So in that Kasie Hunt Tweet she is directly telegraphing that she's already made up a narrative in her head (suburban women are turning on Democrats because that didn't pass paid family leave) and she's gonna go out looking for a story that supports that narrative.
This doesn't seem like how journalism should work.
I think you're just putting the most negative spin on the tweet. If read more generously, she's just making a prediction that a policy choice will cause a reaction in voters that she can see covering when it happens. We can read tweets and put the most negative spin on them all day, but IMO I don't think it's a great use of time or energy.
This is the thing that boggles my mind. As I watched BBB progress, I kept thinking, "This isn't going to happen. You can't bully Manchin into doing this. Why isn't this fact obvious to people?" But so many people carried on with the bill as if it were going to happen and then seemed confused and angry when it didn't happen.
The point about riding maskless on an airplane is a good one. I hadn't thought about it before, but I imagine a Republican president will do that on Day 1. I bet even after 2022, a Republican Congress will pass that bill and complain when Biden doesn't sign it. Why the administration doesn't get ahead of all this and just give up on NPIs now I will never understand.
The use of masks - loose fitting, on kids, inside, outside, doesn't matter - is now an article of faith. As such, it is not subject to debate around tradeoffs or effectiveness. Either you support requiring masks or you want to kill people.
'The mask debate' (which is separate than the more precise, specific discussions about contexts in which high-quality masking may offer benefit) is a perfect microcosm of the intra-elite war between ineffectual virtue signaling and reactionary contrarianism than has defined the last 10 years of American civic life.
I’ve traveled the entire pandemic (about 100 segments a year) and never got it (finally thought I had it a week ago but it was the flu). I’m really really tired of Covid theater. And masking on a 14 hour flight really does suck.
The fact that the Biden administration has never made this indefinite, that they've placed explicit ending dates that get pushed out (we're now on March 18th) makes me hopeful that they recognize this can't keep going on.
But, echoing the sentiments of other commenters below, this remains by far my number one complaint with NPIs, and I still hold that there was a major lost opportunity here of instead requiring full vaccination in order to fly, which could have served as a major carrot to experience something in demand at normalcy.
And flying is one of the best places to target a vaccine mandate. Airlines already have to check your documentation when you buy the ticket. Asking people to upload a photo of their vaccine card (or their QR code if they're from a technologically advanced state) would be really easy at a moment when they already have to dig out their credit card number.
COVID is a wedge issue among Democrats because roughly half of Democratic voters are really covid cautious, to the point of being sketched out by indoor dining and crowds at cultural and sporting events
I think the percentage of voters who travel frequently by air isn't really that high. (As usual, upper-middle-class people underestimate how few people are in the upper middle class.) What drives most people bananas is having to wear masks in stores and so on.
You're probably right that mask mandates on planes will be abandoned at some point, but as someone who always gets sick after flying I think that's too bad. Being locked in a closed space breathing recirculated air with hundreds of other people is a special situation, and I think masks are a common-sense precaution against all kinds of other diseases.
I might have availability bias, but I do think planes frequently make me sick. I live and fly outside the US, though, so who knows what foreign airlines are doing with their air filters.
I would expect the retention of moisture from your breath to be re-inhaled to make that symptom better, not worse.
I really suspect a lot of people just have mild psychosomatic reactions to flying. I fly a lot and hear people complain about a litany of entirely unrelated mild maladies they blame on flying a ton.
Mine is that I feel hungry all the damned time on travel days. I have learned to ignore it, turn down snacks on the plane, drink tomato juice, and get a bigggg fucking salad for lunch or dinner after touching down.
That's a fair point - it's actually not the plane in that case, it's the mask. It's just that on the plane is one of the few times when I have to wear a mask for such an extended period of time. The effect was most severe when I wore an N95. Now I wear the flimsiest piece of cloth I can get away with.
I will likely always carry a mask with me when I travel as I do think they're effective and it's something I can do to protect my own health. I just think the political cost being paid by continuing to impose these things is not worth it. The world will be much worse off if the GOP controls all three branches of government. And they will also repeal the mask mandates. Biden will almost certainly lose if he doesn't, so why not do it and take a talking point away from the other side?
I repeat what I mentioned earlier: Mask mandates have become an article of faith, not subject to questions of effectiveness. One cannot convince a priest to abandon, say, the sacrament of communion by appealing to logic or effectiveness.
"I think the percentage of voters who travel frequently by air isn't really that high...What drives most people bananas is having to wear masks in stores and so on."
I can see that argument. However, the annoyance factor for having to keep a mask on for an 8-hour flight is much larger than for a 10-minute trip to a grocery store, even if you only fly once or twice per year. Air travel masking is also something that Biden actually has direct control over. Grocery store masking is decided by people like governors or mayors.
The most frequent commercial fliers (as opposed to private who aren’t wearing masks) are all solidly middle class. Upper level management doesn’t fly 50-150 times a year. CEOs fly private.
I wasn't flying again for work until very near to Delta's arrival in the States.
In general... Cotton was never a good option, merely less bad than nothing. Any blown mesh fabric mask was more effective, and now anything short of a KN95 or N95 is effectively useless if you're vaccinated and very nearly so if not.
Regarding air travel in particular... Given the filtration environment that exists on an airplane, non-N95 masks weren't really necessary prior to Delta, and they're near-useless with Omicron.
Masks can do only one thing: decrease my chances of contracting COVID in any given period of time. Given that COVID will become endemic and there is no prospect of further technological means of rendering it less lethal, on a personal level it no longer matters whether I get COVID this week, next week, four months from now, or early next year.
> Given that COVID will become endemic and there is no prospect of further technological means of rendering it less lethal, on a personal level it no longer matters whether I get COVID this week, next week, four months from now, or early next year.
There is, Paxlovid will be more available next month than it is now. That and nasal vaccines, though I don't know if anyone will be willing to go out and get them.
