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Dallas County Reports More Than 1,000 New COVID-19 Cases for 9th Straight Day -Fort Worth
Health officials in Dallas County reported 1,101 new cases of COVID-19 Saturday and four more deaths in people who tested positive for the coronavirus.
Saturday marked the ninth straight day on which Dallas County Health and Human Services reported at least 1,000 new cases of COVID-19. The county’s 7-day average stands at 1,121 and has more than doubled in the last 11 days.
It took previously 25 days for the 7-day average to double: from 265 on June 7 to 535 on July 1.
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The four COVID-19-related deaths reported Saturday were a Carrollton man in his 50s, a Dallas woman in her 70s, a Mesquite woman in her 70s and a Richardson woman in her 90s, according to DCHHS. All four people had underlying health conditions.
Dallas County now has 32,626 reported cases of the coronavirus, including 449 deaths.
Dallas County does not report recoveries from COVID-19 because it lacks the manpower to follow up with thousands of patients, however, the Texas Department of State Health Services posts an estimated number of recoveries on its site and lists 16,929 for Dallas County as of Saturday, July 11. Using data supplied by the county and state, there are an estimated 15,248 active COVID-19 cases in the county.
“The numbers continue to rise, which means there are more and more sick people out there moving around,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said in a statement. “You protect yourself by staying home and away from others as much as possible. You protect others by wearing your mask at all times when around them.”
“Today we close out the week with 1,101 new cases and four deaths. The average number of daily cases for this week is 1,121 and 54 total deaths reported for the week making this the deadliest week and highest average of new cases to date….
— Clay Jenkins (@JudgeClayJ) July 11, 2020
In an interview with NBC 5 on Saturday, Jenkins said he believed “things will get worse before they get better.”
“As soon as the Governor came up with his UT Southwestern did a model that said by July 1, we’d be at 800 cases in Dallas. What’s going on now is completely predictable to the doctors,” he said, referring to a study released in May.
It was around the same time Texas prepared to move into the second phase of reopening.
Saturday marked the ninth straight day on which Dallas County Health and Human Services reported at least 1,000 new cases of COVID-19. The county’s 7-day average stands at 1,121 and has more than doubled in the last 11 days.
This week, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) stressed the importance of face coverings to Texans.
A statewide mandate issued in early July states every person in Texas “shall wear a face covering over the nose and mouth when inside a commercial entity or other building or space open to the public, or when in an outdoor public space, wherever it is not feasible to maintain six feet of social distancing from another person not in the same household.”
Exceptions include people under the age of 10, any person with a medical condition or disability that prevents wearing a face covering, while eating or drinking, and exercising outdoors or engaging in physical activity outdoors.
Mask order violators can be fined up to $250.
“The public needs to understand that this was a very tough decision for me to make, to make this level of requirement,” Abbott said this week. “I made this tough decision for one reason, it was our last best effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. The last thing I want to do, the last thing anybody wants in Texas wants to see another lockdown. Hence, the best thing anybody can do is do this thing that is inconvenient of wearing a face-covering knowing it will keep your jobs open, your economy open and your businesses open.”
In a statement to NBC 5 Saturday, a spokesperson for Abbott added, “As the governor said, we need all local officials and law enforcement to step up and enforce the mask order so we can keep our economy open.”
In Fort Worth, police department spokesperson Ofc. Jimmy Pollozani said enforcement regarding businesses out of compliance fall under city code enforcement.
“Anything outdoors can be enforced by any law enforcement after a warning has been issued, but our primary goal with enforcement is educating about the order, why it’s important, and seeking voluntary compliance,” Pollozani wrote in an email. “We also have our pandemic response team that is out there educating the public about the importance of having their PPE on while in a public place. Any citation(s) would be a last resort.”
Catherine Cuellar with the city of Dallas said they rely “most on each and every resident’s personal responsibility for compliance with statewide face-covering orders.”
“So far, Dallas code enforcement has responded to conduct more than 20,000 inspections of possible violations of COVID-19 orders,” Cuellar wrote in an email.
Hospitalizations and emergency room visits due to the virus remained high Friday, with 783 people hospitalized in Dallas County. About one-third of all ER visits Thursday were for COVID-19-like symptoms, DCHHS reported.
County officials said last week more than half of the new cases reported have been young adults between the ages of 18 and 39.
To date, of cases requiring hospitalization who reported employment, more than 80% have been critical infrastructure workers, with a broad range of affected occupational sectors, including healthcare, transportation, food and agriculture, public works, finance, communications, clergy, first responders and other essential functions.
