstandard crises — like what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico or this coronavirus outbreak — they require a president to get the government out of its comfort zone, to push it to do something it is not built to do. There’s really no one else in the government to do that.
Alex Ward
Did you learn that lesson during the Ebola response?
Jeremy Konyndyk
Totally. There were all these different moving pieces that all sat in different parts of the federal government. They weren’t put together to facilitate a coherent response. It really took presidential leadership and the installation of a “czar” to finally bring order to that chaos. Ultimately, it was President Obama making very abundantly clear, to the entire federal bureaucracy, that this was a first-tier priority for him and that everyone needed to step up.
The other really important element to that was also not accepting business-as-usual rationales from the agencies.
There were many times during the Ebola response in 2014 when I, on behalf of my team, or others in the government, would be getting pressed by the White House to do something. We would say, “Look, we can’t do that,” or, “We’re working as hard as we can.” And the White House, to their credit, would come back with some variation of, “Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s not getting the job done.”
What you see now in some of the president’s rhetoric around the coronavirus is him pushing back on any notion the job isn’t getting done. He just notes everyone’s working as hard as they can. And, to be fair, they are working as hard as they can — but they’re not working as well as they can, in a strategically coherent way, and with the leadership that they need.
Alex Ward
To recap so far, Trump’s failures so far are 1) he declared victory too early and 2) isn’t pushing his administration hard to develop a coordinated, effective response.
Is that it, or are there other metrics one should consider when evaluating Trump’s handling of the crisis?
Jeremy Konyndyk
President Trump’s insistence that the strategy of keeping the disease out of the country was succeeding really handicapped the rest of the response. Here’s why: It makes it harder for the government to plan for the moment the strategy stops working. That’s critical in this kind of situation.
The whole point of an overseas containment strategy is to buy you time. It delays the arrival of an outbreak in a country, but it cannot ultimately stop it. You’re not, or you shouldn’t be, hoping that that will be all that you need to do.
I don’t think the president understands that, and I don’t know how openly his team dissuades him of that view.
Alex Ward
This makes sense to me, because most of what I feel like I’ve been hearing from the government and from Trump’s tweets is language about containment.
Jeremy Konyndyk
Exactly — there’s an almost exclusive focus on containment and very little discussion at all of domestic preparedness.
The first time a US official talked about a pivot to preparedness was when the Centers for Disease Control’s Nancy Messonnier detailed last month how she’d started talking to her kids about the disruption they might face in their lives. And the president and his allies went ballistic. It’s a microcosm of the dynamic at play here, that even acknowledging the reality that this strategy might not fully work or might not be fully sufficient set the president off.
It’s very hard to acclimate the country to the idea of a coming pandemic and to begin triggering the tools that you need to be ready for that pandemic if you can’t even publicly acknowledge that possibility.
Alex Ward
Is America’s ability to combat coronavirus a lost cause, or is there a way to rectify these major stumbles?
Jeremy Konyndyk
There are three ways to get back on track.
First, be honest about what we’re facing. The overseas containment phase is coming to a close. The disease is here, and it is spreading. Travel bans and overseas quarantines and travel screening, and so on, are not going to offer us much protection anymore. The main driver of transmission now is going to be community transmission, which is likely already ongoing in numerous places around the country. That needs to be the central focus of the policy now.
Second, there needs to be actual transparency — actual candor — with the American people about what’s coming. That means not trying to argue, as the president repeatedly has, that this is under control and it’s about to wrap up and we’ll be fine in April. That’s not accurate. We need the administration to be real with us going forward.
With approximately 100,000 CoronaVirus cases worldwide, and 3,280 deaths, the United States, because of quick action on closing our borders, has, as of now, only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in) and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2020
Any lies, half-truths, or exaggerations undermine trust, and trust is the engine of outbreak response. If there isn’t trust between the population and the people leading the outbreak response, it is very, very difficult to succeed.
Third, the president has to stop making it about himself and about the election, but I don’t know if he can do that. The irony here is that the more he overtly does that, the worse it looks for him politically. The smartest move for him politically would be to put the politics aside, take this seriously, and let the chips fall where they may. In other words, to show real leadership. We haven’t seen that yet, though I hope he’s capable of it.
Alex Ward
Aren’t we all.


vox--2020-03-05--It looks like Trump is trying to trick people into filling out “census” forms online

Shortly ahead of the US National 2020 census , President Trump ’ s campaign is running ads on Facebook that some are saying are misleading users into thinking that a data-gathering and fundraising survey for the Trump presidential campaign is actually the official US national census .
Facebook confirmed with Recode that it plans to take down the ads .
According to Facebook ’ s ad library , Trump ’ s Facebook page is running a series of hundreds of ads asking users to respond to what it calls a “ census.
” But in fact , the ads point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not the official 2020 US census .
Critics say the ads could mislead users into thinking that they ’ re filling out the actual census when they ’ re not — potentially discouraging people from filling out the real US census that will be hitting mailboxes next week .
The US census is critical in determining representation and funding for communities , including how $ 1.5 trillion in federal resources are spent .
While the ads also refer to the form as a “ survey ” to help Trump craft a “ winning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conflate political campaign language with that of official census communications .
Facebook has touted its policy against census misinformation , banning “ misleading information about when and how to participate in the census and the consequences of participating , ” including in ads .
But the social media giant reportedly told Judd Legum ’ s Popular Information , which first pointed out the issue Thursday morning , that the ads do not violate Facebook ’ s policy because in Facebook ’ s view they are related to the Trump campaign and not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Recode later on Thursday that Facebook is taking down the ads in question and shared the following company statement : “ There are policies in place to prevent confusion around the official U.S. Census and this is an example of those being enforced.
” Trump ’ s campaign did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication .
Here ’ s the language of one of the Trump Facebook ads in question : The ads are labeled as “ Paid for by the Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and they link to a form on Trump ’ s website that ’ s topped with a bright red banner that reads “ OFFICIAL 2020 CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT CENSUS.
” The form then asks a series of questions such as , “ Do you plan on supporting President Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election ?
” and , “ From what media source do you regularly receive your political news ?
” At the end , survey takers are asked to donate to the Trump campaign .
“ I absolutely think that these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Morris Desir , the census project manager for government watchdog organization Common Cause .
Morris Desir acknowledged that the ads also clearly affiliate themselves with Trump ’ s campaign , but said they were still misleading .
“ Although they also say things like ‘ Help Trump Win ’ — I definitely think that the fact that you name this as a census at the same time that the 2020 census bureau will be sending similar communications for folks to fill out their census form is unfortunate.
” The real census does not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ask people to donate money or support to any political campaign .
Morris Desir said this is another example of how , even beyond using the word “ census , ” the ads are using deceptive tactics .
In one case , one of the Trump Facebook ads includes a video with a clip-art-style image of a scroll that says “ 2020 Census ” with an American Flag on it , next to an image of Trump giving a thumbs-up sign and text that says “ Help Shape President Trump ’ s Winning.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ time that the use of the word “ census ” in political materials has been criticized .
The Trump campaign has recently also been criticized by California Rep. Katie Porter for allegedly sending out texts urging recipients to complete a “ census survey ” that asked similar questions .
Meanwhile , since 2000 , the Republican National Committee has sent out “ Congressional District Census ” mailers that request fundraising dollars in addition to asking partisan questions , around the same time as the official US census forms are sent .
( Notably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calls its form a “ Congressional District Census.
” ) The Democratic party has repeatedly complained about the mailers and pointed to people who reported being confused about the surveys .
But so far , they ’ ve avoided any penalty because they skirt the existing regulations on deceptive mail practices .
Back in 2010 , New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney introduced successful legislation to make it illegal for look-alike census communications to use the word “ census.
” The law was a response to census-style mailings from the RNC a decade ago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it to be updated .
But aside from US law , Facebook already has its own established rules to deal with this kind of content .
Now , with these new Trump ads , it ’ s coming down to a question of how the company is going to actually enforce those rules .

