Frontline essential workers and people 75 and over should follow frontline healthcare workers and long-term care residents in getting the coronavirus vaccines, a CDC advisory panel said Sunday. That means grocery store workers, meat industry workers, teachers, public transit workers, and many more.
There are about 30 million essential workers in this group, and 19 million people 75 and older who would be eligible, with vaccinations expected to start early in 2021. They would be followed by a much larger group—129 million people—including another set of essential workers, adults 65 to 74 years of age, and younger adults with medical conditions that put them at higher risk.
The question is when there will be enough doses of vaccines for all these people. The Moderna vaccine has now gotten emergency authorization and is being shipped out, but supply of both that and the Pfizer vaccine will take time to catch up with the need. “Federal health officials have estimated that there could be enough vaccine supply to inoculate 100 million people before the end of February, including the nation’s 21 million health care workers and three million residents of long-term care facilities,” The New York Times reports.
When December hits, a common sentiment might bring joy and excitement or it might freeze you in your tracks: It’s the most wonderful time of the year. For those of us navigating grief and loss during the holiday season, these words can add pressure to an already delicate time. To grieve is to navigate the process of adapting to life after loss has transpired. Navigating that uncharted territory can be fraught with challenges and stress, including unfair expectations of what grieving “should” look or feel like, or an unrealistic timetable about when you are “supposed” to be over your loss.
On top of that, this is not a normal holiday season—it’s coming after a year defined by loss. Since March, whether it has been losing loved ones and friends to illness, losing employment, losing the freedom to travel, or being thrust into virtual work and learning spaces and losing the community of the office or school, grief has been recurring.
For Black women, the grief and challenges of this season may be immense. Our community has faced disproportionately high rates of death and illness from the pandemic, and widespread job loss. Meanwhile, the holidays bring gendered pressure; after all, who bears the responsibilities of the season? Expectations for the holidays fall on women to fulfill, demanding our ability to juggle familial and communal obligations while processing our own pain through the heaviness of forced smiles and sacrifices for others. Now, in the midst of the “happiest” time of the year in the throes of a pandemic, many may be wondering how to maneuver through the uncertainties of these times, be present, and hold space for holiday grief.
While the fact of grief is universal, the way people experience it is not. As Black women, our grief stories are severely underreported, diminishing our ability to share openly about what grief means to us both individually and culturally. Furthermore, the absence of Black women’s grief narratives from public conversation can exacerbate the loneliness and frustrations of the journey, meaning that we may feel pressure—actual or internalized—to downplay our pain to project the appearance of being strong and well.
“I think if there were more meaningful representation beyond stoic tropes of ‘strong Black women’ across the media landscape making it more normalized to process grief in a nuanced way, maybe—just maybe—more of us might feel less reserved and perhaps more free to openly share how we’re feeling,” said Heather Watkins, a disability rights activist, in an interview with Prism. “We might be more inclined to show vulnerability and not have it seen as a sign of weakness or that breaking down [is] actually part of growth and rebuilding.”
Heather states what needs to be said: Black women deserve and have the right to take up space to grieve and be allowed vulnerability that all too often feels forbidden or like a luxury to us.
To help create that space, I spoke with five Black women who are in various phases of their grieving processes during this season. The subject is also personal for me since this year marks the fifth anniversary of my grandmother’s death. Even during a pandemic with the holidays looming, this is the first year my grief felt lighter, and I felt freer to not only remember her legacy, but to embrace the joys of the season that felt lost to me for so long. While that’s where I am in my journey, the women I spoke with had their own unique experiences and perspectives to share.
Adjusting expectations and feeling the loss
In some instances, grief means letting go of the idea that the holidays will be the joyful season that’s constantly marketed to us. That has been the case for Loryn, a communications strategist.
“I don’t have the expectation of this being a wonderful time of the year anymore,” Loryn told Prism. “I’ve learned to give myself permission to feel however I feel in the moment. There are days during the holiday season where I am able to be present with whomever I am with and then there are times where my grief is very present, and I’m ok with both.”
For Heather, whose father died last year, working through grief during the holidays means continuing to process his absence.
“It’s only been the second holiday season since losing my father last year over the summer, so navigating grief still feels fairly new,” she said. “I was his primary caregiver for 11 years and his absence is palpable, and I’m still coming to terms around that since he was such an integral part of the family and we all lived together.”
Tiffany, a licensed clinical mental health counselor, shared similar sentiments. “The winter holidays are harder for me because they are centered around family and I haven’t felt like my family has been the same since my mom died,” Tiffany told Prism. “Historically, we celebrate all holidays together, but winter holidays are different because it’s kind of in your face more. The void is more noticeable.”
As Heather and Tiffany’s experiences attest, the holidays can bring forth memories of those we miss who are no longer here. According to VITAS Healthcare, memories act as constant reminders of loss, and witnessing others express the joys of the season can be difficult or even unbearable.
For Dawn Gibson, a writer, that longing for those she loved is palpable, from extended family to pets.
“I am one of the last of my mother’s line,” she said. “I remember when ‘everybody’ was alive, and it hurts to be so far from that. And, I miss watching our dogs open presents. They got so excited! And yes, there are other dogs, but it’s not on my heart. And seeing all those cute dog sweaters in the stores makes me sad. Our uncle has been gone for over a year. We used to take his favorite snacks to the Memory Care. They made everything look so nice, too. It’s a gap. He’s missing and those beautiful people working there are no longer in our lives. It never crossed my mind that I’d miss entering that space.”
One of the challenges many of us face right now can be the air of isolation, which leads some women to suffocate their feelings instead of finding an outlet to process them.
“I was definitely that ‘suck it up and deal’ person until my father died,” accountant Vanady Enjoli told Prism. “It actually caused me to have a mini breakdown a few months after he passed. Especially being a believer, you’re supposed to quote a few scriptures and smile. I learned there are a lot of things we were taught about grief, pain, and suffering that were not correct. I discovered Brené Brown and went back to see how grief, sorrow, anger, and sadness were handled in the Bible. I realized a lot of what I was told was people’s opinions. Once I became free of that, I was able to fully own my feelings and then ultimately begin to heal. The burden of expectation of others is the worst thing to combine with grief.”
Adding to the challenges, the holidays this year have a different twist because of the pandemic. This year threw all of our plans into limbo. With the bleak outlook of increased infections and death rates, it remains uncertain when we can safely gather and plan for things.
“2020 was supposed to be my year just for myself, with a proper birthday party and vacation,” said Dawn. Now, the sense that everything is up in the air can make things feel even more difficult.
Normalizing vulnerability
Regardless of the time of year, if we want Black women to possess the wherewithal to share their truth of grief and loss, what can be done?
“We must drop elevating strength,” said Dawn. “Black women are people. People are fragile and vulnerable in millions of ways. We must normalize protecting our women, getting therapy, erecting high boundaries, and wanting thriving for our women.” That means ensuring Black women’s safety and healing, and respecting where we are on our journeys.
For Black women who are navigating loss this holiday season and coping with any remnants from 2020 as we count down to the new year, each of the women I talked to offered words of love and validation.
“Say and do unto yourself as you would a precious child,” said Dawn. “Would you be this hard on her? If she broke her arm, you’d do something about it. If your heart is broken, do the same.”
