James.galbraith

Supporters of the initiative hoped it would depolarize the state’s elections.

Voters in Massachusetts have rejected the ballot initiative Question 2, which would have implemented ranked-choice voting in the state.

Had the vote succeeded, all Massachusetts primaries and general elections for state and federal congressional seats; state executive officials; and county offices would have been held using the method.

“We came up short in this election, and we are obviously deeply disappointed,” Cara Brown McCormick, the Yes on 2 campaign manager, said in a statement conceding the race.

Ranked-choice voting works like this: Instead of just picking one of the candidates on the ballot, you rank them from most preferred to least preferred. While it is new in the United States, it has been successfully used for a century in Australia and in Ireland.

The idea is that this allows voters to choose their favorite possible candidate. Most of the United States has what’s called a first-past-the-post electoral system, where the candidate who receives the most votes becomes president. First-past-the-post systems incentivize strategic voting (voting not for your favorite candidate but for your preferred candidate with a real shot at victory), and they have driven the rise of a two-party system like the one in the US.

And while first-past-the-post voting systems are not the only factor that has led to the two-party system or to the increasing polarization of America, they’ve certainly contributed. First-past-the-post systems mean that third-party candidates rarely win, even if many voters prefer them; each voter expects that a vote for the third party would be “throwing away” their vote.

Imagine a person were voting between President Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins, and Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen. Our hypothetical voter likes both Hawkins and Jorgensen better than Biden but would rather Biden win than Trump.

Under first-past-the-post voting — the voting system most Americans voted with this election — our hypothetical voter might feel forced to vote for Biden. Under ranked-choice voting, they would list (for example) Hawkins first, Jorgensen second, Biden third, and Trump fourth. When ballots are counted, the ballot counters will eliminate the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and “move” their vote to their second-place candidate.

You can see how it works on this ballot from Maine, which conducted the first-ever general statewide election conducted with ranked-choice voting this November.

David Sharp/AP Photo

As a result, third-party candidates get more votes since voters don’t feel that they’re throwing their vote away by supporting the third-party candidate. And the process generally favors candidates who lots of voters find acceptable over polarizing candidates who many voters hate.

“Ranked-choice voting rewards candidates who can appeal most broadly because candidates compete to be voters’ second and third choices as well as their first,” voting reform expert Lee Drutman wrote for Vox in 2019. Studies find that in areas with ranked-choice voting, campaigns are more civil. Ranked-choice voting might also increase representation of women and minorities, who seem to benefit when the electoral conditions encourage coalition-building.

A growing conversation about how we vote

Ranked-choice voting is used all over the world, but until two decades ago — when San Francisco adopted it — it was rarely used and rarely discussed in the US.

US election experts, concerned about growing polarization and voter disenchantment, began encouraging other cities and states to adopt it. It did nicely in San Francisco, and other cities signed on. Eventually, the movement hit the national stage: In 2018, Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting. In 2019, New York City signed on as well. In the 2020 election cycle, presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennet endorsed it.

These early adopters allow us a window into some important questions about ranked-choice voting. In particular, critics have worried it will be harder for the election office to tabulate and that it will confuse voters or lead to more spoiled ballots.

No such problems were reported in this year’s new ranked-choice primaries, and ranked-choice voting works fine in many other countries. But this year’s high-turnout statewide general election in Maine will represent the system’s first time in the spotlight for most Americans. If it performs well, it may be on the ballot in more states next election.

Among the people anxiously watching election results trickle in Tuesday night was Luz Chavez in Gaithersburg, Maryland. While we all have a stake in who becomes the next president, it’s even higher for the 23-year-old Trinity Washington University student: both of her parents are undocumented, and she’s one of two children in her family protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. 

“Every single policy put in place by folks that people elect into office directly impact my family, my community, and directly impact me,” Chavez told BuzzFeed News. “There's so much at stake here.”

Chavez’s family first shared their story in a digital ad from pro-immigrant group United We Dream Action (UWDA) PAC last month. Her little brother, 18-year old U.S. citizen Teddy, was set to cast a vote in an election for the very first time. Chavez told BuzzFeed News that the family was so excited, they prominently displayed his voter registration document like a photograph.

“My parents were so proud about him registering to vote,” she continued in the report. “Once he got his voter registration card, my dad laminated it, he put in a little frame, and when he went to go vote a couple of days ago, he actually came back with four ‘future voter’ stickers for my family.”

The family has depended on Teddy to be their voice amid so much uncertainty. Like he said in the UWDA PAC video last month, both of their parents lost their jobs amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, leaving Chavez as the sole person in the family bringing in an income. “I became the sole provider of my family overnight,” she told BuzzFeed News—and all while also trying to finish school, too.

But despite these hurdles, Chavez has been determined to fight for her family through her work with UWDA PAC and voting out impeached president Donald Trump. “[W]e have a president that has been so brutally racist, has been very demeaning toward immigrants, that has been on the track to dismantle DACA,” she continued. 

Even though the Supreme Court this past summer ruled the Trump administration unlawfully ended the program, he’s defied the ruling simply because he didn’t like it. So instead of fully reinstating DACA like he’s under order to (something that would open the program to thousands of new applicants), his administration under unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf is further decimating what currently stands. Just this week, a number of states filed legal action challenging his changes. 

BuzzFeed News reports Chavez is “still optimistic” the work paid off, saying she’s “hopeful that the community won.” Should former Vice President Joe Biden emerge victorious—and it’s looking hopeful for us, folks—there are steps he can immediately take to protect the Chavez family, including fully reinstating the DACA program and removing the threat of deportation from her parents and all families everywhere.

In the meantime, they join the millions all across the country who put their heart and soul into this race and now hope for the best in a vote counting process that could take several days.

“Being with my family tonight, it's my healing,” Chavez told BuzzFeed News during election night. “It's my coping mechanism, being able to be with loved ones during times of hardship. Whatever outcome happens, we're still going to be here together, and we're gonna keep on fighting. My family won't stop until we're all protected.”

COLUMBIA, S.C.—This was the speech Jaime Harrison didn’t want to give. He rocked back and forth on the small outdoor stage. “We proved that a new South is rising. Tonight only slowed us down,” he told the small crowd of aides and supporters standing on the grass in front of him last night. “But a new South with leaders who reflect the community and serve the interests of everyone will be here soon enough.”

Moral victories have no place in the zero-sum game of electoral politics. But Harrison needed an upside to his Senate-race loss, and he found it in the shifting perception of the South, which was already visible in his candidacy. Harrison’s race was not unlike the 2018 campaigns of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida. He raised tens of millions of dollars in his bid to unseat Senator Lindsey Graham, and, despite a defeat, the national buzz he earned illustrated the changing scope of what Americans believe is politically possible in the South over the next decade.

Like Abrams, he ran a campaign predicated on massive registration of Black voters. He had also hoped to woo white voters who had become disillusioned with Graham, and he exploited Graham’s flip-flopping on supporting President Donald Trump. The guy who called Trump “unfit for office” in 2016 was criticizing others for doing the same a year later, Harrison told audiences across the state. Harrison aimed to show South Carolinians that, despite Graham’s shift, the state had gained little from its senator’s political friendship with the president.

[Read: Can Democrats win back the Deep South?]

In January, few people thought Harrison had a chance of competing with the three-term senator, let alone outraising him in campaign donations. The Trump administration’s bungled response to the coronavirus crisis made Harrison’s arguments about Graham and the president even more prescient. Nearly 4,000 South Carolinians have died of the virus so far this year. And, as Harrison had no problem highlighting during the campaign, instead of passing a second coronavirus-relief bill, Republicans—led on the Senate Judiciary Committee by Graham—rushed to confirm a conservative Supreme Court justice.

But the pandemic also forced Harrison to pause his aggressive voter-registration efforts. His planned tour across every county in South Carolina moved online in a state where nearly a quarter of rural residents lack minimally acceptable internet speeds. “I’ve waited 28 years to have the resources to hire 150 people to feed like locusts on neighborhood doors,” Trav Robertson, the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told me. But he couldn’t do that. Meanwhile, Republicans had few qualms about such in-person campaigning. They had a plan that they could execute: Rely on the partisan lean of the state and ride Trump’s coattails to victory. Democrats, especially Black Democrats, needed everything to break the right way for success in the South—but first, they needed to believe that the fights here were worth waging. What ultimately became a neck-and-neck race between Harrison and Graham was an important turn in the state’s modern history. Harrison saw his candidacy as a challenge to the sins of the past.

The 1960s in Orangeburg, South Carolina, began with nearly 1,000 students from the local historically Black colleges, Claflin University and South Carolina State University, marching to protest segregation. The police greeted them with fire hoses—and arrested hundreds, including James Clyburn, now the state’s most prominent Democrat. By 1968, Orangeburg showed visible signs of change—schools were desegregating, as were public parks—but Harry Floyd, the owner of All-Star Bowling Alley, nestled in the corner of a shopping plaza a few miles from where Harrison grew up, was resolved that his lanes would remain for white people only.

For years, Black residents in Orangeburg had urged Floyd to integrate the bowling alley; students at the neighboring colleges craved entertainment beyond the movie theater and nightclubs, and a local Black bowling group was tired of driving more than an hour to Columbia to practice. One February evening, John Stroman, a senior at South Carolina State, led a group of students to the lanes to change Floyd’s mind. Police arrested a handful of them that night. Stroman saw a classmate, Emma McClain, being beaten by one officer as two others held her down. Police clubbed another classmate across the back of his head, leaving a gash in his skin.

Theories ran wild among the town’s white residents. They said the protests were the work of “outside agitators”—Black radicals intent on burning Orangeburg to the ground. That Wednesday, a white man who lived near Claflin blasted bird shot at a group of students, wounding them. Then, as night fell on Thursday, February 8, a highway patrolman fired a warning shot at a group of students upset with how the police had been treating them over the preceding days. His fellow patrolmen, unsure of where the shot came from, opened fire on the students, who had turned to run. Some were hit in the back. Others in the leg. One student thought someone was pulling his coat; he later realized it was the tug of bullets piercing his jacket. Three students—Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton, a high schooler—were killed. At least 28 others were injured in the shooting.

