Sunday, November 13, 2022
SNL48 Fox & Friends Cold Open - SNL
The hosts of Fox & Friends (Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner, Bowen Yang) interview Kari Lake (Cecily Strong) and Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) about the 2022 midterm elections.
Bill McKibben | Has the Fever Broken Just a Bit?
12 November 22
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The view from Egypt: Trumpism, Putinism, Bolsonaroism finally on the defensive
The midterm elections went…really quite okay. Good people lost (Mandela Barnes would have been a superb Senator, and Val Demings too) and a lot of races were razor-tight: that Raphael Warnock has to go into sudden-death overtime against Herschel Walker should be maddening for anyone possessing either a brain or heart. But, since the New York Times had confidently informed me in a news story on October 22 that the “Democrats’ Feared Red October Has Arrived,” I was awfully heartened to read the overall results in a Cairo dawn. (And awfully glad I hadn’t let the Times persuade me to stop working—I’m all but certain that the hundreds of Reno apartment doors my Third Act colleagues and I knocked the weekend after that story came out were the difference in what looks like the possible re-election of Catherine Cortez Masto and a Senate majority no matter what Georgia decides. Thank you residents of Lodestar Drive!)
The midterms weren’t the autumn’s only good news. Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil will translate directly into tens of millions of trees not being cut down or burned; Lula is coming here to the climate summit, and indeed offering to host one of the upcoming annual meetings.
And meanwhile Vladimir Putin has decided to evacuate Kherson, the one regional capital he’d managed to take in his savage invasion of Ukraine. The timing’s interesting; some speculated that the results of the midterms were the final straw, since it’s clear that even the slim House majority the GOP will hold won’t be enough to cut off military aid to the Kyiv government. If the Republicans had picked up dozens of seats the view from Moscow might have looked a little different.
There’s many reasons for these successes (the organizing done in the wake of the Dobbs decision was remarkable) but all of these developments are tied in some way to the climate story. Brazil under Bolsonaro has been the world capital of deforestation; Putin’s invasion is funded by gas and oil, uses gas and oil as a weapon, and has given his friends in the gas and oil industry room to push for a rapid expansion of fossil fuels—enough, according to a report circulating today on the conference floor, to by itself push the world past 1.5 degrees. And he had enlisted his friends in Saudi Arabia to run up the price of oil precisely in the hope of weakening the Biden administration in the run-up to the midterms.
But it didn’t work. Gas prices indeed remained high, thanks to Riyadh, the Kremlin, and the profiteers at Exxon et al, but it didn’t produce a red wave. And the Inflation Reduction Act, with its massive funding for clean energy, didn’t produce a backlash—indeed, very few Republicans campaigned against it, cognizant that solar panels have high levels of support across the board. The IRA seems set now—the GOP plan to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless it was repealed seems unlikely given the thin margins Kevin McCarthy will enjoy in the House.
And perhaps—just perhaps—the Trumpian moment has passed its crest. It was his feral genius for division that arguably got all this going; his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris accords was the lowest point of decades of climate politics. But he’s a reduced figure after this week.
I could easily recite a litany of our remaining challenges, and I will doubtless return to that tomorrow. (The grimmest news of the day is the Egyptian government is forcefeeding political prisoner Alaa Abdel Fattah so that his hunger strike won’t kill him while the climate conference is still underway; there will never be a shortage of tyrants in the world, and many of us here know that we’d be in jail or worse were we Egyptian). But for the moment, in at least a few places and however temporarily, rational people have confronted some of the planet’s most powerful madmen, and if reason won by 51-49 margins it nonetheless won. And since rationality—a certain kind of calm—is necessary for dealing with the most serious challenge we’ve ever faced, the mood at these talks is lighter than one had any reason to expect going in.
More news from the world of climate and energy
+New data from Global Witness and Corporate Accountability International shows 636 oil and gas lobbyists at this climate summit, up 25% from last year and larger than any national delegation except the United Arab Emirates, which if you think about is pretty much an oil and gas lobby too. Meahwhile, hundreds of scientists have signed a petition telling pr giant Hill and Knowlton to stop representing the oil and gas industry—a particularly sad tie, since they’re also the public relations consultant for this gathering. “It's like putting Philip Morris in charge of tobacco negotiations,” veteran campaigner Jamie Henn told the Washington Post.
