“Along with frequent campaign and surrogate trips, including at least four from the president himself in the final weeks, Team Trump’s winning formula included a heavy dose of messaging that sought to brand Democrats as socialists and anti-police, a focus on opening the economy despite the coronavirus pandemic, generous spending on a traditional ground game, and the buildout of a coalition that Trump in the past had paid little attention to, according to nearly a dozen Florida Republicans and campaign officials.”
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“Trump’s largest base of support was, again, with white voters, who helped him outperform his 2016 showing in 32 mostly rural, white counties across the state. That support squeezed an additional 153,000 votes out of areas of the state that already backed Trump by wide margins.
But Trump also sliced into Democratic support in Hispanic-heavy Miami-Dade County, where Biden failed to muster even a fourth of Hillary Clinton’s 30-point margin in 2016.
Biden’s collapse in Miami-Dade drew particular ire from embittered Democrats, but it was only part of the demographic picture that helped Trump carry Florida a second time.”
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“Exit polling showed Biden at roughly 38 percent with white voters, an improvement on Clinton’s abysmal 33 percent, but below what public polling averages had predicted.
Had white support held for Biden, he would have won Florida, Odio said.”
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“Miami-Dade County is politically complex, heavily influenced by its Venezuelan, Cuban and Nicaraguan communities, where many people have fled or have family who fled leftist strongman regimes in their native countries.
The cohort is particularly influenced by political messaging that casts Democrats as part of a plot to implement socialist policies. On Tuesday, it proved once again to be a solid line of attack in South Florida, where Democrats expected the strategy but were unable to counter it.”
“Mississippians have voted in favor of the ballot initiative Measure 3 and will replace their controversial state flag with a new one, according to the New York Times and the Associated Press.
The new flag, named the “In God We Trust” flag, will put to rest a decades-long debate over the flag that the state used for 126 years, which features a Confederate emblem.
The new design was commissioned and approved by the Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag, set up by the state legislature after the body voted to do away with the old flag. It prominently features a magnolia flower — the state flower — encircled by 20 white stars, a nod to Mississippi’s status as the 20th state to join the US. A larger yellow star sits directly above the flower to represent the Choctaw origins of the state, and all the icons sit on a dark blue and red striped background. The design was selected from just under 3,000 other submissions.”
“Proposition 22, created to decide the future of the California gig economy, has passed.
The proposition concerned whether app-based drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft are employees or independent contractors. And its success, which the Associated Press called before midnight Wednesday PT, means those companies will effectively be exempted from a California law that would have pushed such drivers to be classified as employees.
The decision is a major win for gig companies”
“Florida voters have said yes to increasing the state’s minimum wage to $15.
They did so by approving Amendment 2, which increases the state’s minimum wage from $8.56 to $15 by September 30, 2026, according to the New York Times and the Associated Press. The change is incremental, with employers being asked to increase wages, essentially, by $1 a year. The amendment also specifies that as of September 30, 2027, Florida must adjust its state minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), meaning wages will be adjusted up or down as consumer prices change. The same measure is used to calculate changes in Social Security benefits.”
“It took the world decades of stops and false starts to come up with the Paris climate agreement, and it remains the most potent international framework to get countries to reduce their contributions to global warming. However, it has critical weaknesses that have threatened to collapse it completely.
In 2015, just about every country in the world convened in Paris and agreed to a few simple but hard-fought principles: The climate is changing due to human activity, the world should aim to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius this century compared to preindustrial levels, every country has an obligation to act, but every country gets to set their own goals.
The terms of the climate agreement are voluntary and don’t carry the force of law (hence “Paris agreement” or “Paris accord,” and not “Paris treaty,” which would be legally binding). But the terms are structured in a way that creates a lot of incentives to encourage countries to do more to limit their emissions of heat-trapping gases, and it contains some prods for countries that are slower to act.
It was clear from the outset that what countries initially planned to do to cut greenhouse gases wouldn’t be enough to stay below 2°C, let alone hit an even more aggressive target under the agreement of limiting warming to less than 1.5°C.”
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“the idea of the Paris agreement was to get everyone to agree to a common set of goals and strengthen their commitments over time, with periodic international meetings to see where everyone stands and to hammer out the tedious rules of how to gauge progress. So far, this hasn’t been enough to keep the world on track to meet the goals of the accord.”