Tiffany echoed that advice. “Be kind to yourself during this journey. It’s ok to be selfish in some ways to make sure your needs are met so that you can adequately show up and take care of other responsibilities,” she said.
Others emphasized the importance of a willingness to be vulnerable.
“You are not alone, your grief and your feelings about it are valid and they matter,” said Loryn. “Don’t be afraid to reach out for help and be honest about how these times are affecting you emotionally.”
“Allow yourself to feel the full range of your emotions, give yourself plenty of compassion, time, [and] care to experience what grief means for you,” said Heather. “There is no timetable, and what has been helping me cope is keeping the joyful memories of loved ones close to heart, the conversations that were sounding boards filled with sage advice, and other times silliness that still makes me randomly crack a smile. And when that wave of sadness feels like washing over, allow that to happen too because you’re human.”
“Take life one day at a time,” said Enjoli. “Pray. Be honest. Find a few people to just sit with you if possible or needed. Don’t let anyone else’s pressures or expectations hinder your progress. It’s hard and even though it might look a little different, your light can still shine after loss.”
Vilissa Thompson, LMSW, is a contributing writer covering gender justice at Prism. A macro social worker from South Carolina, she is an expert in discussing the issues that matter to her as a Black disabled woman.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and David Beard.
Programming Note: This is the last Digest of the year! We’ll see you again in January. Happy holidays!
Leading Off
● With 2020 coming to a close, the Daily Kos Elections team wants to thank you, our loyal readers, for your steadfast support during an incredibly trying year like no other. We remained as devoted as ever to covering the ins and outs of every campaign, but the coronavirus pandemic handed us several new assignments: keeping tabs on the ever-shifting election calendar, tracking the states’ many changes to voting procedures, and following the still-ongoing legal battles over safe and accessible voting.
We hope our coverage and analysis helped you make sense of the most tumultuous election cycle in our lifetimes, whether you’re an activist, a journalist, a campaign professional, or a political junkie—like we ourselves were before we were lucky enough to turn our hobbies into full-time jobs. We are still massive election nerds at heart and always will be, which is why we love getting to do what we do each and every day.
Now, with last month’s election in the books, we’re turning to our most important project of all: calculating the results of the presidential race for all 435 congressional districts. Given the big polling miss we saw this year, this kind of hard data is more crucial than ever to interpreting elections. Yet amazingly, most states do not provide this information—we have to crunch the numbers ourselves, and it’s a massive undertaking, but one we’re eager to tackle. We’ve made enormous progress so far, as you can see in the hexmap at the top of this post (you can find a larger version here).
We take great pride in making all of this data available for free, but it does cost us money to bring it to you. We need to pay for the servers that keep us humming even on the busiest election nights, the election results that greedy counties charge for, and the staff that publishes our newsletters, maps, and one-of-a-kind datasets day in and day out, without fail.
Meanwhile, federal judges rejected a pair of Republican lawsuits on Thursday seeking to make it harder to vote in the Jan. 5 runoffs. One had sought to bar the use of drop boxes while the other wanted to limit the early processing of absentee ballots. A third suit that also wants to restrict the use of drop boxes remains pending.
Republicans responded to their losses by filing a fourth case, this one aimed at preventing anyone who voted in a Senate election in another state in November and subsequently moved to Georgia from voting in the runoffs. It also asks that all ballots cast by voters who newly registered after Nov. 3 be “segregate[d],” based on made-up fears about “double voting.”
On the polling front, a market research firm called Wick Research has released a survey showing Kelly Loeffler leading Warnock 50-48 and David Perdue ahead of Ossoff 51-47. Just before Election Day, Wick put out a batch of swing-state polling and confidently declared “that Donald Trump is going to win re-election,” in part based on a Georgia poll showing him up 49-47. In their new poll, they say respondents reported voting for Biden 50-48.
Finally, CNN reports that, all told, $477 million has been spent on the airwaves for the runoffs, with $212 million coming from the Democratic campaigns and their allies and $265 million from the Republican candidates and their supporters. That disparity, however, does not necessarily mean that the GOP has run more ads.
A separate analysis from AdImpact, which put total combined spending at $457 million, shows that Ossoff and Warnock have spent far more than Perdue and Loeffler: $159 million versus $92 million. Put another way, around three quarters of all Democratic ad dollars are coming from the campaigns themselves while only about a third of Republican spending has originated from the same source. As astute Digest readers know, candidates are entitled to much lower ad rates than outside groups, so it may well be that Democrats are airing more ads—and reaching more viewers—than Republicans.
We’ll naturally finish out with a couple of spots. A positive ad from Perdue features a group of women sitting around and saying vapid things about him (“He is so well-rounded, well-focused”), while retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, starring in a VoteVets ad, blasts Perdue for voting “to take health care away from 500,000 veterans.”
Senate
●CO-Sen: While Republicans just took a drubbing in last month’s Senate race in Colorado, several GOP politicians are already eyeing the state’s next contest in the hopes that the midterms bring them greater fortune. Colorado Politics’ Ernest Luning reports that Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, who will be up for re-election then, has given “nearly every indication” that he’ll run for a third term, which, if he’s successful, would make him the first Centennial State senator to win three straight times since Republican Gordon Allott last did so in 1966.
The Republican most likely to try to deny Bennet that honor, says Luning, is a familiar one: Rep. Ken Buck, who just announced that he wouldn’t seek another term as chair of the Colorado GOP. Luning reports that Buck “hasn’t yet decided” whether to make another go for a seat in the Senate, which would be his third try if he does. CNN’s Manu Raju said later the same day that Luning’s report came out that Buck told him he wasn’t considering a bid, but we remain skeptical, both given his departure as party chair and his frequent ambitions for higher office.
Buck’s first attempt at the Senate came in 2010, when Bennet defeated him 48-46 in battle often cited as an example of a race that the GOP fumbled away by nominating an extremist tea partier. Four year later, Buck ran again, this time against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, but wound up bowing out after engineering a late switcheroo with then-Rep. Cory Gardner: Gardner announced a Senate bid with an endorsement from Buck, who in turn dropped down to run for Gardner’s House seat—with Gardner’s support.
Buck easily wound up securing Gardner’s conservative 4th District, while Gardner wound up narrowly beating Udall 48-46; of course, Gardner got thumped 54-44 by former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in November. Those results are emblematic of Colorado’s steady leftward trend, which Buck would have to defy in order to finally obtain that brass senatorial ring. If he decides it’s not worth it, though, Luning suggests that Republicans could turn to Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams, state Sen. John Cooke, state Rep. Patrick Neville, or 2016 nominee Darryl Glenn, who lost to Bennet 50-44. None, however, have spoken about their interest publicly.
●PA-Sen: Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, who just won re-election last month by a comfortable 56-44 margin, tells the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Jonathan Tamari that she is “thinking about” a Senate bid but cautioned that she was still “very early” in her deliberations. Pennsylvania’s Class 3 Senate seat will be open in 2022 because Republican Sen. Pat Toomey previously announced his retirement.
Separately, Tamari reports that wealthy socialite Carla Sands is considering a bid. Sands, a major GOP donor, was appointed to serve as U.S. ambassador to Denmark by Donald Trump in 2017.