+The smart people at InfluenceMap have put out a new report identifying the 25 companies doing the most damaging lobbying on climate issues. As you might expect, Exxon and Chevron top the list, but Toyota—once the proud provider of the Prius—comes in tenth, now that it’s taken to fighting against greening the transit sector.
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AP)
Kherson was the sole Ukrainian regional capital that Russian forces had managed to capture since the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, and relinquishing the city to Kyiv shattered the illusion of control Putin tried to create by staging referendums and illegally declaring Kherson and three other regions — Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia — to be annexed and absorbed into Russia.
Although Russian forces still control the broader Kherson region, which forms part of Putin’s coveted “land bridge” from mainland Russia to illegally annexed Crimea, forfeiting the capital city is a stunning blow after repeated, blustery declarations by pro-Kremlin figures that Russia would stay in Kherson “forever.”
Moscow’s hard-line pro-war faction, including nationalist military bloggers, called the surrender of the city a “betrayal” and a “black day.” Kherson, along with the other illegally annexed regions, was written into the Russian constitution as part of Russia after the parliament affirmed Putin’s annexation plans.
Kherson’s flag, along with those of the three other regions, was raised recently during a ceremony in the State Duma.
While other leaders might suffer serious repercussions, the Kremlin for weeks carefully prepared the Russian population for the shock, distancing Putin from responsibility and trying to insulate him from political fallout. Still, there were signs that Putin would not entirely escape responsibility and that the Kherson defeat could fan opposition to the war, which has risen slowly amid repeated battlefield setbacks.
“I think this will seriously complicate how the situation is viewed inside the country,” said one influential Moscow businessman, declining to be named because of possible consequences in a paranoid, increasingly totalitarian state. “It is a serious loss.”
“For Russia, these losses have a sacred character,” the businessman added. “It is a big blow to the image of Putin.”
The retreat from Kherson city was the latest in a string of military collapses for Putin, including Russia’s failed attempt to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early in the war, and Ukraine’s lightning rout of Russian forces from the northeast Kharkiv region in September.
The territorial losses in Kharkiv led Putin to declare a messy conscription drive that prompted hundreds of thousands of men to flee Russia and sent tens of thousands of poorly trained troops to fight in Ukraine.
Many ordinary Russians still see Putin as a clever, czar-like figure who loves his motherland but is perennially let down by venal, incompetent officials, according to analysts, who said the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts had seemingly worked to minimize the public’s concerns about the Kherson surrender.
But the many military failures in an unnecessary war are obvious to Moscow’s elite billionaires and state officials. Equally clear are the political difficulties created by Putin’s annexations, a flagrant violation of international law now exposed as a delusion.
Amid military retreats, bungled mobilization, deepening economic difficulties and mounting casualties, Moscow is increasingly signaling a readiness for talks with Ukraine. But negotiations are unlikely while Putin clings to his position that Kyiv must accept his illegal seizures of territory.
Putin stayed away on Wednesday as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the top Russian army commander in Ukraine, Col. Gen. Sergei Surovikin, performed an awkward, robotic dialogue on Russia 24 state television, formalizing the decision to abandon Kherson “to save lives.”
As Shoigu approved the surrender, Putin visited the federal center for brain and neuro technologies to mark the 75th anniversary of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency. It was unclear whether the Russian president was totally out of touch or intentionally putting himself out of reach of the military decision.
Former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov, speaking in an interview, described the surrender of Kherson as “the largest geopolitical defeat of Russia since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.,” noting Putin’s personal guarantee that the territory would always be part of Russia.
“This is, of course, a huge blow to the mood of the population,” said Markov. “It is a huge blow to the army — to their fighting spirit. It is a blow to respect for President Putin and a blow for optimism.”
Putin, however, remains protected by his coterie of security and military leaders and has shown no outward sign of changing course. Political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently compared Putin’s increasingly closed, paranoid behavior to Stalin in his final years, in which “all decisions are taken by one person.”
But, despite the outrage among hard-liners over the surrender of Kherson, Kolesnikov said ordinary Russians appeared convinced, at least for now, by the military’s explanation that the surrender was needed to save lives.
Putin’s popularity was “fairly solid,” he said, declining to 77 percent from 83 percent during September’s bungled mobilization, before creeping back up to 79 percent last month.
