Good morning, all!
A lot of new national and battleground state new polling dropped yesterday. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake sums up much of it (and much of it was covered here at Daily Kos, as well).
New national polls released from highly respected pollsters Ann Selzer, Suffolk University, Quinnipiac University and CNN show the race remaining largely as it has been in recent weeks. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden led by eight percentage points (49-41) in the Grinnell College-Selzer poll, which was conducted last Wednesday through Sunday, including the final two days of the convention. Biden also led by seven points (50-43) in the USA Today-Suffolk poll and by 10 points (52-42) in the Quinnipiac poll, both of which were conducted starting the day after the convention. He led by eight points (51-43) in the CNN poll conducted Friday through Tuesday.
Each poll is very much in line with Biden’s average lead in the race, which hovered between seven and eight points for most of August.
Previous Suffolk polls show Biden with a slightly larger lead, but the last one was from June, when his 12-point lead was also similar to what was then his average lead. Quinnipiac in early to mid-July showed Biden ahead by 15 points. The race has narrowed slightly since then, but that was notably the case before the conventions and Kenosha.
Biden’s lead in the CNN poll, though, was slightly bigger than in mid-August, just before the conventions, when a surprisingly tight poll showed him up just four points.
There were also various statewide polls released yesterday.
I did check the state battleground trackers at 538 and most of the state battlegrounds do show some tightening of the various races (although notably, Biden seems to have slightly increased his lead in Arizona and Wisconsin). Pennsylvania is a little worrisome but Iowa and Texas remain within reach and Biden has a steady lead in Florida.
So, it looks like the state of the race is pretty much what it was before the party conventions; maybe a slight Trump bump but The Damn Fool still has a lot of ground to make up both nationally and in the battlegrounds.
Louis B. Masur writes for CNN on an old campaign strategy that Joe Biden is likely to deploy.
In a speech delivered in Pittsburgh on Monday, Joe Biden asked, "Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?" By taking that line of attack, he is indicating that he will be following the successful strategy employed by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in campaign speeches delivered through the summer and fall of 1932.
During that period, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, continuously denounced incumbent Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt reminded voters, "The crash came in October, 1929. The President had at his disposal all the instrumentalities of Government. From that day to December 31st of that year, he did absolutely nothing to remedy the situation. Not only did he do nothing, but he took the position that Congress could do nothing." Hoover, a believer in small government, had waited too long to act and then, when he did, his policies failed to improve the economy.
One of Roosevelt's last campaign speeches,
on a trail that saw him travel some 9,000 miles by train around the country, is especially noteworthy because of its uncanny echoes with this moment. If the past can speak to the present, Roosevelt in 1932 offers a model for how to confront an opponent who fails as a leader, attacks democratic norms, and disgraces the office of President.
I’ll give you three guesses as to why Jim Carrey’s essay for The Atlantic made its way into the pundit round-up this morning.
The United States faces catastrophe. That’s a word from my world—drama. In ancient Greek, katastrophḗ means “overturn,” or “a sudden turn.” This is what we have suffered. Untold American lives have been ruined by the presidency of Donald Trump. The rule of law is imperiled, our unity has been shattered, the service sector has been obliterated, and major cities are suffering. Black Americans, who have endured half a millennium of wickedness and brutality, now face more injustice and death.
Last week, amid all this suffering, Trump and his acolytes held their Totally Illegal COVID-19 Super-Spreader Spectacular at the White House, in flagrant violation of the Hatch Act. It got me thinking about the great director Francis Ford Coppola, who masterfully wove together evil deeds and pious words in classic films. Watching Trump accept the nomination of the Republican Party in the people’s house during a pandemic he exacerbated was like watching Michael Corleone swear a sacred oath while his underlings settled scores across the city.
Look, my over/under on the number of opinion columns that the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin will do today is: 4. Yesterday, Ms. Rubin did three columns yesterday and Tuesday she did five(!), including one on Joe Biden hammering The Damn Fool on the issue of Social Security.
You might not have noticed it during his speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, but Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden slipped a big issue into the mix for 2020. While focusing primarily on President Trump’s liability for the ongoing pandemic, the rotten economy and the surge in racial violence, Biden also hit Trump’s plan to eliminate or suspend the payroll tax after the election. Biden declared, “The Social Security Administration’s chief actuary just released a report saying if a plan like the one Trump is proposing goes into effect, the Social Security Trust Fund would be ‘permanently depleted by the middle of calendar year 2023, with no ability to pay benefits thereafter.’” Oh, that seems like a big deal.
