Month: June 2020

Oh look, another Trump cultist get the virus:

The co-founder of a Maryland group that protested the state’s stay-at-home order and has pressured Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to ease restrictions amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic says he has tested positive for Covid-19.Tim Walters, the organizer for Reopen Maryland, said in a Facebook live video posted Thursday that he is quarantining in his home.

The US Navy veteran and former Republican candidate for Maryland’s House of Delegates also said that his wife and son would get tested and they would be following the 14-day quarantine.”I did have a hard day yesterday. I told you guys I wasn’t feeling really well. I crashed later in the day, had to go to the emergency room. I thought I was actually having a stroke … turns out I had Covid,” he said in the video, continuing later: “As you can see, I’m not dying. It’s uncomfortable. I would make it akin to having the flu.”

In April and May, Reopen Maryland, a grassroots group, organized rallies in Annapolis and across the state to push Hogan to reopen the state’s economy. The group in May also joined a handful of religious and business leaders and state lawmakers in suing the governor over his stay-at-home order.

Walters first shared he was diagnosed with coronavirus earlier this week in a series of Facebook videos, according to The Capital Gazette, which first reported on Walters’ diagnosis. Walters separately told The Daily Record on Friday that he had deleted some videos in which he discussed his diagnosis because of backlash his family received.

Walters, according to the Capital Gazette, urged those he has recently come in contact with to assess their health, but said he will not provide information to state public health officials for contract tracing — an epidemiological tool that public health officials say is key to understanding coronavirus and stopping its spread.

I’ve had a couple of very bad cases of the flu in my life. Never once did I think I was having a stroke and I never went to the emergency room. Maybe I was just lucky, but I think this guy is still blowing smoke. I hope he recovers nicely and doesn’t have any of the long-term effects people are starting to see.

However, his unwillingness to help with contact tracing is despicable and I fully expect that as this epidemic continues to explode it will be a big problem among the MAGA folks. Even if they get sick they will continue to deny reality and refuse to cooperate with the public health officials. These are not rational people even when confronted with their own lives being at risk.

The Barbosa family found out the hard way how contagious the coronavirus can be. One asymptomatic nephew who attended a family surprise birthday party in North Texas spread the virus to seven others of the 25 in attendance. Now 10 additional family members are ill:

Ron Barbosa, who is married to a doctor and refused to attend the May 30 party for his daughter-in-law because of safety concerns amid the COVID-19 pandemic, said those hospitalized included his parents, both in their 80′s, and his sister, who is also battling breast cancer.

Barbosa’s father did not attend, but later contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized June 17. Barbosa, holding back tears, told Associated Press his father is on life support in the ICU and “hanging on by a thread.”

Already we worry here about waiting in line to vote this fall with people who refuse to wear masks standing in front and behind. Kentucky’s primary last week, Wisconsin’s in April, and Georgia’s “voting meltdown” earlier this month provided a foretaste of how badly the election could go this fall whatever the results.

The goal of increasing voting by mail and early voting sites is to reduce voters’ chances of COVID-19 infection and reduce Election Day congestion at understaffed polling places.

Even with more funding allocated to support additional early voting sites, staffing them will be a challenge. Anchorage, Alaska city clerk testified recently that 95% of the city’s regular election workers (senior citizens, typically, and at elevated risk from the coronavirus) declined to work this year’s local elections. It is a pattern already repeating across the country.

Nathaniel Persily, law professor at Stanford Law School and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, write at The Atlantic that voting behavior is resistant to change:

In a survey we recently conducted of registered voters in Pennsylvania, roughly half said they would vote in person in the fall. Even among primary voters who cast a mail ballot, 20 percent said they were likely to vote in person in the general election. Most of those who failed to vote in the primary but plan to vote in November said they will do so in person.

Voting in person this fall will come with health risks. But voting by mail or by absentee ballot comes with increased risk that votes will not be counted. As many as 10 percent of vote-by-mail ballots cast recently in New Jersey did not count due to technical deficiencies or because they arrived late. Voters unfamiliar with vote-by-mail or absentee processes are more prone to make errors that cause their ballots to be rejected.

Voters this fall will have to weigh potential pitfalls in voting by mail against the chances of contracting COVID-19 through traditional in-person voting.

