Perspective
A particular way of viewing things that depends on one’s experience and personality.
By David Eaton and Peter Glenshaw
THE LEAD: Democrats in Texas generated a lot of buzz in May when they walked out of the state house rather than provide the quorum needed to pass a bill to reform—or restrict, depending on one’s POV—voting. And while the Texas bill—which will return in a special session next month—captured the media’s attention, similar efforts to change how people can vote are underway in more than a dozen states. David has a list and some context to help explain why making it harder to vote in one state matters even if you don’t live there.
Peter dives into the challenge of communicating complex information to audiences that only seek simplicity… even when that simplicity obscures the facts.
Our BRIEFS include news that will help your brain learn better, a new map that illustrates the country’s “digital divide,” and a great read about a big ship that brought the global supply chain to a halt… with help from a sandstorm and a pair of bickering pilots.
The Details….
On Tuesday of this week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the legislature back for a special session set to begin July 8th. Abbott did not announce a formal agenda, but it is widely expected the bill restricting voting hours and options that failed during the regular legislative session will be near the top of the to-do list. 1
Texas’ moves to restrict voting are generating a lot of headlines, but it’s only one thread of a multi-part story line playing out in legislatures across the country. According to the Brennan Center, a non-partisan organization devoted to voting rights, “as of June 21, 17 states [have] enacted 28 laws that restrict access to vote.”
We are on track for the most significant period of legislative voter suppression in a decade, and more bills are set to come. 2 Among the measures already passed and signed into law:
Restrictions on voting by mail ranging from shortening the time-frame to request a ballot to new limits on where, when and who can return a mail-in ballot: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Kansas, Florida, Montana, Indiana, Arizona and Idaho.
Limits on in-person voting that include new voter ID requirements, elimination of same-day registration, and a reduction in the number of polling places and hours of operation during early voting periods and on Election Day: Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, Iowa and Georgia.
Photo by Michael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle Florida and Georgia banned water and snacks for voters waiting in line to cast a ballot.
Iowa, Florida, Kentucky and Utah made it easier to purge voter rolls.
All but two of the fourteen states listed above—Kansas and Kentucky—are “GOP Trifectas:” Republicans hold both houses of the legislature and the governorship.
Lest you think what happens in these fourteen states has no impact on you, keep in mind they account for 125 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the Presidency. Two of them—Georgia and Arizona—and their 27 electors flipped from red to blue in 2020. Biden’s combined margin of victory in Georgia and Arizona: 23,127 votes. 3
And we’re not done, yet. Perspective’s list comprises the states that have already enacted laws. Nearly a third of state legislatures are still in session and dozens of bills to limit various aspects of registration and voting are still in play.
So, while Texas and, to some extent, Georgia, dominate the voter-suppression headlines, they are literally the tip of the iceberg: the vast majority of the legislative work to make it harder for American’s to vote is happening very much under our noses and generating very little attention.
BRIEFS:
TAKE A BREAK… No, really, we mean it. Take a few minutes before moving on to your next task—it will help your brain learn new skills. Countering the idea that a long periods of rest—like a good night’s sleep—are the best (or only) way for the brain to fully master a new skill, researchers at the National Institutes of Health discovered that short breaks, particularly while trying to master a new skill, actually allow the brain to “strengthen memories of the new skill just practiced.” The smarter-than-we-are folks at NIH aren’t exactly certain why this is the case, but, just to be safe, take five and then read this abstract from NIH Research Matters. Your brain will thank you.
DIGITAL DIVIDE… As negotiators from the White House and Capitol Hill worked toward consensus on an infrastructure bill this week, closing the “digital divide” with a massive investment in broadband was among the many contentious issues requiring resolution. What’s not in dispute is the fact that millions of Americans have no access to the internet. The Commerce Department recently released an interactive “Indicators of Broadband Need” map drawn from American Community Survey data collected as part of the US Census. In the map below red represents census tracts where 25% or more households reported no access to the internet.
Each census tract contains between 1,200 and 8,000 people with an optimum size of 4,000. 4 The maps can be layered a variety of different ways, but no amount of data manipulation can obscure the reality that large portions of the country, particularly in the Deep South and Southwest, have no access to a utility Perspective readers don’t give a second thought. Here’s a link to the map if you want to try it out for yourself.
NOT TOO BIG TO GET STUCK… From bickering pilots to a sandstorm and a ship that pushed the physical limits of the Suez Canal, Bloomberg has a well-reported and fascinating account of the Ever Given—the massive container ship that ran aground “in one of the worst possible spots” while transiting the 120 mile long waterway. It’s a long piece full of detail and well worth the time.
