US Politics

Biden administrationDoJ sues Texas over new voting law, saying restrictions violate civil rightsSuit takes aim at two specific provisions that deal with providing assistance to voters at the polls and mail-in voting Sam Levine in New YorkThu 4 Nov 2021 17.56 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 20.54 EDTThe Biden administration filed a federal lawsuit challenging Texas’s new voting law on Thursday, saying some of the state’s new restrictions violate key civil rights laws.The suit takes aim at two specific provisions in the Texas law that deal with providing assistance to voters at the polls and mail-in voting, respectively.The first measure restricts the kind of assistance people can provide at the polls to voters, blocking them from explaining how voting works or breaking down complex language on the ballot.Senate Democrats poised for voting rights push to counter Republican restrictionsRead moreThat violates a provision of the Voting Rights Act that guarantees that anyone who requires assistance because of “blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” can receive assistance, the Department of Justice said.“Prohibiting assistors from answering voters’ questions, responding to requests to clarify ballot translations, and confirming that voters with visual impairments have marked a ballot as intended will curtail fundamental voting rights without advancing any legitimate state interest,” DoJ lawyers wrote in their complaint.The complaint targets a second provision that requires voters to provide identification information on mail-in ballot applications as well as the ballot return envelopes.The new Texas law says that election workers have to reject the ballots if there are discrepancies in the identification provided.The justice department said that violates a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that says someone can’t be blocked from voting because of an error on a paper or record that is unrelated to their qualifications under state law to vote.“Conditioning the right to cast a mail ballot on a voter’s ability to recall and recite the identification number provided on an application for voter registration months or years before will curtail fundamental voting rights without advancing any legitimate state interest,” the complaint says.“Laws that impair eligible citizens’ access to the ballot box have no place in our democracy. Texas Senate Bill 1’s restrictions on voter assistance at the polls and on which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible,” Kristen Clarke, the head of the Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement announcing the suit.“Texas leaders must be held accountable for their blatant abuse of power in a shameless attempt to keep themselves in power,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic party.The lawsuit comes as Joe Biden faces mounting pressure to enact federal legislation to protect voting rights.Republicans have successfully used the filibuster four times this year to block voting rights bills in the US Senate.The most recent filibuster came on Wednesday, when Republicans blocked a bill that would have restored a key part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with repeated evidence of voting discrimination, including Texas, to pre-clear voting laws with the federal government before they go into effect.Nineteen states have passed 33 laws this year restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This is the second major voting rights suit Biden’s DoJ has filed this year. It sued Georgia over its sweeping new voting restrictions in June.Many of the laws are widely understood as an effort to make it harder for minority populations and low-income people to vote.Texas Republicans say the changes provide safeguards against voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare.“Biden is coming after Texas for SB1, our recently enacted election integrity law,” tweeted Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. “It’s a great and a much-needed bill. Ensuring Texas has safe, secure, and transparent elections is a top priority of mine. I will see you in court, Biden!”The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsBiden administrationUS politicsTexasUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

Trump-Russia investigationRussian source for Steele’s Trump dossier arrested by US authoritiesFive-page indictment released by justice department accuses analyst Igor Danchenko of lying to FBI Luke HardingThu 4 Nov 2021 15.34 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 16.33 EDTA Russian analyst who was the main source for Christopher Steele’s dossier on Donald Trump and Moscow has been arrested by US authorities, the justice department said on Thursday.Igor Danchenko now faces charges as part of the investigation by John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to examine the origins of the FBI’s investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia.Danchenko collected much of the intelligence behind Steele’s dossier during three trips to Russia in summer and autumn 2016. He was the chief source behind