Month: October 2022

Why Japan has done so much better than the US with COVID

We should be embarrassed … and very, very sad:

A piece in The Economist this week about masks, and how at least half of the people in Japan are planning to continue to use masks indefinitely (where there was never a mandate), prompts a deeper look into what has been the secret of Japan’s extraordinary success in the pandemic. Over time it has the least cumulative deaths per capita of any major country in the world.

Before we get into that data, let’s take a look at the age pyramids for Japan and the United States. The #1 risk factor for death from Covid is advanced age, and you can see that in Japan that ~25% of the population is age 65 and older, whereas in the United States that proportion is substantially reduced at 15%. Sure there are differences in co-morbidities like obesity and diabetes, but there is also the tradeoff of a much higher population density in Japan.

Besides masks, which were distributed early on by the government to the population in Japan, there was the “Avoid the 3Cs” cluster-busting strategy, widely disseminated in Spring 2020, leveraging Pareto’s 80-20 principle, long before there were any vaccines available. For a good portion of the pandemic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan maintained a strict policy for border control, while hard to quantify, may certainly have contributed to its success.

Besides these factors, once vaccines became available, Japan got their population with the primary series to 83% of their population rapidly, even after getting a late start by many months compared with the United States, which has peaked at 68%. That’s a big gap.

But that gap got much worse when it came to boosters. 95% of Japanese compared with 40.8% of Americans have had a booster shot. Of note, that 95% in Japan pertains to the whole population. In the United States the per cent of people age 65+ who have had 2 boosters is currently only 42%. I’ve previously reviewed the important lifesaving impact of 2 boosters among people age 65+ from 5 independent studies during Omicron waves throughout the world.

Now let’s turn to cumulative fatalities in the two countries. There’s a huge, nearly 9-fold difference, per capita. Using today’s Covid-19 Dashboard, there are cumulatively 45,533 deaths in Japan and 1,062,560 American deaths. That translates to 1 in 2,758 people in Japan compared with 1 in 315 Americans dying of Covid.

And if we look at excess mortality instead of confirmed Covid deaths, that enormous gap doesn’t change.

Obviously it would be good to have data for other Covid outcomes, such as hospitalizations, ICUs, and Long Covid, but they are not accessible.

Comparing Japan, the country that has fared the best, with the United States, one of the worst pandemic outcome results, leaves us with a sense that Prof Ian McKay’s “”Swiss cheese model” is the best explanation. It’s not just one thing. Masks, consistent evidence-based communication (3C’s) with attention to ventilation and air quality, and the outstanding uptake of vaccines and boosters all contributed to Japan’s success.

There is another factor to add to that model—Paxlovid. Its benefit of reducing hospitalizations and deaths for people over age 65 is unquestionable.

That’s why I had previously modified the Swiss cheese model to add Paxlovid.

But in the United States, where 15% of the population is 65 and older, they account for over 75% of the daily death toll, still in the range of 400 per day. Here, with a very high proportion of people age 65+ left vulnerable without boosters, or primary vaccines, Paxlovid is only being given to less than 25% of the eligible (age 50+), and less people age 80+ are getting Paxlovid than those age 45. The reasons that doctors are not prescribing it —worried about interactions for a 5-day course and rebound—are not substantiated.

Bottom line: In the United States we are not protecting our population anywhere near as well as Japan, as grossly evident by the fatalities among people at the highest risk. There needs to be far better uptake of boosters and use of Paxlovid in the age 65+ age group, but the need for amped up protection is not at all restricted to this age subgroup. Across all age groups age 18+ there is an 81% reduction of hospitalizations with 2 boosters with the most updated CDC data available, through the Omicron BA.5 wave

No less the previous data through May 2022 showing protection from death across all ages with 2 boosters

And please don’t forget that around the world, over 20 million lives were saved, just in 2021, the first year of vaccines.

We can learn so much from a model country like Japan. Yes, we need nasal and varaint-proof vaccines to effectively deal with the new variants that are already getting legs in places like XBB in Singapore and ones not on the radar yet. But right now we’ve got to do far better for people getting boosters and, when a person age 65+ gets Covid, Paxlovid. Take a look at Chris Hayes video segment from yesterday when he pleaded for Americans to get a booster shot. Every day that vaccine waning of the US population exceeds the small per cent of people who get a booster, our vulnerability increases. If we don’t get that on track, it’s likely going to be a rough winter ahead.

Don’t sleep on this. It’s real.