A Russian state official said the decision to surrender Kherson “means there is still rational thinking in the command. If the president is part of this, then there is hope, though the ghost of a chance, that he is ready for talks.”
But the state official added that he did not think Putin would accept Ukraine’s conditions to fully withdraw Russian forces from Ukraine or even retreat to prewar lines, because that would be a “massive political blow” that he might not survive.
Many members of the elite are privately critical of Putin’s catastrophic war and the resulting sanctions, underscoring the split between Russia’s hard-line pro-war faction and the business executives and bureaucrats desperately hoping for an off-ramp and an end to global ostracism.
The businessman said Moscow was banking on Ukrainian resistance crumbling in winter because of missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian energy facilities, although there is no evidence this will happen.
Another prominent Russian businessman said he believed the Biden administration was pressing Ukraine to begin negotiations, citing comments on Wednesday night by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the winter presents “a window of opportunity” for the sides to begin talks. Western officials, however, have said it is Kyiv’s decision.
Russians were tired of the war, the second businessman said, and Putin’s position was “on the brink of catastrophe.”
“From the military point of view, there are a lot of corpses. I think he is ready for some kind of deal,” the second businessman said, adding that Putin likely realized that a decisive military victory was impossible.
The risks are rising for Putin, he said. “If he loses more territory, it would be a complete disgrace for him. It would be the end for him personally. It would be the end for him politically, too.”
Analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the R. Politik political analysis group, said the sense of betrayal among Russia’s “party of war” posed no threat to Putin, who remains convinced that Ukraine will lose Western support next year, forcing Kyiv to capitulate to his terms.
Stanovaya said Putin merely wanted to buy time until Western support for Ukraine disappeared, while Kolesnikov dismissed Putin’s signals he was ready to negotiate as “pure PR,” with the sides too far apart.
Stanovaya said Putin did not expect Russia to win the war through military means but regarded Ukraine as a nonstate that would eventually collapse.
The liberation of Kherson city fueled speculation about how much farther Ukraine’s military might advance before winter. Kyiv’s forces also have been making some gains in the east.
Markov, the former Kremlin adviser, said Putin would try to retain the remaining annexed territories, once the Russian army was reinforced with trained forces in coming months. But it was not clear that Russia could arm them with the necessary weapons, he said.
“If he discovers that the Russian economy can’t give these troops military technology, then he will be forced to enter into negotiations for peace,” Markov said, adding that Putin might even be forced to accept withdrawing to positions Russia held before the Feb. 24 invasion. This includes the regional capitals of Luhansk and Donetsk, which Russian-backed separatists have controlled since 2014.
“The withdrawal to the Feb. 24 line would be seen as a serious loss but not capitulation,” he said. “It would be a very tough condition. But it is possible.”
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John Fetterman. (photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)
It’s hard to look at Tuesday’s election results and still take seriously the centrist attack line claiming that left-wing candidates aren’t electable. We won plenty of big races to be proud of.
1.) The centrist case against left-wing electability has been shattered.
It’s hard to look at these results and still take seriously the standard centrist attack on left-wing candidates. That usually goes something like: the Left can only win in coastal areas filled with liberal voters, and their supposedly radical ideas ― like making sure everyone has health care, is paid a decent wage, and doesn’t suffer from climate catastrophe ― are a turnoff to voters anywhere else.
Just look at Pennsylvania, a formerly reliably blue Rust Belt state that’s effectively been purple the last two election cycles. While victorious Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman moved to the center on some issues, he ran on a broadly progressive platform of a $15 minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, enacting criminal justice reform, and making it easier to unionize, as well as moving toward universal health care by, among other things, lowering the Medicare eligibility age. He enthusiastically backed Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation, attacked corporate profiteering for inflation, and ran a campaign shaming his opponent for being an out-of-touch rich guy with ten houses, an opponent who continually attacked him for being endorsed by socialist Bernie Sanders. Despite a stroke that left him temporarily disabled for the entire general campaign, Fetterman still won.
