Terrified, I read the study that launched a thousand headlines—and did not come away much less terrified. Researchers at King’s College London had tested more than 90 people with COVID-19 repeatedly from March to June. Several weeks after infection, their blood was swimming with antibodies, which are virus-fighting proteins. But two months later, many of these antibodies had disappeared.
The implications seemed dire. If our defenses against COVID-19 evaporate in weeks, people could contract the disease for a second time, as some widely-shared stories have suggested. In such a world, herd immunity would be out of the question. Even more depressing, it could mean that vaccines that work on the basis of antibody response would be useless after a few months. The study conjured for me a future in which the pandemic never went away.
I called several scientists to talk me through the study and ease my apocalyptic anxiety. Their response: Please calm down—but don’t expect us to make you feel entirely relaxed. (I also reached out to several co-authors of the King’s College London paper, but did not hear back.)
“I was definitely very worried when I saw the headlines,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “But then I looked at the data. And actually, looking at the data, I feel okay about it.”
Acquired immunity is cellular memory. When our bodies fight off an infection, we want our immune systems to remember how to defeat it again, like a person who, after solving a big jigsaw puzzle, recognizes and remembers how to set the pieces the next time. The whole point of vaccination is to teach the immune system those same puzzle-solving lessons without exposing it to the full virus.
This is why the KCL study initially seemed so dreadful. It found that the number of certain active antibodies—called “neutralizing antibodies”—declined significantly between tests, especially in patients with mild or no symptoms. Antibody levels are one proxy for the immune system’s memory. If they plunge quickly, that might mean that our immune system can't remember how to solve COVID-19 for more than a few months at a time, dooming us to start from square one with each new exposure. No COVID-19 researchers are rooting for antibody levels to decline so quickly. Everyone I spoke with acknowledged that the study might reveal something important and concerning.
But overall, the scientists converged on three reasons to hold out a bit of skepticism about the most apocalyptic headlines.
First, our immune system is a mysterious place, and the KCL study looked at only one part of it. When a new pathogen enters the body, our adaptive immune system calls up a team of B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells. To oversimplify a bit, the B cells’ antibodies intercept and bind to invading molecules, and the killer T cells seek and destroy infected cells. Evaluating an immune response without accounting for T cells is like inventorying a national air force but leaving out the bomber jets. And, in the case of COVID-19, those bomber jets could make the biggest difference. A growing collection of evidence suggests that T cells provide the strongest and longest-lasting immunity to COVID-19—but this study didn’t measure them at all.
“To look at just one part of the immune response is woefully incomplete, especially if many COVID patients rely more on T cells,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research facility. He pointed me to a study from France’s Strasbourg University Hospital, which found that some people recovering from COVID-19 showed strong T-cell responses without detectable antibodies. “There is a chance that if a similar longitudinal study looked at T-cell response, the outcome would be far more optimistic,” he said.
Second, the virologist Shane Crotty told me that while the decline in antibodies was troubling, it was hardly catastrophic. “It’s not unusual to have fading antibody response after several months,” he said. “The drop-off isn’t that surprising. When you look at something like the smallpox vaccine, you see the antibody response is down about 75 percent after six months. But that’s a vaccine that works for decades. We need a study like this to look at COVID patients six months after infection to really know what we’re dealing with.” It’s been six months since the first American COVID-19 patient went to the hospital. Those studies will surely come.
Third, low levels of antibodies can still be enough to knock out COVID-19, because they can prime a larger immune response some time later. “It’s possible that previously-infected people could utilize [immunological memory] responses to produce new antibodies in case they are exposed to SARS-CoV-2 again,” Pamela Bjorkman, a biochemist at the California Institute of Technology, wrote in an email. “So I would not conclude yet that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are not protected from another infection.”
I heard a similar argument from several people, and I found it pretty confusing at first. Here’s a way to unpack it: Let’s say I learn to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Three weeks later, you might ask me how I did it. I can’t really describe every step from memory, I tell you. But then you hand me a Rubik’s Cube, and I suddenly recall my strategy and solve that sucker in half the time. Similarly, the KCL study might initially seem to describe a forgetful antibody response. But, primed by the reappearance of COVID-19, our immune system might snap back and mount a powerful defense.
Beyond these three caveats to the panic-stricken headlines, several other developments offer reason to be hopeful that the pandemic won’t last forever. Vaccine research is continuing to blast ahead at aninspiringpace. Severalstudiesonmonkeys, whose immune systems are as close to ours as that of any animal, have been promising, showing a strong and lasting immune response. And a recent paper shows that 17 years after SARS first struck East Asia, many patients have “long-lasting T cell immunity” that might even be helping them fight COVID-19, a k a SARS-2.
The race to understand COVID-19 is an unprecedented global effort, and each study is like a little square-inch snapshot of one massive mural. News consumers feeling jerked around by headlines that are alternatively optimistic and devastating should remember this: We are still facing a dangerous disease and learning more every week, but the immune system is a big, complicated place. No single study looking at one part of that big, complicated place should convince you that a vaccine is doomed and the pandemic will be with us forever.
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.
Sweden largely avoided imposing prohibitions. The government allowed restaurants, gyms, shops, playgrounds and most schools to remain open.Credit...Johan Nilsson/EPA, via Shutterstock
LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people as it largely avoided imposing government prohibitions. The government allowed restaurants, gyms, shops, playgrounds and most schools to remain open. By contrast, Denmark and Norway opted for strict quarantines, banning large groups and locking down shops and restaurants.
More than three months later, the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.
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Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more coronavirus-related deaths than the United States.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The elevated death toll resulting from Sweden’s approach has been clear for many weeks. What is only now emerging is how Sweden, despite letting its economy run unimpeded, has still suffered business-destroying, prosperity-diminishing damage, and at nearly the same magnitude of its neighbors.
Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent. The unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in May from 7.1 percent in March. “The overall damage to the economy means the recovery will be protracted, with unemployment remaining elevated,” Oxford Economics concluded in a recent research note.
This is more or less how damage caused by the pandemic has played out in Denmark, where the central bank expects that the economy will shrink 4.1 percent this year, and where joblessness has edged up to 5.6 percent in May from 4.1 percent in March.
In short, Sweden suffered a vastly higher death rate while failing to collect on the expected economic gains.
The coronavirus does not stop at national borders. Despite the government’s decision to allow the domestic economy to roll on, Swedish businesses are stuck with the same conditions that produced recession everywhere else. And Swedish people responded to the fear of the virus by limiting their shopping — not enough to prevent elevated deaths, but enough to produce a decline in business activity.
Here is one takeaway with potentially universal import: It is simplistic to portray government actions such as quarantines as the cause of economic damage. The real culprit is the virus itself. From Asia to Europe to the Americas, the risks of the pandemic have disrupted businesses while prompting people to avoid shopping malls and restaurants, regardless of official policy.
Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent. Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sweden is exposed to the vagaries of global trade. Once the pandemic was unleashed, it was certain to suffer the economic consequences, said Mr. Kirkegaard, the economist.
Updated July 7, 2020
The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
A commentary published this month on the website of the British Journal of Sports Medicine points out that covering your face during exercise “comes with issues of potential breathing restriction and discomfort” and requires “balancing benefits versus possible adverse events.” Masks do alter exercise, says Cedric X. Bryant, the president and chief science officer of the American Council on Exercise, a nonprofit organization that funds exercise research and certifies fitness professionals. “In my personal experience,” he says, “heart rates are higher at the same relative intensity when you wear a mask.” Some people also could experience lightheadedness during familiar workouts while masked, says Len Kravitz, a professor of exercise science at the University of New Mexico.
The steroid, dexamethasone, is the first treatment shown to reduce mortality in severely ill patients, according to scientists in Britain. The drug appears to reduce inflammation caused by the immune system, protecting the tissues. In the study, dexamethasone reduced deaths of patients on ventilators by one-third, and deaths of patients on oxygen by one-fifth.
The coronavirus emergency relief package gives many American workers paid leave if they need to take time off because of the virus. It gives qualified workers two weeks of paid sick leave if they are ill, quarantined or seeking diagnosis or preventive care for coronavirus, or if they are caring for sick family members. It gives 12 weeks of paid leave to people caring for children whose schools are closed or whose child care provider is unavailable because of the coronavirus. It is the first time the United States has had widespread federally mandated paid leave, and includes people who don’t typically get such benefits, like part-time and gig economy workers. But the measure excludes at least half of private-sector workers, including those at the country’s largest employers, and gives small employers significant leeway to deny leave.
So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
Touching contaminated objects and then infecting ourselves with the germs is not typically how the virus spreads. But it can happen. A number of studies of flu, rhinovirus, coronavirus and other microbes have shown that respiratory illnesses, including the new coronavirus, can spread by touching contaminated surfaces, particularly in places like day care centers, offices and hospitals. But a long chain of events has to happen for the disease to spread that way. The best way to protect yourself from coronavirus — whether it’s surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face and wearing masks.
A study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.
If air travel is unavoidable, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself. Most important: Wash your hands often, and stop touching your face. If possible, choose a window seat. A study from Emory University found that during flu season, the safest place to sit on a plane is by a window, as people sitting in window seats had less contact with potentially sick people. Disinfect hard surfaces. When you get to your seat and your hands are clean, use disinfecting wipes to clean the hard surfaces at your seat like the head and arm rest, the seatbelt buckle, the remote, screen, seat back pocket and the tray table. If the seat is hard and nonporous or leather or pleather, you can wipe that down, too. (Using wipes on upholstered seats could lead to a wet seat and spreading of germs rather than killing them.)
If you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have, and have a fever or symptoms like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without potentially infecting or exposing others.
“The Swedish manufacturing sector shut down when everyone else shut down because of the supply chain situation,” he said. “This was entirely predictable.”
What remained in the government’s sphere of influence was how many people would die.
“There is just no questioning and no willingness from the Swedish government to really change tack, until it’s too late,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. “Which is astonishing, given that it’s been clear for quite some time that the economic gains that they claim to have gotten from this are just nonexistent.”
Norway, on the other hand, was not only quick to impose an aggressive lockdown, but early to relax it as the virus slowed, and as the government ramped up testing. It is now expected to see a more rapid economic turnaround. Norway’s central bank predicts that its mainland economy — excluding the turbulent oil and gas sector — will contract by 3.9 percent this year. That amounts to a marked improvement over the 5.5 percent decline expected in the midst of the lockdown.
Sweden’s laissez faire approach does appear to have minimized the economic damage compared with its neighbors in the first three months of the year, according to an assessment by the International Monetary Fund. But that effect has worn off as the force of the pandemic has swept through the global economy, and as Swedish consumers have voluntarily curbed their shopping anyway.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen gained access to credit data from Danske Bank, one of the largest in Scandinavia. They studied spending patterns from mid-March, when Denmark put the clamps on the economy, to early April. The pandemic prompted Danes to reduce their spending 29 percent in that period, the study concluded. During the same weeks, consumers in Sweden — where freedom reigned — reduced their spending 25 percent.
Strikingly, older people — those over 70 — reduced their spending more in Sweden than in Denmark, perhaps concerned that the business-as-usual circumstances made going out especially risky.
Collectively, Scandinavian consumers are expected to continue spending far more robustly than in the United States, said Thomas Harr, global head of research at Danske Bank, emphasizing those nations’ generous social safety nets, including national health care systems. Americans, by contrast, tend to rely on their jobs for health care, making them more cautious about their health and their spending during the pandemic, knowing that hospitalization can be a gateway to financial calamity.
“It’s very much about the welfare state,” Mr. Harr said of Scandinavian countries. “You’re not as concerned about catching the virus, because you know that, if you do, the state is paying for health care.”
Whatever his wobbles, Joe Biden has, from the start of his presidential campaign, got one thing exactly right: The 2020 election is a battle for the soul of America. That’s not just a pretty slogan. It’s the stomach-knotting truth — and it’s the frame he should use for choosing his running mate.
It’s why he should pick Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
She’s a paragon of the values that Donald Trump, for all his practice as a performer, can’t even pantomime. She’s best described by words that are musty relics in his venal and vainglorious circle: “sacrifice,” “honor,” “humility.” More than any of the many extraordinary women on Biden’s list of potential vice-presidential nominees, she’s the anti-Trump, the antidote to the ugliness he revels in and the cynicism he stokes.
Americans can feel good — no, wonderful — about voting for a ticket with Duckworth on it. And we’re beyond hungry for that. We’re starving.
That ache transcends all of the other variables that attend Biden’s deliberations as he appraises Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Val Demings and others: race, age, experience, exact position on the spectrum from progressive to moderate.
Duckworth, a former Army lieutenant colonel who lost both of her legs during combat duty in Iraq, is a choice that makes exquisite emotional and moral sense. Largely, but not entirely, because of that, she makes strategic sense, too.
For the uninitiated: Duckworth, 52, is in the fourth year of her first term in the Senate, before which she served two terms in the House. So unlike several of the other vice-presidential contenders, she has ascended to what is conventionally considered the right political altitude for this next step.
But it’s her life story that really makes her stand out. It’s the harrowing chapter in Iraq, yes, but also how she rebounded from it, how she talks about it. It’s her attitude. Her grace.
As my colleague Jennifer Steinhauer explained in a recent profile of Duckworth in The Times, she didn’t just serve in the Army: She became a helicopter pilot, which isn’t a job brimming with women. And as she flew near Baghdad one day in 2004, her Blackhawk was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. The explosion left her near death.
She later received a Purple Heart, but she bristles when she’s called a hero. That designation, she has often said, belongs to her co-pilot, Dan Milberg, and others who carried her from the wreckage and got her to safety.
She put it this way when, as part of a “Note to Self” feature on “CBS This Morning,” she read aloud a letter that she had written to the younger Tammy: “You’ll make it out alive completely because of the grit, sacrifice and outright heroism of others. You haven’t done anything to be worthy of their sacrifices, but these heroes will give you a second chance at life.” She paused there briefly, fighting back tears.
To Steinhauer she said, “I wake up every day thinking, ‘I am never going to make Dan regret saving my life.’” Her subsequent advocacy for veterans, her run for Congress, her election to the Senate: She casts all of it in terms of gratitude and an obligation to give back.
Tell me how Trump campaigns against that. Tell me how he mocks her — which is the only way he knows how to engage with opponents. Or, rather, tell me how he does so without seeming even more obscene than he already does and turning off everyone beyond the cultish segment of the electorate that will never abandon him. Duckworth on the Democratic ticket is like some psy-ops masterstroke, all the more so because it was she who nicknamed Trump “Cadet Bone Spurs.”
I asked her about that on the phone on Thursday, remarking that it was uncharacteristically acerbic of her. “This guy’s a bully,” she said. “And bullies need a taste of their own medicine.”
Warren, too, is terrific at giving Trump that. Her placement on the Democratic ticket might fire up the progressives who regard Biden warily. And she could make an excellent governing partner for him.
But mightn’t Warren also give moderate voters pause? What about her age? She’s 71. Biden’s 77. Can the party of change and modernity, whose last two presidents were both under 50 when first elected, go with an all-septuagenarian ticket?
Governing partners don’t matter if you don’t get to govern. The certain catastrophe of four more years of Trump demands that Biden choose his running mate with November at the front, the back, the top and the bottom of his mind.
Harris also ably prosecutes the case against Trump. But many progressives have issues with her, and the idea that she’d drive high turnout among black voters isn’t supported by her failed bid for the Democratic nomination. She lacked support across the board, including among African-Americans. And in a recent national poll conducted by The Times and Siena College, more than four in five voters — including three in four black voters — said that race shouldn’t be a factor in Biden’s vice-presidential pick.
Duckworth is neither progressive idol nor progressive enemy. That partly reflects a low policy profile that’s among her flaws as a running mate but could actually work to her advantage, making her difficult to pigeonhole and open to interpretation. Trump-weary voters can read into her what they want. And in recent congressional elections, Democrats have had success among swing voters with candidates who are veterans.
Duckworth certainly can’t be dismissed as the same old same old. Her vice-presidential candidacy would be a trailblazing one, emblematic of a more diverse and inclusive America. Born in Bangkok to an American father and a Thai mother, she’d be the first Asian-American and the first woman of color on the presidential ticket of one of our two major parties.
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From left, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Patty Murray and Tammy Duckworth, with her daughter, in 2018.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times
She was the first United States senator to give birth while in office and the first to bring her baby onto the Senate floor. You want relatable? Duckworth has two children under the age of 6. She’s a working mom.