Historians often gloss over the Orangeburg massacre; it does not neatly comport with the anti-war protests or the civil-rights battles in other states of the Deep South. But Harrison grew up with that specific history, and hears its echoes in the present. “I’ve lived all my life with these scars, this historical pain that has been passed on from generation to generation to generation,” Harrison said during his final debate with Graham.

The Senate seat Harrison sought was once held by Ben Tillman, a man who defended lynchings on the Senate floor, and by Strom Thurmond, who ran for president on a platform defending segregation. Though Harrison did not claim that Graham was the virulent racist Tillman and Thurmond were, he did not shy away from suggesting that Graham’s worldview was informed by the way they led the state. “This guy is just a relic of the old past,” Harrison told me.

Jesse Jackson predicted Jaime Harrison’s campaign. In 1984, Jackson, then a long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, won five statewide primaries. The majority of those victories were in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and his home state of South Carolina. Four years later, when Jackson again made a bid for the White House, he won three times as many delegates in South Carolina as his nearest competitor, and swept the Deep South.

The South was still the South, though. And Democrats, in the late stages of the “Great White Switch,” when they became members of the Republican Party we recognize today, had begun to cede the region as Republicans swept into power in statehouses and governor’s mansions. The old logic remained that a Black statewide candidate would be walloped by white southerners who would be unwilling to support him in a general election. Then, in 2008, America elected its first Black president. A surge of Black mayors soon won races in major cities across the South.

A decade later, Abrams showed that with the right mix of voter registration, money, and charisma, Georgia and the Deep South were within reach for Democrats. “Theoretically, whoever ran in that cycle was going to have a very, very desirable shot, right, because [Trump] was that bad,” Don Calloway, a Democratic strategist, told me. But without the infrastructure Abrams built to support her candidacy—the hundreds of thousands of voters her organization registered—she would not have come within 55,000 votes of winning the governorship, he said.

Abrams nodded to the influence of her governor’s race when she spoke with my colleague Vann Newkirk in 2018. “My focus is on Georgia, but the reality is, Georgia matters to everyone,” she said. “If you change the leadership of Georgia, you change the South. If you change the South, you change the country.” Even if she was unable to win in Georgia that year (her opponent, Brian Kemp, then the secretary of state, refused to recuse himself from overseeing the election, which was dogged by accusations of voter suppression), she changed the way people viewed the path to victory there. “It just goes to show you that maybe we should go out and recruit more African American candidates, because they can articulate something and bring an energy and bring a focus that is unique,” Harrison told me.

[Read: Stacey Abrams’s remarkable campaign for vice president]

The South, and the Deep South in particular, fielded more Black candidates in 2020 than it has since Reconstruction. This year was the manifestation of Abrams’s efforts, and those of southern Black activists and politicians before her, like Fannie Lou Hamer. On Sunday, at a rally in Charleston along the banks of the Ashley River, Harrison reflected on the moment. “We are on the verge of having this great state being represented by two African American senators at the same time. First time that’s ever happened in this country,” he told me. He allowed himself to hope; his campaign, as he’d repeat at stop after stop, allowed people in the state to hope. “And that’s the progress that we have made.”

Harrison will not be the next United States senator from South Carolina. But his campaign allowed Democrats to imagine what was possible in his home state; it reminded national leaders why they should not write off the region. If Democrats had invested in South Carolina—in the same way they invested in Georgia, for Abrams’s gubernatorial race and the 2020 election—might the result have been different? Using the voter list Harrison has assembled, will Democrats be competitive in the state moving forward? Abrams turned an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid into sustained influence within the Democratic Party. She made former Vice President Joe Biden’s shortlist for potential vice-presidential nominees. Harrison, who already had high name recognition among Democrats, now has a bona fide national profile.

The South can change. In September, leaders of a nonprofit in Orangeburg announced that the bowling alley where the Orangeburg Massacre began will be transformed into a civil-rights center. Harrison wound his concession speech to a close with an altar call. “We welcome anyone willing,” he said, “to help us write the story of the new South.”

By winning her race, Collins helped protect the GOP’s Senate firewall.

Longtime moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine proved her staying power — again.

Collins beat Democrat and Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon to win her fifth race for reelection, her toughest one in decades. Collins’s win demonstrated that there’s still room for moderate Republicans who broke with President Donald Trump, even though she’s one of the last left in the US Senate.

Gideon called Collins to concede on Wednesday afternoon, Collins announced at a press conference. With that announcement, Democrats’ already tight path to the Senate majority has shrunk further.

Collins’s center-right positioning used to be the source of her political power in Maine. In previous election years, Collins easily cruised to victory by 20- or 30-point margins, buoyed by a mix of Republicans, independents, and Democrats who liked her willingness to buck her party. This race was much closer, with Collins leading Gideon by about eight points. Still, her longtime brand and clout in Maine eventually won out.

Collins’ moderate position proved tougher to pull off in the hyperpolarized Trump era. Collins tried hard not to pick a side in the presidential race — she was the lone GOP senator running for reelection in 2020 to not endorse Trump outright, refusing to say whom she was voting for in the presidential election.

That brand of centrism came at a high cost with Trump leading the GOP. Whether Collins likes it or not, part of her legacy is tied to the president.

“It’s really hard to be a moderate Republican in a party that is so much defined by Trump,” said New America senior fellow Lee Drutman. “It’s really hard to create a political identity as a moderate because so much of voting is nationalized, it’s partisan, and it’s an extension of your feelings about the president.”

While Collins ran a largely local race focused on her Senate seniority and history of bringing appropriations money back to Maine, Gideon ran a strategy emphasizing the national political implications of the race. Democratic groups were especially galvanized to unseat Collins after her vote to confirm controversial US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Even before Gideon announced her campaign, a $3 million pot of money — crowdfunded by progressive Democratic groups after Collins’s controversial vote to confirm Kavanaugh — was waiting for whoever ended up taking on the incumbent. Collins later broke with her party on Trump’s most recent Supreme Court pick Amy Coney Barrett, becoming the only Republican senator to vote against Barrett’s confirmation.

Even as she faced a barrage of attack ads, Collins bet that a pragmatic brand in her home state and the millions she’s brought back to Maine was strong enough for her to win reelection. Collins had a stronger home-state brand than many of her other Republican colleagues who also faced tough races this year.

Collins has been in the Republican Party a lot longer than Donald Trump. But even as Trump fundamentally altered the GOP, she hasn’t abandoned it yet — and is still left standing in it.

“There’s a reason she’s the only Northeastern Republican left,” said University of Maine political science professor Mark Brewer. “She doesn’t really fit into the Trump GOP. She was increasingly an ill fit for the Republican Party before Trump.”

Collins is still in the Republican Party, and she could help shape where it goes next.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) refused to comply with the order from U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia to conduct sweeps in mail processing facilities serving 15 states to ensure that all ballots in the system be delivered to elections offices on time. That's landing them back in court Wednesday. That leaves ballots from 300,523 Americans that the USPS has lost track of that may not be counted in areas including Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta.

The USPS responded that it just couldn't meet the order, saying that the rest of its Election Day operations would be disrupted if they had to search the 27 facilities for the ballots and immediately deliver them. "Given the time constraints set by this court's order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30pm to 3:00pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the election, something which defendants did not understand the court to invite or require," it wrote in a filing. The 300,523 ballots in question were scanned as incoming at processing facilities, but weren't scanned as having exited them.

That might not be as bad as it looks on the surface, Vice reporter Aaron Gordon says. He argues that the USPS has testified that manual processes have been overriding the system, with ballots being pulled out by postal workers, hand postmarked, and sent out for expedited delivery manually, bypassing the exit scans. So out of the 300,523 ballots that aren't accounted for, some could have been delivered that way. We just don't know.

The big issue is that in some of the most hotly contested areas, like Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; and parts of Wisconsin, ballots had to have been received on Election Day. In Pennsylvania, the receipt deadline is Nov. 6, but that remains a point of litigation by team Trump. The USPS report to Judge Sullivan Wednesday morning is not encouraging. It says it delivered 82.2% of ballots in Atlanta, 61.3% in Central Pennsylvania, 66.3% in Philadelphia, 78.9% in Detroit, 72.9% in Greensboro, North Carolina, and 76.8% in Wisconsin's Lakeland district. Did a large portion of the ballots not reflected in these stats just not get scanned on their way to elections offices? Who knows? That's a big problem.

A problem entirely engineered by Donald Trump and his loyal toady Louis DeJoy—who should have been impeached by the House way back in August and September when his malfeasance and his corruption were discovered. As it is, this is what we got.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — President Donald Trump won Florida for a second time Tuesday night, riding a red wave that delivered stinging losses to Democrats down the ballot and put into question the state’s status as the nation’s largest battleground.

Democrats, already on defense in Florida, were overrun Tuesday. Two congressional incumbents fell to Republican challengers, and the party’s hope of cutting into GOP dominance in the state Legislature failed to materialize.

The losses were made even more painful because they were centered in Miami-Dade County, a Democratic stronghold with a diverse and politically complex electorate that state Democrats long have relied on to maintain any power and that Joe Biden needed to win.

Instead of the Hispanic community delivering Florida to Biden, it turned to Trump, who had used the Black Lives Matter and defund-the-police movements to paint his opponent as extreme.

Miami-Dade Democrats had sounded the alarm about Biden’s standing in the county, but were ignored by campaign officials who thought that the loss of the Cuban American vote there could be made up elsewhere with white voters.

“It’s proof positive Democrats couldn’t rebut the socialist attack and that the Biden campaign just didn’t know what it was doing,” said Alejandro Miyar, a Biden donor and Democratic strategist from Miami who was Barack Obama’s 2008 Hispanic and South Florida communications director.

Republicans turned out in large numbers in Miami-Dade Tuesday, eroding Democrats’ advantage. Biden won the county by roughly 7 percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point victory in 2016.

Elsewhere, Biden did well with suburban communities, the elderly and military voters. But Trump countered those gains with his showing among Hispanics and rural Florida residents, said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic data cruncher who had raised red flags about Biden’s chances in Miami.

