Last Call For House Definitely Afire

Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report's House guru, is the first to admit his calls were catastrophically wrong, and that the likely voter models did not account for the 70% turnout in this week's election favoring the Republicans so much, nor the massive ticket-splitting as Never Trump Republicans and independents racked up huge voting totals for GOP House candidates.

 

Republicans appear to have swept at least 18 of the 27 races in our Toss Up column, with Democrats leading precariously in only three of those races and another six up in the air. Republicans also appear to have won at least four of the races in our Lean Democratic column (FL-26, SC-01, TX-23 and TX-24) and even one race in our Likely Democratic column, where Miami Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala (FL-27) went down to defeat.

Meanwhile, beyond two North Carolina seats that Democrats were guaranteed to pick up because of redrawn district lines, Democrats appear to have only picked up one other GOP seat with Carolyn Bourdeaux in GA-07. This Gwinnett County seat also performed strongly for Biden. There's also a chance Democrat Hiral Tipirneni will defeat GOP Rep. David Schweikert in AZ-06, but there are plenty of Arizona votes left to count.

There will be a lot for everyone to unpack in the days, weeks, and months ahead about what much of the survey data got wrong at multiple levels. But credit should be given to the NRCC, led by chair Tom Emmer and executive director Parker Hamilton Poling, as well as the Congressional Leadership Fund led by executive director Dan Conston, for continuing to invest on offense when other consultants wrote races off.

The day after the election is always a fog of war, but there are three lessons from the early House results:

1. Democrats suffered a catastrophic erosion in Hispanic support.

The races where Republicans most vastly outperformed everyone's priors were heavily Hispanic districts that swung enormously to Trump. These include both GOP pickups in Miami (Carlos Gimenez in FL-26 and Maria Elvira Salazar in FL-27) as well as Republican Tony Gonzales's hold of Rep. Will Hurd's open TX-23. Amazingly, Republicans didn't lose a single seat in Texas.

2. It was a stellar night for Republican women.

We already knew before the election five more GOP women were coming to the House from safe red seats: Kat Cammack (FL-03), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), Mary Miller (IL-15), Lisa McClain (MI-10) and Diana Harshbarger (TN-01). But after last night, Republicans are on track to more than double their current count of 13 women.

Among last night's GOP winners were Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27), Victoria Spartz (IN-05), Ashley Hinson (IA-01), Michelle Fischbach (MN-07), Yvette Herrell (NM-02), Kendra Horn (IN-05), Nancy Mace (SC-01) and Beth Van Duyne (TX-24). It's also possible they will be joined by Young Kim (CA-39), Michelle Park Steel (CA-48), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (MN-02), Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11) and Claudia Tenney (NY-22).

3. Democrats' "national security freshmen" found ways to survive an otherwise poor night for their party in the House.

Although Democrats' challengers mostly fizzled, the four Democratic women from Trump districts who signed a letter last September launching an impeachment inquiry built bipartisan brands that paid off: Reps. Elissa Slotkin (MI-08), Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11), Elaine Luria (VA-02) and Abigail Spanberger (VA-07).

We'll have much more to say soon, but for now it's clear that House Republicans' centerpiece of female recruitment was a success, while House Democrats' centerpiece of Texas was a bust. And, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will need to navigate a much narrower majority in January.

 

The Dems got destroyed in Texas, and things went pear-shaped in Florida too. Latino outreach in Arizona was successful however. There are lessons there if the Dems choose to learn them.

 

Republicans already have.

The Fight For $15 Flies Far For Florida

Florida voters handily approved a hike in the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour, and Republicans are seething.

Voters in Florida have decided to amend the state’s constitution to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour by Sept. 30, 2026.

With more than 60-percent of voters approving of Amendment 2, the state’s minimum wage will gradually go up.

The Florida Constitution, Article X, Section 24, will be modified to increase the existing state minimum wage from $8.56 an hour to $10 an hour starting Sept. 30, 2021. It then will increase by $1 each year until reaching $15 an hour in September 2026. Afterward, increases in minimum wage will be adjusted for inflation.

Lawyer John Morgan and his campaign, Florida For a Fair Wage, spearheaded this amendment.

“I’m confident because Floridians are compassionate and know that giving every worker a fair wage means not just lifting up those who would directly benefit but lifting up our broader economy when hardworking folks have more money to spend,” Morgan previously said.

