Editors’ Blog

Daily COVID cases in New York City are now back to roughly what they were prior to the emergence of Omicron in early December 2021. This chart (from The New York Times) captures the sheer scale of the surge in terms of spread and infection if not severity of disease or mortality. Nationwide, cases are on a similar trajectory but perhaps a week or two behind.

It is still breathtaking to see in the context of the previous two years.

What started as a messaging effort by activists and good government lobbyists pushing Congress to reform the Electoral Count Act has turned into a fairly common talking point for Republicans in a matter of months. It’s been a little surprising to witness.

I’m highly skeptical of the savior/voice of reason role carved out for Ivanka Trump in this report from the Associated Press. But it’s still a very illuminating account of the course of events at the White House on the afternoon of January 6th. In one noteworthy addition, the account notes that as news networks were reporting live video of violent assaults and chaos at the Capitol Trump was cheering them on and seemingly providing his own live color commentary, rewinding and replaying the best parts to watch again. He couldn’t figure out why everyone else didn’t think it was as cool as he did.

You’ve likely seen from Kate Riga’s reporting that things were trending in this direction. But over the weekend, Dave Wasserman of The Cook Report announced that according to his analysis the Democrats are now the net winners of the 2020–22 redistricting process nationwide.

Take a moment to let that sink in. For much of last year people were assuming that Republican state legislatures were going to use redistricting to engineer a gerrymander that might put the House and thus functional control of the federal government out of the reach of Democrats for the next decade. But that’s not how it’s turned out. Wasserman now thinks Democrats are on track for a net 2–3 seat gain.

Before we go any further there are critical caveats to understand here.

“Were you struck, as was I, by the absence of an ad hominem attack on Pence in Trump’s responsive statement? Trump attacks ‘Old Crow Mitch McConnell’ but nary a word against Pence. Looks to me like an invitation for a quid pro quo — I won’t attack you if you are circumspect with the Jan 6 Committee.  He knows that Pence has the goods but he is offering a non-aggression pact.”

The Republican National Committee today voted to censure Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger. But in the course of doing that they officially declared the January 6th insurrection and the conspiracy that preceded it as “legitimate political discourse.”

As we’ve been saying for months, it is an explicitly pro-insurrection political party.

I think public opinion, which is currently sour on the direction of the country and thus on the Democrats as well, isn’t mostly driven by jobs numbers or other government statistics. It’s more fundamentally driven by lived experience. And a lot sucks right now, even though there’s been a lot of positive economic news. Having said that, there’s really no question the consistently flawed jobs tabulations have hurt Joe Biden significantly. Again and again we’ve found out that a slackening recovery was actually a series of counting errors. The reports are “revised” later. But those revisions, in the nature of things, don’t get a fraction of the attention that the monthly reports do. I’m basically certain there’s no funny business going on. At least in broad outlines the cause seems pretty clear: the chaos of the pandemic has at least temporarily broken our system of tabulating jobs numbers.

Journalists have taken way too long to absorb this fact.

You know the news by now: Over the weekend, former President Trump told a crowd of supporters that if he runs/wins in 2024 he will pardon insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. It’s egregious enough on its own, but a report surfaced yesterday revealing that Trump’s been talking about this for a while: in the waning days of his presidency, just after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol trying to do a coup, Trump was obsessing over the idea of potentially offering a blanket pardon to his supporters who attacked the Capitol.

These numbers came out a week or ten days ago. I had seen them before. But seeing them mentioned again today just made me marvel. In December 2021 unvaccinated people in the United States were 97 times more likely to die of COVID than people who are vaccinated and boosted. 97 times more likely. Just think about that number.

The metric is ‘only’ 14 times more likely compared to people who are vaccinated but not boosted. That is a remarkable level of protective benefit by any standard. But I find the degree of benefit from the booster even more eye-popping. It’s not a marginal difference. And to think tens of millions of Americans simply refuse to take this simple, free step.

There’s a fascinating passage in these new Trump election lawyer memos from the pre-January 6th period. One particularly jumped out at me in which Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro casually runs down the relative difficulty of stealing the election in each of the key states.

“In conclusion, it appears that voting by an alternative slate of electors is unproblematic in Arizona and Wisconsin; slightly problematic in Michigan (requiring access to the senate chamber); somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania in the event that one or more electors don’t attend (require gubernatorial ratification of alternates); and very problematic in Nevada (given the role accorded to the Secretary of State).”