She’s not the product of privilege: In fact her family hit such hard times when she was growing up in Hawaii that at one point she sold flowers by the side of the road. But she went on to get not only a college degree but also a master’s in international affairs.
Cards on the table: I’m not at all sure that running mates matter much on Election Day. There’s ample evidence that they don’t.
But in any given election, they sure as hell might. Biden would be a fool, given the stakes, not to consider his running mate a victory clincher or deal breaker and to choose her accordingly.
Duckworth’s virtues include everything that I’ve mentioned plus this: She projects a combination of confidence and modesty, of toughness and warmth, that’s rare — and that’s a tonic in these toxic times.
I asked her whether she deems Trump a patriot. She said that he wraps himself in the American flag — a flag, she noted, that will someday drape her coffin — for the wrong reasons.
“I would leap into a burning fire to pull that flag to safety, but I will fight to the death for your right to burn it,” she told me. “The most patriotic thing you can do is not necessarily putting on the uniform but speaking truth to power, exercising your First Amendment rights — that’s what created America, right?”
I asked her how it felt to have her name floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee.
“It’s surreal, right?” she said, recalling that she was once “a hungry kid who fainted in class for lack of nutrition. It’s unbelievable I’m even a U.S. senator.”
“But it’s one team, one fight,” she added, referring to the Democratic quest to defeat Trump. “I will work as hard as I can to get Joe Biden elected because the country needs it. It doesn’t matter where I end up on that team.”
Yes, Senator Duckworth, it does. In the right role, you could help guarantee the right outcome.
One small favor: If you have a problem with how we did the survey, say so now, before we show the results.
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Outside a polling place in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn on primary day Tuesday. Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
On Wednesdaymorning, The New York Times/Siena College will release its first national survey of the 2020 cycle, followed on Thursday by polls of the six states likeliest to decide the presidency: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina.
Today, we release one element of the data: the methodology and composition of the sample. This offers a detailed look at how the poll was conducted.
In exchange, we ask one small favor. If you have a problem with how we did the poll, say so now; we will have little sympathy if you criticize the poll only after you find out you don’t like the results.
Don’t read this to mean anything about our results tomorrow. We’ve had the idea for a while of publishing our methodology before releasing the results, and indicated our intention to do so a few weeks ago. The results may be exactly what you expect. Or not.
We’ll also take it as an opportunity to discuss how the poll works and our methodological choices, and why you should trust it despite all that happenedfour years ago.
What is the Times/Siena poll?
It’s a telephone survey of registered voters, which starts with a data set known as the voter file: a list of everyone registered to vote in a state. This contains rich data on every voter, like age and party registration. We get our voter files from L2, a nonpartisan voter data vendor (L2 has worked with the Trump campaign as well as with progressive organizations like Latino Decisions and HaystaqDNA).
These files also include a telephone number for most, though not all, registered voters. Many voters provide their number on their voter registration forms. In other cases, the telephone numbers have been matched from commercial records, based on a person’s name and address. We draw a sample of these numbers, and our friends at Siena College and at a variety of call centers across the country dial away.
And yes, we call cellphone numbers. Over all, about two-thirds of our interviews are usually completed on cellphones, including nearly all of our interviews among respondents under age 40.
Why should we care about your polls after 2016?
This may be hard to believe, but we felt pretty good about our polling in 2016.
The final Times/Siena polls, in Florida and North Carolina, had the president ahead or tied over the last 10 days of the race. Only one other live-interview pollster (the highly regarded Ann Selzer poll) found Mr. Trump leading in top-tier battleground states over the final stretch. Other surveys showing President Trump ahead appeared to do so because they did not contact voters via cellphone, and as a consequence would have tended to lean toward the G.O.P.
Other high-quality polls also performed solidly in 2016. Most national polls, for instance, fared very well, including the final New York Times/CBS News survey that had Hillary Clinton ahead by three points nationwide, less than a percentage point from her final popular votemargin.
When we analyzed our data after the election, we assessed that we were right for the right reasons, like showing Mr. Trump with a wide lead among white working-class voters, and that there were opportunities to refine our approach. We reached a different conclusion than you might expect: If we could go back, we would have wanted more of our own polling in 2016, not less.
In 2018, we conducted a greater number of political surveys. We had an average error of around three points over nearly 50 polls of House races over the final three weeks, with virtually no bias toward either party. Over the final 10 days, the average error was just over two points. Out of more than 400 pollsters, the Times/Siena poll is one of six to earn an A-plus rating from FiveThirtyEight.
Why do you think these polls are good?
There are three major advantages that we think help explain our track record and offer cause for confidence:
Partisanship. Perhaps our most important advantage over even other high-quality pollsters is that we can adjust for the partisan makeup of the electorate, using data available on voter registration files.
For instance, we can make sure we have the right number of registered Republicans or Democrats, the right number of people who voted in the 2020 Democratic primary, the right number of precincts that voted heavily for Mr. Trump. This works best in states with party registration, like Pennsylvania or Florida, and is harder in the states without it, like Wisconsin or Michigan, but even in the worst cases it’s a lot better than nothing.
This is possible only because we start our poll with a voter registration file (not all pollsters do). It doesn’t ensure our results are perfect (and a poll can still be top-notch without this step), but it gives us extra confidence that we’re not fundamentally missing Democrats or Republicans, who may at times become more or less likely to respond to surveys.
And we go even further: We complete not just the right number of interviews with Democrats and Republicans, but also the right number by race and region. So, for instance, we have the right number of Hispanic registered Republicans in Miami-Dade County. To our knowledge, that’s an assurance that no other public pollster can make.
Education. Our samples are adjusted to properly represent voters without a college degree, based on census data. Many state pollsters still don’t adjust their samples by education, and this is considered one of the major reasons that state polls overestimated Mrs. Clinton’s standing in 2016.
Contacting hard-to-reach groups. We spend a lot of money to complete interviews with groups that all pollsters struggle to reach: low-turnout voters like younger people or Hispanics. These groups are always important, but properly representing low-turnout voters — especially low-turnout registered Democrats, who are often surprisingly favorable to Mr. Trump — was an essential part of why our polls were closer to the mark than most other polls in our postelection analysis of 2016 surveys.
Does anyone pick up the phone anymore?
Some people do. Just not many. We usually complete interviews with about 1 or 2 percent of the voters we try to reach. Low response rates undoubtedly pose a serious challenge to survey research, and there are some known response biases. For instance, people who take telephone surveys are likelier to volunteer in their community than demographically similar individuals who do not take telephone surveys. But for now, it does not appear that the people who take telephone surveys are vastly different politically from those who do not, after accounting for their demographic characteristics.
Why not online?
Online polling is almost certainly the future of polling and, in many ways, it’s also the present. There are some online polls that are fairly or even favorably comparable to many telephone surveys. But as a whole, online polls continue to have a weaker track record in election polling than telephone polls, and real challenges remain.
There’s a simple reason: There’s no way to conduct a random sample of everyone who uses the internet in the same way that you can conduct a random sample of everyone who has a telephone (or, in our case, a sample of the 60-plus-percent of people with telephone records on a voter file). This doesn’t preclude high-quality survey research. It just makes it a lot harder, and there’s no consensus on the best approach.
What about turnout?
The Times/Siena poll is a poll of registered voters at this stage of the cycle — not of likely voters. It’s hard to predict turnout the day before the election, let alone months ahead or in the midst of a pandemic with uncertain effects on access to voting. So for now estimated turnout won’t affect the survey result: We’ll report the result for all registered voters.
That said, turnout is undoubtedly an important question, and we will report findings among likely voters — as if the election were held tomorrow — even if it won’t be the lead result and even if there’s plenty of reason to wonder whether patterns evident today will hold in November.
Where can I learn more?
You can find a detailed methodology and a description of the composition of the electorate here (PDF).You can find our first presidential national poll results tomorrow at 5 a.m. Eastern. [Update: Here are those results.]
Updated June 23, 2020
Joe Biden has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race, according to a new national poll by The Times and Siena College.
Fears about the coronavirus reduced the number of polling places and led to a surge in absentee balloting that delayed the results, possibly for days.
Here are 13 women who have been under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate, and why each might be chosen — and might not be.
In the weeks since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers outside a grocery store at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, the intersection has remained closed to traffic—filled instead with flowers, memorial murals, and thousands of daily visitors who come to pay their respects. Except for the masks when you’re inside that now-sacred space, it’s hard to remember there’s a pandemic going on. But in the shadow of the Sabathani Community Center a few blocks to the west, where a transformation of another kind has been underway, it’s impossible to forget.
Here's all the WIRED coverage in one place, from how to keep your children entertained to how this outbreak is affecting the economy.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, one corner of the parking lot now fills with a maze of air-conditioned tents and about a dozen nurses wearing hairnets, gowns, and face shields. From 11 o’clock in the morning until 6 in the evening, they work their way through a steady line of cars carrying people eager to have a swab inserted deep into their nasal cavities—not necessarily because they think they are coming down with Covid-19 but because they’ve recently been around lots of other people.
As Floyd’s death sparked a massive protest movement that spread from Minneapolis to the rest of the world, epidemiologists and public health officials fretted that the thronging crowds would supercharge viral spread, driving deadly new surges in coronavirus infections. In an effort to prevent that from happening, officials in many metro areas, including Minneapolis and St. Paul, rushed to stand up free testing near protest sites. The testing program in the Twin Cities has been particularly well-embraced, making it a sort of testbed for the rest of the nation, where protests began later. Now, early data from Minnesota’s efforts suggests such fears may have been overblown. In the vast, unplanned experiment of unleashing tens of thousands of previously isolated people into a few city blocks, that’s good news. But perhaps even more significant is how this preliminary testing data is starting to reshape scientists’ understanding of how the novel pathogen behaves, with important implications for states’ plans to reopen.
The state of Covid-19 testing in the US has improved since a disastrous initial rollout, with about 500,000 tests performed daily now, compared to just a few thousand in mid-March. But fierce competition for lab testing supplies and a lack of federal coordination in obtaining and distributing them has meant that the US has been unable to mobilize mass testing efforts like those that succeeded in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.
That’s forced states to prioritize. Until the protests erupted during the last week of May, Minnesota had only been testing people with symptoms of the respiratory disease, except at hospitals and long-term care facilities, where about 80 percent of the state’s Covid-19 related deaths have occurred. Following the protests, the Minnesota Department of Health changed the criteria for the state’s still-limited supply of tests to include people who’d participated in mass gatherings within the previous week. “We made an exception because of the extensiveness of those events,” says Kristen Ehresmann, the Minnesota Department of Health director of infectious disease.
The decision paved the way for opening four free testing sites around the Twin Cities, in neighborhoods most affected by the protests and subsequent violence. Public health officials are encouraging anyone who’s recently attended a protest, vigil, or neighborhood event to get tested there, regardless or whether or not they have symptoms of Covid-19. The revamped criteria also allows people who’ve recently been at protests and other community events to obtain tests through their doctors. Now, results from the first week of testing are in. And at least among the people who volunteered for the earliest rounds of tests, the data suggests that the mass gatherings may not result in a spike of Covid-19 infections after all.
This is such a clearcut case for extending the unemployment benefits (and amping up how much one can get). I mean, taking on massive amounts of public debt in order to subsidize an emergency lifeline is a) something only the government is capable of doing, and b) as such, it's at least a significant part of what government is *for.* Can't decide if extension of unemployment will definitely fail because Republicans and who cares about the little people, or definitely pass because Republicans want to save Trump's ass.
Nic, I'd imagine you've already heard about this study. What's your professional take on it?
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Brooklyn Heights sits across the East River from Lower Manhattan. It's filled with multimillion-dollar brownstones and — usually — Range Rovers, Teslas and BMWs. These days it's easy to find parking. The brownstones are mostly dark at night. The place is a ghost town. And the neighborhood's sushi restaurants, Pilates studios, bistros and wine bars are either closed or mostly empty. It's a microcosm for what has been the driver of the pandemic recession: Rich people have stopped going out, destroying millions of jobs.
That's one of the key insights of a blockbuster study that was dropped late last week by a gang of economists led by Harvard University's Raj Chetty. If you don't know who Chetty is, he's sort of like the Michael Jordan of policy wonks. He's a star economist. He and his colleagues assemble and crunch massive data sets and deliver insights that regularly shift core economic debates about inequality and opportunity. This new study focuses on the economic impact of COVID-19 and the government response. To us nerds, this is like Game 7 of the NBA Finals, and Chetty just swooped in at a crucial moment to drop some threes.
Raj Chetty
Opportunity Insights
On the day the study came out, Chetty participated in a Zoom webinar sponsored by Princeton University's Bendheim Center for Finance. Dressed in a white-collared shirt with bookshelves as his background, Chetty took us all through the study. The data? Good lord. They've assembled several gigantic new data sets from private companies, including credit and debit card processors and national payroll companies. The data are all freely available online, updated in real time and presented in an easily digestible form. Chetty and his team have crunched it all to give some precise insights about consumer spending, jobs and the geographic impact of the crisis. The study represents an advance for economics as a science, and it has got some bombshells.
First up, consumer spending. Typically, Chetty said, recessions are driven by a drop in spending on durable goods, like refrigerators, automobiles and computers. This recession is different. It's driven primarily by a decline in spending at restaurants, hotels, bars and other service establishments that require in-person contact. We kinda already knew that. But what the team's data show is that this decline in spending is mostly in rich ZIP codes, whose businesses saw a 70% drop-off in their revenue. That compares with a 30% drop in revenue for businesses in poorer ZIP codes.
Second, jobs. This 70% fall in revenue at businesses in rich ZIP codes led those businesses to lay off nearly 70% of their employees. These employees are mostly low-wage workers. Businesses in poorer ZIP codes laid off about 30% of their employees. The bottom line, Chetty said in his presentation, is that "reductions in spending by the rich have led to loss in jobs mostly for low-income individuals working in affluent areas."
Third, the government rescue effort. They find it has mostly failed. The $500 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which has given forgivable loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees, doesn't appear to have done much to save jobs. When the researchers compare the employment trends of businesses with fewer than 500 employees with those with more, the smaller businesses eligible for PPP don't see a relative boost after the program went into effect. It looks like the program didn't do its job of saving jobs. Meanwhile, the stimulus checks, while increasing spending, did not have much stimulative effect because the spending mostly flowed to big companies like Amazon and Walmart. The money didn't flow to the rich ZIP code, in-person service businesses most affected by the downturn. Overall, the federal rescue package, they find, has failed to rescue the businesses and jobs getting hammered most by the pandemic.
Finally, there are state-permitted reopenings: They don't seem to boost the economy either. Chetty and his team compare, for example, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minnesota allowed reopening weeks before Wisconsin, but if you look at spending patterns in both states, Minnesota did not see any boost compared with Wisconsin after it reopened. "The fundamental reason that people seem to be spending less is not because of state-imposed restrictions," Chetty said. "It's because high-income folks are able to work remotely, are choosing to self-isolate and are being cautious given health concerns. And unless you fundamentally address that concern, I think there's limited capacity to restart the economy."
As long as rich people are scared of the virus, they won't go out and spend money, and workers in the service sector will continue to suffer. Low-income workers — especially those whose jobs focused on providing services in rich urban areas — are in for a period of turbulence. Many of these workers are getting a lifeline in the form of unemployment insurance, but some of these benefits will expire soon if the federal government doesn't act.
Economists have learned from previous shocks like this one that the labor market doesn't just easily adjust to them. Workers have a hard time moving and retraining. For example, after over a million manufacturing jobs evaporated in the Rust Belt with the explosion of Chinese imports in the early 2000s, people stayed in the places that lost jobs and failed to get new ones, and many of them, in despair, ended up turning to alcohol and opioids, with tragic results.
Chetty and his team conclude that the traditional tools of economic policy — tax cuts and spending increases to boost demand — won't save the army of the unemployed. Instead, they say we need public health efforts to restore safety and convince consumers that it's OK to start going out again. Until then, they argue, we need to extend unemployment benefits and provide assistance to help low-income workers who will continue to struggle in the pandemic economy.
Next month, the federally funded unemployment benefits passed by Congress to help Americans during the pandemic are set to expire. This groundbreaking study provides a strong case to Washington to think about extending them.
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Nothing terribly surprising in this, but I find it a useful comprehensive summing up of the vaccine situation.