In a letter to the Miami Herald, the president and CEO of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association wrote that an increase in the minimum wage would result in business owners finding ways to control costs.

“Solutions include reducing the number of employees and the hours that remaining employees work and seeking labor alternatives like automation,” Carol B. Dover stated ahead of the amendment’s passage.

 

The thing is though the "crushing job-killing minimum wage hike" hasn't killed the other seven states where $15 minimum wage is now law.

 

You know what has hurt low-paying jobs?

 

COVID-19 and the Republican response to it.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As he all but promised to do on Twitter last week, Donald Trump held a 2 AM press conference and declared victory with millions of ballots still uncounted, and says his campaign will go to the Supreme Court to stop counting.

President Donald Trump early Wednesday morning kept up his tactic of characterizing counting all ballots as cheating.

“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight,” he told gathered supporters at the White House. “And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it.”

It’s the same old story: Trump has argued for weeks that vote-counting should be stopped after Election Day — meaning, just throw out any ballots that take more than a few hours to count.

“We were getting ready for a big celebration,” he added. “We were winning everything, and all of the sudden it was just called off.”

“Frankly we did win this election,” he lied later.

 

It gets worse. Much much worse.

Shortly after Trump said “we’ll be going to the Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams abruptly cut in to call Trump out on his misleading claim that “frankly, we did win the election.”

“We are reluctant to step in, but duty bound to point out when he says we did win this election, we’ve already won, that’s not based in the facts at all,” Williams said.

 

We're now in a full-blown capital C Constitutional Crisis. 

 

We have been for a while now, frankly, but this is one where we don't come back from as a country without tremendous bloodshed if Trump is not stopped here. He is openly stating he will steal this election through the Supreme Court.

I've been warning about this scenario for months now.

 

It's finally here.

 

Only historically catastrophic things happen from this point on.

StupidiNews!

• A new Harvard Business School study finds that the number of Americans unable to pay bills has doubled since Republicans allowed CARES Act unemployment benefits to expire.
• Hurricane Eta has reached Nicaragua as a Category 4 storm, Eta is expected to move over inland Nicaragua and Honduras over the next 24-48 hours.
• Current US hospitalizations for COVID-19 have topped 50,000, the highest level in three months, as the number of daily new COVID-19 US cases continues to top the 100,000 mark.
• New Jersey voters have legalized recreational marijuana use, while Oregon voters have decriminalized a number of federally illegal drugs in small doses.
• A new study on haunted houses being "scary fun" finds that there's a hormonal mind/body balance point between being terrified and being thrilled by fear.
  

Last Call For A Long Week Ahead

 We still don't know a winner here at 11:30 PM EST, and we won't know for several days, most likely.

• Pennsylvania
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Georgia
• Florida
• North Carolina

All have yet to really be called, although Florida is probably going to be a Trump win. 

Arizona and Minnesota got called for Biden late in the evening however.

We'll see you in the morning.

California Goes Viral, Con't

Even if Joe Biden is eventually declared President after all the Trump legal tomfoolery, even after another two-and-a-half months of Trump doing scorched earth damage in the wake of a loss, if California is any example, Trump's federal judges (and Supreme Court!) will be blocking Democratic state and national executive orders for years, making getting anything done to fix the mess we're in almost impossible.

A Northern California county judge on Monday preliminarily ordered Gov. Gavin Newsom to stop issuing directives related to the coronavirus that might interfere with state law.

Sutter County Superior Court Judge Sarah Heckman tentatively ruled that one of the dozens of executive orders Newsom has issued overstepped his authority and impinged on the state Legislature.

She more broadly barred him “from exercising any power under the California Emergency Services Act which amends, alters, or changes existing statutory law or makes new statutory law or legislative policy.”

It’s the second time a judge in the same county has reached the same conclusion, which runs counter to other state and federal court decisions backing the governor’s emergency powers. An appeals court quickly stayed the earlier order in June.

Heckman’s decision will become final in 10 days unless Newsom’s attorneys can raise new challenges. Newsom did not immediately comment or say if he will appeal.

The case centers on a single Newsom executive order in June requiring election officials to establish hundreds of locations statewide where voters can cast ballots in the November election. But lawmakers subsequently approved the same requirement, and the judge’s decision will have no effect on Tuesday’s election.