It gets better (or worse):

Many of the usual polling locations, too, are taking themselves out of commission. Through our work with the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, some local election officials have told us that half of their polling places might be unavailable in the fall. A third of Americans vote in schools, but many such buildings—along with senior-living centers, firehouses, and other community facilities—are now being closed to outsiders. Other facilities that served as polling stations before the pandemic are unfit because they are too small to ensure social distancing. States are improvising—and when they raise COVID-19 concerns as the explanation for restricting access, the courts are not providing any relief. Before the Kentucky primary, voting-rights advocates sued the state over its plan to open only a single polling place per county. A federal court said doing so did not violate either the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.

Sanitatizing supplies and procedures may slow the voting process and add cost to operating in-person sites.

Persily and Stewart believe Congress should allocate more resources to meeting this challenge, perhaps five times the $400 provided in the CARES Act for election assistance. A massive effort to recruit poll workers will be necessary as well:

Big-box retailers, such as Walmart and Costco, should make their facilities available for Election Day as well, given that they are uniquely situated to ensure social distancing for the vote. States should make Election Day a school holiday to ensure that those buildings will remain available for polling and to free up teachers to serve as poll workers. Indeed, all federal, state, and local employees should be given paid leave to serve as poll workers, and college students should be excused from class to do the same.

Promotion for absentee voting or vote-by-mail, I’d add, should include a pitch to those voters to assist in the in-person process by serving as election workers in their communities.

Using alternate facilities on Election Day, while potentially safer, will be more confusing to voters accustomed to voting at their traditional polling places. Voters arriving to find them shuttered may give up rather than traveling additional distance to sites prepared for the pandemic. This is especially true for less-mobile communities. Additional monies will be needed to prevent polling place consolidation from depressing the vote.

Finally, election officials will need to do all they can to assure voters that casting a ballot in person will be safe. This includes adopting and publicizing sanitary protocols well before the election. Campaigns and election officials also must be careful about their messaging about voting by mail. Signaling that mail voting is the only safe way to vote will depress turnout, especially among those communities predisposed to polling-place voting.

Campaigns and volunteers are frustrated that the pandemic has taken traditional campaign tactics such as canvassing, public events, and voter registration drives off the table. We will see them doubling down on phone calls and social media ads because that is all they know to do. in a pandemic. Canvassing, public events, and voter registration drives are off the table.

Promoting voting by mail (or absentee) can substitute for some of the tactics above. Instead of calling voters in September and October to ask if they plan to vote for Candidate X on November 3, volunteers might be helping absentee voters lock in votes many weeks ahead of the election. But voters must be appraised of the small risk of their votes not counting so they can weigh them against potential health risks in appearing in person. Here in North Carolina, the absentee rejection rate is much smaller than the New Jersey number cited above. (Working on assembling the latest numbers.) Any way they go, this election poses unique challenges to exercising the franchise.

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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

He doesn’t like how social distancing looks on TV so …

In the hours before President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, his campaign directed the removal of thousands of “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” stickers from seats in the arena that were intended to establish social distance between rallygoers, according to video and photos obtained by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the event.

The removal contradicted instructions from the management of the BOK Center, the 19,000-seat arena in downtown Tulsa where Trump held his rally on June 20. At the time, coronavirus cases were rising sharply in Tulsa County, and Trump faced intense criticism for convening a large crowd for an indoor political rally, his first such event since the start of the pandemic.

As part of its safety plan, arena management had purchased 12,000 do-not-sit stickers for Trump’s rally, intended to keep people apart by leaving open seats between attendees. On the day of the rally, event staff had already affixed them on nearly every other seat in the arena when Trump’s campaign told event management to stop and then began removing the stickers, hours before the president’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the event who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.AD

In a video clip obtained by The Washington Post, two men — one in a suit and one wearing a badge and a face mask — can be seen pulling stickers off seats in a section of the arena. It is unclear who those two men are. When Trump took the stage on Saturday evening, the crowd was clustered together and attendees were not leaving empty seats between themselves.

The actions by Trump’s campaign were first reported Friday by Billboard Magazine. As rally preparations were underway, Trump’s campaign staff intervened with the venue manager, ASM Global, and told them to stop labeling seats in this way, Doug Thornton, executive vice president of ASM Global, told the magazine.

“They also told us that they didn’t want any signs posted saying we should social distance in the venue,” Thornton said. “The campaign went through and removed the stickers.”

