Did you know? (Some important facts about American democracy in the year 2020)

Everyone knows that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote.

Losing the popular vote, in fact, by nearly 3 million votes.

That's what the Electoral College can do. That's the way our system of government works. Whether it's a good idea for our system of government to work that way is another matter. But consider first some other facts that I suspect are less well known.

In the United States, our government has three branches. At the federal level, Republicans control the executive branch despite having received fewer votes by a healthy margin. What about the other two branches?

Currently, in the Senate, there are 53 Republican senators and 47 members of the Democratic caucus (the latter includes 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with them). Republicans therefore control the Senate.

Did you know that the 53 Republican caucus members collectively represent states with a population smaller by about 12 million than those represented by the 47 Democratic caucus members?

(Note: this uses 2019 census estimates, and is based on splitting into halves the populations of states represented by one member of each party, and assigning the full population to the appropriate party for states represented by two members of the same party.)

In the House of Representatives, thanks to the blue wave of 2018, Democrats hold the majority. Aggregating all House races in 2018, Democrats won the popular vote over Republicans by 8.6%. This was a good thing for the Democratic Party, because prior to the election it was estimated that Republicans would be favored to retain their majority even if they lost the nationwide popular vote by up to 5%!

This is the result of gerrymandering of House districts, which very disproportionately benefits Republicans overall. Importantly, this is also true at the state level; for example, in Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans maintained their majority in the state's House of Representatives by a whopping 63 to 36 seats despite losing the overall popular vote by 8%. This is just one example. Similar situations exist in some other states.

The third branch of government is the judicial branch. At the highest level, United States Supreme Court justices are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the Senate (both of which we've just established are currently controlled by a party with minority support). These judges, who have the final say on so many important issues that affect all Americans' lives, are supposed to be unbiased, nonpartisan arbiters of justice, but let's face it, we all know that isn't really the case.

After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which has given everything I write about here extra importance, the makeup of the court is 5 justices appointed by Republican presidents, 3 by Democratic presidents.

Did you know that? Did you also know that in the last 30 years, the national popular vote for president, which is also effectively a popular vote for Supreme Court justices, has favored Democrats six times and a Republican just once?

If you have read this far, I'd ask you to just pause for a moment and think about these facts.

Were you aware of them?

Whether or not you were aware of them, do you think that most people know these things?

What does this all mean for our country's ability to function as a healthy democracy? Is it possible for a country to continue to have a functional democracy if a party that receives fewer votes over and over is nonetheless able to retain its hold on power? And therefore a minority of the population is able to continuously exert its will, with the power of the government behind it, on the majority?

I would contend that the answer is no. I would contend that a country where one party continues to succeed in doing whatever it can to consolidate power despite lacking popular support is on a path toward authoritarianism.

In a representative democracy, as we ostensibly have in the United States, when a party's positions become unpopular with voters, what is supposed to happen is that the party modifies its positions to try to once more appeal to a plurality of voters. The modern Republican Party is instead taking advantage of structural problems with our democracy to maintain a hold on power while continuing to push deeply unpopular plans like taking away people's health care, giving massive tax cuts and subsidies to giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and rolling back environmental regulations.

Most people see such actions as clearly bad. But let's say that you are a supporter of such actions. Can you not still see the problem? If a party that consistently has minority support continues to hold power and continues to enact policies that most people oppose, and appoints judges to the Supreme Court and lower courts who will hand down important rulings that most people oppose, more and more people will view the government as illegitimate. And if enough people view a government as illegitimate, how legitimate can the government even be?

There are, of course, arguments as to why it is actually a Good Thing that our system of government works this way. Why it is perfectly fine that a resident of Wyoming has approximately 68 times as much of a say in what the Senate (which passes laws that, and confirms judges who, affect everyone in the country equally) does than the say a resident of California has. Why it is perfectly fine that presidential candidates only have to try to appeal to voters in a select group of swing states, and voters who live in safe Democratic or safe Republican states have essentially no say through their votes in who is elected president. To evaluate whether these arguments are valid, I think it's useful to imagine whether any of the people making those arguments would even for a moment buy the same arguments if the roles were reversed. I think it's a safe bet the answer is no. (Yes, different people might then be making those arguments, but the arguments wouldn't hold any more water.)