Shortly ahead of the US National 2020 census, President Trump’s campaign is running ads on Facebook that some are saying are misleading users into thinking that a data-gathering and fundraising survey for the Trump presidential campaign is actually the official US national census. Facebook confirmed with Recode that it plans to take down the ads.
According to Facebook’s ad library, Trump’s Facebook page is running a series of hundreds of ads asking users to respond to what it calls a “census.” But in fact, the ads point to a campaign survey for Trump, not the official 2020 US census. Critics say the ads could mislead users into thinking that they’re filling out the actual census when they’re not — potentially discouraging people from filling out the real US census that will be hitting mailboxes next week. The US census is critical in determining representation and funding for communities, including how $1.5 trillion in federal resources are spent.
While the ads also refer to the form as a “survey” to help Trump craft a “winning strategy,” many are saying they conflate political campaign language with that of official census communications. Facebook has touted its policy against census misinformation, banning “misleading information about when and how to participate in the census and the consequences of participating,” including in ads. But the social media giant reportedly told Judd Legum’s Popular Information, which first pointed out the issue Thursday morning, that the ads do not violate Facebook’s policy because in Facebook’s view they are related to the Trump campaign and not the census.
Upon further review, though, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Recode later on Thursday that Facebook is taking down the ads in question and shared the following company statement:
“There are policies in place to prevent confusion around the official U.S. Census and this is an example of those being enforced.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Here’s the language of one of the Trump Facebook ads in question:
This survey is ESSENTIAL to our team’s 2020 campaign strategy. We need Patriotic Americans like YOU to respond to this census, so we can develop a winning strategy for YOUR STATE. Your participating in this national effort will provide us with the detailed data we need for YOUR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT. It is important that we get as many responses as possible, so we can craft a winning messaging strategy.
The ads are labeled as “Paid for by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee,” and they link to a form on Trump’s website that’s topped with a bright red banner that reads “OFFICIAL 2020 CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT CENSUS.” The form then asks a series of questions such as, “Do you plan on supporting President Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election?” and, “From what media source do you regularly receive your political news?” At the end, survey takers are asked to donate to the Trump campaign.
“I absolutely think that these ads are deceptive,” said Keshia Morris Desir, the census project manager for government watchdog organization Common Cause. Morris Desir acknowledged that the ads also clearly affiliate themselves with Trump’s campaign, but said they were still misleading. “Although they also say things like ‘Help Trump Win’ — I definitely think that the fact that you name this as a census at the same time that the 2020 census bureau will be sending similar communications for folks to fill out their census form is unfortunate.”
The real census does not ask partisan questions, nor does it ask people to donate money or support to any political campaign.
Morris Desir said this is another example of how, even beyond using the word “census,” the ads are using deceptive tactics. In one case, one of the Trump Facebook ads includes a video with a clip-art-style image of a scroll that says “2020 Census” with an American Flag on it, next to an image of Trump giving a thumbs-up sign and text that says “Help Shape President Trump’s Winning.”
This isn’t the first time that the use of the word “census” in political materials has been criticized. The Trump campaign has recently also been criticized by California Rep. Katie Porter for allegedly sending out texts urging recipients to complete a “census survey” that asked similar questions.
Meanwhile, since 2000, the Republican National Committee has sent out “Congressional District Census” mailers that request fundraising dollars in addition to asking partisan questions, around the same time as the official US census forms are sent. (Notably, Trump’s campaign site also calls its form a “Congressional District Census.”) The Democratic party has repeatedly complained about the mailers and pointed to people who reported being confused about the surveys. But so far, they’ve avoided any penalty because they skirt the existing regulations on deceptive mail practices.
Back in 2010, New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney introduced successful legislation to make it illegal for look-alike census communications to use the word “census.” The law was a response to census-style mailings from the RNC a decade ago, and some politicians have called for it to be updated.
But aside from US law, Facebook already has its own established rules to deal with this kind of content. Now, with these new Trump ads, it’s coming down to a question of how the company is going to actually enforce those rules.