Of cases requiring hospitalization, two-thirds have been under 65 years of age, and about half do not have high-risk chronic health conditions. Diabetes has been an underlying high-risk health condition reported in about a third of all hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
The county has been reporting for several weeks now that more than a third of the deaths related to COVID-19 have been among residents of long-term care facilities.
The increase in cases comes as the state’s positivity rate, the percentage of people testing positive for the virus, has been sustained well over 10% for more than two weeks and climbed above 15% on Thursday. On Friday, the rate dropped back down to 14.46%. An increase in the positivity rate indicates an increase in the spread of the virus, not an increase in testing for the virus.
Pennsylvania adds Iowa, Delaware, 2 more states to travel quarantine list
Pennsylvania’s health department also Saturday announced 17 more deaths from the coronavirus, bringing the total toll associated with COVID-19 to 6,897.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — State health officials in Pennsylvania have added four states — including neighboring Delaware — to the travel quarantine recommendation aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19 in the commonwealth.
Officials said people who have traveled to Delaware, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return to Pennsylvania.
The state earlier issued the recommendation for self-quarantine for people coming to the commonwealth from 15 other states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
The health department also Saturday announced 17 more deaths attributed to the coronavirus, bringing the number of deaths associated with COVID-19 to 6,897.
More than 200 new reported cases in Allegheny County and more than 100 in Philadelphia were part of more than 800 additional positive cases announced, bringing the statewide total to more than 94,600 reported cases.
The number of infections is thought to be far higher than the state’s confirmed case count because many people have not been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected without feeling sick.
For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in a couple of weeks. Older adults and people with existing health problems are at higher risk of more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.
A year after leaving prison, he has a job, a fiancée — and maybe only a week left of freedom
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.
By the time Richard Midkiff walked out of a Florida prison last year at age 42, he had spent more than half his life behind bars for a crime he committed when he was 19.
Midkiff has now restarted his life: A full-time paralegal in Ocala, Florida, and the president of the board of a national organization providing legal help to incarcerated people, he begins his busy workdays at 5 a.m. And last month, he proposed to his fiancée, Marianna Kuchma, on the beach.
But Midkiff may not have his freedom much longer. Because of a legal dispute over the wording of his 1997 plea agreement for his role in a murder — and despite the fact that he has not committed any new offenses — a Florida court on July 2 ordered him to report back to the Department of Corrections to spend 15 more years in prison. He was given 15 days to challenge the decision.
In its ruling, the 5th District Court of Appeal noted that Midkiff was a legal adult at the time of his crime, not a juvenile deserving of more lenient treatment. At the same time, the court acknowledged in a footnote that Midkiff appeared to have completed his prison time in a “remarkably favorable way” and to be a model of rehabilitation.
His former warden agrees. Midkiff is the “very embodiment of how we would all ideally want the justice system to transform people into productive, loving citizens,” said Kim Southerland, who ran Marion Correctional Institution when Midkiff was serving much of his sentence there.
A warrant could be issued to take Midkiff back into custody as early as this week, though he is seeking a stay while he pursues an appeal. With the clock ticking, he is scrambling to get his fiancée’s engagement ring resized and to pay his elderly mother’s bills — he worries that he may never see her again as a free man.
And along with grappling with the possibility of “going right back to a place where I was told what I can eat, when I can shower, how I can interact with my family,” Midkiff said, he knows a new danger awaits him in prison: “I haven’t even gotten around to contemplating how I’m headed into a COVID-19 breeding ground.”
A transformation behind bars
In 1996, when Midkiff was 19, he and a 17-year-old acquaintance robbed a man in the Orlando area who they thought would have drugs. Midkiff sat in the getaway car while his friend, J. Patrick Swett, went inside the home with a gun. “This doesn’t take away either of our guilt, which I have been trying to reckon with ever since, but nowhere in the realm of possibility did I think he would shoot this person,” Midkiff said.
Both Midkiff and Swett were charged with first-degree murder; under the legal doctrine of “felony murder,” anyone involved in a crime that turns into a homicide can be charged with the killing even if they didn’t pull the trigger. Midkiff agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and spend 38 years in prison.
The victim’s family, according to court records, wanted the shooter to get a longer sentence than Midkiff, so the judge gave Swett 38 and a half years. (Neither the victim’s family nor Swett, who was also released from prison, could be reached for comment.)
