vox--2020-11-09--The world’s strongmen are silent so far on Joe Biden’s election win

The list of the most prominent world leaders who have yet to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his historic victory over President Donald Trump bear a troubling pattern : They all have a notable authoritarian streak .
As of November 9 , Chinese President Xi Jinping , Russian President Vladimir Putin , President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte , Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador , and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro remain silent on the outcome of the US election .
As soon as Biden ’ s win was called by several major US @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in from leaders around the world .
European politicians and officials who work on climate issues were some of the first to congratulate the president-elect , welcoming the possibility of increased cooperation on climate change .
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron , both of whom have battled Trump over US support for NATO and other issues , offered their congratulations to Biden via Twitter .
Trudeau tweeted that the Canada-US relationship is “ unique on the world stage ” and said he was “ looking forward to working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kamala Harris .
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also tweeted his congratulations to Biden , while commending Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on her groundbreaking win .
When listing the shared priorities between the US and the UK , climate change was the first issue Johnson mentioned , underscoring the importance of Biden ’ s win to efforts to limit global warming .
But there ’ s been a noticeable silence from a select group of leaders .
They differ in the ways and extent to which they are willing to grab power , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which is defined by the refusal to acknowledge opposition and the tendency to emphasize law and order above all else .
Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw the Chinese Communist Party ’ s removal of two-term limits , which basically makes him president until his death , and has arbitrarily detained as many as 3 million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps , among other human rights abuses .
Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed through a raft of constitutional reforms in July that allow him to stay in power far beyond his current term @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president for life .
And in August , he was implicated in the poisoning of one of his most outspoken critics , Alexei Navalny .
Navalny has already acknowledged Biden ’ s win , also mentioning the privilege of a “ fair and free election ” in a Twitter post on November 8 .
Rodrigo Duterte , president of the Philippines , and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have both received love from Trump in the past but have been tight-lipped on Joe Biden ’ s win .
Erdoğan was accused by his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2017 referendum left him with few limits on his power , and has jailed hundreds of journalists .
Duterte , who has expressed support for Trump ’ s reelection , is responsible for a brutal war on drugs that has killed more than 7,000 people .
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won election based on plans to root out corruption and shift policies sharply to the left , but since taking office has threatened the media and been accused of using the military to solidify his power .
Obrador has said in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ congratulate Biden until “ all legal issues are resolved.
” He has generally sought to strike a conciliatory tone with President Trump , amid a long dispute over migrants at the Mexican border .
The silence of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro , who has been referred to as the “ Trump of the Tropics ” because of similarities in their backgrounds , messaging , and tone , is particularly striking .
On November 6 , Bolsonaro signaled that he was perhaps distancing himself from Trump as he called for “ humility , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most important person in the world.
” But Bolsonaro still hasn ’ t congratulated Biden .
Overall , it seems the world ’ s strongmen are still holding out hope that Trump , who cares little for human rights issues and gets along well with the dictators of the world , will somehow manage to pull off a win — or at least , they don ’ t want to offend him while he ’ s still in office .
How long they will insist on living in denial , while the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remains to be seen .

The list of the most prominent world leaders who have yet to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his historic victory over President Donald Trump bears a troubling pattern: They all have a notable authoritarian streak.
As of November 9, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro remain silent on the outcome of the US election.
As soon as Biden’s win was called by several major US news outlets on Saturday, congratulations poured in from leaders around the world. European politicians and officials who work on climate issues were some of the first to congratulate the president-elect, welcoming the possibility of increased cooperation on climate change.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron, both of whom have battled Trump over US support for NATO and other issues, offered their congratulations to Biden via Twitter. Trudeau tweeted that the Canada-US relationship is “unique on the world stage” and said he was “looking forward to working together” with Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also tweeted his congratulations to Biden, while commending Harris on her groundbreaking win. When listing the shared priorities between the US and the UK, climate change was the first issue Johnson mentioned, underscoring the importance of Biden’s win to efforts to limit global warming.
But there’s been a noticeable silence from a select group of leaders. They differ in the ways and extent to which they are willing to grab power, but all exhibit characteristics of strongman rule, which is defined by the refusal to acknowledge opposition and the tendency to emphasize law and order above all else.
Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw the Chinese Communist Party’s removal of two-term limits, which basically makes him president until his death, and has arbitrarily detained as many as 3 million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, among other human rights abuses.
Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed through a raft of constitutional reforms in July that allow him to stay in power far beyond his current term limit — and could essentially make him president for life. And in August, he was implicated in the poisoning of one of his most outspoken critics, Alexei Navalny. Navalny has already acknowledged Biden’s win, also mentioning the privilege of a “fair and free election” in a Twitter post on November 8.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has received love from Trump in the past but was tight-lipped on Biden’s win. Erdoğan was accused by his opponents of a power grab after a 2017 referendum left him with few limits on his power, and has jailed hundreds of journalists.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won election based on plans to root out corruption and shift policies sharply to the left, but since taking office has threatened the media and been accused of using the military to solidify his power. Obrador has said in a press conference that he will not congratulate Biden until “all legal issues are resolved.” He has generally sought to strike a conciliatory tone with President Trump, amid a long dispute over migrants at the Mexican border.
The silence of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been referred to as the “Trump of the Tropics” because of similarities in their backgrounds, messaging, and tone, is particularly striking. On November 6, Bolsonaro signaled that he was perhaps distancing himself from Trump as he called for “humility,” and said that Trump “is not the most important person in the world.” But Bolsonaro still hasn’t congratulated Biden.
Overall, it seems the world’s strongmen are still holding out hope that Trump, who cares little for human rights issues and gets along well with the dictators of the world, will somehow manage to stay in power — or at least, they don’t want to offend him while he’s still in office.
How long they will insist on living in denial, while the rest of the world moves on, remains to be seen.
Correction, November 12: An earlier version of this story included Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on the list of leaders yet to congratulate Biden. Duterte released a statement congratulating Biden on November 8.


vox--2020-11-09--What Trump can do during his lame-duck session

Share All sharing options for : What Trump can do during his lame-duck session Joe Biden has been elected president , but Donald Trump still holds the office for the next two months .
And in that time , for better or worse , he still can get a lot done .
There are no formal limitations on what a president can and can ’ t do between losing an election and the next president ’ s inauguration .
For a historical indication of the most egregious stuff former presidents have done in that time , take a look at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short , simple answers is he can do pretty much anything he can do now , ” Lindsay Cohn , associate professor at the US Naval War College , told Vox .
“ He ’ s still president and still has all the normal powers of the office.
” It ’ s more a question of what he can do given that Democrats control the House , making it all but impossible for him to push through legislation House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn ’ t like .
Still , he has power over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s transition .
As of now , Trump has not conceded the election , so he hasn ’ t accepted that his is a lame-duck administration .
Regardless , it is .
And steps Trump has taken so far provide some clues about what he ’ ll try .
When one administration transitions to another , there ’ s supposed to be an orderly process in place to ensure the government can continue to function .
The process includes briefing the new president on the state of affairs and giving the new team @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agencies .
Pranks aside — the Clinton administration was suspected of taking the Ws off keyboards ahead of George W. Bush ’ s arrival — the period is supposed to be one of comity .
That might not be the case this time .
So far , the Trump administration has refused to sign a letter that would formally begin the transition process and release millions of dollars to fund it , which could lead to a rare transition delay .
When Trump entered office , he largely declined to participate in this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to believe he might not be very helpful with Biden ’ s transition .
“ The transition is supposed to be professional and generous because it ’ s not about you , it ’ s about the work , ” UCLA law professor Jon Michaels said .
“ I worry this is going to be quite different because they ’ ve presented a unified front that this is not a legitimate transfer of power and that the administration is not duly being replaced.
” Thwarting the transition could hinder Biden ’ s ability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If documents are missing , if you don ’ t have an org chart , if no one ’ s told what are the pending investigations , that presents challenges , ” Michaels said .