its most incendiary allegation: that Trump was compromised during a trip to Moscow in November 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.Trump has vehemently denied the claim. Last summer, however, a report by the Senate intelligence committee said that the FSB spy agency presided over a network of secret cameras inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel where Trump stayed, including in guest bedrooms. An FSB intelligence officer was permanently on site, it said.Trump in Moscow: what happened at Miss Universe in 2013Read moreThe five-page indictment released on Thursday accuses Danchenko of lying repeatedly to the FBI when interviewed in 2017 – a criminal offense. These include over his dealings with an unnamed US PR executive with close links to the Democrats. The executive’s information found its way into some of the dossier’s memos, a fact Danchenko allegedly concealed.The FBI further accuses Danchenko of making up a conversation with Sergei Millian, a Russian American property broker with links to Trump, who appears in the dossier as “source D”. He appears to have been credited by Danchenko with the claim that Trump watched sex workers perform “golden showers” by urinating on each other at the hotel. In 2019, the special counsel Robert Mueller said no criminal wrongdoing had taken place between the Trump campaign and Moscow. But Mueller noted that there were multiple contacts in 2016 between Russian spies and Trump aides. The Kremlin had run a “sweeping and systemic” operation to help Trump win, Mueller said.Trump’s justice department claimed the former president was the victim of a witch-hunt. It repeatedly cited the dossier as evidence that the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s relations with Russia was biased and unfair. But the FBI investigation began independently from the dossier, after it emerged Moscow had hacked thousands of Democratic party emails.Democrats believe Durham’s inquiries to be politically driven. But so far the Biden administration has not tried to stop him. Danchenko is the third person, and second in a two-month span, to face indictment with five separate counts on Thursday of lying. In September cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann was also accused of lying to the FBI.Speaking to the Guardian in October, Danchenko, who is based in Washington DC, defended his work on the dossier. “I stand by it,” he said. He said he did not resile from explosive allegations that Trump may have been secretly filmed with sex workers during his Moscow trip. “I got it right,” he declared.He said the “salacious” material in the dossier formed a small part of a 35-page document. The allegation would be “amusing”, he said, were it not for the fact that any covert FSB recording might be used for blackmail purposes. Trump’s false ‘Russian spy’ claims put me in danger, says Steele dossier sourceRead moreThe bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee was dismissive of Steele’s dossier, but corroborated key elements in it. It laid out multiple contacts between Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager who features in the dossier, and Konstantin Kilimnik, described as a Russian intelligence officer. Speaking last year Danchenko said a campaign against him by leading Republicans was designed to deflect from the damaging Senate report. It included claims – which he denies – he was a Russian spy. “I think they thought I would be an easy target to discredit the dossier. By doubling down on this they would be able to discredit the whole Russia investigation,” he said.During his interviews with the FBI, Danchenko appeared to downplay the reliability of his own information – a point seized upon by Republican commentators. According to the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, Danchenko told the bureau his work with sub-sources in Russia amounted to “hearsay” and “conversation had with friends over beers”. Statements about Trump’s sexual activities were “jest”, he said. A lawyer for Danchenko had no immediate comment.TopicsTrump-Russia investigationTrump administrationRussiaDonald TrumpEuropeUS politicsFBInewsReuse this content More

OpinionCoronavirusWhy are so many NYPD officers fighting vaccination?Cops have been on the wrong side of public health for the entire pandemic – and yet they act like they are victims Thu 4 Nov 2021 14.24 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 14.26 EDTIn New York City, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) tried and failed to block the city’s vaccine mandate for all city workers. New York City police officers have been on the wrong side of public health for most of the pandemic. Like other American police unions, the PBA uses its political clout and large coffers to push regressive policies and fight any move towards an even slightly more humane justice system.In an effort to prevent another rise in Covid-19 cases, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, introduced a mandate requiring all city employees to have received at least one dose of a vaccine by 29 October. Seventy-one per cent of all city officials are