In prison, Midkiff by all accounts transformed himself. He started a program called Story Time Dads, which helped incarcerated fathers record videos of themselves reading books so that their children at home could read along with them. He was also the creator and program coordinator of a prison school called SAGE, which provided dozens of classes on topics including public speaking, interviewing, financial literacy, real estate, creative writing and philosophy.
“I even started going to him for help — I’d ask him, Can you build a new program for me to meet this need, or can you work with these inmates?” said Southerland, the former warden.
Midkiff also became a certified law clerk and one of the most prolific “jailhouse lawyers” in Florida, according to his advocates across the state.
So he took note when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of rulings in the 2010s declaring that prisoners who were sentenced to decades behind bars as juveniles — meaning under 18 — deserve to have their sentences reviewed to see if they had grown out of the adolescent mindset that contributed to their crime.
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Midkiff’s co-defendant, Swett, who was 17 at the time of the crime, sought such a review and was granted a new sentence: time served. He was freed in 2018.
With the help of an outside attorney, Midkiff immediately filed a motion saying that the original plea agreement, as requested by the victim’s family and verbally agreed upon by all parties, said that the shooter should get more prison time than the getaway driver. Therefore, if Swett’s sentence was being shortened, so should his. (The victim’s family did not attend Midkiff’s hearing to fight his release.)
A judge agreed with Midkiff’s argument, and he was released in June 2019.
‘I have bad news’
Going free after more than two decades “was kind of like being a newborn except knowing how to walk and how to speak,” Midkiff said. Once, when he was waiting to cross a street, he jumped when he heard a robotic voice coming from the traffic light say, “Don’t walk!” His first night sleeping in a friend’s house, in a room with a soft bed and a door that he could open himself, he nearly had a panic attack.
On Midkiff’s first Friday out, he went to dinner with Kuchma, who had been writing to him for years after being introduced to him by her mother, who was a prison volunteer. (The day she had planned to come see him in prison for the first time happened to be the day after he was released; he had to call her to tell her that he was free and to cancel the visit.) They’ve been together ever since.
They both knew that the Florida attorney general’s office had filed an appeal opposing Midkiff’s release, but they were not concerned. The trial court judge had ruled strongly in Midkiff’s favor, and he had strong evidence of his rehabilitation — support from prison staff and volunteers, as well as colleagues on the outside.
Since his release, Midkiff has worked on hundreds of legal cases, with a special interest in those involving juveniles. He’s also still in touch with his former warden, who asks him “about ideas for how to help these guys,” Southerland said. “Which he doesn’t have to do. He could just move on with his life and forget prison.”
In February, Midkiff flew to New York City to speak to law students at New York University about his jailhouse lawyer work.
“He was so generous with his knowledge,” said Sukti Dhital, executive director of the NYU School of Law’s Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights, who invited Midkiff. “This story is not just about him but about all those he’s served and continues to serve.”
Through NYU, Midkiff became board president of the Legal Empowerment and Advocacy Hub, which works to democratize the law by helping incarcerated people and pre-trial defendants themselves use it.
Apart from his work, Midkiff has spent the past year enjoying nonprison food and convincing Kuchma’s mother and siblings to let him marry her.
But then, after a year of freedom and just weeks after getting engaged, Midkiff’s lawyer called him. “I have bad news,” Mark O’Mara said simply. (O’Mara, an Orlando-based criminal defense attorney, is best known for representing George Zimmerman, including in a libel case against NBCUniversal, which owns NBC News; the suit was later dismissed.)
The appeals court had found that the language saying that Swett should get more prison time than Midkiff was written in Swett’s plea deal, not Midkiff’s. Therefore, Midkiff had no legal grounds to benefit from it.
Midkiff had long believed in the legal system — and he had trained himself while incarcerated not to cry. But the tears came quickly.
It all rushed back: “The 23 years of smells, of sounds, of fears, frustrations, regrets and the great losses of being in prison,” he said.
Undergirding the court’s ruling is the idea that Midkiff, who was a year into being a legal adult at the time of the crime, should not be able to benefit from Supreme Court rulings that said juveniles sent to prison for decades should get a second chance.
“Juvenile resentencing is not newly discovered evidence” in an adult’s case, the appeals court ruled.
But many experts on crimes committed by teenagers question the basis of the hard line that the court system draws at age 18. Brain science shows that there is no or very little difference between a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old in terms of impulse control, risk taking, being easily influenced by peer pressure and considering the consequences of one’s actions.
“There is no magic birthday when someone transitions from a child to an adult,” said Lael E.H. Chester, director of the Emerging Adult Justice Project at the Columbia University Justice Lab, which focuses on 18- to 25-year-olds.