In turn , it will take more time for Biden to get up to speed .
A rough transition could also affect Americans in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession by making it more difficult to get them what they need from the government .
“ The failure to cooperate could interfere with normal agency operations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Governance Lab at New York University , told Vox .
“ It ’ s not just inconsiderate to Biden , it would disrupt the delivering of services to the American people.
” The Biden camp is nonetheless moving forward swiftly , announcing a coronavirus task force on Monday .
Biden is expected to announce key White House positions this week as well .
Trump is free to issue all the executive orders he wants , and there will likely be more to come , though the president hasn ’ t committed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump has issued 192 executive orders , according to data from UC Santa Barbara ’ s American Presidency Project , more than presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did during their first terms .
It ’ s likely he ’ ll issue even more in the next two months .
“ He ’ s been pretty brash about issuing executive orders and overturning different regulations he doesn ’ t like , ” Todd Belt , director of the political management program at George Washington University , told Vox .
“ I expect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The transition is supposed to be professional and generous because it ’ s not about you , it ’ s about the work ” While executive orders are common at the end of a presidency , they ’ re usually inconsequential , according to American University history professor Allan Lichtman .
“ If he were to impose a new Muslim ban , greatly expand crackdowns on immigration , roll back more significant environmental orders , that would be unusual to have truly important substantive executive orders during the lame duck , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s not restrained by democratic norms or historical precedents.
” Biden can overturn Trump ’ s executive orders with his own when he becomes president .
He immediately plans to reverse course on Trump policies with executive orders pertaining to climate change , immigration , and public health .
The problem is that reversing a new slew of executive orders will take effort and time , and a potentially split Congress may make things more difficult .
“ Yeah , they can be reversed , but there ’ s so many of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be simple , ” Lichtman said .
There ’ s also the possibility that some executive orders may be politically unpopular to roll back after the fact .
Belt gave the example of Bill Clinton issuing an executive order at the end of his term to limit arsenic in drinking water .
George W. Bush attempted to reverse it back but gave up because it turns out it looks really bad for a president to want more arsenic in the water .
While Trump could certainly try to enact new laws or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he probably won ’ t because that legislation would likely have trouble getting through a Democratic House .
“ If there ’ s anything that requires legislation , they can wait him out , ” George Washington University ’ s Belt said .
Trump still has the power to pardon , an action widely used by outgoing presidents .
Obama used his pardon power to shorten the prison sentences of a record 330 inmates convicted of drug crimes , for example .
The power might be especially useful for Trump , who has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who ’ ve had charges against them , like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn , among others .
While there have been plenty of controversial pardons in the past , these would be especially uncommon for a president .
As American University ’ s Lichtman put it , “ Their own people aren ’ t usually in jail.
” What would be the most unconventional , however , would be if Trump pardons himself .
It ’ s not clear if that would be possible .
“ These are untested , uncharted , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
That doesn ’ t mean Trump won ’ t try .
He has already commuted the sentence of his former campaign adviser Roger Stone and pardoned Rod Blagojevich , former Illinois governor and a contestant on Trump ’ s show The Celebrity Apprentice , and his friend Conrad Black , among others .
Even if he pardoned himself , pardons only work for federal crimes , meaning that Trump would still be on the hook for criminal cases in states like New York or from the civil rape case against him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try to fill any open judicial appointments in his remaining time in office .
He has already appointed nearly 200 judges , according to Pew Research Center , including more federal appeals court judges than any president at the same point in his presidency .
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month that he would continue confirming judges through the end of Trump ’ s term .
Trump is also likely to bring in or dismiss numerous civil servants .
He issued an executive order late last month that essentially makes it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So far , the Trump administration has already let go the heads of three federal agencies , including the deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development , the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission , and the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration .
He also fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper .
Previously , civil servants — “ technologists in the VA , astronauts in the space station , or frankly just any person who works on Social Security checks ” — had more protections in order to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unduly influenced by partisanship , ” NYU ’ s Noveck said .
The executive order would allow him to reward loyalists with jobs or fire people he doesn ’ t like .
“ In short , the order gives him power to hire and fire civil servants with the snap of his fingers , ” Noveck said .
“ It could effectively convert civil servants into at-will employees.
” Biden could hire these people back , but that ’ s time-consuming and another thing for the incoming president to have to deal with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a huge backlog of employees the Trump administration failed to hire .
“ The rhetoric is of purging the ‘ deep state , ’ but the real move would be incapacitating Biden , who is already going to come in with his hands tied because of the Senate , ” UCLA ’ s Michaels said .
As Trump exits office with loads of debt , it ’ s possible he ’ ll try to use his office to make money — something he wasn ’ t above doing throughout his presidency .
Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Secret Service to stay at Mar-a-Lago and his other properties while guarding him .
As a result , taxpayers have paid at least $ 900,000 to Trump-owned businesses since he took office .
That ’ s in addition to the money that foreign governments have paid to stay at his properties .
“ The only recourse is political , and once he ’ s voted out , it doesn ’ t matter , ” American University ’ s Lichtman said .
And he has plenty of ways to pad his pockets .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where he and his entourage can stay .
He ’ s also privy to information that is valuable to American corporations as well as foreign countries .
“ How he will use that information or already is using it to profit or to hold people hostage is very worrisome , ” Noveck said .
“ We ’ ve seen lots of ways he ’ s traded on his brand and position , and that may only grow in ways that he ’ ll be very careful to shield from view.
” Trump lost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over .
He still has time to demonstrate that a lame-duck session doesn ’ t have to be unproductive .

Share All sharing options for: What Trump can do during his lame-duck session
Joe Biden has been elected president, but Donald Trump still holds the office for the next two months. And in that time, for better or worse, he still can get a lot done.
There are no formal limitations on what a president can and can’t do between losing an election and the next president’s inauguration. For a historical indication of the most egregious stuff former presidents have done in that time, take a look at this piece by Slate.
“The short, simple answers is he can do pretty much anything he can do now,” Lindsay Cohn, associate professor at the US Naval War College, told Vox. “He’s still president and still has all the normal powers of the office.”
It’s more a question of what he can do given that Democrats control the House, making it all but impossible for him to push through legislation House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t like. Still, he has power over federal agencies and over Joe Biden’s transition.
As of now, Trump has not conceded the election, so he hasn’t accepted that his is a lame-duck administration. Regardless, it is. And steps Trump has taken so far provide some clues about what he’ll try.
A bumpy transition to Biden
When one administration transitions to another, there’s supposed to be an orderly process in place to ensure the government can continue to function.
The process includes briefing the new president on the state of affairs and giving the new team access to important information and to federal agencies. Pranks aside — the Clinton administration was suspected of taking the Ws off keyboards ahead of George W. Bush’s arrival — the period is supposed to be one of comity.
That might not be the case this time.
So far, the Trump administration has refused to sign a letter that would formally begin the transition process and release millions of dollars to fund it, which could lead to a rare transition delay.
(Business Insider reported that former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said on a call with Biden supporters that he and other Democrats would raise private funds for a smooth transition, should the Trump administration hold up the money.)
When Trump entered office, he largely declined to participate in this process, so there’s reason to believe he might not be very helpful with Biden’s transition.
“The transition is supposed to be professional and generous because it’s not about you, it’s about the work,” UCLA law professor Jon Michaels said. “I worry this is going to be quite different because they’ve presented a unified front that this is not a legitimate transfer of power and that the administration is not duly being replaced.”
Thwarting the transition could hinder Biden’s ability to quickly accomplish his agenda.
“If documents are missing, if you don’t have an org chart, if no one’s told what are the pending investigations, that presents challenges,” Michaels said. In turn, it will take more time for Biden to get up to speed.
A rough transition could also affect Americans in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession by making it more difficult to get them what they need from the government.