Anyway, what the arguments essentially boil down to is that empty land should have votes. Or, to be less polite but more accurate, that rural white voters should have a bigger say than anyone else in what the government does.

I can also imagine a potential objection: someone might say that these factors just happen to favor Republicans right now, but that's just the way the cards fell and the same factors could favor Democrats in the near future, so we shouldn't upend our system of government to fix this. To which the response is emphatically no: these issues have been getting worse and worse in the same direction for most of my lifetime, and there has been no point in remotely recent history when there was a remotely comparable imbalance in the other direction.

The more imbalanced things get, the harder it becomes to fix the imbalance. Somewhere along the line you reach a tipping point beyond which you simply don't have a democracy anymore.

I'm not going to use this post to go into detail about what could or should be done to fix these problems. I just want everyone to be aware of them. A lot of people recognize that our government is broken but don't really know the reasons why. Lazy "both sides" media reporting leads a lot of people who aren't as tuned in to politics to think the problem is just that the two parties can't work together.

If you look at what's been happening over the last few decades - with key events including the Supreme Court handing the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 when it was later shown that a statewide Florida recount would have resulted in Al Gore being president, and then years later the stealing of a Supreme Court seat by the Republican Senate when that seat was vacated with almost a year remaining in President Obama's second term - I don't think that's it at all.

So if the information in this post is new to you, remember these graphs. If someone you know is talking about how broken Washington is but they don't seem to really know why, take the opportunity to educate them. If Republicans are saying that Democratic plans for things like the Supreme Court or the Electoral College or Washington, DC statehood are unfair, think of whether that's true in the context of the information presented here. A lot of things will be changing in this country in the coming years. I hope that we all take what is happening now as a life-long reminder to never take our democracy or our fundamental rights for granted. We have to move forward as engaged and informed and ever vigilant citizens if we want America to live up to its ideal as a land of liberty and justice for all.

Never forget

And so another 9/11 is here.

I realized that this is the first September 11th on which it has, for me, been more than half a lifetime since the 9/11. That's a pretty weird thing to think about, and pretty hard to believe. But yeah, it's been 19 years since that horrible day that shook me, 18 years old and early in my first semester of college, to the core.

So that's one reason that this September 11 is different to me from those of past years.

I think there's something else, though, that makes this one really stand out, and take on a whole new meaning.

I still remember the feelings I had in the aftermath of those horrific terrorist attacks. To me at the time, it was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life. I felt so in a pit of despair that I legitimately wondered if I would ever truly feel happy again.

I was very young and naive. I had no idea of the ups and downs that life could bring.

9/11 was not the worst thing that has ever happened.

I don't want to be dismissive, though. It was a truly terrible thing.

As I reflect back on that day now, I think it's fitting that the anniversary this year comes in the same week that we received definitive audio proof that Donald Trump, in early February, was fully aware of the fact that COVID-19 was a terrible threat, and far more dangerous than the flu, and that all the statements he made to the contrary from that point on were not borne of mere ignorance but were brazen lies, and that it is therefore undeniable that he has the blood of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans on his hands.

Never forget 9/11. It's a refrain that has been hammered into us over and over.

Not that anyone who lived through that day could forget it.

But of course, "never forget" doesn't just mean that we should remember what happened. It means that there are lessons we should have learned from the events and those lessons should shape our lives and the actions we take both as individuals and as a country, into perpetuity.

Sadly, the people who are most apt to say "never forget" tend to be the people who took all the wrong lessons from those tragic events. Who used them as excuses for promoting xenophobia and endless war.

This has been clear for a long time. But now, the events of this year have fully revealed the utter hypocrisy and sheer moral depravity of the most vocal members of the "never forget 9/11" crowd.