A spokesman for ASM Global declined to comment.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh did not directly respond to questions about the sticker removal.

“The rally was in full compliance with local requirements. In addition, every rally attendee received a temperature check prior to admission, was given a face mask, and provided ample access to hand sanitizer,” Murtaugh said in an emailed statement.

[….]As the crowd entered the day of the rally, the Trump campaign handed out masks and small bottles of “Make America Great Again 2020” branded hand sanitizer.

The BOK Center also put down floor decals in front of concession areas and put up plexiglass to protect vendors.

At 1:47 p.m. that day, Fox 23 News posted on its Facebook page a photo from inside the BOK Center showing two members of the event staff putting stickers on seats. “Stickers are going on every other seat in the BOK Center saying ‘Do Not Sit Here’ to try to spread the crowd out for President Trump’s rally tonight,” the post read.

After the majority of the stickers were in place, a member of Trump’s campaign radioed staff in the event war room where arena management was monitoring preparations and told them to stop, according to the person familiar with the event. Event staff was told to continue applying the stickers. Later, the campaign began pulling them off, the person said.

In video footage of Trump’s rally, there appeared to be no effort to keep an empty seat between attendees.

Attendance turned out to be less than Trump expected — he had said some 1 million people wanted tickets — and the arena was not full, particularly in the upper level.

Trump had wanted every seat packed, and he told advisers coming in on Air Force One and at the arena he was displeased that the crowd was not larger, said two Trump advisers, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations.

“He was quite angry,” said one person who interacted with him.

Trump had told North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) during a May 29 phone call that he would not hold a socially distanced convention in Charlotte because he had never had an empty seat since he came down the escalator at the start of his presidential campaign in 2015.

The spoiled brat wanted his cheering crowd and that was that. But he’s a fool. Had he allowed the social distancing he could have excused the sparse crowd. By doing what he did, he made it obvious that his adoring cult members value their lives more than they value him. And that’s a problem…

Politico on The Lincoln Project:

The moment President Donald Trump started tweeting at 12:46 a.m. about the “RINO Republicans” at the Lincoln Project who’d just run an ad attacking his response to the pandemic, Reed Galen knew his hunch was right: you can trigger a Trump freakout with a little bit of planning and pop psychology.

Galen had co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump PAC run by Republicans, with the goal of convincing Americans to vote against him in November. In May, the group thought Trump’s response to the pandemic had created the perfect opportunity to both make their case. Off of a brainwave that cofounder George Conway had during a conversation with his wife, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Galen and his small team guessed Trump would be particularly enraged by an in-the-moment ad that portrayed the president as making Americans “weaker, sicker and poorer” than ever before. And they figured the best bet to get to the president would be to target Trump where he was, Washington, D.C., on the channel he watches, Fox News, when he was most likely to be watching, at night.

“He’s always gonna be watching Fox News at night in the residence,” said Galen, a GOP consultant who had worked for George W. Bush, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What they hadn’t expected, though, was that Trump would single out nearly every person involved in the Lincoln Project by name — Kellyanne Conway’s “deranged loser of a husband, Moonface” Conway, “Crazed” Rick Wilson, “LOSERS” who had consulted for “loser” candidates.

To Galen, it was a sign that the Lincoln Project — the first phase, at least — was working.

“It’s not just pissing off Donald Trump. Anybody could do that,” Galen said in an interview, though he admitted to “a modicum of enjoyment” from being the topic of midnight tweetstorm. “It’s, to what effect? Like, why are you doing it? And the point is to take him off his game and take his campaign off their game, strategically and tactically, so that the Biden campaign and Joe Biden can have the freedom of movement and the green air to do the things that they need to do.”

In the past few months, the Lincoln Project — a PAC with not much funding, as far as PACs go — has successfully established itself as a squatter in Trump’s mental space, thanks to several factors: members each boasting hundreds of thousands of social media followers, rapidly cut ads that respond to current events and a single-minded focus on buying airtime wherever Trump is most likely to be binging cable news that day, whether it’s the D.C. market or his golf courses across the country. And every time Trump freaks out — or every time the media covers his freakout — the Lincoln Project scores an incalculable amount of earned media, and millions of views online to boot.