“The failure to cooperate could interfere with normal agency operations,” Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Governance Lab at New York University, told Vox. “It’s not just inconsiderate to Biden, it would disrupt the delivering of services to the American people.”
The Biden camp is nonetheless moving forward swiftly, announcing a coronavirus task force on Monday. Biden is expected to announce key White House positions this week as well.
Major executive orders
Trump is free to issue all the executive orders he wants, and there will likely be more to come, though the president hasn’t committed to anything specific so far.
President Trump has issued 192 executive orders, according to data from UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, more than presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did during their first terms. It’s likely he’ll issue even more in the next two months.
“He’s been pretty brash about issuing executive orders and overturning different regulations he doesn’t like,” Todd Belt, director of the political management program at George Washington University, told Vox. “I expect him to continue doing that.”
“The transition is supposed to be professional and generous because it’s not about you, it’s about the work”
While executive orders are common at the end of a presidency, they’re usually inconsequential, according to American University history professor Allan Lichtman. “If he were to impose a new Muslim ban, greatly expand crackdowns on immigration, roll back more significant environmental orders, that would be unusual to have truly important substantive executive orders during the lame duck,” he said. “But we know he’s not restrained by democratic norms or historical precedents.”
Biden can overturn Trump’s executive orders with his own when he becomes president. He immediately plans to reverse course on Trump policies with executive orders pertaining to climate change, immigration, and public health. The problem is that reversing a new slew of executive orders will take effort and time, and a potentially split Congress may make things more difficult.
“Yeah, they can be reversed, but there’s so many of them, it’s not going to be simple,” Lichtman said.
There’s also the possibility that some executive orders may be politically unpopular to roll back after the fact. Belt gave the example of Bill Clinton issuing an executive order at the end of his term to limit arsenic in drinking water. George W. Bush attempted to reverse it back but gave up because it turns out it looks really bad for a president to want more arsenic in the water.
While Trump could certainly try to enact new laws or spending bills as a lame-duck president, he probably won’t because that legislation would likely have trouble getting through a Democratic House.
“If there’s anything that requires legislation, they can wait him out,” George Washington University’s Belt said.
Pardons, pardons, pardons
Trump still has the power to pardon, an action widely used by outgoing presidents. Obama used his pardon power to shorten the prison sentences of a record 330 inmates convicted of drug crimes, for example.
The power might be especially useful for Trump, who has a number of people in his administration who’ve had charges against them, like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, among others. While there have been plenty of controversial pardons in the past, these would be especially uncommon for a president.
As American University’s Lichtman put it, “Their own people aren’t usually in jail.”
What would be the most unconventional, however, would be if Trump pardons himself. It’s not clear if that would be possible.
“These are untested, uncharted, and choppy constitutional waters,” Lichtman said.
That doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. He has already commuted the sentence of his former campaign adviser Roger Stone and pardoned Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor and a contestant on Trump’s show The Celebrity Apprentice, and his friend Conrad Black, among others.
Even if he pardoned himself, pardons only work for federal crimes, meaning that Trump would still be on the hook for criminal cases in states like New York or from the civil rape case against him.
Hiring and firing
It’s likely Trump will try to fill any open judicial appointments in his remaining time in office. He has already appointed nearly 200 judges, according to Pew Research Center, including more federal appeals court judges than any president at the same point in his presidency. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month that he would continue confirming judges through the end of Trump’s term.
Trump is also likely to bring in or dismiss numerous civil servants. He issued an executive order late last month that essentially makes it easier to hire and fire government employees.
So far, the Trump administration has already let go the heads of three federal agencies, including the deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development, the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. He also fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Previously, civil servants — “technologists in the VA, astronauts in the space station, or frankly just any person who works on Social Security checks” — had more protections in order to make sure they’re not “unduly influenced by partisanship,” NYU’s Noveck said. The executive order would allow him to reward loyalists with jobs or fire people he doesn’t like.
“In short, the order gives him power to hire and fire civil servants with the snap of his fingers,” Noveck said. “It could effectively convert civil servants into at-will employees.”
Biden could hire these people back, but that’s time-consuming and another thing for the incoming president to have to deal with. Biden will already have to hire a huge backlog of employees the Trump administration failed to hire.
“The rhetoric is of purging the ‘deep state,’ but the real move would be incapacitating Biden, who is already going to come in with his hands tied because of the Senate,” UCLA’s Michaels said.
Padding his pockets
As Trump exits office with loads of debt, it’s possible he’ll try to use his office to make money — something he wasn’t above doing throughout his presidency.
Trump, for example, has billed the Secret Service to stay at Mar-a-Lago and his other properties while guarding him. As a result, taxpayers have paid at least $900,000 to Trump-owned businesses since he took office. That’s in addition to the money that foreign governments have paid to stay at his properties.
“The only recourse is political, and once he’s voted out, it doesn’t matter,” American University’s Lichtman said.
And he has plenty of ways to pad his pockets. He’s still got his hotels, where he and his entourage can stay. He’s also privy to information that is valuable to American corporations as well as foreign countries.
“How he will use that information or already is using it to profit or to hold people hostage is very worrisome,” Noveck said. “We’ve seen lots of ways he’s traded on his brand and position, and that may only grow in ways that he’ll be very careful to shield from view.”
Trump lost, but his term is certainly not over. He still has time to demonstrate that a lame-duck session doesn’t have to be unproductive.


vox--2020-11-09--50 million world Covid-19 cases: The biggest outbreaks, explained

Last New Year ’ s Eve , a hint of what the world might be in for in 2020 arrived in the form of an Associated Press story about 27 people in Wuhan , China , who had fallen ill with a mysterious strain of viral pneumonia .
This was the first news of the new illness reported outside of China .
Less than 11 months later , 50 million people worldwide are confirmed to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 disease .
And more than 1,250,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reflects the coronavirus ’ s contagiousness as well as a global failure to contain its spread .
Ten highly populated countries account for about two-thirds of confirmed coronavirus tests since the pandemic began , including the United States , Brazil , and Russia .
And the high case counts are not just because they have more people than the average country , though a lack of testing in some regions makes direct comparisons more difficult .
But the virus is now spreading faster and further than ever detected before , with new case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ North America .
As Vox ’ s Julia Belluz reported , European hospitals are once again filling up .
The continent ’ s leaders are reimplementing strict social distancing rules , with curfews and other restrictions imposed in Spain , Italy , and other countries .
More sweeping lockdowns have been ordered in some places , including France , Greece , the Czech Republic , and parts of the UK .
The spread is more under control in Australia and New Zealand , as well as much of East Asia and Africa .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however , have also seen wide disease spread .
And the US has driven up the world ’ s new case numbers in the past few weeks , due in no small part to a lack of national leadership and a reluctance to implement well-established public health measures like testing , contact tracing , and wearing masks .
How the US became the world ’ s worst failure in containing Covid-19 The US has the most reported Covid-19 cases and deaths of any country in the world — more than 10 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deaths as of November 9 , according to Johns Hopkins University ’ s tracker .
Controlling for population , the United States still has one of the worst outbreaks anywhere .
The actual numbers , both globally and in the US , could well be a lot higher , said Eric Toner , a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins ’ s Bloomberg School of Public Health .
“ The 50 million cases globally , we know is an underestimate , probably by a factor of 10 to 20 , ” Toner said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ people who have been infected than those confirmed cases .
Same thing is true for deaths .
So we don ’ t really know how bad it has been , but it ’ s certainly the worst thing we ’ ve seen in 100 years.
” President Donald Trump was briefed on the coronavirus beginning in January , but he has continued to downplay the virus ’ s threat throughout the pandemic .
On February 10 , while campaigning in New Hampshire , the president claimed the virus would “ miraculously go away.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ had already privately told journalist Bob Woodward that Covid-19 was more deadly than the flu .
“ What we ’ ve seen is the absolute failure of effective emergency health communication , which has basic principles that are straightforward , ” says Dr. Tom Frieden , who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) under President Barack Obama .
