| | |  | BY JOANNE KENEN, JASON MILLMAN AND RENUKA RAYASAM | With help from Myah Ward SURPRISE — A chicken in every pot and a vaccine by Election Day! OK, skip the chicken. The vaccine is what President Donald Trump keeps promising — even though his own top health officials, including the former drug company executive leading his Operation Warp Speed vaccine initiative — have said again and again they are highly dubious of his rosy timeline. Yet if Trump thinks an October vaccine is the key to his election, he may be the one who gets a surprise. A new poll from POLITICO and the Harvard T.C. Chan School of Public Health finds that getting a vaccine before Election Day would have virtually no effect on how likely voters cast their ballots. That’s what 84 percent of voters favoring Trump say, along with 89 percent of those supporting Joe Biden. The survey was done before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death created a vacancy on the Supreme Court — and some of its findings, especially about voters’ concerns on abortion or health coverage, for instance — might look different if we did the poll again today. But it’s still a window into what voters care about — and how deeply our country is divided. Unsurprisingly, there are big partisan splits over what matters most. For all voters, the top three concerns were 1) Economy/jobs, 2) Schools/education and 3) Covid-19. For Trump supporters, it was 1) Economy/jobs, 2) Terrorism (foreign and domestic) and 3) Taxes. For Biden supporters, 1) Racial discrimination 2) Covid-19 and 3) Police violence. So one half of the country is way more worried about the pandemic than the other half is. Likely voters don’t think the stock market is a particularly important indicator of the nation’s well-being, though Trump keeps citing its performance as a sign of economic vitality. Of the voters who named the economy as their top priority, only 5 percent of Trump supporters and 2 percent of Biden supporters identified the stock market as key. For most, it was jobs. When it comes to the pandemic, both Republicans and Democrats are supportive of public health leaders — not overwhelmingly so, but largely. About two-thirds of Trump voters and 56 percent of Biden voters said they approve of how public health leaders have handled the outbreak. But the divide over Trump’s handling of the crisis was about as deep as can be. Fully 91 percent of Trump supporters approved of it, versus 6 percent of Biden supporters. Voters who said Covid was their biggest concern split over what mattered most: Republicans focused on shutdowns of schools and businesses, and Democrats on the federal government’s competence in managing the spread of the disease. To read more about the poll, particularly its health care and pandemic components, check out this story from our colleague Gabrielle Wanneh. And here’s the full survey, conducted with 1,459 likely voters via cellphone and landline from Aug. 25-Sept. 6. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Your host’s two-year-old is a budding literary critic. He’s convinced that Snort is the hero of “Are You My Mother?” Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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| | JOIN OUR THURSDAY TOWN HALL - CONFRONTING INEQUALITY IN AMERICA: The current wave of protests have surfaced long simmering racial inequalities in a pronounced way, making it harder for Americans to ignore. On Thursday, POLITICO Live will convene scholars, activists and public officials for a virtual town hall focused on education inequality and the policies and measures needed to overcome disparities that persist in how Black and minority students are educated. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | 
Former clerks watch as the casket of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court where she will lie in repose. | Getty Images | | | SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL — In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, teachers and students of color say they don’t feel safe returning to school. Many of their schools lack windows that open, an ample supply of soap, masks or working ventilation systems — making it nearly impossible to navigate live classes in the middle of a pandemic. An hour’s drive from the U.S. Capitol, about 27,000 Baltimore city school children — 1 in 3 students — don’t have computers vital for virtual school. Thousands lack reliable wireless internet access. And in Salinas, Calif., a photo of two elementary school girls huddled over their laptops, using free Wi-Fi outside Taco Bell, went viral last month, raising alarms in a majority Latino city and seizing the attention of public officials. Yet in wealthy neighborhoods across the country, some students are safely continuing their education via small “learning pods,” where some affluent parents shell out hundreds or even thousands of dollars for private instruction. It’s driving concerns that wealthier kids, many of whom live in predominantly white neighborhoods, are getting an unfair advantage. The split is emblematic of a core truth of the American public education system : Gaps in access to school resources fall along racial and socioeconomic lines, and that gap has been magnified during virtual schooling, write Nicole Gaudiano and Maya King. Non-white school districts receive an average of $23 billion less than predominantly white school districts, despite serving roughly the same number of students, according to a 2019 study from EdBuild, a school funding research group that closed in June. Many schools serving low-income Black and Latino students don’t even have windows that open to increase air circulation, said Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks, the author of “Cutting School: The Segronomics of American Education.” The spread of the coronavirus has unearthed and amplified these inequities. “Covid isn’t just revealing racial inequities,” said Rooks. “It’s reproducing it. It’s making it worse.”