Midkiff’s case captures many aspects of what’s wrong with the American system of punishing young people, youth advocates said. For instance, the notion that everyone involved in a crime, even the driver, should be charged equally: This especially affects teens, who tend to be influenced to do more impulsive, negative things when they’re in groups, research shows. And then there’s the notion of thinking of sentences as a strict number of years to be enforced no matter what, ignoring any rehabilitation that has occurred.
Pleas for freedom
Midkiff and his legal team are pursuing a few strategies to keep him out of prison in a state where COVID-19 cases are spiking and 175 percent more common behind bars. But they are running short on time.
The first option would be to get Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and the state clemency board to commute his sentence. Midkiff had filed a petition for clemency while he was in prison, but once he got out, he assumed it was no longer necessary and let the application lapse; his lawyers are trying to update it and get it back on the governor’s desk.
Kuchma’s family members have all written to DeSantis pleading with him to help “Richie,” as they call their soon-to-be in-law. “Our family has embraced him and have a deep respect for who he is today,” her mother wrote. “The grandchildren look up to him! I have never seen my daughter so happy.”
DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, which argued in a brief that Midkiff’s original plea deal did not entitle him to a shorter sentence, said in an emailed statement that nothing precludes him from seeking clemency “considering the unique circumstances of his case.” She declined to comment further because the case is ongoing.
The other possible route to continuing Midkiff’s freedom is through the courts. A three-judge panel of the appeals court decided that he should return to prison; now he will try convincing either the full court or the Florida Supreme Court, or even a federal court, to take up the case.
If he gets a hearing, Midkiff’s legal team said that he would make an argument based on the common-law concept of “manifest injustice”: the idea that a ruling that might be internally logical should still be overturned if the resulting unfairness is so clear and directly observable it is shocking to the conscience.
“I am already free,” Midkiff said. “But now it feels like any minute the cops could show up and take me back.”
Tammy Duckworth bursts into VP contention
Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s diverse background, military credentials and attack dog ability have caught the attention of Democratic donors. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
CHICAGO — Tammy Duckworth is no longer an afterthought in the Democratic veepstakes.
The Illinois senator and Purple Heart recipient has landed squarely in the conversation after a high-profile clash with Tucker Carlson last week and her advocacy against politicization of the military in the weeks prior.
The attention hasn’t escaped Biden’s vetting team. It has stepped up information-gathering on Duckworth recently, scrutinizing her legislative record and talking to her colleagues, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
A contingent of Duckworth-for-VP backers, including high-dollar donors and a politically active veterans group, has intensified efforts on her behalf in the past two weeks, pushing her as the best choice for Biden’s running mate.
“I’ve been working my rear end off, trying to get Joe to look at her favorably,” Joe Cotchett, a longtime friend of Biden’s and prominent West Coast Biden bundler, told POLITICO. Cotchett said Duckworth’s no-nonsense response to Carlson has further elevated her prospects.
“If you put Tammy Duckworth on the ballot, a lot of veterans are saying to me, ‘Boy, she represents not only the Midwest but she represents what our party is all about,’” Cotchett said. “Having no legs, to me, is an attribute in this insane election year. It brings to the table a veteran who has been severely wounded that’s speaking out for women and veterans and showing that she’s someone who can take on ‘Cadet Bone Spurs.’”
The tit-for-tat with Carlson last week started when the Fox News host called Duckworth — an Army helicopter pilot who lost both her legs fighting in Iraq — “a coward” and “a fraud” who hates America. He was reacting to Duckworth saying she welcomed a “national dialogue” on removing statues of George Washington and other Founding Fathers who owned slaves. Duckworth later clarified that she personally opposes taking down statues of Washington but supports an open discussion.
Duckworth, who uses prosthetics, shot back by challenging Carlson to “walk a mile in my legs.”
Google searches for “Duckworth” skyrocketed and cable news channels built segments around the Carlson-Duckworth clash. Democratic officials including Biden jumped to her defense. The week ended with Duckworth penning an op-ed in The New York Times charging that neither President Donald Trump nor Carlson knows what patriotism is.
“Attacks from self-serving, insecure men who can’t tell the difference between true patriotism and hateful nationalism will never diminish my love for this country — or my willingness to sacrifice for it so they don’t have to,” Duckworth wrote. “These titanium legs don’t buckle.”
Biden has said he expects to announce his VP pick next month, and Duckworth is among several contenders who’s had a moment in the spotlight. Others being vetted include Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Reps. Val Demings of Florida and Karen Bass of California and former national security adviser Susan Rice.