“ Be first , be right , be credible , give people practical , proven things to do .
The US government completely failed on all of those components.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead the government ’ s coronavirus response on February 27 .
On March 11 — the same day the sports world began to shut down and many schools announced plans for remote learning — the president announced travel restrictions from Europe , after restrictions on travel from China the previous month .
Experts disagree on how effective travel restrictions from Europe and China were , especially because by March the virus was already spreading quickly in areas including New York , Washington state , and California .
Moreover , Trump did little with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bought , ignoring the federal government ’ s botched development and rollout of coronavirus testing .
It took until March 16 for Trump to introduce social distancing guidelines , and on March 19 , he admitted to Woodward that he was purposely downplaying the virus to avoid “ creating a panic.
” He also acknowledged that younger people were susceptible to Covid-19 as well .
Trump has admitted publicly he has pressured officials to “ slow down ” testing , not wanting revealed Covid-19 cases to set back reopening of the country .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ his most notable other failures in the pandemic response .
In early April , the CDC along with the country ’ s top infectious disease expert , Dr. Anthony Fauci , director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , recommended that Americans wear masks “ in public settings when around people outside their household , especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.
” Trump , however , wore a mask in public for the first time in mid-July , and repeatedly mocked his Democratic opponent in the 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one .
“ The general measures are wear a mask , watch your distance , and wash your hands , as well as strategic closures , ” Frieden said .
“ You have to call on people ’ s collective sense of responsibility , that we ’ re all in this together .
The lack of recognition that we ’ re all connected , and the lack of acting on that recognition , has been very problematic.
” States that were reluctant to issue mask mandates or close down nonessential businesses again when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ although a lack of federal aid may have played a role in those decisions .
Now , the US is in its third — and worst — wave of surging infections , this time across nearly every region .
On November 5 , the country set a new single-day record with more than 120,000 new cases reported .
As Vox ’ s German Lopez explained , those rising numbers are “ partly due to more testing exposing more cases .
But that can ’ t be the full explanation , because hospitalizations and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trending up.
” It doesn ’ t have to stay this way — but it probably will : How the rest of the world has handled the virus Other than the US , Europe and Latin America have struggled the most to contain Covid-19 .
Italy and Spain had the biggest outbreaks to be initially detected in Europe .
Italy had just 566 new daily confirmed cases on March 1 , but that number rose to more than 6,000 by March 26 .
A strict lockdown successfully contained the disease , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall .
This time , it was Spain that first showed the alarming resurgence on the continent .
The country had followed a similar trajectory , with an initial spike in March and a lockdown that almost totally suppressed the virus .
As Spain reopened , however , social distancing rules and enforcement were lax in some areas , and the disease burden shifted more toward younger people with generally less severe cases .
At the same time , the keys to controlling epidemic spread — test , trace , and isolate — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that had deteriorated with a decade of fiscal austerity .
Cases began to spike again in July , and some more drastic restrictions such as closing restaurants and bars in Catalonia did not come until October .
Spain now has more than 20,000 confirmed cases per day , and continues to record some of the highest numbers of new cases per million people on the continent .
Meanwhile , some European countries were slow to react to Spain ’ s case surge and impose measures of their own .
As Julia Belluz explained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same path as Spain : As outbreaks have spread across the continent again , several countries have returned to full or partial lockdowns to combat the new surge , including the United Kingdom , France , Germany , Ireland , the Netherlands , and the Czech Republic .
Before Europe ’ s coronavirus resurgence , South America ’ s outbreaks had begun to spiral out of control , and the hardest-hit has been Brazil .
President Jair Bolsonaro , the country ’ s far-right populist and a Trump ally , has waved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way as Trump .
He ignored a growing outbreak in the Amazon region in the spring , and touted hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence that it helps at all .
His government continues to endorse questionable treatments for the virus .
Bolsonaro himself tested positive for the virus in July .
He has opposed mask mandates and social distancing measures , and sought to reopen the economy almost as soon as regional restrictions were imposed in March .
Brazil has had by far the most confirmed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 5.6 million , though new cases are on a downward trend .
Other countries in the region have been hit hard , too : Argentina and Colombia each have more than a million cases , and Peru will likely join them soon .
Central America has seen wide disease spread in some countries as well , and Mexico in particular has been criticized for insufficient testing to accurately determine the scope of community transmission .
Other regions have so far done a better job containing the spread , including Africa , despite dire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the continent .
Africa is home to 17 percent of the world ’ s population but accounted for just 3.5 percent of reported Covid-19 deaths , as of early October .
Africa has a younger population compared to other continents , and Covid-19 is most severe in older people .
But that ’ s likely not the only reason behind the relatively fewer confirmed deaths and cases : Many African countries , including Kenya and Lesotho , acted quickly in issuing health guidance and social distancing measures .
And the experience of countries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have helped officials and the public prepare better for this one .
Parts of Asia have also fared well .
China , where the virus originated , initially sought to hide information about the virus .
But officials soon changed course , locking down cities and ordering widespread testing .
The country — of more than 1.4 billion people — still has fewer than 100,000 confirmed cases , according to Johns Hopkins data .
South Korea quickly contained an early outbreak .
And Australia and New Zealand — it helps being islands — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world at suppressing the virus .
The reasons behind disease spread are complicated , and not every country ’ s situation can be easily compared .
But these seem to be key factors in stemming the tide of an outbreak : Quick action , clear health guidance , public trust , robust testing and surveillance systems , and thorough contact tracing .
Many countries in the Pacific have managed all of these .
“ Certainly , we can point to Taiwan , to Singapore , to South Korea , to Japan , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like Vietnam have done a very good job .
Certainly , Australia and New Zealand have been great examples .
They ’ ve done a really good job with messaging and containment .
”

Last New Year’s Eve, a hint of what the world might be in for in 2020 arrived in the form of an Associated Press story about 27 people in Wuhan, China, who had fallen ill with a mysterious strain of viral pneumonia. This was the first news of the new illness reported outside of China.
Less than 11 months later, 50 million people worldwide are confirmed to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 disease. And more than 1,250,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported.
It’s a grim milestone, one that reflects the coronavirus’s contagiousness as well as a global failure to contain its spread.
Ten highly populated countries account for about two-thirds of confirmed coronavirus tests since the pandemic began, including the United States, Brazil, and Russia. And the high case counts are not just because they have more people than the average country, though a lack of testing in some regions makes direct comparisons more difficult.
But the virus is now spreading faster and further than ever detected before, with new case records being set regularly in Europe and North America. As Vox’s Julia Belluz reported, European hospitals are once again filling up. The continent’s leaders are reimplementing strict social distancing rules, with curfews and other restrictions imposed in Spain, Italy, and other countries. More sweeping lockdowns have been ordered in some places, including France, Greece, the Czech Republic, and parts of the UK.
The spread is more under control in Australia and New Zealand, as well as much of East Asia and Africa. India and parts of the Middle East, however, have also seen wide disease spread.
And the US has driven up the world’s new case numbers in the past few weeks, due in no small part to a lack of national leadership and a reluctance to implement well-established public health measures like testing, contact tracing, and wearing masks.
How the US became the world’s worst failure in containing Covid-19
The US has the most reported Covid-19 cases and deaths of any country in the world — more than 10 million confirmed cases and more than 237,000 confirmed deaths as of November 9, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker. Controlling for population, the United States still has one of the worst outbreaks anywhere.
The actual numbers, both globally and in the US, could well be a lot higher, said Eric Toner, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“The 50 million cases globally, we know is an underestimate, probably by a factor of 10 to 20,” Toner said. “There are many, many more people who have been infected than those confirmed cases. Same thing is true for deaths. So we don’t really know how bad it has been, but it’s certainly the worst thing we’ve seen in 100 years.”