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It’s been six months since researchers in China said they had identified a novel coronavirus spreading in the city of Wuhan. Hope and desire for a vaccine to end the global devastation is growing with each passing week.
Almost every day, I hear people making plans around the eventual arrival of a coronavirus vaccine — office reopenings, rescheduled weddings, family reunions and international travel. In recent weeks, colleagues and friends have asked me with growing urgency: “When will we have a vaccine? Will it be any good?”
At the same time, other friends have been telling me, “When I hear that this is going to be the fastest vaccine developed ever, that doesn’t make me feel good — it makes me feel nervous that they’re going to cut corners.”
These questions and concerns resonate with me. I, too, want a vaccine, but I want reassurance that it’s truly safe and effective. So I talked to a dozen people in the vaccine world: scientists, pediatricians, pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as staff at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
Let me tell you this up front: If you’re imagining there’ll be one golden day when a vaccine is approved and the pandemic will be over — Finally! We can all crowd into one another’s living rooms and resume choir practice again — I’m afraid it won’t be quite like that. But it will be the beginning of the end.
There’s much to be hopeful about, and enormous challenges lie ahead. Let’s dig in.
Scientists Are Optimistic About a COVID-19 Vaccine
Everyone I spoke to was optimistic that manufacturers would eventually develop a COVID-19 vaccine. This isn’t just because there are so many scientists and pharmaceutical companies working on the endeavor, and so much money being poured into it, though that also raises the chance of success.
The goal of vaccine developers is to mimic a natural infection as closely as possible without getting a healthy individual sick. There are many ways to do this. You can give a person a weakened virus or a dead virus. You can also show the immune system just part of the virus. Many manufacturers are creating vaccines involving only the “spike protein,” the part on the surface of the coronavirus that attaches to the human cell it is trying to enter. Once the immune system has learned what the spike protein looks like, when it encounters it again, as part of a real coronavirus, it should know how to defend itself.
A transmission electron microscope image shows coronavirus particles. Spike proteins on the outer edge of the virus attach to human cells. (Image Point FR - LPN/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Dr. John Mascola, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he is hopeful because our natural immune system, when healthy, is capable of handling the infection. “Most of the time, people recover from COVID-19, because their immune system eventually clears the virus,” he said. He contrasted the coronavirus to HIV, for which scientists so far have struggled to create an effective vaccine: “In HIV, the natural immune system is not effective and people get AIDS.” In this virus’s case, if we can mimic a natural infection closely enough, it’s likely that a vaccine will work.
The Coronavirus Is Not the Flu. In This Case, That’s Good News.
There are some vaccines that are extremely effective, like the MMR vaccine: One dose is about 93% effective at preventing measles; two doses (which is what’s recommended) are about 97% effective.
Other vaccines aren’t as perfect. The flu shot’s effectiveness varies year to year. During the 2019-20 flu season, it was about 45% effective at preventing infections, according to the CDC. The year before, it was just 29% effective.
The experts I talked to said that the flu shot was an outlier because of the rapidly shifting nature of the influenza virus. Because of its frequent mutations, developers have to make each year’s vaccine based on educated guesses on what strains of the flu virus will be circulating next year. Sometimes, they misjudge, resulting in a vaccine that doesn’t exactly match up with the flu strains that are most prevalent the following season.
“Influenza changes year in, year out, and the people who get it tend to be extremes in age — elderly and children — so you don’t tend to have as good an immune response,” said Dr. Nicholas Kartsonis, infectious disease and vaccines clinical research lead for Merck, which has two COVID-19 vaccine candidates that it plans to start in human trials this year.
One lucky break COVID-19 vaccine developers have had is that this coronavirus hasn’t mutated in any significant way so far, including, crucially, the part that is most visible to the immune system, that spike protein. So long as that remains true, the vaccine they make should match up with the virus that our bodies will encounter in the real world, meaning it’ll likely work as intended. Given the stability seen so far in the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, “I am hopeful that when we do develop a vaccine, it will provide long-term protection,” Kartsonis said.
Even a Vaccine That’s Not 100% Effective Could Be Good Enough
When vaccine manufacturers talk about “effective,” there are two common definitions. One is preventing people from getting sick. The other is preventing people from getting infected at all. In the case of COVID-19, this could be a nontrivial difference.
We know now that many people infected with the coronavirus may be asymptomatic carriers, which means that they never feel sick or get symptoms like a cough or fever, even if they are, in fact, infected with the virus. So you can have a vaccine that is effective in that it prevents symptomatic COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stop everyone from being infected.
Vaccine candidates developed by Novavax, an American company. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
Let’s be clear: A vaccine that can significantly reduce sickness would be fantastic. If a vaccine can reduce the severity of COVID-19 so that it’s far less deadly, decrease hospitalizations and minimize symptoms even for those who catch it, that’s a win.
“In terms of what you’d expect for approval, it should at least be 50% efficacy against symptoms and 70% against moderate to severe disease, to keep you out of the hospital,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Even so, it’s important not only to measure what the vaccine does, but also for politicians, health officials and journalists to clearly explain to the public exactly what it is that the vaccine is capable of doing. If it ends up that the first vaccine to go to market is “70% effective,” we should be clear on whether it is 70% effective at reducing sickness or infection, so members of the public have the appropriate context and don’t feel let down if they are vaccinated and still get a mild case of COVID-19.
Large Scale Trials Will Tell Us if the Vaccine Works
When experimental vaccines are tested, they usually go through three phases of clinical trials. The first phase is the smallest and focuses on safety, making sure that the product doesn’t have any dangerous health effects. The second is a little larger, continuing to gather safety data while testing if the vaccine can induce an immune response, producing antibodies in participants. The third trial is the largest, and it needs to be big enough to confirm that the vaccine is actually effective in the real world.
Moderna Therapeutics is currently expected to be the first U.S. manufacturer to start a phase 3 trial. Candidates by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson will follow, according to The Wall Street Journal. Moderna’s trial is planned to begin in July and will enroll about 30,000 participants. Half will get the vaccine and half will get a placebo, according to Moderna’s chief medical officer Dr. Tal Zaks. (I should disclose: Paul Sagan, chairman of ProPublica’s board, is also one of Moderna’s board members. That said, ProPublica’s board members have no say in what reporters write about, nor do they know about articles before they are published.)
The participants will be tracked carefully throughout the study. If they have any symptoms related to COVID-19, they’ll get tested to see if they have contracted the virus. The participants will also get blood drawn at regular intervals to get tested for antibodies, which will determine if they got infected but perhaps didn’t know because they didn’t develop symptoms.
A participant receives a shot in the first phase of Moderna Therapeutics’ clinical trial in March. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo)
“But wait!” you say. “Doesn’t a vaccine also create antibodies? How can you tell by looking in a participant’s blood whether the antibodies come from the vaccine or from an infection that the vaccine failed to prevent?” Excellent question.
At least for Moderna’s vaccine trial, here’s how they’re going to tell the difference: Moderna’s vaccine is what’s known as an mRNA vaccine. Instead of using the actual virus or even a little bit of the virus, it uses a piece of genetic code, kind of like a recipe, that gives instructions for making the spike protein. Once injected into the arm and introduced into human cells, the cell’s protein-making factories read the recipe and manufacture the spike protein, churning out copies for the immune system to check out. The immune system should then create antibodies that correspond to the spike protein, like a matching puzzle piece.
When you get infected by an actual coronavirus, however, there are more parts to it than just the spike protein. Your body will produce other antibodies that match up with other parts of the virus, including what’s called the nucleoprotein, found inside the virus. We can also measure for those antibodies in a trial participant’s blood, the NIH’s Mascola explained. So if we find so-called NP antibodies, that means you’ve been infected for real, because there’s no way you could induce NP antibodies from the vaccine alone.
The Moderna trial is designed to end when a predetermined number of people have gotten sick, according to Zaks. Then, the study investigators will count up the number of people that have gotten sick in the placebo arm and compare it with the vaccine arm. Hopefully, there will be far fewer in the vaccinated cohort.
There’s one more question that a phase 3 trial cannot answer: How long will protection last? Right now, we don’t even know if people who have gotten sick via natural infection have lifelong immunity. The only way to find out how long a vaccine’s protection lasts will be to keep tracking study participants and whether their antibody levels drop over time. We may end up needing periodic booster shots. Truly, only time will tell.
Shortcuts Involve Trade-Offs
To give you a sense of what a blistering pace we are attempting to move at, consider that under normal circumstances, it typically takes 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine. Creating the HPV vaccine was a 15-year journey from key research findings in 1991 until the vaccine was approved, initially for the prevention of cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers, in 2006. Merck’s Ebola vaccine, one of the fastest ever to be approved, still took about four years from start to finish, according to Kartsonis.
The speed of the phase 3 trials depends on the rate of infection wherever people are enrolled. If there is a huge outbreak going on, people in the placebo group will get sick at a high rate, and the trial may be over in a matter of a few months. If infection rates are very low, however, the trial could drag on for months on end. Moderna hasn’t announced its trial sites yet, but it will have sites “well dispersed” in the U.S. and is considering international trials as well, according to a spokesman.
Among the many ways to shorten the vaccine development timeline, approving a treatment based on antibody data — without completing a phase 3 trial — could be contentious. This is why.
“There have been some European countries that wanted to be part of our trial, and we said: ‘Look at your epidemiology, you’re a victim of your own success — there’s just not enough cases happening. It would take five years!’” Moderna’s Zaks said. “So speed here is going to be enabled by what we anticipate is ongoing attack rates. We expect there will be infections amongst the participants on our trial.”
Still, there have been discussions of some potential ways to speed up trials even more. One common proposal is to conduct what are known as challenge trials, in which vaccinated participants are deliberately “challenged” with the coronavirus to see if they get sick.
This idea was dismissed as unethical by some experts I interviewed. “We don’t have a treatment — we can’t guarantee to any volunteer that if we gave them a challenge with the actual virus, that it wouldn’t make them very, very sick,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt Medicine. “That would make a lot of people very uneasy.”
The other shortcoming of approving a vaccine via a challenge trial is that because of the inherently risky nature of giving participants a live virus, challenge trials are typically very small. “That diminishes the safety database, and you need a large safety database to give us comfort to communicate to the public that we think that this is a safe vaccine,” Schaffner said.
Another potential would be to green light use of a vaccine based on expected benefit, if manufacturers can show it reliably generates levels of antibodies in study participants that are similar to those found in people who have been naturally infected. Not everyone is a fan of that idea — some experts I interviewed told me that immune responses aren’t always predictive of a vaccine’s real-world capabilities. (Read more about this discussion.)
Children and Pregnant Women Won’t Be First in Line
In the phase 3 trials currently being planned, the vaccines will be tested in adults. People over the age of 55 are being specifically recruited, and it’s important to include them because the need for the vaccine in that demographic is particularly high.
One group that won’t be in the initial set of phase 3 trials: children.
This is for two reasons. First, as a safety precaution, the NIH’s Mascola explained. Traditionally, when running trials with an experimental vaccine or drug, developers make sure it’s safe in adults before moving on to children. Second, for the COVID-19 vaccine specifically, the most acute need isn’t in children.
This means that when the vaccine is first approved, it likely won’t be available for those under 18, because it hasn’t yet been studied in that population. However, Mascola said there are already discussions for how to run future trials for children. Moderna will eventually run trials in children, Zaks confirmed.
Another special population is pregnant women. They are also not going to be enrolled in the initial phase 3 trial for the Moderna vaccine, according to Zaks. But Mascola said that it’s essential that that population eventually be studied. “If we’re not able to immunize women of childbearing age, that excludes a large proportion of the population. There’s a strong interest in getting those studies done,” he said. “The FDA is encouraging companies/sponsors to include in their development plans studies that would provide data to support use of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy,” the agency said in a statement.
The FDA added that it “strongly encourages the enrollment of populations most affected by COVID-19, specifically racial and ethnic minorities.” African Americans have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, contracting the virus and dying at higher rates.
Manufacturing “At Risk” Is a Safe Time-Saver
One strategy that everyone agreed was a safe way to save a whole lot of time without any risk to human health is what’s known as “manufacturing at risk.” This is one of the key components of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed, which is supporting five candidates with billions of dollars of federal funding.
Typically, drugmakers will manufacture only enough doses for clinical trials and make sure the trials are successful before starting mass production. Manufacturing at risk means that developers will instead begin mass production at the same time as clinical trials, which means that if a vaccine fails in human trials, they’ll have to throw away all the product they’ve made, wasting money and materials. But if a product is successful, it means that the minute its trial is completed, there’ll be millions of doses ready to go.
Manufacturing at a massive scale is no simple task. “If we’re going to immunize 300 million people in the U.S. — we don’t even do that with the flu vaccine every year — we need a lot of glass vials, we have to make sure we have printing supplies and paper to make the labels and package inserts, we need stoppers for the vials, and they all need to be made to a very high standard. All this in addition to the raw materials to the vaccine itself,” Schaffner said.
Mass production of H1N1 flu vaccines at Sinovac in 2009. (China Photos/Getty Images)
Pfizer and its partner, German company BioNTech, are planning to have a few million doses ready by the end of the year, and hundreds of millions of doses available in 2021, even though the first of their four vaccine candidates just began its first early-stage human trials in May. The companies are currently preparing manufacturing facilities in St. Louis, Andover, Massachusetts, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, as well as in Europe, according to Dr. Philip Dormitzer, Pfizer’s vice president and chief scientific officer for viral vaccines.
Development Is the First Hurdle, Distribution Is the Next Challenge
On the day that a vaccine is approved, you’ll find me jumping up and down in my apartment, cheering loudly enough to startle my neighbors. And then … I’ll keep on washing my hands, wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing.
Why? Because I know that when a vaccine is first approved by the FDA, there won’t be enough available for everyone who wants it. There will need to be a prioritization, with the vaccine given first to those who need it most: essential workers and the elderly. As a healthy adult who is fortunate to be able to work from home, I’ll be nowhere near the front of the inoculation line.
Distribution is going to be a massive challenge. “There’s a need to have in place a mechanism to ensure people who should get the vaccine get it,” Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of Emory University’s vaccine center, said. “We won’t have 8 billion vaccines. So who should get priority, and how should it get delivered? We will need to remove barriers to access, including cost and distance.”
In all likelihood, we’ll have several vaccines that come to market and are in use at the same time, because of the unprecedented need to vaccinate so many people around the globe. No one company has the manufacturing capability to make it all.
There may also be differences in what works best for different countries and populations. Some of the vaccines will require cold shipping or storage. Some will require two doses (Moderna’s is a two-dose vaccine, taken a month apart). All these variations will add to the complexity of delivery and distribution.
“Since I have gray hair, I’m trying to remind my colleagues that in previous distribution and prioritization schemes, flexibility is very important,” Schaffner warned me. He has long worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, which reviews data on vaccines and gives recommendations on which populations they should be used for. He is now on the COVID-19 vaccine working group. “Adverse events will come up that have to become investigated. There will be bumps in the road. War plans are great, until the war starts. Then you will have to be flexible.”
Safety Monitoring Doesn’t End After Trials Are Over
Vaccinating 15,000 to 20,000 people before approval should give regulators a large pool of data to help them understand what side effects are to be expected and help ensure that the vaccines that go to market don’t have any major safety issues.
But of course, 20,000 people isn’t 20 million or 200 million or 2 billion people.
“When we have tens of thousands of people being evaluated, we can at least pick up safety signals for serious adverse events for the more frequent adverse events,” Orenstein said. “Now for very rare events, if it’s 1 per million, you’re not going to catch that in clinical trials.”
What everyone wants to avoid is a repeat of the mass immunization program following the swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix in 1976. After 45 million doses were distributed, the vaccine was found to be associated with increased cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis and sometimes death. Even worse, there wasn’t actually a pandemic — the program had been launched in fears that the swine flu virus circulating among recruits at Fort Dix would cause a catastrophic outbreak. In the end, there was no transmission across the U.S., and the vaccination program was canceled.
So there will need to be some sort of mechanism to track and monitor for rare safety events even after the vaccine goes on the market. There is already a program to do so, which is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, run by the CDC.
While it may be impossible for a phase 3 trial to catch a very rare potential side effect, Offit, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, points out that “it’s not a risk-free choice to not get the vaccine, if the virus is still circulating.”
He added, “If the data were clear that in 20,000 people it appears to be safe and highly efficacious, then you should get the vaccine, because if you’re choosing not to get a vaccine, you’re choosing to risk getting a natural infection, which could be fatal.”