After the 2016 election we all wrote a lot about the alt-right led by Steve Bannon and Milo Yianopoulos and various Khaki clad Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us!” I think over time that people began to believe that was all a flash in the pan, not to be taken seriously. But it was reflective of a real global phenomenon and it’s still out there and growing:

Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Spain’s far-right Sunday in a video shown at a rally in Madrid that also featured messages by the leading stars of Europe’s populist right like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

In a recording that lasted under 40 seconds made while Trump was on a plane, Trump thanked Spain’s far-right Vox party and its leader Santiago Abascal for what he called the “great job” they do.

“We have to make sure that we protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things,” Trump said. “Spain is a great country and we want to keep it a great country. So congratulations to Vox for so many great messages you get out to the people of Spain and the people of the world.”

Vox captured national attention on Spain’s political landscape in 2019 when it became the third-largest force in Spain’s Parliament after an election that led to a national left-wing coalition that still holds power. Vox’s messages include zero tolerance for Catalan separatism, disdain for gender equality, diatribes against unauthorized immigration from Africa and embracing both the “Reconquista” of medieval Spain from Islam as well as the legacy of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 20th-century dictatorship.

Trumpism isn’t an outlier.

Update: More on Trump’s global wingnut outreach

While most national Republicans have been fretting over whether Dr. Mehmet Oz can rebound in Pennsylvania, or whether Herschel Walker will be tripped up by the ghosts of his past, Donald Trump has also been keeping tabs on the political future of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and watching closely as Kim Jong-Un rattles the west.

The former president remains keenly invested in the midterm election cycle that is cresting back home. But his attention has been occupied by affairs overseas too.

Trump and his circles have worked to propel the “America First” style of right-wing populism abroad by giving a MAGA stamp of approval for far-right candidates and building informal alliances with burgeoning right-wing movements. Most recently, he provided a last-minute boost for Bolsonaro with a video endorsement filmed on his private plane while on the way back from a rally in Michigan — a video that Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo said contributed to his father’s better than expected showing in Sunday’s presidential election.

Trump’s warned about world war stemming from U.S. policy towards Taiwan, he’s entertained Hungary’s Viktor Orban at his club in New Jersey, and talked longingly about his relationship with Kim Jong-Un as the North Korean leader fired ballistic missiles over Japan.

His allies say it’s part of building his own political brand.

“The president’s endorsement isn’t just a kind of quirky ‘screw you’ to the media and global institutions, it has a big effect with grassroots voters. His voice plays largely in a lot of countries,” said Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union. “I’ve talked to him about this three or four times and I don’t know if he fully understands he has this kind of non-traditional audience in the U.S. but it is also overseas.”

Trump has long had an affinity for strongmen in far-off countries, going back to his days before becoming president. But his continued fascination with and support for them threatens to further complicate the Republican Party’s search for a cohesive foreign policy doctrine.

Those close to Trump say he views his interest and involvement in foreign elections as a natural extension of his relationships from the White House and his long held efforts to flex political power back home.

“It’s real, his endorsement is looked for as much as a politician here,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House strategist. “He knows these people personally whereas he doesn’t have the hangers-on at Mar-a-Lago that are getting paid to deliver endorsements to House and Senate candidates. President Trump is looked at as the leader in that movement.”

[…]

“Trump is a budding authoritarian and he feels a natural affinity with other actual or aspiring authoritarians abroad. Some call it the Illiberal International,” said Max Boot, a foreign policy expert who advised Republican presidential campaigns. “They are united by their embrace of nationalism and xenophobia and rejection of liberal democracy, science, and even reason. The foreign authoritarians learn from Trump and he learns from them. It’s a disturbing dynamic that is doing much to undermine democracy around the world.”

Trump has been unbowed by the critics. He has defended his relationships and endorsements on the grounds that it’s an extension of a brand of foreign policy realism. And his team notes that he’s shaping the GOP around his worldviews. Top voices in the conservative media ecosystem, for instance, have come to forcefully criticize the U.S. commitments to Ukraine.

[…]

“I think it’s a personal friendship. When I’ve discussed it with President Trump, he has a great affinity for leaders who are willing to stand up against the media elites around the world, who are independent minded and he said these people can put their people first,” said former Trump adviser Jason Miller, who now runs social media platform GETTR and has promoted the platform abroad, including in Brazil. “He’s told me it’s ‘the go alone to get along’ crowd.”