“Dade is a bloodbath,” Isbell tweeted 30 minutes after polls closed. “Florida will go for Donald Trump. I’m calling it.”

Conservatives trounced Democrats in nearly every contested race up and down the ticket. Republicans took two high-profile Florida Senate races, nearly 10 state House races, and knocked off two incumbent U.S. House Democrats, Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.

Democrats were defeated in four of five statewide races in 2018 and have held no power in Tallahassee, the state capitol, for nearly three decades.

“This is Trump country,” said state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida. “It’s time to start thinking about taking Florida out of the toss-up column. We’re red.”

Republicans began Election Day with confidence, as early returns indicated they would eliminate Democrat’s roughly 115,000-vote lead in early voting.

Democrats’ hopes, meanwhile, were bolstered by high turnout in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, where they needed to run up big margins to overcome late Republican gains.

Biden’s team had decided that they needed a 78 percent turnout in Miami-Dade to survive the Republicans' more than 200,000-vote advantage on Election Day itself.

But there was concern among Miami-Dade Democrats. Biden hadn’t spent enough time in the community, due largely to the coronavirus pandemic, and Democrats were too closely associated with Black Lives Matter demonstrations that included protesters waving flags bearing the likeness of Cuban guerilla leader Che Guevara, a man widely seen by Miami’s Cuban exile community as a symbol of brutal tyranny.

“We must have gotten obliterated by Hispanics,” said one Miami Democrat who was reeling from the party’s terrible showing in the county Tuesday night. “We came out strong for BLM and then saw the Hispanic push back and went lukewarm and got killed.”

Defund-the-police campaigns rising from the left also hurt the party.

Echoing other Miami Democrats, Miyar, the Democratic strategist, said Biden aides stiff-armed seasoned Cuban American operatives who knew the terrain from their experience with Obama’s campaigns. He said former Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, former Congressman Joe Garcia, and pollster and consultant Fernand Amandi, to name a few, weren’t tapped for their expertise and struggled to get the campaign to listen to their advice.

Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Peñalosa, too, was sidelined, according to Miyar and a Miami organizer hired by the Biden campaign who did not want to speak on the record. Miyar and the organizer said they had heard that his request for more field programs was nixed for reasons that weren’t explained.

“Juan knows what he’s doing,” Miyar said. “It’s befuddling how many weren’t brought into the fold.”

Peñalosa did not respond to requests for comment.

By 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Republicans statewide had banked a nearly 125,000-vote advantage--about 1.2 percentage points — giving the party another shot of momentum.

Throughout the day, the Republican lead continued to widen, peaking at nearly 380,000 votes around 9 p.m, according to the Florida Division of Elections.

By mid-afternoon, the conservative Gulf Coast community of Collier County reached nearly 88 percent turnout, and turnout in nearby Lee County was more than 78 percent, including nearly 47,000 people who showed up on Election Day.

In central Florida’s Sumter County — home to The Villages, a conservative mega-retirement community — turnout was nearly 88 percent by election night.

“After watching Democrats during vote by mail, this is our period to run up the score,” Republican Party of Florida Vice Chair Christian Zeigler said Tuesday afternoon. “Republicans are flooding the polls for Trump today.”

Biden had his own wins, just far too few of them.

He took Duval County, home to Jacksonville and a longtime GOP stronghold, with 51 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent. Democrats won the county for the first time in decades in 2018, but Clinton lost it by roughly 6,000 votes in 2016.

Biden also eked out a 1,000-point win in Pinellas County, a state bellwether. Trump won the county by less than 1 percentage point in 2016.

He flipped Seminole County with 50 percent of the vote after Trump won the Orlando suburb in 2016.

Biden and Trump ran stylistically contrasting campaigns that, to different degrees, countered Florida’s conventional political wisdom.

For most of the summer, Florida was one of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots. Worried about the risk, the Biden campaign pushed state Democrats to end traditional voter outreach efforts, such as door knocking.

That roiled some party leaders, who said the move could cost them the state. Relief arrived in September when former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped up to fund a South Florida voter outreach program, including $1.5 million to knock on as many as 20,000 doors a day to turn out Black and Hispanic voters.

It wasn’t enough.

“Florida reminds me of what Missouri was back in the day. They would call it a swing state. Money would get dumped in over and over and Democrats always lost,” said one Democratic consultant. “Eventually, you are close but no cigar and lose your swing-state status.”

Right???

Florida voters said yes to Amendment 2, raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 by 2026.

Florida voters have said yes to increasing the state’s minimum wage to $15.

They did so by approving Amendment 2, which increases the state’s minimum wage from $8.56 to $15 by September 30, 2026, according to the New York Times and the Associated Press. The change is incremental, with employers being asked to increase wages, essentially, by $1 a year. The amendment also specifies that as of September 30, 2027, Florida must adjust its state minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), meaning wages will be adjusted up or down as consumer prices change. The same measure is used to calculate changes in Social Security benefits.

The move toward a $15 minimum wage has gained steam across the country in recent years and is now part of the Democratic Party’s platform. Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, but 29 states and Washington, DC, have a higher floor.

Florida’s yes vote on Amendment 2 makes it the first state in the South and the eighth state in the country to raise its minimum wage to $15. According to Fight for $15, a group that advocates on behalf of a $15 minimum wage, Virginia is the only southern state that has increased its minimum wage recently, but to $12, not $15.

The lead-up to Florida’s vote was a somewhat contentious one. Fast-food workers in Tampa, Orlando, and Miami went on strike in support of the ballot measure’s passage. The editorial boards of the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Palm Beach Post, among others, endorsed the measure. However, some business associations and lobbyists opposed it, arguing that paying workers more would mean higher costs, which would ultimately be passed on to consumers — and by arguing that a minimum wage increase would result in job losses.

The last time Florida residents voted on a minimum wage measure was in 2004, when they voted in favor of increasing it to $6.15, and then subsequently increasing it based on changes in the CPI-W.

This is a big deal for a lot of workers — many of whom were suddenly deemed “essential” this year

The left-leaning Florida Policy Institute estimates that Amendment 2’s passage will result in a wage increase for 2.5 million workers in Florida — in other words, it’s likely to make a big impact on people’s lives.

It is important to note the context around this ballot measure: the Covid-19 pandemic. Low-wage workers have been slammed by the outbreak: Millions lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic as parts of the economy were shuttered. Millions more were deemed “essential” and told to keep going to work, often putting their health at risk for meager pay.

In Florida, specifically, out-of-work individuals had to contend with the state’s deeply flawed unemployment insurance system that was supposed to help them stay afloat. Passing Amendment 2 seems like a fair way to acknowledge that those workers deserve more, and that they matter.

The conversation behind a $15 minimum wage is a complicated one. While it would obviously lead to people being paid more, some business owners and politicians worry that it could cost jobs. A 2019 study from the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a federal $15 minimum wage would lift 1.3 million people out of poverty, but also cost the same amount of jobs. (Other economic studies have suggested the job loss risk is not that big.)

One of the problems with projecting the impact of a $15 minimum wage is that not enough places have implemented it to see how it works in practice. Now, Florida will be another case study.

Well, we’re not going to be rid of Donald Trump’s most obsequious Senate lackey anytime soon. Sen. Lindsey Graham has survived a strong challenge by Democrat Jaime Harrison to retain this South Carolina Senate seat. The state’s Republican voters evidently intend to torture America with the buffoonish Graham for another six long years.

Hickenlooper has flipped a must-win Colorado Senate seat blue.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has won the Colorado Senate race, defeating Sen. Cory Gardner and flipping a key seat for Democrats.

Hickenlooper’s win was somewhat expected. Colorado is a state that has been trending blue for years, and as the state’s popular former governor, Hickenlooper was a natural fit. While the race was not entirely a breeze for the Democratic candidate, his Republican opponent had a much steeper hill to climb.

Gardner ultimately could not overcome President Donald Trump’s dismal approval rating in Colorado, a state that has been influenced politically by an influx of younger, liberal voters. The first-term Republican senator from Colorado was long viewed as one of Republicans’ most vulnerable incumbents. Gardner beat a Democratic incumbent in 2014 in part by promising to be “a new kind of Republican” — one who would pass bipartisan legislation with Democrats and support clean energy.

But Gardner also could not win re-election without help from Trump’s base in Colorado, putting him in a bind on how much to embrace the president and how much to hold Trump at arm’s length. Pollsters in Colorado have watched for years as moderate Republicans have departed from the party and switched to unaffiliated — turned off in part by the president.

“The moderates are being run out of the party, top to bottom,” David Flaherty, of Colorado-based Republican polling firm Magellan Strategies, told Vox this summer. “It’s really a math problem for all [GOP] candidates, not just Cory Gardner.”

Ultimately, Gardner’s talent as a politician wasn’t enough to save him.

“Gardner is one of the best incumbents [Republicans] have running; it’s just that he’s running in one of the toughest states for them,” said Cook Political Report Senate editor Jessica Taylor.

Hickenlooper cuts a middle-of-the road profile. He ran on working with state Republican lawmakers as governor from 2011 to 2019, and he has vowed to work with Republicans in Washington DC to seek bipartisan compromise.

“I’m old enough, I’m never going to get seniority, I’m not going to be fighting to be the chair of a committee,” Hickenlooper told Vox in a fall interview. “I’m going to be that foot soldier in the trenches that takes the time, weeknights, and weekends to build relationships with people in my party and the other party.”

Even so, Hickenlooper has not ruled out supporting curtailing or eliminating the Senate filibuster — the 60 vote threshold that has held up many bills over the years.

“If push comes to shove, I have to look at everything. There’s no question,” he told Vox.

The Democrat also told Vox his main priority in 2021 would be passing more Covid-19 relief and economic measures to help create job growth in a still-lagging economy. Hickenlooper also wants to address climate change; his state has seen historic, devastating wildfires this summer.

“I honestly believe Congress is going to have to go back to the more traditional approach of doing several things at once,” Hickenlooper said. “I know it sounds heretical, but we’re facing serious timelines, whether you’re talking about health care and actually getting to universal coverage. ... We’re also going to have to rebuild the economy, and rebuild it in a way that respects the environment, respects the American worker, but begins to address the issues of equity.”