Yet again, I will correct you here(Not for you but for those reading). No mask is useless. As Matt described in the tread, a cloth mask prevents 17%-27% (up to N95 ~90%) of virus particles.... Thus none are useless. If, however, your exposure is severe and lengthy, then the only benefit of a mask is that you will remain non-sick for the first 10% (i.e. 20 min) of your exposure.
I think that's debatable, but even if lives are being saved, aren't they almost entirely the lives of the unvaccinated? And if those people want to risk getting on a plane, getting COVID, and dying I guess that's their choice now? My point is that there is no time in the future where it will not be true that requiring masks is safer than not requiring them. So do we just wear masks forever?
I mean... there's a faction of the Republican Party that thinks there was rampant electoral fraud last election.
Opinions are not given value just by the mere fact that some people hold them.
EDIT: This is doubly true when the people who hold these opinions are screaming "fOLloW tHE SCiEncE" at the top of their lungs and wielding a profoundly flawed, sensationalist-media-filtered understanding of low-quality research as a cudgel against anyone who dares oppose them.
I would just note again that while Matt's earlier article putting a lot of the blame for this on Schumer was persuasive, all of Schumer's incentives change in 8 weeks when the primary filing deadline in New York passes. So that's the timeline to keep an eye on.
Ah, good to note! I hadn't remembered which particular cycle he was up in, but knowing that he's got a full six years before the next one could help. (Though even at his best, Chuck Schumer was no Harry Reid, not that Harry Reid is anywhere near as competent as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.)
This particular episode aside, I don't have a strong view on which of those leaders is more competent or effective than which. But I do think the Senate Democratic leadership has the highest degree of difficulty of the four caucuses.
The depressing thing is that passing BBB in its fullest, pre-Manchin form would not have moved the polls much. Legislation matters much less than the zeitgeist, and laws affect the zeitgeist in strange, unpredictable, hard to control ways.
I think the one big thing legislation does is that it means a couple news cycles of stories about Democrats being successful at something, rather than news cycle after news cycle of Democrats saying how bad Democrats are. If Democrats are spending all their time criticizing Democrats, then Republicans mustn't be that bad!
Yeah, I think this should be more obvious to people given the polls after the large bills that did pass. I wouldn't even be surprised if passing BBB (or a replacement) ended up being slightly bad for the poll numbers - it doesn't address the biggest concerns Americans have at the moment, and Republicans would claim it to be inflationary.
It’s pretty clear now that Manchin is fundamentally negotiating in good faith, so if Schumer and those to his left can’t figure out something, I’m going to place that blame entirely on them.
In a nutshell, the situation has not changed since last June. Manchin said stay under 1.5T and pick a few things to be fully funded (or at least have significantly less budget tricks) and he will support. Why we are still in the same place in February has little to do with Manchin and everything to do with the Progressives not being able to accept reality and continuing to try to get Manchin to change. He is not going to.
All of that, and the thing that had me nodding my head was the paragraph about riding on an airplane without masks. This issue absolutely will be influencing my next votes.
And all the other stuff, the key provision that I support is making the expanded child tax credit permanent. But I’m sort of resigned that that’s not gonna get passed either.
The Democrats should wrap up some pro natural gas to replace coal elements in their climate proposals. That might get Manchin to sign on.
The weird thing is how social media reinforces it. They will force children, teachers, and low income workers to stay masked forever. It is "science" after all. But they will be unmasked on zoom and in their own offices.
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if West Virginia is a bit of an outlier here amongst deep red states. They had Robert Byrd as an institution in the Senate, and he basically staked his whole career on "my state is really poor, they need government solutions to improve roads/electricity/schools etc." and people kept voting him in. I know cultural issues have superseded economic ones in a lot of places, but perhaps those feelings linger just enough in West Virginia to influence Manchin?
Not to be too reductive, but there are hardly any black people in West Virginia. I believe hostile racial polarization among white voters correlates pretty strongly with the size of the local black population. (I am too lazy to look up the studies but I don't think I imagined them.)
One of the reasons Donald Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016 is that the Republicans assign some delegates by congressional district--meaning that if you're a Republican voter in a district that has very few Republicans, your vote has disproportionate influence. White Republicans who live in black-majority districts turned out to be especially supportive of Trump.
This sounds way too reductive. And any studies that try to "show" that's what's happening are going to run up against a major confounding factors: White Republican voters who live in Black Majority districts live largely in the deep south or in very large formerly thriving industrial metros like Philadelphia or the Detroit area. There's very little you can infer from voters in those areas supporting different primary candidates than R voters in Idaho, along the Mexican border, or in West Virginia.
Yeah, you'd need precinct-level data to be sure. But it is true that working-class whites in WV continued voting Democratic for some time after their counterparts in the slave South had switched. (Jay Rockefeller was quite a progressive senator, not a Manchin Democrat at all, and he was in office until 2015.) You could try to explain this with some other factor, like having mountains or banjo music, but I think the state's racial homogeneity made a difference.
You see the same pattern in Indian elections, where the Hindu nationalists do worse in the deep south (overwhelmingly Hindu) than in the north (large Muslim minority). There's a social-science term for this but I forget what it is.
Speaking specifically of Black West Virginians, this small town of 200 people has produced 4 with interesting enough lives to have their own wikipedia page, for 4 very different sorts of accomplishments:
I agree that's a reasonable enough hypothetical theory and one could probably pick and choose some studies that find support for it. I just don't think it's very compelling in this case whatsoever.
WV is special as a state because it has no major metros and is made up of an especially large amount of working class white voters with historical connections to organized labor left-politics. But that's not special regionally, there's lots and lots and lots of places like that across America.
Culturally, I'd say the US non-metro South is special because of a uniquely (bad) historical connection to segregation and Jim Crow that echoes through today in the shape of very racialized voting patterns.
