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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 1, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

For those of you exhausted by this week’s news, you can take a break tonight. Lots of moving pieces are in play, but nothing that would hold a historian to her desk a hundred years from now, so skip this letter with a clean conscience.

For those of you who do want some reflections, I am struck today by the media’s breathless recounting of how the ongoing negotiations over the two infrastructure bills shows that the Democrats are in disarray and President Joe Biden’s agenda is crashing and burning. The New York Times called a delay in the vote on the measures “a humiliating blow to Mr. Biden and Democrats” and wondered if “Biden’s economic agenda could be revived.”

Exactly a year ago, the news reported that Trump adviser Hope Hicks had coronavirus and that she had recently traveled with White House personnel on Air Force One. The stock market dropped 400 points on the news. The previous day had been the infamous presidential debate when Trump yelled and snarled at Biden, while his entourage, including Hicks, refused to wear masks despite a mandate that they must do so. We did not know who else might be infected.

Hours later, we learned that the president and First Lady were both sick, and within hours the president would be hospitalized.

The rest of the news provided a snapshot of the Trump presidency:

•A study of more than 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic between January 1 and May 26 showed that Trump was “likely the largest driver of…Covid-19 misinformation.”

•Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. General H.R. McMaster, told MSNBC that Trump was “aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to disrupt the November election.

•We learned that Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, had not disclosed that in 2006, she signed an anti-abortion ad in the South Bend Tribune. It appeared near another ad from the same organization that called for putting “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.”

•A tape leaked of Melania Trump complaining about having to decorate the White House for Christmas—“I’m working… my a** off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations?”—and then said of criticism that she was not involved with the children separated from their parents at the southern border: “Give me a f****** break.”

•News broke that Donald Trump, Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had left the Fox News Channel after an employee complained of sexual harassment, saying she required the employee to work at her apartment, where she would sometimes be naked, and where she would share inappropriate photos of men and discuss her sexual activities with them. She denied any misconduct, but FNC settled the case against her for $4 million.

•The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, passed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief measure. No Republicans voted for it.

•Right-wing conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged with four felonies in Michigan for intimidating voters, conspiring to violate election laws, and using a computer to commit a crime.

•Claiming he wanted to prevent “voter fraud,” Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas limited the number of locations for dropping off mail-in ballots to one site per county. While Republican counties tended to have just one location already, Democratic Harris County, the third largest county in the country, with a population of more than 4.7 million and an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, had previously used 12. Democratic Travis County, which includes Austin, previously had four.

That was one single day in the Trump presidency.

In contrast, today, the Democrats are trying to pass an extremely complicated package, consisting of two major infrastructure bills, backed by different constituencies, that will alter the direction of our country by investing in ordinary Americans and revising the tax code to claw back some of the 2017 tax cuts the Republican Congress gave to corporations and the very wealthy. Although there is no guarantee they will pass, the bills are currently still on track, and all the relevant parties are still at work discussing them, exactly as one would expect.

What is the unusual piece in this process is that the other major American political party—the Republicans—is refusing to participate in the crafting of a major bill that is extremely popular.

This infrastructure package is huge, but it is hardly the only item in Biden’s agenda. In March 2021, the Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that has helped the administration produce more jobs in its first six months than any other administration in American history.

Not a single Republican voted for that bill; it passed while they were focusing on the ungendered Potato Head kin and the decision of the Dr. Seuss estate to stop the publication of some of Theodor Geisel’s less popular books.

The economy has recovered in large part because of the Biden administration’s enormous success at distributing the coronavirus vaccines to every American who wanted one.

Republican lawmakers have worked against this process, and today we crossed the unthinkable line of 700,000 officially counted deaths from Covid-19.

Now, the administration has begun to put vaccine mandates into effect, and they are working. Those who insisted they would never get vaccines changed their minds when employers and public venues required them. Today, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state will require coronavirus vaccines for school children, along with the ten others it already requires, as soon as the Food and Drug Administration fully approves them for use in children.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated state legislatures are following through on the voter suppression noted a year ago, passing measures to cut down Democratic voting and install Republican operatives in key election posts before the 2022 election.

As political scientist and foreign relations expert David Rothkopf tweeted: “Are the Dems the ones in disarray when they are crafting specific programs while the GOP offers up only cynical Tweets & obstruction? The only GOP agenda items are voter suppression, defending the worst president in history & when they have power, pushing tax cuts for the rich.”

For my part, I’m not sure what is driving the stories that seem to paint Biden’s work as a lost cause: The recent position that Democrats are hapless? That it’s safer to be negative than positive? That our news cycle demands drama?

Whatever it is, I continue to maintain that the issue right now is not Democrats’ negotiations over the infrastructure bills—regardless of how they turn out—but that Republican lawmakers are actively working to undermine our democracy.

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/24/nightmare-scenario-book-excerpt/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/us/amy-coney-barrett-abortion.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/01/us/california-students-covid-vaccine-requirement/index.html

https://www.newsweek.com/texas-ag-says-trump-wouldve-lost-state-if-it-hadnt-blocked-mail-ballots-applications-being-1597909

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/politics/infrastructure-democrats-pelosi.html

David Rothkopf @djrothkopfThe NYT does it again: "House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill as Democrats Feud." On the homepage they call it a "Big Setback for the Biden Agenda." Really? Really? A day? A couple of days? The media is getting this story 100% wrong.

House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill as Democrats FeudA liberal revolt left Democrats short of votes, but leaders insisted they would bring up the measure again on Friday, giving them more time to reach a deal on a separate climate and safety net bill.nytimes.com

2,463 Retweets9,500 Likes

October 1st 2021

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Politics #history #perspective #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From an American #the news #legislation #fairness #last year

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moomingitz · 3 years

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Since you live in Texas what is your take on the news of the mask mandate and covid restrictions expiring next week?

(Obviously late reply here.)

Besides it being obvious that Greg Abbott is trying to distract people from that whole winter storm shit show last month, my basic reaction was, "What mandate?"

No one was ever really enforcing the mask mandate alone to begin with, at least when it comes to the general area I live in. Businesses have been busy and packed, and people have been going to each others houses and having parties, for months on end now. If it wasn't for people wearing masks and the signs and stickers on the floor it was business as usual since the end of summer. Hell, the last two times I’ve went to Dollar Tree the cashiers weren’t even wearing them. Texas was pretty much unofficially fully open even before Abbott even made the announcement.

And it for most of the part wasn’t that much different yesterday, when the mandate officially expired. While there was a bit more people going into the stores maskless from what I saw yesterday, the overwhelming majority of people I saw were still wearing masks anyway. Even then the people who weren’t wearing masks weren’t getting up in other people’s personal space and kept their distance, weren’t being rude or obnoxious, and most of them put on masks when they went to go stand in line and check out anyway since that’s where you’re for sure going to be up and close to people.

Texas is a really big and diverse state, so of course it naturally depends on where you live in it.

Here’s the thing that sensationalized “news” media doesn’t seem to want to mention; Where you live is a big a determination of how the spread of viruses can go. There’s a reason why big cities and metropolitan areas get hit the worst when it comes to virus outbreaks. They’re more densely populated, and places like poor/lower income areas in them especially do not have the best living conditions. There’s also how hospitals in big cities are always short staffed and under prepared, because our country’s healthcare system is a fucking joke. Even back in the late 90s it wasn’t uncommon to have to wait 4 hours at the least to get seen in hospitals in cities like Las Vegas. That’s why cities like El Paso and Houston were hit hard, while the more rural area I live in, and the other rural counties surrounding it, pretty much went untouched during this whole thing, despite the majority of the population where I live consisting of the elderly, disabled, and low income. The same thing goes for why L.A. got hit so bad over the winter: A densely populated city that consists of a lot of densely populated low-income and poor neighborhoods that don’t have the best living conditions. Properly using PPE(I’m not talking about just making sure to cover both the nose and mouth, too) can only do so much when the living conditions are not safe or sanitary, and when the overall healthcare system is a joke.

Honestly, I’m more worried about potential altercations or brawls breaking out between customers, or customers and employees, over whether to wear a mask or not.

#texas #personal #opinions #asks

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worldofwardcraft · 3 years

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The forgotten victims of GOP vote suppression.

June 24, 2021

The despicable voter suppression laws being passed by Republican state legislatures across the land are obviously aimed at disenfranchising people of color, college students and basically anybody suspected of voting Democratic. But there's yet another group negatively impacted by these noxious edicts — disabled voters, of which researchers at Rutgers University report there are more than 38 million.

A recent New York Times article quotes Susie Angel of Austin, TX, who's had cerebral palsy since childhood and is confined to a wheelchair: “They’re really making it so we don’t have a voice anymore. And without that, we can’t get the things that we need to survive.” The article also has this to say about Americans with physical disabilities.

Now, after an election in which mail-in voting helped them turn out in large numbers, the restrictive proposals are simultaneously threatening their rights and testing their nascent political influence.

Texas is already saddled with some of the worst voting laws in the nation, and a new bill includes (among other cruelties) a ban on drive-through voting, restricting access for the disabled even further. Interestingly, Governor Greg Abbott, who has announced his eagerness to sign it into law, is himself disabled.

Elsewhere, a bill in Wisconsin would limit who could return voters' ballots on their behalf, weakening voting opportunities for those identified as unable to vote in person due to age, illness or disability. Another Wisconsin bill calls for anyone under 65 applying for that status to provide a doctor's note.

In Florida, a new rule requires people to apply for absentee ballots every election cycle, burdening those whose disability makes it impossible to access the county website. And strict signature match regulations significantly encumber those who have trouble signing their names consistently due to visual impairment, brain injury or other disability.

Skipping over to Georgia, that state has replaced signature match with a requirement that absentee voters include the number from a state ID. Of course, many disabled Georgians don't have a driver's license and can't easily get to a state office to obtain that mandatory ID. Here's the Times again.

Removing options like absentee voting, drive-thru voting, or allowing voters additional help won't do much to reduce fraud but they will exclude those with a physical disability.

As part of its single-minded crusade to destroy our democracy and turn the US into a one-party state, the GOP is dead set on reducing the number of Americans who are able to vote. Unfortunately, this especially targets those of our fellow citizens who are physically disabled. Like we said, despicable.

#voter suppression #physically disabled #crueltyparty

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phroyd · 4 years

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HOUSTON — Over the past week, Dr. Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.

To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring. Now their situations are reversed.

Thumbing through a dog-eared notebook during a recent shift, Dr. Bakshy counted about a dozen people he had treated for coronavirus symptoms. His colleagues in Houston had attended to many more. Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day.

As Houston’s hospitals face the worst outbreak of the virus in Texas, now one of the nation’s hot zones, Dr. Bakshy and others are experiencing some of the same challenges that their New York counterparts did just a few months ago and are trying to adapt some lessons from that crisis.

Like New York City in March, the Houston hospitals are experiencing a steep rise in caseloads that is filling their beds, stretching their staffing, creating a backlog in testing and limiting the availability of other medical services. Attempts to buy more supplies — including certain protective gear, vital-sign monitors and testing components — are frustrated by weeks of delays, according to hospital leaders.

Methodist is swiftly expanding capacity and hiring more staff, including local nurses who had left their jobs to work in New York when the city’s hospitals were pummeled. “A bed’s a bed until you have a staff,” said Avery Taylor, the nurse manager of a coronavirus unit created just outside Houston in March.

But with the virus raging across the region, medical workers are falling ill. Dr. Bakshy was one of the first at Methodist to have Covid-19, getting it in early March. As of this past week, the number of nurses being hired to help open new units would only replace those out sick.

Methodist, a top-ranked system of eight hospitals, had nearly 400 coronavirus inpatients last Sunday. Nearly a week later — even as physicians tried to be conservative in admitting patients and discharged others as soon as they safely could — the figure was 575. The flagship hospital added 130 inpatient beds in recent days and rapidly filled them. Now, administrators estimate that the number of Covid-19 patients across the system could reach 800 or 900 in coming weeks, and are planning to accommodate up to 1,000.