Though Duckworth is Thai-American, Biden is under pressure to choose an African American woman, both to reward a constituency that powered his victory in the primary and as recognition of the reckoning on race the country is going through. Progressive groups, meantime, have backed Warren, arguing she would help excite the left flank of the party.
Ideologically, Duckworth is mostly aligned with the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus. She has supported progressive causes like paid leave but hasn’t signed on to “Medicare for All,” instead backing Medicare expansion plans closer to Biden’s health care proposal.
Duckworth’s diverse background, impeccable military credentials and attack dog ability have caught the attention of a group of Democratic donors. She is both a daughter of an immigrant mother and a Daughter of the American Revolution. She’s well-versed in military policy and known for advocating women’s issues. She was the first female senator to give birth while she held office and, in an iconic moment, brought her baby daughter onto the Senate floor. She also pushed for nursing stations in public places like airports.
But even supporters say she’s not as polished as some of the other candidates for vice president. And they say they expect Republicans would attempt to exploit the fact that Duckworth was born in Bangkok, where her father was stationed as a Department of Defense employee.
Susie Buell, a prominent Democratic megadonor, is among those firmly in Duckworth’s camp. Buell backed her home-state senator Harris for president during the primary, but called Duckworth her top pick for vice president.
“I think Tammy is amazing and she would be a great choice,” Buell said. “She certainly has shown her devotion and commitment to country. She is indisputably experienced and prepared. Who could not get behind her?”
John Atkinson, a longtime fundraiser for Duckworth, described a “fury” of recent interest in the senator’s prospects for vice president.
“As this thing gets closer to the selection and as Sen. Duckworth’s profile gets elevated, there’s a lot of excitement among donors,” Atkinson said. “Universally it’s, ‘She’d be fantastic for the ticket. She’d be great.’ The common theme is that as Trump continues to try and politicize our military or wrap himself in the flag to suit his political fortunes, or to attack the Constitution she fought to protect, Tammy is in a unique position to challenge him aggressively and authentically.”
Duckworth’s emergence in the VP discussion began before her clash with Carlson. She blasted Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for standing beside Trump after protesters were removed from Lafayette Square to make way for the president’s photo-op. Milley personally called Duckworth to apologize.
Vote Vets, which promotes progressive candidates for office, is pushing hard for Duckworth to be named Biden’s running mate.
“She’ll be a great partner on the campaign trail,” a narrator says in a video entitled “Duckworth is Ready.” “Mike Pence won’t know what hit him.”
Last week, the group released a video dubbed “Tough as Hell” declaring that Trump was scared of facing Duckworth as a running mate. It closed with the narrator saying, “You boys took on the wrong war hero,” and flashes to a 2011 image of Carlson performing on “Dancing with the Stars.”
The Trump campaign said Duckworth would have a hard time defending Biden’s record on defense issues and foreign affairs, which a spokeswoman portrayed as weak, against the president’s investments in the military.
VoteVets Chairman Jon Soltz said the group will step up its advocacy for Duckworth as Biden nears his decision. Soltz argued that Duckworth’s personal qualities are in line with Biden’s but that she also has demonstrated an ability to appeal to swing voters. He cited her outperforming Hillary Clinton in more conservative Illinois counties in 2016.
“Tammy Duckworth is loyal. She did not attack Joe Biden” during the presidential primary, Soltz said. “Tammy has a very good relationship with Joe Biden and has had a relationship with him for many years.”
Duckworth worked as assistant secretary of veterans affairs in the Obama White House. In that time, she, along with Jill and Joe Biden, took part in official events supporting military families. In 2008, Duckworth introduced Biden’s late son Beau at the Democratic National Convention.
“Here’s the thing about Tammy: She is a perfect biographical candidate. And she wears that biography on her sleeve and it’s really, really difficult to attack her because of it,” said former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), whom Duckworth ousted from office in 2012. Walsh said that while Duckworth has become a more well-rounded politician since their race, back then her heroic war story made her just about untouchable.
“Every other word out of her mouth was about her service,” Walsh said. “That bugged me because I couldn’t find a way to attack her. And so I ended up putting my foot in my mouth a few times.”
Polls show Trump is losing to Joe Biden. They said the same thing 4 years ago against Hillary Clinton
CLOSE
President Donald Trump is criticizing former President Barack Obama’s efforts to lift some sanctions against Cuba and warns that the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, would even embrace socialism domestically. (July 10)
AP Domestic
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden can look at the polls and smile.