vox--2020-03-05--LGBTQ voters turned out in record numbers on Super Tuesday

Many Democratic presidential candidates have released extensive and detailed plans for addressing LGBTQ equality over the course of the campaign cycle .
On Super Tuesday , LGBTQ voters rewarded that work by turning out in record numbers .
Nearly one in 10 voters on Tuesday identified as lesbian , gay , bisexual , or transgender , according to exit poll data from NBC News .
That turnout was up from the 2018 midterms , when 6 percent of the electorate identified as LGBTQ .
“ All of the data from this year ’ s presidential primary , the 2018 midterms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the LGBTQ voting bloc is growing and that LGBTQ voters are difference-makers and a constituency to court , ” Geoff Wetrosky , national campaign director at the Human Rights Campaign , told Vox .
“ We turn out at rates much higher than the general public , and we overwhelmingly support pro-equality candidates.
” There are several potential reasons for increased LGBTQ turnout this year .
People may be more willing to identify themselves as queer to exit pollsters , for instance , or to publicly label themselves as LGBTQ in general .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about 4.5 percent of the total population identifies as LGBTQ , up from 3.5 percent in 2012 .
Wetrosky notes that the jump in turnout over the last two years could also be a result of the White House ’ s anti-LGBTQ agenda .
Since President Donald Trump took office in 2017 , his administration has : banned trans troops from serving in the military ; petitioned the Supreme Court to roll back employment protections for LGBTQ workers under Title VII ; proposed a rule to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Affordable Care Act nondiscrimination protections for trans patients ; allowed federally funded shelters to bar trans people from facilities consistent with their gender identity ; and required prisons to house trans prisoners according to their assigned sex at birth .
“ The fate of LGBTQ people and our rights have been on the ballot for decades , compelling us to register to vote and participate in politics , as opposed to letting others decide our rights for us , ” Wetrosky said .
Whether a result of more people identifying as LGBTQ , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response to Trump ’ s anti-LGBTQ policies — or , more likely , some combination of all three — it ’ s clear that queer voters have created a consistent voting bloc .
And politicians tend to listen to people who vote .
It ’ s no surprise that queer voters skewed to the left on Super Tuesday , with 50 percent calling themselves “ very liberal ” and 30 percent labeling themselves “ somewhat liberal , ” according to NBC News exit polls .
Just 4 percent of LGBTQ Democratic voters identified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ result , almost 40 percent backed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , with 21 percent going for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 19 percent voting for former Vice President Joe Biden , NBC News reported late Tuesday .
Historically , LGBTQ voters tend to lean more liberal , for obvious reasons such as the Republican opposition to marriage equality and hands-off handling of the AIDS crisis .
In 2016 , 78 percent of queer voters voted for Hillary Clinton versus 14 percent for Trump , whose performance with LGBTQ voters was lower than every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tracking LGBTQ voter data .
That pattern repeated itself in the 2018 midterms , with 82 percent of LGBTQ voters voting for Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives and 17 percent voting for Republicans .
By consistently coming out to vote in each election , queer voters force politicians to take their needs and concerns seriously , and that ’ s likely why this primary season saw so many Democratic candidates offering very detailed plans for LGBTQ equality .
Many included basic protections like passing the Equality Act , which would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ under federal law for the first time .
But many of those plans also pushed the envelope in ways we haven ’ t seen previously .
Each of the major Democratic candidates this year , except for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg , backed gender-neutral passports .
Many firmly denounced the violence faced by Black and other trans women of color .
Though relatively small in population numbers ( but not insignificant in turnout ) , LGBTQ people have become one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocs , and reliable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political power over the long term .
LGBTQ get-out-the-vote campaigns are increasingly focusing on turning out allies Organizers realize , though , that being a relatively small portion of the general population means LGBTQ voters as a group have a ceiling .
The next step for organizations devoted to turning out the queer vote is to turn out allies who care about LGBTQ people and the issues they face “ Support for LGBTQ equality has increased tremendously in recent years across partisan , ideological , and demographic groups , ” said Wetrosky .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the LGBTQ movement is no longer limited to organizing and mobilizing self-identified LGBTQ people .
With all of this in mind , HRC recognized that we could maximize the LGBTQ community ’ s impact on elections by mobilizing our allies who would support pro-equality candidates , but [ who ] are less likely to turn out.
” That ’ s why the Human Rights Campaign began working with data analytics firm Catalist in 2016 to identify 57 million “ equality voters ” who care deeply about LGBTQ equality .
According to HRC data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of the total 2018 electorate .
In the 2014 midterms , 36 percent of identified “ equality voters ” voted ; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2018 midterms .
HRC used the “ equality voter ” model to shape a larger get-out-the-vote effort in Virginia ’ s state elections last year .
Nine of its top 10 targeted seats in the state were won by HRC-backed candidates , helping Democrats flip control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature .
Last month , the new Democratic majority passed comprehensive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state ’ s history .
LGBTQ voters and allies will continue to play a key role in what is now a two-person race between Sanders and Biden for the Democratic nomination .
It remains to be seen whether LGBTQ people who supported more progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren will turn out to support a potential Biden candidacy in the general election .
But with so much at stake for the LGBTQ community — from civil rights protections to the future of the judiciary — queer people and their allies are needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safer future .