Other Houston hospitals are seeing similar streams of patients. Inundated public hospitals are sending some patients to private institutions like Methodist while reportedly transferring others to Galveston, 50 miles away.

“What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one,” Dr. Mir M. Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said to his medical team before rounds. “It’s really a terrible kind of sinking feeling. But we’re not truly back at square one, right? Because we have the last three months of expertise that we’ve developed.”

Houston’s hospitals have some advantages compared with New York’s in the spring. Doctors know more now about how to manage the sickest patients and are more often able to avoid breathing tubes, ventilators and critical care. But one treatment shown to shorten hospital stays, the antiviral drug remdesivir, is being allocated by the state, and hospitals here have repeatedly run out of it.

Methodist’s leaders, who were planning for a surge and had been dealing with a stream of coronavirus patients since March, pointed to the most important difference between Houston now and New York then: the patient mix. The majority of new patients here are younger and healthier and are not as severely ill as many were in New York City, where officials report that over 22,000 are likely to have died from the disease.

But so far, the death toll has not climbed much in Texas and other parts of the South and West seeing a surge.

“We are having to pioneer the way of trying to understand a different curve with some very good characteristics versus the last curve,” said Dr. Marc Boom, Methodist’s president and chief executive.

But he cautioned, “What I’m watching really closely is whether we see a shift back in age — because if the young really get this way out there and then start infecting all of the older, then we may look more like the last wave.”

Dr. Sylvie de Souza, head of the emergency department at Brooklyn Hospital Center, which on Friday reported no new coronavirus admissions and no current inpatient cases, said that she was receiving distressing text messages from doctors elsewhere in the country asking for advice. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “It sort of brings me back to the end of March, and it’s like being there all over again.”

One of the most worrisome trends, hospital administrators said, is the increased politicization of public health measures against the virus. The hospitals in Houston are operating in a very different environment now compared with during New York’s peak in the spring, when federal, state and local leaders agreed to a national pause.

Here in Texas, political leaders have been at odds with one another, and residents sharply disagree about the danger the virus poses and what precautions are necessary. At some Houston hospitals, visitors and patients have refused to wear masks, creating conflicts with security guards at entrances.

As the Fourth of July holiday approached, Methodist spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a public information campaign — including full-page ads wrapped around a local newspaper, social media efforts and billboards. “Stay Safe and Stay Home This July 4th,” the signs say. Methodist also sent a text message to about 10,000 patients providing safety tips. In response, the hospital system received some angry phone calls and texts. “How about you stay at home and quit telling me what to do,” was how one hospital official described them.

The economy in Texas remains open, with only bars shuttered, but Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday issued an order requiring Texans to wear face coverings in public after long opposing such a mandate.

“There is a glimmer of some optimism,” Dr. Boom told the health system’s physicians this past week, reporting that county testing figures showed some signs of improvement.

Many hospitals in New York during the earlier crisis essentially became all-Covid units and endured billions of dollars in losses.

But Methodist and some other private Houston institutions are trying to operate differently now after taking a financial beating from shutting down elective surgeries and procedures this spring.

With safety protocols and expansion plans in place, they are trying to maintain as many services as possible for as long as possible while contending with the flood of coronavirus cases. “No one’s ever done that before,” Dr. Boom said. “We were seeing all the harm from patients delaying care.”

Doctors and nurses have combed through lists of surgical patients, choosing whom to delay. The easiest surgeries to maintain are those that do not require a hospital stay, like treatment for cataracts. Some surgeons who used to keep patients overnight after knee and hip replacements are now allowing them to leave the same day.

The most agonizing decisions concern the hospital’s robust transplant program, in part because its recipients often require a stay in intensive care. Dr. A. Osama Gaber, the program’s director, spoke with a dialysis patient whose kidney transplant had been postponed from March. “She was in tears,” he said. “She almost wanted me to swear to her we’re not going to put her off again.” For now the surgeons plan to continue cautiously.

A key strategy to maintain services is increasing what hospital officials call throughput — discharging patients as quickly as is safely possible. Yet it is not always clear who is ready to leave. Alexander Nelson-Fryar, a 25-year-old treated for coronavirus pneumonia at Methodist, was discharged from the hospital this past week. Hours after he left, he said, he began laboring to breathe and an ambulance sped him back to Methodist. By the end of the week, he was in intensive care receiving a high dose of pressurized oxygen.

As cases began rising in New York, some overwhelmed emergency departments sent home coronavirus patients only to see them return gravely ill or die. “We realized there was no way of predicting which direction a patient would go,” said Dr. de Souza, the emergency department director in Brooklyn. As a result, she said, she came to believe that any patient aside from those with the mildest symptoms should be admitted to the hospital or otherwise monitored.

But doctors in Houston are tightening criteria for admission. Dr. Bakshy, the Methodist emergency room doctor, who trained at Bellevue and Mount Sinai in New York, said that he was conferring with his former colleagues.

“We all have questions about who truly needs to be hospitalized versus not,” he said. “If we had unlimited resources, of course we’d bring people in just to make sure they’re OK.”

Now, he said, a patient has to have low oxygen levels or serious underlying conditions “to really justify coming into the hospital,” although exceptions can be made.

Another challenge in New York and Houston has been determining who is infected and needs to be isolated from others. Nearly 40 percent of all emergency room patients at Methodist are now testing positive; some of them lack symptoms.

Because test results are sometimes delayed by more than a day, Dr. Bakshy and his colleagues have had to make their best guesses as to whether someone should be admitted to a ward for coronavirus patients.

Hospitals in New York tended to move patients within their own systems to level loads. In Houston, the wealthier institutions have joined together to aid those least able to expand capacity.

This past week, Methodist sent a team to a nearby public hospital to accept transfer patients. Top officials from Methodist and the other flagship hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, normally competitors, consult regularly by phone. They have been coordinating for days with the county’s already overwhelmed safety-net system, Harris Health, taking in its patients. The private institutions have also agreed to take turns, with others in the state, accepting patients from rural hospitals.

Better Treatments

One morning this past week, Molly Tipps, a registered nurse, brought some medications to an older patient at the Methodist ward outside Houston. “I have the dexamethasone for your lungs,” she told the patient, Dee Morton. Preliminary results of a large study, released last month but not yet peer-reviewed, showed that the drug, a common steroid, saved lives among those who were critically ill with Covid-19 or required oxygen.

Ms. Morton, 79, said she was confident she would recover. “I’m going to make it to 80,” she said. A much lower proportion of patients have been dying from the virus locally and nationally than they were several months ago.

The ward where Ms. Morton is being treated is inside a long-term acute-care facility and is known as the Highly Infectious Disease Unit. Created to treat Ebola several years ago, it now serves as a safety valve for the Methodist system. It takes in coronavirus patients who are improving but for various reasons — from lacking housing to living in a nursing home that will not accommodate them — cannot go home. In Ms. Morton’s case, she was too weak, and after transferring to the unit, some signs of infection, including a fever, rebounded.

At Methodist’s flagship hospital in central Houston, Rosa V. Hernandez, 72, a patient in the intensive care unit, has pneumonia so severe that if she had fallen sick several months ago, she would probably have been put on a ventilator and made unconscious.

But doctors, based on the experiences of physicians in New York and elsewhere, are avoiding ventilators when possible and are maintaining Ms. Hernandez on a high flow of oxygen through a nasal tube. She is on the maximum setting, but can talk to the clinical team and exchange text messages with her daughter, who is also a Methodist inpatient with the coronavirus.

“I took it seriously,” Ms. Hernandez said of the virus. But she joined a small party of eight people for her granddaughter’s birthday, a decision she now described with regret. “Just a birthday cake. What’s a birthday cake without health?”

She is getting remdesivir, an antiviral that was tested in clinical trials in New York and Houston, among other cities, and a new experimental drug.

Methodist was part of two remdesivir trials. But because the research has ended, it and other hospitals now depend on allotments of the drug from the state. As virus cases increased, the supplies ran short, said Katherine Perez, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital. “In Houston, every hospital that’s gotten the drug, everyone’s just kind of used it up,” she said.

The hospital received 1,000 vials, its largest batch ever, a little over a week ago. Within four days, all the patients who could be treated with it had been selected, and pharmacists were awaiting another shipment.

A new chance to test remdesivir in a clinical trial in combination with another drug may provide some relief. As cases rise, Methodist researchers are being flooded with offers to participate in studies, with about 10 to 12 new opportunities a week being vetted centrally. Without solid research, “your option is to do a bunch of unproven, potentially harmful, potentially futile, interventions to very sick people who are depending on you,” said Dr. H. Dirk Sostman, president of Methodist’s academic medicine institute.

Convincing the Public

Dr. Boom, the Methodist chief executive, said if he could preserve one thing from the New York experience in March, it would be how the country came together as it had in previous disasters.

When cases began rising again in Texas, hospital officials here spent close to a month trying to educate the public about the risks of contagion. “It didn’t work,” Dr. Boom said.

“How do you get the message out there when certain people just don’t hear it and then you’re dealing with quarantine fatigue and it’s summer and I’m done with school and I just believe I’m 20 and I’m invincible?” he asked. “We told everybody this is all about the sick, vulnerable population, which was the truth, but they heard the message of ‘Well, therefore I’m fine.’ And now we’re doing the re-education on that.”

But even some of Methodist’s physicians, like many Texans, take issue with measures promoted by most public health experts. “A lot of the masks that people are wearing in public don’t do very much,” said Dr. Beau Briese, director of international emergency medicine, contradicting studies that point to a substantial benefit with universal face coverings.

Dr. Briese, 41, believes the soundest approach is to keep opening businesses but have the population at highest risk, including older people, stay apart from the broader public. Some of Methodist’s patients find even those measures objectionable.

One patient on Dr. Bakshy’s emergency room shift, Genevieve McCall, 96, came to the hospital with a satchel full of nightgowns because her legs had swollen, a sign of worsening heart failure. Dr. Bakshy asked about any exposure to the coronavirus. She said her caregiver had been out since the previous day with a fever and a sore throat.

Born five years after the 1918 flu, Ms. McCall, a retired nurse, said that until the coronavirus, she told people she thought she had seen everything. “I question a lot of things,” she said of the safety restrictions. “They’ve been too tight about it. And every time that there is a little bit of a spike, then we’re restricted more.”

Ms. McCall, who tested negative for the virus, added: “This is a political year. I think that politics has a lot to do with the way this has been handled. And I think it’s been mishandled.”

She said that it was difficult to be stuck in her apartment in an independent-living complex that was prohibiting visitors, canceling many activities and delivering meals to rooms instead of serving them in the dining room. “It’s very depressing,” she said. “Until this afternoon, when my daughter walked in the door to come and pick me up and bring me here, I had not been able to see her or touch her for three months, more.”

#new york city #texas #covid

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invincible-selfxmade-punk · 4 years

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Hey, Greg Abbott, Teachers’ Lives Matter too

I get it. I do. You need schools to open because...holy crap you’re not getting anything done, your kids need to see other kids, you have a job to do, and you just plain need a break. I get it. I do. I’ve seen the research. Kids are, as much as we can determine barely six months into a pandemic, less likely to get it. They’re less likely to suffer from a severe form of the disease, possibly less likely to transmit it. The calls for opening schools with this data make total sense. Are you going to send your kids into a building with no adults? No. So when you’re out there demanding that schools open and all of your arguments are about you, about what you need, about what your kids need, but NEVER ONCE mention the dangers to the staff and faculty who will necessarily need to be in those schools, you can see where I’m a little concerned.

I’ve accepted that I ask my friends two or three times a year to donate food to our “snack closet” because ending poverty, let alone childhood poverty and all the many things that encompasses it, seems to be beyond us.