RELOCATION FAILURE… Back in February we wrote about the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) plan to relocate its headquarters and hundreds of staff to Grand Junction, CO, from Washington, DC. The rationale was to put the people responsible for managing 245 million acres of federally owned land closer to the land they manage. Right. Of the 328 BLM employees eligible to relocate, 287 retired or left the agency, in many cases for other jobs in the federal government. Forty-one BLM-ers elected to move and three of them are moving to the new Grand Junction headquarters. Three employees… or about 1 percent of the original pool eligible to move are actually moving to the new HQ. The remaining 38 employees are indeed relocating….to other offices around the West. The good news, we suppose, is that social distancing will be be a cinch for three people sharing 6,000 square feet of office space spread across two floors in Grand Junction. Read more at the Colorado Newsline, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent online news organization.
Earlier this month, the New York Times profiled the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and her efforts to assert control over a complex organization whose reputation as a global leader in public health was openly questioned and subverted by the Trump Administration. 5
Battered by political interference and mismanagement, the CDC faces some tough challenges: it must gain the upper hand in the operational war against a disease that has killed as many people in the first half of 2021 as it did in all of 2020; and, it must regain the independence and trust it lost through the Trump Administration’s campaign to politicize the agency and its messaging.
That second point, the Times suggested, is particularly challenging because it involves telling two stories that, at first glance, conflict with each other:
Story #1: “the virus’s hold on the country is loosening…” because the COVID-19 vaccines work.
Story #2: “large parts of the population remain unvaccinated and the pandemic is not yet over.”
On their own, these messages are complex enough.
After working for months to stay safe, some people are reluctant to acknowledge the virus is less worrisome than it was even three months ago. In my corner of the world, our local cooperative grocery chain—the oldest in the nation, renowned for its supply chain of local food producers—refuses to change its masking policy. 6 Everyone must wear a mask, vaccinated or not, even though Vermont residents are 80% vaccinated and New Hampshire is in the top ten states in terms of percent residents vaccinated.
Vaccination adoption in New England, however, doesn’t translate to the rest the US. More than 30% of the U.S. population will not have received any vaccine by July 4th, missing a goal set by President Biden. As a result, rather than contain the virus, the opposite is occurring in the US: the pandemic continues. And it gets worse. Low vaccination rates allow variants to emerge. These newer variants are 60% more transmissible and appear to be far deadlier. Soon they will be the dominant form of COVID-19 in the US, increasing the potential for illness and death in regions with low vaccination rates. 7 Early reports suggest hospitals in Missouri, Arkansas, Nevada and Utah are already severely taxed. 8
Communicating these conflicting messages requires the audience to accept a “both-and” statement: the pandemic is winding down and the pandemic is getting worse. This apparently contradictory message is challenging to communicate in the best of circumstances, but Dr. Walensky and the CDC face an additional obstacle: media-savvy interlopers who champion simplistic narratives that are easily communicated and understood, even if they are erroneous.
Take Emily Oster: a Brown University professor who has successfully established herself as a “lodestar for a certain set of parents, generally college-educated, liberal and affluent,” according to the New York Times profile of her this week. She’s been arguing for months that it is safe for kids to return to schools. Her message appealed to affluent white families with the financial resources and access to health care that made them statistically less likely to contract or die from COVID-19. But it did not resonate with less-affluent, non-white communities where the same factors were reversed, making them far more vulnerable to the virus.
Consider New Hampshire, where only 10 percent of the population is non-White. White residents of the Granite State contracted COVID-19 at a rate of 4,922 people per 100,000, whereas Latinos (7,715) and Blacks (10,730) were infected at significantly higher levels.
As for conservative communicators, they misled their viewers about the pandemic and ultimately caused them more harm, according to three academic studies. 9 But, it doesn’t take a PhD to understand the harm Tucker Carlson causes by comparing children in masks to children being beaten at a Walmart, or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) equating masking policies to the Holocaust. 10
In these examples, interlopers skipped right thru the complexity challenge in order to deliver an inaccurate but simple (and thus appealing) message. This is the communications battleground on which the CDC and Dr. Walensky find themselves, and it has a lot of touchpoints. With US smartphone adoption at 85% earlier this year, there are nearly 280 million communication devices capable of streaming video and other content directly to consumers on the topics of their choosing.11 The days of holding a press conference in front of a handful of national media outlets and considering your communication work finished are gone.
Also gone are the reliable interpreters of this information. With the Fairness Doctrine abandoned long ago, the only guardrails on communications appear to the potential for libel and/or slander litigation, neither of which is much of a speed-bump for the likes of Carlson or MTG.
How does this end?
It will likely come to down our oldest yet least sophisticated form of communication: personal experience shared by one individual with another. As family and friends sicken and unfortunately die in Missouri and other low vaccine adoption communities, the hope is behaviors and beliefs change. Hope. It’s the lowest possible bar and one that science hoped to keep us from embracing. After all, isn’t science meant to keep us from misfortune by providing insights using data, theory and sufficient evidence to prevent too many people experience harm? For now, too many Americans are reluctant to embrace this early-warning system and their reluctance will provide an opening for a supremely opportunistic disease.
The C.D.C.’s New Leader Follows the Science. Is that Enough?, The New York Times, June 10, 2021