Elsewhere in the state, democratic socialist Summer Lee ran on a more radical platform that included the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and abolishing cash bail and life sentences without parole. This in theory should’ve been a liability, since the redrawn district she was running in contained parts of Westmoreland County, a deep red area where Biden had only won 35 percent, where the GOP controlled every level of elected office, and where physical threats to Democrats had become increasingly common, not to mention her Republican opponent confusingly having the exact same name as the retiring Democratic incumbent. Instead, she did vastly better in the general election than she did in her squeaker of a primary. Besides that, the state’s winning gubernatorial candidate, Josh Shapiro, had run in part on his record of holding opioid makers, pharmaceuticals, and predatory lenders to account.
Likewise, democratic socialist councilman Greg Casar’s win in Texas’s 35th district, Illinois state representative Delia Ramirez’s win in Illinois’s 3rd district, and Maxwell Frost’s win in Florida’s 10th district — with all three running on similar platforms to Lee ― expands the electoral map for the Left. This is particularly the case in light of the GOP’s sweep over Florida, and the fact that Casar and Ramirez won handily in majority Latino districts at a time when commentators claim that demographic is moving rightward. In fact, Ramirez won in a district with traditionally GOP-voting suburbs, where the primary returns show she fared better than in Chicago proper.
Even unsuccessful bids show evidence for this. While far from a progressive firebrand — he opposed Biden’s student debt cancellation, for one ― Ohio representative and Senate candidate Tim Ryan borrowed somewhat from the Left’s playbook, running a workerist campaign that often stressed his opposition to his own party’s leadership. While he still lost in the Rust Belt state, he fared far better than the president had in the state, and was likely sunk by Ohio’s Republican tilt in voter registration. Similarly, in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes came the closest yet to beating incumbent Ron Johnson, falling short by just one point after running a (mostly) union- (and worker-) focused campaign, and in a race that, unlike Johnson’s two previous runs, featured no conservative third-party candidates.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a progressive platform means an automatic win regardless of a candidate’s quality, the political conditions, or the countless other factors that influence a race. But it’s implausible at this point to claim, if it wasn’t already, that it guarantees defeat.
2.) The Dobbs decision mattered.
Many observers, this author included, had looked at polling over the last few months and assumed the popular fury unleashed by the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, which struck down abortion rights, had dissipated after the summer. That clearly wasn’t true.
Looking at the election results, the voter surge that saw an antiabortion measure drive up turnout and go down in flames in Kansas in August was clearly not a one-off. Besides the winning ballot measures in Michigan, Vermont, and California enshrining abortion rights in their respective state constitutions, the clearest measure of this might’ve been the 52 percent defeat of Kentucky’s Amendment 2, which would have rejected that right in its constitution — in a state where as recently as 2014, nearly two-thirds of voters thought abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Exit polling clearly shows that abortion, while generally not as important for voters as the economy and inflation, was a top issue, with roughly a third of voters overall considering it their top priority, and around 60 percent saying the court ruling made them “dissatisfied or angry.” In Pennsylvania — where Dr Oz infamously said the decision should be between “women, doctors, and local political leaders” — 36 percent said it was their most important issue when going to vote, compared to 27 percent for inflation, as did 14 percent Georgians, 17 percent Arizonans, 20 percent of New Hampshirites, and 13 percent of Wisconsinites — all states where the Senate races were either closer than expected, or where Democrats ended up winning.
This might help explain why Democrats, whose preelection campaign messaging almost exclusively focused on the issue, proved so resilient in this election, even as 70 percent reported thinking the country was going in the wrong direction, and even as Biden was a historically unpopular president, usually a bellwether for a party’s poor performance in midterms. It also suggests that, had the Democrats listened to voices like that of Bernie Sanders and had an actual message on the economy and inflation — which in both exit polls and preelection surveys sat above abortion as voters’ concern, particularly among Republican voters. Speaking of which…
3.) The go-big economic strategy pushed by the Left saved the party.
Commentators are already noting the stark difference between the Democratic “shellacking” of 2010, when a too-small stimulus kept unemployment at persistently close to 10 percent going into the midterms, and this result, which comes after the Democrats jump-started the economy with a far bigger stimulus that put money directly into people’s pockets, and has kept unemployment at just under 4 percent. Economist and author Zach Carter has argued this suggests voters may be more inclined to punish unemployment more severely than inflation.