Cautiously.
A double-digit advantage in numerous national surveys, solid leads in a number of key battlegrounds, and competitive showings in states Donald Trump carried handily in 2016 suggest the presumptive Democratic nominee is the favorite to win in November.
But the overwhelming majority of polls four years ago indicated Trump would lose as well. So why put much faith in the 2020 polls that show the former vice president consistently on top?
David Burgess of Kittery, Maine, said he stopped believing polls after the 2016 presidential election.
“They predicted Hillary Clinton would win, and she didn’t,” Burgess said while taking a stroll through downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his miniature schnauzer, Taavi. “Voters are like an iceberg. (With polls), you just see the tip of the iceberg. You don’t see the rest of the iceberg. You don’t know who they’re going to vote for.”
As America heads into the final weeks of the presidential campaign, pollsters say they’ve learned lessons from 2016’s failings that they believe will make this campaign season’s polls more accurate. And while they sympathize with voters’ frustrations, they defend their work as needing minor tweaks, not a fundamental overhaul.
More: Exclusive USA TODAY poll: Biden widens his lead, but Trump keeps the edge on enthusiasm
“The public understandably walked away from 2016 feeling like polls were broken. And there’s some truth to that,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center. “But it’s not the case that 2016 meant that polling writ large doesn’t work anymore.”
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, one of many that showed Clinton with a lead over Trump, said 2016 is “a reason to be very cautious.”
“It taught us the lesson that there really isn’t safety in numbers because it is possible for a systematic error or change in the last minute of the election to make everybody wrong and that’s what we saw in 2016,” he said.
What went wrong in 2016?
Actually, pollsters got it mostly right four years ago.
They had Clinton winning the popular vote by about 3 percentage points. She won by 2.1 points. And they were right about the outcome in most states. But their research did not capture the full picture of voter sentiment in the upper Midwest that provided Trump with the margin of victory in the Electoral College.
More: Some young Black voters not enthusiastic about a Biden presidency
Polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed Clinton winning consistently in the months leading up to Election Day.
Of 104 published polls that surveyed voters in those three states from August to the election, 101 had Clinton winning, two were tied, and one (in Pennsylvania) showed Trump with a slight lead. Many fell within the margin of error but 15 had Clinton up by double digits at some point.
Trump ended up winning all three states by whisker-thin margins: a combined 77,744 votes out of 13,940,912 cast, or about half a percentage point. The 46 electoral votes those three states provided Trump the winning margin, stunning those who predicted a Clinton victory. He won 306 electoral votes to Clinton’ 232.
Ronna McDaniel, who chairs the Republican National Committee, dismissed the 2020 polls given what happened four years ago.
More: Bernie Sanders supporters reluctantly turn to Joe Biden, fueled by their dislike of President Trump
“These polls right now are not even significant,” she told FOX Business channel recently. “One hundred and fifty polls were done between now and the election in 2016 that showed Donald Trump losing, and the ultimate poll is Election Day.”
How polls are changing
Both Kennedy and Franklin say two large factors complicated the accuracy of the 2016 polls: Many state surveys tended to over-sample college-educated voters (who favored Clinton) and many failed to capture the late-deciding voters (who generally swung to Trump).
Neither says those problems couldn’t recur this year but they’re hopeful 2020 polls will provide a better yardstick of voter opinions for several reasons:
Educational attainment: Pollsters have been encouraged to increase the sample of non-college graduates, who not only tend to favor Republicans over Democrats but who are also less likely to want to participate in polls.
Patrick Murray who runs the New Jersey-based Monmouth University Polling Institute, which had Clinton winning in its three Pennsylvania polls, said they’ve begun weighing educational attainment more in polls “and we’re already seeing that impact has helped a bit.”
Late deciders: This may be harder to capture since most polls don’t interview voters in the week before the election. But the number of voters unable to make up their minds until the last minute is expected to be considerably less in 2020 than four years ago, when the historic unpopularity of Trump and Clinton had many hemming and hawing up to the very end.
A Monmouth poll in June indicated that nearly nine in 10 voters had already made up their minds about which candidate they’ll back in November..
More: Young Black voters say they aren’t enthusiastic about a Joe Biden presidency
“That’s a suggestion that there’s not a lot of room for movement,” Murray said. “But of course the one reason why we want to be a little careful about taking what were seeing in the polls today and projecting it to November is that there are still certain states where it would take a very small amount of movement to change the outcome.”
Third party candidates: The lack of a prominent independent in the presidential race this year means fewer choices and clearer options.