already vaccinated but, according to the PBA, roughly a third of uniformed police officers are not. Even optimistic assessments of the department’s vaccination rates as a whole lag behind the rates of city residents. Despite the fact that Covid-19 is the leading cause of death among US police officers, the PBA launched a lawsuit against the city to halt the mandate. A judge struck down the suit, but the PBA plans to appeal the decision.The police union loves to play the victim card and paint even its worst officers as heroes – like when it called for a slowdown strike after an officer was fired for his role in the 2014 death of Eric Garner. Yet when faced with a real threat to the lives of their members, and to the public those officers ostensibly serve, the unions’ leaders have chosen to oppose public health recommendations. While the police commissioner has at least urged officers to get vaccinated, the department and its individual officers haven’t exactly had a stellar record of behavior from earlier phases of the pandemic.In October, unmasked police officers forced a subway rider out of a station after he asked them to put on their masks as mandated by both the city’s transportation authority and the NYPD itself. This was not an isolated incident, according to the New York Times: “[t]he flouting of mask mandates by some police officers in New York City has been the subject of criticism throughout the pandemic. Face coverings have remained required on the city’s public transit and at indoor subway stations since April 2020. But many reports on social media and in local news outlets have drawn attention to instances of officers ignoring those rules.”This behavior is especially dangerous considering that officers interact face-to-face with the public on a daily basis. According to the Legal Aid Society, the NYPD illegally detained hundreds of people during the George Floyd uprising and the second surge of the pandemic. Protesters were allegedly held for longer periods of time than legally allowed, increasing their risk of contracting Covid-19 and potentially spreading it once released. One protester complained of police stuffing protesters in vans while the officers themselves were not wearing masks. The NYPD insists that these delays were not retaliatory and just another symptom of the pandemic, but the Legal Aid Society noted the similarity to a previous lawsuit over similar alleged events at the 2004 Republican national convention.In fact, the mere existence of such a large police department is a hindrance to public health. If current trends continue, the city will probably spend more than $10bn on the police department this year, including hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to settle lawsuits for police brutality and misconduct. In comparison, the city’s department of health and mental hygiene has a budget of $1.6bn.While city residents could have benefited from an increase in healthcare access, the city was busy maintaining the largest police department in the country, spending over $100,000 a year on average for every uniformed officer, according to Business Insider. Insider also notes that a single set of riot gear could provide personal protective equipment for 33 nurses. These numbers recall the dueling images of New York healthcare workers wearing trash bags during the earlier days of the pandemic, in contrast to the heavily armored officers sweeping through neighborhoods arresting people en masse.The NYPD spent $115m in overtime in the first two weeks of the George Floyd protests alone. And large sums of that money, in the form of membership dues and donations, find their way to police unions. Those unions shell out tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, much of it to elect candidates seen as pro-police and “tough on crime”. According to Dan Quart, a New York State assembly member, the PBA has “had very significant and I would say disruptive influence in blocking so much important criminal legal reform of our criminal justice system”. Between 2015 and 2018, the union gave $78,500 to the state senate Republican campaign committee. In 2020 the union endorsed Donald Trump for re-election, its first endorsement of a presidential candidate in decades. This last fact alone speaks to the depravity of the union’s perspective and priorities.The PBA insists that the vaccine mandate will cause “chaos” – that 10,000 officers will be gone from the street, that dozens of patrol precincts will go unstaffed. This outcome seems unlikely. If it does happen, however, it may be a great experiment for the city. During their 2014 slowdown strike in response to anti-police brutality protests, officers decreased their “proactive” crime duties, cutting down patrols and only responding to active calls. The department expected the city to come crawling back in fear. But the opposite happened; a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that residents actually reported a decline in major crime.The PBA may be setting itself up for another disappointment – and offering yet more evidence that we must defund police for the sake of public health and the public good.
Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
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The fight to voteUS SenateRepublicans continue to stymie Democrats on voting rights. Will anything change?Republicans filibuster Democratic efforts to pass billMove escalates pressure on Senator Joe Manchin The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 4 Nov 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 11.55 EDTHello, and happy Thursday,No, it’s not deja vu: Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster on Wednesday to stymie Democratic efforts to pass a significant voting rights bill. It’s the fourth time it’s happened this year, the most recent coming just two weeks ago.But Democrats and other voting rights advocates hope that this time is different.They never really expected 10 Republicans to sign on to the bill and advance it. Instead, they hoped to use the vote as a final chance to show the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, two of the staunchest filibuster defenders, that there is no hope of passing a voting rights bill while the filibuster remains in place.Democrats’ stinging Virginia defeat raises stark questions for Biden’s tenureRead moreIt’s a development that significantly escalates pressure on Manchin specifically. The voting rights bill that Republicans blocked in late October was one he personally helped write and sought GOP input on. The measure Republicans blocked on Wednesday, which would have restored a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act, is one he supports. Manchin has said that “inaction is not an option” on voting rights. But now Republicans have made it clear that while the filibuster remains in place, inaction is the only option.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterSo where do things go from here? To start, I think we’ll begin to see a lot more explicit language from Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, about changing the rules of the filibuster. While Schumer has repeatedly said “all options are on the table” when it comes to voting rights, he’s stopped short of outlining specific changes he’d like to see or calling out Manchin and Sinema specifically. It’s only recently that Schumer has begun to talk about the need “to restore the Senate as the world’s greatest deliberative body”. I expect we’ll also see some increased pressure from the White House.Schumer continued that rhetoric on Wednesday after the filibuster. He described it as a “low, low point” in the history of the Senate, and questioned whether some of Congress’s greatest legislative accomplishments would have been able to overcome the filibuster if they had been proposed in today’s Senate.Per a senior Dem aide, Schumer met with King, Kaine and Tester earlier today to talk about next steps on voting rights and to have “family discussions” with their colleagues about how to “restore the Senate” and find a pathway forward on the legislation.— Marianne LeVine (@marianne_levine) November 3, 2021
But will this be enough to sway Manchin and Sinema? I’ve written before about why I’m cautiously optimistic they will come around on voting rights. Manchin didn’t seem to be budging after Wednesday’s vote.“We’ve got Lisa Murkowski, we just need nine more,” Manchin said, according to Politico. “We need other people to be talking to each other and find a pathway forward. It can’t just be one or two people talking to both sides.”But as Democrats get mired in negotiations over the infrastructure bill, it may be harder to pressure their two holdouts. Biden said during a town hall in late October that it would be hard to deal with the filibuster while infrastructure negotiations were ongoing.In any case, the next few weeks will be critical in determining whether Democrats can actually protect access to the ballot box.Readers’ questionsPlease continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at [email protected] or DM me on twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.Also worth watching …
I spoke with election officials across the country about the wave of threats and harassment they’ve seen over the last year
Republicans in North Carolina and Ohio are pushing maps that would give them an extreme partisan advantage for the next decade.
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OpinionUS politicsDemocratic strategists are embracing ‘popularism’. But they’ve got it wrongSteve PhillipsA debate is raging about what type of policies Democrats should lead with. Simply following the polls is a flawed approach Thu 4 Nov 2021 09.04 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 13.01 EDTBy the time you finish reading this sentence, a 17-year-old in the United States will have turned 18 and become eligible to vote. And by the time you finish reading this sentence, someone will have died. In this nation of nearly 330 million people, a young person turns 18 roughly every 8 seconds, and someone dies every 11 seconds. This dynamic and fast-paced demographic change is transforming the country’s politics – and is also the glaring analytical hole in the growing school of thought coming to be known as “popularism.” After Democrats under-performed in the 2020 Congressional and down-ballot races, some have taken to arguing that the party paid a political price for supporting policies that were “unpopular,” resulting in disappointing electoral outcomes. The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote a lengthy analysis of the phenomenon, most recently popularized by Democratic data analyst David Shor. Klein summarized the essence of popularism as the belief that Democrats “should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”In the real world of winning elections in the context of a country roiled by white racial resentment and systemic racism, the results of this week’s gubernatorial election in Virginia exposed the naivete and folly of the popularism approach. Republican Glenn Youngkin stoked the flames of white racial fear by promising to outlaw so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT), code for any educational instruction about the realities of racism and oppression in this country. CRT is a law school construct and is not taught in any pre-college schools in Virginia or anywhere else, but it nevertheless sufficiently alarmed white voters that they turned out in record numbers and propelled Youngkin to victory over Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee. McAuliffe certainly didn’t campaign on CRT and did his best to ignore it. But his cautious and conflict-avoidant ostrich approach failed miserably, in part because Democratic voters were not nearly as motivated by the bland popularism approach as Republicans were by what they saw as a threat to their racial identity.More broadly, beyond the obvious dangers of a moral