She acted in a lawsuit brought by Republican Assemblymen James Gallagher and Kevin Kiley, who said Newsom, a Democrat, was single-handedly overriding state laws in the name of keeping Californians safe.

“This is a victory for separation of powers,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement. Newsom “has continued to create and change state law without public input and without the deliberative process provided by the Legislature.”

Heckman wrote in a nine-page decision that the California Emergency Services Act “does not permit the Governor to amend statutes or make new statutes. The Governor does not have the power or authority to assume the Legislature’s role of creating legislative policy and enactments.”

Newsom used his emergency powers to virtually shut down the state and its economy in the early weeks of the pandemic.

“Nobody disputes that there are actions that should be taken to keep people safe during an emergency,” the lawmakers said. “But that doesn’t mean that we put our Constitution and free society on hold by centralizing all power in the hands of one man.”

 

After decades of the "unitary executive" legal principle, Republicans are now arguing that Governors have no powers, and that everything rests with state legislatures...which happened to be controlled by Republicans in many cases.  California's is not, but blocking Newsom's orders, as was the attempted case here in Kentucky a few months ago, is the point. 

Even if they are temporary, it disrupts the process and undermines authority. If Republicans cannot rule, Trump's judges will make sure the country remains ungovernable, even in deep blue California.

 

Europe's Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Multiple gunmen opened fire Tuesday in Vienna, attacking in several locations around the center of the city, as authorities continue to hunt the attackers in what Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is calling "a repulsive terror attack".

Gunmen armed with rifles have opened fire in six different locations in central Vienna, killing three people and wounding several more, police say.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called it a "repulsive terror attack" and said one gunman was also killed.

Police were searching for at least one attacker who was still at large, the interior minister said.

The shootings took place near Vienna's central synagogue but it is not yet clear if that was the target.

The city's police chief said two men and a woman were killed. At least a dozen other people were wounded, officials said.

The attack happened just hours before Austria imposed new national restrictions to try to stem rising cases of coronavirus. Many people were out enjoying bars and restaurants which are now closed until the end of November.

European leaders strongly condemned the shooting. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was "deeply shocked by the terrible attacks".

Police said the incident began at about 20:00 (19:00 GMT) on Monday, near the Seitenstettengasse synagogue, when a heavily armed man opened fire on people outside cafes and restaurants.

Members of the special forces quickly arrived at the scene. One policeman suffered a gunshot wound before other officers shot the perpetrator, who was armed with an automatic rifle, a pistol and a machete.

Jewish community leader Oskar Deutsch tweeted that the synagogue was closed at the time the attack began.

 

Just remember that as bad as things are here in the US, Europe has seen multiple terrorist attacks like this in the last several years, and there's no indication that the EU is dealing with their right-wing white supremacist fascism problem any better than the United States is, especially during a resurgent pandemic.

StupidiNews, Election Day Edition!

• It's Election Day here in America. If you're heading to the polls today, be safe, mask up, and check vote.org to double-check your polling place location.
• If anyone tries to stop you from voting, know your rights. Call 1-866-687-8683 to reach the Election Protection Hotline.
• Get out there and vote!
  

Last Call For Zandar's Final Map

In the end, I agree with Charlie Cook. Trump is out of time, Biden's lead is too big, Trump would have to run the table on too many states, and the only real question is how big Biden's victory margin will be.

On a hundred-odd Zoom meetings, webinars, and conference call speeches that I’ve participated in over the past two months, virtual attendees continue to raise the possibility of a contested presidential election, even though the chances of that have been getting smaller all the time. Every day that Trump remains behind in the polls, outspent badly and with the early vote gushing in, the cone of uncertainty narrows, and the odds of such an upset goes down.

Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes seems pretty straightforward: Hold all 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) that Hillary Clinton carried four years ago, which total 232 electoral votes, just 38 short of the majority threshold of 270. Then win each of the three states that Clinton lost by eight-tenths of a point or less: Michigan (0.2 percentage points) Pennsylvania (0.7), and Wisconsin (0.8). That gives him 278 electoral votes, eight more than needed. Biden will likely also carry two congressional districts that eluded Clinton in 2016, Nebraska’s 2nd District and Maine’s 2nd, giving him 280 electoral votes. That would represent a “skinny” Biden win.