[…]

But the influence of Trumpism is still unmistakable – it’s evident abroad. In Brazil, Trump has served as an inspiration for Bolsonaro – often called the “Trump of the Tropics” – who has spent months of his campaign fueling distrust in Brazil’s elections; while Orban has echoed the ex-president in speeches where he rails against the media, illegal immigration, and compares “liberal progressives” to communism.

But it’s been felt at home, too. The Conservative Political Action Conference — often cited as the hotbed of youth activism in the party — has become almost a mirror reflection of the 45th president’s approach. The group has held conferences in Brazil, Israel, Japan, Australia and Hungary and plans to hold another conference in Mexico this November. In its most recent gathering back home, Orban was a keynote speaker and received a certifiable hero’s welcome. It drew condemnation from certain quarters, over Orban’s anti-democratic bent. But CPAC simply reveled in not bending to GOP orthodoxy.

“When we go to Brazil, the Bolsonaro family is featured,” said Schlapp who just returned from CPAC Australia. “We went to Hungary and Orban is featured…CPAC is not usually affiliated with one politician and party and it’s the same role we play in America. As chummy as we like to be with Republicans we are sometimes a bur in their saddle. It’s an uncomfortable role but one we play.”

Matt Schlapp is a hack from way back. He’ making money, period. But there are plenty of people who are pushing this ideology. And it’s becoming more and more popular.

"Under the presidential records act, everything should come back, and there's no crime. You negotiate whatever you negotiate is fine. It's a process" — Trump

Suffice it to say that's not how it works. pic.twitter.com/7NQCYOEEbn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2022

He also whined about the outlandish idea that anyone could possibly want to prosecute him. “They want to put me in jail!” How dare anyone even think such a thing?

Trump: When Biden hears me speak, he knows he can't fight back in any other way than to try and get me through these prosecutors pic.twitter.com/43iTWcFHxA

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

Trump: Clinton kept classified recordings in his sock draw. In fact, he supposedly put the information from the WH in his socks pic.twitter.com/Bor7zYAmv1

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

And yet, for all the whining:

We’ve reached the first lock her up chant pic.twitter.com/LbqlWjeCky

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

He’s not being subtle. Of course he never is…

Trump: You know the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen? January 6th pic.twitter.com/2rG8xZZeIR

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 9, 2022

They’re getting primed.

Imagining a post-Putin Russia

Masha Gessing:

Russia says that it has expanded. On September 30th, President Vladimir Putin signed a document that ostensibly accepted four Ukrainian regions as members of the Russian Federation. The residents of those regions, Putin said in a speech, “have become our citizens forever.” He made this assertion as the Ukrainian Army was liberating territory to which Russia was laying claim. He was not just trying to snatch propaganda victory from the jaws of evident military defeat; he was laying the groundwork for fighting for those lands ever more aggressively. A week and a half earlier, he had ordered the military to draft hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and had threatened to use nuclear weapons.

A Russia that includes parts, or all, of Ukraine and untold other lands is the Russian World, a vague and expansive idea pioneered by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, some of whose ideas have been adopted by the Kremlin. In August, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Darya, also an imperialist pundit, was killed by a car bomb that may have been intended for him. Last week, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes a part of the Ukrainian government may have been behind the attack. If true, this suggests that the government puts strong, probably unfounded, faith in the power of the concept of the Russian World.

Putin, in his speech, described both the Russian World and the larger world as he sees it. According to him, the West destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia came back, defiant and strong. Now the West wants to destroy Russia. “They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” he said. “That is why they target our philosophers for murder.” The ultimate goal of the West—specifically, the United States and Great Britain—is to subjugate people around the world and force them to give up traditional values, to have “ ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ and ‘parent No. 3’ instead of mother and father (they have completely lost it!),” and to teach schoolchildren that “there are some other genders besides men and women and offer them sex-change operations.” Putin has said, repeatedly, that only Russia can save the world from this menace. This is the story of a world in which his war in Ukraine—and the draft, and even, perhaps, a nuclear strike—makes sense.

But when the world shaped by the feedback loop of propaganda collides with the world of facts on the ground, things begin to crack. On October 5th, two videos circulated widely on Russian-language social media, including in normally pro-war quarters. The videos show a crowd of men in uniform. They say that there are five hundred of them and that they were recently drafted. They complain of “animal-like” conditions, of having to buy their own food and bulletproof vests, and of a lack of organization. “We are not registered as part of any detachment,” one man says. “We have weapons, but these are not officially issued to us.” Meanwhile, some Russian television propagandists have been acknowledging Ukrainian victories, and urging Russians to prepare for a long wait before their country can attack again.