The official death toll of the victims of the 9/11 attacks is 2977.

Each one of those deaths was a tragedy.

We changed so many things about our country in response to those attacks. Many of those changes were for the worse. All were promoted with the idea that we should do whatever it takes to stop something like that from happening again. Because "never forget."

For the last five-plus months, on average every two to three days a 9/11's worth of Americans has died from COVID-19. This didn't have to happen. Most of those deaths were preventable. If the federal government had taken decisive action at the start of the pandemic, and had committed our country's vast resources toward the challenge of containing the virus, and if our so-called leader had not lied and minimized the threat and encouraged his followers to not take it seriously, most of those people would still be alive.

The people who have been most loudly telling us over and over for the last 19 years to never forget those 2977 victims are the same people who are most likely to just shrug their shoulders at sixty 9/11s' worth (and still climbing, with the end nowhere in sight) of mostly preventable deaths.

What is happening in this country right now is kind of like if 9/11 was happening over, and over, and over, except the terrorists are the people in charge of the country, and we're currently in a campaign season where there's a real chance that those terrorists will be elected to another term.

Which is why on this 9/11 it's more important than on any before for us to say:

Never Forget.

Never forget this horrible tragedy that is unfolding all around us. And this time, let's collectively learn the right lessons from a horrible tragedy.

Donald Trump, by repeatedly lying to the American people to minimize the threat of COVID, and by deliberately slowing down testing efforts that could have helped contain the virus, and by doing numerous other things both before and during the pandemic that sabotaged our ability to effectively respond, is guilty of crimes against humanity. And we should never forget that. But we should also never forget that he's not the only guilty party.

Donald Trump is also the most corrupt and most criminal president in our nation's history. He does things pretty much every day that would fully warrant removal from office under the Constitution's impeachment clause. Early this year, before COVID became widespread in the U.S. but after the threat was already becoming apparent (on January 27, which was during the impeachment trial, USA Today published an op-ed by Joe Biden under the prophetic heading Trump is worst possible leader to deal with coronavirus outbreak), 53 Republican senators had the chance to do their constitutional duty and vote to remove Trump from office for his high crimes and misdemeanors. Only one, Mitt Romney, chose to put country over party.

They didn't know it at the time, but how many lives would have been saved if nineteen of Romney's Republican colleagues had joined him and the Democratic and independent senators and Trump had been removed?

(I'm not saying Mike Pence would have been the ideal president to lead the fight against COVID, but I doubt he'd have gone to nearly the levels Trump has in actively sabotaging our country's response.)

Trump has the blood of countless Americans on his hands. Trump is guilty of numerous acts of criminality and corruption and should have been removed from office many times over. Trump is also blatantly racist and blatantly misogynistic and a serial sex offender.

The Republican Party has stood nearly in lockstep behind him.

And the most distressing and depressing thing, the thing I never could possibly have imagined happening to this country when I think back to the events of 9/11/2001, is that about 40% of Americans are totally okay with this. Totally fine with all the damage Trump has done. Totally fine with their leader's failures and lies directly leading to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of their fellow citizens.

(We should also never forget that the toll of our country's failure on COVID is so much more than those hundreds of thousands of deaths. It's also in the perhaps equally large if not larger number of people left with long-term debilitating effects from the virus. It's also in all the people facing economic ruin thanks to Republicans' refusal to fund adequate relief packages. It's also in so many experiences that are normally parts of the fabric of our lives, precious time with our loved ones, celebrations and mourning, that we've had to sacrifice and will have to continue sacrificing as we continue to not contain the pandemic. We should never forget any of this.)

It's just bewildering that Trump's approval rating has only slightly budged through all of this horror. I never could have imagined it before I saw it actually all unfold before my eyes. I can only conclude that a dedicated right wing propaganda campaign that has been carried out over the course of the last few decades has twisted so many people's minds to the point where they have lost much of their ability to discern fact from fiction or right from wrong.