A big Biden win would bring in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, and might also include one or two states from the next tier, mostly likely Georgia or Iowa, although don’t count out Ohio or Texas. Generally speaking, Trump is underperforming his 2016 pace by 3 to 8 points, depending upon the state or district.

The RealClearPolitics average of national polls pegs Biden’s lead at 7.4 points, 51.1 to 43.7 percent. But that’s a less discriminating measure, including as it does some mediocre surveys, some that seemed congenitally slanted toward one side or the other, and some that would be better utilized lining hamster cages. The FiveThirtyEight modeled average of national polls, which is more selective than the RCP average but still includes some surveys that I consider rather sketchy, puts the Biden lead at 8.8 points, 52 to 43.2 percent.

I believe his actual lead is more like 9 or 10 points, based on the higher-quality, live-telephone-interview national polls conducted since the first debate, as well as the gold standard of online polling, the Pew Research Center’s mammoth poll of 11,929 voters released two weeks ago.

Any way you slice it, these are pretty good leads, considerably higher than the 3.2-point national margin that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the RCP average on Oct. 29, 2016. When all the votes were counted, the margin ended up being 2.1 percent.

If I had to give you a map, and I do, frankly, it would look like this.

305-233 Biden.  And I think I might be underestimating GA, FL, OH, and TX.

God I hope I'm right.

You're Vlad Marugov, The Sausage King Of Moscow?

Hey, it's not election news for once as the Sausage King of Moscow has been assassinated by crossbow bolt. Nope, serious. May even have not been Putin's fault, either.

 

A Russian oligarch, nicknamed The Sausage King, has been murdered with a crossbow, investigators say.

Vladimir Marugov and his partner were in an outdoor sauna when they were attacked, reportedly by two masked assailants.

The woman managed to escape through the window and call the police.

Detectives found the body of Mr Marugov, who owned some of Russia's largest meat-processing plants, in the sauna with a crossbow next to it.

The attack happened at Mr Marugov's countryside estate, about 40km (25 miles) outside the capital, Moscow, early on Monday morning, Russia's Investigative Committee (similar to the FBI in the US) reported.

It did not name the man, but local media identified him as Mr Marugov, the owner of the Ozyorsky and Meat Empire sausage factories.

The intruders demanded cash from Mr Marugov, before fleeing in a car, the Investigative Committee said.

The getaway car was later recovered on the outskirts of the town of Istra, outside Moscow.

 

This is twenty, thirty minutes of a good Guy Ritchie film right here.  Somebody get me Jason Statham, Peter Stormare, Rooney Mara and Dave Bautista.

Also, just kidding, everything having to do with Russian oligarchs dying is Putin's fault.

Trump Goes Viral And Fauci Goes Off

Leading US infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning of a dire several months ahead as Donald Trump continues to lie to America about COVID-19 at his rallies, with just hours to go before Election Day. And for the first time, Fauci is now openly blaming Trump for the country's failures in controlling the pandemic.

Fauci, who once took a starring role in the response and briefed the president almost every day as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described a disjointed response as cases surge. Several current and former senior administration officials said the White House is almost entirely focused on a vaccine, even though experts warn it is unlikely to be a silver bullet that ends the pandemic immediately since it will take months under the best of circumstances to inoculate tens of millions of people to achieve herd immunity.

Officials told governors on a call Friday that they hoped to begin distributing a vaccine by the end of the year, giving some specific guidance on how states would receive their first doses. Fauci focused on the rise in cases, according to people familiar with the call.

Fauci said the White House coronavirus task force meets less frequently and has far less influence as the president and his top advisers have focused on reopening the country. “Right now, the public health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly,” he said.

Fauci said he and Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, no longer have regular access to the president and he has not spoken to Trump since early October. “The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,” he said. Fauci said he phones into meetings of other staffers but largely avoids the West Wing because “of all the infections there.”

He also lamented that Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and Trump’s favored pandemic adviser, who advocates letting the virus spread among young healthy people and reopening the country without restrictions, is the only medical adviser the president regularly meets with.

“I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Fauci said he actually appreciated chief of staff Mark Meadows saying last weekend on CNN that the administration was not going to control the pandemic. “I tip my hat to him for admitting the strategy,” he said. “He is straightforward in telling you what’s on his mind. I commend him for that.”