It’s too early to make assumptions about where these tiny cracks may lead. It is not too early, however, to think about what a future, militarily defeated Russia might look like. This is what Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician who has been in prison since January, 2021, has been doing. The Washington Post recently published an op-ed, smuggled out by Navalny’s legal team, in which he writes that Russia deserves to lose the war and that, once it does, it must be reconstituted as a parliamentary, rather than a Presidential, republic. This, he argues, will insure that no one person can usurp power in Russia as Putin has.

Navalny’s op-ed serves to illustrate Putin’s wisdom, of sorts—the wisdom of keeping his most important political opponent behind bars. Navalny seems to have missed a cultural turning point. In the seven and a half months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country. Many of them are journalists, writers, poets, or artists, and they, along with some who are still in Russia, have been producing essays, poems, Facebook posts, and podcasts trying to grapple with the condition of being citizens of a country waging a genocidal colonial war. Some of their Ukrainian counterparts have scoffed at their soul-searching. Ukrainians, indeed, have bigger and more immediate problems. But they also have certainty—they know who they are in the world, while for Russians nothing is as it once seemed to be.

One of the earliest examples of this outpouring was a poem, by the children’s-book author Alexey Oleynikov, about the incongruity of trying to flee Russia with a pet hedgehog in tow. One stanza reads, “We will not wash the shame off until our old age, until we die / There have been worse times, but there has never been a more ridiculous time.” Posted on Facebook, the poem went viral in March.

May’s viral poem, by the actress and poet Zhenya Berkovich, tells of a young Russian man visited by the ghost of his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the ghost asks his grandson to forget him, lest the memory of his valor be used to justify the current war.

This month’s viral poem, by Eli Bar-Yahalom, an Israeli Russian, is a dialogue between God and a Muscovite who hopes to return home someday. “There is no resurrecting Bucha, no raising up Irpin,” God says, referring to suburbs of Kyiv where Russians appear to have committed war crimes. There are also at least two Russian-language podcasts devoted to the issues of individual and collective responsibility for the war. And Linor Goralik, an acclaimed Russian writer born in Ukraine and living in Israel, has founded an online journal called roar (Russian Oppositional Arts Review), which has published three packed issues.

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties. Soviet citizens back then had been confronted with their past—the Stalinist terror. That moment gave Russia, among other things, Memorial, the human-rights organization that, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian activists, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Now Russian citizens are being confronted with their present. The writers in exile have physically fled their country (as has much of Memorial’s leadership) and are trying to write their way to a new Russia. Their imagination extends far beyond the Russian constitution to a world that’s radically different, and better than not only Putin’s revanchist Russian World but the world we currently inhabit. ♦

That may be the most optimistic thing I’ve seen about this situation.

Ugh.

On Saturday, Ye uploaded a screenshot of a text conversation with rapper P. Diddy, in which he tells him: “I’ma use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.” In what seemed to be a preemptive defense, he captioned the post “Jesus was a Jew.”

The tweet was taken down because it “violated Twitter rules,” while Meta did not explicitly state which of his posts led to his account being restricted, though the screenshot in question was deleted from his profile.

This prompted Ye to turn to his inactive Twitter account to post a picture of him with Meta’s owner Mark Zuckerberg, saying “How you gone kick me off Instagram. We used to be n*****.”

Elon Musk, who is currently in the process of buying Twitter, responded: “Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!”

Ye then tweeted again, “Who do you think created cancel culture?,” before strangely pivoting to a tweet supporting the Iranian “revolution against 44 years of dictatorship.”

The American Jewish Committee slammed the “anti-Jewish posts shared to his 18 million followers on Instagram.”

The posts came after Ye was interviewed on conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, where he alleged that ex-U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had orchestrated the Abraham Accords between Israel and Gulf states “to make money.”

Here’s that Tucker Carlson interview. I only wish that Carlson had had Sarah Palin and Herschel Walker on with him for a true gibberish fest. For me, that thing just adds up to 42 minutes I can’t get back.

https://youtu.be/YL5dnoNYGfw

Is Kanye West relevant to politics? Probably not. Tucker Carlson’s viewers aren’t going to be impressed and the rest of the country can see that he’s a disturbed, wealthy individual who has lost the thread. But I do worry that he has influence on the culture at large. He’s revered as a genius by millions of people and many of them might think his anti-semitic comments are acceptable and his attention grabbing nonsense like wearing “white lives matter” t-shirts is a legitimate position.