But though the PAC has successfully caught Trump’s attention — The Daily Beast reported the campaign spent $400,000 on ads in the D.C. market in part so Trump would feel less threatened by Lincoln Project ads — Trump’s critics worry that the ads, as well cut and as troll-effective as they are, may not actually work to “prosecute the case” against his re-election, as the group vowed to do back in December.

“I love seeing their stuff. Their recent ad is my pinned tweet,” said Robert Wolf, a top Democratic donor who said he’s considering donating to the group. “All the Democrats love watching what they’re doing, but I’m not sure yet if they are preaching to the choir or actually moving Republicans away from Trump to Biden. Either way, it’s still a net positive.”

There’s more at the link and it’s an entertaining article. This, for instance, is juicy:

Off of a brainwave that cofounder George Conway had during a conversation with his wife, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Galen and his small team guessed Trump would be particularly enraged by an in-the-moment ad that portrayed the president as making Americans “weaker, sicker and poorer” than ever before. 

I’m sure we’ll find out some day what the story is with the Conways. I had heard they were separated so maybe this conversation took place a while ago. But maybe it didn’t. I’ll bet Trump is wondering the same thing …

Anyway, I think it’s a good thing. Their ads are really good and it’s not just the ones designed to get under Trump’s skin by making him look ridiculous.

This one is really very good:

Of course, these are the ones that kill:

They’re living in Trump’s head. And there’s a whole lot of room in there…

While everyone else is encouraged to go out and “open up the economy” Dear Leader lives in a sterile bubble:

President Donald Trump appears ready to move on from a still-raging coronavirus pandemic — skipping the first White House task force briefing in months and moving the event out of the White House itself. But the measures meant to protect him from catching the virus have scaled up dramatically. As he seeks to insert rival Joe Biden’s health into the presidential campaign, Trump has voiced escalating concern about how it would appear if he contracted coronavirus and has insisted on steps to protect himself, even as he refuses to wear a mask in public and agitates for large campaign rallies where the virus could spread.

When he travels to locations where the virus is surging, every venue the President enters is inspected for potential areas of contagion by advance security and medical teams, according to people familiar with the arrangements. Bathrooms designated for the President’s use are scrubbed and sanitized before he arrives. Staff maintain a close accounting of who will come into contact with the President to ensure they receive tests.

While the White House phases out steps such as temperature checks and required mask-wearing in the West Wing — changes meant to signal the country is moving on — those around the President still undergo regular testing. And even as Trump attempts to put the pandemic behind him by encouraging reopening and downplaying the new surge, there are signs of the still-raging pandemic even within his orbit.

This week, the virus again struck members of the President’s staff, this time a collection of campaign aides and US Secret Service personnel who had been working on Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa.And CNN has learned a third White House staffer who was recently in Trump’s vicinity also tested positive. According to two sources familiar with the matter, the staffer is a senior economic official who was in the Rose Garden with Trump during an event this month. Because of privacy concerns, CNN is not naming the individual.

As infections surge and several states grind their reopenings to a halt, the President’s political advisers and allies are growing concerned he is moving on from a pandemic still gripping the nation — and, this week, members of his own team. Trump’s absence from Friday’s coronavirus task force briefing only heightened the impression that he is leaving the pandemic response to others.

None of the nation’s top health experts — dropped off in the circular drive in front of the Department of Health and Human Service — seemed overly concerned that Trump wasn’t there.

The coronavirus task force meeting had been moved from the White House Situation Room to the health agency’s headquarters without much explanation. Vice President Mike Pence arrived with his security in tow and several aides were driven from the West Wing in black suburbans.As the meeting got underway, the President was back at the White House tweeting about attempts to tear down statues and abruptly canceling a planned trip to New Jersey so he could, he claimed, ensure that “law and order” is maintained over the weekend.

His absence at the meeting across town seemed largely unremarkable to his staff; Trump hasn’t attended a formal task force meeting since April, two sources familiar with his attendance say.”The President continues to lead the whole-of-government response to Covid-19 and regularly receives updates on the work of the task force from the vice president,” White House spokesman Judd Deere told CNN.

Of course he wasn’t missed. He always makes things worse. And in any case, Pence has learned to be a mindless cheerleader without openly insulting the press corps so Trump is able to get his suicidal message out anyway.