 

At this point, don't be surprised if Fauci is silenced completely or even fired after the election. (Trump even suggested he would do so "a few days after the election" at one of his rallies last night.)

At one point during the interview, Fauci said he needed to be careful with his words because he would be blocked from doing appearances in the future.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, offered blistering criticism of Fauci for his comments in a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday. Deere said Fauci “knows the risks [from the coronavirus] today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago.”

“It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,” Deere said. “As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent — exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.”

Deere added that the president “always put the well-being of the American people first,” citing his decision to cut off travel from China, his early shutdown of the country and his mobilization of the private sector to deliver critical supplies and develop treatments and vaccines.

 

It's far from the first time the Trump regime has gone after Fauci, but this is definitely the first time that the good doctor has taken a swing or three back like this. Should Trump win a second term, Fauci's name is almost certainly at the top of the list of Trump's mass loyalty purge.

President Donald Trump and his top aides are planning a huge overhaul of his Cabinet if he wins a second term, scuttling officials in key health-related and intelligence jobs who Trump views as disloyal, slow-acting or naysayers.

The shift would amount to a purge of any Cabinet member who has crossed the president, refused to mount investigations he has demanded, or urged him to take a different, more strict tack on the coronavirus response.

The evictions could run the gamut from senior health officials to much of the national security leadership. Already, the White House and administration officials have started to vet names of health care experts who could take over the agencies running many elements of the government’s pandemic response and overseeing the country’s health insurance system, according to two Republicans close to the White House. And the president is eying a remake of leadership at the FBI, CIA and Pentagon, exasperated with what he perceives as unwillingness to investigate his preferred subjects or take on the government’s “deep state.”

This personnel overhaul of the Trump Cabinet at the start of a second term would mirror the turnover his administration has already experienced during his first four years. Of the 23 Cabinet-level posts in the Trump White House, only seven officials lasted all four years. Many, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, had public and contentious departures. And it would represent a fully unencumbered Trump, no longer constrained by political considerations or pushback from Congress.

“I can only imagine the score-settling Trump would undertake if he won,” said one Republican close to the White House about the potential Cabinet shakeup.

235,000 Americans and counting are already dead, and hundreds of thousands more will follow in the weeks and months ahead, regardless of who wins the election. Trump will spend his final days in power making those who chose to vote him out of office suffer, win or lose.

So, if you're somehow still on the fence over your vote on Tuesday, for the love of God, vote for Biden.

Four more years of Trump will kill millions of us.

 

StupidiNews!

• Trump regime officials are planning to put up "non-salable fencing" around a four-block area surrounding the White House, the same fencing used earlier this year during protests.
• A Georgia Democratic campaign rally was moved to a Zoom virtual event after Georgia militia Trump supporters threatened the rally with armed violence.
• DC Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the US Postal Service to "deliver every possible ballot" to election offices by Tuesday's cutoff time.
• The Trump regime is expected to announce a 180-day moratorium on asylum entries due to "COVID-19 concerns" this week as the White House begins a new crackdown on immigration.
• Tropical Storm Eta is the 28th named storm in 2020, tying 2005's Atlantic record, and is expected to reach Category 1 hurricane strength on Monday before hitting the western Yucatan Peninsula.

Last Call For Bus, Biden Bus

In a preview of the events to come, the Biden campaign has canceled several events in Texas this weekend after Trump cultists ambushed a Biden campaign bus in Texas and tried to force it off Interstate 35.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a Friday incident in which a group of Trump supporters, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus as it drove up I-35 in Hays County, a law enforcement official confirmed to The Texas Tribune Saturday.

The confrontation, captured on video, featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events on Friday. The campaign officials cited “safety concerns” for the cancellations.

The highway skirmish came as Democrats close ground in a state that is polling like a potential battleground in the race for president. Recent polls indicate the presidential race in Texas between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden is tight, with some national prognosticators calling it a “toss-up.”

“Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas [Friday] instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way,” said Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director for the Biden campaign.

On Saturday night, Trump tweeted a video of the Trump supporters following the Biden bus saying, “I LOVE TEXAS!”

When reached for comment, the Texas GOP Chairman Allen West dismissed questions regarding the incident. “It is more fake news and propaganda. Prepare to lose ... stop bothering me,” West said in a statement.