If you used a mail-in ballot in Fulton County, Georgia this year, you may have noticed peculiar language at the top of the ballot: “Copyright © 2020 Dominion Voting Inc.” Dominion Voting is a private company that sells election technology. And this ballot design — which was created by Dominion and counted using the company’s proprietary equipment — is technically its intellectual property.

Unusual as it may seem, this isn’t uncommon: Most voting technology used throughout the U.S. is covered by intellectual property law. That means the touch-screen you might have tapped on to vote could be patented. The software used to process your vote could be copyrighted. Before you even got to the voting booth, your ballot was likely designed on copyrighted software.

And all of it could cause a nightmare after Nov. 3, according to election-security experts.

“We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.

In most elections, the intellectual-property laws that surround the machinery of America’s electoral system prove inconsequential in determining who won or lost a campaign, and software isn’t central to most contested-election scenarios, such as late-arriving ballots or issues with access to polling locations. But in instances where the vote tally itself is in question, analysts could need access to voting machines’ underlying code to determine if potential security flaws, errors or even purposeful tampering are behind the irregularities. And this year, with widespread fears of contested ballots, recounts and the potential for weeks of legal challenges that threaten to undermine public faith in the results, those IP laws could prove decisive.

“You know how Apple fights against law enforcement coming in and going into their iPhone software? Well, you’d be in the same position,” said Ptashnik. “You might have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get permission to get into proprietary software.”

Three major companies — Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — together control about 90 percent of the U.S. market for voting systems, according to election security advocates and researchers consulted by POLITICO. Industry-wide, it is standard practice for those companies to tightly control who has access to their proprietary software — not only to help those companies maintain an edge over their competitors, but to prevent the fraud or hacking of elections equipment. That means that the relevant source code used to design ballots and tabulate votes is copyrighted and private.

The rough outline of those legal battles is further complicated by the contracts some states have entered into with the election-tech companies. For instance, take Michigan — the pivotal battleground state that President Donald Trump won in 2016. Under a 10-year contract signed with Hart InterCivic in 2017, the state agreed not to “attempt to access or derive any source code” used by the company. In a similar agreement with Dominion, Michigan “agree[d] not to reverse engineer or otherwise attempt to derive the source code” of the company’s software, and forfeited its right to transfer its license for Dominion’s software to third parties.

Contracts and licensing agreements are one of a few ways companies prevent outsiders from looking at their proprietary code. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is another. Section 1201 of that federal law may block anyone besides the source code owner from accessing and viewing copyrighted source code, even if it’s for the purpose of gauging the security of those systems.

For researchers like University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, that presents a real obstacle.

“I’ve studied machines several times that came up on eBay after state governments decommissioned them,” said Halderman. “Once, in 2005, I got to study another voting machine because an anonymous source gave us one and our lawyers were convinced we would be allowed to study it.”

What Halderman and others are trying to prove is that these machines are secure. But some election technology companies say giving researchers access to their software is a security risk in itself.

Voatz, a technology firm that sells mobile voting systems, recently filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing that opening up its software to well-meaning third parties invites bad actors to exploit the system.

“If a security vulnerability is widely disseminated publicly and prematurely, it can expose software platforms and their users to malicious attacks, as ill-intentioned hackers can take advantage of such vulnerabilities prior to the development of any patch,” the brief said.

There are other ways to ensure security besides opening the door to hackers. One option is certifying technology equipment through the Election Assistance Commission, which also tests systems for functionality and accessibility. But Halderman says its testing program is weak.

“That level of testing is very superficial from a security standpoint,” Halderman said. “There’s now been many, many dozens of studies by academics and other independent researchers of voting machines in the U.S., virtually every one of which passed the EAC testing before it was found to have vulnerabilities by other testers.”

Federal auditors do get to inspect parts of voting-machine software, but the goal is to evaluate functionality, not quality, according to Eddie Perez, a former Hart InterCivic executive who now works with the Open Source Election Technology Institute to advocate for publicly owned voting systems.

“It’s a little bit like a mechanic looking under the hood of a car and saying, ‘The carburetor is indeed driving the piston, and that’s driving the crankshaft that makes the wheels go,’” said Perez. “But that’s not the same thing as the mechanic saying, ‘This is the best-quality car that I’ve ever seen and it’s a Mercedes, not a Yugo.’”

Getting that sort of third-party certification is critical to building public trust in an election’s outcome, said Perez. Without it, the public might have a hard time trusting election officials or election-technology companies — both of which could hypothetically produce an audit that protects their own interests.

Dominion and Hart InterCivic did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. ES&S told POLITICO its systems have been inspected by third parties, but it’s unclear if those audits were paid for by the company and if the findings were made public.

“ES&S has been participating in an industry effort to craft a vulnerability disclosure program that works for both security researchers and the elections technology industry,” a company spokesperson said. That program invites findings from researchers about possible vulnerability in its digital products, even though ES&S “does not give authorization to test state and local government election related networks or assets.”

Asked why it frequently places its products under intellectual protection, ES&S had a simple answer: “It’s common practice for businesses to protect their intellectual property.”

Which, to election security experts, is precisely the problem.

“What is so secret about the way these machines are counting our votes?” asked Halderman. “That’s the question that everyone should be asking when we’re told that the software is copyrighted.”

You can ignore these voting “information” robocalls.

Election officials in several states, including the critically important battleground state of Michigan, are reporting robocalls full of misinformation about how to vote — and they’re warning voters to ignore them.

Experts are always on edge about last-minute hijinks that seek to discourage certain people from voting. But those concerns are even greater this Election Day. That’s both because the rules about how to vote during a pandemic are indeed complicated and because misinformation has been running more and more rampant on online platforms.

It is a very old technology — the robocall — that seems to be causing problems so far, though. And it’s so alarming that the FBI is investigating the calls, according to ABC News.

Michigan officials on Tuesday said they had received reports of misleading phone calls in at least the city of Flint, a heavily Black city. The calls tell Flint residents that they should vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday, because of long lines at the polls.

It’s not immediately clear where the calls are coming from or what exactly they say. Michigan is a state that Donald Trump won in 2016 but which Joe Biden is favored to flip based on current polls.

Just yesterday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said there were also concerns about “trick” text messages being sent to voters in the Michigan city of Dearborn.

Unfortunately, Michigan isn’t alone in needing to worry about last-minute misinformation that can mislead voters.

In Nebraska, which has one competitive congressional district, the secretary of state said on Tuesday that he had received reports of anonymous calls “telling voters to ‘stay home and stay safe.’”

The Des Moines Register reported calls with similar language being made in Iowa and said the matter has been referred to the FBI. Officials in Kansas — which is not a politically competitive state at the presidential level — also said they had received reports of calls.

It’s unclear if any of these incidents are related. But election officials are united in their guidance: Election Day is today, and you can safely vote in person until the polls close.

More than one election night scenario has Donald Trump coming out trying to undermine the results of the election. Maybe he’ll try to stop mail votes from being counted if the Election Day votes in key states make the results temporarily appear in his favor. Maybe he’ll declare a victory he hasn’t won. Maybe he’ll see that he’s well and truly behind and try to foment violence. 

The certainty is that Trump will be irresponsible and self-serving. The question is what the media will do about it.

The answer appears to be: Punt. Dodge responsibility. Screw up.

Or, as CNN Business puts it, “Though network executives are reluctant to talk publicly about such a hypothetical and disturbing scenario, five people at various networks said on condition of anonymity that they fully expect the President's Election Night remarks to be shown live virtually wall to wall.”

The plan is to air Trump’s remarks live, whatever they may be, and then fact check them. After the damage is done.

”We are prepared to aggressively fact-check any effort by anyone to mischaracterize the status of the race or the results of the race prematurely,” NBC News president Noah Oppenheim has said.

Okay, but how about not airing that mischaracterization? How about a five- or 10-minute delay on whatever Trump has to say to determine if it meets the lowest possible bar of responsibility?

”One industry source, on condition of anonymity, did sketch out a possible scenario in which networks opt out of carrying Trump live: If there is widespread violence and newsroom leaders have reason to believe that Trump will pour gasoline on the proverbial fire,” CNN Business continues. 

But ... you guys know that Trump will always pour gasoline on the fire, right? Always.

And context is not enough if you give Trump an uninterrupted platform to spread lies.

Twitter will label tweets that falsely declare victory, and Facebook may also apply warning labels to misinformation and disinformation. But YouTube doesn't have a policy for dealing with this certainty, as American Interregnum’s helpful chart of social media platform election night policies shows.

Democracy is at stake here. The media needs to serve as a guardian of that democracy, not a platform for efforts to sabotage it.

There’s an additional wrinkle in the Maine Senate race: ranked-choice voting.

There’s a chance that one of the year’s most important Senate races could go to an instant runoff.

Maine’s unique system of ranked-choice voting, which the state adopted in 2016, could decide the race between longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Sara Gideon, speaker of the Maine state House. It could also prolong the process, making it take days or even over a week to decide.

Polls between the two candidates have shown a tight race for months, with Gideon maintaining a slight lead. Still, recent state polls of the race show neither candidate getting 50 percent of the vote — the magic number to avoid activating the ranked-choice system (also known as an “instant runoff”).

Save for a September Quinnipiac College poll showing Gideon up 12 points that many in Maine politics believe was an outlier, other recent polls haven’t shown Gideon above 47 to 48 percent on the first round of voting, according to Colby College political science professor and pollster Dan Shea. Collins’s numbers in public polls have been slightly lower than Gideon’s.

In a recent poll by Colby College, Gideon was getting about 47 percent of the vote, compared to 43 percent for Collins. Another recent SurveyUSA poll found the race even tighter, 46 percent for Gideon compared to 45 percent for Collins. Still, neither was hitting that 50 percent threshold.

If these numbers hold true on election night, “the issue is then where will the ranked-choice voting process leave us?” Shea said. He and other Maine politics experts think it could benefit Gideon, in large part because the next-highest-polling candidate after Gideon and Collins is progressive independent candidate Lisa Savage, who is currently polling around 5 percent. The other third-party candidate, conservative Max Linn, is polling closer to 1 percent.

