Running the Numbers: Early Voting, COVID-19, Town Hall Ratings
Let’s face it, November 2020 will be a critical month in the history of the United States. The choices couldn’t be more obvious. All sides engaged in the political process agree on the importance of this election.
Mid-way through October, there are millions of data points to consider as we head into the last few weeks of election season 2020, and today seems like a good time to look around.
Seventeen Million
Early voter turnout is impressive.
Via the Associated Press:
More than 17 million Americans have already cast ballots in the 2020 election, a record-shattering avalanche of early votes driven both by Democratic enthusiasm and a pandemic that has transformed the way the nation votes.
The total represents 12% of all the votes cast in the 2016 presidential election, even as eight states are not yet reporting their totals and voters still have more than two weeks to cast ballots. Americans’ rush to vote is leading election experts to predict that a record 150 million votes may be cast and turnout rates could be higher than in any presidential election since 1908.
“It’s crazy,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who has long tracked voting for his site ElectProject.org. McDonald’s analysis shows roughly 10 times as many people have voted compared with this point in 2016.
In California, roughly 7 percent of the 21 million ballots that were sent out earlier this month have been processed. For perspective, there were just 150,000 returned ballots at the same point in time during the 2016 presidential election.
How and when are other states counting ballots? The New York Times published a handy-dandy chart showing this information.
Eight million
There’s no good news here.
The country passed eight million cases of documented COVID-19 infections yesterday, and the numbers are headed up, up, up. This weekend President Trump will be holding another super-spreader rally in Wisconsin, where field hospitals have been set up as the state moved up to fourth in the nation for new COVID-19 cases per population and seventh for test positivity.
Hospitalizations in the state tripled over the last three weeks, deaths climbed to 87 last week, and the White House Coronavirus Task Force privately warned this week that residents need to avoid “crowds in public and social gatherings in private” unless they want to cause “preventable deaths.”
Reports of new cases are trending upward in 41 states over the last two weeks, while nine states are holding case numbers roughly steady. No state in the country is seeing a sustained decline.
Eight million more people have slipped into poverty over the past five months, as emergency assistance in the CARES Act has tapered off, according to researchers at Columbia University.
From the New York Times:
Underscoring those concerns, the Labor Department reported on Thursday that about 886,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, an increase of nearly 77,000, or 9.5 percent, from the previous week. Adjusted for seasonal variations, the total was 898,000.
The recent rise in poverty has occurred despite an improving job market since May, an indication that the economy had been rebounding too slowly to offset the lost benefits. And now the economy is showing new signs of deceleration, amid layoffs, a surge in coronavirus cases and deadlocked talks in Washington over new stimulus.
Despite the urging of both the White House and Democrats, Senate Republicans are proposing a designed-to-fail stimulus. They privately admit the probability of a drubbing at the polls and are now playing the long game of working to undermine the next administration.
Two Hundred Twenty Nine Million
That’s the number of dollars needed to repair infrastructure damage in California from six destructive wildfires that burned hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, including a massive central California wildfire that has become the single largest in state history.
The federal government has denied a September 28 request for a Major Presidential Disaster Declaration submitted by Gov. Newsom.
UPDATE- Via Politico:
Rep. Tom McClintock said Friday that President Donald Trump has agreed to reverse his administration's decision to deny federal cleanup funding for six wildfires, including the largest single fire in state history located in the Republican-heavy Central Valley.
Impact: McClintock, a Republican who represents fire-struck regions of California, said in a tweet that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told him that Trump would issue a disaster declaration providing funding to clean up fire debris. That comes despite the Federal Emergency Management Agency's denial of Gov. Gavin Newsom's request earlier this week. "The Presidential Disaster Declaration is imminent and help is on the way," he wrote.
Three Hundred Eighty Three Million
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign raised $364M in August -- the biggest sum for any presidential campaign ever. But last month, he raised $383M!!
$203 million of September’s total came from small, online donors. And 1.1 million of those donors were new to the campaign.
Two Million
https://twitter.com/Mediaite/status/1317127510019182592?s=20
While this sounds cool, the actual numbers are undoubtedly wrong, since viewers streaming and simulcasts (MSNBC) are not included. We many never know.
But when it comes to old style TV, more favored by old-style people, the kind of people that gave Donald Trump support in the last election, the ratings are an indication that should be taken seriously.
As to the content of the town halls, here’s Laura Clawson:
On the one hand, you had Trump deflecting responsibility for having tweeted a conspiracy theory that Biden had SEAL Team Six killed to cover up the fake death of Osama bin Laden, saying “That was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position,” to which moderator Savannah Guthrie responded “I don’t get that, you’re the president. You’re not like, someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.”
On the other hand, you had Biden saying “I am running as a proud Democrat, but I am going to be an American president. I am going to take care of those who voted against me as well as those who voted for me. For real. That’s what presidents do. We’ve got to heal this nation.”
Twelve Million
That’s the number of Americans who have lost access to health care via employer-sponsored health insurance since the start of the pandemic.
The coronavirus is not only deadly, it's also leaving many Americans without medical coverage as the unemployment rate continues to surge.
Since the pandemic hit the U.S., more than 6 million Americans have lost health insurance they'd previously had through their work. And when you take into account spouses and children, the number of those affected climbs to more than 12 million, according to new research.
"Because most U.S. workers rely on their employer or a family member's employer for health insurance, the shock of the coronavirus has cost millions of Americans their jobs and their access to health care in the midst of a public health catastrophe," according to Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
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Funny/Not Funny
Someone has been taping “‘Official’ Republican ballot drop-box” signs to trash cans in Crockett, CA, a small East Bay town. “It’s unclear who is plastering the drop box signs... But the joke appears to be in direct reference to a statewide ballot box brouhaha that began unfolding earlier this week.”
NOT Funny
https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1316817278386700289?s=20
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