This is certainly possible, though it’s hard to say for sure, given all the other factors that didn’t exist twelve years ago, most notably the Dobbs decision. But what we can say with some certainty is that Democrats would’ve fared far worse had they listened to neoliberal voices like Larry Summers and passed a smaller fiscal stimulus, held back on the spending that followed, or even just not continued the extended unemployment insurance that gave workers ever so briefly the bargaining power to demand better wages and benefits.
For all the talk of an overheated economy, even the same Federal Reserve currently trying to throw the country into a recession to curb inflation admits the problem is largely the result of external factors, like pandemic-driven prolonged supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine. Had Biden gone small, there’s a good chance his party would’ve been going into these elections with both higher-than-average unemployment and stubborn inflation, which may have led to a very different outcome. On that note…
4.) Trump was the big loser.
It wasn’t a great night for Republicans, but it was especially not great for one Republican in particular: former president Donald Trump, many of whose endorsed candidates either underperformed or lost.
Trump’s endorsement was key to getting Dr Oz over the line in his GOP primary, to the rest of the party’s chagrin, before Oz lost to a man absent from much of the campaign due to a stroke. Trump’s gubernatorial candidates lost in the winnable states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — where Capitol rioter Doug Mastriano ran behind Oz — and his similarly election-denying endorsee in Arizona is also currently running behind.
Other key Senate race endorsees likewise underwhelmed. In Georgia, football star and political novice Herschel Walker took the GOP nomination largely on the back of Trump’s support, but his raft of personal scandals saw him perform worse than the state’s governor and end up in a runoff. In Arizona, Blake Masters, another right-wing extremist boosted by Trump in the primary, looks to have lost his Senate bid, though it has not been officially called. Trump ally Ron Johnson struggled in Wisconsin, eking out a win.
As it stands, by Politico’s count, seven of Trump’s “riskiest” picks have lost (not counting Masters), while seven have won, with the former president faring especially poorly in House races so far. An Axios tally of key races gives Trump a win-loss ratio of thirteen to ten, with fourteen races still to go, a count somewhat padded by the fact that a number of endorsees were running in safe seats. While not disastrous, Trump made a big, public show of taking credit in advance for the coming outcome, which he thought would be a Republican landslide.
Whatever the final count, the result has already dented Trump’s standing within the GOP. Originally planning to announce his presidential run shortly after the results, he’s now being urged to delay it for fear of costing the Republicans the Georgia Senate seat. You’ve got Fox News hosts more or less openly rebuking Trump. Laura Ingraham said the conservative movement isn’t “about any one person” while denouncing nameless Republicans “putting your own ego or your own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country.” Marc Thiessen called the (nominally) more moderate Republican governors who won on Tuesday “the path to the future” while complaining about the “radical candidates who ran far behind them.”
Most ominously for Trump, his leading rival for the presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, won big in the key Republican state, way outperforming Trump’s result in 2020 by flipping the normally blue Miami-Dade County and winning big among the key demographics of Latinos and women, as well as pretty much every other group. Already the knives are out among the more Trump-skeptical parts of the Right, who are already turning to the victorious DeSantis.
5.) Hard-right candidates struggled.
It’s tricky to talk about extremism in regards to today’s Republican Party, whose “centrist” establishment is wildly to the right of the country on everything from social issues to economic and tax policy. But the results seem to reflect serious ambivalence among the electorate toward some of the loopier elements that have entered the party with Trump’s rise.
An Axios tally of 2020 election deniers so far shows more losses than wins for this faction. This is particularly significant in secretary of state races, given their key roles in elections, where election deniers have gone down in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, one is currently trailing in Arizona, and another is in a dead heat in Nevada.
Maine’s former hard-right governor Paul LePage was easily beaten. Sarah Palin, once the darling of the Republican Party, crashed and burned. Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, a QAnon adherent who opposes the separation of church and state, is fighting for her political life, sitting on the slimmest of slim leads of a little more than a thousand votes, clearly driven by substantial backlash from voters of her own party. Add on to that the way some of the Trump endorsees outlined above have struggled, some of them having to flirt with, then awkwardly distance themselves from, Trump’s election fraud nonsense.
6.) So did centrists.
Republicans’ struggles shouldn’t lead to triumphalism for the Democratic establishment, though, whose corporate-backed centrists didn’t have a sterling night either, for all their claims to electability.