House
●NM-01: Now that Joe Biden has formally announced his selection of Rep. Deb Haaland as interior secretary, the jockeying to succeed her in the event of her confirmation is already underway. The important thing to note, though, is that both the Democratic and Republican nominees in a special election will be chosen by party leaders, not by voters in a primary, so any appeals candidates might make are directed solely toward a very small electorate whose motivations are often unclear.
Nonetheless, the pitches have begun. State Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, who took third with 21% in the 2018 primary that Haaland won when the 1st District was last open, says she’s “definitely thinking about” another run. Other Democrats who have expressed interest are state Auditor Brian Colon; state Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Javier Martinez; Victor Reyes, who serves as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s legislative director; and Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis, who ran in 2018 but dropped out a week before the primary and endorsed Haaland.
Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s 2018 campaign manager also said that her old boss was thinking about running and would “make her decision public in the coming days.” Meanwhile, former U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez, whose 26% earned him second place in the 2018 primary for this seat, is “rumored” to be considering, reports Tony Raap of the Santa Fe New Mexican, but he hasn’t spoken publicly yet.
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, who is up for re-election next year, didn’t quite rule out a campaign, but he also sounded unlikely to go for it. Keller said in a statement that, while he was “flattered lots of folks have asked” about a run for Congress, “Being the mayor of my hometown means that I get to dig in and make daily impact – especially in this time of crisis when leadership is so needed. I’m not sure about that trade.”
Joe Monahan, the longtime publisher of a local tipsheet, mentions several more potential names on the Democratic side: New Mexico Department of Indian Affairs head Lynn Trujillo, Bernalillo County Clerk Linda Stover, state Sen. Linda Lopez, state Rep. Moe Maestas, and state Rep. Derrick Lente.
For Republicans, the options are far fewer, and understandably so: According to new calculations from Daily Kos Elections, the 1st District went for Joe Biden 60-37 in November, the bluest it’s ever been since its creation in more or less its present form 40 years ago. Still, Michelle Garcia Holmes, who got blasted 58-42 by Haaland last month, declared, “[A]bsolutely I will seek the nomination if it opens.” Conservative talk radio host Eddy Aragon, who just lost a bid for state party chair to incumbent Steve Pearce, also said he’d consider.
The GOP’s best bet would likely be former TV weatherman Mark Ronchetti, who just lost this year’s Senate race by a surprisingly close 52-46 margin, but the Albuquerque Journal writes that “a GOP source indicated Ronchetti would not be running.” We may not have seen the last of Ronchetti, though, as Monahan says that he “may want to save his last bullet for the 2022 Governor’s race.”
TX-SD-30: State Rep. Drew Springer defeated salon owner Shelley Luther 56-44 in the runoff for this safely red seat in North Texas.
Gov. Greg Abbott not only endorsed Springer, his campaign also spent $250,000 to promote him and run an anti-Luther ad. Abbott’s intervention wasn’t a surprise, though: Luther, who gained notoriety and admiration among conservatives when she was arrested earlier this year for defying the state’s COVID-19 restrictions to keep her Dallas-area establishment open, denounced Abbott in September as “our tyrant governor [who] has embarrassed us completely.”
●Pres-by-CD: We’re rolling out seven states for our project to calculate the 2020 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide: Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Rhode Island. You can find our complete data set here, which we’re updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available.
●Colorado: The Centennial State supported Joe Biden 55-42 four years after it backed Hillary Clinton 48-43, making it the most lopsided presidential contest in Colorado since 1984, when Ronald Reagan won 63-35. It was also the first time Democrats carried the state by double digits since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, though Biden’s improvement on Clinton numbers was due at least in part to the reduced appeal of third-party candidates.
On the surface, 2020’s map looks similar to 2016’s: Biden took the same four congressional districts that Clinton won in 2016, while Trump again carried the remaining three seats, and as before, all the Biden/Clinton districts were won by Democrats while Republicans prevailed on all of Trump’s turf. But many shifts lurk just below. (Click here for of our map.)
We’ll start with a look at the GOP-held 3rd District in the western part of the state, where Qanon defender Lauren Boebert ousted Republican Rep. Scott Tipton in a June primary shocker and ultimately prevailed in the general election. Multiple polls showed Trump in danger of losing the district, and Democrats hoped that Republican problems at the top of the ticket, as well Boebert’s toxic views and multiple run-ins with law enforcement, would give former state Rep. Diane Mitsch Bush an opening. However, while Trump’s 52-46 performance was considerably closer than his 52-40 showing last time, it was still enough for Boebert to win by a similar 51-45 margin.
Trump took his two other districts by double digits, though his margin in both also declined from 2016. Rep. Ken Buck’s 4th District in eastern Colorado and the Denver exurbs supported Trump 57-41 after backing him 57-34 four years earlier. Meanwhile, Rep. Doug Lamborn’s 5th District in the Colorado Springs area went for Trump 55-42 compared to 57-33 in 2016.
We’ll turn next to the four Biden constituencies, the closest of which he won by 19 points. That was the 6th District in Aurora and Denver’s southern suburbs, which was a major battleground for much of the decade, with Barack Obama carrying it 52-47 in 2012. The district supported Clinton by a larger 50-41 while still re-electing GOP Rep. Mike Coffman that year, but local Republicans took a huge beating over the following two cycles. Democrat Jason Crow ousted Coffman 54-43 in 2018 and won without any trouble this year as Biden was prevailing by a hefty 58-39 margin. (Coffman himself managed to land on his feet in 2019 by winning a tight race for mayor of Aurora.)
Crow’s seat has in fact almost caught up with the neighboring 7th District, which began veering sharply to the left more than 10 years ago. This constituency, which includes the communities of Arvada, Westminster, and Lakewood (the home of the real-life Casa Bonita, Eric Cartman’s favorite restaurant on South Park), was competitive territory when Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter first was elected in 2006, but he hasn’t faced serious opposition since 2010. The district did backtrack a bit, going from 56-41 Obama to 51-39 Clinton, but Biden took it 60-37 this time.
The areas making up the 1st and 2nd Districts were reliably blue even when Republicans were dominant in the state, and they remain so today. Rep. Diana DeGette’s Denver-based 1st District went for Biden 76-22, an increase from Clinton’s 69-23. Rep. Joe Neguse’s Boulder area 2nd District, meanwhile, supported Biden 64-34 compared to 56-35 Clinton.
Democrats control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature, but they won’t be the ones drawing the new maps. Voters approved two independent redistricting commissions, one for Congress and one for the state legislature, in 2018.
●Hawaii: The Aloha State went for Joe Biden 64-34 after backing Hillary Clinton 62-30, which actually made Hawaii the state where Donald Trump’s margin improved the most compared to four years earlier. That shift didn’t matter much in either of the state’s very blue congressional districts, though, and Biden carried them each 64-34. The seats voted almost identically in 2016 as well, with Clinton winning the 1st 63-31 and the 2nd 61-30, respectively. A bipartisan commission will draw new lines next year, though it would be a surprise if the boundaries changed much. (Click here for our map.)