President Donald Trump was briefed on the coronavirus beginning in January, but he has continued to downplay the virus’s threat throughout the pandemic.
On February 10, while campaigning in New Hampshire, the president claimed the virus would “miraculously go away.” But three days before, he had already privately told journalist Bob Woodward that Covid-19 was more deadly than the flu.
“What we’ve seen is the absolute failure of effective emergency health communication, which has basic principles that are straightforward,” says Dr. Tom Frieden, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under President Barack Obama. “Be first, be right, be credible, give people practical, proven things to do. The US government completely failed on all of those components.”
Trump named Vice President Mike Pence to lead the government’s coronavirus response on February 27. On March 11 — the same day the sports world began to shut down and many schools announced plans for remote learning — the president announced travel restrictions from Europe, after restrictions on travel from China the previous month.
Experts disagree on how effective travel restrictions from Europe and China were, especially because by March the virus was already spreading quickly in areas including New York, Washington state, and California. Moreover, Trump did little with the time that travel restrictions may have bought, ignoring the federal government’s botched development and rollout of coronavirus testing.
It took until March 16 for Trump to introduce social distancing guidelines, and on March 19, he admitted to Woodward that he was purposely downplaying the virus to avoid “creating a panic.” He also acknowledged that younger people were susceptible to Covid-19 as well.
Related A detailed timeline of all the ways Trump failed to respond to the coronavirus
Trump has admitted publicly he has pressured officials to “slow down” testing, not wanting revealed Covid-19 cases to set back reopening of the country.
Equivocation around mask-wearing has been one of his most notable other failures in the pandemic response. In early April, the CDC along with the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recommended that Americans wear masks “in public settings when around people outside their household, especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
Trump, however, wore a mask in public for the first time in mid-July, and repeatedly mocked his Democratic opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, for wearing one.
“The general measures are wear a mask, watch your distance, and wash your hands, as well as strategic closures,” Frieden said. “You have to call on people’s collective sense of responsibility, that we’re all in this together. The lack of recognition that we’re all connected, and the lack of acting on that recognition, has been very problematic.”
States that were reluctant to issue mask mandates or close down nonessential businesses again when cases rose did not help matters, although a lack of federal aid may have played a role in those decisions.
Now, the US is in its third — and worst — wave of surging infections, this time across nearly every region. On November 5, the country set a new single-day record with more than 120,000 new cases reported.
As Vox’s German Lopez explained, those rising numbers are “partly due to more testing exposing more cases. But that can’t be the full explanation, because hospitalizations and the overall rate of positive tests are trending up.” It doesn’t have to stay this way — but it probably will:
Cities, counties, states, and the federal government — or, short of all that, the public — could take social distancing seriously again. Governments could mandate masks, and the public could opt to wear them without a mandate. Bars and restaurants could close, voluntarily or not. Places that do open, such as schools, could try to adopt aggressive testing-and-tracing regimes to try to keep the coronavirus under some control. Without that, America’s coronavirus epidemic will keep getting worse.
How the rest of the world has handled the virus
Other than the US, Europe and Latin America have struggled the most to contain Covid-19. Italy and Spain had the biggest outbreaks to be initially detected in Europe. Italy had just 566 new daily confirmed cases on March 1, but that number rose to more than 6,000 by March 26. A strict lockdown successfully contained the disease, but it came back with a vengeance in the fall.
This time, it was Spain that first showed the alarming resurgence on the continent. The country had followed a similar trajectory, with an initial spike in March and a lockdown that almost totally suppressed the virus.
As Spain reopened, however, social distancing rules and enforcement were lax in some areas, and the disease burden shifted more toward younger people with generally less severe cases. At the same time, the keys to controlling epidemic spread — test, trace, and isolate — were underutilized by a public health system that had deteriorated with a decade of fiscal austerity. Cases began to spike again in July, and some more drastic restrictions such as closing restaurants and bars in Catalonia did not come until October.
Spain now has more than 20,000 confirmed cases per day, and continues to record some of the highest numbers of new cases per million people on the continent.
Meanwhile, some European countries were slow to react to Spain’s case surge and impose measures of their own.
As Julia Belluz explained in September, France soon went down the same path as Spain:
In July, cases started increasing in a way that couldn’t be explained by testing alone — albeit slowly, doubling every two weeks instead of every 3.5 days, like in March. A rise in hospitalizations didn’t follow immediately. It’s become clear that was because younger people were catching the virus. By mid-August, “the virus started to affect older people, and then a few weeks later, hospitalizations have started to increase,” said [Edouard Mathieu, the Paris-based data manager of Oxford University’s Our World in Data project]. By September 10, the French public health ministry reported that new Covid-19 hospitalizations were growing in all but one region of the country.
As outbreaks have spread across the continent again, several countries have returned to full or partial lockdowns to combat the new surge, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.
Before Europe’s coronavirus resurgence, South America’s outbreaks had begun to spiral out of control, and the hardest-hit has been Brazil. President Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right populist and a Trump ally, has waved off the virus in much the same way as Trump. He ignored a growing outbreak in the Amazon region in the spring, and touted hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence that it helps at all. His government continues to endorse questionable treatments for the virus.
Bolsonaro himself tested positive for the virus in July. He has opposed mask mandates and social distancing measures, and sought to reopen the economy almost as soon as regional restrictions were imposed in March.
Brazil has had by far the most confirmed cases in Latin America, with nearly 5.6 million, though new cases are on a downward trend. Other countries in the region have been hit hard, too: Argentina and Colombia each have more than a million cases, and Peru will likely join them soon. Central America has seen wide disease spread in some countries as well, and Mexico in particular has been criticized for insufficient testing to accurately determine the scope of community transmission.
Other regions have so far done a better job containing the spread, including Africa, despite dire predictions early on about potential spread on the continent. Africa is home to 17 percent of the world’s population but accounted for just 3.5 percent of reported Covid-19 deaths, as of early October. Africa has a younger population compared to other continents, and Covid-19 is most severe in older people.
But that’s likely not the only reason behind the relatively fewer confirmed deaths and cases: Many African countries, including Kenya and Lesotho, acted quickly in issuing health guidance and social distancing measures. And the experience of countries on the continent with previous epidemics may have helped officials and the public prepare better for this one.
Around the world, the places that have struggled most in controlling the virus are those with the least social cohesion. Fighting Covid requires a common understanding that we’re all in this together. — Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) November 6, 2020
Parts of Asia have also fared well. China, where the virus originated, initially sought to hide information about the virus. But officials soon changed course, locking down cities and ordering widespread testing. The country — of more than 1.4 billion people — still has fewer than 100,000 confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins data.
South Korea quickly contained an early outbreak. And Australia and New Zealand — it helps being islands — have been among the best in the world at suppressing the virus.
The reasons behind disease spread are complicated, and not every country’s situation can be easily compared.
But these seem to be key factors in stemming the tide of an outbreak: Quick action, clear health guidance, public trust, robust testing and surveillance systems, and thorough contact tracing. Many countries in the Pacific have managed all of these.
“Certainly, we can point to Taiwan, to Singapore, to South Korea, to Japan,” Toner said. “But also places like Vietnam have done a very good job. Certainly, Australia and New Zealand have been great examples. They’ve done a really good job with messaging and containment.”


vox--2020-11-09--Mark Esper is out as defense secretary, months after defying Trump

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has been fired , mere days after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election .
Trump made the Monday afternoon announcement , as he often does , on Twitter .
“ Mark Esper has been terminated , ” the president wrote .
“ I would like to thank him for his service.
” He added that Christopher Miller , the director of the National Counterterrorism Center , would take over as the acting Pentagon boss .
Esper has had a hot-and-cold relationship with Trump since he became defense secretary in July 2019 , and in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chief was a “ dead man walking.
” They were right .
Initially , the former Army infantry member and Raytheon lobbyist seemed to be in lockstep with the president .