I’ve accepted that I spend hundreds of dollars of my own money every year to buy things my students need because adequately funding schools seems to be beyond us.

I’ve accepted that there might come a time I have to lock my students in the closet in my classroom - and let me tell you how blessed I feel that I have a closet big enough to fit all of my kids - because reasonable gun control seems to be beyond us. Now you’re asking us to accept going back into classrooms in the middle of a pandemic. Classrooms that are located in buildings that have been neglected for decades (please see: adequate funding), that in some cases have no windows that open, where our support people - occupational therapists, speech therapists are working in closets (please see: adequate funding), and buildings that have sketchy HVAC on a good day. You’ll forgive us if we’re not quite onboard with this idea yet.

You see, if we want hand sanitizer in our classrooms, we have to ask parents to donate it. If we want Lysol wipes for our classrooms, we have to ask our parents to donate it. Our parents are pretty poor out here so I buy all these things, all year, myself. If we want tissues for snotty noses, we have to ask our parents to donate it.

Since, for the entire two decades I’ve been teaching, we’ve been asking parents to donate basic school supplies because we can’t or won’t adequately fund education, you might see where we’re a little hesitant to go back into those classrooms without masks, without face shields, because masks don’t work with the littlest kids (though face shields really aren’t nearly as effective as masks, but…), without any promise of reliable, regular testing with a quick turnaround of results, without any plan for what happens when someone gets sick, without any plan for what staff and faculty do when someone in their family is sick, without any plan on how we help parents who need the childcare, so they’re forced to give kids Tylenol in order to get through the temperature screening so they don’t lose their job, without any promise of additional money to hire more teachers, to lease more space, to scale up what distance learning will or could look like. (Does anyone really think we’re going to make it through flu season without ending up right where we were in March?) Do you know what schools look like once school starts? We are a snotty, sneezing, sniffly, coughing mess and that's without spike proteins invading our beings. I’m worried for me. I have parents who are considered elderly (sorry about that, but you are). Parents I have only seen from a distance since early March, except for that super socially-distanced Father’s Day. I’m worried for teachers who are parents - what will they do with their kids whose school schedules might be wildly different than that of their parents. I’m worried for the teachers who are older (and I’m REALLY sorry I’m considered one of them).

But I’m more worried about our custodial staff, bus drivers, our cafeteria workers, our instructional assistants who are far more likely to be BIPOC, people who are far less likely to have the resources needed to survive an extended illness (again, not funding what matters), whose family members are more likely to be considered an essential worker in some other field.I don’t see anyone having these conversations. I don’t see ANY consideration for the adults in school buildings in all the articles calling for schools to open. AAP is telling schools to open, but not giving any guidance on how to do so safely for students AND staff alike. That must be nice. You have to open and good luck on figuring out how to make that work. We’re used to flying by the seat of our pants and making it work. This is a piss-poor solution most of the time and it is a completely untenable one in the middle of a pandemic, one that has been managed in the worst possible way at the federal level. I’m worried for my kids. I know they need to be back at school. I saw how distance learning went this spring. It wasn’t pretty.

I know that our kids need teachers who aren’t terrified to be at work because there’s nothing in place that would suggest society values teachers as more than cheap childcare, despite the fact that this spring and summer should have sounded that message loud and clear. I know our kids need to be around each other. I’m worried that people are going to start calling for “normal” school. Nothing about this is normal. Even if kids are in school full time, nothing about this is going to be normal. We’re going to be facing kids who are dealing with layer upon layer of trauma, we need to make time and space for that, so stop telling me kids are behind. They’re not any further behind than anyone else. They’re behind some arbitrary lines we drew in the sand so long ago we’re not sure we remember why we drew them. We need to meet our kids where they are. I don't want to hear one word about testing, unless it involves a nasal or throat swab. Not. One. Word.

The worst part about this is the completely cavalier attitude I see from far too many about doing what needs to be done if you have even half a prayer of opening schools this fall. Wear a mask. Stay home. No, you don’t need to eat in that restaurant. No, you don’t need to go visit your parents or friends 5 states away. No, you don’t need to go hang out with your friends because you’ll really stay 6 feet away - let me assure you that the pictures you’ve posted show me that is almost never true. Yes. You need to wear a mask. Yes. You need to stay home unless it’s really important. If you can’t do any of those things, but want me to go back to school in August with a smile on my face, you’re asking me to make far bigger sacrifices than the ones you’ve been willing to make so far.I am not the author of this amazing work, but please reblog.

#Texas #teaching #covid-19 #Gov. Abbott #Greg Abbott #Pandemic #forced back to work

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quietduckpond · 4 years

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2020, January-July in Review

If you'd have told me what 2020 was gonna be last year I woulda been like what??? The hell kind of drugs are you on??? This stuff is so far out that it'd be considered a completely unrealistic plot for a tv show or book or anything, really. Like, especially recently, it’s almost (but not quite) comical.

I thought I’d just start listing stuff I knew about, but then I did some research, and, well . . . Sources are at the bottom :) . I’ve tried to keep it to the weird or just plain cool stuff that’s happened, because most of what I hear about is the bad stuff, but I may have gone a liiiiiiitle overboard. Anyway, here's a list of stuff that's happened this year (feel free to add to it, as I couldn’t possibly include everything in a single post).

First off, we have January. Looooooot of stuff went down in January. And we thought that that’d be the worst of it. Ha! Anyway, here it is:

Australia was, like, on fire, with tens of millions of acres burned. (Last source has a visual guide for this. Australia is roughly the same size of the US, for those unaware)

WWIII threatened to break out when Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed on orders from Trump

Iran's retaliation strike involved the launch of missiles at two American military bases (further WWIII fears)

Ukrainian plane carrying 176 civilians was shot down by Iran, after mistaking it as a threat

Covid-19's outbreak in China being officially reported to the WHO (despite being reported to Chinese officials as early as Nov. 2019)

China records the first death due to Coronavirus

Wuhan, China, goes under lockdown, impacting 11 million people in terms of travel restrictions, with food shortages ensuing.

Trump's impeachment trial begins

UK withdraws from the European Union (tbh I don't fully understand the deal with this as I don't live in Europe, but oh well)

Next, we have February. Not too much happened in February tbh:

Trump is acquitted by the Senate on both articles of impeachment

Antarctica reaches a record high of 18.2 °C (64.9 °F) as recorded by an Argentinian research station (Global Warming!!!!)

India grants equal rights to women (but only within the armed forces)

Then we get to March:

Italy implements a country-wide lockdown, and is the first nation to do so

COVID-19 is officially declared a world-wide pandemic, after cases were recorded in more than 100 countries

Summer Olympics postponed until 2021

Trump declares a national emergency, freeing up $50 billion to help with the Covid-19

And April:

New York alone receives the highest number of COVID cases than any country in the world.

By this stage there are now more than 1 million COVID-19 cases world-wide

Bernie Sanders endorses former rival Joe Biden for US President

Trump freezes WHO funding

Canada experiences its worst modern mass-shooting, with 18 people dead, leads to ban of 1500 types of assault-style weapons (technically the banning happened in May, but anyway)

Trump suggests to injecting disinfectant or UV light (honestly, how would that even work??? Glow sticks? Swallowing torches???) into the body. (But seriously, DO NOT DO THIS!!!!!!!!!)

Trump claims that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan Laboratory. (This is not supported by ANY facts, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence even said that the virus wasn’t man-made)

Green house gas emissions drop by a massive 17% world-wide, relating to the COVID-19 pandemic

And May:

World leaders pledge $8 billion to fund COVID-19 vaccination research. The US and Russia choose not to contribute.

11-year-old Brazilian skateboarder, Gui Khury, becomes holds the world record for the 1st 1080° turn on a vertical ramp (tbh I only included this one because I thought it was cool, and I needed something happy to write about)

George Floyd is killed by police in the US, sparks international racial protests and a resurgence of BLM marches

Twitter adds a warning label about the inaccuracies of Trumps tweets

USA surpasses 100,000 deaths due to COVID-19

National guard is brought into Minnesota to quell George Floyd and BLM protests, as well as a curfew

Further protests ensue, well into July, both in the US and internationally.

But wait! There’s more in June! A lot more:

Locusts swarm the Horn of Africa, damaging crops and spreading disease. BILLIONS of locusts

Trump threatens to use Military force against civilians in order to quell protests sparked by George Floyd’s death

Trump orders the tear-gassing and dispersal of peaceful protesters using riot gear and rubber bullets, without warning, for a photo-op outside St John’s Episcopal Church. This was without permission of the bishop, Reverend Mariann Budde. She has said she was "outraged” and that the church was used, “as a backdrop . . . without permission”, and that members of the clergy had even joined the protests the day before.

UK COVID-19 death toll surpasses 50,000

3 Former Police Officers charged with second-degree murder over George Floyd’s death

Former defence secretary speaks out against Trump saying, "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us."

First major breakthrough in treating coronavirus COVID-19 using steroid dexamethasone announced by Oxford University

US Supreme Court rules the Obama-era Dreamers Program (DACA), enabling undocumented migrant children ability to study and work, can stay (Yay!!!!!!)

Trump holds his first re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before being COMPLETELY derailed by TikTok users and K-Pop stars to purposefully orchestrate a low turn-out by reserving seats and then not attending (Honestly, this was so on-brand for Gen Z, absolutely brilliant!!!)

US government data shows African Americans four times more likely than white Americans to be hospitalized due to COVID-19, highlighting racial disparities during the pandemic

The WHO declares the Ebola outbreak in the Congo over, which killed 2,280 people over 2 years

New York Times says Russia secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked forces to kill US and coalition troops in Afghanistan, meanwhile Trump did nothing

Locust invasion labelled 'Swarmageddon' by The Times of India as it reaches Delhi (Yup, the very same one form before, now in India)

Global death toll due to COVID-19 passes 500,000, more than doubling in less than two months.

Arizona reports 20% of tests returning as positive

And finally, July. This has been an absolute trip so far, but here we go:

Australian state Victoria re-imposes coronavirus lockdown on 36 Melbourne (which is in Victoria) suburbs, affecting 300,000 people

The US confirms more than 50,000 new COVID cases in one day

Texas Governor Greg Abbott makes wearing face masks mandatory as cases of coronavirus soar in the state

Over 160 people die after a landslide at a jade mine in northern Hpakant area of Myanmar

The US officially begins withdrawing from the WHO

Trump Administration issues directive that more than 1 million international students will be stripped of their visas if their courses are entirely online

Kanye West has said he’s now running as an independent for President???? Like, what???

So. Rappers are running for president amid a world-wide pandemic. There was an almost-revolution, a locust plague, the UK just decided to just quit Europe, and TikTok partially derailed a presidential campaign.

This has been a (just-over) half-year review. Might do another one at the end of the year, we’ll see. Sorry for the long post, but I hope you can appreciate with me just how bonkers this year has been so far.

Source, Source, Source, Source, Source, Source

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alindakb · 4 years

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Letters to my Parents - Monday 8 November 1993 - by Alinda

Monday 8 November 1993

Hi Mom & Dad,

Professor Lupin told me he used to be friends with you both. I can’t believe it. After all these years I finally know someone who knew you both and could tell me about you. I figured this out during Halloween. You remember me telling you that Halloween was the first day my classmates were allowed to go to Hogsmeade. Well, I had to stay behind all by myself. Draco first wanted to stay with me at the castle. He hates that he had to go without me, but Blaise and I convinced him to go.

When they were all getting ready to go, Draco gave me a long kiss goodbye and promised that he would bring back lots of sweets from Honeydukes. Greg yelled at us to stop being so pathetic and that we can snug again when they come back in time for the feast. And we both knew he was right, but still, I’m so used to always be around Draco that it was weird saying goodbye to him.