Florida was ground zero for their failure. To compete in the increasingly red state, Democrats ran a set of uninspiring centrists, like Val Demings, who reminded voters constantly that she had been a police chief, and Charlie Crist, a former GOP congressman and three-time election loser who once described himself as “an anti-tax, pro-life, pro-gun Republican.” Both went down in flames.
In Nevada, which has voted blue in the last four presidential cycles, Catherine Cortez Masto has been hanging on for dear life against a Trump ally who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Among the highlights of her recent career are her lack of enthusiasm for raising the minimum wage, her high-profile opposition to canceling student debt, and serving as a well-known and loyal servant for the hard-rock mining industry, on whose behalf she stripped from her party’s major spending bill a provision imposing royalties to pay for their cleanup.
Maybe the most shocking loss was Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney, a five-term incumbent who had effectively squeezed progressive Mondaire Jones out of his House seat. After boasting that his primary win against a progressive insurgent was a win for the “mainstream” and “common sense,” Maloney lost to the Republican in a district that Biden had won by ten points.
In fact, the Democratic establishment in New York as a whole had a disastrous night, with New York governor Kathy Hochul beating her hard-right opponent by the smallest lead in decades, and Democrats collapsing throughout the state. The party’s disastrous showing in what’s typically the bluest of blue states may single-handedly cost Democrats continued control of the House, itself partly the legacy of corporate centrist and former governor Andrew Cuomo’s stranglehold on the state’s politics, as well as Maloney himself and former state party chair Jay Jacobs, whom one Democratic consultant blamed.
7.) A lot of money was wasted.
Core to the Democrats’ own underperformance was the diversion and siphoning of massive sums of money and fundraising energy into high-profile but failing candidates at the expense of more winnable races ignored by the party establishment.
Perennial loser Beto O’Rourke lost his Texas gubernatorial bid by nine points, despite raising a whopping $76 million and outraising his opponent in the final few months of the race. Stacey Abrams failed to beat Republican governor Brian Kemp in Georgia for a second time — this time by nearly eight points, running well behind Raphael Warnock — even though she raised a record-breaking $105 million, more than $20 million more than the incumbent.
Both candidates have uninspiring neoliberal records, but have been kept in national prominence for years by pro-Democratic media for, somewhat absurdly, losing major races. Other centrist candidates we can add to this list are: Demings, who outraised and outspent Marco Rubio to the tune of $65 million; Crist, who had one of the highest Democratic gubernatorial fundraising hauls this cycle ($31 million); and Marcus Flowers, who raised more than $15 million only to lose by thirty points in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Tim Ryan’s surprisingly strong Ohio campaign was left high and dry by the party’s national leadership. So was Jamie McLeod-Skinner, currently locked in a too-close-to-call race for a red-leaning Republican district where she had beaten corporate-backed saboteur Kurt Schrader for the primary, while Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell complained to Jacobin that Barnes could have been put over the top in Wisconsin if he had gotten some added late-hour financial support in the already expensive race.
8.) The party can’t take young people for granted.
If previous election results hadn’t already made it clear, then this election should set it in stone: young people are an integral part of the Democratic coalition and the party can’t keep taking them for granted if it wants to keep winning.
Young voters showed up in higher numbers in six key battleground states, and overall turnout of under-thirties is estimated to be the second-highest in thirty years, after 2018. There are multiple polls that show voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine voting for Democrats at a rate upward of 50 and even 60 percent. In fact, a comparison of CNN’s exit polls this year and 2020 shows the Democrats’ voter share increased among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine ― jumping significantly, in fact, among the twenty-five to twenty-nine range ― while forty-five continues to be the cutoff age for majority Democratic support. In light of this, Biden’s decision to ignore conservative naysayers and sign his (admittedly limited) student debt cancellation executive order ― which sent his approval ratings among this previously unenthusiastic cohort soaring in the immediate aftermath — looks particularly wise.
The GOP is clearly paying attention too, with Ingraham telling Fox viewers the party needed to “win over voters outside our traditional base — that means young people too.” But if Republicans are serious about this, they’ll need to make some major and, for them, uncomfortable changes, if they’re going to attract votes from a generation that’s far more socially liberal, and overwhelmingly concerned with the accelerating threat of climate change, on which the GOP policy is to do everything possible to make the crisis worse.
With all this in mind, there are at least two big questions the results leave us with:
1.) Will the Democrats learn the right lessons?