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Annette Choi/POLITICO | | | HOW COVID IS LIKE AN STD — For one set of public health experts, the heated debates over testing, wearing masks and contact tracing are eerily familiar — as odd as it might seem, they are similar to arguments that officials and academics working to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases have been having for decades as they’ve worked to bring down the rates of infections like HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, health care reporter Alice Miranda Ollstein writes. It may seem incongruous — even inappropriate — to compare a respiratory disease to a sexually transmitted infection. After all, it’s emotionally harder (if logistically easier) for someone to tell a contact tracer whom they’ve been intimate with than it is to list everyone who has shared their airspace. But the cycles of infection we’re watching with Covid are similar to patterns we’ve long seen in diseases like HIV and tuberculosis, where a successful suppression of infection rates is followed by funding cuts and the abandonment of vulnerable communities, allowing viruses and bacteria to make a comeback. FAUCI VS. PAUL — The government’s top infectious disease doctor accused Republican Sen. Rand Paul of repeatedly misconstruing information about the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, including making misleading claims about herd immunity and the effects of mitigation measures, health care reporter Brianna Ehley writes. Testifying before the Senate HELP Committee, Anthony Fauci rejected Paul’s assertion that the United States’ mitigation and lockdown efforts were misguided. Paul cited the experiences of countries like Sweden that did not take aggressive measures to control the virus, arguing that “our death rate is essentially worse than Sweden’s.” “If you look at the data, the countries that did very little have a lower death rate than the U.S.,” Paul, a doctor, said. “It’s important that we the people not simply acquiesce to authoritarian mandates on our behavior without first making the nanny state prove their hypothesis.” Fauci disputed the comparison between the U.S. and Sweden and added that Sweden has a higher death rate than other comparable Scandinavian countries. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us,” Fauci said — adding that he doesn’t regret the mitigation efforts he and others on the White House coronavirus task force recommended that states implement.
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| | | Nightly asks you: As cooler weather arrives in much of the U.S., the Nightly crew has noticed that fall and winter holidays seem to be getting an early pandemic observance. Have you or your neighbors set up some early decorations for Halloween or Thanksgiving (maybe even Christmas)? Send us your photos at nightly@politico.com, and we’ll include select shots in our Friday edition.
| | FIGHTING FALSEHOOD — In 2016, Russia and China attacked American democracy by muddying the political discourse online. The virtual strikes, which included disinformation campaigns, online bots and email server hackings, marked one of the most direct interferences into American democracy by foreign actors in history. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, technology reporter Steven Overly explains the lessons learned from the 2016 attacks, and how the federal government and tech giants are preparing to secure the 2020 election.
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383 The number of companies whose bonds were bought by the Fed that paid dividends to shareholders, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found in an analysis released today. These include 95 that also conducted layoffs, and 227 companies had been accused of illegal conduct sometime in the past three years. (h/t financial services reporter Victoria Guida) |
| | | AMID EVERYTHING — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant writes: In Monday’s Nightly, your host Renu included this line, describing the pandemic’s early months: “The term ‘grim milestone’ in headlines became so routine that we banned it at the Nightly.” It can be challenging, writing day after day, to come up with new language to describe this year. Covid has developed a vernacular, phrases and words that people didn’t say when they were making Valentine’s Day dinner reservations but are now ubiquitous. These are “unprecedented times,” “difficult times,” “challenging times,” “tough times.” We declare that we’re all in this together, and the best way of staying together is staying apart. Another word we’ve tried to banish in the Nightly is “amid.” As Nightly editor Chris Suellentrop said, “What happened to ‘during’?” Amid the pandemic, the new era that we all described as “the time of coronavirus” before we tired of that phrase, “during” became too casual, not dramatic enough. In 2020, there is unprecedented use of “unprecedented,” and abnormal use of “normal.” When things do get back to normal, we might have to relearn how to talk and write. Editors hate clichés, but I sympathize with folks who see them behind the “break in case of emergency” glass and, in desperation, swing the hammer. There’s comfort to be found in the collective language we use to make a bizarre experience less bizarre. Common phrases are on the easiest-to-reach shelf. In these trying times, amid a pandemic in the time of coronavirus, when grim milestones have become routine, clichés are here for us. Or, at the very least, now more than ever, while we’re all at home, they hope this email finds us well.
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| | JOIN US FOR POLITICO'S AI SUMMIT - WHAT'S NEXT FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?: Artificial intelligence is changing the world we live in, and the coronavirus pandemic has served as a testing ground for AI’s potential. But challenges remain. Join POLITICO on October 15 for our 3rd AI Summit, where we will virtually convene policymakers, federal officials, technologists, private-sector executives, scientists and advocates to explore the future of AI as the world tries to recover from the pandemic and as the U.S. deals with social unrest and a presidential election. Register here. | | | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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