May I turn this around a little bit?
Is this a good look for a president?
Ok, that last one is a photo shop.
This is ridiculous.
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2020
According to the 2016 exit polls, people over 65 preferred Trump over Clinton 52-45. Frankly, I’m a little surprised it wasn’t worse. I think I assumed that Trump won that group by double digits. But lately we are seeing a number of polls showing Trump is losing that group.
Robert Griffin and John Sides of the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage point out that it isn’t just the coronavirus that’s causing this, as we all assume.
Trump’s apparent problems with seniors started well before the coronavirus outbreak. Surveys show Biden has been beating Trump among seniors for months. Here’s how we know.
This is clear in data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, which has conducted large surveys of more than 6,000 people each week since July 2019. Those surveys have consistently asked whether people would vote for Trump or Biden in a general election matchup. The figure below shows how Biden has polled against Trump among registered voters in four different age groups:
ÂÂSince July, the margin between Trump and Biden has clearly tightened among voters under 45. This has brought Biden’s lead among both groups in line with Clinton’s lead in 2016. Biden’s current lead among 18- to 29-year-olds is 19 points, according to the trendline in the graph that averages the weekly polls. Clinton’s lead was 18 points according to the 2016 exit polls. Biden’s seven-point lead among 30- to 44-year-olds matches Clinton’s eight-point lead.
But among voters over 45, including seniors, very little has changed since July. Biden’s lead among 45- to 64-year-olds was 10 points in July and is eight points now — substantially better than Clinton’s nine-point deficit.
Biden’s lead among seniors has also been a fairly consistent four to eight points over the past 10 months. It may have increased a few points in the most recent weeks, but this only brought it back to where it was in July.
Biden’s lead among seniors isn’t an “anybody but Trump” phenomenon. Nationscape has also consistently asked about a matchup between Bernie Sanders and Trump. Compared to Biden, Sanders has performed about six to eight points worse among seniors when matched against Trump. He does better than Biden only among the younger voters who have typically supported the Vermont senator more.
Of course, those who are seniors today include some who were not in 2016. Is this why Biden is doing better? No. Among those who were at least 65 years old in 2016 (that is, those 69 or older today), Biden is leading by eight points.
In short, Trump’s struggles among seniors — and Biden’s appeal — appear to predate the coronavirus outbreak by a long time.
What could be going on here? The fact that Biden himself is a senior doesn’t seem to explain anything. After all, so are Trump and Sanders.
Another potential explanation is gender: Perhaps Biden appeals to seniors more than Clinton did because of sexist attitudes. Nationscape asks several questions that gauge respondents’ views about gender, including attitudes on sexual harassment, comfort with having a female boss, perceptions of the ability of men and women to think logically, and whether increased opportunities for women have improved society.
But while seniors are more likely than younger Americans to express negative gender attitudes, Biden does better than Clinton among seniors regardless of their gender attitudes.
A third explanation is Biden is perceived to be less liberal than Clinton, which would help him particularly among seniors, who are more likely to identify as conservative than liberal. There is some evidence for this.
In a May 2016 YouGov poll, 68 percent of seniors said Clinton was liberal or very liberal, 27 percent said she was moderate, eight percent said she was conservative or very conservative, and seven percent did not know.
In the most recent Nationscape poll, 56 percent of seniors said Biden was liberal or very liberal, 22 percent said he was moderate, eight percent said he was conservative, and 14 percent did not know. So it is possible Biden benefits from perceived as less liberal. Biden is winning seniors except those who think he is “very liberal.” But we cannot determine whether perceptions of ideology are actually causing seniors to support him.
Regardless of the reason, the unusual feature of the 2020 campaign thus far is that it is “flattening the curve” — that is, the age curve that has characterized voting in the past few presidential elections. Although the last three elections have featured notable divides between different age groups, the unusually high support for Biden among those over 45 has substantially reduced those differences.
They don’t break it down here, but polling shows a major gender gap with senior women supporting Biden in much greater numbers than men.
My guess is that older people, including women, didn’t like Clinton because they formed their opinions of her a long time ago and see her as a feminist, which they just don’t like, even if they are generally liberal themselves.
And I suspect that the senior women who are defecting from Trump are not as pleased with his crude narcissism, insults and undignified behavior as some of his younger fans. Of course, all of that was on full display in the 2016 campaign but I think plenty of people assumed that he would become more presidential once in office.
But whatever their issues, it appears that they are much happier with an older, white male moderate Democrat than they were with Obama or Clinton. Surprise. I suspect that this is what was in the Democratic primary electorate’s collective subconscious when they chose Biden as much as anything.
(Apropos of nothing, looking at these graphs, I have to wonder what’s happening with the 30-44 year olds? At this point in time fewer of them say they’re going to vote Dem than the seniors. Huh?)