Despite both Democratic presidential candidates’ wide victories, it wasn’t that long ago that the 1st District, which includes most of Honolulu, was a major battleground. Republican Charles Djou won the seat in a 2010 special election with just 40% of the vote thanks to a state law that required all the candidates to run on one ballot in one single round of voting, with no primary or runoff. Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, who had edged out fellow Democrat Ed Case for second, flipped the seat back that fall, however, by unseating Djou 53-47.
But Djou came close to winning back the district in 2014 after Hanabusa left to unsuccessfully challenge appointed Sen. Brian Schatz in the primary. Major outside groups on both sides spent a serious amount of money in the contest, but Democratic state Rep. Mark Takai held on 52-48 in the midst of another GOP wave.
Takai announced in 2016 that his battle with pancreatic cancer would prevent him from running for re-election. Hanabusa, who earned Takai’s endorsement shortly before he died that summer, went on to win back her old seat with minimal opposition but left again in 2018 to launch an ultimately failed primary bid against Gov. David Ige. This time the primary winner was Case, who had no trouble in the general election that year or this one.
By contrast, the more rural 2nd District, which includes the remainder of Honolulu as well as Hawaii’s other islands (known locally as the “Neighbor Islands”), has been in Democratic hands for decades. Indeed, one of its former representatives is Case, who was elected here in a 2002 special but gave up the seat four years later to wage an unsuccessful primary bid against Sen. Daniel Akaka.
This year, state Sen. Kai Kahele won the primary and general elections to replace Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who left to run for president. Kahele had assembled a serious campaign operation to take on Gabbard, who spent months keeping local politicians guessing if she’d seek re-election, so he had a major head start over potential primary foes when she finally decided to call it quits and no one of note bothered to challenge him.
●Idaho: Idaho once again proved itself as one of the reddest states in the nation this year: As in 2016, it gave Donald Trump his fifth-best margin in the country in November. But without the presence of conservative independent Evan McMullin on the ballot this time, the contours of the 2020 elections looked different, especially when drilling down to the congressional district level.
Four years ago, Idaho was McMullin’s second-strongest state after Utah, thanks to the large Mormon population in the state’s southeastern corner along the Utah border. That region is contained in the 2nd Congressional District, which Trump won 54-30, with McMullin taking 9% and Libertarian Gary Johnson 4. This time, he carried it 60-37, as many once-squeamish Mormon voters returned to the Republican fold.
McMullin’s impact was considerably smaller in the 1st District, which runs along Idaho’s western border all the way up through the northern panhandle. In 2016, Trump won the 1st 64-25, while McMullin and Johnson won 4% apiece; this year, Trump dominated the district 67-30. Needless to say, both of the state’s Republican members of the House, 1st District Rep. Russ Fulcher and 2nd District Rep. Mike Simpson, easily won re-election. (Click here for our map.)
Idaho’s district boundaries have remained remarkably stable for a long time, and there’s no sign that they’ll shift much as we head into the next round of redistricting. Though Republicans control every branch of state government, they won’t be in charge of producing new maps. Instead, the constitution hands authority to an independent bipartisan commission evenly divided between the two parties, with a two-thirds majority required to pass any plans. Naturally, Republicans have tried to pass an amendment that would stack the commission in their favor, but they haven’t been successful yet.
Biden was able to exceed 60% of the vote in every seat he won. The closest district both in 2020 and 2016 was Democratic Rep. David Trone’s 6th District, which includes part of western Maryland and Montgomery County, though it was hardly tight: This suburban seat went for Biden 61-38, compared to 55-40 Clinton.
The 6th did feature an unexpectedly competitive race during the 2014 GOP wave when then-Democratic Rep. John Delaney turned Republican Dan Bongino (who went on to run for Congress in Florida before becoming a far-right social media influencer) by a single point. It seems that experience convinced Delaney he represented a “Red District,” as he tweeted during his extremely ill-fated presidential bid, but Team Blue hasn’t had any trouble holding it in the three elections since.
The lone Republican district, Rep. Andy Harris’ 1st, includes the Eastern Shore and Baltimore exurbs. Trump won 59-39, a dropoff from his 62-33 victory, but still by no means close. Harris himself had narrowly lost the previous version of this seat in 2008 to Democrat Frank Kratovil, but he came back and unseated Kratovil 54-42 in the 2010 GOP wave. Democratic mapmakers opted to make this seat more conservative in order to strengthen the party’s candidates in the rest of the state (even though they could have easily made it much bluer had they had the courage), and Harris has had no trouble over the ensuing decade.
Maryland was one of the few states where Democrats had control of the redistricting process last time, and the status quo is likely to persist. While Republican Gov. Larry Hogan can veto any maps he doesn’t like, Democrats have more than enough members in both chambers to override him.
●Minnesota: Republicans hoped that this would be the year they captured Minnesota’s electoral votes for the first time since Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide, but it was not to be. Joe Biden won it 52-45 four years after Hillary Clinton took it by a tight 47-45 margin, though this is likely another state where Democrats benefited from a decline in third-party voting.
Biden, who improved on Clinton’s margin in all eight seats, also flipped the 2nd District in the Twin Cities suburbs, while Donald Trump again won four other constituencies. The news wasn’t all good for Team Blue, though, as longtime Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson badly lost re-election in the 7th District, which was Trump’s best seat in the state. (You can our map here.)
We’ll start with the 2nd, which was very close in the prior two presidential contests: Barack Obama took it by an extremely narrow 49.07-49.01 (a margin of 226 votes), while Trump won it 47-45 in 2016. The area swung left in 2018, though, as Democrat Angie Craig unseated freshman Republican Rep. Jason Lewis 53-47 two years after losing an open seat contest to him.
2020 was another good year for Team Blue, though the area still has a long way to go before Democrats can feel safe here: Biden took the 2nd 52-46, while Craig held off Republican Tyler Kistner by a smaller 48-46 in a contest that was briefly postponed following the death of Legal Marijuana Party Now candidate Adam Weeks.
The neighboring 3rd District also began the decade as a swing seat that Obama took only 50-49, but Trump’s toxicity with well-educated suburbanites has radically altered its electoral landscape. Clinton won 51-41 here in 2016, and two years later, Democrat Dean Phillips ousted Republican incumbent Erik Paulsen 56-44. The seat got worse for Republicans this year, with Biden winning in a 59-39 landslide as Phillips turned in another 56-44 victory.
The 4th and 5th Districts have long been Team Blue’s strongest areas in Minnesota, and that did not change this year. Rep. Betty McCollum’s 4th District in St. Paul backed Biden 68-30, compared to 62-31 for Clinton. Fellow Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 5th District in Minneapolis, meanwhile, supported Biden 80-18 four years after going for Clinton 74-18.
We’ll turn now to the four Trump seats, starting with the GOP’s pickup in the 7th District. This slice of rural western Minnesota has long been red turf, with Mitt Romney taking it 54-44, but it handed Peterson decisive wins as recently as 2014, even amidst the GOP wave. That all began to change in 2016, however, when Trump carried the district 62-31 and Peterson only held off an underfunded Republican named Dave Hughes 52-47.
A similar Peterson performance two years later in a rematch with Hughes served as a warning sign, especially when Republicans landed a far stronger nominee in former Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach for 2020. This time, Trump took the 7th District 64-34, only a slightly smaller margin than four years earlier and more than enough to power Fischbach to a strong 53-40 victory over the 15-term incumbent.