And so it's imperative that we never forget. Never forget Trump's crimes. But also never forget the crimes of his enablers in the Republican Party. And never forget the perhaps equally as heinous crimes of their enablers in the right wing media.

I know a lot of people who have voted Republican in the past and are now desperate to get Trump out of office. I know a lot of moderates and even liberals who are just desperate to get back to some sense of normalcy.

If Trump is gone next year and we collectively let out a big sigh of relief and then decide life is back to normal? If those never-Trump Republicans go back to voting Republican once Trump is off the ballot? If all those people who have become newly politically active decide their activism is no longer necessary?

Then we'll be just as doomed in the long run as we would be with a second Trump term.

The Republican Party and their right wing media allies are a far bigger threat to the people of this country than al Qaeda could ever have dreamed of being. Sixty 9/11s' worth and counting of COVID deaths make that clear. That threat isn't going to go away if Trump loses.

No decent, patriotic American should ever support the Republican Party again, at least until that party has completely remade itself into something totally different from the extremist, authoritarian  movement it has become. That might happen some day. It definitely won't happen in two or four or even eight years. And we must be constantly vigilant against the threat that propaganda campaigns pose to our democracy. Too many of our friends and loved ones have already been lost to those propaganda campaigns, but there are so many impressionable young minds out there who could still be swayed in either direction.

Never forget 9/11.

Never forget how the meaning of 9/11 was twisted to help reshape our country for the worse.

Never forget 2020.

Most importantly, never forget what allowed the events of 2020 to happen, and always fight to protect our society from going down this path again.

Did Sturgis really cause 19 percent of all U.S. COVID cases in August? A skeptical response

I want to make something very clear at the beginning of this post so that it is not misconstrued: I think COVID is a very serious problem that our country has failed miserably to control. I think the motorcycle rally that brought hundreds of thousands of people to Sturgis, SD was a very bad thing and it was incredibly irresponsible and dangerous to hold the rally this year. The point of this post is not to defend the Sturgis rally. I am emphatically not defending the rally. My purpose is more to look at how popular media report research findings and how people tend to believe and uncritically share stories that support views they already hold.

In the last couple days I'm seeing the story about the Sturgis motorcycle rally held August 7-16 being a COVID super-spreader event all over the place. The big headline that everyone is sharing is that the rally has led to more than 250,000 COVID cases nationwide. An article from Mother Jones states, "According to a new study, which tracked anonymized cellphone data from the rally, over 250,000 coronavirus cases have now been tied to the 10-day event, one of the largest to be held since the start of the pandemic."

It is not true that over 250,000 cases have been tied to the event. Let's take a look at the origins of this claim.

The original study, The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19, is from the "Discussion Paper Series" of the IZA - Institute of Labor Economics. I note that the article states, "IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author." As far as I can tell this study has not undergone formal peer review. Now, not going through peer review does not mean something is wrong, just as going through peer review does not mean something is right. But it is, I think, a factor in how much weight should be given to the conclusions.

The study, the authors of which are four economists, uses anonymized cell phone data to show travel of people to Sturgis from the surrounding areas and elsewhere in the country, and looks at changes in COVID case rates before and after the rally in those same areas. (This is a very oversimplified explanation. If you want to see all the details, read the paper.)

The conclusion that the rally caused a large increase in cases in Sturgis and adjacent counties, and even in the state of South Dakota as a whole, is one that I feel very comfortable accepting after reading the paper. I won't spend time here going over the evidence for those findings. And there's no doubt that attendees who traveled from elsewhere in the country brought COVID back home with them. No doubt at all. But what's the evidence for that "250,000 cases" conclusion?

In the discussion section of the paper, the authors state, "In counties with the largest relative inflow to the event, the per 1,000 case rate increased by 10.7 percent after 24 days following the onset of Sturgis Pre-Rally Events. Multiplying the percent case increases for the high, moderate-high and moderate inflow counties by each county’s respective pre-rally cumulative COVID-19 cases and aggregating, yields a total of 263,708 additional cases in these locations due to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally."