There are a lot more places like WV in terms of the way I described it than there are places like South. And those place generally have voting patterns similar to West Virginians whether there happen to be a lot of Black people nearby or not. There are a fair amount of Black people in the mill towns and smaller cities all the way from Missouri - Illinois all the way through to upstate NY. The working class white people there have been voting almost exactly like the same types of people in WV over the last 2 decades.
I'm not sure there's all that much Banjo music in WV, btw. Maybe in the Southern Half. The northern half has a lot of mill towns and even the coal towns were settled by lots of turn of the century immigrants like Poles, Italians, etc.. Like I said, the southern half may be different but the northern half is more like the Deer Hunter than like Deliverance.
I think Jeff's point is almost 100% accurate on its face.
Bill Clinton lost all the Southern states with the largest Black populations in 1996 while winning all the ones that are less Black (AR, KY, TN, WV, MO if you count that as Southern). That isn't a coincidence! The fact that the presence of large numbers of the most Democratic group is negatively correlated with electoral victory is almost impossible to rationalize away through any other means.
Does it support that conclusion? It doesn't look like it to me. There are large blotches of red all over rural areas East of the Mississippi, all over the mountain west, over most of Texas and all kinds of other spots without especially high Black proportions of voters nearby. A simpler explanation for those state level results is Clinton did especially well in states near to Arkansas..
Meanwhile, Clinton won Louisiana by 12%, LA is currently the 2nd highest % Black state in the USA at 33%. LA and WV have charted similar courses since 1996, shifting from +12% and +15% D to +19% and + 39% R, respectively, in 2020.
There may still be some correlation in the present day, but there's not an awful lot of data points. The states with the highest black % include Maryland at 30%, Delaware 23% and NY 17%. All of which also have white people that vote D far more than West Virginians. So it's not clear that if that effect exists that it's an important one.
I'm happy to defer to anyone who knows more than I do about Indian politics, which isn't difficult. But that's my general impression of the map in 2019:
It's true that the south has strong regional parties, and that they won elections even while Congress was still nationally dominant. But you have to ask why people who feel dissatisfied with Congress tend to express themselves by voting for regional parties in the south and for the ethnonationalists in the north. Maybe the south's linguistic distinctiveness is another factor.
White voters in West Virginia are about as Republican as white voters in Georgia, despite the fact that Georgia has 10 times as many blacks per capita.
Any white person in Georgia who has a job or a profession deals with black people on a daily basis, there’s much more of a lived experience of integration in Georgia than West Virginia
Of course. It was hugely blue in the late 90s - that's recent enough that plenty of older, less diligent types of people haven't even bothered to change their party id even though they haven't voted D in a decade or two. The Paul Ryan get-rid-of-SS type of Republican is very unpopular there.
This is among the guiding stars I look to when people panic about gerrymandering ending the Republic.
The landscape will erode out from under anyone who tries, lol.
The only thing that might end the Republic is if the Democrats simply cannot get their shit together to silence or marginalize those who want to *narrow* the electoral coalition instead of broadening it.
Message discipline from within the party is already gearing up, but it will be insufficient. It must be *forced* on the bad actors outside the party as well. A degree of brutality will be required, of the "I want this fool blacklisted from any employment by anyone who solicits money from our donors or any of our friendly press. Burn their life to the ground and turf them out onto the street, then use their example to warn the next idiot" sort.
I don't currently see anyone on this side of the aisle who has that ruthlessness.
We'll see. You continue to make what is, to my mind, a serious mistake in believing the GOP must rely on minoritarianism to win, and that it will feel the need to upset the apple cart even when it can win fair and square.
I see reason to believe the GOP is going to start winning actual majorities in Federal elections before too long, because the Democrats are so damned in love with their "incipient demographic victory" to do anything to secure it.
Sure, they're still the party of decent social programs, but you and many others drastically overstate where in Maslow's hierarchy of political needs that lies. Basic security of persons and property is way more important to most voters, as is fundamental equality of opportunity, and the Democrats seem bound and determined to give up the high ground on those two issues.
I will not be surprised to see the GOP successfully erode solid Democratic leans among Hispanic and Asian voters down to parity over the coming 2 electoral cycles, and start to eat into the black vote as well.
And with those voters will come some degree of responsiveness to their needs and concerns, including social programs and economic fairness.
That they won't be the "other" anymore will also make the party's white, working class base more amenable to interventionism even when it benefits those groups.
I think we're going to see a fairly rapid shift in the economic bases and policies of the two sides over the coming two decades, and I don't think it's going to come out with the Democrats looking good from a policy standpoint, aside from climate change.
Sure, for the moment I'm voting straight-ticket Democrat, but I can easily foresee a day when that will not be the case, and it may be before the end of the decade.
I'll be very surprised if Asian voters end up at 50/50.
My overarching theory on political realignment is guided by the face that this is happening across the board in Western Democracies. The left party is becoming the party of the educated and urban, regardless of income, worldwide, and Asians in America are extremely educated and extremely urban.
Racial / ethnic identity is a small part of the equation in Europe, where as I understand it Muslims and immigrant groups are averaging around 60% support for left-wing parties. It would be a small part in the USA, too, if we were only looking at Whites, Hispanics and Asians.
What's most unique about the US is that a large block of less-educated voters is still tied to the left for historical reasons. That's not very stable in the long term and eventually when the black vote slips a bit more towards Rs it could hit a tipping point and slide really fast.
In support of the previous post, from "Draw the Lines PA" (ostensibly non-partisan but if anything somewhat Democratic-leaning":
"On Friday, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission released and voted 4-1 to approve final State House and State Senate voting maps for Pennsylvania for the next decade. Notably, this was a bipartisan vote, with Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland) joining Minority Leader Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia) and Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D–Allegheny), along with Chair Mark Nordenberg, in voting for the maps.