Republicans also retained their hold on two other seats that had swung from Obama to Trump in 2016 and elected GOP members two years later. The 1st District in the southern part of the state went from 50-48 Obama to 53-38 Trump. It swung back the following cycle, when Democratic Rep. Tim Walz left two years later to wage a successful bid for governor, and Republican Jim Hagedorn beat Democrat Dan Feehan in a very close 50.1-49.7 contest.
Feehan sought a rematch this year, and Democrats were encouraged by polls showing Biden in position to return this district to the blue corner. However, while Trump’s 54-44 showing wasn’t quite as strong as it was four years ago, it was enough for Hagedorn to prevail 49-46.
The 8th District, located in the Iron Range in the northeastern corner of the state, was a reliably blue area for decades, but those days are long gone. The seat swung from 52-46 Obama to 54-39 Trump in 2016, and Trump took it by an only slightly smaller 56-42 this time. Republican Pete Stauber won the 2018 race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan 51-45 and prevailed 57-38 this year.
The final seat in Minnesota is the 6th District in the northern Twin Cities exurbs, a longtime Republican bastion held by NRCC chair Tom Emmer. The district backed Trump 59-39 this year, a smaller margin than his 59-33 showing in 2016, but still better for Team Red than Romney’s 56-42 performance.
Neither party has enjoyed control of the redistricting process in decades, and courts have had to draw boundaries after the legislature and governor failed to agree on a map. Democrats control the governor’s office and the state House while Republicans have the Senate, so we’re likely in for another deadlock this time.
●Oregon: The Beaver State backed Joe Biden 57-41, which was a bit larger than Hillary Clinton’s still convincing 52-41 showing from four years ago, and he improved on Clinton’s margin in all five congressional districts. Biden, who likely benefited from a decline in third party voting, also took the same four congressional districts Clinton won, and he made important gains in the competitive 4th District. (You can find our map here.)
This seat, which includes the southern Willamette Valley and Oregon’s coast, was the closest of any of the nation’s 435 congressional districts four years ago, having supported Clinton 46.1-46.0—a margin of 554 votes. Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, who was first elected in 1986, had never failed to win re-election by double digits, but he faced his first well-funded challenge in decades this time from former Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos. Democrats spent heavily late in the game to protect DeFazio, who won 52-46. Biden won by a smaller 51-47 spread, but it was a veritable landslide compared to 2016.
Biden also took the 5th District 54-44, an improvement on Clinton’s 48-44 win in this Salem-area seat. However, Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader ran a little behind the top of the ticket, winning his seventh term 52-45 in a contest that attracted no serious outside spending. Indeed, this was the first time Schrader had failed to win re-election by double digits since the 2010 GOP wave, when he turned back a credible foe 51-46.
Biden’s two strongest showings were, unsurprisingly, in the Portland area’s 1st and 3rd District, which are also held by Democrats in the House. Biden took Rep. Suzanne Bonamici’s 1st District in the western Portland suburbs and North Coast 63-34, a move to the left from Clinton’s 57-35 win. Biden also dominated in Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s Portland-based 3rd District, winning it 74-23 compared to 71-22 for Clinton.
Trump had no trouble again carrying the 2nd District in rural eastern Oregon, which has long been the GOP’s best area of the state, though his 56-42 showing was a bit weaker than his 57-36 performance in 2016. It didn’t make much of a difference for Cliff Bentz, though, who easily won the race to succeed his fellow Republican, retiring Rep. Greg Walden, 60-37.
A decade ago, Oregon’s Democratic governor and state Senate reached a compromise with the state House, which was evenly split between the two parties, to pass a congressional map that made only small changes from the one in use in the 2000s. This time, though, Democrats have full control of state government.
Oregon’s GOP legislators are infamous for using walkouts to stop the Democratic majority from passing progressive legislation, but if they obstruct redistricting, newly-elected Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan would take over the process for legislative lines, while congressional maps would likely get kicked to the courts.
●Rhode Island: This may be the last time we ever crunch presidential election results by congressional district for Rhode Island, because the Ocean State is on track to lose a seat when reapportionment data from the 2020 census is released, turning it into an at-large jurisdiction like fellow New England state Vermont.
For now, we still have two districts to deal with, and the results show a continuation of a long-standing pattern: The 1st Congressional District, which occupies the eastern slice of Rhode Island and contains a slightly larger portion of the capital of Providence, was once again considerably bluer than the 2nd District in the western half of the state.
The 1st, represented by Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, went for Joe Biden 64-35 after backing Hillary Clinton 61-35 in 2016, while the 2nd, occupied by Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin, supported Biden by a smaller 56-43 margin. That, however, was a bigger improvement on Clinton’s 51-44 win four years ago. (Click here for a full-size version of our map of these results.)
Both members of Congress easily won re-election—Cicilline didn’t even face a Republican opponent. However, if they were to face off in a 2022 primary, the vocally progressive Cicilline would likely have the advantage over the more conservative Langevin, who describes himself as “pro-life.” Langevin may therefore prefer a different race, such as the open-seat contest for governor, which might host a more crowded primary that could allow someone with a profile like his to win with just a plurality.
I hope you all have the best holidays possible under the circumstances! Thanks for reading my cartoons over this very, very long year. And as always, if you enjoy this work, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining Sparky’s List.
While journalists, pundits and bloggers with big fancy degrees and lots of “experience” pore over the resumes and records of Joe Biden’s proposed cabinet, I’ve decided to tap a different well to get a truer feeling for how the team will get along with their boss. It all starts with this: Biden is a Scorpio.
How will he get along with cabinet members who fall under different astrological signs? According to what I read on the some astrology web site I found using The Google (being a Leo, I’m just naturally tenacious that way), the future looks promising. Let’s take a look:
Continued…
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (Libra): This is a team that naturally perfect for detective work, as together your problem solving skills are incredible and you compliment each other in a way that others signs can’t come close to. Scorpio has the ultimate desire to figure out all details, while Libra is dedicated to the balance needed in fairness and being morally ethic.
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg is a Capricorn. He and Biden will “get the job done with hard work that seems effortless.” I hope that includes a lot of trains.
Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, & Chief of Staff Ron Klain (Leo): While Leo can take the lead and be in the spotlight, Scorpio is happy to work behind the scenes with precise planning and organization. This is a perfect match of strengths being highlighted and used for the most lucrative and beneficial to all. Be sure that roles are clear, with concise instruction so everyone knows their job to keep from problems arising.
Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, & VA Secretary Denis McDonough(Sagittarius): This is a great combination of fire and water elements coming together and making quite a great impact in a work environment. Where Sagittarians needs structure and purpose, Scorpio energy helps to focus appropriately. Scorpio gains equal benefit from Sagittarius’s emotional influence and all in all a great compatibility.
Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas & HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge(Uh oh…also Scorpios!): Of all the Zodiac, only another Scorpio can truly understand you, and on a level that most just don’t get. This combination does not take much effort whatsoever and problems and challenges aren’t usual.
Well, one thing we know as Team America faces the cleanup of the century: it’ll never be boring.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Monday, December 21, 2020
Note: Our daily note has to work on Christmas this year so we’re giving it today off. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank it for all of its diligent efforts to inform us of stuff throughout the year, and we hope it’s having fun in Vegas cheating on its spouse with a buxom Scrabble pad. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
30 days!!!