“I’m convinced that most Lisa Savage voters will move to Gideon as their second choice,” Shea told Vox. Savage has already openly encouraged her supporters to mark Gideon as their second preference.

“Is this a margin-of-error race? I think on the first run it probably is, but then when you add in the ranked-choice process, I think it’s probably Gideon’s to lose,” Shea said.

How does ranked-choice voting work?

Maine was the first state in the nation to adopt ranked-choice voting, passing it by ballot initiative in 2016. Massachusetts and Alaska voters are considering ballot initiatives to implement the system as well.

The best way to understand this voting system is by looking at a ranked-choice ballot. Here’s one from the 2011 Portland, Maine, mayor’s election.

Portland voters fill in the circles noting their first through 15th choices in 2011. (It’s worth noting that voters don’t have to rank every single choice on the ballot — they could still just choose one candidate and submit their ballot.)

If someone emerges from this system with more than 50 percent of the vote on the first round, they are declared the winner. But if no one gets 50 percent, it becomes a system of culling the lowest vote-getters one by one. The votes are essentially tabulated in multiple rounds. Once the least popular candidate is eliminated, their vote share goes to whichever candidate a voter listed as their second choice.

This vote counting and allocation goes on and on until someone gets a majority of votes — all the way until there are just two candidates left if necessary. That 2011 Portland mayoral election went for 14 runoff rounds to get to a winner with more than 50 percent of the vote ... so, in other words, this process can take a long time. It shouldn’t take as long if the Senate race goes to a runoff, because there are only four candidates — but it’s still longer than a conventional winner-takes-all system.

Maine ballots are counted either by hand or by an automated machine. But with such a closely watched Senate race that could determine which party controls the chamber, town and city clerks in Maine have to be extra careful this year. Local officials are only able to declare winners who got above 50 percent; if no candidate gets to that threshold, all the ballots get transported to a secure location in the state capital of Augusta, where the vote tabulating starts.

It could be a lot of work just to collect all the ballots (Maine is a fairly big state with some very far-flung, rural towns) and get them to the capital. So counting everything to determine winners could potentially take days.

The 2018 midterms were the first elections using ranked-choice voting. In 2018, the process to determine a winner of Maine’s contested Second Congressional District was decided more than a week after Election Day. Democrat Jared Golden won that race, defeating the incumbent Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R) even after he was behind Poliquin in the initial vote tally. He won because Poliquin couldn’t make it to 50 percent on the first round, and Golden eventually accumulated more votes through the ranked-choice process.

Maine Republicans have tried to challenge the ranked-choice process in court but have gotten rejected by both the Maine Supreme Court and, more recently, the US Supreme Court.

The system is definitely here to stay for the 2020 election.

The latest research suggests mask mandates help control the spread of Covid-19.

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, toured North Dakota this fall, as the state was overwhelmed by one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country. While she commended the state’s testing efforts, she was distraught by the noticeable lack of face masks in public spaces. “This is the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of any place we have been,” she said at an October 26 press conference.

North Dakota, which at the time didn’t require masks, had the lowest mask-wearing rate in the country in October, according to survey data.

North Dakota is not the only state that lagged in a mask policy in the throes of a major outbreak, however: Eight of the top 10 states that saw the highest new cases per capita in October did not have a widespread mask mandate, as the chart below shows. (Several of these Great Plains and Midwestern states were spared significant outbreaks of the virus until the fall.)

Youyou Zhou for Vox

But the dramatic surge of Covid-19 across the country this fall and winter has forced some states to change course. On November 8, Utah implemented a mask mandate, as new daily Covid-19 cases continue to rise in the state and across the country. Several other states have implemented or tightened mandates since then, including Iowa and North Dakota. Thirty-seven states now have mandates, according to the AARP.

And on December 4, the CDC issued a new recommendation that people wear masks indoors at all times, unless they are at home.

Over the course of the pandemic, America has been engaged in a massive and uncontrolled mask experiment: Some jurisdictions implemented and enforced mask mandates; others rejected them as public health guidance became politicized. President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned and even scorned the use of masks, and several Republican governors have followed his lead. President-elect Joe Biden, meanwhile, has called for a national mask mandate and for Americans to wear masks for the “first 100 days” he is in office, as vaccines roll out.

But the different state-level approaches mean researchers can now parse the results of a trial they never would have received approval to conduct. New research from Kansas and Tennessee suggests that not only do mask mandates prevent Covid-19 spread, they may also blunt the severity of illness and reduce the number of serious cases that require hospitalization. Other findings support the argument more and more public health experts are making: that masks remain among our cheapest most effective tools to control the pandemic — if worn consistently.

“If you’re not in the ICU, the only tools at our disposal that we know work are the tried-and-true public health measures, like social distancing, hand-washing, and masks,” says Vin Gupta, a critical care pulmonologist and affiliate assistant professor for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “We’re bearing the brunt of those things being implemented poorly.”

“You’re less likely to get Covid-19 if you’re wearing a mask,” says Donna Ginther, an economist and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. And “even if you do get sick while wearing a mask, you’re less likely to get deathly ill.”

Let’s walk through some of the latest research on mask mandates and what it means as we head into one of the most perilous seasons in the pandemic so far.

New evidence from Kansas and Tennessee that mask mandates control the spread of Covid-19

One intriguing piece of evidence of the effect of mask mandates on controlling the spread of the virus comes from Kansas. In July, Laura Kelly, the Democratic governor of Kansas, issued a mandate requiring everyone in public places to wear a mask where 6 feet of social distancing couldn’t be maintained. It prompted an immediate outcry from conservatives. Because of a state law passed in June that allowed counties to supersede the governor’s emergency powers, 81 counties out of 105 opted out of the mask mandate altogether, and only 21 counties decided to enforce it.

Two researchers from the University of Kansas analyzed what happened next.

Youyou Zhou for Vox

Ginther, the economist working on this analysis, found that in the counties that enforced mask-wearing, new cases stayed roughly steady. But in the counties without mandates, even after controlling for how often people left their homes, they doubled. “We were stunned by the strength of the effect,” she says.

The public health officer of Johnson, the state’s largest county, was so impressed he asked Ginther to share her work with the Board of County Commissioners, even though it’s not yet peer-reviewed or even written up into a paper. She is currently working on publishing the results.

Ginther says it wasn’t until 12 weeks after the mandates took effect that the growth in cases began to slow. But she thinks her results are likely conservative. “A 50 percent reduction in cases is likely to be a lower-bound on the true effect of wearing a mask,” she says. “If you had 100 percent compliance, I would expect to see an even larger effect.”

Other researchers have made related findings. A nonprofit group called Prevent Epidemics recently published a report showing that, following mask mandates, coronavirus cases declined in Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. The CDC found that in Arizona, after a mask mandate was put in place, Covid-19 cases dropped 75 percent. Conversely, cases spiked 151 percent when stay-at-home orders were lifted, demonstrating that behavior has a significant impact on viral transmission.

In addition to slowing the spread of the virus, new evidence from Tennessee shows that mask mandates could reduce the severity of the virus. A paper by researchers at Vanderbilt found that at Tennessee hospitals where at least 75 percent of Covid-19 patients came from counties with mask requirements, coronavirus hospitalization rates are the same as they were in July. In hospitals where fewer than 25 percent of patients come from places with a mask mandate, hospitalizations are 200 percent higher. What’s more, the researchers wrote, hospitals in areas with mask requirements and other mitigation strategies “are in a much better position to serve the entire spectrum of community health needs, not just Covid-19 patients.”

Mask mandates lead to more people wearing masks

Even if they aren’t always followed, mask mandates appear to be an effective tool in encouraging behavior change. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found in August that mask use increased 8 percentage points after mask mandates, and increased 15 points if those mandates were enforced.

Only around 65 percent of Americans currently regularly wear masks, according to IHME. But in Singapore, for instance, around 95 percent of people wear masks, and they have one of the world’s lowest coronavirus death rates. “We know that countries that wear masks are doing much better,” says Ali Mokdad, the chief strategy officer of public health at the University of Washington.

Thirty-three states and Washington, DC, implemented statewide mask mandates between April and August. During the same period, an increasing number of Americans began to wear masks regularly, according to a weekly survey started in mid-April by the data intelligence company Premise.

Youyou Zhou for Vox

There is one caveat of all the analyses mentioned above: They simply observe behavior, which means that they can demonstrate associations — like case counts falling after mask mandates are put in place — but not causation. The gold standard to prove that would be a randomized controlled trial. But that’s a hard study to design in a pandemic because of ethical concerns.

Even without randomized trials, Rebekah Gee, a public health policy expert and secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, says the body of evidence “confirms what public health experts have known since early on in this pandemic, which is that masks work.”

Masks could save 130,000 lives by February, but more Americans would have to wear them consistently

In fact, a study published October 23 in Nature Medicine by IHME’s forecasting team modeled current public health interventions — projecting case numbers based on current behavior — and found that universal mask use could save as many as 130,000 lives by the end of February 2021.

Mokdad says that’s why it’s essential to have clear, consistent recommendations to wear masks. He adds, “We never debate seatbelts. Is it okay if only 80 percent of people wear them? We say everybody should.” But while he would prefer that 100 percent of people wear masks, Mokdad says at this point, any incremental increase in mask use “for me is a celebration.”

Unfortunately, in many parts of the US, mask use is actually decreasing. In Florida, for example, which grappled with a serious surge in cases this summer, Mokdad says 70 percent of people were wearing masks in August. Now, only 65 percent are. “Wearing masks has been a response to fear rather than a good, persistent behavior,” Mokdad says.

Vox analyzed the relationship between the frequency of wearing masks from the Premise survey data and the Covid-19 cases in states from April to October. As the charts below show, in states with mandates where cases surged in the spring, more people now wear masks. These states — where more people consistently wear masks — are now less likely to see another huge surge in cases.