So, how do the new maps stack up to the current districts? They appear better almost across the board. As noted in the graphic above, there are fewer splits across political divisions. Districts are more compact. Overall population deviation between the largest and smallest district is slightly larger, but the average deviation is about the same.
There was a great deal of discussion on Friday about racial equity in the maps. There are now 7 districts in the House and 2 in the Senate where there is not an incumbent and in which non-white voters make up a majority of the district. In the maps drawn in 2012, there were 28 districts in which non-white voters made up at least 35% of the voting-age population. The new maps contain 44 such districts. On the Senate side, the maps drawn in 2012 had 5 such districts; the new maps contain 10.
The Philadelphia Inquirer summarized the overall partisan impact of these maps. Neither map appears to unduly advantage one party over another. “The new maps still slightly favor Republicans but are significantly closer to evenly split than the current maps,” they write."
The actions of foreign governments have made it hard to feel we have returned to normal. Every time I turn on the Olympics, I see empty seats and an event that could be a celebration of peace and normalcy downgraded to a grim rendition of pandemic theater. The Tokyo games were even worse. I could not vacation in Canada last summer even though I was fully vaccinated. Biden might have been able to pressure Canada into opening it’s border to tourists a bit earlier, but he didn’t try and he would have taken a lot of flak if he had.
Nor can Biden make my mother more willing to travel and dine out. The continued dreariness of life isn’t Biden’s fault. However, I’m wearing a mask on a plane right now because of a Biden administration mandate, and that makes it very easy to project pandemic angst onto Biden.
I think one problem with "Build Back Better" is that it implies the country is in a desperate situation due to COVID, whereas a lot of swing voters think it's mainly in a mess because of unnecessary COVID restrictions. The slogan might have made sense a year ago, but not now.
I can't say for sure, obviously, but I think Manchin probably would have been more receptive to funding gimmicks and CBO score gaming if Democrats and leadership hadn't spent three months trashing him for not going up to $3.5 trillion. It's hard to see how that wouldn't result in a lot of bad blood, particularly when Manchin made his red lines clear at the beginning in the Schumer memo. That Schumer kept it a secret even, apparently, from Pelosi and President, and said nothing as other Democrats complained that Manchin didn't spell out what he wanted.
But maybe things had to play out that way. It's also hard to see progressives willingly go from $3.5 to $1.5 trillion until they'd exhausted all avenues and proved to their base that they "fought" for a bigger number. But the way in which they fought - often in personal terms about the (lack of) moral character of Manchin and Sinema, was probably counterproductive considering they need Manchin more than he needs them.
Democrats: “Cut one penny from the welfare state and we’ll have millions of sick and starving children and old people dying in the streets.”
Republicans: “Cut one penny from the military and we’ll have Chinese tanks rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard.”
The bipartisan “compromise” has indeed always been “why not both?” - spend more on everything without addressing the obvious status quo of massive programs that pad public payrolls and funnel cash to politically connected contractors and “consultants” while benefiting neither national security nor the personal well being of citizens in need.
So, Schumer and Manchin had a deal in July, in writing, not to go over 1.5T. If that's true, and it seems like it is, I understand why Schumer kept it secret to protect his left flank. And Manchin would keep it quiet, publicly, to help Schumer. But why would Manchin not bring it up during negotiations with the White House? They kept pressing on him, assuming 1.5T was a soft line; wouldn't he just say "It's a hard line that Schumer and I agreed on." And if he didn't, doesn't that suggest that Manchin wasn't negotiating in good faith? That he was just stringing the WH along, waiting until they got pushy enough that he could make it look like their fault for pushing too hard (which he did), knowing he could also then lay the blame at Schumer's feet for keeping the deal secret, and splitting the caucus down the middle? Because now the right/middle wing is mad at the WH for pushing too hard, and the left is mad at Schumer over a secret deal. And Manchin got what he wanted: his infrastructure bill, and no more.
I just don't see another reason why Manchin wouldn't have told WH negotiators about his deal with Schumer.
So in that Kasie Hunt Tweet she is directly telegraphing that she's already made up a narrative in her head (suburban women are turning on Democrats because that didn't pass paid family leave) and she's gonna go out looking for a story that supports that narrative.
This doesn't seem like how journalism should work.
I think you're just putting the most negative spin on the tweet. If read more generously, she's just making a prediction that a policy choice will cause a reaction in voters that she can see covering when it happens. We can read tweets and put the most negative spin on them all day, but IMO I don't think it's a great use of time or energy.
True but also seems to be totally how journalism "works" right now. Hence the presence of all of us in substack land!
The BBB fiasco has been a big loss for the "Bullying Works" caucus.
no no just proves they didn't bully hard enough
Bullying cannot fail... it can only be failed!
This is the thing that boggles my mind. As I watched BBB progress, I kept thinking, "This isn't going to happen. You can't bully Manchin into doing this. Why isn't this fact obvious to people?" But so many people carried on with the bill as if it were going to happen and then seemed confused and angry when it didn't happen.
No one has any leverage over him. If anything publicly harassing Manchin just makes him more likely to win in 2024
They don't seem to have noticed, unfortunately.
The point about riding maskless on an airplane is a good one. I hadn't thought about it before, but I imagine a Republican president will do that on Day 1. I bet even after 2022, a Republican Congress will pass that bill and complain when Biden doesn't sign it. Why the administration doesn't get ahead of all this and just give up on NPIs now I will never understand.
The use of masks - loose fitting, on kids, inside, outside, doesn't matter - is now an article of faith. As such, it is not subject to debate around tradeoffs or effectiveness. Either you support requiring masks or you want to kill people.
'The mask debate' (which is separate than the more precise, specific discussions about contexts in which high-quality masking may offer benefit) is a perfect microcosm of the intra-elite war between ineffectual virtue signaling and reactionary contrarianism than has defined the last 10 years of American civic life.
As someone who travels for a living, this is going to weigh heavily on my vote.