Biden was referring to Trump’s suggestion to eliminate the payroll tax, the funding mechanism that supports Social Security and Medicare. The Associated Press explained: “These taxes raised $1.24 trillion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Over a 10-year period, Trump’s idea would blow a $16.1 trillion hole in a U.S. budget that is already laden with rising debt loads.”
***
Biden was handed a gift from the president, who once vowed he would never cut entitlements (although he is trying to rip out Obamacare entirely, which presumably would cut back on Medicaid as well). Trump made an impulsive, reckless promise to wreck the chief funding mechanism for the two programs most seniors rely upon in retirement. In key swing states with large numbers of seniors such as Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, Biden will have a field day telling seniors (whom Trump already endangered by playing down the pandemic and racing to reopen prematurely) that Trump wants to put their retirement and health care in peril.
Ezra Klein writes for Vox on a topic that...doesn’t surprise me, exactly, but disturbs me, nevertheless.
...Trump is such a gleefully polarizing figure — so contemptible to those he offends, so heroic to those he defends — that minds were made up on him before he ever stepped into the Oval Office. Moreover, Trump is a limited figure: He doesn’t switch strategies, adopt new tones, adapt to new circumstances. Where past presidents made concerted efforts to shift course as their presidencies evolved, pursuing unexpected policies to win over skeptics and new messages to quiet critics, Trump is just Trump. He’s reliably, inalterably, himself. Your view of the man is your view of the presidency, and that’s the way he wants it.
But pundits should be honest when reality surprises them. If you had told me, a year ago, that a pandemic virus would overrun the country, that 200,000 Americans would die and case numbers would dwarf Europe, that the economy would go into deep freeze and the federal government prove utterly feckless, I would’ve thought that’s the kind of systemic shock that could crack into public opinion. I’m not saying I would’ve predicted Trump falling to 20 percent, but I would’ve predicted movement.
The stability unnerves me because it undermines the basic theory of responsive democracy. If our political divisions cut so deep that even 200,000 deaths and 10.2 percent unemployment and a president musing about bleach injections can’t shake us, then what can? And if the answer is nothing, then that means the crucial form of accountability in American politics has collapsed. Yes, many of us are partisans, with a hard lean one way or the other. But the assumption has long been that beneath that, we are Americans, and we want the country governed with some bare level of competence, that we care more for our safety and our paychecks than our parties.
My argument with Klein here is that while it is true that Trump’s overall numbers have not shifted much throughout his presidency, much of the polling data shows that independents and voters age 65+ (Boomers) are much less likely to vote for him than they did in 2016, in large part because of The Damn Fool’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As things stand today, that shift in the voter approval demographics would mean a win for Biden.
FWIW, if Biden gets 46% of whites (which I don’t think that he will), Biden wins this election easily with a 2008 Obama-like margin.
Rochester, NY native Elliot Shields writes for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle wondering where is the justice for Daniel Prude, an unarmed Black man that was suffocated by Rochester police in March.
Many have questioned what good have these protests done? Following the death of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island District Attorney presented the case to the grand jury and failed to secure an indictment. It was widely speculated that the District Attorney “threw” the case, leading to mass protests in New York City. These protests influenced Governor Andrew Cuomo to issue Executive Order 147, which appointed the state Attorney General as the independent prosecutor in all instances where a law enforcement officer kills an unarmed civilian.
As a result of the recent protests, on June 12, 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a package of reform bills into law that included making Executive Order 147 permanent, banning police chokeholds and repealing Section 50a of the state Civil Rights Law, which has been used to shield officers' disciplinary records from public view for decades.
But these reforms are meaningless if police officers are not held accountable when they are responsible for the death of an unarmed civilian like Mr. Prude. In this case, the involved officers have not been disciplined in any way. In fact, the official position of the Rochester Police Department is that the actions of Officers Vaughn, Talladay and Santiago were appropriate and in accordance with their training.
James Hamblin of The Atlantic talked with his colleague Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale, about exactly what “herd immunity,” as a public health concept is, and the dangers of pursuing so-called “herd immunity” without a vaccine. In this excerpt, Hamblin and Forman corrects a misnomer that Sweden actually pursued a “herd immunity” effort to combat COVID-19.
