Some may recall I got into a brief disagreement with @jfeldman_epi a few weeks back about whether or not it's *always* appropriate to adjust for age when running COVID death rate numbers. Having said that, he makes some valid points here: jmfeldman.medium.com/a-year-in-how-…
For me, the single biggest mistake made by the Biden Administration (or at least the CDC...but the buck stops w/the WH) was on May 13th when @CDCDirector Walensky issued her "fully-vaxxed can take of their masks!" guidance, which was a TERRIBLE change. abcnews.go.com/Politics/fully…
Many people, including myself, roasted the @CDCgov at the time for this change at the time (I wrote a whole thread about it), but the moment the words left her mouth it was too late anyway; genie out of the bottle/etc:
Having said that, I think he also does a lot of hand-waving away of the political realities with statements like this:
He *does* acknowledge the political/polarization factor later on, but again, I think he vastly understates just how "entrenched" that Republican opposition is:
I've posted the graph below many times over the past 8 months or so, but I don't think people fully understand that it's not just how steep the slope is NOW, it's how it's CHANGED over time:
This animation only runs from February 2021 - August 2021, but you can clearly see that the Red/Blue vaccination divide only started AFTER most senior citizens had gotten vaxxed:
THESE graphs tell the story all the way from February through the end of December. The first is the R^2 (correlation strength). The second is the slope itself (the angle of the trend line).
Notice what happened the moment the vaccines became available to all adults?
The moment grandma & grampa were fully vaxxed, the GOP/MAGA/FOX went into overdrive on a robust anti-vaxx campaign. It worked like a charm, though the effect started to flatten out around mid-September...only to start up again as soon as 5-11 yr olds were approved.
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Here's an updated version of my "Dem Stop the Steal!" conspiracy theory thread which hopefully is less scattershot.
There's 3 main claims:
1. "How could there be 20M fewer voters than in 2020 w/"record-breaking turnout?"
2. "How could 15M fewer voter for Harris vs. Biden?"
3. "How could so many swing state voters vote for the Dem for Senate but not for Harris for POTUS?"
There's a few others, but these are the biggest ones, so let's tackle them first:
1. There weren't 20M fewer voters.
I've been compiling the data as it's being updated by CNN's tracking center via a Google spreadsheet. As of this writing, total POTUS turnout is ~147.6M, or ~10.8M lower than 2020's 158.4M.
Yesterday I posted a thread digging into the actual data behind the "20M missing votes!" and "15M fewer than Biden!" conspiracy theories being tossed around the past few days.
Via CNN, as of this writing, total 2024 POTUS votes are only down 13.9 million vs. 2020...with a likely 11.5 - 12.0 million ballots still to be counted across 30 states.
Total 2024 turnout will likely be ~156M or so...just a couple million fewer than 2020.
Again, using CNN's data & estimates, once every legitimate ballot has been counted, Trump will likely have around ~78 million votes to Harris' 75-76 million.
That'd mean he added ~4 million vs 2020 while she lost ~5-6 million.
...the vast majority of this discrepancy happened in districts/counties which were heavily red to begin with, which is why the MAGA COVID Death Cult factor only ended up making a decisive difference in exactly one statewide race: Arizona Attorney General: acasignups.net/22/12/29/updat…
At the House district level it didn't make a decisive difference in any races at all. To understand why, let's look at two extreme examples...
People have started asking why I'm still pushing fundraising for Dems just 5 days before Election Day. All the ad time has been purchased & the lit pieces printed & mailed out already, right?
There's several reasons: 1/
1. For state legislative races in particular, a last-minute cash infusion of even $50 can mean an extra few pizzas for tired & hungry canvassers or an extra burner phone for phone banking.
2. After the polls close, there's going to no doubt be some races which require recounts...which may or may not have to be paid for by the campaign requesting it, depending on the state and the margin. That's gonna cost money.
🧵THE DEAD POOL: Since @MikeJohnson and @JDVance are promising to Concentrate folks w/pre-existing conditions into separate Camps, let's talk about that. 1/ acasignups.net/24/10/04/dead-…
Let's go back to the pre-ACA healthcare landscape. This is what it looked like in 2012...*before* the ACA's major provisions went into effect.
Half the US had employer coverage. Another third had Medicare or Medicaid. ~11M had "individual" insurance; ~48M had nothing at all. 2/
The ACA had 2 main goals:
1. Reduce the number of uninsured Americans as much as possible by making coverage more affordable & accessible;
2. Provide protections from insurance industry abuses, *especially* for the individual market where the abuses were the most blatant. 3/