I’m currently quarantined in Mexico where I caught Covid despite them having 100% masking including KN95s at work.
It’s sucked for a day. But I still don’t wanna wear masks on planes.
I’ve traveled the entire pandemic (about 100 segments a year) and never got it (finally thought I had it a week ago but it was the flu). I’m really really tired of Covid theater. And masking on a 14 hour flight really does suck.
Are you allowed to consume food and drink in that time? Do circulating SARS-COV-2 viruses agree to a temporary truce when people are doing so?
"This is why I have a loose fitting cloth mask for all occasions"
FTFY.
*Not entirely true currently, but damned if it won't be in about another two weeks.
The fact that the Biden administration has never made this indefinite, that they've placed explicit ending dates that get pushed out (we're now on March 18th) makes me hopeful that they recognize this can't keep going on.
But, echoing the sentiments of other commenters below, this remains by far my number one complaint with NPIs, and I still hold that there was a major lost opportunity here of instead requiring full vaccination in order to fly, which could have served as a major carrot to experience something in demand at normalcy.
And flying is one of the best places to target a vaccine mandate. Airlines already have to check your documentation when you buy the ticket. Asking people to upload a photo of their vaccine card (or their QR code if they're from a technologically advanced state) would be really easy at a moment when they already have to dig out their credit card number.
COVID is a wedge issue among Democrats because roughly half of Democratic voters are really covid cautious, to the point of being sketched out by indoor dining and crowds at cultural and sporting events
Half?
I sincerely doubt that.
20%, perhaps.
Of Democrats though? I betcha David Abbott's not far off the mark and it's like 47% or something...
I think the percentage of voters who travel frequently by air isn't really that high. (As usual, upper-middle-class people underestimate how few people are in the upper middle class.) What drives most people bananas is having to wear masks in stores and so on.
You're probably right that mask mandates on planes will be abandoned at some point, but as someone who always gets sick after flying I think that's too bad. Being locked in a closed space breathing recirculated air with hundreds of other people is a special situation, and I think masks are a common-sense precaution against all kinds of other diseases.
The air on a modern airplane is cleaner than what you'll find in most restaurants, bars and your home. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/17/travel/flying-plane-covid-19-safety.html
I might have availability bias, but I do think planes frequently make me sick. I live and fly outside the US, though, so who knows what foreign airlines are doing with their air filters.
The dry air on planes sometimes gives me a sore throat afterwards. This has been noticeably exacerbated by having to wear a mask on a plane.
I would expect the retention of moisture from your breath to be re-inhaled to make that symptom better, not worse.
I really suspect a lot of people just have mild psychosomatic reactions to flying. I fly a lot and hear people complain about a litany of entirely unrelated mild maladies they blame on flying a ton.
Mine is that I feel hungry all the damned time on travel days. I have learned to ignore it, turn down snacks on the plane, drink tomato juice, and get a bigggg fucking salad for lunch or dinner after touching down.
That's a fair point - it's actually not the plane in that case, it's the mask. It's just that on the plane is one of the few times when I have to wear a mask for such an extended period of time. The effect was most severe when I wore an N95. Now I wear the flimsiest piece of cloth I can get away with.
Is it possible it's going through a super crowded airport that's doing it and not being on the airplane?
Or perhaps even more likely, the crowded and poorly ventilated places one may visit as part of the destination.
The air filters are the same. You’re probably reacting to the somewhat thinner air.
As others say, it's much more likely the airports rather than the airplanes, at least if various things I read are to be believed.
I will likely always carry a mask with me when I travel as I do think they're effective and it's something I can do to protect my own health. I just think the political cost being paid by continuing to impose these things is not worth it. The world will be much worse off if the GOP controls all three branches of government. And they will also repeal the mask mandates. Biden will almost certainly lose if he doesn't, so why not do it and take a talking point away from the other side?
I repeat what I mentioned earlier: Mask mandates have become an article of faith, not subject to questions of effectiveness. One cannot convince a priest to abandon, say, the sacrament of communion by appealing to logic or effectiveness.
The cabin air is completely changed every 3 minutes. You're not breathing " recirculated air" as most people would think of it.
"I think the percentage of voters who travel frequently by air isn't really that high...What drives most people bananas is having to wear masks in stores and so on."
I can see that argument. However, the annoyance factor for having to keep a mask on for an 8-hour flight is much larger than for a 10-minute trip to a grocery store, even if you only fly once or twice per year. Air travel masking is also something that Biden actually has direct control over. Grocery store masking is decided by people like governors or mayors.
The most frequent commercial fliers (as opposed to private who aren’t wearing masks) are all solidly middle class. Upper level management doesn’t fly 50-150 times a year. CEOs fly private.
Strangely enough, an airplane might be the place wearing a mask bothers me the least given how tight the confines are.
I found wearing a mask in the airport much more intensely annoying than onboard the plane.
Dozing through most of the flight just makes it a nice, warm presence, like having a blanket pulled up over your chin, instead of an itchy annoyance.
Admittedly, this is contingent on wearing a cotton mask which is all but useless for its stated purpose, only there to check the box.
I wasn't flying again for work until very near to Delta's arrival in the States.
In general... Cotton was never a good option, merely less bad than nothing. Any blown mesh fabric mask was more effective, and now anything short of a KN95 or N95 is effectively useless if you're vaccinated and very nearly so if not.
Regarding air travel in particular... Given the filtration environment that exists on an airplane, non-N95 masks weren't really necessary prior to Delta, and they're near-useless with Omicron.
Masks can do only one thing: decrease my chances of contracting COVID in any given period of time. Given that COVID will become endemic and there is no prospect of further technological means of rendering it less lethal, on a personal level it no longer matters whether I get COVID this week, next week, four months from now, or early next year.
This is theater, and I will treat it as such.
> Given that COVID will become endemic and there is no prospect of further technological means of rendering it less lethal, on a personal level it no longer matters whether I get COVID this week, next week, four months from now, or early next year.