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“In September, China made a surprise announcement at the United Nations General Assembly that it’s striving to be carbon-neutral by 2060. While China hasn’t laid out exactly how it plans to meet its goal, researchers have begun chalking out a road map to get China to its targets.
The European Union, meanwhile, has adopted a program called the European Green Deal, which aims to make its 28 member countries carbon-neutral by 2050. Its core elements, such as ensuring a just economic transition for workers in industries likely to be left behind in the shift to clean energy, are actually modeled on the Green New Deal proposal in the US. Crucially, Europe’s program calls for a border adjustment carbon tax that could go into effect as soon as 2021. For countries that aren’t doing enough to fight climate change, their goods could face additional tariffs in the EU.
If the United States decided to stay out of the Paris agreement and not step up its commitments, the EU’s new policies could take a big bite out of the US’s roughly $320 billion worth of exports to the bloc.
The EU, China, Japan, and South Korea are also working on their own trade agreements with climate change as a key element.”
“In every state where a ballot measure asked Americans to reconsider the drug war, voters sided with reformers. In Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, voters legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. In Mississippi and South Dakota (separate from the full legalization measure), voters legalized medical marijuana.
In Oregon, voters decriminalized — but not legalized — all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Also in Oregon, voters legalized the use of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms, for supervised therapeutic uses.
In Washington, DC, voters in effect decriminalized psychedelic plants, following the lead of several other cities.
With its vote, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize all drugs in modern times. And marijuana is now legalized in 15 states and DC, although DC still doesn’t allow sales.”
“The announcement of the targeted airstrikes followed heavy clashes during the weekend that brought the Taliban to the outskirts of the Helmand’s capital, Lashkar Gah. The Taliban also have been blamed for a rash of fighting around the country.
Despite the escalating violence, the U.S. is on course to fulfill a key commitment it made under the deal with the Taliban — to withdraw all foreign forces by May next year.”
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“Military officials have said the Taliban have not held to verbal agreements with the U.S. to reduce violence against Afghan forces.
The Taliban also have fallen short of meeting conditions in the February deal, including that they would sever ties with terrorist groups like al-Qaida — the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. — and would start talks in March with the Afghan government.
The intra-Afghan talks only got underway in September and are expected to take months, if not years.”
“The Philippine Navy is hiring maritime militia forces to patrol and protect fishermen in the South China Sea from intruding Chinese forces.
Navy chief Vice Admiral Giovanni Carlo Bacordo told reporters on Tuesday that it is preparing to send over 200 militiamen to the disputed South China Sea.”
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“These are our counterparts for Chinese maritime militia,” Bacordo added.
China employs a maritime militia composed of covert fishing trawlers, which support the Chinese coastguard and navy operations in the region. Hundreds of its vessels are reportedly deployed near Philippine-occupied areas.”
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“The Philippines has won an international arbitration case against China for its claims in the South China Sea, but China refused to accept the ruling.
On June 9, 2019, a Chinese trawler rammed a Filipino fishing vessel in Reed Bank and abandoned its 22 crew members in cold water, drawing outrage in the Philippines.”
“Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society released a working paper studying mail-in voting disinformation campaigns. Using a quantitative and qualitative study of millions of tweets and tens of thousands of Facebook posts and news stories about mail-in voter fraud — the persistent but debunked idea that people are illegally using mail-in ballots to meaningfully sway elections — the study found that President Trump was largely responsible for spreading that disinformation.
In particular, the study found that the president himself, on Twitter as well as through press conferences and interviews, was the main source of falsehoods about mail-in voter fraud. In turn, right-wing media organizations and media organizations in general abetted the spread of that disinformation by uncritically parroting it without full context.
The intention is to get people to believe mail-in voting is faulty precisely as 80 million people are set to vote by mail this year, due to the coronavirus. Uncertainty about the mail-in voting process has the potential to subdue voter turnout and undermine faith in the outcome of the upcoming election.
This is hardly the only disinformation campaign being led by Trump this year. A recent Cornell study found the president to be the largest driver of coronavirus disinformation as well. In conjunction with lies about mail-in voting, these two campaigns not only jeopardize the health of millions of Americans but also stand to sway the election results.”
““Lockdowns only make sense if they’re followed by testing and tracing,” Steven Hoffman, director of York University’s Global Strategy Lab, summed up. “Otherwise you’ve endured a painful experience without any longevity in its benefit.”
Indeed, countries that didn’t use the lockdown, and post-lockdown, period as effectively are now faring worse in the second wave.”