He still doesn’t see that economic revcovery depends upon the virus being contained. He’s convinced himself that it will “go away” and everything will be fine and anyway all the white people will be so upset about the removal of confederate statues that they’ll vote for him and he’ll win. It’s as delusional as it gets.

Even Tucker Carlson is losing hope:

.”At some point in the future, historians will marvel at the fact that the President lost ground during a pandemic and then during mass riots,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said during his opening monologue Thursday night. “Both crises should have highlighted his strengths. They were naturals for him.””An awful lot of people voted for Donald Trump precisely to avoid a moment we are now in,” Carlson said.

It’s unknown if he’s listening to Tucker. But really, he can’t do what Tucker says he should do because he doesn’t know how. He’s a poser, a phony, a clown.

He’s also a pathetic coward:

Even as Trump attempts to move on, the protective bubble around him has grown thicker. Aides say the steps are necessary to allow the President — by all definitions an essential worker — to continue leading the country amid the pandemic. But people familiar with the matter say the precautions also stem from Trump’s own insistence that he not contract the disease and his heightened awareness of how a sick President would affect both the country’s view of him and his ability to command a response to the pandemic.

After Trump told aides at the beginning of the outbreak he must avoid getting sick at all costs, efforts to prevent him from contracting the virus have progressively become more intensive and wide-ranging. Early steps such as keeping more hand sanitizer nearby eventually evolved into an intensive safety apparatus, including the testing regimen requiring dozens of staffers.

So far the efforts appear to have been effective, at least at preventing the President from contracting the virus. But events of the past week have also underscored the primacy of Trump himself to the safety measures, with the safety of staffers who compose his massive footprint coming second.

I think he is terrified and wants to stay in his bunker but believes that if he demonstrates any kind of responsible behavior to the public it will show weakness. So he’s trapped, desperate to stay out in the public and keep up the pretense that the virus is gone knowing that it’s roaring out of control and killing people just like him:

Trump, who turned 74 on June 14, is considered obese, according to the results of his last physical, which showed he weighed 244 pounds and stands 6 feet 3 inches tall. The results from his first physical while in office indicated he also had a common form of heart disease.

Trump’s most recent physical results showed his cholesterol is lower than when he first took office. But other aspects of his health remain unknown. The summary of results provided by the President’s doctor this year did not include the same level of detail Trump provided in 2018, when he insisted he be administrated a mental acuity test to put to rest questions about his sharpness.

Trump’s abrupt trip last October to Walter Reed National Medical Center remains the source of questions and speculation, even among some of his aides. The White House insisted the trip was meant to get a head start on his yearly physical, but it was not announced ahead of time and the results of the physical were not released for another six months.

The President has told officials repeatedly that he cannot get sick, and he grew upset when he learned last month that one of the military valets who handles his food and drink had come down with the disease. Trump asked how it was possible that someone with such intimate access to his person could have contracted the virus, and in the days following the revelation appeared cautious around people he did not know well, people familiar with his reaction said.

Trump appeared genuinely alarmed when people close to him contracted the disease, seeing in their experiences a fate he was adamantly working to avoid for himself. He raised repeatedly his friend Stanley Chera, a New York real estate developer who Trump had been friends with for decades. Trump described his surprise at Chera’s descent from contracting the virus to entering a coma to eventually succumbing to the disease.

Later, Trump was surprised again to learn that one of his closest foreign allies, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had fallen seriously ill from the virus, at one point being admitted to an intensive care unit in London. Trump asked for frequent updates on Johnson’s deteriorating condition and later asked to speak with him as soon as he was on his way to recovery.

Meanwhile as he’s telling all of us to out and expose ourselves, get sick and die.

What a guy.

Harry Enten at CNN:

The polls are fairly unanimous: Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a significant advantage over President Donald Trump. On average, he’s up by 10 points nationally and in the pivotal battleground state of Wisconsin.

There is time for Trump to mount a comeback, but the candidates who do come back are usually not incumbents and have never been elected incumbents in the polling era.

Since 1940, the only incumbent losing at this point in the cycle who would go on to win another term was Harry Truman. He, like Trump, was down around 10 points to Thomas Dewey in the early summer of 1948. But remember, Truman was not elected president before taking the 1948 election. He ascended to the office through the vice-presidency, after Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945.