Many Democratic presidential candidates have released extensive and detailed plans for addressing LGBTQ equality over the course of the campaign cycle. On Super Tuesday, LGBTQ voters rewarded that work by turning out in record numbers.
Nearly one in 10 voters on Tuesday identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, according to exit poll data from NBC News. That turnout was up from the 2018 midterms, when 6 percent of the electorate identified as LGBTQ.
“All of the data from this year’s presidential primary, the 2018 midterms, and the 2016 presidential election shows the LGBTQ voting bloc is growing and that LGBTQ voters are difference-makers and a constituency to court,” Geoff Wetrosky, national campaign director at the Human Rights Campaign, told Vox. “We turn out at rates much higher than the general public, and we overwhelmingly support pro-equality candidates.”
There are several potential reasons for increased LGBTQ turnout this year. People may be more willing to identify themselves as queer to exit pollsters, for instance, or to publicly label themselves as LGBTQ in general. According to a 2018 Gallup report, about 4.5 percent of the total population identifies as LGBTQ, up from 3.5 percent in 2012.
Voters identifying as LGBTQ in the first wave #SuperTuesday exit polls:
AL 6%
CA 11%
CO 9%
ME 13%
MA 13%
MN 10%
NC 7%
TN 8%
TX 10%
VA 8%
VT 9% — Michael Del Moro (@MikeDelMoro) March 3, 2020
Wetrosky notes that the jump in turnout over the last two years could also be a result of the White House’s anti-LGBTQ agenda.
Since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration has: banned trans troops from serving in the military; petitioned the Supreme Court to roll back employment protections for LGBTQ workers under Title VII; proposed a rule to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ employees; proposed a rule to undo Affordable Care Act nondiscrimination protections for trans patients; allowed federally funded shelters to bar trans people from facilities consistent with their gender identity; and required prisons to house trans prisoners according to their assigned sex at birth.
“The fate of LGBTQ people and our rights have been on the ballot for decades, compelling us to register to vote and participate in politics, as opposed to letting others decide our rights for us,” Wetrosky said.
Whether a result of more people identifying as LGBTQ, efforts to increase turnout, or a response to Trump’s anti-LGBTQ policies — or, more likely, some combination of all three — it’s clear that queer voters have created a consistent voting bloc. And politicians tend to listen to people who vote.
LGBTQ voters tend to skew more liberal
It’s no surprise that queer voters skewed to the left on Super Tuesday, with 50 percent calling themselves “very liberal” and 30 percent labeling themselves “somewhat liberal,” according to NBC News exit polls. Just 4 percent of LGBTQ Democratic voters identified themselves as “conservative.”
As a result, almost 40 percent backed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 21 percent going for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 19 percent voting for former Vice President Joe Biden, NBC News reported late Tuesday.
Historically, LGBTQ voters tend to lean more liberal, for obvious reasons such as the Republican opposition to marriage equality and hands-off handling of the AIDS crisis. In 2016, 78 percent of queer voters voted for Hillary Clinton versus 14 percent for Trump, whose performance with LGBTQ voters was lower than every previous Republican candidate since polls first began tracking LGBTQ voter data.
That pattern repeated itself in the 2018 midterms, with 82 percent of LGBTQ voters voting for Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives and 17 percent voting for Republicans.
By consistently coming out to vote in each election, queer voters force politicians to take their needs and concerns seriously, and that’s likely why this primary season saw so many Democratic candidates offering very detailed plans for LGBTQ equality. Many included basic protections like passing the Equality Act, which would give LGBTQ people comprehensive civil rights protections under federal law for the first time.
But many of those plans also pushed the envelope in ways we haven’t seen previously. Each of the major Democratic candidates this year, except for former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, backed gender-neutral passports. Many firmly denounced the violence faced by Black and other trans women of color.
Though relatively small in population numbers (but not insignificant in turnout), LGBTQ people have become one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocs, and reliable electoral turnout helps queer people build real political power over the long term.
LGBTQ get-out-the-vote campaigns are increasingly focusing on turning out allies
Organizers realize, though, that being a relatively small portion of the general population means LGBTQ voters as a group have a ceiling. The next step for organizations devoted to turning out the queer vote is to turn out allies who care about LGBTQ people and the issues they face
“Support for LGBTQ equality has increased tremendously in recent years across partisan, ideological, and demographic groups,” said Wetrosky. “This broad and increasing support means the LGBTQ movement is no longer limited to organizing and mobilizing self-identified LGBTQ people. With all of this in mind, HRC recognized that we could maximize the LGBTQ community’s impact on elections by mobilizing our allies who would support pro-equality candidates, but [who] are less likely to turn out.”
That’s why the Human Rights Campaign began working with data analytics firm Catalist in 2016 to identify 57 million “equality voters” who care deeply about LGBTQ equality.
According to HRC data, “equality voters” constituted 29 percent of the total 2018 electorate. In the 2014 midterms, 36 percent of identified “equality voters” voted; that number jumped to 56 percent in the 2018 midterms.
HRC used the “equality voter” model to shape a larger get-out-the-vote effort in Virginia’s state elections last year. Nine of its top 10 targeted seats in the state were won by HRC-backed candidates, helping Democrats flip control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature. Last month, the new Democratic majority passed comprehensive LGBTQ protections for the first time in the state’s history.
LGBTQ voters and allies will continue to play a key role in what is now a two-person race between Sanders and Biden for the Democratic nomination. It remains to be seen whether LGBTQ people who supported more progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren will turn out to support a potential Biden candidacy in the general election.