There is, Paxlovid will be more available next month than it is now. That and nasal vaccines, though I don't know if anyone will be willing to go out and get them.
Yet again, I will correct you here(Not for you but for those reading). No mask is useless. As Matt described in the tread, a cloth mask prevents 17%-27% (up to N95 ~90%) of virus particles.... Thus none are useless. If, however, your exposure is severe and lengthy, then the only benefit of a mask is that you will remain non-sick for the first 10% (i.e. 20 min) of your exposure.
I think that's debatable, but even if lives are being saved, aren't they almost entirely the lives of the unvaccinated? And if those people want to risk getting on a plane, getting COVID, and dying I guess that's their choice now? My point is that there is no time in the future where it will not be true that requiring masks is safer than not requiring them. So do we just wear masks forever?
I mean... there's a faction of the Republican Party that thinks there was rampant electoral fraud last election.
Opinions are not given value just by the mere fact that some people hold them.
EDIT: This is doubly true when the people who hold these opinions are screaming "fOLloW tHE SCiEncE" at the top of their lungs and wielding a profoundly flawed, sensationalist-media-filtered understanding of low-quality research as a cudgel against anyone who dares oppose them.
I would just note again that while Matt's earlier article putting a lot of the blame for this on Schumer was persuasive, all of Schumer's incentives change in 8 weeks when the primary filing deadline in New York passes. So that's the timeline to keep an eye on.
Ah, good to note! I hadn't remembered which particular cycle he was up in, but knowing that he's got a full six years before the next one could help. (Though even at his best, Chuck Schumer was no Harry Reid, not that Harry Reid is anywhere near as competent as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.)
This particular episode aside, I don't have a strong view on which of those leaders is more competent or effective than which. But I do think the Senate Democratic leadership has the highest degree of difficulty of the four caucuses.
The depressing thing is that passing BBB in its fullest, pre-Manchin form would not have moved the polls much. Legislation matters much less than the zeitgeist, and laws affect the zeitgeist in strange, unpredictable, hard to control ways.
I think the one big thing legislation does is that it means a couple news cycles of stories about Democrats being successful at something, rather than news cycle after news cycle of Democrats saying how bad Democrats are. If Democrats are spending all their time criticizing Democrats, then Republicans mustn't be that bad!
Yeah, I think this should be more obvious to people given the polls after the large bills that did pass. I wouldn't even be surprised if passing BBB (or a replacement) ended up being slightly bad for the poll numbers - it doesn't address the biggest concerns Americans have at the moment, and Republicans would claim it to be inflationary.
Thanks Afghanistan!
It’s pretty clear now that Manchin is fundamentally negotiating in good faith, so if Schumer and those to his left can’t figure out something, I’m going to place that blame entirely on them.
In a nutshell, the situation has not changed since last June. Manchin said stay under 1.5T and pick a few things to be fully funded (or at least have significantly less budget tricks) and he will support. Why we are still in the same place in February has little to do with Manchin and everything to do with the Progressives not being able to accept reality and continuing to try to get Manchin to change. He is not going to.
All of that, and the thing that had me nodding my head was the paragraph about riding on an airplane without masks. This issue absolutely will be influencing my next votes.
And all the other stuff, the key provision that I support is making the expanded child tax credit permanent. But I’m sort of resigned that that’s not gonna get passed either.
The Democrats should wrap up some pro natural gas to replace coal elements in their climate proposals. That might get Manchin to sign on.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1490421067420209152?s=21
His worst tweet ever?
You're forgetting the one about "Anna Karenina"
The Covid fear porn fetishists are killing us.
NJ Gov. and Covid hawk Phil Murphy is now a Covid dove. It has become a weird and incredibly stupid self-own by liberals.
Like most of the things that kill us as a party it is mostly upper class white women who push this.
The weird thing is how social media reinforces it. They will force children, teachers, and low income workers to stay masked forever. It is "science" after all. But they will be unmasked on zoom and in their own offices.
great photo of Abhrams in a school this week
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if West Virginia is a bit of an outlier here amongst deep red states. They had Robert Byrd as an institution in the Senate, and he basically staked his whole career on "my state is really poor, they need government solutions to improve roads/electricity/schools etc." and people kept voting him in. I know cultural issues have superseded economic ones in a lot of places, but perhaps those feelings linger just enough in West Virginia to influence Manchin?
Not to be too reductive, but there are hardly any black people in West Virginia. I believe hostile racial polarization among white voters correlates pretty strongly with the size of the local black population. (I am too lazy to look up the studies but I don't think I imagined them.)
One of the reasons Donald Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016 is that the Republicans assign some delegates by congressional district--meaning that if you're a Republican voter in a district that has very few Republicans, your vote has disproportionate influence. White Republicans who live in black-majority districts turned out to be especially supportive of Trump.
This sounds way too reductive. And any studies that try to "show" that's what's happening are going to run up against a major confounding factors: White Republican voters who live in Black Majority districts live largely in the deep south or in very large formerly thriving industrial metros like Philadelphia or the Detroit area. There's very little you can infer from voters in those areas supporting different primary candidates than R voters in Idaho, along the Mexican border, or in West Virginia.
Yeah, you'd need precinct-level data to be sure. But it is true that working-class whites in WV continued voting Democratic for some time after their counterparts in the slave South had switched. (Jay Rockefeller was quite a progressive senator, not a Manchin Democrat at all, and he was in office until 2015.) You could try to explain this with some other factor, like having mountains or banjo music, but I think the state's racial homogeneity made a difference.
You see the same pattern in Indian elections, where the Hindu nationalists do worse in the deep south (overwhelmingly Hindu) than in the north (large Muslim minority). There's a social-science term for this but I forget what it is.