Basically, the authors observed that in counties with more travel to Sturgis, COVID increased more after the rally, and then they did some multiplication and summation based on those percentage increases to arrive at the >250,000 cases estimate.

Let's look at the underlying data.

This is the figure demonstrating that COVID increased more in counties with high travel to the rally:

By the way, the figures in this paper have no figure legends, which is irritating. I'm interpreting the figure based on what is written in the results section.

The vertical axes on the plots show relative changes in COVID case numbers, the horizontal axes show time in days with the red vertical line indicating the start of the rally, and the panels from (a) to (e) go from counties with the highest relative travel to Sturgis to counties with the lowest relative travel to Sturgis.

One thing to note here is that almost all the points on the graphs have large error bars, representing the degree of uncertainty in the estimates. Most of the error bars overlap the zero line. Now, the fact that the error bars overlap the zero line does not mean there's no evidence that the increases are real. But it does mean that we cannot state with an extremely high degree of certainty that the increases are real.

To get the estimate of "263,708 additional cases" the authors put in numbers that had very high degrees of uncertainty, did some math, and got out a point estimate that is presented by itself without any uncertainty. But because the underlying numbers had so much uncertainty, that estimate also has a huge amount of uncertainty! Articles that say over 250,000 cases have been "tied to" the event are ignoring this.

And there's another thing I notice about these graphs. If you look at the trends of numbers from the leftmost point on each graph through the first point to the right of the red vertical line (which would be too early for the rally to have had a measurable effect on COVID numbers), you can see that for the top three panels, counties with travel to Sturgis ranging from high to moderate, it appears the COVID curves were already bending upward. And then they continued to bend upward more sharply. For the last panel, counties with low travel to Sturgis, the COVID numbers were on a steady downward trend, and then continued on that steady downward trend.

An alternate interpretation of the data in this figure is not that Sturgis caused the nationwide increases, but rather that people who live in places that were doing a worse job keeping COVID under control in August are more likely to have traveled to Sturgis for the rally. Which, intuitively, would make sense, wouldn't it?

I'm absolutely not stating that as any sort of definitive conclusion, but I think it's something the authors as well as other people reading the paper should consider as a possibility.

The conclusion about the rally causing over 250,000 cases nationwide does not appear to be the result of a rigorous analysis; it's in the discussion section, not the results section, and it's presented with no measure of uncertainty. It's not the main claim of the paper. To me it comes across as more of a hypothetical discussion point that should be taken with a grain of salt. But it's the part of the paper that is getting all the headlines and that everyone is sharing as if it's a fact and not a hypothetical.

I think that issues like this are all too common with popular media reporting of scientific research studies. But I also suspect that in this case the study authors may be partly to blame. I suspect they knew that the gaudy claims about 19% of all cases nationwide in August and $12 billion in health care costs would get a lot more attention than the much more strongly supported claims that the rally caused large COVID spikes in and around Sturgis and even around South Dakota as a whole state. And they probably wrote the discussion and promoted their findings with this in mind.

Did the Sturgis motorcycle rally cause increased COVID spread in Sturgis, surrounding counties, and the state of South Dakota? Undoubtedly, and this study makes that case quite well. Was there spread from the rally to many other parts of the country from which rally attendees traveled? This is also undoubtedly true.

Did that spread from the rally result in over 250,000 total cases, accounting for 19% of all new cases nationwide in August?

Maybe? But maybe not. Personally, I'm doubtful. And it's certainly not something that should be stated as a fact.

All people have a natural tendency to more easily accept claims that support the views of the world they already hold. As misinformation campaigns threaten to destroy our democracy, it's becoming more and more important to be able to distinguish fact from fiction, as well as to be able to distinguish claims that are very strongly supported by evidence from claims that might be true but aren't nearly as certain. For me, the widespread sharing of this story (one I initially took at face value before I looked into it) is a good reminder of that.