But with so much at stake for the LGBTQ community — from civil rights protections to the future of the judiciary — queer people and their allies are needed to turn out for a better and safer future.


vox--2020-03-05--Coronavirus in the US: Tracking cases and deaths

Since December 31 , when China first reported cases of the novel coronavirus disease to the World Health Organization , it has spread to dozens of countries around the world , including the United States .
Now , there are more than 96,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide , with major outbreaks in mainland China , South Korea , Iran , and Italy .
Covid-19 initially arrived in the US in two ways .
First , infected people returned to the US from China , where the virus originated and where the vast majority of cases have been reported .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone who had been to China or to another country with Covid-19 .
Since February 28 , new cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the US with no link to travel , which means the disease has been spreading inside the country .
In February , there was little testing done by the US , and many of the original test kits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) sent out could not be validated by testing labs .
Another problem was that the testing was focused only on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
On February 28 , the CDC said the problem with the kits was fixed , and it was sending kits to labs around the country along with new , expanded testing criteria .
All state and local public health labs as well as qualified private labs are expected to be able to test by the end of this week , USA Today reports .
Health experts say this means the number of cases will rise in the coming weeks .
It doesn ’ t mean the virus is spreading any faster .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center , said on Twitter that case numbers are rising because there is “ likely a backlog of cases to be detected ” : When including those repatriated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship , more than 170 cases have been reported across the United States .
We ’ ll update this post as more cases are reported and more information becomes available .
Reported cases , reported deaths , and recovered cases ( as of March 5 , 1:52 pm Eastern ) : This data is based @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CDC .
The numbers reported may vary depending on the source .
These numbers don ’ t include the 46 repatriated cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship .

Editor’s note: This article is not currently being updated. You can find updates on US case counts, deaths, and testing with our new tracker and the latest case counts on this Johns Hopkins tracker. Or follow Vox’s coverage of the coronavirus outbreak here.
Since December 31, when China first reported cases of the novel coronavirus disease to the World Health Organization, it has spread to dozens of countries around the world, including the United States. As of March 18, there are more than 205,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide, with major outbreaks in mainland China, Italy, Spain, Iran, and South Korea.
Including those repatriated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, more than 6,500 cases have been reported across the United States.
Covid-19 initially arrived in the US in two ways. First, infected people returned to the US from China, where the virus originated and where the vast majority of cases have been reported. Second, people came into contact with someone who had been to China or to another country with Covid-19. Since February 28, new cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the US with no link to travel, which means the disease has been spreading inside the country.
In February, there was little testing done by the US, and many of the original test kits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent out could not be validated by testing labs. Another problem was that the testing was focused only on people who’d been to China.
On February 28, the CDC said the problem with the kits was fixed, and it was sending kits to labs around the country along with new, expanded testing criteria. Testing has still been slow to roll out, however.
Health experts say this means the number of cases will rise in the coming weeks. That doesn’t mean the virus is spreading any faster.
Trevor Bradford, an associate member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, tweeted that case numbers are rising because there is “likely a backlog of cases to be detected”:
Because of the lack of national testing that had been going on, there is likely a backlog of cases to be detected. As this backlog gets cleared, case counts are going to rise quickly. But please remember that reported cases aren’t newly acquired infections. 3/4 — Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 2, 2020
We’ll update this post as more cases are reported and more information becomes available.
Reported cases, reported deaths, and recovered cases (as of March 18, 11:38 am Eastern):
California:
6519 cases
cases 13 deaths
6 out of 6519 recovered
New York:
1717 cases
cases 16 deaths
Washington state:
1041 cases
55 deaths
1 out of 1041 recovered
New Jersey:
267 cases
3 deaths
Massachusetts:
218 cases
1 out of 218 recovered
Florida:
217 cases
cases 7 deaths
Louisiana
196 cases
4 deaths
Colorado
185 cases
cases 2 deaths
Illinois:
161 cases
1 death
2 out of 161 recovered
Georgia:
147 cases
1 death
Texas:
132 cases
2 deaths
Pennsylvania:
115 cases
Wisconsin:
90 cases
1 out of 90 recovered
Tennessee
78 cases
Connecticut:
68 cases
Oregon:
68 cases
2 deaths
Ohio
67 cases
Virginia
67 cases
2 deaths
Michigan
66 cases
North Carolina
66 cases
Maryland:
60 cases
Minnesota
60 cases
Nevada
56 cases
1 death
Utah
51 cases
South Carolina:
47 cases
1 death
Alabama
39 cases
Maine
32 cases
District of Columbia
31 cases
Indiana
30 cases
2 deaths
Iowa
29 cases
Kentucky
27 cases
1 death
New Hampshire:
26 cases
Nebraska
24 cases
New Mexico
23 cases
Rhode Island:
23 cases
Arkansas
22 case
Mississippi
22 cases
Arizona:
21 cases
1 out of 21 recovered
Oklahoma
19 cases
Kansas
18 cases
1 death
Vermont
17 cases
Delaware
16 case
Missouri
16 cases
Wyoming
15 cases
Hawaii
14 cases
South Dakota
11 cases
1 death
Montana
10 cases
Idaho
9 cases
North Dakota
5 cases
West Virginia
1 case
This data is based on reports from Johns Hopkins and the CDC. The numbers reported may vary depending on the source.
These numbers don’t include the 46 repatriated cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.