Hamblin: Sweden became this reportedly textbook case of using a “herd immunity” approach, or at least, they initially said they were going to.
Forman: It started off with Sweden and the United Kingdom talking about pursuing herd immunity. Then England got cold feet and Sweden supposedly proceeded with this, but they didn’t. Sweden did a lot of things to curtail the spread. What people seem to not understand is that we do things in our country, even in some areas that are “still shut down” that would not be tolerated in Sweden. They still have a ban on gatherings of 50 people or more.
Wells: Oh! I feel like the picture of Sweden I have in my mind is everyone outside without masks enjoying the summer, all together.
Forman: For the most part, they are without masks. But they still have a complete ban on visiting retirement homes. They still have a ban on public gatherings of 50 people. Gatherings for religious practice? Banned. Theatrical and cinema performances? Banned. Concerts? Banned. And this is what bothers me. Our president did a rally in Tulsa. That would have been banned in Sweden.
Gregg Gonsalves of The Nation (another epidemiologist/public health professor at Yale) continues...
To be fair to Atlas, the Trump administration’s policies have been consistent with a herd immunity strategy all along: We’ve never had any emphasis on scaling up widespread testing, contact tracing, and isolation—or the support to state and local governments that would be needed to do these things—nor the social and economic support needed by ordinary Americans to get through these tough times, allowing them to continue to socially distance and isolate if necessary. The administration, however, is interested in protecting the elderly at all costs—it just invoked the Defense Production Act to deliver millions of tests to nursing homes around the country. The rest of us, apparently, are expendable. Finally, just this week, FEMA suggested it would pull funding for face masks in US schools. Even kids are being thrown to the wolves, deprived of financial support for the most simple of protective equipment against the virus as the president and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are urging schools to reopen.
As we head toward the November election, the stakes couldn’t be higher—and I am afraid that, after all these months, there is now a method to the Trump crew’s madness on Covid-19. They do think that trying to sequester the elderly will stave off the worst of the pandemic—and thus have no interest in protecting the rest of us. No matter that plans to shield our seniors will be almost impossible to carry out, as most of the elderly are integrated into our communities and do not reside in skilled nursing facilities. No matter that with the rates of underlying medical conditions in this country, the vulnerable also include millions of people who are far from old.
Matthew Herper of STATnews reports that it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine could be both “fast-tracked” and safe.
The FDA has laid out clear criteria for the full approval of a vaccine: It should reduce the rate of symptomatic Covid-19 disease by 50%. Equally important is that the data should suggest it’s highly unlikely that the vaccine could possibly be less than 30% effective. Any vaccine less effective than that would be useless.
The agency also said that there should be safety data of a year or more for at least 3,000 patients. There’s no way to shorten that timeframe, and it is one of the reasons experts believe the FDA could grant a Covid-19 vaccine an emergency use authorization, rather than full approval.
It’s also possible that the studies could be ended early based on an interim analysis of data.
These early looks are handled by a data and safety monitoring board, or DSMB, that reviews the data from a study regularly to make sure that patients are not being endangered by side effects from the vaccine and that it’s still ethical to give a placebo.
“At the end of the day, if things are done according to the tradition, the DSMB looks at the data intermittently and makes one of four determinations,” explained Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is working with Moderna and AstraZeneca on vaccine trials.
I simply don’t trust this government under this Damn Fool and that includes the agencies that he has corrupted like the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, period. I will take a pass on any sort of vaccine that’s fast-tracked to be distributed prior to the presidential inauguration.
Ryan Malosh and Nina Masters write for The Conversation that COVID outbreaks on college campuses were inevitable.
Back in March, colleges and universities closed down like everything else except essential businesses. They sent students home. There was a rough transition to online instruction. Students weren’t happy, faculty weren’t happy. And so, they started to come up with plans on how to reopen for in-person instruction for the fall semester.
Many places installed plexi-glass barriers in classrooms, considered mask mandates and worked out physical distancing in lecture halls. Most people realized that professors who taught large classes should plan for remote learning.
University administrators and public health experts started making these plans in the spring. Back then, we scientists and public health researchers all operated under the assumption that community spread would be under some sort of control by fall. We all thought that the country would increase testing capacity, and we have. Then, once new cases dropped to a low level, we could institute contact tracing, the way other countries had.
But that part hasn’t happened. And so now these same colleges and universities are facing huge increases in cases, including at the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame and the University of Alabama. Many universities that have opted to return to in-person classes are also having a surge in cases. These outbreaks will inevitably spread to the wider communities in which the campuses are located.
