Did Cunningham’s Affair Cost Him the Election?
Everything you need to know for Tuesday, Nov. 17: N.C. cops propose cop reforms + a second vaccine for Christmas + UNC researchers find COVID’s Achilles heel
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020
9 days until Thanksgiving
23 days until Hanukkah
38 days until Christmas
45 days until this cursed year ends
64 days until this cursed presidency is over
—> Correction: Yesterday, because I am dumb and/or was in a hurry, I wrote that Donald Trump had received 171 million votes. He did not, thank God. I meant to say 71 million. But that number, too, was a few days out of date. The correct one is 73 million.
Today’s Numbers
42
North Carolina counties, out of 100, in the so-called COVID red zone, meaning they have more than 25 cases per 100,000 people and should enact a stay-at-home order, according to data from Harvard. Many of these counties are in rural parts of the state that weren’t hit hard by the first wave.
11
Percentage chance that someone at a 10-person event in Durham County will have COVID, assuming there are five times more cases than have been reported, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology’s interactive tool. Something to consider as you make Thanksgiving plans.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Did Cal Blow It?
Slate recently ran a piece arguing that Cal Cunningham tanked a perfectly winnable Senate race—and in so doing “jeopardized the well-being of every person on Earth”—by having a dumb affair that pulled Thom Tillis’s miserable ass out of the fire and likely enabled Mitch McConnell to maintain a majority.
Cunningham’s selfishness undoubtedly inflicted some measure of damage on his Senate chances, especially given the tightness of his race. After his stupid affair and stupid extramarital text exchanges were revealed, Cunningham pulled out of at least one scheduled online forum. He stopped giving interviews. He pared down his schedule of events to structured virtual meetings with supportive groups. He stopped informing reporters of his in-person campaign schedule so they couldn’t show up to cover his events and ask him questions. This is not the way a successful political campaign functions in its final month before an election.
Cunningham also gave the GOP an opening to criticize him on character grounds, undermining what was previously a “character-first” campaign, according to one political science professor. All of a sudden, Tillis—who’d disparaged “the Hispanic population” for not wearing face masks, then publicly apologized after being pictured without a mask at the Republican National Convention, then contracted COVID-19 after going maskless again at the Amy Coney Barrett superspreader event—began to seem like the upstanding one in the race. While Cunningham hid from the press, Tillis was trashing him in interviews, telling the Associated Press that the affair “raises a question about whether or not you can believe anything [Cunningham] said up to this point in terms of what he will and will not do if he gets elected to the Senate.” At a campaign stop, Tillis told supporters that Cunningham had “run on a campaign of trust and honor,” but “he’s not been truthful to his family and to his voters and he’s not been honorable to the very uniform that he wears.”
The question isn’t whether Cal Cunningham, who was as charismatic as porridge, deserves to be shamed. Of course he does. The question is whether his dalliance actually mattered.
In other words, would Cunningham have lost anyway?
And did the DSCC make a mistake by throwing in with him rather than state Senator Erica Smith?
Slate’s Christina Cauterucci thinks so:
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorsed Cunningham in the primary against several other Democrats, including progressive two-term state Sen. Erica Smith, a Black woman in a state whose registered Democrats are nearly half Black. … According to a Democratic consultant who spoke to Politico and was “familiar with the process” of selecting Cunningham, Democratic leaders saw Cunningham as the candidate “with the fewest vulnerabilities for Republicans to exploit.”
First question first: Did Cunningham’s affair kill his campaign? Unlikely.
Cunningham lost by about 96,000 votes.
Joe Biden lost by about 73,000.
Tillis was riding or dying with Trump.
To believe that Cunningham would have won sans affair, you have to believe there would have been 100,000 Trump-Cunningham voters—or 100,000 Trump voters who were going vote third party in the Senate race—who changed their minds because Cal sent the world’s unsexiest sexts. More likely, the affair lost him about 23,000 votes—the difference between him and Biden.
Second question: Would Erica Smith have done better? There’s no way to know for sure. But I doubt it. There were a few reasons the national party didn’t back her.
In part, they thought she’d be too easily tarred as a leftist. As important, though she announced her primary campaign first, it was a mess. She didn’t raise money. She barely had any organization. She didn’t do the blocking and tackling you need to win a statewide campaign.
Smith’s theory was that she would boost turnout.
Democrats did that. They still lost.
So who would have won? It’s an open secret that Chuck Schumer wanted state Senator Jeff Jackson, but Jackson was turned off by the endless fundraising the DSCC demanded. (I imagine he’ll get pressured to reconsider in 2022.) Jackson is less robotic than Cunningham, but it’s still unclear to me that he would have flipped enough Trump voters, based on what we know of the electorate.
The one person I would have put money on?
Former Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane—technically an independent, though that’s fixable. Unfortunately for Dems, she wants nothing to do with DC politics.
The DSCC’s mistake: Roy Cooper would have been an ideal choice to run for Senate two years from now, no matter the GOP opponent (Dan Forest? LOL) or the environment. Unfortunately, with Republican fruitcake Mark Robinson defeating Yvonne Holley for the lieutenant governor spot, that’s no longer possible.