vox--2020-03-06--Why women are feeling so defeated after Elizabeth Warren’s loss

Many women are left feeling defeated after Elizabeth Warren ’ s exit from the presidential race .
With a crushing loss on Super Tuesday , and voter after voter quoted in the media saying they ’ d vote for a woman , just not Warren , it made some wonder if a woman would be president in their lifetimes .
Warren spoke about the bind women candidates face while talking with reporters Thursday afternoon .
“ Gender in this race — you know , that is the trap question for every woman , ” Warren said , standing outside her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ announcing she would be suspending her campaign Thursday .
“ If you say , ‘ Yeah , there was sexism in this race , ’ everyone says , ‘ Whiner.
’ And if you say , ‘ There was no sexism , ’ about a bazillion women think , ‘ What planet do you live on ?
’ ” For the second time in four years , an exceptionally qualified female candidate lost to her male counterparts — some objectively far less qualified .
Warren ’ s loss was not as sudden or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 .
But what stung for many was the depth of voters ’ rejection , so much so that Warren came in third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday .
“ I can ’ t stress to you how tired I am of answering the same questions , ” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz told Vox in an interview Thursday , after publishing an essay on Warren ’ s loss .
“ We ’ ve just asked for one chance for a woman to lead the country .
Just once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Sexism was a big factor in Warren ’ s loss — though it was far from the only one .
The specter of President Donald Trump and Democrats ’ obsession with finding the most “ electable ” candidate to beat him loomed over everything in the primary .
It also relied on long-held assumptions about what a “ successful ” candidate looks like .
“ I am so disappointed with voters in this country , I wonder if a woman could win , ” New Hampshire voter Chris Hurley , a self-described @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I hate to say that .
It may be a white middle-aged man .
We ’ ve got to beat Trump.
” Warren certainly made missteps during the campaign .
But America apparently isn ’ t ready for a woman president — at least not yet .
“ One of the hardest parts of this is all the pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait for four more years , ” Warren said Thursday , her voice cracking slightly .
What we know about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2020 primary There ’ s no doubt sexism played a major role in the way women running for president were treated throughout the primary .
Candidates , including Warren , were questioned for their likability , their ambition , and their ability to win in ways men simply were not , echoing long-held double standards that still exist for women candidates .
Biases about both gender and race likely intersected on myriad other fronts as well .
For instance , a July poll of likely New Hampshire voters found good favorability numbers for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( 67 percent for Warren , 54 percent for Harris ) but dismal “ likability ” ratings for them .
Just 4 percent of likely voters thought Warren was “ likable , ” and 5 percent for Harris .
Compared to that , 20 percent of likely voters thought Biden and Sanders were likable .
While 38-year-old former South Bend , Indiana , Mayor Pete Buttigieg was rarely questioned about his ambition running for the highest office in the land after governing a city of fewer than 102,000 people , Massachusetts residents registered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bid before it even started .
An October 2018 Suffolk University poll of Massachusetts voters found just 17 percent thought Warren should run for president , compared to 68 percent who said no ( about 10 weeks before she announced her candidacy ) .
Warren ’ s favorability ratings in the state were decent , but not many wanted her to try for the presidency .
That could be viewed as Massachusetts voters not wanting to lose Warren , but it could also be seen as disliking a woman ’ s ambition .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ Know your place .
We ’ ve already given you this thing ; how dare you aspire to more , ’ ” Schultz said .
“ I don ’ t see that message telegraphed to men .
There should be no guilt about being ambitious.
” Women running for president also needed to prove their qualifications more than the men they were up against .
“ It ’ s one thing for voters to support a woman as part of a deliberative body , like a legislature , as ‘ a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her to be ‘ the ’ decision-maker , voters have to be that much more convinced she ’ s qualified , ” says Amanda Hunter , a communications and policy director at the Barbara Lee Foundation .
Women candidates were more than aware of this expectation , tailoring their speeches and rollouts to highlight their experience , policy bona fides , and track record of winning .
“ Every office I ’ ve run for — no one like me had ever done the job , ” Harris said in an interview with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , based on race .
Every time , pundits said the people weren ’ t ready for it .
But I won.
” Warren , too , got so many questions about this subject that her campaign signage was tailored to emphasize how she could win .
Clinton ’ s shocking 2016 defeat elicited voters ’ fears that a woman couldn ’ t beat Trump again in 2020 , even though women candidates had won in droves during the 2018 midterms .
“ When it comes to the difference between the midterms and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of anything that looks or feels similar to 2016 , ” said Democratic strategist Meredith Kelly , the former communications director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’ s presidential campaign , as well as for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018 .
“ And because of that almost blinding fear , I think female candidates were at a particular disadvantage in the race to take on Trump.
” “ Male candidates have the benefit of being judged by their potential for greatness , and women have to bring receipts , ” Kelly added @ @ @ @ @ @ @ translated to voters ’ decision-making : A study from Tufts University ’ s Brian Schaffner and YouGov ’ s Sam Luks , released in July 2019 , found Democratic primary voters who scored higher on a “ hostile sexism ” scale were less likely to choose either Warren or Harris as their top choice for the primary when polled .
Schaffner and Luks established this scale by asking voters a battery of questions about their attitudes on gender , a panel developed by social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske .
Voters were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like “ most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them ” and “ women seek to gain power by getting control over men.
” Schaffner and Luks concluded that dealing with such sexism was an obstacle that women candidates in the Democratic primary continued to face with a subset of voters , though they added that voters pushing back against sexism could flock to the Democratic Party during the general election and boost a woman candidate .
In an updated survey released this week , Schaffner and Data for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Iowa caucuses and found the same trend : Voters who had more sexist attitudes were less likely to support Warren .
Questions related to candidates ’ gender were abundant during the primary , particularly on the issue of electability : Throughout the race , women candidates had to answer questions over and over again about electability — even though none of the most prominent women had ever lost an election before .
“ When people say it shouldn ’ t be a woman this time because a woman lost last time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidency for hundreds of years , ” Hunter told Vox .
There were other factors , too It is ultimately difficult to pinpoint just how big a factor sexism was during the 2020 primary — and whether it was the factor that hurt women candidates ’ chances .
“ Gender , broadly speaking , is always interacting with and influencing factors that are important to a candidate ’ s success or defeat , ” says Kelly Dittmar , a political science professor at Rutgers University and scholar at the Center for American Women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who have so far dropped out of the 2020 race , there are 20 men who also exited .
The Democratic field was massive from the get-go , and male candidates of color like Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro struggled to find their footing before ending their campaigns as well .
Just like the men running in 2020 , the women all had individual strengths and weaknesses that respectively bolstered and impeded their bids .
Warren , for example , established herself as an effective and detailed policy wonk who has a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early in the polls and was bogged down at times by the rollout of her health care proposal and her use of a DNA test to try to prove Native American ancestry .
She wasn ’ t the only one .
Harris was known for being a charismatic leader who struggled with a consistent message and had to reckon with a sometimes-contradictory record on criminal justice reform .
Sen. Amy Klobuchar ( D-MN ) , who came in a surprisingly close third in the New Hampshire primary , was dogged by early allegations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ message of being electable in Midwestern states that Clinton lost , and rattling off a long list of legislative accomplishments in the Senate , Klobuchar also bowed out .
Gillibrand ( D-NY ) , a candidate focused on women ’ s issues , could not shake blowback from the Democratic base and donors alike for her role in the ouster of former Sen. Al Franken ( D-MN ) for his alleged sexual harassment .
Male candidates have faced electability questions , too .
There were plenty of concerns about Biden ’ s spate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s intense interest in his son ’ s ties to a Ukrainian energy company ( so much interest , it led to Trump ’ s impeachment ) .
There are lingering concerns about Bernie Sanders ’ s October heart attack or whether his ideological agenda is too risky for the general election .
But these things were ultimately easier for primary voters to accept than almost all the women candidates when the Republican opponent is Donald Trump .
“ The electability argument was so frustrating , and is so frustrating , ” Schultz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ force of a storm in terms of , you ’ re battening down the hatches instead of throwing the windows open wide to see what the possibilities are.
” One of the most disheartening takeaways from the recent developments in the 2020 race is the feeling that progress around gender equity in politics has remained stagnant .
Columnist Jessica Valenti said as much in a Medium post : While it is undeniably — and devastatingly — true that the United States has still yet to elect a woman president , there is progress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is building up an even larger bench of women lawmakers to keep pursuing higher office .
In 2018 , Democrats ’ efforts to retake the House were driven heavily by women candidates .
Of the 41 seats that Democrats flipped from red to blue during the midterms , 23 were won by women , many of them in purple districts in states like Iowa and Michigan .
Both Senate pickups the party had — in Arizona and Nevada — were also won by women .
On top of that , four out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , including in Michigan , Kansas , and Maine .
“ I think that people are forgetting the lessons of 2018 , ” Rep. Katherine Clark , vice chair of the House Democratic caucus and a surrogate for Warren , told Vox in a January interview .
“ When people are scared , which they are , they kind of look for what they ’ ve always known as the safe choice.
” It ’ s worth noting , too , that after Clinton ’ s run in 2016 , there were a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic nomination this cycle , who helped further normalize the idea of running for president .
It ’ s also true that for whoever emerges as the nominee , there will be incredible pressure to pick a woman for the vice presidential spot .
As Errin Haines writes for The 19th , female activists have ramped up their focus on the No .
2 slot and called on Biden and Sanders to prioritize choosing a woman for the role .
As more women run for office at different levels across the country — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — more will be in position to run for executive office down the line .
And candidates ’ willingness to call out sexism , though it can be seen as hurting the chances of women candidates in the future , also enables people to confront the problem head-on .
“ The more that women push these institutions , they more that we see sexism playing a less pervasive role , ” says Dittmar .