I don’t know the degree to which COVID outbreaks on college campuses were inevitable but then I look at something like the COVID outbreak down at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I see “we’re all in this together” drivel like this and…
Look, I live in a college town (Evanston, Illinois) that’s on a quarter system, so classes for Northwestern University students don’t begin until the last week of September. I read these news of all these COVID outbreaks all over the country and, yes, these big universities are economic drivers of college towns, but there’s also people that live in any given college town other than university students, faculty, and staff.
And I know that college students don’t simply confine themselves to campuses.
The ProPublica investigative team of Annie Waldman and Joshua Kaplan write about what seems to be a horrific manner in which Louisiana’s largest hospital network handled patients during the spring outbreak of COVID 19 in New Orleans.
The city’s death statistics reveal an aberration, ProPublica found. Nationally, coronavirus patients aged 85 and older died at home only 4% of the time, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; local coroner records show that in New Orleans, it was 17%. Reporters attempted to contact the families of everyone who died at home there.
The interviews revealed a striking pattern: Before they died, about two dozen patients first sought care at a hospital, which then discharged them, in many cases sending them home to die with hospice care. All were Black. The vast majority came from Ochsner Health, the largest hospital network in Louisiana, which treated 60% of the region’s critically ill coronavirus patients.
The families of eight patients, as young as 69, told ProPublica that Ochsner staff pressured them into accepting hospice care for their loved ones who had COVID-19, even as some questioned or pushed back against the suggestion. Three families said they were told that there wasn’t enough space to continue treating the patient in the hospital, or that the hospital needed the bed for another patient.
Some family members felt that their loved ones suffered without hospice workers at their side to manage their pain and navigate their complex symptoms. At least two relatives got sick, after being denied the proper protective gear.
The Angry Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer on the importance of the distinction between “boycott” and “strike.”
To illustrate the word-choice problem, witness the clumsiness of the first sentence of this column: “decision by professional sports players to not play their scheduled games” — one word would be better, no? And readers are curious: Lookups for boycott and strike on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary spiked 2,800% last week. The Bucks and others called it a boycott, but Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, among others, made a point of calling it a strike, not a boycott, in order to emphasize the players’ status as employees of their respective leagues.
The difference matters as much as whether you refer to protesters or marchers or rioters. Each word choice reveals volumes about the speaker.
As Merriam-Webster points out, neither boycott nor strike does a great job of describing what happened. Strike doesn’t work because it’s used for protests in order to make demands of one’s employer; the athletes wanted change from elected officials, not from their own employers.
Boycott, on the other hand, doesn’t fit either, because its connotation is more external: Fans could boycott games by not attending them, but the word isn’t apt for those who work for the leagues themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary’s boycott definition fits a bit better: “to refuse to handle or buy (goods), or refuse to participate in (an event, meeting, etc.), as a protest.”
Finally this morning, Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News writes about the legacy of George Thomas Seaver, the Greatest Met of Them All.
He was the one, more than anyone, who brought National League baseball back to New York. The Dodgers were gone from Ebbets Field 10 years by the time Seaver came to the Mets. The Giants were gone from the Polo Grounds. I have written this before about Tom Seaver: He didn’t take away the pain of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn and the Giants leaving the Polo Grounds. But once the ball was in his right hand and his right arm was coming forward at Shea Stadium and his knee was covered in dirt, it hurt a little less.
He was the Mets the way Michael Jordan was the Bulls. He didn’t win the way Michael did. There was only the one magic October, one of the most magical times a team and a city and their fans ever had in baseball, when the Mets finally won a pennant and then a World Series just seven years after they came into existence, and Jimmy Breslin was writing a book about them that asked “Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game?” There was just one other trip for Seaver’s Mets to the Series a few years later, in 1973.
But Mets fans know. Baseball New York knows. You do not measure Tom Seaver in the titles he won. It was not who he was and what he was in a Mets uniform. No Met will ever matter more. He was to young Mets fans in the ’60s and ’70s what Mickey Mantle had been for the Yankees when he was a kid in the 1950s. It wasn’t until his seventh year in the big leagues, with the Mets on their way to that second World Series, that Tug McGraw, Tom’s teammate, turned “Ya Gotta Believe” into the team’s rallying cry.
Everyone have a good morning!