After that, I just wandered through the castle. I didn’t want to go back to the common room and be reminded that Draco was out having fun with all our friends. For a moment I considered going to the library and do some homework, but I prefer to do my homework when Draco or Hermione are around to help me when I get stuck. Really I wouldn’t get the grades I have if it wasn’t for their help. We started our little study group again in the library. We go there every Wednesday afternoon after class. It’s me, Draco, Blaise, Greg, Daphne, Hermione and Luna. The other Gryffindors don’t really hang out with us anymore. I’ll tell you all about why in a bit, first I want to explain how I figured out that Professor Lupin was a friend of yours.

I wandered around the castle before I decided to go the Owlery to see Hedwig. Only I never made it. Professor Lupin called out to me from his office when I passed by. He asked me where Draco was and I told him that he was at Hogsmeade with the rest of our friends. And then Professor Lupin showed me a Grindylow to cheer me up. A Grindylow is a sickly green creature with sharp little horns and long spindly fingers. The professor explained that they are water demons and that they were easier to handle than the Kappas we studied in the lessons before that.

After that we had tea and Professor Lupin asked about Draco, if he was doing okay after the Bogart incident. I told him all was fine. I didn’t have it in me to tell him that Draco has nightmares still and then just clutches onto me when I wake him and cries. I don’t know what to do to make it any better. I told him I wasn’t going to die any time soon, and I know he knows I don’t want to die anymore, but the nightmares won’t stop. I asked Miss Davis if she knew what we could do about them, but she said it will just take time. Really she’s becoming more useless every day.

While the Professor and I were having tea Professor Snape came by to bring Lupin a potion because he’d been feeling a little off-colour. It was weird seeing them interact. I don’t think they like each other very much. And it didn’t look like Snape made the potion out of kindness, more because someone ordered him to do it. Like when I get when I don’t want to make my homework. They hardly spoke more than three words at each other. Professor Lupin didn’t even thank Professor Snape for the potion, he just drowned it quickly and placed the smoking goblet on his desk. And then I saw it, the picture on Professor Lupin’s desk. It contained both of you, a younger Professor Lupin and two other young men I didn’t recognise. And it just shocked me, seeing you there in that picture, big smiles on your faces.

Professor Lupin told me that you, dad, were one of his best friends when he was a student at Hogwarts. I just nodded and then walked out of his office. You both had looked so happy in that picture, surrounded by friends and I really missed you both. I ran down to the dungeons and cried into my sheets until Draco came back with bags filled with sweets. I asked him about his day, and he told me all about visiting Dervish and Banges, Zonko's Joke Shop, the Three Broomsticks and the Post Office. It seems Hermione had gone a little crazy there, completely fascinated with the colour-coded owls.

Professor Lupin took me apart for our next DADA lesson and told me that if I ever wanted to talk to him about you I was always welcome to come by for a cup of tea. I told him I would, but I haven’t gone to see him yet. I’m a little scared of what he will tell me. What if you are different than I imagined? What if you hated gay people? What if he would tell me you would never approve of Draco and me being a couple. I don’t want to hear that. I rather have my fantasy about who you are than finding out you were horrible people. Draco says it will be okay, that I was a kind soul and that at least one of my parents must have given it to me. Maybe he’s right, but I’m still scared. Even though I get more curious every day about how you were really like.

After the Halloween feast, which was great and a lot of fun, I just wanted to crawl into bed with Draco and kiss all my worries away. But we had hardly brushed our teeth when we were all ordered to go back to the Great Hall. When we arrived there, Hermione made her way over to us and told us that The Fat Lady, the portrait that guarded the Gryffindor dormitories had vanished and that her portrait had been slashed so viciously that strips of canvas littered the floor. According to Peeves it had been Sirius Black trying to get into Gryffindor Tower.

We got to spend the night in the Great Hall while the Professors searched the castle. Headmaster Dumbledore waved his wand around to clear the Hall of all the tables and make purple sleeping bags appear. The colour of the sleeping bags lightened the mood a little when Blaise joked that Dumbledore was as gay as they get with his love for purple. We all crammed together in a corner (we is Blaise, Greg, Daphne, Luna, Hermione, Draco and I) and wondered how Black had gotten into the castle. Which turned into a lesson from Hermione about how the castle was protected and you can’t apparate in. And then Draco wondered out loud why Black had gone for Gryffindor Tower when it was Harry he wanted to kill. Well, you can imagine that this was a shock to all our other friends and we had to explain to them that I had overheard the Tonks family when they had a fight about telling me or not. We think that maybe Black thinks I’m in Gryffindor since both of my parents were in Gryffindor. That it was a mistake on his part.

The days after Halloween, everyone in the castle talked about Sirius Black. The theories about how he made it inside became crazier by the day. Hannah Abbott from Hufflepuff is convinced that Black can turn into a flowering shrub. It’s kind of funny how sure she is of herself. Hermione is just annoyed by it all. She says that having Sir Cadogan as the guardian of their door is driving everyone insane. I’m glad we just have a piece of wall and no crazy portrait guarding our dormitories.

But that’s not the worst. Since Black had been spotted in the castle, teachers all find excuses to walk along with me to my next class. Draco loves complaining about that, it takes away all our changes to sneak into one of the many alcoves and snug a little between classes. And then Professor Snape called me into his office to tell me that Black might want to kill me. I told him I already knew. He just shook his head and said he should have known. He gave me some new rule for my safety. I’m not aloud to go anywhere after dark without a teacher and I should not spend to much time alone. Not that Professor Snape was worried I’ll be alone much since it seems impossible to separate me from Mister Malfoy. And he assigned Madam Hooch to oversee our Quidditch training. He wouldn’t want Slytherin to lose another match because I can’t train at night.

Talking about Quidditch. You remember me telling you that Draco was fighting with his hair the entire match. Well, Daphne showed me how to make a French Braid around the sides of his head so the shorter hairs won’t pull out of the ponytail so easily. And ever since then I’ve been braiding Draco’s hair every morning. First, it was just to practice, so it will be perfect by the time we have to play our next match. But now it’s more because I like doing it, and Draco loves it when I touch his hair and brush my fingers lightly over his head. Daphne says it’s sweet and Greg just thinks it’s a weird gay thing he will never understand.

And I need to tell you still why we hardly hang out with the other Gryffindors anymore. Well, it’s really simple. Hermione and Ron are fighting again. I don’t even know what’s about this time. But they don’t talk and avoid each other like the plague. So Ron and his friends don’t hang out with us anymore. Draco isn’t too worried about it. Said it’s easier when he doesn’t have to give Neville evil looks all the time because he’s staring at me. I don’t think Neville stares that much, but Draco is convinced that Neville has the hots for me. Blaise is a bit more disappointed by it all, he liked hanging out with Seamus. He says it’s one of the few people in this school he can gossip with about girls. And of course Greg was all bother by this and Blaise just told him it’s no fun with to talk girl with him because he can only talk of that one girl he likes.

Well, I think that’s all for now, I’ll write to you again soon. Draco just finished his shower and I have to go braid his hair so we can go get some breakfast.

Love you,

Harry James Potter.

#letters to my parents #drarry #Harry Potter #Draco Malfoy #harry in slytherin #remus lupin #severus snape #halloween #sirius black #AlindasStories

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nicepicsworld · 4 years

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Governors, White House Race to Reopen America

An arms race of sorts has emerged between red states and blue states to reopen America, with Democrat and Republican governors developing rivaling plans to lead their states out of the darkness of the coronavirus crisis while the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force and President Donald Trump’s ultimate decision looms large over the country. Hundreds of millions of Americans are under some variation of stay-at-home orders in every state in the union, with all 50 states also having active disaster declarations—the first time such a crisis has ever swept the nation in her nearly 250-year history. The president has called the decision to reopen America for business the biggest he will ever make in his presidency, and his life, and is expected to roll out a new task force from the White House on Tuesday to detail his plans and lead the effort from Washington. The president has also said it is his decision—and his alone—to make, arguing Monday that he has the authority as the nation’s commander-in-chief to override any governors or local officials nationwide who may get in his way. That being said, while some Democrat governors have expressed unease with moving too quickly—in other words, they want to go on their own timetable, not Trump’s—there is an emerging competition between various governors nationwide to see who can get there first safely for the people of their state. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is eyeing a plan rollout as early as this week to begin opening parts of his state back up for commerce. During an interview on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News on Monday evening, Abbott reiterated the need to get Texas back to work as early as this week—and definitely ahead of the previous schedule of May 1. “We want to open. Texans love to work. Texans are dying to get back to work,” Abbott said during the Hannity interview. “We want them to get back to work, but we have to do so in a very safe way so that we don’t regenerate the spread of the coronavirus in the state of Texas. But we’re working on strategis as we speak with medical experts and business leaders to find the right strategy so we can unleash our economy.” He added that he believes Texas—and many other states—can reopen well before May 1. “I think most states can reopen even sooner than later. We don’t have to wait until May 1,” Abbott said. The White House, sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News, has a list of approximately 20 states they intend to begin the reopening process in as soon as potentially later this week but definitely before the end of April. The virus, public health and federal officials admit, has not lived up to the dire predictions that doomsday models had originally forecast. The vaunted Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model from the University of Washington has been notoriously wrong, predicting first anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 dead Americans, then dropping that several times in subsequent weeks down to 93,000, then 81,000, then down to 61,000. The IHME model, which is what the White House used to extend the original “15 days to slow the spread” out from ending at the end of March all the way until now April 30, has also been even more incorrect when it comes to hospitalization numbers. In fact, a little-noticed revision to the model—one of many that the organization has made in the past several weeks—announced that the United States has already passed the proverbial “peak” of the curve of the virus days ago when it comes to hospitalizations and now the modelers admit the virus is in retreat. 1/ Yes, the geniuses at @IHME_UW have updated their model again. According to them, we are now PAST the peak of hospitalizations – which were cut yet again, to 57,000 beds from 94,000 in the previous forecast (and 262,000 in the April 1 forecast – April Fool’s!)… pic.twitter.com/sCioDU9gtG — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 13, 2020 Part of the reason why U.S. officials at the federal, state, and local level relied on these now demonstrably flawed models to make their public policy decisions is because they had no real-world data on the threat of the quickly-spreading disease. Chinese Communist officials in Beijing lied to the world—including the World Health Organization (WHO), which dutifully reprinted the inaccurate information the communists provided about the disease’s spread—and then Europe was rocked quickly by it as the virus took a major toll on Italy then Spain then France and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the coronavirus scared the public as celebrities like Tom Hanks and several NBA stars were infected early, and lawmakers like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as well as Reps. Ben McAdams (D-UT) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) were all infected. Each of those U.S. lawmakers has since recovered, but their infections combined with the infection of U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson—who was admitted to the ICU in a British hospital for treatment as his condition worsened, something he has since bounced back from as he continues his recovery outside the hospital—gripped American leaders with fear that even they were not invincible to the threat of the coronavirus. Despite all the high-profile cases, and what appeared to be a nasty perfect storm heading into April where U.S. hospitals would have been overrun and not enough ventilators would be available to treat the public as the virus spread, the models and projections have not come to pass. The models have been so badly inaccurate, in fact, that even Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel on Monday morning that the White House team is no longer using them—but instead making decisions on real world data. “It’s important to know that models are projections when you don’t have data,” Adams said. “Our original models were people’s best guesses, and/or they were informed by experiences in very different cultures and very different places. What the American people need to know now is we actually have data and we’re tracking that data and we’re not as reliant on these models as we are as say ‘this is what’s happening in California, this is what’s happening in New York, this is what’s happening in New Orleans.’ We’re following that data every single day and we’re giving that data to the community so they can make intelligent and informed decisions about when and where to reopen. It’s not going to be light-switch—just like it wasn’t a light-switch going off, it’s not going to be a light-switch going back on. Different communities will reopen sooner than other communities and they’ll have to do so based on their testing data—not a model, but actual data—and their capacity to be able to follow up on cases and isolate them. I feel confident that some places will start to reopen in May, June—other places won’t—it will be piece by piece, bit by bit, but it will be data-driven.” On that note, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo—a Democrat—said on Monday that his state has contained the virus, a huge win for the country as New York has represented the American epicenter of the disease. “We can control the spread. Feel good about that,” Cuomo said early on Monday, also adding, “because, by the way, we could have got to a point when we said we can’t control this damn thing.” “The worst is over,” Cuomo also said. After announcing those breakthroughs against the virus in New York, Cuomo then led a conference call with several Democrat governors from neighboring and nearby states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and others to discuss reopening the country. That effort came as the governors of Washington state, Oregon, and California each announced a pact between those western states to discuss reopening the country. This very interesting analysis came in just as the three Democratic governors of CA, OR, and WA announced a pact to reopen WITHOUT an explicit goal of no infections or deaths. (A long way from no @nfl season, as @CAgovernor said just days ago.) https://t.co/IBcM25I946 pic.twitter.com/5Nqw5yy29D — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 13, 2020 Several other GOP governors in a number of states in addition to Texas are looking at reopening before May 1, too, Breitbart News has learned, though much remains in flux and depends on data that keeps rolling in this week. What these efforts by the White House and by these various governors—Republican and Democrat from all different parts of the country—could end up forcing, however, is essentially an arms race to reopen America. “Whoever figures it out first, good on them,” a former Trump White House official told Breitbart News. “They should be competing over who can safely open back up for business first and then instill confidence in their neighbors around the country, all while President Trump keeps edging the country back from the brink. if Texas leads the way or California does, it really doesn’t matter. We need to get the country back in business.” Read the full article