Days ’til inauguration day: 30
Minimum number of tweets Trump has sent out since the election: 729
Number of those tweets that acknowledged the coronavirus death toll: 0
Percent of men who say they use formal titles—like “Dr.”—when referring to other men and women, respectively, according to ABC News: 72%, 49%
Percent of women who say they use formal titles, regardless of their colleagues’ gender: 96%
Number of people found guilty by a French court in the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris: 14
Number of troops, horses, and cannon, respectively, Washington took across the Delaware river on Christmas night in 1776: 2,400 / 200 / 18
JEERS to a pre-Ho-Ho-Ho reality check. I know, I know. It’s Christmas and Kwanzaa and Festivus and Boxing Day week, and you’re not in the mood—nor should you be—for a bunch of hard news that’ll just kill the buzz. So we’ll keep this roundup as short ‘n sweet as we can:
» Jared Kushner set up a shell company to bilk his father-in-law’s red-hatted cult out of hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations. Somehow I’m cool with that.
Yay. It’s another week on planet Earth.
» Republicans in the Senate continued to theatrically “argue” with each other over details in a Covid-19 relief bill, which finally seemed to move forward yesterday. Congress also moved heaven and earth on Friday to pass an official United States budget…for a whopping two days.
» 2020 was likely the hottest year on record, some say hotter even than our current First Lady’s lesbian porn.
» Space Force enlistees will be called “Guardians.” To show the depth of their allegiance and discipline, they will only be able to say “I am Groot” while on duty.
» Yesterday was the deadline for Brexit negotiations to wind down, four-and-a-half years after Britain voted to destroy itself rather than welcome immigrants. Since conservatives are still in charge over there, naturally things are still a blinkered mess.
Moments from now, these stories will be sealed in concrete, wrapped in chains, and thrown off a pier in an undisclosed location. If Susan Collins happens to get accidentally sealed in with them, oops our bad.
JEERS to keeping track of America’s fugliest numbers. The mighty Covid-19 Wurlitzer plays on with 77 million cases worldwide—over 20 percent of them in the U.S. Our weekly tradition of maintaining a benchmark of the still-escalating awfulness for the C&J historical record continues, so let’s check the most depressing tote board in the world as our death toll now surpasses the population of America’s 60th-largest city Lexington Kentucky:
6 months ago: 2.1 million confirmed cases. 118,000 deaths.
3 months ago: 7 million confirmed cases. 204,000 deaths
The vaccine is flowing.
1 month ago: 11.5 million confirmed cases. 251,000 deaths
This morning: 18 million confirmed cases. 325,000 deaths
Today’s notable Covid event will involve President-elect Biden, who’s expected to get his first dose of the vaccine on TV so the public can hear him say, “It’s okay. I’m fine.” As opposed to Mitch McConnell, who took it in private last week so the public wouldn’t hear him say, “It’s okay. My face always looks like it’s melting.”
CHEERS to hitting another milestone on this crazy tilt-a-whirl we call Earth. Autumn ended with a gentle sputter-sputter-wheeze at 5:02 EST this morning—when the sun was directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, or 23.5° south latitude, and this year with Saturn and Jupiter snuggling closer than they’ve been in 800 years—and will be replaced with the season popularly known as “Is it !#&%!! spring yet?” Today is also the shortest and darkest day of the year, so at least we can look forward to teeny tiny slivers of extra light through late June. Plus: nothing tastes better in winter than steaming clam chowder chugged from an L.L. bean boot during a blizzard. And now, here it is: your Moment of Stonehenge (now livestreaming)…
Bonus winter tip: Remember that during ice storms, there’s no need to shovel or salt your sidewalk. A public service message from the Society of Unscrupulous Chiropractors.
CHEERS to Pine Tree State roots. Happy to say that President Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice will be a major force in the Biden White House, seeing as she’s been hired to be the Joe’s domestic policy adviser. Turns out she’s practically my sister:
Rice’s family has deep roots in Maine.
Her grandparents immigrated to Portland from Jamaica in 1912, working such jobs as janitor, shipper, maid and seamstress as they sought to save money and build lives in the city. All five of the couple’s children graduated from college, including Rice’s mother, Lois Dickson Rice, who was valedictorian and class president at Portland High School before attending Radcliffe College.
She’s expected to play an active role in the Biden administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Health care, immigration and tackling racial inequality are also expected to be among the top issues for the domestic policy shop next year. The 56-year-old Rice will be among the most prominent Black women in Biden’s administration.
Once again I feel an obligation—driven only by patriotism—to invoke the Billeh Principle of expertise by osmosis: Ms. Rice has Maine ties + I have Maine ties = I am now a senior member of Biden’s inner circle. I prefer a corner suite but I’ll settle for a cubicle in the Oval Office.
JEERS to bad spelling. On today’s date in 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle sent out 30,000 Christmas cards that said: “May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope to the world.” Really:
We’re sure he regerts the mistake.
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Ten years ago in C&J: December 21, 2010
CHEERS to a bit more order in the court. Lest we forget, another major obstacle Republicans have thrown up to thwart the Obama administration is gridlock over judicial confirmations. For no other reason but to be assholes, they’ve blocked nominee after nominee month after month. But now there seems to be some movement. Four judges were approved late last week and Harry Reid’s office says they’re “just a start.” They better be. A cursory glance at Obama appointee confirmations versus those of the previous five presidents shows an appalling mockery of Senate rules. Yet another reason why those rules need to be changed on January 5 so the point is made clear to the smirking do-nothing crowd: you abuse your privileges, you lose your privileges. What’s the difference between a GOP senator and a three year-old? Beats me.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to making a joyful noise. If you’re wondering why you’re hearing all those orgasm carols on the radio, there’s a good reason: today is Global Orgasm for Peace Day. Your mission, should you decide to ahhhhhccept it:
This is the 8th year of the Global Orgasm for World Peace, held annually on the December Solstice & New Year.
Millions of satisfied people around the world have participated, saying Yes! to World Peace in their own special way.
Through links with the Noosphere Project at Princeton University, and more recently The Center for Subtle Activism, the Global O has been able to contribute in a unique way to the new sciences of the collective mind.
We ask that you vote for a brighter future with your orgasm. Use it to pray for Peace. With you will be millions of people around the world.
What can we say? O come all ye faithful. Come one, come all. Come rain or come shine. Just don’t come on-a my house.
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
‘Don’t Book Bill in Portland Maine’: Rachel Maddow Speaks Exclusively On Making of Her Show, The Competition, What’s Next in the Cheers and Jeers Era
A President Who Can’t Put Aside Grudges, Even for Good News
The past week served as a preview of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency: no leadership on debates within his party, but keen attention to waging personal vendettas and cultivating his supporters.
It was among the most consequential weeks of President Trump’s tenure: Across the country, health care workers began receiving a lifesaving coronavirus vaccine. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers closed in on a deal for economic relief aimed at averting a deeper recession. And on Friday, federal regulators authorized a second vaccine.