When Trump wanted US troops sent to the border with Mexico , Esper gave the authorization with minimal fuss .
When Trump wanted to block military aid to Ukraine — an event that led to Trump ’ s impeachment — Esper did little to stop it or detail his knowledge of the effort .
Esper even joined Trump for the president ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ June after federal law enforcement officials scattered a protest crowd with tear gas — all in service of a photo op featuring Trump holding a Bible .
Esper ’ s conduct earned him the nickname “ Yesper , ” underscoring the sentiment in Washington ’ s national security circles that the secretary was Trump ’ s lapdog .
In August , the president even repeated that nickname when talking about Esper with reporters .
But over the summer , Esper began to buck Trump on some of his more controversial demands , quickly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad side .
When Trump demanded that active-duty troops be sent into cities to quash the anti-police brutality protests taking place across the country , Esper publicly rejected the president ’ s plea .
“ The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort , and only in the most urgent and dire of situations , ” Esper said during a June 3 Pentagon news conference .
“ We are not in one of those situations now .
I do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he continued , referring to a centuries-old law that gives the president the authority to send troops to halt domestic unrest .
Trump considered firing Esper over that announcement but was talked out of it by aides .
That gave Esper the space the next month to ban the Confederate flag on all military property , even as Trump argued Army bases should still be named after Confederate leaders .
Esper kept a noticeably lower profile after that .
He spent the last few months traveling the world and avoiding the press @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of the spotlight and the election conversation .
He also had to contend with a coronavirus outbreak within the US military , which so far has killed nine troops out of about 2.2 million .
That apparently wasn ’ t enough to get Esper back in Trump ’ s good graces .
The president remained angry over Esper ’ s June statement and had discussed replacing him month after month with staff .
The main argument against removing Esper was that he hadn ’ t clearly done anything wrong and that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Esper , though , knew of Trump ’ s ire and drafted a resignation letter as he worked with lawmakers to change the names of bases honoring Confederates .
With the election over , Trump finally followed through on his desire to oust his Pentagon chief .
Esper may rue no longer being the defense secretary , but he might like getting his name back .

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has been fired, mere days after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Trump made the Monday afternoon announcement, as he often does, on Twitter. “Mark Esper has been terminated,” the president wrote. “I would like to thank him for his service.” He added that Christopher Miller, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, would take over as the acting Pentagon boss.
...Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2020
Esper has had a hot-and-cold relationship with Trump since he became defense secretary in July 2019, and in recent weeks many observers believed the Pentagon chief was a “dead man walking.” They were right.
Initially, the former Army infantry member and Raytheon lobbyist seemed to be in lockstep with the president. When Trump wanted US troops sent to the border with Mexico, Esper gave the authorization with minimal fuss. When Trump wanted to block military aid to Ukraine — an event that led to Trump’s impeachment — Esper did little to stop it or detail his knowledge of the effort.
Esper even joined Trump for the president’s controversial walk across Lafayette Square in June after federal law enforcement officials scattered a protest crowd with tear gas — all in service of a photo op featuring Trump holding a Bible.
Esper’s conduct earned him the nickname “Yesper,” underscoring the sentiment in Washington’s national security circles that the secretary was Trump’s lapdog. In August, the president even repeated that nickname when talking about Esper with reporters.
But over the summer, Esper began to buck Trump on some of his more controversial demands, quickly putting him on the president’s bad side.
When Trump demanded that active-duty troops be sent into cities to quash the anti-police brutality protests taking place across the country, Esper publicly rejected the president’s plea.
“The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said during a June 3 Pentagon news conference. “We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” he continued, referring to a centuries-old law that gives the president the authority to send troops to halt domestic unrest.
Trump considered firing Esper over that announcement but was talked out of it by aides. That gave Esper the space the next month to ban the Confederate flag on all military property, even as Trump argued Army bases should still be named after Confederate leaders.
Esper kept a noticeably lower profile after that. He spent the last few months traveling the world and avoiding the press, likely in an effort to stay out of the spotlight and the election conversation. He also had to contend with a coronavirus outbreak within the US military, which so far has killed nine troops out of about 2.2 million.
That apparently wasn’t enough to get Esper back in Trump’s good graces. The president remained angry over Esper’s June statement and had discussed replacing him month after month with staff. The main argument against removing Esper was that he hadn’t clearly done anything wrong and that it would look bad ahead of the election.
Esper, though, knew of Trump’s ire and drafted a resignation letter as he worked with lawmakers to change the names of bases honoring Confederates.
With the election over, Trump finally followed through on his desire to oust his Pentagon chief. Esper may rue no longer being the defense secretary, but he might like getting his name back.


vox--2020-11-10--One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

What the hell happened with the polls this year ?
Yes , the polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the presidency .
But they got all kinds of details , and a number of Senate races , badly wrong .
FiveThirtyEight ’ s polling models projected that Biden would win Wisconsin by 8.3 points ; with basically all the votes in , he won by a mere 0.63 percent , a miss of more than 7 points .
In the Maine Senate race , FiveThirtyEight estimated that Democrat Sara Gideon would beat Republican incumbent Susan Collins by 2 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an 11-point miss .
Biden ’ s lead was robust enough to hold even with this kind of polling error , but the leads of candidates like Gideon ( or apparently , though it ’ s not officially called yet , Cal Cunningham in North Carolina ) were not .
Not all ballots have been counted yet , which could change polling-miss estimates , but a miss is already evident in states like Wisconsin and Maine where the votes are almost all in .
To try to make sense of the massive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reached out to the smartest polling guy I know : David Shor , an independent data analyst who ’ s a veteran of the Obama presidential campaigns who formerly operated a massive web-based survey at Civis Analytics before leaving earlier this year .
He now works advising SuperPACs on ad testing .
Since 2016 , Shor ’ s been trying to sell me , and basically anyone else who ’ ll listen , on a particular theory of what went wrong in polling that year , and what he thinks went wrong with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The theory is that the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way .
This challenges a core premise of polling , which is that you can use the responses of poll takers to infer the views of the population at large — and that if there are differences between poll takers and non-poll takers , they can be statistically “ controlled ” for by weighting according @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and so forth .
( Weighting increases and decreases the importance of responses from particular groups in a poll to better match their share of the actual population . )
If these two groups do differ systematically , that means the results are biased .
The assumption that poll respondents and non-respondents are basically similar , once properly weighted , used to be roughly right — and then , starting in 2016 , it became very , very wrong .
People who don ’ t answer polls , Shor argues , tend to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people more generally .
These low-trust folks used to vote similarly to everyone else .
But as of 2016 , they don ’ t : they tend to vote for Republicans .
Now , in 2020 , Shor argues that the differences between poll respondents and non-respondents have gotten larger still .
In part due to Covid-19 stir-craziness , Democrats , and particularly highly civically engaged Democrats who donate to and volunteer for campaigns , have become likelier to answer polls .
It ’ s something to do when we ’ re all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This biased the polls , Shor argues , in deep ways that even the best polls ( including his own ) struggled to account for .
Liberal Democrats answered more polls , so the polls overrepresented liberal Democrats and their views ( even after weighting ) , and thus the polls gave Biden and Senate Democrats inflated odds of winning .
Shor and I talked on Zoom last Thursday about the 2020 polling miss , how he ’ s trying to prevent it from happening again ( at least with his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is vulnerable to these same problems .
A transcript , edited for length and clarity , follows .
So , David : What the hell happened with the polls this year ?
So the basic story is that , particularly after Covid-19 , Democrats got extremely excited , and had very high rates of engagement .
They were donating at higher rates , etc.
, and this translated to them also taking surveys , because they were locked at home and didn ’ t have anything else to do .
There ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s nearly all of it : it was partisan non-response .
Democrats just started taking a bunch of surveys [ when they were called by pollsters , while Republicans did not ] .
Just to put some numbers on that , if you look at the early vote results , and compare it with the cross tabs of what public polls said early voters were going to be , it ’ s pretty clear that early voters were considerably less Democratic than people thought .