When Will a Coronavirus Vaccine Be Ready? Let Data Determine the Timeline.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed has said it “aims to have substantial quantities of a safe and effective vaccine available for Americans by January 2021.”
Experts I’ve spoken to have ranged in their optimism about that timeline. The NIH’s Mascola said, “If a study is started in the summertime, it’s possible that by the end of the year we’ll have an answer.”
Dr. Luciana Borio, former FDA acting chief scientist and current vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm, concurred. “Depending on the results of the clinical trials, I think we might see some vaccine become available before the end of the year, but most people will have to wait for 2021.”
Others were more cautious. Orenstein said he thinks there is a “real possibility” that we will have a vaccine by summer next year, “if everything goes well.”
Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said he prefers to avoid timelines altogether. “We’re making the same mistake we made back in 2009 when we developed the H1N1 vaccine. We made the same statements and then it took more time than people anticipated, and when it finally came out, the media all said, ‘It’s a late vaccine!’
“So we overpromised and underdelivered in 2009, and we haven’t learned that lesson. We are overpromising now, and I wish we wouldn’t do that. I wish we would just say, ‘We’re working as hard as we can and we’ll get it to you whenever it’s finished, but we’ve got to do it right.’ And that would be a much more solid message.”
ProPublica deputy managing editor Charles Ornstein wanted to know why experts were wrong when they said U.S. hospitals would be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. Here’s what he learned, including what hospitals can do before the next wave.
Many of the experts I talked to stressed that they wanted to see the phase 3 trials run to completion, however long they took.
Dr. Brit Trogen, a pediatrics resident at NYU Langone, said she worries about political pressures on developers. “I consider vaccines to be one of the greatest public health achievements of the past few centuries, and I know the consequences of undervaccinating, because I treat kids who are seriously ill with preventable illness,” she said. “But I worry that at the first hint of something positive, politicians will swoop in and push for an early release beyond what the science allows.”
Some also noted that vaccine hesitancy has been growing in the United States, thanks to a fervent anti-vaccination movement.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said communication that focuses solely on speed “is very tone deaf to the fact that there’s an aggressive anti-vax lobby that says that vaccines are rushed and aren’t adequately tested for safety.”
I brought these concerns to the FDA, as the agency will ultimately be the one to make the call on when there is sufficient data to approve a vaccine.
“We recognize that there are some that are concerned that ‘rapid development’ means that vaccine development steps are being skipped, but the FDA scientists will not cut corners in order to approve a vaccine,” the agency responded. “The FDA will thoroughly evaluate the data submitted in support of a vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, and will approve a vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 only if the FDA determines that it is safe and effective for its intended use.”
When I pause to really think about it, I am staggered by what an enormous undertaking is underway around the globe — and what lies ahead — to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine to billions of people. There is so much at stake, both to give the world a vaccine as soon as possible, and also to not make any critical mistakes in the process. As I cheer on all of the developers, I hope that every country’s leaders will let science and evidence guide decisions every step of the way.
I asked Zaks, of Moderna, what kind of pressure he felt, and he answered me in two ways. He said: “Every day and every minute counts.” And then he told me this — that normally, when he works on vaccines, he never gets to meet the people that he’s making the vaccine for. But this pandemic has been different. His future daughter-in-law is a second-year internal medicine resident in New York City, where the coronavirus has hit hard. “This one’s personal,” he said. “This one cuts close to home.”
Last August, Axios reported that President Trump repeatedly asked top national security officials to consider using nuclear bombs to weaken or destroy hurricanes. Now, one congresswoman wants to make it illegal for Trump, or any president, to act on this idea, which experts say would be both ineffective and extremely dangerous.
On June 1, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) introduced the Climate Change and Hurricane Correlation and Strategy Act, a bill that explicitly prohibits the president, along with any other federal agency or official, from employing a nuclear bomb or other “strategic weapon” with the goal of “altering weather patterns or addressing climate change.”
In a phone interview, Garcia told The Washington Post that the bill was drafted as a direct response to last year’s report that Trump has floated the idea of nuking hurricanes to his senior homeland security and national security advisers. Trump denied ever making such a suggestion in a tweet shortly after Axios published its report.
The bill, which has no co-sponsors and no hearing date, appears unlikely to make it out of committee anytime soon. It has been referred to three committees: Armed Services; Energy and Commerce; and Science, Space and Technology.
With no companion bills in the Senate, the chances of it appearing on the president’s desk, much less being signed into law, are even slimmer. But after hearing Trump’s alleged comments on nuclear weapons and hurricanes and researching the issue further, Garcia felt she had to at least get the idea of a ban on using nuclear weapons to disrupt the weather on the table.
“When I heard our president suggest that we needed to launch a nuclear weapon to disrupt a hurricane, my first thought was that’s a really dumb idea,” Garcia said. “When we did the research, we found that others have thought of that idea before.”
The bill comes at the start of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which is off to a roaring start, with Tropical Storm Cristobal, the earliest-recorded third-named storm of any season, striking Louisiana on Sunday. The season is expected to bring above-average storm activity, with 14 to 19 named storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In October 1945, Vladimir Zworykin, associate research director at Radio Corporation of America, suggested that if humans had technology to perfectly predict the weather, military forces could be sent out to disrupt storms before they formed, perhaps using atomic bombs. That same year, UNESCO director Julian Huxley spoke at an arms control conference in Manhattan, where he discussed using nuclear weapons for “landscaping the Earth” or dissolving the polar ice cap. In a 1961 speech at the National Press Club, U.S. Weather Bureau head Francis Reichelderfer said he could “imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea,” according to a 2016 report by National Geographic.
The United States even conducted several near-space experiments using nukes, including Operation Argus, a 1958 field test in which the military and the Atomic Energy Commission detonated atomic bombs more than 100 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean in an ill-conceived effort to induce artificial radiation belts in Earth’s magnetic field. According to Fleming, the Argus tests, along with subsequent high-altitude nuclear detonations, helped “fuel discussions” leading to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibits atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.
While nuking a hurricane in an attempt to destroy or weaken it would probably cause an international uproar, the Partial Test Ban Treaty wouldn’t prohibit the president from doing so. In addition, there’s no domestic law or international treaty that would prohibit such an action, according to Scott Sagan, a professor of political science at Stanford University.
“It would be a stupid thing to do, but it would not be an illegal thing to do,” Sagan said. He said test bans wouldn’t cover the actual use of a nuclear weapon against a perceived threat to the United States. In such circumstances, the president has sole authority to use nuclear weapons.
Hurricane experts have long maintained that detonating a nuclear device in a hurricane would have little effect on it, according to an FAQ page on the NOAA website. As the agency explains, the energy released by nuclear weapons pales in comparison to the energy released by a typical hurricane, which the NOAA describes as comparable to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding “every 20 minutes.”
Even detonating multiple nuclear bombs inside a hurricane is unlikely to disrupt the storm, although the radioactive fallout released downwind could have catastrophic impacts for people and the environment.
“We don’t have any knowledge on how far that fallout might spread,” said Michael Jacquari Smith, a recent meteorology graduate from Jackson State University who has investigated the issue. “It’s just like dealing with covid-19 — we don’t know much about it.”
“It was a bad idea when [the NOAA] wrote this FAQ,” saidPhil Klotzbach, a meteorologist and tropical cyclone expert at Colorado State University, “and it’s still a bad idea.”
Category 5 Hurricane Michael at landfall in Florida in October 2018. (UW-Madison)
In addition to prohibiting the president from attempting to alter the weather with nukes, Garcia’s bill calls for the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the NOAA to issue five annual reports to Congress on “ways to combat increasing hurricane activity due to warming oceans from climate change,” as well as a “a one-time scientific explanation and analysis on the use of nuclear bombs to alter severe weather, such as hurricanes.”
This explanation would explore the health and environmental risks of deploying nuclear weapons on hurricanes, the radioactive fallout, and “how such use would or would not address the systemic issues and challenges of hurricanes.”
Climate studies show that warming seas and air temperatures are making hurricanes more damaging by increasing their rainfall output and favoring higher-end, “major” storms of Category 3 intensity or greater. Scientists have also been seeing an uptick in storms that rapidly intensify from weak to major hurricane status, which is enabled by warm sea surface temperatures, among other factors.
Garcia’s district on the eastern side of Houston was heavily impacted by flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a storm that featured extreme rainfall totals that scientists eventually tied in part to climate change.
Klotzbach said the bill’s call for annual reports on hurricanes and climate change seemed redundant, given that many reports on the topic already exist. But he felt that a modeling study investigating the effects of dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane could be useful, if only to help scientists debunk the idea in the future.
Fleming, of Colby College, said that the new bill seemed like “an overreaction to an off-the-cuff comment, a nonexistent threat.”
Axios’s reporting noted that Trump raised the idea not once, but at multiple points in time, including with top national security and intelligence aides.
Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, sees things a bit differently.
“If we have a leader who would contemplate using a nuclear weapon on a hurricane,” he said, “we have a much more extensive and serious problem than could be covered by a specific bill like this one.”
Trump sides with deranged conspiracy theories over Black Lives Matter protesters
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Video shows man motionless, bleeding from the head after Buffalo police shove him
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Police officers in Buffalo appeared to push a man onto the ground while clearing Niagara Square following a citywide curfew. (WBFO / Spectrum News Buffalo via Storyful)
The White House communications team has gone to great lengths to present President Trump’s position on the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests as evenhanded and sympathetic. He has twice offered scripted responses to the protests that approximate the expected tone of a president faced with roiling unrest, including his comments from the White House Rose Garden on June 1 when he declared that he was “an ally of all peaceful protesters.”
That federal officials were simultaneously using tear gas, batons and explosive devices to clear a nearby park of peaceful protesters was simply a coincidence.
Efforts to present Trump as understanding of the protests, though, conflict with the president’s obvious and visceral dislike of what is happening and his determined effort to cast the protests as an extension of violent far-left opposition to American ideals. Trump keeps insisting that the worst effects of the early demonstrations were a function of “antifa,” a loosely knit movement that opposes fascism and racism. Antifa is a useful enemy for Trump in the moment, allowing him to avoid criticizing black protesters and to identify the opposing wing of American politics as dangerous. That the role of antifa has been limited has not prevented Trump from blaming it broadly.
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It wasn’t clear how much of Trump’s focus on antifa was opportunistic and how much actually derived from a belief that antifa is a frightening force jeopardizing the union. In a single, bizarre tweet on Tuesday morning, we got our answer.
Last Thursday, 75-year-old Martin Gugino, a longtime activist in Buffalo, approached an advancing line of police officers in that city. It’s not clear why; video captured by a reporter for a local radio station doesn’t include any audio. Shortly after Gugino approached, holding his phone in his hand, a police officer pushed him, causing Gugino to stumble backward, fall and hit his head on the pavement. Police walk by as Gugino bleeds on the sidewalk. Two officers were suspended after the video emerged, prompting more than 50 others to resign their positions with a special group within the Buffalo Police Department in protest.
That was the story, until the unfailingly pro-Trump network One America News ran a segment elevating ridiculous accusations about Gugino from a right-wing website called Conservative Treehouse. It’s not the first time that One America News has pushed out obviously nonsensical conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, reporter Chanel Rion reported that the coronavirus originated in North Carolina — because some random unidentified guy on Twitter said it had. Rion is OAN’s White House reporter, who attends White House press briefings at the invitation of the administration after the White House press corps barred her for violating social distancing efforts.
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Trump loves OAN because of its loyalty to his presidency and his politics. He has often used it as a foil to Fox News when he feels that Fox has strayed too far from him, as when it interviews Democratic legislators. It’s not surprising, then, that he saw OAN’s most recent conspiratorial report. It is still somehow surprising, though, that he decided it was worth sharing with the American public.
If you'd like to see the report on Gugino to which Trump's refers, it's here. It's so obviously false and so impressively sloppy that it's not worth sharing directly. But we should nonetheless parse its contents.
The report is from OAN's Kristian Rouz, whose prior media employment was with Sputnik News — an outlet funded by the Kremlin. (A Daily Beast report from last year indicated that Rouz was working for both outlets simultaneously.) Rouz is no stranger to antifa conspiracy theories, having “reported” in 2017 that Hillary Clinton's political action committee provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to antifa.
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In this case, Rouz claims that Gugino was part of a “false flag provocation by far left group antifa.” In other words, that the elderly Gugino intentionally injured himself to make the police look bad, as though there were no other available evidence of the police treating protesters in questionable ways.
The evidence that Gugino is antifa? That he was holding his phone in his hand.
“Newly released videos appear to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest,” Rouz says. “The tactic, known as skimming, is an old trick used by antifa to locate police officers and plan violence activities, bypassing the police response.”
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First, there are no “newly released videos” — just the original video of Gugino approaching the police.
Second, this theory about Gugino scanning police communications devices is an obvious effort to create a justification for police to push him away. Cellphones can be used to record information from embedded chips that put out short-range signals; this is how tap-to-pay systems work, essentially. But beyond Gugino holding his phone in his hand, there’s no evidence this is what he was doing. There’s no evidence that the places he held his phone had any chips that would emit such a signal. There’s no evidence that if he had collected any information about the chips being used that he would be able to do anything with them. There’s no evidence — besides the claims of this one website — that this is an “old trick” used by antifa. Particularly since the implementation of near-field communications (as this short-range interface is called) has happened within the last 10 years.
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Shown in real-time, Gugino is obviously just gesticulating and pointing. The Conservative Treehouse blog — which slows Gugino's motions down in order to make them appear more nefarious — argues that it's suspicious when Gugino holds his phone near a police officer's radio microphone. But that microphone is connected to the radio itself, which broadcasts publicly. What information is Gugino supposed to be picking up here? The frequency at which Buffalo police radios broadcast? If so, he could have saved himself a head wound by Googling it.
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Oh, but wait. Is this a false flag — a faked injury to cast the police in a negative light — or is it intelligence gathering? Rouz has no idea what he's talking about, but that didn't stop him from elevating the blog — or stop OAN from running the report.
In another context, this would all be laughable, something not even worth parsing. It's so sloppy and obviously untrue, and any actual media organization should be embarrassed to run it. Normally, we'd ignore it.
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But OAN has created a loyal viewer in Trump, thanks to its sycophantic coverage of his administration. And that means that Trump saw the report on Gugino, accepted it as believable enough to warrant consideration — and then shared it with 80 million people on Twitter.
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For some reason, Trump then decided to make his own assumptions about how the technology worked. Gugino was trying to “black out the equipment,” which means … what? He wanted to keep two police officers from being able to use their microphones? Well, the good news is that dozens more police were in earshot. Trump says Gugino was “aiming scanner,” which is a very scary-sounding way of saying he was “holding a phone.”
Remember the bigger context: Trump is elevating this nonsense because it casts protesters in a negative light and police in a positive one. Despite the White House’s rhetoric, it shows the extent to which Trump is skeptical of the aims of the Black Lives Matter protests and sympathetic to the targets of the demonstrations.
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Soon after Trump’s tweet about Gugino, the Republican National Committee’s national spokesman Elizabeth Harrington apparently attempted to defend it by quoting from a news article in which Buffalo’s mayor talked about a protester being “a key major instigator” of vandalism and looting in the city. Harrington has since deleted the tweet.
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This by itself is a remarkable assertion, though, implying that Gugino somehow deserved to be pushed and injured by police because the police viewed him as being involved in criminal acts. Never mind that there’s a process for adjudicating claims about criminal activity that doesn’t depend on the police meting out physical punishment. And never mind that there’s no evidence that the police pushed Gugino because of that suspicion. It’s an obvious and explicit after-the-fact rationalization for Gugino having been hurt that bears no relationship to what actually happened.
But, again, let’s step back. The president of the United States apparently finds it less believable that the Buffalo police pushed an elderly man to the ground, injuring him, than that a 75-year-old activist deployed sophisticated technology to track police on behalf of a shadowy far-left militant movement and then threw himself on the ground in order to make the police look bad.
When the Wall Street Journal is saying that a Republican president is betraying the foreign policy interests of the country and being Putin's lap-dog, the writer's room has really really stretched the limits of character plausibility.
Retreat From Germany
Withdrawing U.S. troops would be a win for Russia—and China.
President Donald Trump greets U.S. troops at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, Dec. 27, 2018.