Many women are left feeling defeated after Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential race.
With a crushing loss on Super Tuesday, and voter after voter quoted in the media saying they’d vote for a woman, just not Warren, it made some wonder if a woman would be president in their lifetimes. Warren spoke about the bind women candidates face while talking with reporters Thursday afternoon.
“Gender in this race — you know, that is the trap question for every woman,” Warren said, standing outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after announcing she would be suspending her campaign Thursday. “If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner.’ And if you say, ‘There was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’”
For the second time in four years, an exceptionally qualified female candidate lost to her male counterparts — some objectively far less qualified. Warren’s loss was not as sudden or shocking as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. But what stung for many was the depth of voters’ rejection, so much so that Warren came in third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.
“I can’t stress to you how tired I am of answering the same questions,” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz told Vox in an interview Thursday, after publishing an essay on Warren’s loss. “We’ve just asked for one chance for a woman to lead the country. Just once, let’s try a woman.”
Sexism was a big factor in Warren’s loss — though it was far from the only one. The specter of President Donald Trump and Democrats’ obsession with finding the most “electable” candidate to beat him loomed over everything in the primary. It also relied on long-held assumptions about what a “successful” candidate looks like.
“I am so disappointed with voters in this country, I wonder if a woman could win,” New Hampshire voter Chris Hurley, a self-described progressive woman, told Vox in January. “I hate to say that. It may be a white middle-aged man. We’ve got to beat Trump.”
Warren certainly made missteps during the campaign. But America apparently isn’t ready for a woman president — at least not yet.
“One of the hardest parts of this is all the pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait for four more years,” Warren said Thursday, her voice cracking slightly.
What we know about the role that sexism played in the 2020 primary
There’s no doubt sexism played a major role in the way women running for president were treated throughout the primary.
Candidates, including Warren, were questioned for their likability, their ambition, and their ability to win in ways men simply were not, echoing long-held double standards that still exist for women candidates. Biases about both gender and race likely intersected on myriad other fronts as well.
For instance, a July poll of likely New Hampshire voters found good favorability numbers for both Warren and then-candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (67 percent for Warren, 54 percent for Harris) but dismal “likability” ratings for them. Just 4 percent of likely voters thought Warren was “likable,” and 5 percent for Harris. Compared to that, 20 percent of likely voters thought Biden and Sanders were likable.
While 38-year-old former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was rarely questioned about his ambition running for the highest office in the land after governing a city of fewer than 102,000 people, Massachusetts residents registered their displeasure with Warren for her presidential bid before it even started.
An October 2018 Suffolk University poll of Massachusetts voters found just 17 percent thought Warren should run for president, compared to 68 percent who said no (about 10 weeks before she announced her candidacy). Warren’s favorability ratings in the state were decent, but not many wanted her to try for the presidency. That could be viewed as Massachusetts voters not wanting to lose Warren, but it could also be seen as disliking a woman’s ambition.
“It’s another version of, ‘Know your place. We’ve already given you this thing; how dare you aspire to more,’” Schultz said. “I don’t see that message telegraphed to men. There should be no guilt about being ambitious.”
Women running for president also needed to prove their qualifications more than the men they were up against.
“It’s one thing for voters to support a woman as part of a deliberative body, like a legislature, as ‘a’ decision-maker. But in order for her to be ‘the’ decision-maker, voters have to be that much more convinced she’s qualified,” says Amanda Hunter, a communications and policy director at the Barbara Lee Foundation.
Women candidates were more than aware of this expectation, tailoring their speeches and rollouts to highlight their experience, policy bona fides, and track record of winning.
“Every office I’ve run for — no one like me had ever done the job,” Harris said in an interview with NBC News. “Based on gender, based on race. Every time, pundits said the people weren’t ready for it. But I won.” Warren, too, got so many questions about this subject that her campaign signage was tailored to emphasize how she could win.
Clinton’s shocking 2016 defeat elicited voters’ fears that a woman couldn’t beat Trump again in 2020, even though women candidates had won in droves during the 2018 midterms.
“When it comes to the difference between the midterms and today, I think voters are terrified of anything that looks or feels similar to 2016,” said Democratic strategist Meredith Kelly, the former communications director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign, as well as for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018. “And because of that almost blinding fear, I think female candidates were at a particular disadvantage in the race to take on Trump.”
“Male candidates have the benefit of being judged by their potential for greatness, and women have to bring receipts,” Kelly added.
Prejudices about women could well have translated to voters’ decision-making: A study from YouGov’s Sam Luks and Tufts University’s Brian Schaffner, released in July 2019, found Democratic primary voters who scored higher on a “hostile sexism” scale were less likely to choose either Warren or Harris as their top choice for the primary when polled.
Luks and Schaffner established this scale by asking voters a battery of questions about their attitudes on gender, a panel developed by social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske. Voters were asked to agree or disagree with statements like “most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them” and “women seek to gain power by getting control over men.”
Luks and Schaffner concluded that dealing with such sexism was an obstacle that women candidates in the Democratic primary continued to face with a subset of voters, though they added that voters pushing back against sexism could flock to the Democratic Party during the general election and boost a woman candidate.
In an updated survey released this week, Schaffner and Data for Progress co-founder Jon Green polled voters before the Iowa caucuses and found the same trend: Voters who had more sexist attitudes were less likely to support Warren.
Questions related to candidates’ gender were abundant during the primary, particularly on the issue of electability: Throughout the race, women candidates had to answer questions over and over again about electability — even though none of the most prominent women had ever lost an election before.
“When people say it shouldn’t be a woman this time because a woman lost last time, well, men have been losing the presidency for hundreds of years,” Hunter told Vox.
There were other factors, too
It is ultimately difficult to pinpoint just how big a factor sexism was during the 2020 primary — and whether it was the factor that hurt women candidates’ chances.
“Gender, broadly speaking, is always interacting with and influencing factors that are important to a candidate’s success or defeat,” says Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.
For the five women who have so far dropped out of the 2020 race, there are 20 men who also exited. The Democratic field was massive from the get-go, and male candidates of color like Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro struggled to find their footing before ending their campaigns as well.
Just like the men running in 2020, the women all had individual strengths and weaknesses that respectively bolstered and impeded their bids.
Warren, for example, established herself as an effective and detailed policy wonk who has a plan for everything, but she peaked early in the polls and was bogged down at times by the rollout of her health care proposal and her use of a DNA test to try to prove Native American ancestry.
She wasn’t the only one. Harris was known for being a charismatic leader who struggled with a consistent message and had to reckon with a sometimes-contradictory record on criminal justice reform. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who came in a surprisingly close third in the New Hampshire primary, was dogged by early allegations of staff mistreatment. Despite hammering a message of being electable in Midwestern states that Clinton lost, and rattling off a long list of legislative accomplishments in the Senate, Klobuchar also bowed out. Gillibrand (D-NY), a candidate focused on women’s issues, could not shake blowback from the Democratic base and donors alike for her role in the ouster of former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) for his alleged sexual harassment.
Male candidates have faced electability questions, too. There were plenty of concerns about Biden’s spate of gaffes and the Trump administration’s intense interest in his son’s ties to a Ukrainian energy company (so much interest, it led to Trump’s impeachment). There are lingering concerns about Bernie Sanders’s October heart attack or whether his ideological agenda is too risky for the general election. But these things were ultimately easier for primary voters to accept than almost all the women candidates when the Republican opponent is Donald Trump.
“The electability argument was so frustrating, and is so frustrating,” Schultz said. “This narrative had the force of a storm in terms of, you’re battening down the hatches instead of throwing the windows open wide to see what the possibilities are.”
Things are changing
One of the most disheartening takeaways from the recent developments in the 2020 race is the feeling that progress around gender equity in politics has remained stagnant.
Columnist Jessica Valenti said as much in a Medium post:
Last night, my nine-year-old daughter came over to me because I looked upset. When I told her I was sad because I felt like I would never see a woman be president, she told me, “Well, you’ll see at least one — me.” I want her to be able to hold on to that optimism because the truth is that I’m fresh out of hope to give her.
While it is undeniably — and devastatingly — true that the United States has still yet to elect a woman president, there is progress taking place in the US Congress that is building up an even larger bench of women lawmakers to keep pursuing higher office.
In 2018, Democrats’ efforts to retake the House were driven heavily by women candidates. Of the 41 seats that Democrats flipped from red to blue during the midterms, 23 were won by women, many of them in purple districts in states like Iowa and Michigan. Both Senate pickups the party had — in Arizona and Nevada — were also won by women. On top of that, four out of seven gubernatorial flips were won by women, including in Michigan, Kansas, and Maine.
“I think that people are forgetting the lessons of 2018,” Rep. Katherine Clark, vice chair of the House Democratic caucus and a surrogate for Warren, told Vox in a January interview. “When people are scared, which they are, they kind of look for what they’ve always known as the safe choice.”
It’s worth noting, too, that after Clinton’s run in 2016, there were a groundbreaking number of women vying for the Democratic nomination this cycle, who helped further normalize the idea of running for president.
It’s also true that for whoever emerges as the nominee, there will be incredible pressure to pick a woman for the vice presidential spot. As Errin Haines writes for The 19th, female activists have ramped up their focus on the No. 2 slot and called on Biden and Sanders to prioritize choosing a woman for the role.
As more women run for office at different levels across the country — a number that spiked dramatically in 2018 — more will be in position to run for executive office down the line. And candidates’ willingness to call out sexism, though it can be seen as hurting the chances of women candidates in the future, also enables people to confront the problem head-on.
“The more that women push these institutions, the more that we see sexism playing a less pervasive role,” says Dittmar.