Update: I guess he is relevant to politics

https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1578174670854975491

Jon interviewed Leslie Rutledge, Arkansas Attorney General, about why her state banned gender-affirming care for minors – ignoring the guidelines of major medical organizations and taking the decision out of parents’ hands. Watch the full interview on @AppleTVPlus pic.twitter.com/4SoH3orWa6

— The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) October 7, 2022

Stewart did a good job aggressively interviewing this woman who clearly doesn’t understand the issue she’s so scared of so she’s lying about it:

In the season two premiere of “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” Stewart devotes an entire episode to discussing America’s “war on gender.” 

Using video clips, audience plants and a panel discussion to demonstrate the importance — both mentally and physically — of supporting the gender identities of minors, Stewart capped off the episode with a quick trip to Arkansas to speak with Attorney General Leslie Rutledge (R), a woman working against that being a possibility in her state.

Rutledge worked to pass the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act in Arkansas a few years ago, which she says will “protect” minors from moving forward with what she refers to as dangerous and irreversible gender correction procedures, but Stewart is quick to remind her that nothing is more irreversible than a child’s death.

Describing the ins and outs of the SAFE Act, Rutledge says “essentially what it does is prevent young people from going through experimental procedures to transition their gender from male to female and female to male.”

When prompted by Stewart to explain these “experimental procedures,” Rutledge does so saying “Well, all of these drugs we’re talking about have not been approved, and these are experimental procedures to transition these young people . . . what we passed in Arkansas was to simply say, you can’t do that.”

When Rutledge specifies that the law only applies to trans youth under the age of 18, Stewart asks her to put a number on how many so-called “experiments” of this nature have been performed in Arkansas in the past five years. When she’s unable to provide the answer, he does so for her. None.

“It’s surprising that the state would say ‘we wanna make a decision for your family and your child, to protect them,’ even though the American Medical Association, the American Association of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, The American Association of Psychiatrists all recommend a certain set of guidelines for children that are expressing gender dysphoria. So I guess my surprise is why would the state of Arkansas step in to override parents, physicians, psychiatrists, endocrinologists who have developed guidelines. Why would you override those guidelines?”

From here, Rutledge conflates the importance of “protecting” children with the prevention of them getting the care they actually need. Unable to provide any backing or documented evidence for her claims, her argument fizzles into a generalized “because we said so.”

“I know that there are doctors, and we’ve had plenty of people come and testify before our legislature, who said that we have 98% of the young people who had gender dysphoria that they are able to move past that. And once they had the help they need, no longer suffer from gender dysphoria. 98%”

“Wow. That’s an incredibly made up figure,” Stewart said. 

“Parents with children who have gender dysphoria have lost children to suicide,” Stewart said, driving home the severity of what the SAFE Act is interfering with. “These mainstream medical organizations have developed guidelines through peer review data and studies, and through those guidelines they’ve improved mental health outcomes. So I’m confused why you follow AMA guidelines, AAAP guidelines for all other health issues in Arkansas, but not for this.”

This is a very fraught issue with many people feeling confused. But often the discussion about it is incredibly reductive and emotional and it’s resulting in cruel and inhumane blunderbuss policies for an issue that requires empathy and nuance. And it’s an issue that’s truly best left up to families to navigate for themselves when it comes to kids. As with abortion rights, having far right yahoos in backwards legislatures deciding something like this with their broad-brushed hypocritical “morality” is simply grotesque.

Gen. Bolduc seems nice

With a name right out of “Li’l Abner,” Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, leader of women, denier of elections, will keep ladies in line (Huffington Post):

New Hampshire GOP Senate nominee Don Bolduc told supporters this week that he thinks the future of abortion rights “belongs” to Republican “gentlemen” state lawmakers, who he claims know best how to give women a voice on their reproductive rights.

During a Wednesday night town hall in Auburn, New Hampshire, Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general, weighed in on whether he thinks abortion rights should be decided at the state level or the federal level.

“It belongs to the state. It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you,” Bolduc said, motioning to at least two Republican state representatives in the room, Jason Osborne and Jess Edwards.

A+! Perfect articulation of the GOP position, no sugar-coating here, folks! https://t.co/QTSBtIShL8

— Paul Rosenberg (@PaulHRosenberg) October 9, 2022

The general was not done:

Bolduc went on to say that “as a man,” he thinks that women “get the best voice” on their reproductive rights when state legislators decide how to regulate them.

“That is the best way, I think, as a man, that women get the best voice: at the state level, not at the federal level,” he said.