The bus tour was separate from vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ visit to the state Friday.

Texas Congressional candidate and former state senator Wendy Davis was on the Biden bus at the time, according to multiple sources, including U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Travis County Democratic Party Chair Katie Naranjo, and a now-deleted tweet from the Biden Operations Director for Texas, David Gins. A spokesperson for Davis declined to comment.

The tour, which started on Wednesday in Amarillo and went through East Texas, the Gulf Coast, along the Texas-Mexico border, and Central Texas faced protests of varying sizes along the way.

Friday’s campaign events started with a small gathering in Laredo that was met with few protesters. From there, staffers drove to San Antonio. Around 12:30 p.m. on Friday, a social media user using the hashtag #TrumpTrainTexas posted on Twitter, “Trolling is FUN.” The user called for other Trump supporters to “escort the Biden [bus] coming through San Antonio.” 

 

Should Trump lose, and the odds are looking very much like he will, expect a lot more violence like this. It's only the beginning as this infected boil is lanced this week.  There will almost certainly be far more intimidation by Trump cultists, some of them law enforcement, in an effort to hurt Democrats over the next 48 hours.

And should it become clear that Trump is going down in flames, the rest of the country may very well follow.

Be careful this week at the very least. Between the virus and the cultists, America is not safe by any measure right now.

Boris Finally Locks It Down

As COVID-19 rips through the European Union, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a 30-day national lockdown starting on Thursday as UK total cases now top 1 million.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday announced a new month-long lockdown for England after being warned that without tough action a resurgent coronavirus outbreak will overwhelm hospitals in weeks.

On the day the U.K. passed 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, Johnson made a sudden about-face and confirmed that stringent restrictions on business and daily life would begin Thursday and last until Dec. 2.

He said at a televised news conference that “no responsible prime minister” could ignore the grim figures.

“Unless we act, we could see deaths in this country running at several thousand a day,” said Johnson, who was hospitalized earlier this year for a serious case of COVID-19.

Under the new restrictions, bars and restaurants can only offer take-out, non-essential shops must close and people will only be able to leave home for a short list of reasons including exercise. Activities ranging from haircuts to foreign holidays must once again be put on hold.

Unlike during the U.K.’s first three-month lockdown earlier this year, schools, universities, construction sites and manufacturing businesses will stay open.

As in other European countries, virus cases in the U.K. began to climb after lockdown measures were eased in the summer and people began to return to workplaces, schools, universities and social life. The Office for National Statistics estimated Friday that 1 in 100 people in England, well over half a million, had the virus in the week to Oct. 23.

Johnson had hoped a set of regional restrictions introduced earlier in October would be enough to push numbers down. But government scientific advisers predict that on the outbreak’s current trajectory, demand for hospital beds will exceed capacity by the first week of December, even if temporary hospitals set up during the first peak of the virus are reopened.

The scientists warned COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths could soon surpass the levels seen at the outbreak’s spring peak, when daily deaths topped 1,000. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said the mortality rate had “potential to be twice as bad, if not more” than it was during the pandemic’s first European wave, if nothing was done.

As European countries such as France, Germany and Belgium in imposing a second lockdown amid surging caseloads, it looked inevitable that Johnson would have to follow.

 

Boris Johnson is finally doing the right thing.

 

There will be no lockdowns here in the US however. Trump will openly punish states that try it, and we've already had kidnap and assassination plots against Democratic governors, and there's always the Supreme Court to block them.

 

Expect another 100,000 deaths between now and Inauguration Day on Trump's butcher's bill.

Sunday Long Read: Reciting The Lordstown's Prayer

Our Election Day Sunday Long Read comes to us from Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian as he profiles Lordstown, Ohio and the voters there facing a historic choice. Two years after GM closed its major Chevy Cruze plant in Lordstown, four years after Donald Trump won Ohio by eight points based on his promises to keep the auto plants and steel plants open and jobs pouring in, the people of the Mahoning Valley are considering that Trump may have screwed them over and left them and the state holding the bag. 