Pollsters say the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who polled at 10% as late as August 2016, probably contributed to the relatively large number of late-breaking deciders since a significant bloc of voters were seeking alternatives to Trump and Clinton. Johnson faded toward the end of the campaign, finishing with less than 3.3% of the vote.
Early voting: The coronavirus pandemic has injected uncertainty into the 2020 election as to who will vote and how. But it is expected to ratchet up the amount of early voting in many states.
If more respondents have cast their ballot when pollsters contact them in late October, it should be easier to gauge true voter sentiment since they will have already made their decision, pollsters say.
Likely voters: Pollsters are slowly but steadily moving to a model using public voter records to identify likely voters rather than a “random-digit dial” system that relies on respondents to report their voting participation patterns.
“People forget that large swaths of our fellow citizens don’t vote. But a lot of them still participate in polls,” said Kennedy, who led a review of the 2016 polling for the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “So there’s a big (gap) that even the best pollsters struggle to model away.”
While changes are in progress, Murray said it’s wise not to dramatically revamp polls that are already largely on target.
“There are some errors that we’ll never be able to account for because they happen idiosyncratically in each election. They’re different each time,” he said. “So you just want to be careful that you don’t over-correct for your last mistake because that’s not the one that’s going to happen this time around.”
The ‘protest vote’ in 2016
Despite the 2016 stumble, most polls in 2018 showing Democrats retaking the House and Republicans keeping the Senate proved accurate. Even so, pollsters caution that surveys are simply snapshots – not predictors – and that some are better than others at revealing voters’ deeper attitudes on issues and candidates.
But polls can influence voting behavior.
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Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University political science professor, studied how some Bernie Sanders voters in 2016 ended up casting a ballot for Trump. Those progressives might have thought Clinton would make a better president than Trump but they also believed she would win anyway and couldn’t stomach the thought of voting for her, he said.
“It felt OK to cast a protest vote or just not turn out,” Schaffner said. “Some people felt more at liberty to cast a vote that they think wasn’t going to matter.”
FiveThirtyEight, which analyzes opinion polling, warns not all polls are the same.
It recommends consumers look at who’s being polled (adults, registered voters, likely voters), check the track record of the pollsters, and pay close attention to the margin of error. A poll that shows Biden up by two points over Trump and has a four-point margin of error means Biden could be up as much as six points or be trailing Trump by two.
Keeping ‘their opinions to themselves’
Ellen Chaput, a nurse who lives in Portsmouth, said she hopes polls showing Biden with a lead over Trump are accurate. But she doesn’t believe them.
“They’ve got it wrong before,” she said. “I don’t pay any attention to them.”
Even if Biden is ahead right now, “things can change,” she said.
Helaine Dandrea, a pharmaceutical consultant from Staten Island, New York, said polls often reflect the biases of the people who conduct them.
Dandrea, who is backing Trump for re-election, said polls that show Biden with a solid lead could be underestimating the president’s strength. Some Trump supporters may be unwilling to tell pollsters they are backing the president because they don’t want to face the inevitable backlash from the other side, she said.
“People tend to be afraid because there’s a lot of aggression,” she said. “People tend to keep their opinions to themselves.”
Jim Menard, a retiree from Salisbury, Massachusetts, who backs Biden, said he can see why Trump voters might want to keep their preference to themselves.
“I imagine they are kind of embarrassed to say they support him,” Menard said.
Menard suspects polls showing Biden with a comfortable lead are correct because be believes pollsters changed their methodology to get more accurate results, he said.
“They’ve gotten better at these polls since the last time,” he said.
Important to focus on ‘where things stand today’
Franklin said it’s also important to look beyond the top-line numbers of who’s in front and examine the deeper data that explores why voters feel the way they do.
Marquette’s June poll, for example, shows Biden with an eight-poll lead in Wisconsin: 49%-41% with a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. That’s up from the three-point lead Biden had in May due mainly to declining support for Trump and growing opposition from independents.
The June poll shows 50% of Badger State voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy (down from 54% in May), while 44% approve of his handling of the coronavirus crisis (the same as the previous month). But only 30% said they approved of his handling of protests over the death of George Floyd.
“If there’s a valuable lesson to learn from ’16, it’s to put less weight on what may happen in the unknown future and put more weight on where things stand today,” Franklin said.
Murray, whose Monmouth poll released earlier this month is one of nearly a dozen in June showing Biden with a double-digit lead nationally, said the polling today centers on how voters view Trump because many have yet to learn much about the former vice president. That could change by October as the public gets to know more about Biden, he said.