Campaign pollsters can actually join survey takers to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the percentage of our survey takers who were , say , ActBlue donors , skyrocketed .
The average social trust of respondents went up , core attitudes changed — basically , liberals just started taking surveys at really high rates .
That ’ s what happened .
You mentioned social trust .
Walk me through your basic theory about how people who agree to take surveys have higher levels of social trust , and how that has biased the polls in recent years .
For three cycles in a row , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pollsters overestimating Democratic support in some states and underestimating support in other states .
This has been pretty consistent .
It happened in 2018 .
It happened in 2020 .
And the reason that ’ s happening is because the way that [ pollsters ] are doing polling right now just doesn ’ t work .
Poll Twitter tends to ascribe these mystical powers to these different pollsters .
But , they ’ re all doing very similar things .
Fundamentally , every “ high quality public pollster ” does random digit dialing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ numbers , roughly 1 percent of people pick up the phone , and then they ask stuff like education , and age , and race , and gender , sometimes household size .
And then they weight it up to the census , because the census says how many adults do all of those things .
That works if people who answer surveys are the same as people who don ’ t , once you control for age and race and gender and all this other stuff .
But it turns out that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They ’ re considerably more politically engaged than normal .
I put in a five-factor test [ a kind of personality survey ] and they have much higher agreeableness [ a measure of how cooperative and warm people are ] , which makes sense , if you think about literally what ’ s happening .
They also have higher levels of social trust .
I use the General Social Survey ’ s question , which is , “ Generally speaking , would you say that most people can be trusted or that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in dealing with people ?
” The way the GSS works is they hire tons of people to go get in-person responses .
They get a 70 percent response rate .
We can basically believe what they say .
It turns out , in the GSS , that 70 percent of people say that people can ’ t be trusted .
And if you do phone surveys , and you weight , you will get that 50 percent of people say that people can be trusted .
It ’ s a pretty massive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actually did some research on this but people who don ’ t trust people and don ’ t trust institutions are way less likely to answer phone surveys .
Unsurprising !
This has always been true .
It just used to not matter .
It used to be that once you control for age and race and gender and education , that people who trusted their neighbors basically voted the same as people who didn ’ t trust their neighbors .
But then , starting in 2016 , suddenly that shifted .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ education , high-trust non-college whites tended toward [ Democrats ] , and low-trust non-college whites heavily turned against us .
In 2016 , we were polling this high-trust electorate , so we overestimated Clinton .
These low-trust people still vote , even if they ’ re not answering these phone surveys .
So that ’ s 2016 .
Same story in 2018 and 2020 ?
The same biases happened again in 2018 , which people didn ’ t notice because Democrats won anyway .
What ’ s different about this cycle is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polls were basically right .
This time , we ’ ll see when all the ballots get counted , but the national polls were pretty wrong .
If you look at why , I think the answer is related , which is that people who answer phone surveys are considerably more politically engaged than the overall population .
If you match to vote history , literally 95 percent of people who answer phone surveys vote .
That ’ s the problem with “ likely voter screens ” [ which try to improve polls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to vote ] .
If you restrict to people who have never voted in an election before , 70 percent of phone survey takers vote .
If you restrict to people who say they will definitely not vote , 76 percent of those people vote .
Normally that doesn ’ t matter , because political engagement is actually not super correlated with partisanship .
That is normally true , and if it wasn ’ t polling would totally break .
In 2020 , they broke .
There were very , very high levels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You can see in the data it really happened around March .
Democrats ’ public Senate polling started surging in March .
Liberals were cooped up , because of Covid , and so they started answering surveys more and being more engaged .
This gets to something that ’ s really scary about polling , which is that polling is fundamentally built on this assumption that people who answer surveys are the same as people who don ’ t , once you condition on enough things .
That can be true at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we ’ re trying to measure are constantly changing .
And so you can have a method that worked in past cycles suddenly break .
Why can ’ t you just fix that by weighting ?
Why not just control the results by sexual orientation or religion to get around that problem ?
You can know from the GSS , say , how many people nationwide have low levels of social trust .
But that doesn ’ t tell you — what about likely voters ?
Or what about likely voters in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How does that break out by race or gender or education ?
How does that interact with turnout ?
All that stuff becomes quite hard .
There ’ s a reason pollsters don ’ t weight by everything .
Say you have 800 responses .
The more variables you weight by , the lower your effective sample size is .
Once the number of things you control for increases past a certain point , traditional techniques start to fail and you need to start doing machine learning and modeling .
This is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m trying to make .
There used to be a world where polling involved calling people , applying classical statistical adjustments , and putting most of the emphasis on interpretation .
Now you need voter files and proprietary first-party data and teams of machine learning engineers .
It ’ s become a much harder problem .
One reaction I ’ ve seen from several quarters is that 2020 shows that quantitative methods aren ’ t enough to understand the electorate , and pollsters need to do more to incorporate ethnographic techniques , deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re proposing the opposite : Pollsters need to get way more sophisticated in their quantitative methods to overcome the biases that wrecked the polls this year .
Am I understanding that right ?
I mean , I ’ m not a robot .
Qualitative research and interpretation are important for winning elections .
But I think it ’ s a misunderstanding of why polls were wrong .
A lot of people think that the reason why polls were wrong was because of “ shy Trump voters.
” You talk to someone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or they say they ’ re gon na vote for Biden , but it wasn ’ t real .
Then , maybe if you had a focus group , they ’ d say , “ I ’ m voting for Biden , but I don ’ t know.
” And then your ethnographer could read the uncertainty and decide , “ Okay , this isn ’ t really a firm Biden voter.
” That kind of thing is very trendy , as an explanation .
But it ’ s not why the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t .
People tell the truth , when you ask them who they ’ re voting for .
They really do , on average .
The reason why the polls are wrong is because the people who were answering these surveys were the wrong people .
If you do your ethnographic research , if you try to recruit these focus groups , you ’ re going to have the same biases .
They recruit focus groups by calling people !
Survey takers are weird .
People in focus groups are even weirder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the problem of one group of people being really , really excited to share their opinions , while another group Isn ’ t .
As long as that bias exists , it ’ ll percolate down to whatever you do .

What the hell happened with the polls this year?
Yes, the polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the presidency. But they got all kinds of details, and a number of Senate races, badly wrong. FiveThirtyEight’s polling models projected that Biden would win Wisconsin by 8.3 points; with basically all the votes in, he won by a mere 0.63 percent, a miss of more than 7 points. In the Maine Senate race, FiveThirtyEight estimated that Democrat Sara Gideon would beat Republican incumbent Susan Collins by 2 points; Gideon lost by 9 points, an 11-point miss.
Biden’s lead was robust enough to hold even with this kind of polling error, but the leads of candidates like Gideon (or apparently, though it’s not officially called yet, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina) were not. Not all ballots have been counted yet, which could change polling-miss estimates, but a miss is already evident in states like Wisconsin and Maine where the votes are almost all in.
To try to make sense of the massive failure of polling this year, I reached out to the smartest polling guy I know: David Shor, an independent data analyst who’s a veteran of the Obama presidential campaigns who formerly operated a massive web-based survey at Civis Analytics before leaving earlier this year. He now works advising super PACs on ad testing. Since 2016, Shor’s been trying to sell me, and basically anyone else who’ll listen, on a particular theory of what went wrong in polling that year, and what he thinks went wrong with polling in 2018 and 2020, too.
The theory is that the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way.
This challenges a core premise of polling, which is that you can use the responses of poll takers to infer the views of the population at large — and that if there are differences between poll takers and non-poll takers, they can be statistically “controlled” for by weighting according to race, education, gender, and so forth. (Weighting increases and decreases the importance of responses from particular groups in a poll to better match their share of the actual population.) If these two groups do differ systematically, that means the results are biased.