Maybe give incumbent Democrat Maggie Hasan some help keeping the retired general retired. Polls may be tighter than they appear. But aren’t they always?

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

November is a referendum on equal treatment

2022 Senate Election Interactive Map; 2022 Consensus as of Oct. 5

If this country is to survive the simmering brew of anti-democratic authoritarianism, it will be women who save it. Not the sad cases wearing the “Trump can grab my ↓” tee shirts or those declaring him the MAGA messiah. The women who see clearly how much panicked conservatives mean to take from them (Washington Post):

Donald Trump’s election made evident to Robin Kupernik and Elizabeta Stacishin of suburban Denver what was at stake. Last summer’s Dobbs decision revoking Roe v. Wade made clear — crystal — just what conservative backlash meant for women’s rights.

“This is not about babies, this is about keeping women down,” the two agreed (Washington Post):

Kupernik, 57, and Stacishin, 53, were spurred to political activism by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But for much of this year, they had been sensing a lack of energy on the left — an absence of the kind of commitment on the part of voters like themselves who had propelled Democrats to victories in 2018 and 2020. Then came the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both women said the abortion case persuaded them to redouble their efforts for the 2022 campaign.

“I really didn’t see, you know, a very positive path forward … ,” Stacishin said over coffee in this suburb northwest of downtown Denver. “People have protested so many times and so many different things, it’s not even that meaningful anymore. But I think that everyone is feeling in their bones, especially women, the insult and indignity of what the Supreme Court has done. … And that is in no small part why I am working as hard as I’m working for the midterms right now.”

The August defeat in Kansas of an amendment banning abortion there supplied oxygen to their fire. Still, in a midterm election, especially in a president’s first term, his party tends to lose ground. In normal times. Ours are anything but normal.

2022 House Election Interactive Map; 2022 Consensus as of Oct. 7

Polling suggests that pocketbook issues are, as ever, atop voters minds. Inflation, naturally.

But in conversations, the issue of inflation doesn’t always translate immediately to the political advantage or disadvantage of one party or the other. Some women reflexively blame Biden; others see the problem as more complex, caused by global economicdisruptions from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In contrast, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision is, for many, more visceral. Democrats believe that difference might be enough for the party to hold down expected losses in the House and maintain their Senate majority. The issue is whether Republican advertising in the final weeks and more bad economic news will override the initial energizing effects from the Dobbs decision.

Trump’s election spurred the largest single-day, nationwide protest in U.S history, the Women’s March (3-5 million nationwide). Women who had never been engaged in sustained political organizing became involved and drove the Democratic sweep election of 2018.

Republicans hope to move some White suburban women who supported Democrats in 2018 and 2020 back to their column. Democrats hope to prevent that from happening. But Democrats also need sizable participation by the women who powered them to victory in 2018, a year when turnout for a midterm election was the highest in a century.

The Post’s extended story looks at how women might influence outcomes in the 2022 midterms. It is not just women on the Democratic side energized this cycle. Women are not a monolith, as the Post’s story reflects.

The wildcard is how much Dobbs backlash and fears about the authoritarian (even pro-Vladimir Putin) tilt of the Republican Party after the Jan. 6 insurrection and threats of right-wing violence will energize countervailing voter turnout from the left in November.

RINO (Republican In Name Only) was once an epithet with which the party’s fringe right branded traditional Republicans. Today the term describes an entire party that rejects all but the decorative trappings of democracy. One wonders why they bother participating in elections they consider illigitimate unless their candidates win. Chalk it up to muscle memory for the rank and file, perhaps, and to steady paychecks for the campaign industrial complex. But it seems Republicans are only in elections now to keep up appearances. And to maintain power at any cost, even the republic itself.

Jessie Danielson, 44, is a Democrat who was elected to the Colorado state Senate in 2018 after serving in the state House. She is the mother of two young children. She has advocated for many issues and causes, but nothing seems to animate her more than what she sees as the fragile state of democracy.

Not exactly a street-level voter, Danielson nonetheless expresses what many of us sense.

“I feel this is an unprecedented embrace of that extremism by the Republican Party,” she said. “I don’t think this kind of thing has happened before, and that is what I believe voters across the country will reject — an armed mob storming the United States Capitol to overthrow the elected government. And that mob was driven by Trump.”

Still, Danielson is hopeful that things can change. “I have to believe that now that we’ve gone through this and it’s been over and over and over, that the majority of Americans will say, ‘This is not okay with me, … that is not American,’” she said.