Already, the Democratic Party is reacting to this less-bad-than-expected result with self-congratulatory back-slapping.
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said Biden was “on the verge of being the most successful Democratic president in a midterm election that we have seen in quite some time.” A Democratic official texted the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein that it showed that “Team Biden was right and actually the economy is good and people love it.” An entire regiment of partisan commentators aren’t just breathing a sigh of relief, but actively celebrating the outcome as a triumph. We’ll have to wait and see what exactly happens with the final tally, but bear in mind that all these responses had come when it was looking like the GOP was headed for a reduced House majority.
This is, to say the least, a bizarre way to react to what was the party’s projected loss of the House and highly uncertain continued control of the Senate. While a smaller House majority — as projected at this stage, anyway — would make it harder for Republicans to enact their agenda, a loss of either chamber, let alone both, will also make it much harder for Biden to govern.
Meanwhile, the GOP and its more extremist elements may have struggled, but it’s been far from a decisive rebuke by the electorate. A fair amount of Trump allies and election deniers have still won, like Johnson in Wisconsin and J. D. Vance in Ohio, while others — like Republican gubernatorial candidates in Arizona and Oregon — are either within striking distance of winning, have mounted the stiffest Republican challenges in some time, or are even leading their races. The “Christian nationalism” movement is alive and well within the GOP, and at least at this stage, the party’s QAnon Caucus, which includes Boebert, looks like it will be returned to Congress. Clearly, under the right economic conditions, it remains entirely possible for the US electorate to send a wave of extreme, antidemocratic candidates to the highest levels of power.
The demographic trends that should be worrying the Democratic Party have continued with this election. If we compare AP VoteCast polling this year and 2020, Democrats’ share of voters earning under $50,000 has declined six points, their share of voters earning between that and $100,000 had fallen four points, and even their share of earners making more than $100,000 has dropped four points. The party is still bleeding voters without college degrees, and saw its support fall among college graduates, too. The GOP, meanwhile, continues to make inroads among black (+6), Latino (+3), Asian (+5), and even Native American (+4) voters. The same trends are evident in CNN’s exit polls from the same year.
There seems to be little introspection around the party’s failure to deliver on its agenda, nor over how overruling the Senate parliamentarian to raise the minimum wage and cap insulin — or simply not having the president sabotage his own agenda for the sake of handshake photo-ops with Republicans ― might have shifted this result. If anti-Republican backlash let Democrats survive this election under such challenging economic conditions, with no real economic message and with voters overwhelmingly concerned with the economy, it’s not out of the question that Biden and the Democrats could’ve done far better this cycle if they’d delivered what they’d promised.
Instead, there’s a real likelihood Democrats will simply take away from this that they can continue to coast on the educated, affluent suburban vote while drumming up fear about the GOP. Ditto for the party’s risky gambit of deliberately promoting seemingly unelectable hard-right candidates in Republican primaries, which seemed to work out this year, but backfired spectacularly in 2016.
2.) Is this the new normal or just this election?
Finally, it’s an open question to what extent these unexpected results are a one-off or herald some kind of new political era. These elections saw unusually high turnout among young voters, a return to ticket-splitting, wild regional variations, an overall surprisingly strong showing for an unpopular president, and results that defy challenging economic conditions. How much of this points to a new normal, and how much of it is specific to the unique conditions of this election, which come in the wake of the Supreme Court’s unpopular gutting of abortion rights, in the midst of a strange mixed bag of an economy, and with the polarizing figure of Trump looming over everything?
These questions will only be answered in the years ahead. What’s certainly true is that with the strong performance of populists like Fetterman, Ryan, the new crop of socialist candidates who are entering Congress next year, and even with Michigan Democrats’ plans to use their new majorities to end “right to work,” we’re getting a preview of one possible future of progressive politics in the United States. It remains to be seen if the Democratic Party as a whole seizes it.
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"To hold their majority, Democrats need to gain the lead in four House races where Republicans are currently ahead - as well as holding on to their own leads, some of which are quite narrow." (image: Christina Animashaun/Vox)
Private consternation reached a public boiling point Friday as lawmakers in both chambers confronted the fallout from Tuesday’s elections
The narrowing path for Republican victory has stunned lawmakers from both parties, freezing plans for legislation and leadership maneuvers as they wait to see who takes control and learn the margins that will dictate which ideological factions wield power. Regardless of the outcome, the lack of a “red wave” marks a devastating outcome for Republicans, who believed they would cruise to a large governing majority in the House and possibly flip the Senate.