Yet Mr. Trump was largely absent from those events. It was Vice President Mike Pence who held a call with governors on Monday to hail a “medical miracle,” and who received the Pfizer vaccine at week’s end on live television. Legislative leaders were the ones working late into the nights on a stimulus deal eventually reached on Sunday.
McConnell is on the floor saying there was no reason this package couldn’t have been signed into law “multiple months ago.” This will infuriate Dems, who have been trying to pass Covid relief since May. McConnell wanted to take a “pause”
African-American Resistance to the COVID-19 Vaccine Reflects a Broader Problem
Inequalities abound in the narrative of this pandemic. Black people and Latinos have disproportionately lost their jobs in the covid recession, but they are also more likely to perform the kinds of labor deemed essential, which accounts, in part, for the higher infection, hospitalization, and death rates found among these populations. For this and similar reasons, the fact that, on Monday, Sandra Lindsay, a Black nurse who works at the Long Island Jewish Hospital, became the first American to receive the Pfizer vaccine, and that it was administered to her by Dr. Michelle Chester, a Black doctor with Northwell Health, was laden with significance. Just forty-two per cent of African-Americans are willing to receive the vaccine, despite the fact that they are more likely than white Americans to be infected with—and die from—the virus. Last month, the N.A.A.C.P., in conjunction with two other organizations, released a report, “Vaccine Hesitancy in Black and Latinx Communities,” which found that just fourteen per cent of African-Americans surveyed “mostly or completely trust” the vaccine’s safety. On Wednesday, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, who last month ran for a county commissioner’s seat in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, posted her doubts on Instagram, asking, “I really want to trust the scientist but why do they have a vaccine for covid-19 so fast but not cancer or aids?”
Don’t cut in line for the COVID vaccine. Elites who do will be named and shamed.
The optics of the privileged jumping the COVID vaccine line ahead of essential workers will be terrible and should be damaging.
There are already rumors of executives seeking special dispensation to have their workers newly designated “essential” in order to cut in line. Any new designations should be carefully examined, and governmental agencies should sequester their decision-making processes from undue political influence. The lives of those who have been risking theirs to care for our sick, work in our drive-thrus and stock our grocery stores and drugstore shelves should come first.
White House adviser Dr. Deborah Birx traveled with three generations of her family from two households after Thanksgiving. That was after she warned Americans to “be vigilant” and limit celebrations to “your immediate household.” https://t.co/eaZUhf6f7Y
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. What Does That Mean for Us?
Officials in Britain and South Africa claim new variants are more easily transmitted. There’s a lot more to the story, scientists say.
The British variant has about 20 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. These mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit more efficiently, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.
But the estimate of greater transmissibility — British officials said the variant was as much as 70 percent more transmissible — is based on modeling and has not been confirmed in lab experiments, Dr. Cevik added.
Since there appears to be some appetite for a discussion of worst-case scenarios out there: the good news is that in the very unlikely event that the UK SARSCoV2 variant escapes vaccines, the runway to a revised mRNA vaccine, including supplies, is considerably shorter this time
COVID-19 has held a mirror to Christianity, just as the epidemics of the past did.
It has been, to a distressing degree, an ignominious year for the church in America. In the midst of a global public-health crisis, many Christians certainly took seriously Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Matthew about how he would separate believers from unbelievers on Judgment Day: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” My colleague Jonathan Blitzer profiled Juan Carlos Ruiz, a fifty-year-old Mexican pastor of a Lutheran congregation in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who tirelessly delivered meals, arranged discounted burials with funeral homes, and answered calls for help at all hours from undocumented members of the community. Legions of Roman Catholic priests donned personal protective equipment and ventured, at great personal risk, into hospital rooms to anoint the dying with oil. Churches have operated food pantries, distributed rent-relief checks, and provided housing during the crisis. But white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election, despite his denialism about the pandemic, which has now killed more than three hundred thousand people in the United States, and his utter lack of compassion for its victims. Many churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings about large indoor gatherings. The virus has swept through houses of worship across the country. In the end, the lasting image of the church in the pandemic may very well be that of an unmasked choir at First Baptist Church, in Dallas, led by the pastor, Robert Jeffress, a staunch Trump supporter, singing in front of Vice-President Mike Pence at a “Freedom Sunday” service, as the county where the church is located reported a record high for covid-19 cases.
Don’t let this go overlooked: Bill Barr has concluded that he didn’t “see any sign of improper CIA activity” regarding Trump or “foreign government activity before July 2016,” when the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane. “The CIA stayed in its lane.”https://t.co/AS3glyYeCO
Here’s what’s in the new $900 billion stimulus package
Jobless benefits, aid to small businesses, stimulus checks and money for vaccine distribution are in. Aid for local governments and corporate liability shields are out.
The bill comes at a critical time for the recovery as the coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming the nation’s healthcare system and scores of Americans were set to lose federal aid by the end of the year. Two separate bill summaries released by Republican and Democratic congressional leaders late Sunday, as well as reporting by The Washington Post, confirmed some details of what’s in and out of the bill.
Front-line essential workers and adults 75 and over should be next to get the coronavirus vaccine, a CDC advisory … https://t.co/MtyyRdMLF9
‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department
No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.
Still, I felt I was abandoning the ship. I continued to believe that a critical mass of responsible attorneys staying in government might provide a last line of defense against the administration’s worst instincts. Even after I left, I advised others that they could do good by staying. News reports about meaningful pushback by Justice Department attorneys seemed to confirm this thinking.
I was wrong.
Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed….
No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.
We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.
This could amount to thousands of dollars for many unemployed low-income families. Dem leaders deserve serious props for wringing this out of McConnell. https://t.co/XHQF025XmC
— Nathan Newman 🧭 “GOP Cut Your Checks in Half” (@nathansnewman) December 21, 2020
Just look at what’s happening across the spectrum. The Federal Trade Commission is seeking information about data collection from nine social media companies. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who’s about to join the Biden Cabinet, is suing to compel Amazon’s compliance with an investigation into the company’s workplace protocols and level of coronavirus cases. Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama are voting on unionization with the Trump Labor Board’s blessing. App seller Cydia is suing Apple for creating a monopoly with its App Store. Researcher Zack Maril single-handedly implanted the notion of Google’s web-crawler monopoly in the public consciousness with one report. Northeastern University professor John Kwoka and Imperial College London’s Tommaso Valenti revised the history on firm breakups, showing them to be far superior to behavioral or conduct remedies. And across the pond, the European Union’s new rules on digital services and markets reflect a stronger and more confident challenge to tech firms, which feels like a direct consequence of the flurry of lawsuits.
The lawsuits against Google and Facebook will last for years. Big Tech’s defenders and lobbyists will defame them and bargain for a settlement of the anti-monopoly strife. The cases might even fail. It doesn’t matter. The policy center of America has now been convinced that the situation in corporate America has grown out of control. Public opinion supports that perspective. The network of anti-monopoly thinkers and scholars and activists has grown. The arguments for enabling monopoly power have been revealed as weak. Nothing is going to stop this evolution away from the laissez-faire of the Chicago school and toward the preservation of liberty and democracy.