Youyou Zhou for Vox

Even though mask use has risen in many states, the nation as a whole is on a troubling trajectory, with new daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all on the rise. Mokdad says he’s very concerned about the holidays. “As we go be with our loved ones — our grandparents, our kids — do you want to go sit at a table and risk the people you care about most, or do you want to wear a mask?” IHME models predict that if some US states increased their mask use from now on, they could reduce the number of future Covid-19 deaths by about 50 percent.

The stakes for getting this right are high — not just for the holidays, but for the rest of the pandemic, however long that might be.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently echoed Biden’s call for a national mask mandate. “If you don’t want to shut down, at least do the fundamental, basic things,” Fauci told the editor-in-chief of JAMA, “the flagship of which is wearing a mask.”

Rather than thinking about a mask mandate as something that takes away a freedom, as anti-mask protestors have claimed, Leana Wen, a physician and the former Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore, says, “Mask-wearing allows you to do things.” If everyone wears a mask, it will keep transmission low, allowing businesses and schools to stay open.

“If you want a more normal life, we need to adjust our behavior, as opposed to locking ourselves away,” Ginther says. “Masks rise to the top as an approach we can take as a society to have a more open economy but not get everyone sick.”

Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.

Editor’s note, November 7: Due to a data error, a previous version of the chart of increases in Covid-19 cases in October did not include Hawaii and miscategorized Louisiana as not having a mandate. In fact, Louisiana implemented a mandate in August. The chart has been updated to reflect these changes.

Margaret this is probably it for us. Most likely our last presidential election. It’s been a hell of a ride. We’ve always voted, but nobody paid attention until Matthew put our words in a blog. It started with that bitch Palin. What a hoot. Along the way we met idiots like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, and that Muslim-hating woman with the crazy hair at the John McCain rally. Oh, and let’s not forget Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter. One couldn’t form a coherent thought and the other couldn’t write a grammatically correct sentence and yet both were held up as leaders for the conservative movement. More like a bowel movement if you ask me. And more recently there was that horrible Sarah Michelle Gellar. No wait. She’s lovely. I mean that horrible Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She’s heinous.

Thank God for those eight years with Obama or I might not have had anything good to say. But in the end, it all boiled down to one asshat that ruled them all: Donald Trump, the orange yeast infection that has irritated us for the last four years. America has never needed an antifungal cream more than it does right now.

Normally I’d tell you to run a bath and add a half cup of apple cider vinegar and soak for at least 20 minutes. That’s usually going to get it under control. But this particular strain is infamously bad so it might take a prescription strength medicine of some sort. In fact, this strain has proven to be deadly, killing almost 230,000 Americans so far. When you talk to your doctor make sure she is aware of all the symptoms:

1. Itchy rash
2. Racist tendencies
3. Xenophobia
4. Excessive, compulsive lying
5. Burning sensation
6. Lack of respect for fallen soldiers
7. Desire to mock the disabled
8. Willingness to orphan and cage children
9. Voter suppression
10. Sexism
11. Watery discharge
12. Tax evasion
13. Adultery
14. Sexual misconduct Type A – groping
15. Sexual misconduct Type B – rape
16. Stupidity – All Types
17. Treason

For the life of me, I’m not sure why 40% of Americans are willing to live with such a horrible yeast infection. I can only assume massive quantities of Tucker Carlson numbs more than just the brain.

It’s unimaginable. Forty percent of Americans are ok with hating the other 60% of their fellow Americans because Trump told them to be afraid. Forty percent of Americans are fine having a President who has 26 credible accusations of sexual assault and bragged about it on video. Forty percent of Americans watched an adult make fun of a disabled person and 4 years later they want more of that. Forty percent of Americans gladly gave up their confederate flags and white hoods and replaced them with a Trump flag and a red MAGA hat. Forty percent of Americans can kiss my ass.

We are supposed to be better than this. We are supposed to be Americans first and political foes second. Under any other Presidency we would all be wearing masks because Americans have always taken care of Americans in times of crisis. We have our flaws, but we’ve always come together when we had to. But under this guy, under Trump, we couldn’t’ even come together to fight a global pandemic. Wearing a mask is just too much to ask. Grandparents have lived long enough evidently because wearing a mask to protect them was just too much of an inconvenience. You have asthma. Heart disease. Cancer. An unknown health risk. Screw all of you because that mask is uncomfortable.

Is this who you want to be America? Is this as good as it gets? This idiot? This orange, thin skinned, balding sex offender? Margaret and I hope not. We both married and have now buried veterans who fought for this country. In their honor and in their memory, we implore you. Vote. Him.Out.

And don’t just vote. Take a friend to vote. Take your adult children to vote. Take your mothers to vote. Statistically speaking, you might want to leave your white husbands at home. But take everyone else and vote like your life depends on it.

Don’t rely on the polls. I’m not sure I believe in shy Trump supporters who aren’t showing up in the polls, but I certainly can believe some of them are too ashamed to admit it. There are more of us. Show up and we win.

Just vote. This is your moment. Seize the day and change the world. Margaret and I have enjoyed getting to know you. But our best days are behind us. It’s up to you now. Your future awaits.

Vote for Joe. He doesn’t itch. We mean it. Really.

(Want more? Follow Margret and Helen on Twitter @HelenPhilpot)

We don’t control the ads on this space. If you see an ad for Trump, remember he doesn’t have to pay for it unless you click on it.

President Donald Trump on Monday created a “1776 Commission” to promote "patriotic education” and counter lessons that he says divide Americans on race and slavery and teach students to “hate their own country."

On the eve of Election Day, Trump directed the commission’s creation, via executive order, to “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

The order follows Trump’s recent attacks on critical race theory and the 1619 Project, directed by The New York Times Magazine, which revisits the country’s history with a focus on slavery and Black Americans’ contributions.

Racial justice issues have been at the center of this election following protests this summer and fall over the police killings of Black men and women. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at protesters, positioning himself as the "law and order" candidate.

His order blasts historical accounts that he says have “vilified” the nation’s founders.

“This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured,” the order states. “Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”

He blames “one-sided and divisive accounts” on race for failing to recognize the country’s “successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”

The commission’s 20 members will be appointed by the president and serve for a term of two years. Ex-officio members will include the secretaries of State, Defense, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Education, along with assistants to the president for domestic policy and for intergovernmental affairs.

The order acknowledges that the federal government's role is to preserve state and local control over instructional programs.

The commission is tasked with writing a report on the “core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of ‘the blessings of liberty’ and to promote our striving ‘to form a more perfect Union.’”

They must also help ensure patriotic education is offered to the public at national parks, battlefields, monuments, museums, installations, landmarks, cemeteries and other places that are significant to the Revolution and country’s founding. Agencies will be told to prioritize “the American Founding” in federal grants and initiatives.

Funding will be provided through the Department of Education and subject to the availability of appropriations. Members will serve without compensation.

The order also calls on agencies to prioritize federal resources to promote patriotic education, including the Department of State through its Fulbright scholars program.

FiveThirtyEight has issued its final presidential forecast. There hasn’t been a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast.

Of course, you can click over to the forecast right now if you’d like to see what it says — I’m sure most of you have already done that. But in these accompanying write-ups, I like to provide some context. When I wrote about our final presidential forecast in 2012, for example, I was trying to explain why a race that everyone assumed was close actually reflected a fairly decisive advantage for Barack Obama. When I wrote about our final forecast in 2016, conversely, it was pretty much the opposite. I was trying to explain that, although Hillary Clinton was favored, what most of the media was portraying as a sure thing was a highly competitive contest between her and Donald Trump.

This year … I’m not really sure what I’m trying to convince you of. If you think that polling is irrevocably broken because of 2016 — well, that’s not really correct. On the other hand, if it weren’t for 2016, people might look at Joe Biden’s large lead in national polls — the largest of any candidate on the eve of the election since Bill Clinton in 1996 — and conclude that Trump was certain to be a one-term president. If you do think that, please read my story from earlier this week about how Trump can win and why a 10 percent chance needs to be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race. His lead is larger than Clinton’s in every battleground state, and more than double her lead nationally. Our model forecasts Biden to win the popular vote by 8 percentage points,¹³ more than twice Clinton’s projected margin at the end of 2016.

Indeed, some of the dynamics that allowed Trump to prevail in 2016 wouldn’t seem to exist this year. There are considerably fewer undecided voters in this race — just 4.8 percent of voters say they’re undecided or plan to vote for third-party candidates, as compared to 12.5 percent at the end of 2016. And the polls have been considerably more stable this year than they were four years ago. Finally, unlike the “Comey letter” in the closing days of the campaign four years ago — when then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that new evidence had turned up pertinent to the investigation into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state — there’s been no major development in the final 10 days to further shake up the race.

Now, there are also some sources of error that weren’t as relevant four years ago. The big surge in early and mail voting — around 100 million people have already voted! — could present challenges to pollsters, for instance. Still, even making what we think are fairly conservative assumptions, our final forecast has Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)

But what’s tricky about this race is that — because of Trump’s Electoral College advantage, which he largely carries over from 2016 — it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting. Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

So as we did four years ago, let’s run through a few stress checks here. On average in past elections, the final polls have been off by around 3 percentage points. How would the map change if there were a 3-point error in Trump’s direction? And what about a 3-point error in Biden’s direction? Keeping in mind that some states move more than others in accordance with national trends, here’s what our final forecast shows:

How a 2016-sized polling error would change our forecast

Biden’s projected margin of victory or defeat in the most competitive states

First, before we get to the Biden-friendly or Trump-friendly scenarios: Suppose this is one of those happy years when there isn’t any systematic error in the polls — that is, Biden wins by about 8 points nationally. In that case, then Biden’s going to win the Electoral College, even if there might be polling misses in individual states. Biden’s easiest path to victory would be to win back three of the so-called “Blue Wall” states that Hillary Clinton lost: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Coupled with the states that Clinton won in 2016, that would get Biden up to 278 electoral votes, more than the 270 required. Pennsylvania is the most tenuous of the “Blue Wall” group, but even if Biden lost it — unlikely if polls are about right overall — he’d have plenty of other options as he’s also narrowly ahead in our final forecast in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia and only narrowly behind Trump in Ohio, Texas and Iowa.