Fun Fact Side Bar:
Speaking specifically of Black West Virginians, this small town of 200 people has produced 4 with interesting enough lives to have their own wikipedia page, for 4 very different sorts of accomplishments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_Fork,_West_Virginia
I agree that's a reasonable enough hypothetical theory and one could probably pick and choose some studies that find support for it. I just don't think it's very compelling in this case whatsoever.
WV is special as a state because it has no major metros and is made up of an especially large amount of working class white voters with historical connections to organized labor left-politics. But that's not special regionally, there's lots and lots and lots of places like that across America.
Culturally, I'd say the US non-metro South is special because of a uniquely (bad) historical connection to segregation and Jim Crow that echoes through today in the shape of very racialized voting patterns.
There are a lot more places like WV in terms of the way I described it than there are places like South. And those place generally have voting patterns similar to West Virginians whether there happen to be a lot of Black people nearby or not. There are a fair amount of Black people in the mill towns and smaller cities all the way from Missouri - Illinois all the way through to upstate NY. The working class white people there have been voting almost exactly like the same types of people in WV over the last 2 decades.
I'm not sure there's all that much Banjo music in WV, btw. Maybe in the Southern Half. The northern half has a lot of mill towns and even the coal towns were settled by lots of turn of the century immigrants like Poles, Italians, etc.. Like I said, the southern half may be different but the northern half is more like the Deer Hunter than like Deliverance.
I think Jeff's point is almost 100% accurate on its face.
Bill Clinton lost all the Southern states with the largest Black populations in 1996 while winning all the ones that are less Black (AR, KY, TN, WV, MO if you count that as Southern). That isn't a coincidence! The fact that the presence of large numbers of the most Democratic group is negatively correlated with electoral victory is almost impossible to rationalize away through any other means.
That does give me some pause and made me reconsider a bit.
But after reassessing I still don't agree. Look at the county-level map of 1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1996_United_States_presidential_election_results_map_by_county.svg
Does it support that conclusion? It doesn't look like it to me. There are large blotches of red all over rural areas East of the Mississippi, all over the mountain west, over most of Texas and all kinds of other spots without especially high Black proportions of voters nearby. A simpler explanation for those state level results is Clinton did especially well in states near to Arkansas..
Meanwhile, Clinton won Louisiana by 12%, LA is currently the 2nd highest % Black state in the USA at 33%. LA and WV have charted similar courses since 1996, shifting from +12% and +15% D to +19% and + 39% R, respectively, in 2020.
There may still be some correlation in the present day, but there's not an awful lot of data points. The states with the highest black % include Maryland at 30%, Delaware 23% and NY 17%. All of which also have white people that vote D far more than West Virginians. So it's not clear that if that effect exists that it's an important one.
I'm happy to defer to anyone who knows more than I do about Indian politics, which isn't difficult. But that's my general impression of the map in 2019:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48366944
It's true that the south has strong regional parties, and that they won elections even while Congress was still nationally dominant. But you have to ask why people who feel dissatisfied with Congress tend to express themselves by voting for regional parties in the south and for the ethnonationalists in the north. Maybe the south's linguistic distinctiveness is another factor.
(I just remembered Byrd was an ex-Klansman, which sort of ruins my argument)
A reformed one, apparently 🤷🏿♂️. The NAACP praised him at the time of his death for coming around to the right side.
Fascinating stuff
Can you imagine the modern wokeists doing something so crass as *forgiving* someone?
Elizabeth Warren was a Republican once.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/12/elizabeth-warren-profile-young-republican-2020-president-226613/
They'll forgive the right people.
I thought the far left actually hated her because she betrayed Bernie, etc. etc.?
White voters in West Virginia are about as Republican as white voters in Georgia, despite the fact that Georgia has 10 times as many blacks per capita.
Any white person in Georgia who has a job or a profession deals with black people on a daily basis, there’s much more of a lived experience of integration in Georgia than West Virginia
Of course. It was hugely blue in the late 90s - that's recent enough that plenty of older, less diligent types of people haven't even bothered to change their party id even though they haven't voted D in a decade or two. The Paul Ryan get-rid-of-SS type of Republican is very unpopular there.
I remember in 2000 there were all sorts of recriminations about how Al Gore failed to win West Virginia, the most reliably Democratic of states.
This is among the guiding stars I look to when people panic about gerrymandering ending the Republic.
The landscape will erode out from under anyone who tries, lol.
The only thing that might end the Republic is if the Democrats simply cannot get their shit together to silence or marginalize those who want to *narrow* the electoral coalition instead of broadening it.
Message discipline from within the party is already gearing up, but it will be insufficient. It must be *forced* on the bad actors outside the party as well. A degree of brutality will be required, of the "I want this fool blacklisted from any employment by anyone who solicits money from our donors or any of our friendly press. Burn their life to the ground and turf them out onto the street, then use their example to warn the next idiot" sort.
I don't currently see anyone on this side of the aisle who has that ruthlessness.
We'll see. You continue to make what is, to my mind, a serious mistake in believing the GOP must rely on minoritarianism to win, and that it will feel the need to upset the apple cart even when it can win fair and square.
I see reason to believe the GOP is going to start winning actual majorities in Federal elections before too long, because the Democrats are so damned in love with their "incipient demographic victory" to do anything to secure it.
Sure, they're still the party of decent social programs, but you and many others drastically overstate where in Maslow's hierarchy of political needs that lies. Basic security of persons and property is way more important to most voters, as is fundamental equality of opportunity, and the Democrats seem bound and determined to give up the high ground on those two issues.
I will not be surprised to see the GOP successfully erode solid Democratic leans among Hispanic and Asian voters down to parity over the coming 2 electoral cycles, and start to eat into the black vote as well.
And with those voters will come some degree of responsiveness to their needs and concerns, including social programs and economic fairness.
That they won't be the "other" anymore will also make the party's white, working class base more amenable to interventionism even when it benefits those groups.