“I think the polls are telling us a story about what’s going on and how people are dug in,” he said. “It doesn’t tell us how the Electoral College is going to turn out right now so that’s why you should continue to take the polling with a grain of salt if you’re looking ahead to November.”
Just as they did in 2016, polls in 2020 once again show Trump losing in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The grain of salt? The same Marquette University Law School Poll that has Biden up by eight points in June showed Clinton up by nine four years ago.
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President Trump wears face mask for visit to military hospital
July 11, 2020 | 6:20pm | Updated July 11, 2020 | 6:49pm
President Donald J. Trump, center, wears a face mask as he arrives to visit with wounded military members and front line coronavirus healthcare workers.
EPA/Chris Kleponis
President Trump is covering up.
The president, who has resisted calls to wear a face covering in public throughout the coronavirus epidemic, appeared for the first time with one before the White House press corps. It was navy blue bearing the presidential seal in gold.
The occasion was a visit to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he met with wounded troops and medical staff on Saturday.
“I love masks in the appropriate locations,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House.
Earlier in the week he had promised to take the precaution during his visit.
“You’re in a hospital setting, I think it’s a very appropriate thing,” the president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Thursday.
Trump has worn a face mask — out of the cameras’ glare — at least once before, during a visit to a Ford auto plant in May, NBC News reported.
Andrew McCarthy: Dems attacking Trump for Roger Stone clemency defended outrageous Clinton and Obama pardons
President Bill Clinton pardoned his own brother for felony distribution of cocaine. And a key witness in the Whitewater scandal for which he and Hillary Clinton were under investigation. And three others convicted in independent counsel Ken Starr’s probe. And Marc Rich, in what was a straight-up political payoff. And his CIA director. And his HUD secretary. And eight people convicted in an investigation of his Agriculture Department.
No surprise there: The Clintons and their supporters then, like President Trump and his supporters now, regarded the special-prosecutor probes into the administration as witch hunts.
Clinton also commuted the sentences of convicted terrorists, some of whom hadn’t even asked for clemency. Shameless as he was, though, even he couldn’t bring himself to pardon Oscar Lopez Rivera, the defiantly unrepentant FALN leader.
President Obama took care of that.
Obama also commuted the sentence of a U.S. soldier who passed top-secret information to WikiLeaks. He pardoned his former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, who’d been convicted of making false statements about a leak of classified information to The New York Times.
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And when he couldn’t get Congress to amend federal drug laws the way he wanted them amended, Obama used the pardon power to slash hundreds of sentences, under an executive initiative later sharply criticized by the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general.
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That doesn’t even account for the Obama administration’s penchant for making sure things never got to the pardon stage by distorting the law to give Hillary Clinton — the same Hillary Clinton who was nearly indicted in the aforementioned Clinton-era scheme — a pass, asserting executive privilege to obstruct the Fast and Furious investigation (for which Obama’s attorney general was held in contempt of Congress), ignoring his CIA director’s spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and turning a blind eye to the abuses of power and obstructions attendant to the scandal that engulfed his IRS.
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Giuliani calls Biden a pathological liar and a big crook: I can’t understand how he’s running for president
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Dead cat gets voter registration application in mail
ATLANTA (AP) – In a presidential election year, there’s always a push to get people registered to vote.
For one Atlanta family, that push got a little interesting.
Ron Tims said he checked his mail Wednesday and found a voter registration application addressed to Cody Tims – his cat, who died 12 years ago.
“A great cat, indoor and outdoor, loved his family, loved his neighborhood. He was 18 and a half when he passed away,” Carol Tims told WAGA-TV.
The Tims were surprised, and a bit amused when they saw what Cody received in the mail.
“There’s a huge push but if they’re trying to register cats, I’m not sure who else they’re trying to register. I’m not sure if they’re trying to register dogs, mice, snakes,” Carol Tims said.
The Secretary of State’s Office said the application did not come from its office and that third-party groups often use mailing lists to get names and addresses.
“Third-party groups all over the country are targeting Georgia to help register qualified individuals,” the Secretary of State’s Office said in a statement. “This group makes you wonder what these out-of-town activists are really doing. Make no mistake about it, this office is dedicated to investigating all types of fraud.”
The Secretary of State’s Office said it’s quite sure that even if Cody were still alive and showed up at the polls, he wouldn’t be allowed to vote since he does not have a license or state ID.
If you’re wondering how Cody would have voted if he could go to the polls. His owner said he was a DemoCAT.
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