Gallup released a new poll about public attitudes toward the coronavirus crisis. They find that most people think the media shouldn’t downplay or exaggerate the threat. Imagine that. There are some partisan differences with Democrats more “strongly” believing the media shouldn’t downplay the threat and Republicans more “strongly” believing the media shouldn’t exaggerate it. But overall, most people seem to prefer knowing the truth about a highly contagious, deadly disease. I’d be impressed if I actually believed that was true…
But it’s the question illustrated above that interested me because it’s really uninformative. It’s tempting to think that if 72% of the country believes the harm from the virus is worse than it needed to be it reflects a consensus that Trump screwed the pooch. But that’s probably not true. I would guess that Democrats and Indies hold Trump more responsible for the spread of the virus due to his incompetent response. I would also guess the Republicans hold China responsible for the harm from the virus in the first case, and the governors for locking down their state in the second. These are big differences that aren’t reflected in a vague question like that.
So, I don’t think it tells us much beyond the fact that everyone agrees that the harm from the virus is worse than it needed to be, which isn’t nothing. But, as usual, the devil is in the details.
Trump banned travel from Brazil over the weekend due to their huge rise in cases. President Jair Bolsonaro has been acting like Trump and it finally caught up to him. Brazil now has the second highest number of cases i the world, after the US.
This piece in the Financial Times discusses the possible political fallout for the right-wing nutjob. Unfortunately, it isn’t all that reassuring:
But is it fair to blame Mr Bolsonaro? The president, who was sworn into office on January 1 2019, is obviously not responsible for the virus — nor for the poverty and overcrowding that make Covid-19 such a threat to the country. He has also not been able to prevent many of Brazil’s governors and mayors from imposing lockdowns in local areas. But by encouraging his followers to flout the lockdowns and undermining his own ministers, Mr Bolsonaro is responsible for the chaotic response that has allowed the pandemic to get out of hand.
As a result, the health and economic damage suffered by Brazil is likely to be harsher and deeper than it should have been. Other countries facing even tougher social conditions, such as South Africa, have had a much more disciplined and effective response.
If life were a morality tale, Mr Bolsonaro’s coronavirus antics would lead Brazil to turn against its populist president. But reality may not be so simple. There is no doubt that Mr Bolsonaro is in political trouble. His popularity ratings have tumbled and are now below 30 per cent; some 50 per cent of the population disapprove of his handling of the crisis. The support he once enjoyed from mainstream conservatives — who were desperate to see the back of the leftwing Workers’ party — is now crumbling away.
Sergio Moro, his popular corruption-fighting justice minister, resigned last month. Mr Moro’s allegations about the president’s efforts to interfere in police investigations were sufficiently explosive to provoke the Supreme Court into opening an investigation that could lead to his impeachment. But impeachment in Brazil is as much a political as a legal process.
The misdemeanours that led to the removal of Dilma Rousseff as president in 2016 were fairly technical. It was more significant that Ms Rousseff had sunk to a 10 per cent approval rating in the polls and the economy had suffered a deep recession. Mr Bolsonaro’s ratings are still way above Ms Rousseff’s nadir. And while the economy is undoubtedly heading for a deep recession and a surge in unemployment, his anti-lockdown rhetoric may buy him some political protection. Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, says, “What Bolsonaro wants to do is to disassociate himself from the economic crisis that is approaching.”
The social isolation measures that Mr Bolsonaro decries, may actually help him politically. They could prevent the mass demonstrations that provided the impetus for the drive to impeach Ms Rousseff. And they will make it harder for politicians to plot and bargain in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” — a process that is necessary to stitch together a successful impeachment. Plotting over the phone is just not the same.
Some politicians may feel that plunging Brazil into a political crisis is unseemly, in the middle of a pandemic. Yet national unity will not emerge while Mr Bolsonaro is president. In classic populist fashion he thrives on the politics of division.
Brazil is already a deeply polarised country, where conspiracy theories are rife. The deaths and unemployment caused by Covid-19 are exacerbated by Mr BolsoÂnaro’s leadership. But, perversely, a health and economic disaster could create an even more hospitable environment for the politics of fear and unreason.
I wish all that didn’t sound so depressingly familiar.
In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925, President Calvin Coolidge famously declared “the chief business of the American people is business.” Coolidge was succeeded by another Republican, Herbert Hoover, who in a 1928 campaign speech called for American government to foster “rugged individualism” and self-reliance. Republicans have not strayed from that catechism in the hundred years since.
Senior White House Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett, former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, coauthored “Dow 36,000” in 1999. He has advised multiple Republican campaigns and administrations and is now a distinguished visiting fellow a at the Hoover Institution. Perhaps his comments on Sunday about “human capital stock” will land him in the history books beside the Republican presidents whose administrations preceded the Great Depression.