I think we're going to see a fairly rapid shift in the economic bases and policies of the two sides over the coming two decades, and I don't think it's going to come out with the Democrats looking good from a policy standpoint, aside from climate change.
Sure, for the moment I'm voting straight-ticket Democrat, but I can easily foresee a day when that will not be the case, and it may be before the end of the decade.
I'll be very surprised if Asian voters end up at 50/50.
My overarching theory on political realignment is guided by the face that this is happening across the board in Western Democracies. The left party is becoming the party of the educated and urban, regardless of income, worldwide, and Asians in America are extremely educated and extremely urban.
Racial / ethnic identity is a small part of the equation in Europe, where as I understand it Muslims and immigrant groups are averaging around 60% support for left-wing parties. It would be a small part in the USA, too, if we were only looking at Whites, Hispanics and Asians.
What's most unique about the US is that a large block of less-educated voters is still tied to the left for historical reasons. That's not very stable in the long term and eventually when the black vote slips a bit more towards Rs it could hit a tipping point and slide really fast.
In support of the previous post, from "Draw the Lines PA" (ostensibly non-partisan but if anything somewhat Democratic-leaning":
"On Friday, the Legislative Reapportionment Commission released and voted 4-1 to approve final State House and State Senate voting maps for Pennsylvania for the next decade. Notably, this was a bipartisan vote, with Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland) joining Minority Leader Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia) and Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D–Allegheny), along with Chair Mark Nordenberg, in voting for the maps.
So, how do the new maps stack up to the current districts? They appear better almost across the board. As noted in the graphic above, there are fewer splits across political divisions. Districts are more compact. Overall population deviation between the largest and smallest district is slightly larger, but the average deviation is about the same.
There was a great deal of discussion on Friday about racial equity in the maps. There are now 7 districts in the House and 2 in the Senate where there is not an incumbent and in which non-white voters make up a majority of the district. In the maps drawn in 2012, there were 28 districts in which non-white voters made up at least 35% of the voting-age population. The new maps contain 44 such districts. On the Senate side, the maps drawn in 2012 had 5 such districts; the new maps contain 10.
The Philadelphia Inquirer summarized the overall partisan impact of these maps. Neither map appears to unduly advantage one party over another. “The new maps still slightly favor Republicans but are significantly closer to evenly split than the current maps,” they write."
The actions of foreign governments have made it hard to feel we have returned to normal. Every time I turn on the Olympics, I see empty seats and an event that could be a celebration of peace and normalcy downgraded to a grim rendition of pandemic theater. The Tokyo games were even worse. I could not vacation in Canada last summer even though I was fully vaccinated. Biden might have been able to pressure Canada into opening it’s border to tourists a bit earlier, but he didn’t try and he would have taken a lot of flak if he had.
Nor can Biden make my mother more willing to travel and dine out. The continued dreariness of life isn’t Biden’s fault. However, I’m wearing a mask on a plane right now because of a Biden administration mandate, and that makes it very easy to project pandemic angst onto Biden.
"Nor can Biden make my mother more willing to travel and dine out"
He cold try. He could, for instance, stop wearing a mask while walking out to Marine One.
"We need a new name,..."
Build back McManchins?
I think one problem with "Build Back Better" is that it implies the country is in a desperate situation due to COVID, whereas a lot of swing voters think it's mainly in a mess because of unnecessary COVID restrictions. The slogan might have made sense a year ago, but not now.
“The Inflation Stabilization Act”
Or, WIN! WIP INFLATION NOW! Wait, have we been here before?
What’s better than BBB? AAA. American Advancement Act : )
I can't say for sure, obviously, but I think Manchin probably would have been more receptive to funding gimmicks and CBO score gaming if Democrats and leadership hadn't spent three months trashing him for not going up to $3.5 trillion. It's hard to see how that wouldn't result in a lot of bad blood, particularly when Manchin made his red lines clear at the beginning in the Schumer memo. That Schumer kept it a secret even, apparently, from Pelosi and President, and said nothing as other Democrats complained that Manchin didn't spell out what he wanted.
But maybe things had to play out that way. It's also hard to see progressives willingly go from $3.5 to $1.5 trillion until they'd exhausted all avenues and proved to their base that they "fought" for a bigger number. But the way in which they fought - often in personal terms about the (lack of) moral character of Manchin and Sinema, was probably counterproductive considering they need Manchin more than he needs them.
There may be too much bad blood now for a deal.
Democrats: “Cut one penny from the welfare state and we’ll have millions of sick and starving children and old people dying in the streets.”
Republicans: “Cut one penny from the military and we’ll have Chinese tanks rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard.”
The bipartisan “compromise” has indeed always been “why not both?” - spend more on everything without addressing the obvious status quo of massive programs that pad public payrolls and funnel cash to politically connected contractors and “consultants” while benefiting neither national security nor the personal well being of citizens in need.
Government welfare spending including government health care spending is like 3-4x the military budget, FWIW.
So, Schumer and Manchin had a deal in July, in writing, not to go over 1.5T. If that's true, and it seems like it is, I understand why Schumer kept it secret to protect his left flank. And Manchin would keep it quiet, publicly, to help Schumer. But why would Manchin not bring it up during negotiations with the White House? They kept pressing on him, assuming 1.5T was a soft line; wouldn't he just say "It's a hard line that Schumer and I agreed on." And if he didn't, doesn't that suggest that Manchin wasn't negotiating in good faith? That he was just stringing the WH along, waiting until they got pushy enough that he could make it look like their fault for pushing too hard (which he did), knowing he could also then lay the blame at Schumer's feet for keeping the deal secret, and splitting the caucus down the middle? Because now the right/middle wing is mad at the WH for pushing too hard, and the left is mad at Schumer over a secret deal. And Manchin got what he wanted: his infrastructure bill, and no more.
I just don't see another reason why Manchin wouldn't have told WH negotiators about his deal with Schumer.