What if there were a 3-point polling error in Biden’s favor? Then he’d be a favorite in all of the aforementioned states. Coupled with the 2nd Congressional Districts in Maine and Nebraska, where he’s also favored, that would result in his winning 413 electoral votes. Other states that are traditionally extremely red could even come into play for Biden too, with Montana being the most likely possibility, followed by South Carolina, Alaska and Missouri. This scenario would also make for an 11-point popular vote margin for Biden, the biggest by any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the biggest winning margin against an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Herbert Hoover in 1932.

But with a 3-point error in Trump’s direction — more or less what happened in 2016 — the race would become competitive. Biden would probably hold on, but he’d only be the outright favorite in states (and congressional districts) containing 279 electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, the tipping-point state, he’d be projected to win by 1.7 percentage points — not within the recount margin, but a close race.

Such a scenario would not be the end of the world for Biden. The extra cushion that he has relative to Clinton helps a lot; it means that with a 2016-style polling error, he’d narrowly win some states that she narrowly lost. Biden has polled well recently in Michigan and Wisconsin in particular and has big leads there. Still, this would not be the sort of outcome that Democrats were hoping for. For one thing, because Biden would probably be reliant on Pennsylvania in this scenario — a state that is expected to take some time to count its vote — the election might take longer to call. For another, it could yield a fairly bad map as far as Democrats’ Senate hopes go, as Biden would be a narrow underdog in several states with key Senate races, including Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa. So while Biden isn’t a normal-sized polling error away from losing, he is a normal-sized polling error away from having a messy win that might not come with control of Congress.

Still, as much as we’ve tried to strike a note of caution, Democrats have a right to be pleased about where they wound up. Sure, Biden could be in a meaningly safer position with a larger polling lead in Pennsylvania or Arizona, where his numbers have slipped a bit down the stretch run. Nonetheless, if we’d told our Democratic readers six months ago that Biden would be heading into election morning ahead by 8 points nationally, also ahead by 8 points in Wisconsin and Michigan, by 5 points in Pennsylvania, by 2 or 3 points in Florida and Arizona, and even a little bit ahead in Georgia and with a pretty decent chance to win Texas, we think they’d be fairly pleased.

It’s also worth keeping in mind the background conditions in the country today. Trump only barely won the election four years ago, against a highly unpopular opponent in Clinton. In 2016, 18 percent of voters in the national exit poll disliked both Trump and Clinton, and those voters went for Trump by 17 points. If they’d merely split evenly, Clinton would have (narrowly) won the Electoral College. Many of those voters actually like Biden, though, who has much better favorability ratings than either Clinton or Trump.

Meanwhile, the election comes at a time where a 2:1 majority of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country amid a COVID-19 pandemic that his killed 233,000 Americans — and which has gotten worse in recent weeks — along with high (though improving) unemployment, a summer of racial protests, and continuous erosions of democratic norms by Trump and his administration. Trump’s approval rating has been in negative territory through virtually the entirety of his presidency. Trump’s electoral record is hardly unblemished: Democrats won the popular vote for the U.S. House by nearly 9 points in 2018, about the same margin that Trump now trails in national polls, in an election where polls and forecasts were highly accurate.

In other words, given everything going on in the country — and Biden’s popularity relative to Clinton — it simply shouldn’t be that hard to imagine a small number of voters switching from Trump to Biden. Indeed, that’s what polls show: There are more Trump-to-Biden voters than Clinton-to-Trump voters. The lion’s share of people who voted for Gary Johnson or another third party candidate four years ago also say they plan to vote for Biden.

Trump might be able to overcome this with a disproportionately high Republican turnout. But while Republican turnout might be very high, Democratic turnout almost certainly will be too, as evidenced by, among other things: Democrats’ equal or higher enthusiasm level in polls; their very high numbers in early and absentee voting, and their greater fundraising prowess throughout the cycle.

Again, this is not to deny that Trump will turn out his voters, too. Our model projects overall turnout in the race to be a record setting 158 million, with an 80th percentile range between 147 million and 168 million. But if persuadable voters and independents are mostly flipping to the other party, you need your turnout to be high and for the other party’s to be low to have much of a shot, and that latter condition doesn’t appear likely for Trump.

Still, 10 percent chances happen, there’s never been an election quite like this one and this isn’t a moment that anybody should be taking anything for granted. We hope you’ll follow our coverage for as long as it takes to determine who won.

If you can vote in the USA and have not voted already, please vote for Joe Biden today. The future of our democracy is at stake. Thank you.

If you're wondering why a striking percentage of police officers appear to have neo-Nazi tendencies, compared to the general population, the most obvious explanation might be that wielding often-violent authority is an ideal career choice for violent authoritarian-minded people.

Or, as it turns out, maybe it's because police training materials are straight-up telling cadets to Be Like Hitler. Jeeeebus.

The Washington Post brings us a scoop first reported by the Manual RedEye, a high school newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky. A local attorney brought them records obtained from the police agency, including a slideshow used to train Kentucky State Police officers; the slides approvingly quote, multiple times, no kidding, Adolf Hitler.

The presentation is based on "warrior"-styled policing and emphasizes the need for violence "without anger," urging cadets in underlined words to "Be the loving father, spouse and friend as well as the ruthless killer." Toward this goal, several of the slides quote Hitler; one adds a quote from Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee promoting "manliness."

Of the Hitler quotes, they're not subtle. Hitler wasn’t known for being subtle. "The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence," quotes one slide. From another: "It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge."

"And the following page simply said 'Über Alles,' a German phrase meaning 'above all else,'" reports the Post.

Oooookay then. So we're not talking Nazi-adjacent, here. We're talking about a slide deck literally burping out Hitler's greatest hits.

As you can imagine, this is causing all sorts of highly appropriate fury among Kentucky leaders, because Of F--king Course. A state official told the student paper that the slideshow hasn't been used to train cadets since 2013, which is not reassuring when you realize that this means it was used to train cadets who are now in veteran positions in the state police force.

The obvious question: How the holy hell did it just happen that a batshit-insane violence-celebrating Hitler-approving slideshow became standard training material for Kentucky state police, and how the holy hell is it that not one cadet going through the program managed to pipe up to let outsiders know that this was going on?

The now-retired then-assistant commander at the academy whose name appears on the slideshow, Lt. Curt Hall, isn't responding to reporter queries, so it remains a mystery why Hitler's advice that "It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge" was, in addition to an inserted-out-of-nowhere "Über Alles," considered something important for cadets to know.

Seriously though, did nobody complain about this ever, in the history of soon-to-be-police officers? It didn't come up? It wasn't considered something eyebrow-raising, wedged into the patriotism-themed slide deck urging would-be officers to be "ruthless killers?"

Huh?

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I am the first to propose this theory and I encourage someone else to do all the legwork then name it after me.

On election eve, the Trump administration is still working to roll back Obamacare.

HealthCare.gov is the face of Obamacare, the online marketplace where millions of Americans sign up for health insurance — and now, two days before the 2020 election, the Trump administration has approved a plan to scrap the website in the swing state of Georgia.

In a Sunday announcement, which is highly unusual timing, as several health care experts noted, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced it had approved a plan from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to close HealthCare.gov to his state’s residents. They will instead be asked to shop for health insurance through brokers or on private websites.

“The Obamacare Exchanges have not worked for Georgians, leaving them with fewer options and skyrocketing premiums,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a Sunday statement. “Today’s approval of the state’s waiver will usher in a groundswell of healthcare innovation that will deliver lower costs, better care, and more choice to Georgians in the individual market.”

That statement is untrue on both counts. Georgia’s uninsured rate today is 5 points lower today (13.7 percent) than it was before Obamacare took full effect (18.8 percent in 2013). More than 430,000 Georgians buy their health insurance through HealthCare.gov, and almost all of them receive premium subsidies created by the health care law. The reason the state’s uninsured rate isn’t even lower is its Republican leaders had refused to expand Medicaid through Obamacare, leaving 240,000 people without coverage. (We’ll come back to this in a moment.)

So, contrary to Verma’s claims, the ACA provided a lot of people in Georgia with health coverage. Moreover, experts expect thousands of people in the state could lose coverage as a result of this new waiver.

The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities laid out the ways people could lose coverage or face higher medical costs as a result of eliminating HealthCare.gov in Georgia. Consumers may be confused about where to buy coverage after seven years of using the federal website. Insurer brokers have incentives to steer people to non-ACA coverage that doesn’t cover preexisting conditions. Many private insurance exchanges sell noncompliant coverage alongside ACA plans.

“Evidence from past, far simpler transitions between federal and state marketplaces suggests that tens of thousands of Georgians might lose coverage simply because of the disruption from the state’s transition away from HealthCare.gov,” the center’s analyst, Tara Straw, wrote.

The Trump administration is approving health care proposals that could lead to thousands of people losing health coverage

For that reason alone, the Georgia waiver is arguably illegal. The waiver program under which the plan has been approved specifically stipulates that a state waiver cannot lead to people losing coverage or costs increasing.

Georgia and Trump’s health department say the state’s plan won’t lead to coverage losses. But outside experts disagree.

Christen Linke Young and Jason Levitis at the Brookings Institution pointed out in their analysis that more than 80 percent of Obamacare enrollees in Georgia don’t actively shop for their insurance; they are simply reenrolled in the same plan or a similar one year after year. The state assumes 90 percent of them would actively pick a new plan under this waiver, an assumption that Young and Levitis call “unreasonably optimistic.”

Instead, if you assume 95 percent of previously active shoppers find new coverage and 50 percent of the previously passive consumers also pick a new plan but the other 50 percent do not, that means about 50,000 people would become uninsured. That would be a blatant violation of the ACA’s waiver requirements.

“Despite the state’s claims to the contrary, the waiver proposal would likely cause tens of thousands of Georgia residents to lose their health insurance coverage, especially in the first year, and therefore fails to satisfy the statutory requirement that a 1332 waiver may not decrease the number of people with health insurance coverage,” they wrote.