Asked about the prospect of double-digit unemployment coming down before the November election, Hassett told CNN’s Dana Bash, “Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”
“Human capital stock” must be put back to work in America’s chief business, “producing, buying, selling, investing,” as Coolidge put it. Therein lies true freedom. It’s what the Revolutionaries died for, dontcha know. They could do all those things under the British, sure, but don’t cloud the issue.
Calling people “stock,” writes Peter Wade at Rolling Stone, “so casually lines up with the lack of empathy shown to the victims of the coronavirus by Trump’s administration and Republicans since the crisis began months ago.”
Asking just who owns and controls our “human capital stock” is the next logical question.
Andrew Naughtie at The Independent elaborates:
The term “human stock” has long been associated with eugenics, a discredited pseudoscience that enjoyed some mainstream credibility in the early 20th century. Many of its adherents, who believed that selective breeding was a self-evident way to better the human race, argued for limiting or cutting off the reproductive capacity of those showing “undesirable” traits.
Author H.G. Wells, whose early views on the hierarchy of racial groups are notorious, wrote in 1904 that “the way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies”.
The idea was so influential that in 1927, the US Supreme Court itself passed a verdict, in Buck v Bell, that compulsory sterilisation “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the 14th amendment.
While it is not to be implied that Mr Hassett was advocating for the sterilisation of the disabled and “feebleminded”, the furore caused by his phrasing itself testifies to the depth of offence caused by the resurfacing of eugenicist ideas and phraseology.
It is not as if ideas just “lying around” are not there waiting to be picked up in a crisis, as Milton Friedman once said. They’re inside the house. Inside the White House.
Henry Ford had “good bloodlines, good bloodlines,” Donald Trump told Ford employees last week in a deviation from his script. Then with a grin and a delighted chuckle, Trump added a third time, “if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.” Â
Those who don’t are, if not canon fodder, economic inputs to be used up and discarded when no longer productive.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern:
She interrupted Newshub host Ryan Bridge to tell him what was happening at the parliament complex in the capital, Wellington.
“We’re just having a bit of an earthquake here Ryan, quite a decent shake here,” she said, looking up and around the room. “But, um, if you see things moving behind me.”
New Zealand sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is sometimes called the Shaky Isles for its frequent quakes.
Monday’s magnitude 5.6 quake struck in the ocean about 100 kilometers (62 miles) northeast of Wellington, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake hit just before 8 a.m. and was felt by thousands of New Zealanders who were getting ready to start their work weeks. It was strong enough to rattle food from shelves and stop train services.
But there were no reports of major damage or injuries.
Ardern continued on with her interview, telling the host the shaking had stopped.
“We’re fine Ryan,” she said. “I’m not under any hanging lights, I look like I’m in a structurally sound place.”
A 2011 quake in the city of Christchurch killed 185 people and destroyed much of the downtown area. The city is continuing to rebuild.
After he made a sanctimonious point of demanding that churches open, he didn’t bother himself and went golfing instead yesterday:
He is completely shameless so hypocrisy means nothing. But still, it’s worth noting simply because there might be some people in this world who instinctively know that someone in his position should walk the walk he insisted his predecessors walk. There may not be many, but there should be a few.
And then there are these tweets from today which are just …
Here’s today’s infantile “you guys all say I can’t do anything right so I might as well just do what I want and anyway that other guy was way worse and I’ve been better than anyone … ” whine:
Have you ever seen anyone over the age of 8 whine like that?
Apparently, this antipathy toward wearing masks is not unprecedented. In 1918 they were also controversial:
There has been recent scholarly interest in the “Anti-Mask Leagues” in American communities during the 1918-19 pandemic. You can read about them HERE.
A Schuylkill County native on a visit to the Pacific Northwest in November 1918 got in on the mask bashing in a lengthy letter written to the Pottsville Republican. He condescendingly wrote about the “mask epidemic” taking over the city of Seattle as the influenza pandemic hit the city that month. The author, signing himself as H.G.H., noted that panic gripped the city when a local newspaper reported 100 new cases and 8 new deaths in a single day.
“If they had had a Minersville life sized dose here,” the author jibed, “everyone at large on the streets would have to be encased in a sack, head, feet, and all.”
The condescension and sarcasm misses the mark big-time. In the Schuylkill County town of Minersville, about 500 people died of pandemic influenza or the resulting pneumonia in the “Spanish Flu” pandemic. Those deaths occurred in a community of about 8,000 residents. That puts the death rate in Minersville at a staggering 6% of the town’s population. County officials recorded nearly 300 orphans in Minersville by 1919 as a result of the outbreak. Neighboring Pottsville suffered a death toll of 407 out of a population of about 21,000 – a fatality of rate of 1.9%
In these Schuylkill County communities, measures to stop the spread of pandemic influenza did not go into effect until well after community spread had become common. Measures to stop the spread of influenza – quarantines, business closures, bans on mass gatherings – were put in place too late to “flatten the curve.” Use of masks were not required.