Barry Lynn, an intellectual godfather of the new anti-monopoly movement, wrote this week that Joe Biden must make a choice to wield the laws at his disposal to fight corporate power, and must break with the failed consensus of his Obama-era confidants, who didn’t break corporate power when they had every opportunity to do that. I agree that it’s important, but I don’t totally agree that it’s Biden’s choice to make. The genie is out of the bottle. The nation has already made its decision. Biden can lead, follow, or get out of the way.
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
“No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison, by Justine van der Leun.Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” ~~Andrew Wyeth
The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.
But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper’s internal discussions.
The NY Times was sitting on the biggest story of the year. The NY Times was sitting on the information that the President of the United States was illegally spying on citizens of this country. The NY Times knew that the administration was carrying on illegal surveillance of the American people before those very Americans were going to the polls to elect a president. Hmmmm…. It would have been kind of handy to have had that information on November 2, 2004, wouldn’t it? As for why they held it? Care to explain, Bill Keller?
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for “Netroots Radio.”
In the true spirit of GOP service, Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida, showed his support for vaccinating Florida’s most vulnerable residents by scoring one of those vaccinations in short supply himself. “I know I looked away from the needle And yes, I know I need a tan But I am so confident that the #Covid19 vaccine is safe & effective that I decided to take it myself,” he said in a tweet Saturday.
Thankfully, Twitter users saw through the senator’s selfless display. Daniel Uhlfelder, the Florida lawyer who protested the state reopening beaches by wearing a Grim Reaper costume, advocated for the safety of Floridians in the face of Rubio’s tweet pretending to. “Florida has a population of 21,480,000 largely made up of people over 65 with large nursing home population,” he tweeted. “According to Florida Dept. of Health only 32,000 people have been vaccinated. One of them is Marco Rubio, a 49 year healthy corrupt, career politician @marcorubio”
Florida has a population of 21,480,000 largely made up of people over 65 with large nursing home population. According to Florida Dept. of Health only 32,000 people have been vaccinated. One of them is Marco Rubio, a 49 year healthy corrupt, career politician @marcorubiopic.twitter.com/38RmYijI2S
Author Don Winslow tweeted: “. @marcorubio is the guy from Titanic who grabs a baby just so he can jump ahead of the line for a lifeboat. ‘I have a child! I have a child!’” Democratic strategist Kaivan Shroff tweeted: “Every janitor in every COVID wing of every hospital should have gotten the vaccine before feckless Marco Rubio. It’s absurd.” Political strategist Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted: “Young, healthy Senator, who spoke at rallies packed w/thousands w/o masks, who supports Trump -who’s down-played COVID & mocked those who wear masks, is 1st to get vaccine while most medical workers, elderly & infirm Americans, wait. Congratulations on ur privilege, @marcorubio.”
As a Puerto Rican, Marco Rubio is a complete disgrace to Hispanic/Latin people and to humanity itself. He uses our culture to pretend he isn’t the same as Moscow Mitch or Rand Paul.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with lawmakers, nurses, and other politicians getting vaccinated in the hopes of inspiring the general public to do so. But when the very politicians fighting expert-recommended advice to reduce the virus’ spread and keeping much-needed coronavirus relief funds tied up in political red tape start shouting me first with regards to vaccines, I find it a bit gag-worthy.
Rubio, of course, isn’t the only Republican putting his needs before his constituents. Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made sure to get vaccinated too. Mary Trump, author and niece of President Donald Trump, tweeted Saturday: “Mitch McConnell is a traitor to this country. That he got the vaccine after willfully failing to protect us from Covid-19 is obscene. That he’s continuing to block aid to Americans that would help them survive the catastrophes his party created is unconscionable.”
Ever notice all the Republicans stepping in front of our healthcare workers to be first in line for the vaccine even though the @GOP insisted the virus was a hoax? Just like false virtue and bible quotes, hypocrisy is a major conservative trait. https://t.co/qthpW6pks5
The Aloha State went for Joe Biden 64-34 after backing Hillary Clinton 62-30, which actually made Hawaii the state where Donald Trump’s margin improved the most compared to four years earlier. That shift didn’t matter much in either of the state’s very blue congressional districts, though, and Biden carried them each 64-34. The seats voted almost identically in 2016 as well, with Clinton winning the 1st 63-31 and the 2nd 61-30, respectively. A bipartisan commission will draw new lines next year, though it would be a surprise if the boundaries changed much. (Click here for a larger version of our map.)
Despite both Democratic presidential candidates’ wide victories, it wasn’t that long ago that the 1st District, which includes most of Honolulu, was a major battleground. Republican Charles Djou won the seat in a 2010 special election with just 40% of the vote thanks to a state law that required all the candidates to run on one ballot in one single round of voting, with no primary or runoff. Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, who had edged out fellow Democrat Ed Case for second, flipped the seat back that fall, however, unseating Djou 53-47.
But Djou came close to winning back the district in 2014 after Hanabusa left to unsuccessfully challenge appointed Sen. Brian Schatz in the primary. Major outside groups on both sides spent a serious amount of money on the contest, but Democratic state Rep. Mark Takai held on 52-48 in the midst of another GOP wave.
Takai announced in 2016 that his battle with pancreatic cancer would prevent him from running for reelection. Hanabusa, who earned Takai’s endorsement shortly before he died that summer, went on to win back her old seat with minimal opposition but left again in 2018 to launch an ultimately failed primary bid against Gov. David Ige. This time the primary winner was Case, who had no trouble in the general election that year or this one.
In contrast, the more rural 2nd District, which includes the remainder of Honolulu as well as Hawaii’s other islands (known locally as the “Neighbor Islands”), has been in Democratic hands for decades. Indeed, one of its former representatives is Case, who was elected there in a 2002 special election but gave up the seat four years later to wage an unsuccessful primary bid against Sen. Daniel Akaka.
This year, state Sen. Kai Kahele won the primary and general elections to replace Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who left to run for president. Kahele had assembled a serious campaign operation to take on Gabbard, who spent months keeping local politicians guessing whether she’d seek reelection, so he had a major head start over potential primary foes when she finally decided to call it quits and no one of note bothered to challenge him.
P.S. If you haven’t done so yet, you’ll want to bookmark our complete dataset with presidential results by congressional district for all 50 states, which we’re updating continuously.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced late Sunday that congressional leaders have now reached agreement on an end-of-year pandemic relief package. While the details are still being inked, the agreement will reportedly include $600 per person stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, and an extension of small business loans aimed at keeping payrolls intact despite pandemic restrictions. While school aid is included, other details remain unclear. Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced earlier that the agreement will not include Republican demands to curtail the Federal Reserve’s ability to provide crisis funding to individual states and cities.
Congress will approve a one-day deal to avoid an evening government shutdown, and is to vote on the packaged relief and yearly government spending bill on Monday. The total is said to rise to over $2 trillion in funding.
The deal follows nine months of refusals by Sen. Mitch McConnell to allow additional pandemic aid, repeatedly blocking bills with his own poison-pill demands that businesses be provided immunity from liability for exposing either customers or employees to COVID-19; according to Sen. Schumer, that demand is not included in the agreed-to package.
In the end, the deciding factor in favor of the deal may have been the Senate runoff elections in Georgia. After blocking near-identical aid proposals all summer and fall, in recent days McConnell had reportedly expressed to his caucus that he wanted to move forward with pandemic relief so as to boost Republican chances of keeping the Senate.
