This week on The Brief: The Covid-19 vaccine rollout, more Georgia, and 2020 in review

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This week on The Brief (our last episode of the year), we had a fully packed Daily Kos episode! Hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld were joined by three Daily Kos writers: Mark Sumner, David Nir, and Walter Einenkel. Mark joined to discuss his extensive coverage of the coronavirus, how the rollout of the vaccine will go, and what the timeline may be when it comes to bringing an end to the pandemic. David shared crucial data and insights about voters in Georgia that should help inform Democrats’ strategy as we head towards the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs. Lastly, Markos and Kerry chatted with Walter about the year in review.

Mark, a prolific writer with a penchant for reading and summarizing scientific research papers, has written over 140 pieces on the Covid-19 virus so far this year and was covering the pandemic before many were even acknowledging it as the grave threat we now know it to be. As one of the early writers extensively covering the subject, Mark was well aware of the dangers of the virus by January and February of this year and had hoped that the U.S. would have a better response:

It became obvious early on that this wasn’t going to be contained to Wuhan, right? That there was going to be a pandemic of some extent. This thing was just too communicable to be contained. But, like everybody else, I made the foolish assumption that people would make reasonable choices and that there wouldn’t be a pandemic the way we’re seeing it now. Even when it hit South Korea, and you started seeing those numbers go to 8,000 cases just overnight—but you saw, they responded. They put in a national testing program, they put in case tracing, and really, to my surprise, they brought the case count down just about as quickly as it went up. And I expected that model to be repeated in other countries. I expected we’d see one South Korea, and another South Korea, and another South Korea, in terms of how those outbreaks went. So when it hit the United States and we deliberately did nothing, that was really shocking. It still is shocking.

Mark believes that with the pending approval of the Moderna vaccine, more Americans will want to get vaccinated—leading to overwhelming demand for vaccine. He also discussed the vaccine rollout timeline, and most Americans will not be able to get vaccinated until the late spring at the earliest. The Trump administration passed up on a chance to secure a second round of Pfizer vaccines, meaning that many people will have to wait until June to receive an innoculation.

David, Daily Kos’ political director, came on next to talk about the latest updates in the U.S. Senate runoff races in Georgia and how the Republicans are trying to turn out voters who may have have become reluctant to vote thanks to Trump’s rhetoric about “rigged” voting and elections. January will be a test of anti-Trump Republicans, David thinks, as their votes could be crucial to swinging the elections in either direction—and thereby, control of the Senate. As David explained,

The 6th District, of course, was the site of the famous special election in 2017. Biden flipped that district this year, and both Ossoff and the Democrats collectively in the special Senate race carried the district, but they were several points behind Biden. And I wonder if this means that in these Atlanta suburbs, you had a sizable chunk of, sort of, never-Trump Republicans—Traditionally Republican voters—they were happy to vote for Biden just to get rid of the orange menace, but then, a little lower down the ticket, they stuck with Republicans. Are these people going to show up again? Can they be convinced to go one step further? Have Trump’s hard antics and refusal to accept [the results of] the election over the last five weeks convinced them, Wow, maybe we really do have to support Ossoff and Warnock this time instead of Perdue and Loeffler? I think that’s going to be a huge question for January.

The Daily Kos Elections team released some interesting data that calculated the results of the Nov. 3 election for president and U.S. Senate in Georgia broken down by congressional district. As David noted,  “The most interesting thing we found was that the biggest gap between Biden’s win at the top of the ticket and then both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the Senate races came in the 6th District.”

Our final guest was Walter, and he gave us an overview to help recap all the major events of this wild ride of a year. Despite all the things that happened, he witnessed so many reasons to find joy—including more people getting interested and involved in voting and the democratic process at large:

Even under this terrible administration, a corrupt Senate, and then a pandemic, people continued to do the work on the ground. And you’d see stories of people doing the good stuff that people do for other people. This is at a time when you’re like, I don’t even want to go outside without wearing gloves. So the fact that there are 70+ million people voting for Joe Biden, for all of the 64 or so million that voted for Trump, there are that many more people—and they’re growing, there’s more people becoming more and more interested. And that’s the best thing that our democracy can have: more people interested in it. It’s been this mixture of feeling really bad and also really hopeful, because it is such an extreme version of what you normally see.

Walter also discussed how the organizational infrastructure built in Georgia and Arizona that helped Democrats clinch the presidential election goes back years—and the more we support these efforts financially and with people power, the more we can increase voter engagement in the long term. As he said, “We’re seeing these dividends [from organizing locally] pay out. No matter what happens in Georgia, we’re having a runoff in Georgia. Four years ago, I was not even looking anywhere near that part of the map.”

You can watch the full episode here:

Happy holidays, folks, and we look forward to bringing you new episodes of The Brief in the new year!