Seattle, a city that put in place measures to mandate social distancing and enforced the use of masks, drew sarcastic criticism from our Schuylkill County correspondent. But comparisons between Seattle and Schuylkill County communities are definitive.
In Seattle, a city of about 400,000 people in 1918, 1,513 people died of influenza or resulting complications. That’s a death rate of 0.3%. If Seattle had suffered the percentage of deaths that Minersville did during the 1918 pandemic, the city would have had suffered 24,000 deaths. So those masks that H.G.H complains about in the piece below, paired with early efforts to mandate social distancing, undoubtedly saved lives.
Read the full excerpt from the Pottsville Republican, November 18, 1918, below:
… it is not safe for any respectable insect or germ to get within the city limits.
A panic was almost created in the city [Seattle] when the daily paper announced a hundred new cases with eight more deaths. If they had had a Minersville life sized dose here every one at large on the streets would have to be encased in a sack, head, feet, and all.
This is a real life sized city with a population, say of a quarter or half million and try to imagine if you can a population of that sort walking about the streets masked to the eyes. You might incline to profanity or just bejiggered if you would do it but the chances are you would change your mind before long.
If you want to ride in a street car or taxi you must have a mask, if you want to buy soothing syrup for the baby you must have on a mask. If you want to tell your troubles to a policeman you must have your mask on, in fact you can’t yell for help while being held up in the heart of the town unless you first run to a drug store and buy a mask. Then the policeman may hear you if he is not mortally engaged himself in trying to repel a flu bug struggling to go through his own mask by the aid of tanks and a creeping barrage.
If you would rather walk to the top of the 42 story building just around the corner don’t buy a mask and you can climb to your heart’s content. In fact, Seattle doesn’t see you, doesn’t know you exist unless you wear a mask.
You can’t send a telegram, buy a coffin or get in or get out of the city unless you wear a mask, so you will change your mind before long and bejiggered and buy one and feel like a full fledged nut or highwayman on parade.
It would be far preferable to wear a gas mask or a baseball mask if they would do. They can’t see you if you don’t wear a mask in a store, but as soon as you hide your mug they are ready for business. Probably it does improve the appearance of some of us and it also has a tendency to save powder and rouge. One fellow who was tired of being treated like a kaiser on a tour of Belgium went into a drug store but the clerks didn’t see him as he shifted from one foot to the other in front of the cigar stand. Finally the clerks held a consultation and the proprietor was notified and came with firm and daring step to the meek and mild stranger and with all the hanteur of the Pacific Coast informed the weary would be customer that he could not be waited upon unless he wore a mask, only to be mildly informed that that was exactly what he came in to buy.
It looks like the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan or a convention of the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient Brotherhood of Western Train Bandits and Highwaymen. But they are getting away with it and the strange part of it is that most of them take it seriously and are half scared to death.
Flu may not furnish a pleasant death but it doesn’t torture the life out of you like the mask epidemic.
HGH
The letter is erudite enough that I might wonder if it was satire. But apparently this really was a big deal during the 1918 pandemic.
The country had a population of about 103 million and suffered an estimated 675,000 deaths in the several waves of the 1918-1919 pandemic. They were mostly young people as well. And even then people bitched about wearing masks.
You would think that one hundred years later, with a greater knowledge of science and better medical interventions, people would have more understanding of the necessity. But here we are:
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) defended the steps his state has taken to reopen even as it saw its largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases Thursday.
“We have to manage the risk,” Hutchinson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We take the virus very seriously, it’s a risk, it causes death, but you can’t cloister yourself at home, that is just contrary to the American spirit.”
Hutchinson compared social distancing and wearing masks to driving while wearing a seatbelt.
“You can be in an automobile and that is very risky, but you can manage the risk by wearing a seatbelt,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
Uhm, ok. But his people are refusing to wear their fucking seat belts. And worse than that, they’re driving drunk and weaving all over the road!
That’s right. In a free country, we wouldn’t have lights and stop signs or any rules of the road at all! And we certainly wouldn’t allow those lily-livered Democrat Governors and politicians to make laws that require us to follow them. Why, they even allow the police to enforce the traffic laws!
Oy. One of the reasons we only have 30K traffic deaths per year is because we have those laws. If we didn’t, our mobility by car and truck would be so fraught with risk that the economy would collapse. Why these Republican officials can’t see that this ridiculous highway analogy doesn’t work for them, I will never understand.
.
A cult you say?
Honestly, I’m not sure what religion these people are observing.