Photo:
jonathan ernst/Reuters
The Chinese threat to democratic values extends far beyond the Pacific, and the U.S. needs allies across the world to resist. That’s one of many reasons President Trump’s partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany would be damaging.
There’s been no official word or explanation. But the Journal reported Friday that Mr. Trump has ordered 9,500 of the 34,500 Americans stationed in Germany to leave by September. Troop levels in the country—the heart of America’s presence in Europe—sometimes rise to more than 50,000. They now will be capped arbitrarily at 25,000. Some may be moved elsewhere in Europe, though infrastructure built over decades can’t go with them.
Deterring Russian aggression is one purpose of the U.S. presence. But the U.S. can also respond to far-flung threats faster thanks to its German bases. U.S. Africa Command is based in Stuttgart, while other U.S. facilities support American efforts in the Middle East. This lets the U.S. project power while maintaining a smaller presence in dangerous regions.
Withdrawal is a gift to Vladimir Putin, who delights at divisions in NATO and has done nothing to warrant a drawdown of U.S. forces. The Russian military said Friday it is deploying a brigade with advanced equipment to the country’s west. It’s a reminder that Russia, despite being an economic backwater, still poses a significant military threat to Europe.
The trans-Atlantic relationship isn’t always harmonious. American and European interests diverge sometimes, and it can get ugly. But revisionist powers like Russia and China envy America’s enduring ties with Europe. The U.S. and European Union are each other’s biggest trading partners, and together their economic power is unrivalled. One foundation of this is security cooperation.
Mr. Trump’s partial withdrawal appears to be mostly out of personal pique for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently rejected Mr. Trump’s invitation to a G-7 meeting at Camp David. This offers no political benefit for Mr. Trump, and a wider rift with the President won’t hurt Mrs. Merkel. Some 13% of Germans have confidence in Mr. Trump, according to a 2019 Pew Researchsurvey.
Germany is often a frustrating ally. The country spent an estimated 1.38% of gross domestic product on defense in 2019 and says it won’t reach its 2% commitment until 2031. Mrs. Merkel has defied the U.S. and most of Europe in supporting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would deepen the Continent’s dependence on Russian energy.
Mrs. Merkel’s personal disdain for Mr. Trump stands in contrast to her more amiable relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. While she openly criticizes the U.S., Mrs. Merkel has been relatively quiet about China’s increasing belligerence abroad and oppression at home. Despite China’s violation of its treaty with Britain over Hong Kong, she is pushing for a European investment deal with China. Mrs. Merkel is short-sighted on the Chinese challenge, but she isn’t long for the job and many other German politicians know better.
Much of the world is growing wary of China’s behavior. Mr. Trump should be reinforcing America’s commitment to alliances, not giving adversaries new openings to exploit.
I think the DNC made a huge mistake in having so many debates so frequently. They're already a bit of a snooze-fest to most voters, and more of the same over and over again means that almost nobody will pay attention to them.
Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate from Los Angeles drew an audience of 6.17 million viewers — lowest so far of the cycle, according to early numbers from Nielsen. PBS NewsHour and Politico hosted the debate from Loyola Marymount University, and it also was simulcast by CNN. According to Nielsen, the debate posted 2.062 million viewers and […]
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a bill championed by the WGA East and the DGA that will support a study into the lack of opportunities for women and minority TV writers and directors in the state – after which $5 million from the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit can be allocated to […]
"The enormity of his alleged transgressions works, perversely, to his advantage."
This piece is spot-on. The smorgasbord approach would be a grave mistake. What distinguishes the Ukraine situation from all the others is that it's sound-byte-able enough to possibly turn public opinion to the point where enough GOP senators, as a matter of self-preservation, will vote to convict and remove.
Muddy those sound bytes, and the senate acquittal that everyone but me thinks is inevitable will indeed happen, the overall narrative will be about how Democrats are hyper-partisan sore losers from 2016, and Trump will be reelected in a landslide in 2020.
Democrats, Don’t Overreach on Impeachment
Like Nixon, Trump is accused of many things. But only one matters.
By Caroline Fredrickson
Ms. Fredrickson is the author of “The Democracy Fix.”
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Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday discussing impeachment hearings.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
The summer of 1998 was not an auspicious time for me to start work as a young White House lawyer. I was in the Office of Legislative Affairs — but all legislative work had ground to a halt with President Bill Clinton facing impeachment in the House. Instead, we compiled a daily catalog of statements by members of Congress about Mr. Clinton’s actions and their possible consequences.
While it wasn’t a great way to start a career, that experience offered an accidental insight into the current impeachment process — and a warning about overreach by the Democrats.
Back in 1998, House Republicans put together a fairly straightforward case against the president: Mr. Clinton was accused of having an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then lying about it. The Republicans took full advantage of this simple story to advance their claim that a president of questionable morals should not remain in office. The statements we tracked divided into easy categories; some members thought the affair was enough to sink the president, while others thought the lying was the impeachable offense.
President Trump’s White House no doubt has a similar operation. But while our job was simple because the narrative of Mr. Clinton’s sins was easy to grasp, today’s allegations are all over the map and could amount to a lengthy list of articles of impeachment.
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Unfortunately for House Democrats, the complexity of this story does not help their cause. Mr. Trump has destroyed so many norms, has been credibly accused of breaking so many laws and has otherwise engaged in such a dizzying array of possibly impeachable behaviors that any intelligible story line has been blurred, if not obliterated. The enormity of his alleged transgressions works, perversely, to his advantage.
Right now Democrats are debating whether to focus articles of impeachment solely on the Ukraine scandal, or to add multiple other charges, ranging from obstruction of justice and other illegal or unethical actions detailed in the Mueller report, to personal enrichment in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The latter, however satisfying, would be a mistake.
Even though it means leaving out actions many members believe independently merit removing this president from office, which would frustrate many, there may be virtue in keeping the focus narrow at least in how they talk about the case against Mr. Trump.
The impeachment case of Richard Nixon offers a fruitful example. There are many obvious parallels between Mr. Trump and Nixon, including their venal behavior, demonization of the news media and the fact that both investigations have included evidence of break-ins into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Both presidents also sought to persuade a foreign power to interfere in our elections — Mr. Trump with Ukraine and Nixon with South Vietnam.
What made the public sit up and take notice was the release, on Aug. 5, 1974, of a transcript of the so-called Smoking Gun Tape, which made it impossible for Nixon to argue that he was unaware of and uninvolved in the cover-up. The president’s support in Congress crumbled. Representative John Jacob Rhodes, a Republican Nixon loyalist who served as the minority leader in the House, stated it most directly: “Cover-up of criminal activity and misuse of federal agencies can neither be condoned nor tolerated.”
Donald Trump is the master of diversionary tactics. Every day through tweets and press statements, he spreads falsehoods, attacks his opponents on made-up grounds and sometimes even gives congressional committees new avenues of illegality to follow for impeachment or prosecution. Each of these new story lines must be ignored. The best story line is the simple one: Mr. Trump tried to bribe a foreign official with American government dollars to announce an investigation of unfounded charges against a domestic political rival. There is more, much more. But that’s enough.
We at the Avocado are often asked for advice on how to be a “Good Angelino.” In this series, we provide all the help you’ll need to look like you actually belong in Hollywood and aren’t just an out of your league poser from Cherry Hill, New Jersey or worse, Arizona.
We’ve all been there: You’re out with friends seeing a potential future Best Picture nominee staring Rachel Weisz (or is that Jennifer Connelly?), when the credits finally begin. The movie was three hours long and you really need to pee and check your notifications, so you stand up to leave. Suddenly, the entire theater looks at you like you put on a MAGA hat. Congratulations, you piece of shit, now all of your new friends from acting class think you are an unsophisticated rube who has no respect for the fine men and women people who worked so hard to make that boring movie you hated.
It’s time you learned that going to the movies in Los Angeles isn’t like going to the movies in Oklahoma or wherever you and Bill Hader are from. Well, I’ll tell you what I told Bill when he and I started Hebrew school at Camp Rama: we all need to pee, Bill, but now that you are in Hollywood you need to hold it in while everyone pretends to care about the name of Adam Driver’s wardrobe assistant’s assistant.
The theatrics (sorry) of sitting through the credits of a movie may cause you to wonder why you can’t instead just pull up IMDB and feign recognition of John Wick’s 2nd A.D. from your phone as you exit the theater or why it is counterintuitively a sign of sociopathy to watch the credits on Netflix. Well, the answer to those questions is: “Shut Up.” Going to the movies still means something and is special in Los Angeles, and will always be special for another 2-4 years until all new content will be available to stream and all of the movie theaters will be converted to condos or mattress stores.
So hold it in, pretend to be interested in the visual effects team, and for God’s sake make sure to clap throughout the entire credits sequence even if you feel like an idiot doing so because clapping at the end of a movie is an objectively idiotic thing to do. If you’re gonna make it this business, you’re gonna need to do a lot of stupid things. You might as well start now.
Next week we’ll discuss the proper way to drive past the 400 cars waiting patiently to merge onto the 405 so you can get where you’re going because you are more important than them and what to do if you run into Lenny Kravitz in Echo Park (just a tip: don’t mention his penis).
That last panel is what I thought when I saw the movie. It's been too long since I read the book, so I can't recall: did Eowyn kill the witch king in the books as well? If so, did it make more sense than it did in the movie?
The Thirteenth Doctor is in her TARDIS on her way back to our screens! A thrilling 10-part series will land on New Year’s Day 2020, with subsequent episodes airing on Sundays.
Starting with a blockbuster action packed two-part episode entitled Spyfall, written by Chris Chibnall, the Thirteenth Doctor is well and truly back with a bang.
Intelligence agents around the world are under attack from alien forces. MI6 turns to the only people who can help: The Doctor and friends. As they travel the globe for answers, attacks come from all sides. Earth’s security rests on the team's shoulders, but where will this planet-threatening conspiracy lead them?
Written by Chris Chibnall
Directed by Jamie Magnus Stone
Guest starring Stephen Fry and Lenny Henry.
As Jodie Whittaker takes charge of the TARDIS once again, the Doctor will be joined by her friends Ryan (Tosin Cole), Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Graham (Bradley Walsh). Series Twelve will also welcome a host of famous faces including Stephen Fry, Sir Lenny Henry CBE, Robert Glenister and Goran Višnjić to name just a few.
Add to that some familiar faces including the Judoon and the Cybermen, Series Twelve is set to be an epic action-packed rollercoaster for everyone, just don’t stray too far from behind the sofa…
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Doctor Who will be airing on BBC One 6:55pm and BBC America 8pm from New Year’s Day, starring Jodie Whittaker, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill and Bradley Walsh. Stay tuned for further details!
This is an increasingly important question, both for his campaign and for the overall state of the Democratic primary. Black voters will likely make up about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters, and they’ll be a majority in states like Alabama and Mississippi. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor will have a hard time winning the delegates he needs to secure the Democratic nomination without support from black voters. And if his numbers among nonwhite voters stay low, Buttigieg could also have issues with white Democrats, who are increasingly conscious of racial issues and might balk at being part of an overwhelmingly white coalition.
Exactly why Buttigieg is struggling with black voters is a complicated question. And it’s a question many, many reporters are also looking into. So what I tried to do, using survey data and my own reporting, was to look at some of the explanations being offered and break down which of them seem particularly compelling and which I feel more skeptical of.
Relatively clear problems for Buttigieg
Lately, Buttigieg is doing great in Iowa polls and pretty well in New Hampshire polls, but he’s still behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in many polls of Nevada and South Carolina, and in most national polls. Maybe this will change in the next few weeks, but for now, Buttigieg still isn’t that popular with Democrats, including white Democrats, outside of Iowa and New Hampshire. And Buttigieg, as Politico detailed recently, also has weak support among Latino Democrats, which partly explains his lower numbers in Nevada, where about 20 percent of Democratic caucus voters were Latino in 2016.
In other words, Buttigieg doesn’t have a ton of support overall, and is thus struggling with lots of groups. Late-November surveys from both the Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac University suggest Buttigieg is relatively weak with voters under 30 and those with incomes below $50,000 a year. “Why are Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire (basically all of whom are white) so enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” is just as valid a question as “Why are black voters so not enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?”
Of course, this isn’t to say Buttigieg isn’t doing especially badly among black Democrats. He is. In the Quinnipiac survey, Buttigieg is at 23 percent among white Democrats and 4 percent among black Democrats. The Economist/YouGov survey put him at 16 among white Democrats and 2 percent among black Democrats. Which brings me to another obvious challenge for the mayor (and every other candidate) in winning black support: Biden. The former vice president is doing substantially better with black voters than he is overall, getting more than 40 percent of black voters in both the YouGov and Quinnipiac surveys. Buttigieg, I would argue, is going to have a hard time pulling that support from Biden. Older black voters in particular are more familiar with Biden from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president and have a pragmatic streak that may make them reluctant to help nominate a 37-year-old small-town mayor to take on President Trump.
I worry that political observers are making the same mistake that we did in 2008 and 2016: attributing a candidate’s challenges with black voters to something that candidate is doing wrong (Hillary Clinton in 2008, Sanders in 2016) as opposed to a rival candidate just being more popular with black voters ( Obama in 2008, Clinton in 2016). Maybe black voters, particularly older ones, just really like Biden, at least at this stage in the race.
What about younger black voters, who, according to polling from Morning Consult, aren’t as enamored with Biden? Here, Buttigieg may have more of an ideological problem. Even the recent polls that found Buttigieg surging also showed Sanders and Warren polling ahead of him among black voters. That might be simply because they are better known — and currently have more total support — than the mayor. But there is something of a “black left” that skews young, and it is wary of Buttigieg’s more moderate politics. Buttigieg’s “lane” among white voters — people who might think Sanders and Warren are too liberal but are not comfortable with Biden — may not exist, or may simply be much smaller, with black voters.
Potential problems for Buttigieg
I think the evidence is fairly clear that black Democrats as a group are not as supportive of gay relationships or gay marriage as white Democrats. So, it is plausible that Buttigieg, as an openly gay candidate, starts at a disadvantage among black voters.
So why do I list this a potential reason, as opposed to a clear problem? Well, because I’m not sure that black political behavior is particularly influenced by black views on gay rights. In 2012, there was speculation that Obama would lose sizable support among black voters once he started supporting gay marriage. Not only did that not happen, but African Americans have also remained as supportive of the Democratic Party as ever over the last decade, even as the party has increasingly allied itself with LGBTQ rights. I don’t want to make too much of a local election, but to take one notable example: In April, America’s third-largest city, Chicago, elected Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian woman, as its mayor. In a runoff, Lightfoot won all of the city’s 50 wards, including those in the city’s heavily black South Side, in her contest against fellow Democrat Toni Preckwinkle, who is also a black woman.
So I think we should be cautious about naming homophobia as a principal factor when assessing why a 37-year-old, white small-town mayor might lose the black Democratic primary vote to Barack Obama’s vice president in a primary where black voters are desperate to find a candidate who they think will defeat Donald Trump. We shouldn’t rule it out, but I wouldn’t give it too much weight. My expectation is that if Buttigieg were nominated, he would get around 90 percent of the black vote in a general election, as Democratic presidential nominees typically do.
Another potential problem Buttigieg faces in winning black support: a lack of backing from prominent black figures. The New York Times recently published a piece showing that Buttigieg trails way behind other candidates in terms of endorsements from current or former black elected officials. (According to the Times, Biden has 154 such endorsements, Kamala Harris has 93, Sanders 91, Cory Booker 50, and Warren 43, compared to six for Buttigieg.) Would it help Buttigieg if he had more support among black elites, to signal to black voters that he is a candidate who cares about their interests? Probably. That said, Harris has a lot of endorsements from prominent black figures, and she also has weak numbers among black voters (7 percent, per the YouGov survey).
There are other potential causes for Buttigieg’s lack of black support — ones I wouldn’t ascribe much explanatory value to. Some black leaders, for instance, both nationally and in South Bend, have criticized Buttigieg’s dealings with his city’s black residents, particularly his demoting South Bend’s first-ever black police chief in 2012. Liberals, black and non-black, are also criticizing Buttigieg’s presidential campaign for weaknesses in its approach to black outreach. For example, the campaign put out a list of supporters for Buttigieg’s “Douglass Plan for Black America” that included lots of white Democrats, as well as a number of African Americans who said they have not endorsed the proposal or Buttigieg.