#America #governors #House #race #reopen #White

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Down the stretch they come! No, it’s not the Kentucky Derby — today, Kentuckians will vote for governor in their party primaries. Incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin will likely win renomination in the Republican contest despite being incredibly unpopular. But Democrats have a competitive three-way race between state House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, state Attorney General Andy Beshear and former state auditor Adam Edelen. Beshear appears to be in the lead, but it’s unclear how big that lead really is and whether a Democrat can even still win a general election in a state that is now so deeply red.

Until Kentucky’s 2015 gubernatorial race, Democrats held most major statewide offices, and the GOP had won the governorship only once in the past 44 years. But Bevin won handily in 2015, and in 2016 Republicans captured the state house for the first time since the 1920s, giving them full control of state government.1 Thus, state politics now more closely align with Kentucky’s preferences in national races — the GOP presidential nominee has won Kentucky by at least 15 percentage points going back to 2000, and in 2016, President Trump won the state by 30 points.

All the same, Bevin (assuming he wins tonight) may still face a tough re-election fight next November. And that’s because he’s currently the most unpopular governor in the country, based on Morning Consult’s approval data for the first quarter of 2019.2 As you can see in the chart below, Bevin’s disapproval rating has been above 50 percent since the second quarter of 2018, which might have to do with his repeated run-ins with teachers, public sector unions and even his own party.

In April 2018, for example, Bevin vetoed legislation that raised taxes to expand public education spending only to have the Republican-controlled legislature override his veto while teachers rallied outside of the state capitol. He’s also made controversial comments, like when he said school closures allowing teachers to rally at the capitol may have caused children to be “sexually assaulted” or “physically harmed” because they couldn’t attend school.

Bevin’s approval numbers are even worse when you consider just how Republican-leaning Kentucky is. He had the worst approval rating of any governor relative to his state’s partisan lean,3 according to my colleague Nathaniel Rakich’s “Popularity Above Replacement Governor” rankings.

The latest ‘Popularity Above Replacement Governor’ scores

Governors’ net approval ratings for the first three months of 2019 relative to the partisan leans* of their states

Governor State Name Party Net Approval state Partisan Lean PARG KY Matt Bevin R -19 R+23 -42 RI Gina Raimondo D -11 D+26 -37 HI David Ige D +11 D+36 -25 WV Jim Justice R +14 R+30 -16 CT Ned Lamont D -4 D+11 -15 SD Kristi Noem R +18 R+31 -13 NY Andrew Cuomo D +9 D+22 -13 OR Kate Brown D -3 D+9 -12 CA Gavin Newsom D +12 D+24 -12 OK Kevin Stitt R +26 R+34 -8 UT Gary Herbert R +25 R+31 -6 NJ Phil Murphy D +8 D+13 -5 WY Mark Gordon R +43 R+47 -4 AK Mike Dunleavy R +12 R+15 -3 IL JB Pritzker D +11 D+13 -2 NE Pete Ricketts R +22 R+24 -2 IA Kim Reynolds R +6 R+6 0 ID Brad Little R +36 R+35 +1 NM Michelle Lujan Grisham D +8 D+7 +1 ND Doug Burgum R +34 R+33 +1 WA Jay Inslee D +15 D+12 +3 VA Ralph Northam D +5 EVEN +5 MO Mike Parson R +26 R+19 +7 IN Eric Holcomb R +27 R+18 +9 AR Asa Hutchinson R +34 R+24 +10 AZ Doug Ducey R +20 R+9 +11 OH Mike DeWine R +18 R+7 +11 DE John Carney D +26 D+14 +12 TN Bill Lee R +40 R+28 +12 MS Phil Bryant R +27 R+15 +12 GA Brian Kemp R +25 R+12 +13 ME Janet Mills D +20 D+5 +15 AL Kay Ivey R +44 R+27 +17 TX Greg Abbott R +34 R+17 +17 SC Henry McMaster R +34 R+17 +17 CO Jared Polis D +18 D+1 +17 MN Tim Walz D +21 D+2 +19 MI Gretchen Whitmer D +20 D+1 +19 NV Steve Sisolak D +19 R+1 +20 WI Tony Evers D +20 R+1 +21 PA Tom Wolf D +21 R+1 +22 NC Roy Cooper D +22 R+5 +27 FL Ron DeSantis R +34 R+5 +29 LA John Bel Edwards D +15 R+17 +32 NH Chris Sununu R +41 R+2 +39 MT Steve Bullock D +26 R+18 +44 KS Laura Kelly D +24 R+23 +47 VT Phil Scott R +32 D+24 +56 MD Larry Hogan R +57 D+23 +80 MA Charlie Baker R +59 D+29 +88

A Democratic governor with a net approval of +2 in an R+7 state has a PARG of +9 (2+7 = 9). If the same state had a Republican governor with the same approval rating, the PARG would be -5 (2-7= -5).

Shaded rows denote governors whose seats are up in 2019 or 2020, excluding those governors who are not seeking reelection.

* Partisan lean is the average difference between how a state votes and how the country votes overall, with 2016 presidential election results weighted at 50 percent, 2012 presidential election results weighted at 25 percent and results from elections for the state legislature weighted at 25 percent. The partisan leans here were calculated before the 2018 elections; we haven’t calculated FiveThirtyEight partisan leans that incorporate the midterm results yet.

Sources: Morning Consult, media reports

A big part of Bevin’s problem is that he’s struggling with his base. Morning Consult found in that poll that just 50 percent of Republicans approved of him while 37 percent disapproved. Compare that to the 86 percent of Kentucky Republicans who approved of Trump, and it’s understandable that Bevin is now trying to tie himself to the president, hoping to boost his numbers.

One bit of positive news for Bevin is that he avoided a high-profile primary challenge when U.S. Rep. James Comer — who Bevin beat by just 83 votes for the GOP nomination in 2015 — decided not to run. However, Bevin didn’t escape a primary challenger altogether. State Rep. Robert Goforth is running against him and even loaned his campaign $750,000 (as of early May, Bevin had raised a little over $1 million). But Goforth doesn’t seem to pose a serious risk to Bevin, at least not according to the scant polling we have: A survey from earlier in May from the GOP pollster Cygnal found Bevin leading Goforth 56 percent to 18 percent. Still, 32 percent of likely GOP primary voters said they had an unfavorable view of Bevin in that poll, so Goforth’s share of the primary vote on Tuesday could be an indicator of how strong or weak Bevin is among the Republican faithful.

But today’s main event is the Democratic race. The front-runner is Andy Beshear, the first-term attorney general and political scion whose father Steve preceded Bevin as governor. The younger Beshear squeaked out a narrow 0.2-point victory in 2015, with Bevin winning by 9 points at the top of the ballot. Since they took office, the two have been at loggerheads over many issues, including education, health care and pensions. These fights are one of Beshear’s main selling points in the Democratic primary, but Adam Edelen is running to Beshear’s left, hoping his support for abortion rights, decriminalizing marijuana and renewable energy will attract Democratic voters. And on Saturday, the state’s largest newspaper, the Courier-Journal, endorsed Edelen.

Edelen, the former state auditor, has also been on the offensive, attacking Beshear for his connection to a former aide who was convicted of bribery (however, there is no evidence Beshear knew about these activities). Edelen’s upstart campaign has also been aided by an influx of cash from his wealthy running mate, Gill Holland, and Better Future PAC, an outside group backing Edelen (primarily funded by Holland’s mother-in-law).

Meanwhile, state House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins is running to the right of Beshear and Edelen on social issues, claiming that his anti-abortion views and support for coal are more likely to appeal to the rural parts of the state where Democrats have been decimated in recent years.

Beshear currently seems to be ahead, but the only data we have are competing internal polls. Additionally, the two most recent surveys are from mid-April, so it’s hard to know if things have changed substantially in the past month. For what it’s worth, Edelen’s campaign found Beshear in first with 43 percent of the vote, Edelen in second with 23 percent and Adkins in third with 22 percent. Meanwhile, Beshear’s internal poll put him at 44 percent compared to 17 percent for Adkins and 16 percent for Edelen. So Beshear appears to be the polling front-runner, but a win by Edelen or Adkins shouldn’t be ruled out; internal polls are notoriously unreliable, the polling we do have is old and three-way races can be incredibly fluid.

Looking ahead to the general election in November, election handicappers view Kentucky as a toss-up or leaning in the GOP’s direction. Still, it’s possible a Democrat could take back the governor’s mansion. It’s early, but the pollster Mason-Dixon found Beshear up 48 percent to 40 percent in a Bevin-Beshear matchup in December. So if Bevin remains as unpopular as he is now, there could be an opening. Then again, the Bluegrass State’s politics are pretty darn red.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