How Democrats lacked the foresight to invest heavily in the LG race—and to make Robinson, a legitimately crazy person, the face of the NCGOP—genuinely perplexes me.
LOCAL & STATE
—> Cops Propose Cop Reforms
When I saw that the N.C. Sheriffs’ Association had preempted a forthcoming report on police reform from the N.C. Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice with its own, I didn’t expect to be blown away. And, well, I wasn’t—though there are some good recommendations. The basics:
Change the name of Governor Cooper’s Center for the Reduction of Law Enforcement
Use of Force to the Center for Analysis of Law Enforcement Use of Force “to more accurately reflect its mission.”
Establish statewide use-of-force policies for all law enforcement agencies.
High schoolers should be taught how to mind their Ps and Qs when dealing with the police—specifically, by their junior year, they should be forced to watch a video “about common law enforcement encounters and what the general public should expect and should do during encounters such as traffic stops, arrests, etc.”
No chokeholds (unless the police think it’s really necessary).
Cops should undergo psych evaluations.
Require officers seeking transfers from one agency to another to release their personnel files, including internal affairs records, to the new agency.
Require officers who have lied in court or on warrants to report that they’ve been caught lying to law enforcement commissions. (This is not required now, amazingly.)
Allow the law enforcement commissions to decertify bad cops, and keep a searchable database of decertified officers.
The cops, of course, do not want the public to be able to review internal affairs files. You’re still going to need to trust the cops that everything’s on the up and up. Nor do they want to give up qualified immunity, which allows officers to whatever they want without fear of civil liability.
The Sheriffs’ Association report describes qualified immunity as “a judicially created doctrine that protects government officials (including law enforcement officers) from civil liability only when their conduct does not violate a clearly established constitutional right of which a reasonable official should have known.”
That’s true and it’s not. Mostly not: “Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, public officials are held to a much lower standard. They can be held accountable only insofar as they violate rights that are ‘clearly established’ in light of existing case law. This standard shields law enforcement, in particular, from innumerable constitutional violations each year. In the Supreme Court’s own words, it protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’ It is under this rule that officers can, without worry, drag a nonthreatening, seven months pregnant woman into the street and tase her three times for refusing to sign a piece of paper.”
Activist Kerwin Pittman and state Representative Marcia Morey, members of the state task force, both think the sheriffs are trying to head off actual reform (obviously).
—> N.C. Expands Restaurant Rent Relief Program
The state has about $20 million left in a CARES Act fund that it’s going to give out to restaurants to cover five months of rent and mortgage interest payments—provided the restaurant a) is being reimbursed for payments already made and b) didn’t take any PPP money—up to $20,000 (or $40,000 for spots with multiple locations).
At the beginning of the pandemic, Cooper closed restaurant dining rooms for about two months, from March 17 to May 22. Since then, restaurants have operated at 50% capacity. Other executive orders have established an 11 p.m. curfew for serving alcohol and reopened outdoor seating at bars at 30% capacity. …
On Tuesday, Cooper tightened restrictions on some COVID-19 measures, including limiting indoor gatherings to 10 people instead of 25. Coronavirus cases have climbed sharply through October and November, reaching their highest point of the pandemic this week. While restaurant restrictions were unchanged, Cooper said the move backward is meant to send a signal that people are more vulnerable indoors.
The reimbursement is welcome, but without help from Washington, it probably won’t be enough.
N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association director Lynn Minges: “This has drug on, reserves are depleted, some have taken on loans. Without another round of PPP or some other relief, many just aren’t going to make it. The truth is many restaurants are living month to month.”
—> UNC Researchers May Have Found COVID’s Achilles Heel
COVID, like most other viruses, mutates rapidly.
Bad news: The strain most common today, D614G, spreads 10 times faster and replicates more easily than the one that made its way around the world in January and February.
Good news: The strain is not associated with “more severe disease.”
Best news: The same mutation that makes the virus spread also makes it susceptible to antibodies, according to UNC researchers.
Essentially, the mutation in D614G causes an opening on the tip of one of the spikes—for which coronavirus gets its name—to open, allowing the virus to more effectively infect human cells but also leaving open a pathway that makes it vulnerable. That open pathway, researchers say, should make the virus more susceptible to antibodies, such as those that vaccine-makers worldwide are hoping to induce with their drugs.
—> The North Carolina Roundup
An Ohio firm paid $58 million for that bougie AF apartment complex across the street from the Fed.
There shall be no March Madness at PNC.
Wake parents are demanding that sports events and performances be opened to spectators.
UNC-Chapel Hill received more than 450 complaints of students violating COVID rules when the school tried to reopen this fall.
—> Weather
Sunny! High of 61, low of 33.
NATION & WORLD
—> The Lede: We’ve Got Another Vaccine!
A week after Pfizer announced that its COVID vaccine was 90% effective in early studies, Moderna went one better: Its vaccine was nearly 95% effective.
Biotechnology firm Moderna announced Monday that a preliminary analysis shows its experimental coronavirus vaccine is nearly 95 percent effective at preventing illness, including severe cases—a striking initial result that leaves the United States with the prospect that two coronavirus vaccines could be available on a limited basis by the end of the year. … The announcement sent stocks up again, with the Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 up about 1 percent in midmorning trading. Moderna’s share price rose more than 6 percent.