Before Covid-19 hit, Trisha Amato spent her weekdays behind a modest, ebony-colored desk, running the “transition center” that helps laid-off General Motors workers pick up the shards of their lives. GM announced it was closing its mammoth plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in November 2018 and ever since Amato has been ladling out advice to the 1,700 laid-off workers on such matters as how to obtain jobless benefits and how to qualify for government assistance to pay for college courses.

The GM plant, the size of more than 100 football fields, had long been the heart of Lordstown – as recently as 2016, it employed 4,500 workers, and in its 53-year history, it produced 16m vehicles. Built alongside I-80, the hulking plant has long been a monument to America’s industrial might, or perhaps one should say its fading industrial might.

Deep-voiced, with long, auburn hair and broad shoulders – she, too, had worked at the plant – Amato has problems of her own, saying that she can no longer afford health insurance for herself and her two daughters on her transition center salary. Amato, who is divorced, felt betrayed when GM said it would shut the plant – the company had received $60m in state subsidies, and had promised in return to keep the plant open through 2027.

Many of the GM workers were also angry at Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly proclaimed that he would make American manufacturing great again and would bring back jobs that had gone overseas. That message resonated in Lordstown and nearby Youngstown, part of the Mahoning Valley area that has been dragged down for decades by one factory and steel mill closing after another. Trump’s repeated promise to bring back factory jobs played well not only in Ohio, but also in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, helping win over many blue-collar voters, who were key to his narrow victories in those states. Blue-collar workers in those states could again play a decisive role in this year’s election, with many still supporting Trump, but some souring on him – perhaps enough to flip those states to Joe Biden.

In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!”

Laid-off GM Lordstown workers still rail about that speech. Many moved to other cities to find work; many lost money selling their homes. “Some of my hardest days of the last few years came when everybody left,” Amato told me. “They had to sell their houses.” Hundreds of longtime Lordstown workers moved to take jobs at GM plants in Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas – all so that they could continue receiving good United Auto Workers (UAW) wages (around $30 an hour) and accrue additional years toward their pensions. Many in this diaspora make the four- to 10-hour drive back to the Mahoning Valley once or twice each month to visit their families.

“It’s all just a mess,” said Amato. “The ones who left, they’re angry.” GM offered to transfer Amato to its plant in Wentzville, Missouri, but she turned it down because her 19-year-old daughter was in high school and her 79-year-old father was ailing.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump had considerable support in the Lordstown plant even though surrounding Trumbull County is traditionally a Democratic stronghold and even though UAW members, stretching back to Franklin Roosevelt’s time, have tilted heavily Democratic. Union officials estimate that 30 to 40% of Lordstown’s workers voted for Trump. “They felt he was the lesser of two evils,” Amato said. The sentiment was, “Let’s not have a lifetime politician in there. Let’s get some change.”

“Since so many of the steel mills closed, there isn’t much here economically,” Amato added. “They were hoping or praying that Trump would bring something here.” The workers were wowed, she said, by his promises to bring back jobs and his being a seemingly successful businessman.

Asked whom she supported in 2016, Amato told me: “I backed Trump,” but she followed that with a quick, nervous laugh. “I thought he stood for more of what I stood for.”

She, too, felt that Trump was the lesser of two evils. Hillary Clinton was an excellent first lady, she said, but to her mind, Clinton, by 2016, had become yet another career politician. “She just changed,” Amato said. “It comes down to character, and I wanted to believe Trump has a better character.”

Amato admits that she woefully misjudged Trump. “After he was elected, he really opened his mouth. He started tweeting and saying things that I feel are crazy. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

Upset at herself for backing Trump, she said: “I feel like I’m living in a reality TV show.” She added: “Trump, he’s a clown.”

She had thought it would be good to have a businessman as president. “But maybe he’s not such a good businessman,” she acknowledged, pointing to his numerous bankruptcies. “He doesn’t understand where the blue-collar workers are coming from. I don’t think any of the big politicians understand that. Trump, especially, doesn’t understand what it is to struggle.”

 

Like a lot of 2016 Trump voters, Amato goes on to say she won't vote for Trump, but she doesn't know if she'll vote for Biden or at all (she would have voted for Mayor Pete "in a heartbeat" though.)  I don't blame her for not wanting to vote for a septuagenarian white dude, but it really is a binary choice right now.

Biden, or not voting for Biden.  That's the choice.

Vote like your country, your state, your county, your city, your home depends on it.

Because it does.