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schraubd · 6 years

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Election 2018: Post-Mortem

We're not 100% "post-" yet, as there are still a decent number of races outstanding. Here in California, the mail vote could yet push around some House race numbers (though Montana just was called for Jon Tester!). Nonetheless, we've got enough of a picture to give a pretty solid account of yesterday's events. Here are my takeaways: * * * Dems winning the House is huge: This was not something to take for granted. Let's not forget, there was a good chunk of time where people thought GOP gerrymandering had placed the House out of Democratic reach. And control of the House doesn't just prevent Congress from ramming through far-right pieces of the Trump agenda. It also gives Democrats a key fulcrum from which to launch investigations into the deep cesspool of corruption that characterizes the Trump administration. On that score, I actually don't recommend starting with Trump necessarily. There are so many targets to choose from, and if there's one thing I think we learned from how the GOP handled the Benghazi (non-)story, it's that a steady and constant drip-drip-drip of scandal is far more powerful than blowing everything in one shot. Start with easy marks like Zinke, and the noose will slowly begin to tighten around the inner circle. This was a continuation, not a reversal, of 2016's trend: One theory about 2016 was that it was a fit of temporary insanity, whereby good-hearted Americans had a bout of temporary insanity or rage or anti-Clinton derangement and chose a President whom they didn't really endorse or even like. Under this view, 2018 would be a "snapback" election, where these voters would revert to form and go back to supporting sensible candidates while repudiating Trump's extremism. Another theory about 2016 takes Trump voters more seriously. It posits that in certain very conservative parts of the country -- generally more rural, generally less-educated, concentrated in Appalachia and the American southeast -- they liked Trump, and they continue to like Trump. All the lying and racism and extremism and utter off-the-wall demagoguery -- the love it. Meanwhile, other parts of the country -- more suburban, more diverse, and especially in the southwest -- were moving away from Trump and Trumpism. Last night, I think, decisively ratifies the second theory. By and large, the people who like Trump still like Trump. Rick Scott's numbers in Florida were almost perfectly correlated with the 2016 presidential race. And at the same time, we saw a more decisive shift away from the GOP in the sort of districts where people already didn't like Trump. From what I saw, Democrats did better in Romney-Clinton districts than Obama-Trump ones, which verifies this instinct. And Democrats are continuing to make big strides in Nevada and (yes, even in defeat) Arizona and Texas. The partial exception to this view is the midwest (where Democrats won governorships in Wisconsin and Michigan, and a decent clutch of House seats as well). But even here, the news was mixed: Democrats lost the Senate races in Indiana and Missouri, the governorship in Iowa (albeit while winning 3 of 4 House seats) and Ohio, and their two pickups in Minnesota House races were offset by at least one and probably two GOP flips (which were some of the only such GOP wins nationwide). There is a truth that is important for pundits to get through their head: conservative Americans like Trump. He's not an aberration. He's not deus ex machina. He's not someone they begrudgingly tolerate. American conservativism, right now, is Donald Trump. If that's a scary thought -- and it is -- start reporting it like something scary rather than pretending that most Republicans basically pine for Gerald Ford but somehow got sucked into an authoritarian nightmare they wish they could escape from. State Races Matter The national focus also has somewhat obscured how Democrats did on the state level. A bucket of governor's mansions have just turned blue -- Maine, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, and Kansas -- and there were no blue-to-red flips (solid holds in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado). And it looks like they've turned over at least six state legislative chambers too -- not bad! Priority #1 in any state with Democratic majority: lock in voting rights. It's embarrassing that a state like New York has a train wreck of a voting system, and it needs to end immediately. Republicans really did overperform Senate side Yes, it was a brutally tough map for the Democrats. But Republicans nonetheless exceeded at least gameday expectations. Democrats taking back the Senate was always a longshot, but if the GOP holds onto their leads in Arizona and Florida (likely), then they'll have come close to running the table on their best realistic Senate scenario (with only Montana and Nevada as the blemishes). That's legitimate GOP ammo for the spin cycle. And, of course, it does give Trump the ability to continue to pack the courts with right-wing ideologues, which is substantively terrifying. The Democratic Party Neither Needs To Pivot Left Nor Pivot Center The favored post-election parlor of any pundit after an election is to explain why the results decisively demonstrate why a given party needs to adopt the political positions they already supported. Among Democrats, this has typically shaken out along the Bernie/Establishment divide that we're apparently doomed to relive forever because this is The Bad Place. But the fact is, there was no clear trend in which sort of Democrats were winning and losing last night. A bunch of more conservative voices went down in the Senate, but in states which were already punishing turf. And some progressive darlings -- like Ben Jealous in Maryland and Andrew Gillum in Florida -- lost too. On the other side, some establishment picks did their job and won their race (think Jacky Rosen in Nevada, or Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan). But progressives had their stars too -- Beto O'Rourke's campaign in Texas certainly performed better than Texas's red tint should've allowed, and there were a bunch of more progressive challengers who are among the entering House class. Which is to say: different races are different, and different candidates are good fits for different districts. The Party isn't the enemy here. What I think has been shown is that the more extreme "Bernie" accusation -- that there were a bunch of winnable races that Democrats were quasi-deliberately letting go Republican because something-something-corporate-money, and if we only ran Real Democrats they'd be ours -- has been decisively refuted (I don't think Ben Jealous necessarily did worse than Rushern Baker would have done in Maryland, but he certainly didn't do better). But that was a colossally stupid take anyway. Which probably means it still won't die the death it deserves. Briefly on Beto -- Yes, He Deserves Praise This isn't even a hot take anymore but obviously O'Rourke deserves a ton of credit for how he performed in his race against Ted Cruz. I'm seeing some mockery from the usual conservative suspects on this, since he lost, but that's a dumb take. Yes a loss is a loss, and yes everyone hates Ted Cruz, and yes Texas has been slowly purpling. But a sub-three point victory in a statewide race in Texas (by contrast, Governor Greg Abbott -- no political superstar -- won reelection by 13 points) is a monster performance. And his tailwind likely carried a few House races over the finish line as well. The New Redemption is (Sort of) Upon Us I'm by no means the first to come up with the idea that we're going through a "second redemption" to undo the "second reconstruction" that was the civil rights era. But I think there is something to be said about the re-energizing of White racist attitudes that's occurred in America over the last few years. People have talked a lot about Trump and, before him, the Tea Party, not so much creating prejudice as "activating" it. I think that in places like Georgia or Florida, there was some demoralization among the White racist crowd where they had basically given up on the possibility that open racism was something they could "do" anymore. Now, they're downright jazzed -- and from that we get both Kemp and DeSantis likely entering a governor's mansion. That said, the story does seem too pat in some ways -- especially with the passage of Amendment 4 (felon re-enfranchisement) in Florida. It's no exaggeration to say this might put Democrats firmly in the driver's seat in a state as evenly divided as Florida (a full 40% of Black male adults in the state regained their right to vote through this measure), which makes it all the more surprising that it managed to clear the 60% threshold. And to be fair, some amount of credit thus has to be given to those voters who punched a ballot for both Amendment 4 and DeSantis/Scott (there must be a lot of them). One-State Wave! With Rashida Tlaib's victory in Michigan, we not only have our first Palestinian-American Congresswomen, we also will have the first Democratic Representative to openly support a one-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. She will join approximately 2/3 of the House Republican Caucus in taking this view (and if you're a pro-Israel type who's about to respond "that's not fair -- Republicans only support a one-state solution where Palestinians aren't allowed to vote!" stop and listen to yourself). Mixed Results for Anti-Semites Tablet did a whole bit on "antisemites running for Congress", but I found their list far too restrictive (or in a few cases -- most notably Rep. Andrew Carson and GOP challenger Lena Epstein -- too expansive). Overall, it seems like the worst-of-the-worst antisemites -- the open Holocaust denier sorts -- lost, but some more "moderate" cases did fine. I may do a more in-depth exploration of this later. Early Frustration is Misleading There did seem to be an extent which last night felt like a letdown for Democrats. Obviously, the Senate is a clear case where that sentiment is justified. At the same time, it seemed like the night got better for Democrats as it went on -- a couple of races which seemed to be slipping away (Wisconsin, Connecticut) broke blue late, and some of our biggest victories (Nevada) were also well into the evening. On net, there's no question this was a big night for the good guys. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2AQsRAy

#Election 2018

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 15, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Monday federal holidays generally mean that not much gets done. Today was a bit of an exception, since we are dealing with the fallout from the Senate’s refusal to convict former president Trump for the January 6 insurrection.

For the Republicans, that acquittal simply makes the split in the party worse. First of all, it puts the Republicans at odds with the majority of Americans. According to a new ABC/Ipsos poll, 58% of us think Trump should have been convicted, and more than three-quarters of us—77%-- think the senators’ votes reflected partisanship rather than the facts.

But Republicans disagree. Trump packed state Republican positions with his supporters because he was afraid he would face primary challengers in 2020, and those loyalists are now defending him. State Republican parties have censured a number of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump; of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict, Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) have already been censured, and a censure effort is underway against Susan Collins (R-ME), Ben Sasse (R-NE), and Pat Toomey (R-PA). According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 75% of Republicans want Trump to continue to lead the party.

But 21% don’t, and between 24% and 28% blame him for the January 6 riot.

That split means the Republican Party, which was already losing members over the insurrection, stands to lose even more of its members if it continues to defer to the former president. Already, the Democratic National Committee has prepared a video advertisement to circulate on digital platforms, highlighting Republicans leaving their party. It includes a clip from former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele saying that “when you’re losing Republican members and you’re left with QAnon and Proud Boys, you’ve got to reassess whether or not you are even close to being a viable party.” The video ends with Biden urging Americans to come together and to “help us unite America and build back better.”

For Democrats, the Senate trial put on display for the American public an impressive group. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) gave the lead impeachment manager from Trump’s first Senate trial, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) a run for his money as a model for brains and morals. But Raskin was not alone. Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-US Virgin Islands) and Representative Joseph Neguse (D-CO), relatively unknown outside of their home districts, got significant positive national attention during the trial, suddenly becoming household names. The entire Democratic team shone and indicated that the young Democrats have quite a deep bench of talent, especially in contrast to the younger Republicans, who seem to excel in media appearances more than in policy.

Democrats recognize that the Senate acquittal means there is considerable interest in an actual accounting of what happened in the insurrection. Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she will urge the House to establish an independent commission, like the one that investigated the 9/11 attacks, to study what led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Members of both parties have asked for such a commission.

The Senate trial also gave powerful proof of just how undemocratic the Senate has become. Voting rights journalist Ari Berman noted that the “57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 MILLION more Americans than 43 senators who voted to acquit.”

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted that the adherence of all but seven senators to Trump “should end the absurd talk that there is a burden on President Biden to achieve a bipartisan nirvana in Washington. If most Republicans can’t even admit that what Trump did is worthy of impeachment, how can anyone imagine that they would be willing and trustworthy governing partners?”

Dionne added that the acquittal made an overwhelming case for getting rid of the filibuster, which in its current incarnation effectively means that no legislation can pass without support from 60 senators. Thanks to the 50-50 split in the Senate, getting to 60 means getting 10 Republican votes. This is impossible, Dionne says, because clearly “There are not 10 Republican Senate votes to be had on anything that really matters.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is simply working around Republican lawmakers, starting with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly stand against the bill, in part because it calls for $350 billion to provide aid to states and cities. But Republican governors and mayors are desperate for the assistance. Republican voters like it, too.

Last Friday, Biden invited governors and mayors from both parties to the White House to ask them what they needed most. The Republican mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, told reporters that he had had more contact with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the first weeks of their administration “than I had spoken to the prior administration in the entirety.”

Biden is about to hit the road to try to convince Senate Republicans to support the relief package, going directly to the people to sell his ideas.

The Democrats also have another trick to lay on the table to get Republican support. Today, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced they would back the return of a new version of so-called “earmarks,” more formally known as “member-directed spending,” in legislation.

These “Community-Focused Grants,” as the new lingo calls them, are funds that individual congress members can direct toward their districts. In the past, earmarks were made by lawmakers and were occasionally havens for corruption—which is what people remember—but even at their worst, they made up less than 1.1% of federal spending and tended to actually produce things that districts needed.

Democrats cleaned the system up before then-House Speaker John Boehner declared a moratorium on it in 2011. After the ban, the government still targeted federal money to get votes, but the power to make those calls shifted to the executive branch rather than Congress. For much federal spending, Congress appropriates the amounts but the executive branch decides where to spend it. A 2020 congressional study established that presidents use that money “to influence policy and support their preferred projects without receiving approval from Congress.” To that, we can add that a president targeted federal money to try to buy reelection.

In the past, congressional earmarks were a key feature in bipartisanship: they gave reluctant lawmakers a reason to support legislation they might otherwise hesitate about. The new rules will likely be different than the old ones in that they apparently will be targeted to public entities that ask for a grant. They will provide a challenge for Republicans—who actually like these grants, normally—because they will undercut Republicans’ stance against appropriation bills. They might also swing some Republicans behind the coronavirus bill.