In terms of elected incumbents, Jimmy Carter was the one to be down by as much as Trump is right now. Carter went on to get crushed by Ronald Reagan in 1980. George H.W. Bush in 1992 was the other elected incumbent to lose reelection since 1940. At this point, he was ahead of Bill Clinton, though he found himself trailing in a number of polls to independent Ross Perot.

None of those were the subjects of non-stop shocking scandals as Trump has been from the moment he took office and none of them were impeached, only surviving because of the servile sycophancy of their party’s Senators. Neither did any of them fail to deal with a major crisis in such spectacular fashion as Trump has done in the middle of a pandemic, economic failure, and social unrest.

The fact that the only incumbent to come back (Truman) is an indication of a wider phenomenon: races without an elected incumbent running for re-election are different from ones with one. Gerald Ford was the only president not given another term with a positive net approval (approve – disapprove) rating, and he wasn’t an elected incumbent.

Elected incumbent races are much more likely to be referendums on the occupant of the White House. Those without them tend to be much more of a choice between the two major party candidates. Indeed, the other presidential candidates to blow clear leads at this point were running in non-incumbent races.

In many of these non-incumbent races, a lot of voters have weak or no opinions about one or both of the candidates.

Consider the 1988 campaign. Democrat Michael Dukakis was up by around 5 points in late June 1988. His lead over George H.W. Bush would grow even larger later in the summer. Yet, it was Bush who would win an 8-point victory in the fall.Dukakis, though, was barely known at this point. About a majority (49%) of voters said they hadn’t heard enough or were undecided when asked whether they had a favorable or unfavorable view of him in a CBS News poll. Biden is much better known. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this month, 25% said they were neutral or not sure about Biden.

Opinions of Bush also were weak at this point in 1988. A sizable minority (41%) of voters told CBS News that they hadn’t heard enough or were undecided on Bush. In that recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just 9% said they were neutral or not sure about Trump. In other words, four to five times fewer voters are undecided on the most important factor for the 2020 race (Trump) than they were for the two candidates in 1988.

The other big non-incumbent race where the clear polling leader at this point lost the popular vote was 2000. George W. Bush was up by 8 points and lost the popular vote to Al Gore. But about 3 times as many voters (25-30%) were undecided or had no opinion on Bush and Gore than do on Trump currently.

The fact that 1988 and 2000 moved a lot fit a larger pattern. When fewer voters have a strong opinion of the candidates, it’s correlated with more movement in the polls.

Right now, more voters have a strong opinion of Trump than any other candidate at this point in 40 years.

Simply put, Trump doesn’t have a lot of room to mount the type of comeback he needs to.

Trump’s approval rating has been pretty solid — but it’s been solidly in the low 40s. Here it is today:

Any other president in his position would have seen this crisis as an opportunity to shore up his approval rating going into the election. But they would have known they’d have to take control, show leadership and shepherd the people through it with reassurance and empathy.

He only knows how to brag, blame, whine and insult. He is completely out of his depth in the job in general but when it comes to actually knowing how to deal with a problem he’s paralyzed. All he can do is stand around complaining that the crisis ruined everything.

They do cheat so I’m not sanguine that this thing is definitely going to go my way in November. Holding the election during the pandemic is a wild card and Trump is already plotting to contest the results. But it’s a big plus that so many people are finally seeing that he is destroying us and are willing to give the Democrats a chance to try to turn this big ship around. The question is whether they’ll be able to.

Budgets are moral documents, some lefties say. “Some” being even Vice President Mike Pence, although a raft of quotations pages cite no source for his saying so. Nevertheless, ours have been seriously out of line with our espoused moral priorities pretty much forever.

When the Berlin Wall fell, among anti-nuclear and peace activists there was widespread talk of a “peace dividend.” Think of all the helpful things the United States could do with the money it would not be spending to defend against the Soviet Union, they said. Billions might be redirected to schools and health care, etc., to programs that would make life better for children and other living things.

That never happened, of course. The United States will spend hundreds of billions of deficit dollars on military hardware. But spending (deficit or not) on things that do not go BOOM face hyperbolic morality plays in Congress about moral hazard and the personal integrity of intended recipients. Congress must debate the true needs of lower classes God has seen unfit to bestow with riches. The poors must be incentivized to throw themselves against the wheel in redeeming, character-building labor. Fiscal conservatives must wring waste, fraud and abuse from entitlement programs to make room in our budgets for the waste, fraud, and abuse in military spending. They key difference being into whose pockets deficit dollars ultimately flow.