But the Trump administration has repeatedly stretched its administrative authority to roll back Obamacare as far as it can go — and arguably beyond its legal bounds. That was also the case of Medicaid work requirements, which Verma also recently approved in Georgia, a plan specifically designed to circumvent the previous court rulings blocking Medicaid work requirements.

Georgia’s Medicaid plan would only partially cover the population meant to be covered by Medicaid expansion (up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level instead of 133 percent), and it would impose work requirements for many of the newly eligible people. So while the state estimates 64,000 people would gain coverage under the plan, that is a small fraction of the number of people who would gain coverage under regular expansion: just 11 percent, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

The state is also forgoing Obamacare’s 90 percent federal Medicaid expansion match under this plan, instead receiving its traditional 67 percent Medicaid match with the state on the hook for the other 33 percent.

“Georgia’s approach severely limits access to health insurance during a pandemic, conditions it on having work hours during a recession with high unemployment (especially in certain industries), and asks state taxpayers to pick up more of the tab at a time when state budgets are under considerable strain,” Georgetown’s Joan Alker and Allexa Gardner wrote.

The US uninsured rate was already increasing under Trump, and it could still get worse if he’s reelected. Even if Trump’s bid to get the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare fails, he would have four more years to approve proposals like this. The only limitations would be whether states would want to take up the administration’s preferred policies — and clearly some, like Georgia, are — and whether the increasingly conservative judiciary would stop them.

To put it another way: These are the health care plans that the Trump administration has been approving in a swing state, on the eve of Election Day. If Trump is reelected, his health officials will be unbound by any electoral concerns. Georgia provides a preview of what the president could do if he wins a second term without having to pass a bill through Congress.

This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news.

Biden will probably win ... but he might not.

Going into the final weekend of the presidential campaign, a trove of new national polling shows Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a comfortable lead.

But, of course, the vote for president is not a national election. It’s a series of state-by-state elections that determine the winner of the Electoral College. Here, Biden’s edge is more muted, but still substantial. And whether looked at nationally or statewide, there’s simply no sign of a late change in either direction. Trump is not suffering from the new spike in Covid-19 cases, nor is he gaining ground based on the final debate or his last-ditch efforts to attack Hunter Biden.

That stability is good news for Biden. He had a solid lead in the polls four months ago, but there was still much uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome. That the many subsequent events — conventions, protest and unrest, multiple debates, the president’s Covid-19 illness and recovery — left the race largely steady means that Biden’s odds of victory have grown substantially, even if his polling lead has not. Trump has a clear path to win, but it’s not especially probable.

On the other hand, the Economist’s super-bullish odds for Biden say that the likelihood of Trump winning is 4 percent, or about as likely as Steph Curry missing a free throw — a rare occurrence, but certainly something that happens. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden about an 11 percent chance; if someone told you a given restaurant gave food poisoning to 11 percent of its clients, you probably would not eat there. In non-election scenarios, the kind of odds Trump is facing would be understood as involving a fair amount of risk.

The national polls show a strong Biden lead

More than a dozen national surveys were released Thursday, all showing Biden in the lead and averaging to something in the high single digits.

His best result came from the USC Dornsife tracking poll (which has a somewhat unorthodox methodology) and registered a gigantic 12-point lead. Trump’s best poll came from Rasmussen, which invariably delivers Republican-leaning results and still showed Biden up 1 point.

All in all, the RealClearPolitics unweighted national average shows Biden up 7.8 points. Crucially, in that average, Biden is over 50 percent — so even if every single undecided voter and third-party supporter decided to flock to Trump in a desperate pro-malarkey surge, Biden would still have the lead.

Remarkably, throughout the entire campaign there’s been essentially no shot of Trump actually winning more votes than his opponent, and that continues to be true on the eve of the election. But it’s the states that matter, and in the states, the race is closer.

Biden has a healthy lead in Pennsylvania

The most likely “tipping point” state — the one that could be decisive if the election is close — is Pennsylvania. And the polling averages there are closer.

RealClearPolitics says Biden is up by 4.3 points, which is a healthy lead, but polling errors of that scale happen. The final RCP average for Pennsylvania in 2016, however, had Clinton up by 1.9 points. Trump won by 0.7 points, for a total polling error of 2.6 points. (FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average currently puts Biden up by 5.2 points.)

In other words, if you think that pollsters have done nothing at all to fix the methodological problems that plagued swing state polling four years ago and that an error of the same magnitude will recur, then Biden would still win Pennsylvania and thus almost certainly win the election.

And the two most recent polls for Biden — +7 from Quinnipiac University and +5 from a firm called Citizen Data that’s not well-known — were actually better for him.

Then there are a bunch of other states where Biden has a lead, but generally a smaller one.

Biden has smaller leads in the other battlegrounds

By the numbers, Biden unquestionably does not “need” to win Pennsylvania.

Polling averages show him with modest leads in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and even Iowa, so taking even an important state like Pennsylvania off the board isn’t the end of the story. But his leads in all these states are smaller — 1.4 in Florida, for example, and just 0.7 in North Carolina.

If it turns out the polls are badly off in Pennsylvania, one likely scenario is that they were off everywhere, and Trump wins after all. That’s because while polling errors are random, large polling errors can be correlated from place to place. If you undersample white voters with no college degree, as many pollsters did in the 2016 cycle, you end up undersampling them everywhere, so every state where those voters are a large share of the population tips the same way.

But it’s also not out of the question that polling error could go one way in Pennsylvania and another way in a demographically dissimilar state like Arizona or North Carolina.

And in North Carolina, Biden did get late-breaking good news from the very well-regarded New York Times poll, which put him up 3 points, while Citizen Data had him up 7. In Arizona, by contrast, the most recent survey was a Rasmussen poll that had Trump up 4, though on Wednesday, a well-regarded Latino Decisions poll had Biden up 5.

The basic picture, which is really what we’ve seen all year, is that you’d definitely prefer to be in Biden’s shoes. But the odds of a Trump win, though not large, are also not large enough to dismiss out of hand. On the other hand, liberal anxiety and conservative chest-thumping can obscure the fact that mistakes may happen in either direction.

Biden could win in a landslide

Biden definitely doesn’t need to win Texas to win the election, which is good news for him because the latest polls all have him losing the state — whether by 4 points or by just 1. There was a Data for Progress poll on October 26 showing him up 1 point, but the same day the New York Times had him down 4.

The larger significance of all this is that Trump’s polling lead in Texas is actually smaller than Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania.

In other words, while it’s definitely possible that Trump will defy the odds and win, it’s more possible that Biden will win a landslide victory that features a shocking blue Texas scenario. This would almost certainly involve sweeping Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, too, and likely involve Iowa and Ohio as well. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight thinks it’s slightly more likely that Biden will win Alaska than that Trump will win the election.

That doesn’t mean either outcome is likely (though the combined probabilities of one or the other happening are over 25 percent), but it’s a reminder that uncertainty exists in all directions. For now, though, the last week’s flurry of polling mostly confirms what’s been true of this race all along — Biden is up, and the Electoral College helps Trump, but not enough to save him unless the polls are wrong.

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Many pollsters released their final polls of the 2020 election over the weekend. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew analyzes what the recent data tells us about the state of the race in its final days.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is operating under a judicial order to report its on-time performance every day, and those reports are trending badly in some key battleground states. For the third day in a row, on Sunday it reported moving fewer ballots on time than the previous day,

That puts ballots in the system at risk of not being received in time in 28 states that require ballots be received on or before Election Day. The USPS reported moving 97% of ballots on time Wednesday, then 93% on Friday, and 91% on Saturday. That's at a national level. In battleground states, the on-time rate is below 90% and in some of these states, it’s disastrously low. In central Pennsylvania, the on-time rate for ballots was just 62% on Saturday. Atlanta's was just 64%, same as ballots processed in Maine and New Hampshire. Less than half—43%—of ballots were on time Saturday in Colorado. Colorado conducts its elections by mail, sending ballots to everyone, with some in-person early voting. Ballots there must be received by Election Day. "Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Carolina, the rest of Pennsylvania and parts of Texas and Florida were under the 90% mark as well," CNN reports.

Pennsylvania is the tipping-point state, and Republicans know it. Joe Biden should win, but only if we can get out the Democratic vote. Click here to get involved in phonebanking, textbanking and other crucial volunteer activities we need for the FINAL DAYS to deliver the Keystone State for Democrats.

Meanwhile in South Miami-Dade County, Florida, the discovery of four dozen undelivered ballots sitting in a post office last Friday has prompted an investigation and sweep of mail facilities to make sure there aren't more ballots sitting around. The majority of those discovered ballots, 42, were going to voters, and 24 of them were delivered on Saturday. The rest were destined for voters who had already voted early in person or had already obtained replacement ballots. Six of them had been voted, and are now at the elections office. A concerned postal worker alerted State Rep. Kionne McGhee about the backlog of mail, including the abandoned ballots, at their facility with a video that McGhee released. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle immediately called for a search of every mail distribution center on Friday evening, but it's not clear as of now how extensively the USPS is responding—they're not saying how many centers are being searched. The mail problem isn't news to Miami-Dade residents, though. As of Friday, 70,000 of them who had requested mail-in ballots had cancelled them to vote early in person.

In some areas nationally, the USPS has set up processes where ballots are postmarked and taken directly to elections offices, not going through the regular mail process. Judge Emmet Sullivan and Stanley Bastian of the Eastern District of Washington—the federal judges who have taken on oversight of the mail—are considering what other steps can be taken to get all the ballots delivered in those states where they have to be on Tuesday. That included mail collection on Sunday on some routes, early collections on Monday and Tuesday, and carriers checking "every residential mailbox" for outgoing ballots. Some post offices will set up drop-off areas for ballots, all to be directly delivered to elections offices.

At this point, there should not be any more ballots going in the mail—last Tuesday was really the deadline for that. If you've got a ballot at home, don't mail it. Take it to a drop box or your local elections office. As you're making your GOTV calls, be sure to advise voters that it's too late to rely on the regular mail.

It's another motivating factor for voters—we've got to elect Democrats to oust Trump's saboteurs at the USPS, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and the board of governors who have happily worked to destroy the institution.