Biden demonstrated national unity yesterday when he issued a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas in response to a request from Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Such a declaration frees up the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and federal funds to provide help to the region, which is suffering from bitter cold temperatures that have shut down power and left residents without electricity in unheated homes—a dangerous and potentially deadly situation. Biden’s quick response recalls the way presidents have traditionally responded to state crises, and the governor of the state in which Trump supporters tried to run Biden’s campaign bus off the road acknowledged Biden’s response.

“I thank President Biden for quickly issuing a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas as we continue to respond to severe winter weather conditions throughout the state,” Abbott’s press release stated.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #January 6 2021 #Biden Administration #bipartisan #insurrection #legislation

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Republicans Are Running For President

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-running-for-president/

What Republicans Are Running For President

How Mitt Romney Could Wind Up Running The United States 6 Years After Losing The Presidential Election

If, as expected, Mitt Romney wins his race for a Senate seat from Utah he may become the most powerful man in the United States Senate. As many of us remember, Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, ran for president in 2012 and lost to Barack Obama. It wasn’t one of those totally humiliating losses—the map did not turn blue—but we assumed Mitt Romney would fade into history.

Well, maybe not.

Here’s how. Just a few months ago, conventional wisdom was that while the Democrats had a good chance of taking control of the House of Representatives, the Senate was out of reach. In 2018 there will be at least 35 Senate seats up—of which 26 are held by Democrats. Democrats need a net gain of 2 seats to take control of the Senate. In an ordinary year this would be tough for two reasons. One is that incumbents usually win, and secondly, 10 of those Democratic senators represent states that went for Trump in 2016—so a somewhat popular president might be able to use his clout to win a Senate seat back from the Democrats. But this is no ordinary year as poll after poll and special election after special election indicate a “blue wave” for Democrats.

EKamarckrecent pollspolling aheadpolling close

Us Election 2024: Who Are The Likely Republican Candidates To Run For President Against Joe Biden

Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and Ted Cruz are among the rumoured candidates to become Donald Trump’s successor

The 2020 presidential race has only just finished, but the Republican candidates for 2024 are already preparing themselves for their shot at the White House.

We take a look at who may be looking to get themselves in to the race.

Nj Primary Elections 2020: The Five Republicans Who Want To Take Over As Us Senator

Colleen O’Dea, Senior Writer and Projects EditorNJ Decides 2020Politics

Five Republicans are vying for the chance to try to do something no one else has been able to do in almost a half-century: Convince New Jersey voters to elect a Republican to serve in the U.S. Senate, where Democrat Cory Booker now sits.

It has been 48 years since New Jersey voters have sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly a million. In 2018, Republican and former pharmaceuticals executive Bob Hugin spent more than $39 million, including $36 million of his own money, and lost by 11 percentage points to incumbent Bob Menendez, who had been considered vulnerable after his trial on political corruption charges ended in a hung jury.

“Statewide races are the toughest ones of all for a GOP outnumbered by a million more registered Democrats in the state,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “But even before party registrations were so lopsided, Republican Senate candidates have fared more poorly here than almost anywhere else in the nation.” Since New Jersey last sent a Republican to the Senate in 1972, “the GOP has lost a staggering 15 Senate races in a row,” he said.

Thoughts On New Poll: Most Republicans Want Trump To Run For President In 2024

John Fletcher Jrsays:

May 29, 2021 at 11:48 am

There may not be an American Presidential Office to run for when Joe Biden is done. I still believe Joe Biden is a Counterfeit President. One thing is certain, Barack Hussein Obama is happy that Joe Biden now reigns as worst American President. America get yourself ready for HYPERINFLATION, it’s coming.

May 29, 2021 at 3:43 pm

I have hats of Trump that read ” make America Great Again”, Trump 2020?,and “KEEP AMERICA GREAT”,I also have flags of him ” TRUMP ON THE TANK”, “TRUMP 2020, NO MORE BULLSHIT”. and I just got a new one,“TRUMP 2024” and then I have a MASK that reads, “TRUMP 2024 and has 2 AMERICAN FLAGS .So I really hope he runs, otherwise all of this means nothing ! TRUMP 2024 and TRUE FIGHTING REPUBLICANSIN 2022 !! NO RINOS NEEDED ! STAND UP OR SHUT UP !

May 29, 2021 at 5:19 pm

IT is more than if he runs or not. YOU are sending a message that you stand for freedoms and still support that hard work he did while still in office. Trump stands for AMERICA FIRST and that is also part of your message to the leftists.You are sending a great message no matter what he decides….You know as well as I do that he is all about what is best for the AMERICA and All Americans….SO IF he supports someone else to run then we know that person is worthy of what we all need as AMERICANS.Don;t loose hope and wear your attire with pride knowing there are many others still hoping for another win.

Yes we want Donald Trunp be our presidentin 2024.

Republican Lawmakers Are Terrified Of Trump Running For President Again

A new report by Politico cites multiple unnamed Republican lawmakers – even those who publicly praise Trump – who say that they REALLY don’t want Donald Trump running for President again in 2024. They would much rather see Trump working “behind the scenes” to help shore up support for the Party as a whole, and they insist that the Party is stronger now than it was five years ago. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently, Politico interviewed several Republican lawmakers, who of course all chose to remain nameless. But Politico says that these were Trump supporting lawmakers, still are Trump supporting lawmakers, by the way. And each one of them said that they do not want Donald Trump to be the Republican party’s nominee in 2024. In fact, they don’t want Trump to run for president ever again. I’ll read a couple quotes from some of these lawmakers here. Here’s what one of them said, he’s one of the best presidents we’ve had in terms of policies. But having said that if it were up to me, I would never have Trump on any ballot ever again, because it’s such a distraction. I would love for him to play a behind the scenes role and not be on the ballot. Another one said, I’d like to see a fresh face. I think we have a lot of them.

Eight Republican 2024 Candidates Speak In Texas Next Week But Not Trump

Steve Holland

WASHINGTON, April 30 – A Republican Party event in Texas next week will hear from eight potential candidates for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024, without former President Donald Trump, a source involved in the planning said on Friday.

The May 7 event at a hotel in Austin is being co-hosted by U.S. Senator John Cornyn and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to thank donors who helped fund a voter registration drive and get-out-the-vote efforts in the state.

High-profile Republican politicians who are considering whether to seek the party’s nomination in 2024 are expected to speak to the crowd of about 200 donors.

They include former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and U.S. senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Rick Scott, the source said.

The event comes as Republicans wrestle with whether to try to move past Trump in the next election cycle or fall in line behind him. Trump told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Thursday that he was “100%” considering another run after losing in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump was not invited to Texas, the source said. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was invited but was unable to attend, the source said.

Many Republican insiders doubt Trump will follow through on his musings about running for president in 2024, leaving a void that other party leaders will seek to fill.

Fact Check: Trump Did Not Call Republicans The Dumbest Group Of Voters

5 Min Read

An old quote falsely attributed to Donald Trump has recently resurfaced online. The viral meme alleges Trump told People magazine in 1998 that Republicans are “the dumbest group of voters in the country”. This is false.

While the quote has been debunked several times since it apparently surfaced in 2015, users have recently been resharing it on social media. Examples can be seen here , here , here , here

The meme reads: “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific. – Donald Trump, People Magazine, 1998”

Snopes first wrote about the false quote here in October 2015 . Since then, the quote has been debunked multiple times .

People magazine has confirmed in the past that its archive has no register of this alleged exchange.

“People looked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct. . We combed through every Trump story in our archive. We couldn’t find anything remotely like this quote–and no interview at all in 1998.”, a magazine spokesperson told Factcheck.org that year .

In December 1987, People published a profile on Donald Trump titled “Too Darn Rich”. The article quoted him saying he was too busy to run for president .

The Long Race For The 2024 Republican Presidential Nomination Begins

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — In the past week alone, Nikki Haley regaled activists in Iowa, Mike Pence courted donors in California and Donald Trump returned to the rally stage, teasing a third campaign for the White House.

The midterms are more than a year away, and there are 1,225 days until the next presidential election. But Republicans eyeing a White House run are wasting no time in jockeying for a strong position in what could emerge as an extremely crowded field of contenders.

The politicking will only intensify in the coming weeks, particularly in Iowa, home to the nation’s leadoff presidential caucuses and a state where conservative evangelicals play a significant role in steering the direction of the GOP. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is slated to visit on Tuesday, and others, including Pence, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are expected to appear in July.

The flurry of activity is a sign that there is no clear frontrunner to lead the GOP if Trump opts against a 2024 campaign.

“It definitely feels early, but it doesn’t feel like it’s a bad idea based on the situation,” said Mike DuHaime, a longtime Republican strategist. “The party has changed, the voters are changing and I think the process has changed. And I think many of the candidates have realized that.”

“We won the election twice,” he said. “And it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time.”

As for Trump?

Are You Ready For Republican Tim Scott To Run For President In 2024

The Senate’s lone Black Republican member, Tim Scott, is opening eyes and creating conversation about his 2024 political prospects.According to Fox News, Scott has brought in $14.4 million in campaign fundraising, after posting $9.6 million during April-June. The total amount in his campaign coffers has led many to believe that Scott is eying higher office than just the U.S. Senate.Scott has kept his name ringing in the political arena during his tenure in the Senate, especially after delivering a GOP response to President Biden’s primetime address to a joint session of Congress earlier this year. Scott has also led his party in negotiations with congressional Democrats on a major police reform bill.

While Scott has downplayed the hype surrounding his political aspirations, people on the Hill and talking heads on camera are noting that he could possibly be a 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

“Tim Scott is a force,” Jim Merrill, a New Hampshire-based Republican consultant said to Fox News. “His strong numbers reflect how he has inspired activists and business leaders alike, good for both his reelection next year and for a potential presidential campaign in 2024.”

Fear of a Black Landowner

With Scott previously downplaying the notion of running for president and his recent declaration that he won’t run for Senate after 2022, Black America will just have to see if Tim Scott will lean-in to the dollars raised to bankroll a potential campaign for the White House.

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New Poll: Most Republicans Want Trump To Run For President In 2024

A new Quinnipiac University national poll released this week revealed that two-thirds of Republicans want former President Donald Trump to run for president in 2024.

The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 1,316 U.S. adults nationwide from May 18-24. The poll’s margin of error was +/- 2.7 percentage points.

Three key Republican findings of the survey included:

66% of Republicans want to see Trump run in 2024

66% of Republicans do not think Biden’s victory was legitimate

85% of Republicans want candidates that mostly agree with Trump

“The numbers fly in the face of any predictions that Donald Trump’s political future is in decline. By a substantial majority, Republicans: believe the election was stolen from him, want Trump to run again, and , if they can’t vote for Trump, prefer someone who agrees with him,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.

Malloy is right. The poll reveals what many American already know — Trump still serves as a top conservative leader.

But is Trump still up for another run? And if he does, can he win?

The first question looks like a yes. Trump recently told radio host Dan Bongino people will be very happy with his answer. However, Trump has also previously said he would not announce whether he is running until after the 2022 midterm elections.

The more important question is can he win? If two-thirds of Republicans already support Trump, how many more will be required, especially in key battleground states, to reach the needed electoral votes?

Native American Voting Rights Are Under Attack In Republican

Paul Blumenthal

After turning out to vote in record numbers in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Native Americans are now one of the biggest targets of Republican-backed voter suppression efforts in states where their votes mattered the most.

Republicans in states with significant Native populations like Arizona, Kansas, Montana and more have enacted new laws that limit voter access in ways that disproportionately impact Native voters. Imposing strict time limits on correcting a mail-in ballot, prohibiting third-party ballot collection, implementing strict voter identification requirements and making it harder to pay for election resources all negatively impact Native Americans in these states, largely due to specific circumstances on reservations where many of them live.

“The laws the state legislatures are passing are lethal to every Native American living in those states,” said OJ Semans, the founder of the Native voting rights group Four Directions and an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Such legislation, he said, “is going to knock us back 10 years” after “what we’ve been working through for the last 18 to 20 years to get more and more Native Americans to participate in elections.”