If nothing else, budgets are a reflection of priorities. They reveal our nation’s character. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus said. Jesus knew a thing or two about people’s priorities.

The drive to reopen state economies before the deadly coronavirus epidemic is under control lays bare where our priorities are. Still are.

“The chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge said in January 1925, praising commerce as a core motivator in people’s lives as the Roaring Twenties roared. He said that just before challenging the poet Oliver Goldsmith’s belief that wealth is corrupting:

Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins.

We know where that attitude led just over four years later.

A century on, we are reliving the end result of wealth-driven budget priorities. Thus, today we must return Americans’ shoulders to the wheel with all haste, even to the risk of their lives, lest in idleness they risk their immortal souls.

Abby Goodnough and Reed Abelson consider the Trump administration’s effort to collapse the Affordable Care Act. The patchwork system is being tested by the pandemic that has left millions of vulnerable Americans of lesser means at risk of catastrophic illness and financial ruin. Just before midnight Thursday, the Trump administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to overturn the law. The court already increased people’s vulnerability by allowing states to opt out of expanding Medicaid:

Four out of every five people who have lost employer-provided health insurance during the coronavirus pandemic are eligible for free coverage through expanded Medicaid programs or government-subsidized private insurance, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group. And many jobless 20-somethings have been able to join their parents’ plans. All three options were made possible by the law.

Yet others have fallen through the holes in the law’s safety net. Nearly three million low-income people are ineligible for assistance in the 14 states that have declined to expand Medicaid under the law, including Texas, Florida and others, mostly in the South, where coronavirus cases are now spiking. Many people who have qualified for government subsidies to buy private plans still face unaffordable co-pays and deductibles.

We might have addressed that the way activists fantasized the U.S. might have spent that peace divided. We did not.

“The pandemic has exposed some of the glaring weaknesses in the A.C.A.,” said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who served as a health policy adviser to the Clinton administration. “When millions of workers lose their jobs, most of them also lose their health coverage, and the A.C.A. does not provide for any automatic backup or means of transferring coverage to a publicly subsidized alternative.”

“To be sure, we are better off with the A.C.A. than without it,” Mr. Starr added, “but we ought to be prepared to go beyond it and create a system that doesn’t leave so many Americans in the lurch.”

We might have, as Denmark did, covered 75 to 90 percent of all worker salaries during the coronavirus shutdown. Our budgets might have prioritized health and safety above the need to accumulate wealth. Instead, the president, fixated on his reelection as he reportedly is, demanded we get the human hamsters back on their wheels with all haste.

People have died. More people will die. Congress, the president, and states that succumbed to pressure to reopen their economies early have their priorities.

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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Who could have predicted?

Amid all of this, one particular difference stands out between the American and European approaches. Many states were happy to reopen after simply “bending the curve” — that is, slowing upward growth and ensuring spare hospital capacity. These states went on to expand economic activity at an elevated plateau with lots of ongoing transmissions. In contrast, European countries mostly waited to reopen until they crushed the curve or reached its far slope, with substantially lower incidence or dramatic reductions in the viral spread. It’s not the only explanation for a growing gap, but it’s a compelling one.

Italy is something of an exception, having opened with a comparatively high case count. However, the country was recovering from a particularly large and concentrated outbreak, and its incidence was on a steep downward trajectory. Its average daily count was below 20 cases per million within a week of its initial limited opening, a metric none of the most troubled states have managed since early April. More fromChina Should Join Trade Deal the U.S. AbandonedChina’s Rise Heralds Return of the Domino TheoryThe Stock-Market Recovery Makes a Lot of SenseCoronavirus Mission Not Accomplished

So why is low incidence so crucial to successful reopening? It’s simple math. More virus circulating in a community means more opportunities for it to spread. It makes every precaution individuals and officials take a bit less effective, and every activity riskier. This doesn’t necessarily translate to immediate outbreaks, as people came out of lockdown quite cautiously. But as activity expands to include things such as indoor service at bars, a high base level of infection becomes increasingly likely to cause problems. 

Meanwhile, Mike Pence has canceled his rallies in Texas and Arizona this week. Big of him.