At a briefing Monday, government officials predicted that if the two vaccines receive a regulatory greenlight, the first shots could be given in December, with enough to vaccinate 20 million people that month—and more becoming available into 2021 as production ramps up and other vaccine candidates may be successful.
The implications are remarkable.
Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna: “In this pandemic, what has been awful from a public health standpoint, an economic standpoint, is the worry people have to get so sick they have to go to the hospital—so sick they have to get to the ICU and have a high risk of dying. If a [vaccine] could prevent 95 percent of people to not get disease, but to not get severe disease, that would be a game-changer: the impact on hospitals, the impact on people’s psyche and the impact on deaths.”
Here’s some irony: “Moderna has committed to completing its trial before applying for emergency-use authorization—which means waiting until there are 151 cases of covid-19 in the study. A previous projection showed that the trial might end sometime early next year, but it is instead expected to reach its endpoint in seven to 10 days, Bancel said, because of surging coronavirus cases in the United States.”
—> RELATED: Trump wants you so-called historians to know who did all the work.
—> The Brief: 6 Stories to Read Today
Public pressure kept the Postal Service from rigging the election. “What made the difference, experts say, was enormous public pressure, multiple lawsuits, scrutiny from the courts, urgent efforts to urge voters to mail their ballots as early as possible, and extraordinary measures taken by the agency itself and its legions of dedicated postal workers. As soon as it became apparent that operational changes made by DeJoy were slowing the mail, an enormous wave of public pressure, including congressional hearings, forced him to back off of making any operational changes before the election. Voting rights advocates sued to force him to roll back the remaining changes, and public pressure and the U.S. district judge overseeing the federal case, Emmett Sullivan, caused the USPS to adopt what it calls ‘extraordinary measures’ to keep ballots moving faster than the rest of the mail.”
Lindsey Graham asked Georgia’s secretary of state to discard legal ballots—which seems like … I don’t know … election fraud. “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who he said questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state. … In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities. In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said. Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots.”
Trump came very close to attacking Iran. “President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday. A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. … Any strike—whether by missile or cyber—would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. … A strike on Iran may not play well to [Trump’s] base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do.”
The pandemic has laid bare capitalism’s shortcomings. “The nine months of the pandemic have shown that in a modern state, capitalism can save the day—but only when the government exercises its power to guide the economy and act as the ultimate absorber of risk. The lesson of Covid capitalism is that big business needs big government, and vice versa. With astonishing nimbleness and speed, businesses in the United States and worldwide have accomplished remarkable feats—most notably the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies trying to fight the virus. … But the list includes other important achievements: keeping grocery store shelves stocked even as much of the capacity to process and distribute food was disrupted, and redeploying factories to make ventilators and personal protective equipment. … Big business and big government both play vital roles in making the modern economy work. The pandemic has showed how these two can’t really be disentangled—they rely on each other more than partisans may care to acknowledge.”
More than 82,000 people have filed sex-abuse claims against the Boy Scouts. “More than 82,000 people have come forward with sex-abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America, describing a decades-long accumulation of assaults at the hands of scout leaders across the nation who had been trusted as role models. The claims, which lawyers said far eclipsed the number of abuse accusations filed in Catholic Church cases, continued to mount ahead of a Monday deadline established in bankruptcy court in Delaware, where the Boy Scouts had sought refuge this year in a bid to survive the demands for damages.”
A Florida jail inmate died in his cell while strapped to a restraint chair with a hood over his head, the guards looking the other way. “For almost 16 minutes, the surveillance video shows [Gregory Lloyd] Edwards—a decorated former U.S. Army medic—all alone in holding cell #9, confined in a wheeled chair, taser darts lodged in back, his torso ever so slightly inclined, hands cuffed straight behind him, lap thrust forward, writhing and moving his mouth as if he were gasping for air. And while he swiveled his head and contorted his face and body until he stopped moving altogether but for some twitches at 2:23 pm, the guards charged with closely monitoring him while he was in the restraint chair were focused on computer screens, paperwork, and each other, ignoring Edwards in his last conscious moments. The video shows, in crisp color without audio, that once Edwards was restrained, jail staff failed to provide him with required medical attention.” Related: In 2014, a newspaper I edited reported a frighteningly similar story about a different jail in Florida.
—> Et Cetera
After Ohio’s Republican governor acknowledged Biden’s victory, Trump wondered aloud who was going to primary him.
Trump’s (soon to be former?) national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, acknowledges that Trump lost and says the National Security Council will support a smooth transition.
The total normal chairman of the Federal Elections Commission, a Trump appointee, went on Newsmax TV to claim—based on debunked right-wing nonsense—that the election was “illegitimate.”
Trump plans to speed up withdrawals from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.
Even after Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron says the EU needs to maintain its independence from America. America’s favorability in Europe, meanwhile, has shot up 20% since Biden’s election.
The White House has asked oil companies to select where in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge they would like to drill “as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before the Biden administration takes over.”
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you tomorrow.