Democrats and Republicans have different takes about what is at the top of likely voters’ minds. But those are largely a reflection of the doors their campaigns’ turnout efforts have chosen to knock. What counts more is who turns out.

What has to happen for Democrats to prevail in this election and beyond is better organization at the local level, and not simply in the blue cities. We cannot concede rural America to a party opposed to democracy and committed to minority rule.

In early 2018, a purple-state, rural county chair activated by Trump’s election wrote to me about her early travails:

I have received NO direct communication for the State Party! I have had to personally beat the bushes to even make contact with them via email and phone. To date, my District chair has been unreachable. I have received NO info from the outgoing chair or state party about what we should be doing or need to do on the local level to get Democrats elected!!!

Your email and GOTV Platform is the FIRST communication I have received that gives me any help at all.

What I suspect will happen after Dobbs is, as after 2018, a fresh wave of women will step up to reinvigorate county committees that have for years been on life support. State Democratic parties do what they can with limited budgets and bandwidth. But they’d best take a fresh look at the maps above and reorder their priorities.

“Jesus will prob return before we flip the county,” one freshly minted county chair told me in May. With “very little political party experience,” she leads one of the largest counties in her state. People like her need more than a 250+ page manual on party administration if Democrats have any hope of turning the maps above bluer.

Democrats cannot win where they do not show up to play.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

We’re about to see

‘This comparison between Herschel Walker and Cal Cunninham, the North Carolina Democrat who was taken down by sex scandal just before the 2020 election is instructive. A lot of Democrats couldn’t hold their noses and vote for Cunninham. Will Republicans in Georgia behave similarly?

A candidate running in a critical Southern battleground state got caught in a personal scandal that threatened to upend his campaign just a few weeks before Election Day.

His supporters dug in, saying voters viewed the campaign as a parliamentary type of race to determine the Senate majority and predicted that the personal foibles would have no impact.

Herschel Walker this month in Georgia? No, Cal Cunningham, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina two years ago.

In the fall of 2020, Cunningham emerged with a clear lead over Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), in part because of his biography as an Army prosecutor who served in Iraq. But in early October, he acknowledged that he had sent sexually explicit messages to a woman who was not his wife, and, a few days later, she told the media that they had an intimate affair. Cunningham, a married father of two, refused to answer questions about whether he had had other affairs.

Herschel Walker denies paying for girlfriend’s abortion

Ga. Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who is campaigning on an antiabortion platform, has denied that he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. (Video: Reuters, Photo: Meg Kinnard/AP/Reuters)

In 25 public polls after the revelations and before Election Day, Cunningham led in 22 and was tied in two others.

But his campaign had collapsed. Cunningham lost by nearly two percentage points, falling considerably short of the vote tallies of Democrats Joe Biden in the presidential race and Roy Cooper in the gubernatorial race in the Tar Heel State.

“It’s a self-inflicted wound,” said J. Michael Bitzer, an expert in state politics and a professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “You’ve thrown a monkey wrench into your campaign.”

Cunningham’s fate is, by no means, a definitive prologue about what will happen to Walker, the former football star who faces allegations of paying a woman to abort his child in 2009, after he said he became a born-again Christian who was opposed to abortion rights.

Walker has been locked in an extremely close race against Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), one of the most critical contests for determining the Senate majority. The abortion story broke on Oct. 3, two years and a day after Cunningham’s affair allegations.

Walker, a first-time candidate, has denied the assertions but has looked unsteady in several media appearances trying to explain his past. He has taken a familiar path of accusing Democrats of trying to distract voters from real policy.

“They can keep coming at me like that, and they’re doing it because they want to distract people,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday.

The woman has since accused Walker of encouraging her to have a second abortion a couple of years later, but she said she refused and gave birth to their now 10-year-old son.

Cunningham took the same approach in his first media appearance after hunkering down for a few days. “People are tired of hearing about personal issues. They want somebody focused on them,” he told reporters.

Cunningham had offered an apology to his family in a statement but then demanded “that my family’s privacy be respected” and said the affair was not an issue.

In that regard, Cunningham and Walker followed a page from the Donald Trump playbook: Barrel ahead when scandal happens, don’t focus on the issue, and accuse your opponents of worse. It worked in 2016.

Although GOP officials in Georgia and Washington remain strongly behind the Heisman Trophy winner, some unaffiliated Republican strategists in the Peach State find themselves miffed by how Walker cruised through the primary with the blessing of Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“He gets propelled into this Senate race without ever having been vetted,” said Jay Morgan, who worked in Georgia politics for the late Sen. Johnny Isakson (R) and advised former governor Nathan Deal.