Neither of these narratives are good for Buttigieg, because they play into some of the problems that I listed above. They will probably make decidedly liberal black voters who were not likely to back Buttigieg in the first place even more wary of him. And if you are a black elected official who is considering endorsing the mayor, these stories might give you pause.
But I doubt a ton of rank-and-file voters of any race are following these kinds of stories in detail. I think it’s more likely that Buttigieg’s struggles with black voters in polls gives these stories more resonance, as opposed to the stories causing Buttigieg’s problems with black voters.
For right now, though, whatever the cause, Buttigieg’s lack of support among black voters is a huge hurdle for his campaign. If the race winnows to just Biden and Buttigieg, for example, I think Buttigieg could lose the black vote by more than 50 points like Sanders did in 2016, killing his chances of winning the nomination.
Alternatively, there are two potential positive scenarios for Buttigieg. First, maybe three or four candidates (say Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren) remain viable through much of the primary season, dividing up the black vote so Biden is not getting 80 percent of it. Secondly, maybe Buttigieg’s efforts to appeal to black voters pay off in the next few months and his numbers rise. He’s working hard on this front; for example, he made an appearance at the North Carolina church of black civil rights activist William Barber on Sunday. If the race comes down to Buttigieg vs. Biden, the South Bend mayor may have some appeal among black liberals who are particularly wary of the former vice president.
But that really gets at the bottom line for Buttigieg — and every other candidate besides Biden — with regards to black voters: It may not be that black voters hate Pete Buttigieg, really, but rather that they like Joe Biden. Unless that changes, a lot of candidates will struggle to gain meaningful black support.
Moreover, with the field so divided — this isn’t 2016, when Hillary Clinton was polling at or above 50 percent nationally for most of the race — most candidates, including Buttigieg, will be doing poorly with one group or another; if you have only about a quarter of the vote overall, there’s really no way around that. A candidate’s issue may not lie with any single group, but with their strength overall.
A “Keep America Great” rally in Tupelo, Miss., a month ago.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
“E pluribus unum” — out of many, one — is one of America’s traditional mottos. And you might think it would be reflected in reality. We aren’t, after all, just united politically. We share a common language; the unrestricted movement of goods, services and people is guaranteed by the Constitution. Shouldn’t this lead to convergence in the way we live and think?
In fact, however, the past few decades have been marked by growing divergence among regions along several dimensions, all closely correlated. In particular, the political divide is also, increasingly, an economic divide. As The Times’s Tom Edsall put it in a recent article, “red and blue voters live in different economies.”
What Edsall didn’t point out is that red and blue voters don’t just live differently, they also die differently.
About the living part: Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated. In the close presidential election of 2000, counties that supported Al Gore over George W. Bush accounted for only a little over half the nation’s economic output. In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64 percent of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.
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The thing is, the red-blue divide isn’t just about money. It’s also, increasingly, a matter of life and death.
Back in the Bush years I used to encounter people who insisted that the United States had the world’s longest life expectancy. They hadn’t looked at the data, they just assumed that America was No. 1 on everything. Even then it wasn’t true: U.S. life expectancy has been below that of other advanced countries for a long time.
The death gap has, however, widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans. This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol. And the rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy for the past few years.
What I haven’t seen emphasized is the divergence in life expectancy within the United States and its close correlation with political orientation. True, a recent Times article on the phenomenon noted that life expectancy in coastal metropolitan areas is still rising about as fast as life expectancy in other advanced countries. But the regional divide goes deeper than that.
A 2018 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at changes in health and life expectancy in U.S. states between 1990 and 2016. The divergence among states is striking. And as I said, it’s closely correlated with political orientation.
I looked at states that voted for Donald Trump versus states that voted for Clinton in 2016, and calculated average life expectancy weighted by their 2016 population. In 1990, today’s red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.
Is this all about deaths of despair in the eastern heartland? No. Consider our four most populous states. In 1990, Texas and Florida had higher life expectancy than New York and almost matched California; today, they’re far behind.
What explains the divergence? Public policy certainly plays some role, especially in recent years, as blue states expanded Medicaid and drastically reduced the number of uninsured, while most red states didn’t. The growing gap in educational levels has also surely played a role: Better-educated people tend to be healthier than the less educated.
Beyond that, there has been a striking divergence in behavior and lifestyle that must be affecting mortality. For example, the prevalence of obesity has soared all across America since 1990, but obesity rates are significantly higher in red states.
One thing that’s clear, however, is that the facts are utterly inconsistent with the conservative diagnosis of what ails America.
Conservative figures like William Barr, the attorney general, look at rising mortality in America and attribute it to the collapse of traditional values — a collapse they attribute, in turn, to the evil machinations of “militant secularists.” The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind “soaring suicide rates,” rising violence and “a deadly drug epidemic.”
But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven’t seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy. And even within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.
So something bad is definitely happening to American society. But the conservative diagnosis of that problem is wrong — dead wrong.
Dating back to “The Apprentice,” he has long grasped that cultural loyalties can animate Americans far more than high-minded principles.
By Talmon Joseph Smith
Mr. Smith is on the editorial staff of the Opinion section.
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Donald Trump during “The Apprentice” Recruiting Tour in 2004.Credit...Getty Images
Much like the way rearview mirrors bend space-time so that the objects you’ve sped away from still remain “closer than they appear,” there was a time not too long ago — although it doesn’t always seem like it — when Donald Trump seemed like harmless fun to most of us. For me, that was about 15 years ago, when “The Apprentice” debuted in prime time on NBC.
While my own memory of that preteen era in my life is blurry, I still vividly remember how after the show’s premiere the buzz around it spread virally, in that quaint, primordial pre-Twitter sort of way. Back when the media environment surrounding the “blockbuster” impeachment inquiry today — driven by ideologies and algorithms that lock us into our various niches — was unimaginable; when all the demographic divisions the internet is surfacing today were less visible, tucked in the intimacy of private conversations.
The local morning radio hosts on the Top 40 station WEZB in New Orleans talked about Mr. Trump’s new show for days. The “Tom Joyner Morning Show,” which has been syndicated on countless black radio stations for years, and which my dad listened to as he dropped me off at school and drove himself to work, chirped about the reality competition program as giddily as Katie Couric, who covered it on “The Today Show,” too.
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You couldn’t turn on NBC without seeing a promo. At the beginning, middle and end of each spot: a puffed up, perma-squinting Donald Trump. A guy, who — as I understood him then — was basically this rogue billionaire who’d decided it would be more fun to have his industry buddies film people fighting over the chance to work for him than to do whatever austere stuff the billionaires on CNBC did.
It seemed more droll a premise than any reality show we’d heard of before, so although my parents — “Law & Order” fans — were skeptical, they’d let us watch “The Apprentice” after dinner, out of their own curiosity if nothing else. (Mr. Trump’s horrific response to the Central Park Five case still vaguely lingered in our minds, but the idea, in the year of our Lord 2004, of boycotting a TV show because it had a problematic lead seemed unrealistic, and the bar for famous men’s behavior was admittedly low.)
In a slapdash attempt to bridge Donald Trump as he seemed then — funny mean, not scary mean — with the man as he appears now, I found myself rewatching the first season of the series earlier this year. Even as I eye-rolled at the casual sexism of the men-versus-women teams and at the obviously canned intros, the unmilled, unscripted brashness of the rest of the program was still rib-tickling all these years later, in the undying way eavesdropping on a workplace argument stirs excitement. The commercial break cliffhangers just as heads were about to butt, as well as Mr. Trump’s encouragement of it (much like now in his White House), souped up the “stay tuned” allure.
On a second look, however, the underlying engine of the show — which would become the underlying engine of his candidacy, his presidency and now, his impeachment — came from the clashing of candidates from “various backgrounds,” as Mr. Trump put it in the premiere. There was the frenemy dynamic between “Country Boy” Troy McClain, a white Montanan with only a high school degree, and the black Harvard-educated M.B.A., Kwame Jackson. Tammy Lee, a haughty Asian businesswoman, chafing at perceived slights from some of her equally self-satisfied, younger white teammates. And of course, there was the assertive Omarosa Manigault — whose future as a Trump White House adviser surpassed the ability of any crystal ball — tussling with just about everyone, comfortably filling the token role of Angry Black Woman the producers may have had in mind.
“Omarosa, I don’t know how anyone likes you, honestly,” Mr. Trump chirped in one boardroom scene, as he mulled over firing her with the same mix of insouciance and venom that he performs during press gaggles in the West Wing today. “Do you think Omarosa has class?” he asked her fellow contestants.
While the troubling gender dynamics of the show were always overt — with Mr. Trump, when he wasn’t nauseatingly inviting women up to his penthouse as a reward, alternately praising and shaming contestants for “using womanly charm” and “relying on your sexuality to win” — the class and racial tensions were more apparent, if indirect.
In one of the season’s final episodes, Mr. Trump pits Mr. McClain against Mr. Jackson, comparing Mr. McClain’s lack of education (despite his great “instincts and guts”) to Mr. Jackson’s Harvard degree. He ends up firing Mr. McClain. And as we would later learn, when Mr. Jackson lost in the finale to Bill Rancic, a cigar entrepreneur with Mad Men looks, Mr. Trump apparently took race directly into consideration.
Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s now-jailed longtime confidant and fixer, spoke last year to Vanity Fair about Mr. Trump’s “back-and-forth about not picking Jackson.” In the end, according to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump said, “There’s no way I can let this black [expletive] win,” employing a homophobic slur.
I talked to Mr. Jackson, who now leads inclusion and diversity work in the business world, to see whether he believed Mr. Cohen’s claim. “I don’t spend any time thinking about the veracity of Michael Cohen as a moral compass in my life,” Mr. Jackson said. But when asked whether he sensed some of those tribal dynamics at play when he was in the thick of the show, he responded: “Of course, that was the whole point. It was identity politics.”
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Troy McClain, a contestant on the first season of “The Apprentice.”Credit...Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage
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Kwame Jackson made it to the finale of the first season.Credit...Jim Spellman/WireImage
In his mind, producers cast him in the first place so that, “O.K., now we have an Ivy League black guy vs. a high-school-educated white guy. We’ll have a country girl vs. a city girl. A pretty woman vs. a plain looking guy — whatever.”
Mr. Trump once built on his “men vs. women” theme by testing the idea of a “black team vs. white team” season of the show. That reportedly failed with NBC executives, but in making the first reality business competition, it’s clear Mr. Trump and his producer Mark Burnett cleverly understood how office undercurrents — of who seems smart, like a leader and the right fit — were loaded questions with impassioned, deeply personal answers.
Tribalism is definitely unhealthy. It is also effective, and entertaining.
People forget that crowds gathered for “Apprentice” watch parties in bars. The show’s first season was a smash, averaging over 20 million viewers. (By comparison, the season eight premiere of “Game of Thrones,” this era’s cultural juggernaut, had 17.4 million viewers across all platforms.) There have long been two ways of absorbing Donald Trump’s presence: seriously but not literally, as has often been said. Or with holier-than-thou irony — the way his fans eagerly watch his exploits and the way A-listers, like the magazine editor Tina Brown, invited him over to play a sort of court jester at their parties. (He’s a “con man, but fun to listen to,” Ms. Brown explained.)
My family thought it was in on the joke. But after watching a few episodes, I’m not so sure we didn’t end up invested. I could see how my father identified with Mr. Jackson’s unspoken but visible feeling that he had to play down his insight in order to not come off as an uppity minority. I could sense how my mother, who sniffed at reality TV as a rule, found herself annoyed by Ms. Manigault yet also had a begrudging soft spot for her — something I can’t decouple from her own effort to overcome workplace bias against women of color.
And despite my innocence, I was civically sentient enough to understand that Mr. Trump and his producers must have known there was an entire cross-section of other households across America that probably had a soft spot for the contestant Jessie Conners, an earnest young white woman from Wisconsin who’d carved out a managerial position for herself. Or others that perhaps cheered for Mr. McClain. (Mr. Trump himself would later state, “Guys like Troy are what make America great.”)
Donald Trump is someone who “got that everybody plays identity politics, not just people of color,” said Mr. Jackson. While he told me production editing had “a lot to do with it,” he argued people who now find it comforting to think of Mr. Trump as a puppet deny his “diabolical genius” for starting fights. “I think that’s how he got elected, by doing the same thing,” he said, with the timbre of a shrug.
When I asked Mr. Jackson whether he could sense the support from the people of color even though in 2004 there was no real social media, he joked, “If it had been 2019, I would literally have 20 million twitter followers.” Still, he continued, “I definitely got love across the TV, radio, print and event platforms from the black community and it was obvious and endearing.”
As we spoke, I couldn’t help but think that many voters seemed at the end of the 2016 campaign to have chosen Mr. Trump for few of the technical reasons I find myself poring over as a journalist but more in the way my family and many others rooted for “Apprentice” contestants. In the way, at least partly, we’ve elected presidents for ages.
As a broad, “Apprentice”-sized field of Democrats fight for their party’s presidential nomination, it looks as though the major candidates have bought into a gentler version of Mr. Trump’s identitarian worldview — that when push comes to shove you’re more likely to root for “your kind,” whatever that is.
While they are all clear foils to Mr. Trump’s nativism and policy apathy, they all seem to have hyper-strategized their brands to either subtly or explicitly make identity appeals to sections within their party coalition, which has more mini factions than a college friends group text.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, for instance, surely has a deep, if quiet, hope that her humble Oklahoman roots can help her earn the trust of whites in the heartland just as much as Senator Kamala Harris more openly plans to rely on the party’s base of women of color to regenerate her candidacy.
They’ll both silently hope that the nagging reputation of “Bernie Bros” hurts Senator Bernie Sanders when the primaries get snippier. And there are the untold number of voters who, like my father, say they are leaning toward Joe Biden not because he’s their favorite but because they’ve calculated older white men will feel less threatened by the former vice president than a woman, a person of color or a gay man.
That the same Pavlovian tool kit of something so harmlessly tacky as “The Apprentice” would 15 years later be the lifeblood of its host’s dark, racist movement — as well as the organizing principle of those hoping to dethrone him — is a chilling distillation of the recursive trap America seems to be in.
Mr. Jackson said the difference between Mr. Trump now and when he was on the show is that back then, “there was smoke” — housing discrimination, his public hatred of the Central Park Five — “but there was no raging fire.” Now, despite the raging fires of “Lock her up,” “Send her back,” the Muslim ban, the impeachment inquiry and much more, recent polls find the president in a relatively enviable position in battleground states, where he may have a greater demographic advantage in 2020 than in 2016.
55 percent of Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source told pollsters there is nothing Mr. Trump could do to lose their approval. And another poll found, “The overwhelming majority of Americans across both parties say nothing they hear in the impeachment inquiry will change their minds.” The president has long grasped that little of this fight is about principles or the republic; that there are Republicans who can’t stand that he tweets and acts so odiously but who can’t stand Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad” even more. Republicans who’d rather back Mr. Trump than let that other team, those other people, win.
So it makes some sense that the president seems unbothered that half of the eyeballs now fixed on him are filled with repulsion instead of fascination. Booing or cheering, we’re all stuck with him for now, reacting to the latest episode: Televised impeachment hearings that he has promptly folded right back into the culture war, starring him.
Talmon Joseph Smith (@talmonsmith) is on the editorial staff of the Opinion section.
The second day of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Here is a provocation that might just be true: The most important moment in the impeachment battle thus far did not take place in the halls of the Capitol or even in the bars and cafes of the republic of Ukraine, but in Ankara on Oct. 17, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with Mike Pence and agreed to a cease-fire in northern Syria, thus limiting the scope of the moral and strategic debacle created by Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds.
I’m not suggesting that the American public, in all its wisdom, cares more about the doughty Kurds or the lines of political control in Syria than it does about abuses of presidential power. But I am suggesting that part of the country relies on general heuristics rather than the specific details of presidential misconduct to determine when it might support something like impeachment. In which case any strategy congressional Democrats pursue or any defense served up by Jim Jordan or Lindsey Graham matters less to Trump’s fate than the answers to two basic questions: Is the economy O.K.?Is the world falling apart?
This supposition is based on an admittedly thin historical record. We have exactly two impeachment case studies in the modern era, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, which involved very different fact patterns and unspooled in very different ways.
The differences are grist for competing partisan interpretations: Liberals can argue that Clinton survived the process and Nixon didn’t because Clinton’s crimes were minor things and Nixon’s met the “high crimes” bar, while conservatives can argue that Clinton survived and Nixon didn’t because Republicans were more honorable in 1974 and Democrats more partisan in 1998.