slippery slope associated with such thinking as popularism (the Nazis were quite popular in 1930s Germany, for example), the analysis suffers from several fundamental mathematical flaws. Ironically, given the future-oriented image of tech-savvy Democratic data crunchers who champion the framework, the primary flaws of popularism stem from adherence to anachronistic models that are of limited use in today’s rapidly changing society. First, popularism fails to address the question of “popular with which groups of people?” Back in the 1970s when white voters accounted for nearly 90% of all voters, standard practice was to look generically at questions of popularity without doing a deeper demographic dive. In 2020, however, the electorate is no longer so monochromatic, with the white share of the electorate having fallen to 67%. Given that nearly 90% of African Americans consistently vote Democratic, and the majority of white voters almost always take the exact opposite position, a generic race-neutral analysis misses one of the major determinative data points in American politics. The second problem with the popularism school is its dependence on old metrics that don’t capture new realities. Historically, analysts have compared year-over-year changes in vote margins to try to identify meaningful trends in voter behavior, but such data is of only limited utility in times of extraordinary developments and can result in wildly inaccurate interpretations. It would be like a financial analyst trying to explain Delta Airlines’ $17bn drop in income in 2020 without factoring in the “black swan” event of the worldwide pandemic.In US politics, the 2020 black swan was the highest level of voter turnout in over a century, making it an even rarer occurrence than a global pandemic. The electoral tsunami also wiped out the usefulness of the traditional metric of comparing vote margins, and popularists who have tried to analyze 2020 electoral behavior with pre-2020 analytical tools have arrived at dangerously inaccurate conclusions about last year’s results. Many analysts looking at Democrats’ reduced margins in some heavily Latino counties in Florida and Texas have come to believe that large numbers of Latino voters abandoned Democrats in 2020 in favor of Trump. For example, in Hidalgo County – a 93% Latino county on the Texas border which Obama won by a margin of 42% in his 2012 re-election campaign (72% to 29% for Republican nominee Mitt Romney) – Trump shrunk the margin to less than 1.9%, securing 48.5% of the vote. This type of data point is a cornerstone of the popularism theory of the case, but it obscures the very inconvenient fact that the number of Latinos voting Democratic has actually increased over the past decade, even in Hidalgo County. It is difficult to square the circle of Democrats losing voters while at the same time increasing their vote totals. Looking up from the myopic microscope of vote margins to examine the bigger and more important picture of historic voter turnout reveals the real 2020 story. Simply put, Trump generated greater enthusiasm and turnout among his previously non-voting supporters than Biden and the Democrats did. While Biden attracted 22,000 more Democratic voters to the polls in Hidalgo County than Obama did nearly a decade ago, Trump galvanized 75,000 previously non-voting Republicans. The same phenomenon also explains the Democratic losses in the House of Representatives. In the 16 seats flipped by Republicans last year, an average of 34,000 more people came out to cast ballots for the Democratic candidate than in 2018. The challenge for Democrats was that Republican votes jumped by 54,000 votes per district. This is definitely a problem for Democrats, but the remedy is very different than what the popularists are offering. Rather than distancing themselves from issues that are unpopular with Trump supporters, Democrats need to double down on the issues that resonate with and inspire infrequent voters who are progressive. The third flaw in the popularism school of thought is reliance on stale data sets that fail to account for the electorate’s changing demographic composition. Every year, more than 4 million people, half of them people of color, turn 18, and these new voters are already transforming US politics. Biden won Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes, and 39,000 18-year-olds cast ballots for the first time in that election, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist. In Georgia, where Biden prevailed by a similarly small margin of 12,000 votes, 59,000 18-year-olds voted, a tribute to the massive voter mobilization machine built by Stacey Abrams and her allies over the past decade.The diversification of the electorate is only going to accelerate in coming years, particularly in battleground states. In Texas, where Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost his 2018 senate race by 214,921 votes, more than two-thirds of those under 18 are people of color (67%), and nearly 300,000 people of color turn 18 every year; that’s equivalent to 33 new eligible voters of color in the Lone Star state every hour. O’Rourke is now considering a 2022 gubernatorial bid, and by the time ballots are cast in November 2022, 1.2 million more young Texans of color will be eligible to vote than was the case four years ago.Not only are these younger voters in the process of upending old electoral assumptions, but they are far more progressive and bring a different set of priorities in terms of determining what is popular. They backed Biden by a 34-point margin nationally, and that level of support was replicated in the critical states of the South and Southwest – including in a 31% Democratic advantage among 18-24-year-old voters in Arizona, and 20% advantage in Texas. On policy issues, younger voters have a very different definition of what is “popular.” A 2020 Gallup poll found that 70% of 18–34-year-olds supported “reducing the budgets of police departments and shifting the money to social programs,” more than twice the 32% level of support of those over 50. On immigration, the percentage of young people who support a pathway is twice as large as those who advocate deportation. Among those 45 and older, the immigration positions are split 50/50 according to a September Economist/YouGov poll.Popularists are right about one thing and that is that Democrats should champion popular policies. Looking at the correct data set shows that the electorate is becoming more diverse – and more progressive – by the minute. If you’ve made it this far in this column, 25 people have now turned 18 in the US. A future-focused popularism would pay greater attention to engaging these new voters changing the composition of the electorate than to polling data about the behavior of sectors of the electorate that had more sway in the past.