Walker has been forced to acknowledge fathering several children out of wedlock and has discussed violent acts toward his first wife, prompting concern that some moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents will happily vote for Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and then take a pass on Walker.

“I think it’s more a case of who’s going to vacate that race — who is going to vote for Kemp and then skip over the Senate race,” Morgan said.

That is precisely what happened to Cunningham two years ago.

Which is its own irony, because for months before, both parties’ strategists had thought that Tillis, who had a rocky relationship with Trump, would lag too far behind his party’s presidential nominee as MAGA voters abandoned him.

Tillis fell 93,000 votes shy of Trump’s totals in the state, and he even fell about 20,000 votes behind Biden’s losing performance in North Carolina.

But Cunningham fell 115,000 votes shy of Biden — and 265,000 votes off Cooper’s victorious vote tally in the governor’s race.

The stench factor was big in the Senate race that year. Almost 50,000 voters who cast their ballots in the presidential race declined to vote in the Senate race.

And almost 240,000 voters chose one of the two fringe candidates in the Senate race, triple the number who voted for a third-party alternative in the presidential contest.

The Cunningham allegations landed at the worst possible moment, just two weeks before early voting started; anyone who had their doubts had enough time to rethink their vote.

“That is when everyone is paying attention,” Bitzer said.

His post-election analysis showed Cunningham took the biggest hit in cities and urban areas, lagging Biden there by 65,000 votes, and by 27,000 votes in the state’s competitive suburbs.

Those results suggest that core Democrats, many of whom did not have deep ties to Cunningham, abandoned him.

Of the 12 candidates to win statewide races in North Carolina two years ago, Tillis received the fewest votes. Cunningham now practices law in Raleigh, with just a single sentence mentioning the 2020 campaign in a more than 800-word biographical section of his website.

In Georgia, establishment Republicans do not expect core conservatives to abandon Walker, despite the inherent contradiction of their strong antiabortion beliefs and the possibility that Walker, 60, paid for a girlfriend to have the procedure.

Cole Muzio, the president of a Christian conservative organization outside Atlanta, sent his supporters a memo Thursday that highlighted, in bold font, that “much about Herschel Walker’s past is extremely problematic” and that the candidate so far had “oscillated between political answers” on the topic.

But the other choice was another Warnock term, Muzio told his fellow Christians, highlighting this portion in bold. “Policies voted for and supported by Raphael G. Warnock harms my neighbor’s family, their business, and their right to worship freely.”

Some Republicans privately are hoping that Walker gets a pass for being a celebrity, so that his past behavior is taken as akin to Trump’s pre-White House days in Manhattan, especially after a video of him making crass comments about assaulting women came out shortly before the 2016 election that he still won.

But others fear that public polls had already shown Walker consistently trailing Kemp’s position, and these latest stories, on top of the initial stories about his personal life, could further drive Republican-leaning voters away from the former football star.

“I think they’re scratching their heads about what to do,” Morgan said

Personally, I think withholding a vote for personal issues like having an affair or paying for an abortion is ridiculous. I don’t think those things are relevant to the qualifications for public office. But that’s just me. I don’t go around passing a lot of moral judgments on people for their personal behavior unless it affects the workplace or the public in some way. Cunningham would have certainly gotten a pass from me. Old school.

But these right wing Christians are passing judgment constantly on everyone else, even to the point of demanding the government dictate the most intimate issues of women’s bodily autonomy — unless it might affect their political ambitions. Then, it’s anything goes.

We’ll have to see if Georgia Republicans reject Herschel Walker by refusing to vote for him while voting for other GOP nominees on the ticket. I don’t think we can ever know if the scandal is the reason — after all, Walker is manifestly unfit for the job in virutally every way, so they could be making that decision for perfectly rational reasons that have nothing to do with it. But it won’t help.

In a new interview, Trump blames the US for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: “They actually taunted him. Our country, and our so-called leadership, taunted Putin. I said, you know, they’re almost forcing him to go in with what they’re saying.” pic.twitter.com/CcRyGKkK4n

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 8, 2022

In case you were wondering if Trump was still on the pro-Putin right. Is he ever.

Recall:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday described Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy,” praising his onetime counterpart for a move that has spurred sanctions and universal condemnation from the U.S. government and its trans-Atlantic allies.

“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said in a radio interview with “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

But Biden made him do it…