vox--2020-03-05--The economic cost of tech events canceled due to coronavirus is $666 million and rising

As the novel coronavirus continues to take a human and economic toll across the world , the lucrative business of tech conferences is not immune .
The direct economic loss from the cancellation from eight major tech conferences including Google I/O , Facebook ’ s F8 event , and Mobile World Congress over coronavirus has already reached $ 666 million , according to estimates the data intelligence company PredictHQ pulled for Recode .
That number doesn ’ t even include what event organizers like Facebook itself would have made from the event .
The figure just covers the losses to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transportation providers that would normally make money from attendees ’ purchases .
Some $ 480 million — the vast majority of that total loss — comes from the cancellation of Mobile World Congress , which was supposed to host more than 100,000 attendees in Barcelona last month .
The Game Developers Conference , a 30,000-person event that was scheduled for March but has been postponed , incurred $ 129 million in losses .
That ’ s followed by the cancellation of Google I/O , a 5,000-person developer conference whose direct losses are estimated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ While a number of events , including Facebook F8 and Adobe Summit , will still have an online component , that effort does not stave off the significant economic loss from canceling the physical event .
PredictHQ looks at losses from four categories : airfare , lodging , food , and transportation .
That means this is a very conservative estimate since it doesn ’ t include losses incurred from , say , event sponsors , purchases that employees might have made , or ancillary impacts to the local economy .
PredictHQ said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ major event cancellations and postponements last month , and the International Air Transport Association estimated last month that the new coronavirus outbreak could cost it more than $ 29 billion in revenue .
Oxford Economics estimates that business conferences generate more than a trillion dollars in direct spending annually ; so far these canceled tech conferences haven ’ t put a major dent in that .
Still , both tech companies and consumers will be responsible for bearing the brunt of their losses , as most major insurance companies exclude communicable disease losses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 3,100 people have died and nearly 93,000 have been diagnosed with coronavirus .
Numerous tech companies , including Twitter and Square , have told their employees to work from home .
Several other major companies , like Amazon , have canceled nonessential travel , especially internationally .
Mentions of working from home also skyrocketed last month in public company transcripts .
If more companies follow these tech companies ’ lead , it could result in a test of people ’ s ability to work at home en masse rather than in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to hold its giant developer conferences later this spring .
Austin ’ s South by Southwest is on for later this month , although major tech companies like Facebook , Intel , and Twitter have pulled out of the event .
Were SXSW to cancel , total tech conference losses would reach nearly $ 900 million , according to PredictHQ .
Recode ’ s own Code Conference is still scheduled for the end of May .
As the threat of coronavirus grows , it ’ s likely more companies big and small will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remains to be seen how big those losses will be .

As the novel coronavirus continues to take a human and economic toll across the world, the lucrative business of tech conferences is not immune.
The direct economic loss from the cancellation of more than 10 major tech conferences — including Google I/O, Facebook’s F8 event, Mobile World Congress, SXSW, and now the massive video gaming conference Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) — due to the coronavirus outbreak has surpassed $1.1 billion, according to estimates the data intelligence company PredictHQ pulled for Recode. That number doesn’t even include the amount of money that the respective companies would have made from hosting the events. The figure simply covers the losses to airlines, hotels, restaurants, and transportation providers that would normally make money from attendees’ purchases.
Some $480 million — the biggest loss — came from the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, which was supposed to host more than 100,000 attendees in Barcelona in February. That’s followed by SXSW, an Austin tech, music, and movie conference that had approximately 280,000 attendees last year and whose announced cancellation could result in $350 million in direct losses, according to PredictHQ. The Game Developers Conference, a 30,000-person event that was scheduled for March but has been postponed, could incur $129 million in losses. E3 is estimated to have a direct economic loss of $75 million. Google I/O, a 5,000-person developer conference, has a direct loss estimate of nearly $20 million.
While a number of events, including Facebook F8 and Adobe Summit, will still have an online component, that effort does not stave off the significant economic loss from canceling the physical event.
PredictHQ looks at losses from four categories: airfare, lodging, food, and transportation. That means this is a very conservative estimate since it doesn’t include losses incurred from, say, event sponsors, purchases that employees might have made, or ancillary impacts to the local economy.
PredictHQ said there was a 500 percent increase in major event cancellations and postponements last month, and the International Air Transport Association this month increased previous estimates for airline travel losses due to the coronavirus outbreak to as much as $113 billion.
Oxford Economics estimates that business conferences generate more than a trillion dollars in direct spending annually. So far these canceled tech conferences haven’t put a major dent in that. Still, both tech companies and consumers will be responsible for bearing the brunt of these conference-related losses, as most major insurance companies exclude communicable disease losses from reimbursement.
These cancellations come as nearly 5,000 people have died and more than 127,000 have been diagnosed with coronavirus. Numerous tech companies — including Google, Twitter, and Square — have told their employees to work from home. Several other major companies, like Amazon, have canceled nonessential travel, especially internationally, and are advising some workers to stay home. Accordingly, mentions of working from home skyrocketed last month in public company transcripts. If more companies follow these tech companies’ lead, the response to the coronavirus outbreak could result in a test of people’s ability to work at home en masse rather than in the office.
Meanwhile, Apple is still expected to hold its giant developer conferences later this spring. Recode’s own Code Conference is still scheduled for the end of May.
As the threat of coronavirus grows, it’s likely more companies big and small will decide to cancel their conferences. It remains to be seen how big those losses will be.
Update, March 12, 2020, 1:50 pm ET: This post has been updated to include additional information about canceled conferences.