Steve Phillips is the host of Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips, a color-conscious podcast about politics, and is the author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
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ColoradoSurge in Colorado Covid cases could force hospitals to ration servicesIncrease can be attributed in part to the almost 40% of the state population that has not been vaccinated Eric BergerThu 4 Nov 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 4 Nov 2021 09.00 EDTEvan Faber’s 78-year-old father, Michael, has for the last three years had difficulty walking around his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Fabers hope that a spinal surgery scheduled for late December at a local hospital will help restore his balance and motor function.But now they are worried that the hospital will have to postpone the operation.That’s because a recent surge in Covid-19 cases around the state has increased the number of unvaccinated patients needing care and prompted concerns that hospitals may have to ration services for other issues.“If you have been waiting for an elective procedure for the last 18 months and are finally scheduled – you’re vaccinated, you don’t have Covid – your procedure might still get canceled if a hospital is totally full,” said Dr Anuj Mehta, a pulmonologist with Denver Health who serves on the governor’s expert emergency epidemic response committee. “While this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated at this point – and the surges in the hospital are entirely being driven by unvaccinated folks – it is having a massive bleed-over effect on to the entire population.”There are about 1,300 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in Colorado, according to the New York Times data; that’s the highest number since December 2020, when more than 1,900 patients were hospitalized.That number has increased by 15% over the last two weeks, the third largest increase in the country, and at a time when the national picture for the US is of a Delta variant surge that is firmly on the way down.The trend in Colorado can be attributed in part to the almost 40% of the state population that has not been vaccinated and people again gathering indoors without masks. It also shows that, despite the national downward trends of infections, regional spikes can still happen that can cause havoc in state healthcare systems.“We clearly have events taking place in Colorado, as elsewhere, that are spreading infection,” said Dr Jon Samet, an epidemiologist who directs Covid-19 modeling for the state. “I know everyone would like for it to be 2019 all over again, but that’s not the case.”The state had also not had surges on the scale of other states, said Dr Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth.Other states “had flames from the get-go, whereas we have been smoldering along this whole time, and we are finally hitting that peak of saturation and seeing flames finally,” said Barron.Thirty per cent of Colorado hospitals are anticipating a shortage in the number of intensive care unit beds and 37% are anticipating staffing shortages within the next week, according to data from the Colorado department of public health and environment.“Staffing is becoming increasingly a problem, which is true everywhere throughout the country. We are seeing healthcare workers really burned out from everything the last two years,” said Mehta. “It just raises concerns that we are pushing the limits of how many patients we can take care of. We are still taking great care of everybody” at Denver Health, “but we are filling up fast.”In response to the surge, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, on Sunday issued a pair of executive orders that allow the state to direct healthcare facilities to redirect patients to other centers and for the implementation of a protocol for healthcare workers to decide in an emergency who should be treated first.Mehta would also like to see the governor issue a statewide indoor mask mandate, something Polis has declined to do.“If we were to continue masking indoors, I think we would see a significant drop in transmission and hospitalization, and that would free us up to do the routine medical stuff that we do all the time,” Mehta said.Even though people who have been vaccinated against Covid face a very low risk of hospitalization, they still, of course, face other risks. The UCHealth system is seeing record number of patients with non-Covid issues, according to a spokesperson.