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But the simplest explanation is that Nixon didn’t survive because his second term featured a series of economic shocks — summarized on Twitter by the political theorist Jacob Levy as “an oil crisis, a stock market crash, stagflation and recession” — while Clinton’s second term was the most recent peak of American power, pride and optimism. In a given impeachment debate, under this theory, neither the nature of the crimes nor the state of the political parties matter as much as whether an embattled president is seen as presiding over stability or crisis, over good times or potential ruin.
To the extent that this reductive theory is true — and clearly it’s at least somewhat true — we shouldn’t be surprised at Trump’s survival, and we shouldn’t assume that it can be explained only by polarization or hyper-partisanship, Fox News or fake news, or for that matter by the “that’s how you get Trump” progressive overreach that I tend to critique.
Of course it matters that Trump’s party is craven and debased; of course it matters that the Democrats have swung to an ideological extreme. But maybe it matters more to Trump’s not good but stable — amazingly stable — approval ratings that he is presiding over a period of general stability, at home and abroad, which would have to fall apart for the supermajority that turned on Nixon to finally turn on him.
The idea that the Trump era is stable probably seems unpersuasive to people who follow the D.C. carnival obsessively; the idea that it is more stable than the later Obama years may seem like a joke. But one reason Trump managed to get elected was that the waning years of Barack Obama’s second term felt chaotic and dangerous across multiple fronts — with the rise of the Islamic State, the Russian seizure of Crimea and the Ukrainian quasi-war, a modest increase in crime and a series of terrorist attacks domestically, and a version of the child migrant crisis that has recurred under Trump.
And if you don’t pay attention to the chaos in the nation’s capital, as quite a few Americans do not, the Trump era has been arguably calmer than 2014-16. The migrant crisis and white-nationalist terrorism have both worsened, but the late-Obama-era crime increase appears to have subsided, campuses and cities have been relatively calm, Russia’s aggression has given way to stalemate, the Islamic State’s defeat has been mostly completed and Islamist terrorism has grown more sporadic than in the period that gave us Charlie Hebdo, San Bernardino and much more. Meanwhile the economy has grown steadily, leaving a majority of Americans in their best financial position since the days when Clinton survived impeachment.
This environment has created constituencies that get less attention than the “with the president even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue” sort of Trump voter, but probably matter more to how impeachment plays out. These are voters who dislike Trump but give him some grudging credit for the solid economy and the absence of new foreign wars, voters who don’t support his policies but don’t share the educated-liberal revulsion at his style, and voters whose reluctant support is contingent on Trumpian chaos seeming confined to Washington.
It’s possible to persuade these lukewarm voters to turn on him; you can see it begin to happen in the polling data when his party pursues unpopular policies (the Obamacare repeal push) or when his personal chaos seems to produce a real political breakdown (the government shutdown) or when his bigotry seems linked to some real-world horror (as with Charlottesville). But when a feeling of stability returns, when there isn’t a cascade toward economic debacle, foreign-policy catastrophe or late-1960s civil strife, these voters drift back toward mixed feelings, lukewarm support, dislike leavened by skepticism about removing Trump via impeachment rather than the 2020 vote.
Which is why, to return to the initial hypothesis, it mattered that the impeachment debate began at the same time that Trump was stumbling badly on foreign policy with Turkey and the Kurds; it gave some of these voters (and the swing-state Republican senators who represent them) a feeling that maybe this time everything was going to fall apart at once, that Trump’s incompetence would blow up the Middle East at the same time that his scandals multiplied.
Then the pattern in polling since — the dip in his approval rating giving way to a tiny upswing, support for impeachment peaking and then declining just a bit — might not reflect some dramatic failure by Democrats to make the case or some dramatic success for the Trumpian defense. Instead, it might just reflect the fact that the situation in Syria seems to have temporarily stabilized, the economy is fine and there are voters who will support removing a president when the world seems to be falling apart, but if it’s not, then not.
This reality doesn’t make a case against impeaching Trump when his conduct is basically asking for it; an impeachment process can be morally correct even if it’s unlikely to succeed. Nor does it prove that impeachment will hurt the Democrats in 2020; it might be that keeping a focus on Trump’s misdeeds and corruptions is a better use of Democratic energy than fighting over which not-necessarily-popular progressive agenda item their presidential nominee should be pressured to support.
Rather, it just makes a case for a certain modesty in all analysis, whether it’s a critique of some Adam Schiff stratagem today or a condemnation of Susan Collins (or, perhaps, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) for not voting to remove the president tomorrow. It might just be the case that in our system it takes a clear cascade of disasters to pre-emptively remove a president, even a manifestly corrupt one. And though the likelihood of such a disaster the longer Trump remains in office is one reason to wish for his removal, even his fiercest critics should prefer stability, and the necessity of defeating him at the ballot box, to the Something Worse that might expedite his fall.
Wow. Only three of the writers from last season returned. Dang! I sense internal turmoil . . .
With the Thirteenth Doctor and her friends well on their way to landing back on our screens, the next series is set to welcome an exciting host of new directors and both new and returning writers.
Three new writers have jumped on board the TARDIS for series 12:
Nina Metivier
Maxine Alderton
Charlene James
Also making their debut in 2020 and joining the fam, are four new directors ready to travel through space and time:
Nida Manzoor
Emma Sullivan
Jamie Magnus Stone
Lee Haven Jones
In addition, three writers return from series 11:
Vinay Patel (Demons of The Punjab)
Ed Hime (It Takes You Away)
Pete McTighe (Kerblam!)
Chris Chibnall says:
"We’re thrilled that Doctor Who continues to attract some of the most exciting and dynamic talent working in television. Along with our returning faces, we’re excited to welcome new members to the Doctor Who family. The Doctor Who team is crammed with British television’s brightest writers and directors: we’ve adored working with them, and can’t wait to show you the explosive stuff they’ve created!”
Doctor Who returns in early 2020 when Doctor Who makes an explosive return to screens for another action-packed series of thrilling adventure.
UPDATE: Netflix is re-editing its doc series The Devil Next Door to update a map that was cited as inaccurate earlier this week by Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki. On Tuesday, Morawiecki took the step of penning a letter to Netflix chief Reed Hastings in which he complained about the depiction of Nazi concentration camps inside modern-day Polish […]
"a month with 20 days of investigative hearings caused an approximately 2.5-percentage point drop in presidential approval; for a month with 40 investigative hearing days, presidential approval fell by around 4 points.3"
?
Thirty days hath November, April, June, and September. Of 28 is but one And all the remnant 30 and 1.
The House’s impeachment inquiry is moving from secure conference rooms underneath the Capitol and into the public eye. On Wednesday, diplomats William Taylor and George Kent will testify in open hearings, followed by former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Friday. And as House Democrats begin to present the evidence they’ve gathered in a series of televised hearings, they face the difficult task of persuading a deeply divided country that President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine amounts to an impeachable offense.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s impeachment polling tracker, Americans are narrowly split on whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office — as of publication, 47.2 percent are in favor and 45.0 percent are against. (Support for beginning the impeachment process is a little higher, at 51 percent.)
As you can see in the chart above, Democrats seem to have already picked off most of the persuadable voters when it comes to impeachment support, too. The share of Americans who think Trump should be impeached and removed has been essentially unchanged since mid-October. So how much can the Democrats’ public hearings be reasonably expected to shift the needle?
In the past, congressional hearings have been a powerful weapon. When control of the government is divided between two parties, investigations have been a vehicle for the House majority to publicly and repeatedly hammer the president. And research has found that the cumulative toll of hearings has been effective in weakening presidents, particularly as it pertains to their approval rating, so a blitz of hearings outlining the case against Trump could harm him. But then again, Trump has proven surprisingly resilient in the face of House Democrats’ investigations so far — although his approval rating is hovering around its lower bound at 41.3 percent, it hasn’t yet dipped below 40 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of presidential approval. There’s reason to believe that could continue even after the impeachment process goes public.
Congressional investigations can hurt presidents’ approval ratings — but not always
In the past, the relentless negative attention generated by hearings and investigations was a fairly effective way to undermine the president — or at least that’s what political scientists Eric Schickler and Douglas Kriner have found in their analysis of data on congressional hearings held between 1953 and 2014. In their book on congressional investigations, they found that when the party controlling the House was not the president’s party, there were on average 37 more investigative days, and those hearings systematically lowered presidential approval ratings.18
And when Kriner and Schickler modeled the relationship between presidential approval ratings and investigative activity, they found that more days of hearings dragged down a president’s approval rating. For instance, a month with 20 days of investigative hearings caused an approximately 2.5-percentage point drop in presidential approval; for a month with 40 investigative hearing days, presidential approval fell by around 4 points.19 (This was after even controlling for external factors that may affect views of the president, like the state of the economy. They also accounted for the effect that presidential approval can have on Congress’s willingness to investigate to begin with.)
The lesson here for Democrats is that investigations that unfold over weeks or months, rather than days, have historically damaged the president. Kriner and Schickler didn’t try to isolate the specific impact of hearings related to impeachment (although they were included in the dataset), but in an interview, they pointed out that President Nixon’s approval rating fell significantly in the summer of 1973, when the Senate Watergate Committee held weeks of public hearings on Nixon’s ties to the Watergate burglary and cover-up, which 71 percent of Americans watched live.
But the impeachment process is especially complex, and it hasn’t always negatively impacted the president. President Clinton’s approval rating remained high throughout his impeachment, never dipping below 60 percent. House Republicans only held four hearings during the entire process, though, so it’s hard to say what would have happened if they had conducted a longer, independent investigation.
Previous public hearings haven’t appeared to weaken Trump
Of course, this isn’t the first investigation of Trump House Democrats have launched. Democrats reopened the House investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election soon after taking control of the chamber, and in connection with this and other investigations of the president, secured high-profile, public testimony from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and special counsel Robert Mueller — yet neither appeared to substantially change opinions of Trump or of impeachment. So it’s entirely possible that the public impeachment hearings won’t have a big effect on either support for impeachment or Trump’s approval ratings.
One theory for why Trump’s approval ratings might be unusually resilient in the face of investigations is that it’s already quite low and is also incredibly steady. Past presidents’ favorability has tended to fluctuate in response to news events, but starting with President Obama, voters’ views about the president’s job performance have been much less variable. “We may be in a world where there’s a core of Americans who will continue to support the president no matter what’s revealed about him,” Schickler said.
And Democrats’ time crunch could limit the impact as well. They’ve already scheduled three hearings, but it’s unclear how many more days of open testimony they’ll be able to get on the calendar before public phase wraps up.
The impeachment hearings could have a bigger impact, but it will still be an uphill climb
One big difference between the upcoming impeachment hearings and Democrats’ previous investigations of Trump is the number of people who are willing to testify publicly. Before the Ukraine allegations broke, Democrats struggled to secure testimony from people who could shed light on what was happening in the Trump administration. And although the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, a number of bureaucrats and diplomats have appeared for closed-door depositions anyway, and will now be testifying publicly. The televised hearings will likely unfold over several weeks and will be closely covered by the media, which are both promising signs for Democrats. “The cumulative weight of the hearings and the coverage is exactly the kind of thing that can lead to approval ratings being dragged down,” Schickler said.
But that doesn’t mean that the hearings will lead to a huge shift in people’s views. Kriner said it might be easier to nudge people in favor of impeachment than to erode Trump’s approval ratings, since disapproval of Trump currently appears more entrenched than support for impeachment. But the fact that some of the biggest bombshells to come out of the investigation are already public — like European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland’s recent confirmation that military aid to Ukraine was contingent on the country announcing a probe of the Bidens — might dampen the effect of the hearings. It could potentially even result in a situation similar to the Russia investigation, where many of the most dramatic details in Mueller’s final report were already made public through court documents and reporting.
“There are advantages to having dramatic moments where unexpected things are said,” Kriner said. But because a lot of the facts are already known, he added, a big swing in opinion seemed unlikely: “[F]rankly it’s just very hard to know what would change the minds of the people who are still on Trump’s side.”
However, one thing is clear: Gabbard doesn’t seem to be planning to drop out any time soon. In late October, she announced that she would not seek reelection to her seat in Hawaii, and while she’s by no means a front-runner in the race, she has managed to qualify for the November debate and is just one poll shy from making the December debate after Quinnipiac University released a New Hampshire survey on Monday that found her at 6 percent. So here’s a look at what Gabbard’s support looks like, and how that can help us make sense of her unusual candidacy.
For starters, despite her upstart campaign, Gabbard doesn’t have a ton of supporters: She’s averaging 1 to 2 percent in national surveys and 2 to 4 percent in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But she’s managed to meet the higher polling thresholds for debate qualification, so her support has grown at least a little bit — and what’s more, a chunk of it seems to be exclusively considering backing Gabbard. Back in October FiveThirtyEight partnered with Ipsos to dig into candidate support before and after the fourth Democratic debate. Our survey found that 13 percent of Gabbard’s supporters said they were only considering voting for her, a larger share than all Democratic candidates other than former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom have more support overall.
Which candidates’ supporters are considering only them?
Share of each candidates’ supporters who are only considering voting for that candidate, according to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll
Supporters
candidate
Exclusive*
Total
Share
Biden
218
996
21.9%
–
Sanders
100
683
14.6
–
Gabbard
11
83
13.1
–
O’Rourke
29
245
11.7
–
Warren
107
917
11.6
–
Yang
14
187
7.4
–
Buttigieg
27
437
6.2
–
Castro
6
105
5.7
–
Harris
23
433
5.2
–
Klobuchar
8
180
4.2
–
Booker
4
201
2.2
–
Steyer
1
84
1.4
–
*Only considering one candidate
From a survey of 1,761 likely Democratic primary voters who were surveyed from Oct. 15 to Oct. 16.
So what do we know about Gabbard’s base? For one thing, it’s overwhelmingly male — in The Economist’s national polling average, her support among men is in the mid-single digits, while her support among women is practically nonexistent.
This trend is evident in other recent polls as well. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll of Iowa found Gabbard at 5 percent among men and 1 percent among women, and Quinnipiac’s new survey of New Hampshire found her at 9 percent among men and 4 percent among women. A late October national poll from Suffolk University found her at 6 percent among men and 2 percent among women.
Gabbard’s supporters are also likely to fall outside of traditional Democratic circles. Her supporters, for instance, are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. An early November poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 24 percent of Democratic primary voters who voted for Trump in 2016 backed Gabbard. By comparison, 12 percent of these voters backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 11 percent backed Biden and 10 percent backed Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Primary voters who identified as conservative also overwhelmingly backed Gabbard in that poll (16 percent) — only Biden and Harris enjoyed more support from this group (27 percent and 17 percent, respectively).
And a University of New Hampshire/CNN survey in late October found Gabbard actually ahead of Biden among Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire who identified as Republican, at 28 percent to Biden’s 18 percent. To be sure, the number of conservative, Republican and/or Trump voters in these polls was not large, but considering Gabbard doesn’t get that much backing to begin with — 3 percent in The Economist’s poll and 5 percent in the University of New Hampshire’s — these voters do make up a significant chunk of her support.
Quinnipiac’s New Hampshire survey also signaled Gabbard might have success among independent voters in the Democratic primary, a group that boosted Sanders in the 2016 race. In that poll, 10 percent of registered independents backed Gabbard versus just 1 percent of registered Democrats. That could be significant for Gabbard, because independents are allowed to vote in the New Hampshire primary (registered Republicans are not). Quinnipiac didn’t separate out conservatives from moderates in its ideology crosstabs, but once again less liberal voters were also more inclined to support Gabbard: 9 percent of moderate or conservative voters said they supported Gabbard as opposed to 2 percent of both somewhat liberal and very liberal voters.
The nontraditional nature of Gabbard’s support, plus the criticism she’s gotten from Democrats like Hillary Clinton — who has gone as far as to suggest that the Republicans are “grooming” Gabbard, a “favorite of the Russians,” as a spoiler candidate — has certainly helped fuel the idea that Gabbard might run as a third-party candidate. Gabbard has denied it so far, although it is hard to believe her strategy is a winning one in the Democratic primary. While loyal, her base of support just isn’t that big, meaning she needs to make serious inroads with more traditional Democratic constituencies. On the one hand, her back and forth with Clinton may have given her a boost in recent weeks, so battling the party establishment could be a useful strategy. On the other hand, garnering approval from conservative media isn’t likely to improve her poor favorability among Democrats or attract the support she needs to win the primary, no matter how loyal her base is.
Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.
Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.
By Eugene Linden
Mr. Linden has written widely about climate change.
2100
Transit workers pumped water out of the South Ferry subway station in Lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
For decades, most scientists saw climate change as a distant prospect. We now know that thinking was wrong. This summer, for instance, a heat wave in Europe penetrated the Arctic, pushing temperatures into the 80s across much of the Far North and, according to the Belgian climate scientist Xavier Fettweis, melting some 40 billion tons of Greenland’s ice sheet.
Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.
Science is a process of discovery. It can move slowly as the pieces of a puzzle fall together and scientists refine their investigative tools. But in the case of climate, this deliberation has been accompanied by inertia born of bureaucratic caution and politics. A recent essay in Scientific American argued that scientists “tend to underestimate the severity of threats and the rapidity with which they might unfold” and said one of the reasons was “the perceived need for consensus.” This has had severe consequences, diluting what should have been a sense of urgency and vastly understating the looming costs of adaptation and dislocation as the planet continues to warm.
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group of thousands of scientists representing 195 countries, said in its first report that climate change would arrive at a stately pace, that the methane-laden Arctic permafrost was not in danger of thawing, and that the Antarctic ice sheets were stable.
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Relying on the climate change panel’s assessment, economists estimated that the economic hit would be small, providing further ammunition against an aggressive approach to reducing emissions and to building resilience to climate change.
As we now know, all of those predictions turned out to be completely wrong. Which makes you wonder whether the projected risks of further warming, dire as they are, might still be understated. How bad will things get?
So far, the costs of underestimation have been enormous. New York City’s subway system did not flood in its first 108 years, but Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 storm surge caused nearly $5 billion in water damage, much of which is still not repaired. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey gave Houston and the surrounding region a $125 billion lesson about the costs of misjudging the potential for floods.
Image
Flooded roads in Beaumont, Tex., after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
The climate change panel seems finally to have caught up with the gravity of the climate crisis. Last year, the organization detailed the extraordinary difficulty of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), over the next 80 years, and the grim consequences that will result even if that goal is met.
More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue.
Conventional wisdom, in the 1950s,
on the pace of major climate change:
8,000 years
Each large square = 100 years
1960s through the ’80s:
Centuries or millenniums
1990s to today:
5 to 50 years
Conventional wisdom, in the 1950s, on the pace of major climate change:
8,000 years
Each large square = 100 years
1960s through the ’80s:
Centuries or millenniums
1990s to today:
5 to 50 years
The word “upended” does not do justice to the revolution in climate science wrought by the discovery of sudden climate change. The realization that the global climate can swing between warm and cold periods in a matter of decades or even less came as a profound shock to scientists who thought those shifts took hundreds if not thousands of years.
Scientists knew major volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes could affect climate rapidly, but such occurrences were uncommon and unpredictable. Absent such rare events, changes in climate looked steady and smooth, a consequence of slow-moving geophysical factors like the earth’s orbital cycle in combination with the tilt of the planet’s axis, or shifts in the continental plates.
Then, in the 1960s, a few scientists began to focus on an unusual event that took place after the last ice age. Scattered evidence suggested that the post-ice age warming was interrupted by a sudden cooling that began around 12,000 years ago and ended abruptly 1,300 years later. The era was named the Younger Dryas for a plant that proliferated during that cold period.
At first, some scientists questioned the rapidity and global reach of the cooling. A report from the National Academies of Science in 1975 acknowledged the Younger Dryas but concluded that it would take centuries for the climate to change in a meaningful way. But not everyone agreed. The climate scientist Wallace Broecker at Columbia had offered a theory that changes in ocean circulation could bring about sudden climate shifts like the Younger Dryas.
And it was Dr. Broecker who, in 1975, the same year as that National Academies report playing down the Younger Dryas, published a paper, titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in which he predicted that emissions of carbon dioxide would raise global temperatures significantly in the 21st century. This is now seen as prophetic, but at the time, Dr. Broecker was an outlier.
Then, in the early 1990s, scientists completed more precise studies of ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice sheet. Dust and oxygen isotopes encased in the cores provided a detailed climate record going back eons. It revealed that there had been 25 rapid climate change events like the Younger Dryas in the last glacial period.
The evidence in those ice cores would prove pivotal in turning the conventional wisdom. As the science historian Spencer Weart put it: “How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not.”
In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” which described the new consensus as a “paradigm shift.” This was a reversal of its 1975 report.
“Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records,” the report said, and added that “changes of up to 16 degrees Celsius and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years.”
The National Academies report added that the implications of such potential rapid changes had not yet been considered by policymakers and economists. And even today, 17 years later, a substantial portion of the American public remains unaware or unconvinced it is happening.
24%
… believe that half of climate scientists, or fewer, think human-caused global warming is happening.
of Americans …
… believe that between 51 and 90 percent of scientists think global warming is happening.
36%
… correctly understand that almost all climate scientists think global warming is happening.
17%
21%
Don’t know
24%
36%
17%
21%
of Americans …
… believe that
half of climate scientists, or fewer, think human-caused global warming is happening.
… believe that between 51 and 90 percent of scientists think global warming is happening.
… correctly understand
that almost all climate scientists think global warming is happening.
Don’t know
Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication survey conducted in April; figures do not add up to 100 percent because of rounding
Image
Melt water poured into a fjord in western Greenland this summer when a heat wave that smashed records in Europe moved over the island.Credit...Caspar Haarl'v/Associated Press
Were the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to melt, sea levels would rise by an estimated 225 feet worldwide. Few expect that to happen anytime soon. But those ice sheets now look a lot more fragile than they did to the climate change panel in 1995, when it said that little change was expected over the next hundred years.
In the years since, data has shown that both Greenland and Antarctica have been shedding ice far more rapidly than anticipated. Ice shelves, which are floating extensions of land ice, hold back glaciers from sliding into the sea and eventually melting. In the early 2000s, ice shelves began disintegrating in several parts of Antarctica, and scientists realized that process could greatly accelerate the demise of the vastly larger ice sheets themselves. And some major glaciers are dumping ice directly into the ocean.
By 2014, a number of scientists had concluded that an irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet had already begun, and computer modeling in 2016 indicated that its disintegration in concert with other melting could raise sea levels up to six feet by 2100, about twice the increase described as a possible worst-case scenario just three years earlier. At that pace, some of the world’s great coastal cities, including New York, London and Hong Kong, would become inundated.
Then this year, a review of 40 years of satellite images suggested that the East Antarctic ice sheet, which was thought to be relatively stable, may also be shedding vast amounts of ice.
250 cm
(8.2 ft)
Changing Estimates of Sea Level Rise by 2100
200
I.P.C.C.
NOAA
WORST CASE
MID-RANGE
150 cm
(5 ft)
120
110 cm
(3.6 ft)
98
95
70
66 cm
59
55
55
55
26
1990
’95
2001
’07
’12
’13
’17
YEAR EACH ESTIMATE WAS PUBLISHED
Note: The I.P.C.C.'s 2007 estimate of future sea level rise did not include satellite data on the contribution of melt water from Greenland and Antarctica because of disagreements among scientists.
250 cm
(8.2 ft)
Changing Estimates of Sea Level Rise by 2100
200
I.P.C.C.
NOAA
WORST CASE
MID-RANGE
150 cm
(5 ft)
120
110 cm
(3.6 ft)
98
95
70
66 cm
59
55
55
55
26
1990
’95
2001
’07
’12
’13
’17
YEAR EACH ESTIMATE WAS PUBLISHED
Note: The I.P.C.C.'s 2007 estimate of future sea level rise did not include satellite data on the contribution of melt water from Greenland and Antarctica because of disagreements among scientists.
Image
Rifts in the Amery ice shelf in Eastern Antarctica. In September, a section of the shelf broke away, forming a 600-square-mile iceberg.Credit...Richard Coleman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As the seas rise, they are also warming at a pace unanticipated as recently as five years ago. This is very bad news. For one thing, a warmer ocean means more powerful storms, and die-offs of marine life, but it also suggests that the planet is more sensitive to increased carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought.
The melting of permafrost has also defied expectations. This is ground that has remained frozen for at least two consecutive years and covers around a quarter of the exposed land mass of the Northern Hemisphere. As recently as 1995, it was thought to be stable. But by 2005, the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that up to 90 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2100, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
For all of the missed predictions, changes in the weather are confirming earlier expectations that a warming globe would be accompanied by an increase in thefrequency and severity of extreme weather. And there are new findings unforeseen by early studies, such as the extremely rapid intensification of storms, as on Sept. 1, when Hurricane Dorian’s sustained winds intensified from 150 to 185 miles per hour in just nine hours, and last year when Hurricane Michael grew from tropical depression to major hurricane in just two days.
If the Trump administration has its way, even the revised worst-case scenarios may turn out to be too rosy. In late August, the administration announced a plan to roll back regulations intended to limit methane emissions resulting from oil and gas exploration, despite opposition from some of the largest companies subject to those regulations. More recently, its actions approached the surreal as the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into those auto companies that have agreed in principle to abide by higher gas mileage standards required by California. The administration also formally revoked a waiver allowing California to set stricter limits on tailpipe emissions than the federal government.
Even if scientists end up having lowballed their latest assessments of the consequences of the greenhouse gases we continue to emit into the atmosphere, their predictions are dire enough. But the Trump administration has made its posture toward climate change abundantly clear: Bring it on!
It’s already here. And it is going to get worse. A lot worse.
Image
The flooded roadway into the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy.Credit...Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Shared because it's a great summary of the possible outcomes, and also for this line: "Late night shows’ writer’s rooms get a little ‘70s retro, firing up the cocaine to fuel them through four more years of comb over jokes."
It’s November. That means your seasonal depression is settling in for the long haul, the 2020 election is a year away, and the Congressional Democrats are taking the impeachment inquiry into its next, very public phase. This week, some transcripts of formerly closed-door testimony were made public, and televised hearings will now follow.
Given that there are three months until the Iowa caucuses and the official kickoff of voting season — aka, political consequences time! — we’ve been thinking about the various ways that impeachment might affect each party’s 2020 electoral prospects. And there are a lot of them. So while we’re not oracles over here, we can already divine how this could end. Think of this as your wham, bam thank you ma’am primer on impeachment and its potential 2020 outcomes.
I) Things Are Bad For Trump And Very Good For Democrats
This set of scenarios imagines a black and white version of the moral-political universe: the American people believe Trump abused his power and they push to punish him personally and his party more broadly.
1) Trump loses everything: In this version of events, the public impeachment hearings become appointment viewing for the nation, attracting tons of attention and meaningfully shifting public opinion. The Democrats pull off the synthesizing of facts and narrative in such a way that a majority of independents and a healthy swath of Republicans turn against President Trump. (Right now, FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls asking about impeachment and removal from office shows 47.5 percent of Americans in favor, 45.6 percent opposed. Currently, only 11.1 percent of Republicans think the president should be impeached.) So much does the tide turn, in fact, that Trump loses his congressional allies and is forced to resign. Think Nixon. Mike Pence becomes president, but only for a few months; the public sees Pence as irrevocably linked to Trump. Like Gerald Ford’s eventual fate, but all sped up. Even sympathetic Republican voters stay home in key states, while key swing demographics move toward the Democrats. Pence loses the election and what’s worse, the GOP loses the Senate, as vulnerable senators are seen as having done too little, too late. Ouch.
2) Voters abandon Trump but stick with the GOP: Congress remains split along partisan lines and few in the Republican Party end up pulling a Fredo on Trump. He doesn’t need to resign and stays at the top of the GOP ticket in 2020. But the televised hearings are damning to Trump — the public doesn’t like what it sees, and remembers that come November. The impeachment proceeding lowers morale among Republican voters who aren’t part of Trump’s hardcore base (the president currently has a 41.3 percent approval rating and a 54.6 percent disapproval), leading to lowered turnout particularly among reluctant Trump voters in key states. (We first identified reluctant Trump voters in the wake of the 2016 election as Republicans who had cast their ballot for the president unenthusiastically. This group tends to be better educated than the rest of Trump voters, though like most of the president’s voters, they are white, and middle-aged or older.) This scenario might look like the 2018 midterms, when independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin. In this scenario, Trump loses the election but things are a little better for GOP as a whole; it keeps the Senate. Democrats get two houses: the White House and the House of Representatives.
II) Things Are Bad For Trump But OK For Republicans
This set of scenarios imagines a post-impeachment political landscape that has rid itself of Trump. The Republican Party is in a state of flux, trying to figure out what comes next after the end of an administration and party platform driven by a single, powerful personality.
1) President Pence: Impeachment hearings go really badly. The tide of public opinion turns against Trump and he loses his allies in Congress and is forced to resign. This scenario is a little like the one we started with, except with one key difference: Pence becomes president and wins the general election. He draws huge turnout from Republican voters who love Trump — the campaign charges them up about the unjust fate of Trump — while also reassuring reluctant Trump voters that he, Pence, will make for a steadier hand on the till. Currently, it should be noted, Pence has a net average approval of -5.5 percent according to a Real Clear Politics average; Trump is at -12.0 percent.
2) The Republican Civil War: The tide of public opinion turns somewhat against Trump, but not enough to shake the faith of leading GOP figures — Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham still watch the Super Bowl with Trump. But certain rebellious GOP figures are fed up and have had enough of hiding their concerns: Mitt Romney joins Jeff Flake (remember him?) in calling for Trump’s impeachment and removal. The moderate GOP caucus falls in line with these figures and the whole lot of them decide to throw their support behind the candidacy of Bill Weld, or, even better, back Romney in a longshot primary bid. They know they probably won’t win, but they siphon off support from Trump and lodge enough attacks for the president to be mortally wounded come general election time. He loses, and Romney et al finally settle in to implementing the 2012 GOP post-mortem plan to win back Latinos.
III) Things Go Very Well For Trump And Backfire On Democrats
Oops. The Democrats took a gamble on impeachment and lost. Their narrative doesn’t gel on TV; the details of the Ukraine scandal are too mired in diplomatic minutiae. People can’t keep track of the cast of characters. Who’s Kurt Volker again? Wait, what did Gordon Sondland do that was so bad? The Fox News apparatus proves to be a powerful story-telling voice for the president’s side of things, and Democrats can’t push their advantage.
1) Trump wins: The House remains split along partisan lines — nothing really changes after the vote to open the inquiry. Few if any Republican senators vote against Trump during his Senate trial. And after watching a whole lot of CSPAN-style television, the American public is divided over what they’re seeing, a la Brett Kavanaugh. (Republican support for now-Justice Kavanaugh only increased following his testimony while Democratic opposition ramped up.) The election is a squeaker. A combination of semi-ambivalent Republicans and low-energy Democrats — perhaps their base isn’t entirely thrilled about their nominee? — leads to Trump winning the election. The Democrats keep the House, the Republicans keep the Senate. Late night shows’ writer’s rooms get a little ‘70s retro, firing up the cocaine to fuel them through four more years of comb over jokes.
2) Utter chaos and destruction for Democrats: Congress remains split along partisan lines and the televised hearings leave the American public divided, a la Kavanaugh. Republican voters are angry, though. Really angry. The election is a squeaker but Trump pulls through, thanks to his enthused base, reluctant Trump voters and independents who think that the Democrats have led the country through a national pain in the neck for naught. (Independents are the real surprise, given nearly half of them supported impeachment in early November 2019.) The Democrats not only lose the White House, but also the House, as Democratic members from more moderate districts are punished for having put the president on trial. The Democratic gains of the 2018 midterms are all but completely reversed as college-educated whites from the suburbs — the Trump era’s stereotypical swing voter — make their way back to the GOP side of the dividing line.
3) The weird mixed-bag: The public hearings are damning but Republican voters and elected officials stick with Trump. Democratic voters nationwide are ready to dump Trump, though. Turnout on both sides is high. In certain key swing states, vulnerable Republican senators are ousted (a recent Morning Consult poll shows sliding net approval ratings for some Republican senators up for reelection). The Democrats keep the House, miraculously win the Senate and come out ahead in the popular vote, too. But in a re-hashing of the 2016 election, Trump wins the electoral college. The nation goes to bed confused on Nov. 3, 2020, and spends the next four years wondering whether there was ever any other way things could have ended.
A Jobs Surprise / Jim Mattis Fires Back
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