It wasn’t until 1962 when New Mexico’s laws blocking Native voting fell. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 also provided important protections for Native voting rights.

Trumps Role As Republican Party Leader Is Becoming Stronger

This weekend’s CPAC straw poll results showed that Trump’s popularity — along with DeSantis’ — in the Republican Party has grown in the last six months, according to Forbes.

In February, only 55% of attendees of a similar CPAC event in Orlando, Florida, said they wanted Trump to lead the ticket in 2024, Forbes reported.

If Trump stayed in political retirement, or at least stayed off the presidential primary ballot in 2024, DeSantis lead the poll with 43% attending Republicans choosing him in February’s hypothetical presidential primary.

Inside the newsroom: Words matter, including the hateful ‘Murder the media’

When Presidential Primaries Started They Weren’t Decisive

Woodrow Wilson.

The Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century saw a backlash against local party machines and their bosses dominating American politics. This backlash was especially pronounced in Western states, where reformers implemented ideas like legislating via ballot initiative at the polls.

Progressive reformers also invented the presidential primary. In 1910, Oregon became the first to use a popular election to pick its delegates for national conventions, with the delegates pledged to support specific candidates.

But these primaries lacked the efficacy and decisiveness of those we have today, in part because most states didn’t have them and in part because the ultimate nomination decision was still made via a multi-ballot process at a national convention.

In 1912, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt decided to challenge his successor William Howard Taft for the GOP nomination. He crushed Taft in the primaries, carrying nine of the 12 states that held primaries, while Robert La Follette won two and Taft just one.

But that still left 36 other states, which mostly sent pro-Taft delegates to the convention, securing him the nomination. And that led Roosevelt to bolt the party and launch an independent bid for the general election.

But while McAdoo didn’t have enough support to win, he did have enough to block the party bosses’ favorite, New York Gov. Al Smith, a Catholic.

Why Donald Trump Is Republicans’ Worst Nightmare In 2024

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Earlier this week, amid a rambling attack on the validity of the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump said this: “Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I’m far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024.”

this on Trump’s future political ambitions from Politico“Trump is confiding in allies that he intends to run again in 2024 with one contingency: that he still has a good bill of health, according to two sources close to the former president. That means Trump is going to hang over the Republican Party despite its attempts to rebrand during his exile and its blockade of a Trump-centric investigation into January’s insurrection.”new Quinnipiac University national pollhis growing legal and financial entanglementsAs CNN reported on Wednesday night“Manhattan prosecutors pursuing a criminal case against former President Donald Trump, his company and its executives have told at least one witness to prepare for grand jury testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter — a signal that the lengthy investigation is moving into an advanced stage.”

The Contenders Who Competed To Run Against Donald Trump

Tom MurseTom Murse

Within weeks of Donald Trump taking the oath of office as the nation’s 45th president, challengers began lining up to see who would attempt to unseat him in the 2020 presidential election. The controversial president faced early challenges from within his own party, but by and large, the focus remained on the candidates put forth by the opposing Democratic Party.

During one of the most crowded primary seasons in recent memory, several high-profile Democrats, including multiple sitting senators and rising stars in the party, competed for the party’s nomination. Ultimately, it was former vice president Joe Biden who won the party’s nomination. He selected Senator Kamala Harris, another primary candidate, as his running mate, and the ticket won the 2020 general election with 51.3% of the vote and 306 electoral votes to 46.9% and 232 electoral votes for the incumbent Trump/Pence ticket.

Here’s a look at the Democrats, and even members of Trump’s own Republican Party, who ran campaigns looking to unseat the controversial commander-in-chief.

Democratic Challengers

February 7, 2020

Former Us Ambassador To The United Nations Nikki Haley

Haley, 49, stands out in the potential pool of 2024 Republican candidates by her resume. She has experience as an executive as the former governor of South Carolina and foreign policy experience from her time as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Haley was a member of the Republican Party’s 2010 tea party class. A former South Carolina state representative, her long shot gubernatorial campaign saw its fortunes improve after she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. Haley rocketed from fourth to first just days after the endorsement, and she went on to clinch the nomination and become her state’s first female and first Indian-American governor.

As governor, she signed a bill removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol following the white supremacist attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston. She left office in 2017 to join the Trump administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Quinnipiac poll found she was at one point the most popular member of Trump’s foreign policy team.

“I think that she’s done a pretty masterful job in filling out her resume,” said Robert Oldendick, a professor and director of graduate studies at the University of South Carolina’s department of political science.

Haley criticized Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters, saying she was “disgusted” by his conduct. Oldendick said he thought her “pretty pointed criticism of the president will potentially cause some problems.”

Republican Candidates Running For The Us 2020 Election

Bill Weld was married twice and has five children.

Weld ran for vice-president as a Libertarian on the Gary Johnson ticket in the 2016 presidential election.

As a conservative, Weld is strongly pro-choice on abortion issues.

The presidential race is on and the candidates are being whittled down to the very few. Who is running on the Republican side? Current President Donald Trump is going for re-election, and the only candidate now challenging him for election as president of the US this coming November 3rd, 2020 is Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor.

The 2024 Republican Presidential Candidate Wild Cards

The first Democratic debate back in 2019 had 20 — TWENTY! — candidates, so don’t be surprised if the Republican field is just as large or larger. We could have some more governors or representatives run, or even other nontraditional candidates, like a Trump family member, a Fox News host or a celebrity, like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who’s said he’s “seriously considering” a run. Stranger things have happened.

Who Wants To Run For Governor As A Republican In 2022

Pennsylvania Republicans have been battling with Gov. Tom Wolf since he unseated incumbent Tom Corbett in 2014. Many of them are eager to take Wolf’s place, but there is no clear frontrunner this early in the race. Several Republicans have already announced their bid, and a few others have hinted or shown interest in joining what is expected to be a crowded primary. Thus far, it’s hard to find a Republican candidate without some sort of ties to former President Donald Trump.

With a heated race to fill U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey’s seat next year, the GOP will have to be strategic about what candidates it wants to back for the Senate and for governor. Potential candidates will also have to weigh their options and decide where they fit best and can compete.

There are plenty of names that could be added to this list in the coming months, but here is our second iteration of potential Republican candidates for 2022. A couple of candidates have been added since the last edition.

Running

Former U.S. Rep Lou Barletta

Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale

Gale was the first Republican to formally announce his candidacy for governor back in February. An avid Trump supporter, he has criticized the Pennsylvania GOP and pledged to be a conservative populist. He’s also caught attention for and saying Trump’s presidency was sabotaged.

Former Corry Mayor Jason Monn

Pittsburgh attorney Jason Richey

Dr. Nche Zama

Charlie Gerow

John Ventre

For These Republicans 2024 Is Just Around The Corner

Mike Pence. Mike Pompeo. Rick Scott. They share big ambitions, but one name hovers above them all …

President Biden told reporters last month that his “plan is to run for re-election,” despite already being the oldest person to have won a presidential election. So, for now at least, the question of who will lead the Democratic ticket in 2024 has been put to rest.

On the Republican side, however, certainty is in short supply. It’s beyond early to be talking about the next presidential election — but that’s only if you aren’t planning to run. Some Republican candidates have already made trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and others are laying plans to go, in what often represents the first step in building out a campaign operation in those early-voting states.

And on Wednesday, in a conspicuously forward-looking move, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a new political organization, Advancing American Freedom, whose advisory board is stacked high with former Trump administration officials and allies. The news came on the same day Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish Pence’s autobiography as part of a two-book deal.

The G.O.P. is badly fractured, trying to hold together a dominant base of those loyal to former President Donald Trump and a stubborn minority of pro-decorum, anti-Trump conservatives. Anyone looking to grab the Republican mantle will have to find some way of satisfying both camps — and maybe even expanding upon them.

Rivera Another Candidate Who Is Trying A Second Time

Another candidate making her second Senate attempt is Natalie Lynn Rivera. A social services coordinator from Sicklerville, Rivera ran as an independent under the slogan “For the People” in 2018, garnering about 0.6% of the vote.

Rivera, 44, said she wants to give typical New Jersey residents a voice in Congress. On her Facebook campaign site she calls herself a conservative. Among her priorities are restoring Second Amendment rights that she says are “under seige” in the state and outlawing abortion.

What sets her apart from the other candidates, she said, is that she “will be a servant to the people … I think I am authentic and will serve from the heart to put their best interests at the forefront.”

Another candidate running a shoestring campaign is Eugene Tom Anagnos, a retired middle school teacher who taught in Newark and Elizabeth schools. A Greek immigrant who now lives in East Hanover, Anagnos is an Army veteran who holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Indiana University.

General Election Candidates On Five Or More Ballots

In addition to Biden, Hawkins, Jorgensen, and Trump, the following candidates have qualified to appear on five or more ballots:

Roque De La Fuente Gloria La Riva Jade Simmons Jesse Ventura/Cynthia McKinney Sheila Tittle Kyle Kenley Kopitke Ricki Sue King/Dayna Chandler

Incumbents are bolded and underlined The results have been certified.

Total votes: 158,379,904

0 states have not been called.

Here Are The Republicans To Keep An Eye On For 2024

Bradley Devlin

Republicans are paying extra attention to a number of Republican governors, senators, and former officials that might consider making a run for president in 2024.

The contenders come from various contingents of right-leaning thought, and will be fighting to capture parts of former President Donald Trump’s base. Whichever Republican hopeful prevails will not only become the Republican Party’s nominee, but also help determine the ideological trajectory of the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

Vice President Mike Pence

It’s not uncommon for vice presidents to follow up their stint as second-in-command with a run for president. Former President John Adams, the nation’s second president, was America’s first vice president under President George Washington. More recently, President Joe Biden became the 46th president four years after he ended his eight-year tenure as former President Barack Obama’s vice president.

Vice President Mike Pence might decide to do the same, but Pence’s relationship with Trump seems to be severely tarnished after Pence did not contest the certification of the Electoral College results, as reported by The Hill.

Senator Ted Cruz

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz could run for president again come 2024 after he defended his senate seat in 2018 from Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Cruz’s bid for the presidency in 2016 ended in failure as Trump captured the Republican Party’s nomination.

Senator Josh Hawley

Governor Ron DeSantis

Poll Results Are Fake Unless Theyre Good Trump Says

During his speech at the Dallas convention Sunday night, Trump said he only would have believed the results of CPAC’s straw poll if they were his favor, Business Insider reported.

“Now, if it’s bad, I just say it’s fake,” the former president told the crowd, reported Insider. “If it’s good, I say that’s the most accurate poll, perhaps ever.”

In the past, Trump has decried similar things he doesn’t like as false, like referring to unfavorable media coverage as “fake news.”

Early Nomination Contests Didn’t Involve Primaries

Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.

Intraparty disputes over who should be nominated for the presidency are as old as the republic itself. But the modern system of determining nominees through a series of state primary elections is essentially an innovation of the 1970s. Before that, parties deployed a wide range of methods.

The Democratic-Republicans, the dominant political party of the early 19th century, used to select candidates via a vote of the party’s members in Congress.That method let it control the White House for 20 years, and lasted until the rivalry between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson made the party splinter into the Democrats and the Whigs in the aftermath of the 1824 election.

Back in 1836, in the early days of Whig versus Democrat competition, the Whig Party even tried nominating several candidates simultaneously in their bid to block Martin Van Buren from succeeding Jackson in the White House.

In most Northern states, William Henry Harrison appeared on the general election ballot, while Hugh White got the nod in most Southern ones. And Massachusetts Whigs went with Daniel Webster , while Willie Magnum was nominated in South Carolina.

But it did not work. Van Buren won the election, and in subsequent contests the Whigs emulated the Democrats, picking a single nominee at a broad national convention with representatives from all states.

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