“A year ago, most schools and businesses were virtual, and there were capacity limits on restaurants and other businesses,” Dan Weaver vice-president of communications for UCHealth stated in an email. “Now, with few people staying at home, we are seeing large numbers of traumas, other injuries, and non-Covid healthcare needs.”Even among healthy Colorado residents, the pandemic continues to affect their lives. Stephanie Danielson, a Boulder resident, had 60 children in her son and daughter’s Cub Scouts pack a year ago; there are now 10, in part because of ongoing concerns about the virus.The pack gathered for a hike in September for the first time in more than a year – and afterwards learned that a parent had tested positive for Covid.“As a leader, it felt defeating because we are trying so hard to bring back some normalcy to each other’s lives, and our very first time, we had this happen,” said Danielson, who works at Moxie Sozo, a branding agency in Boulder.Faber, the 40-year-old CEO of the company, just got a vaccine booster and said his life has not changed much because of the surge. But he continues to worry about his father, a retired restaurant owner.“Everything is so volatile, it’s a waiting game to see if [the surgery] will still happen,” said Faber. “It’s the circle of people just outside of the direct impact from Covid that are dealing” with the surge, “and I know there are more severe examples than this”.TopicsColoradoCoronavirusInfectious diseasesUS politicsVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More

New JerseyDemocratic governor Phil Murphy is New Jersey’s first to win re-election in 44 yearsThe tight race was viewed as a referendum on Murphy’s – and more broadly, Democrats’ – leadership throughout the pandemic Maanvi Singh and agencies@maanvissinghWed 3 Nov 2021 20.04 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Nov 2021 20.29 EDTThe Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, has narrowly won reelection, eking out a victory that spared Democrats the loss of a second gubernatorial seat.Murphy, a former executive at Goldman Sachs and ambassador to Germany, became the first Democratic governor to win reelection in New Jersey in 44 years. He defeated Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican and former assembly member.Murphy won following a tight race that was widely viewed as a referendum on the Democrat’s leadership throughout the pandemic. The governor issued stringent health orders to slow the spread of Covid-19, and has earned high marks from constituents for his leadership. He was one of the first governors to require Covid-19 vaccinations for public school teachers.What you missed: results from five US races on TuesdayRead moreBut Ciattarelli, like many Republican politicians across the US, seized on growing backlash and frustrations over mask mandates, school closures and other pandemic restrictions, waging a formidable campaign with spending that nearly equalled the governor’s. But while Republican voters came out in much higher rates for Ciattarelli this year than they did for his GOP predecessor in 2017, Murphy’s advantages, including 1 million more registered Democrats, proved too much for the Republican to overcome.That the race remained so close well into Wednesday evening, however, is likely to be an encouraging sign for Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms, especially given the party’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election, where Glenn Youngkin, a Republican businessman, staged an upset victory over the incumbent Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe.The Virginia race and other elections on Tuesday were seen as an early referendum on Joe Biden’s presidency and the Democrats’ national agenda, providing the first major tests of voter sentiment since the president took office. McAulliffe’s loss and Murphy’s narrow victory point to a potentially painful year ahead for Democrats as they try to maintain thin majorities in Congress.The closeness of the race has surprised experts, who watched public polls showing Murphy leading comfortably and looked to his party’s registration advantage of more than a million voters.“If you asked anybody several months ago within the state, I think anyone would have predicted a high double digit landslide for Murphy,” said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University.Murphy built his campaign around the progressive accomplishments he signed into law, such as a phased in $15 an hour minimum wage and paid sick leave along with taxes on the wealthy. He also brought on Democratic allies, including Senator Bernie Sanders, to campaign for him.A spokesperson for Ciattarelli said Wednesday that the campaign was focused on the vote count and said that a possible legal pursuit of a recount was on the table. Murphy also called Wednesday morning for every vote to be counted.Ciattarelli is a former state Assembly member, serving until 2018. He’s the founder of a medical publishing company called Galen Publishing, and served as a local and county official in Somerset.TopicsNew JerseyUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More