The assumption that poll respondents and non-respondents are basically similar, once properly weighted, used to be roughly right — and then, starting in 2016, it became very, very wrong. People who don’t answer polls, Shor argues, tend to have low levels of trust in other people more generally. These low-trust folks used to vote similarly to everyone else. But as of 2016, they don’t: they tend to vote for Republicans.
Now, in 2020, Shor argues that the differences between poll respondents and non-respondents have gotten larger still. In part due to Covid-19 stir-craziness, Democrats, and particularly highly civically engaged Democrats who donate to and volunteer for campaigns, have become likelier to answer polls. It’s something to do when we’re all bored, and it feels civically useful. This biased the polls, Shor argues, in deep ways that even the best polls (including his own) struggled to account for.
Liberal Democrats answered more polls, so the polls overrepresented liberal Democrats and their views (even after weighting), and thus the polls gave Biden and Senate Democrats inflated odds of winning.
Shor and I talked over Zoom on November 5 about the 2020 polling miss, how he’s trying to prevent it from happening again (at least with his own survey), and why qualitative research is vulnerable to these same problems. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Dylan Matthews
So, David: What the hell happened with the polls this year?
David Shor
So the basic story is that, particularly after Covid-19, Democrats got extremely excited and had very high rates of engagement. They were donating at higher rates, etc., and this translated to them also taking surveys, because they were locked at home and didn’t have anything else to do. There’s some pretty clear evidence that that’s nearly all of it: It was partisan non-response. Democrats just started taking a bunch of surveys [when they were called by pollsters, while Republicans did not].
Just to put some numbers on that, if you look at the early vote results and compare it with the crosstabs of what public polls said early voters were going to be, it’s pretty clear that early voters were considerably less Democratic than people thought. Campaign pollsters can actually join survey takers to voter files, and starting in March, the percentage of our survey takers who were, say, ActBlue donors skyrocketed. The average social trust of respondents went up, core attitudes changed — basically, liberals just started taking surveys at really high rates. That’s what happened.
Dylan Matthews
You mentioned social trust. Walk me through your basic theory about how people who agree to take surveys have higher levels of social trust, and how that has biased the polls in recent years.
David Shor
For three cycles in a row, there’s been this consistent pattern of pollsters overestimating Democratic support in some states and underestimating support in other states. This has been pretty consistent. It happened in 2018. It happened in 2020. And the reason that’s happening is because the way that [pollsters] are doing polling right now just doesn’t work.
Poll Twitter tends to ascribe these mystical powers to these different pollsters. But they’re all doing very similar things. Fundamentally, every “high-quality public pollster” does random digit dialing. They call a bunch of random numbers, roughly 1 percent of people pick up the phone, and then they ask stuff like education, and age, and race, and gender, sometimes household size. And then they weight it up to the census, because the census says how many adults do all of those things. That works if people who answer surveys are the same as people who don’t, once you control for age and race and gender and all this other stuff.
But it turns out that people who answer surveys are really weird. They’re considerably more politically engaged than normal. I put in a five-factor test [a kind of personality survey] and they have much higher agreeableness [a measure of how cooperative and warm people are], which makes sense, if you think about literally what’s happening.
They also have higher levels of social trust. I use the General Social Survey’s question, which is, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” The way the GSS works is they hire tons of people to go get in-person responses. They get a 70 percent response rate. We can basically believe what they say.
It turns out, in the GSS, that 70 percent of people say that people can’t be trusted. And if you do phone surveys, and you weight, you will get that 50 percent of people say that people can be trusted. It’s a pretty massive gap. [Sociologist] Robert Putnam actually did some research on this, but people who don’t trust people and don’t trust institutions are way less likely to answer phone surveys. Unsurprising! This has always been true. It just used to not matter.
It used to be that once you control for age and race and gender and education, that people who trusted their neighbors basically voted the same as people who didn’t trust their neighbors. But then, starting in 2016, suddenly that shifted. If you look at white people without college education, high-trust non-college whites tended toward [Democrats], and low-trust non-college whites heavily turned against us. In 2016, we were polling this high-trust electorate, so we overestimated Clinton. These low-trust people still vote, even if they’re not answering these phone surveys.
Dylan Matthews
So that’s 2016. Same story in 2018 and 2020?
David Shor
The same biases happened again in 2018, which people didn’t notice because Democrats won anyway. What’s different about this cycle is that in 2016 and 2018, the national polls were basically right. This time, we’ll see when all the ballots get counted, but the national polls were pretty wrong. If you look at why, I think the answer is related, which is that people who answer phone surveys are considerably more politically engaged than the overall population.
If you match to vote history, literally 95 percent of people who answer phone surveys vote. That’s the problem with “likely voter screens” [which try to improve polls by limiting them to the likeliest respondents to vote]. If you restrict to people who have never voted in an election before, 70 percent of phone survey takers vote. If you restrict to people who say they will definitely not vote, 76 percent of those people vote.
Normally that doesn’t matter, because political engagement is actually not super correlated with partisanship. That is normally true, and if it wasn’t, polling would totally break. In 2020, they broke. There were very, very high levels of political engagement by liberals during Covid. You can see in the data it really happened around March. Democrats’ public Senate polling started surging in March. Liberals were cooped up, because of Covid, and so they started answering surveys more and being more engaged.
This gets to something that’s really scary about polling, which is that polling is fundamentally built on this assumption that people who answer surveys are the same as people who don’t, once you condition on enough things. That can be true at any given time. But these things that we’re trying to measure are constantly changing. And so you can have a method that worked in past cycles suddenly break.
Dylan Matthews
Why can’t you just fix that by weighting? Why not just control the results by sexual orientation or religion to get around that problem?
David Shor
You can know from the GSS, say, how many people nationwide have low levels of social trust. But that doesn’t tell you — what about likely voters? Or what about likely voters in Ohio’s 13th Congressional District? How does that break out by race or gender or education? How does that interact with turnout? All that stuff becomes quite hard.
There’s a reason pollsters don’t weight by everything. Say you have 800 responses. The more variables you weight by, the lower your effective sample size is. Once the number of things you control for increases past a certain point, traditional techniques start to fail and you need to start doing machine learning and modeling.
This is the bigger point about the industry I’m trying to make. There used to be a world where polling involved calling people, applying classical statistical adjustments, and putting most of the emphasis on interpretation. Now you need voter files and proprietary first-party data and teams of machine learning engineers. It’s become a much harder problem.
Dylan Matthews
One reaction I’ve seen from several quarters is that 2020 shows that quantitative methods aren’t enough to understand the electorate, and pollsters need to do more to incorporate ethnographic techniques, deep interviews, etc. In a way, you’re proposing the opposite: Pollsters need to get way more sophisticated in their quantitative methods to overcome the biases that wrecked the polls this year. Am I understanding that right?
David Shor
I mean, I’m not a robot. Qualitative research and interpretation are important for winning elections. But I think it’s a misunderstanding of why polls were wrong.
A lot of people think that the reason why polls were wrong was because of “shy Trump voters.” You talk to someone, they say they’re undecided, or they say they’re gonna vote for Biden, but it wasn’t real. Then, maybe if you had a focus group, they’d say, “I’m voting for Biden, but I don’t know.” And then your ethnographer could read the uncertainty and decide, “Okay, this isn’t really a firm Biden voter.” That kind of thing is very trendy as an explanation.
But it’s not why the polls were wrong. It just isn’t. People tell the truth when you ask them who they’re voting for. They really do, on average. The reason why the polls are wrong is because the people who were answering these surveys were the wrong people. If you do your ethnographic research, if you try to recruit these focus groups, you’re going to have the same biases. They recruit focus groups by calling people! Survey takers are weird. People in focus groups are even weirder. Qualitative research doesn’t solve the problem of one group of people being really, really excited to share their opinions, while another group isn’t. As long as that bias exists, it’ll percolate down to whatever you do.