The GOP faces a small but real prospect that it may not reclaim the House majority despite high pre-election hopes based on the disapproval of President Biden, record inflation and traditional losses for the party that holds the White House. Late Friday, Democrats moved one Senate seat closer to retaining their majority in the chamber as Sen. Mark Kelly won reelection in Arizona. Winning either in Nevada — which was still counting votes — or in Georgia, where a runoff is set for Dec. 6, would allow them to stay in power.
House Democrats also were closely watching uncalled races in those states, as well races as Maine, Oregon, Washington and California, to determine whether they have a pathway to keep the majority. Even if they don’t, as many Democratic aides expect, there is a recognition from both parties that Democratic votes will be critical in a narrow House GOP majority.
“It’s an unworkable majority. Nothing meaningful will get passed,” a dejected aide to a senior House Republican said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal tensions.
‘Reality is going to be rough’
Outgoing Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) told The Washington Post he knew the evening of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that the GOP would have a difficult time proving to voters they should be in the majority in two years.
“By midnight on January 6, it was obvious that if we continued to sleepwalk down the path of crazy we’d face a rude awakening,” he said. “Instead of facing those facts, the GOP spent the last two years heading in the same direction and actively avoiding any internal reckoning. After Tuesday, we have no choice but to heed voters when they say that ‘the grass is green, the sky is blue, and by the way, you just got your ass handed to you.’ But waking up to that reality is going to be rough.”
House Republicans need to net only five seats to win back the majority, a seemingly easy goal that has proved surprisingly difficult. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which initially had projected winning as many as 30 seats, now sees their majority between 220 and 224 seats, according to three people familiar with the organization’s internal data. That sliver of control would hand GOP leaders what many see as the impossible task of corralling far-right-wing demands while balancing them with the desires of more moderate members.
The first hurdles for a slim House GOP majority are leadership elections and agreeing on conference rules, a showdown that is expected next week. The staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus is calling for a delay to those housekeeping efforts — especially if control of the House is not decided by then.
Members vying for leadership positions need to garner a plurality of votes behind closed doors Tuesday, a threshold McCarthy’s team and several GOP aides believe he will be able to cross to become speaker-in-waiting.
But his destiny is officially determined on Jan. 3, 2023, when he must garner 218 votes on the House floor to become speaker. Getting there has become much more perilous for McCarthy, as he has faced growing opposition from those on the far-right flank of the party.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) told reporters Thursday that McCarthy was not his first choice to lead the conference, echoing calls by Freedom Caucus members to bring forth a challenge to him. In a tweet Friday, Gaetz cited several perceived deficiencies with McCarthy, including his telling other GOP leaders that President Donald Trump should resign in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The Freedom Caucus has long had a list of demands to make of whoever leads the conference, but many members acknowledged earlier this year that their effort to push leaders for concessions would be determined by the margins of a majority. McCarthy had already heard them out on several requests, including returning more legislative power to committees, ending proxy voting, and considering adding a number of Freedom Caucus members to coveted committee assignments, including the influential Steering Committee.
There are other outstanding requests that may appease some, but not all, within the group. Those include putting more members in committee chair positions and having McCarthy publicly back Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.), a staunch Trump ally, as majority whip. But as the expected majority grows slimmer, such demands could irritate more-moderate members, who also hold sway.
McCarthy’s team is confident he will be able to maintain support, citing how he has worked to create relationships with many of his detractors, including members of the Freedom Caucus. McCarthy is seen as open to conversations with his detractors but there are demands he is unlikely to bargain away, including changing the rules to make it much easier to remove the speaker from his or her post.
McCarthy left the Capitol on Friday evening without addressing questions from reporters about his negotiations.
Even if McCarthy exhausts all his bargaining chips, some Republicans acknowledge that the most-fringe members may still vote against him on the floor in January.
Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) has said “no one currently has 218” votes — the number needed to win the speakership in the full chamber. Moreover, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.) have declined to say whether they would support McCarthy.
“There are people who swear upon firstborn children that they’ll never vote for McCarthy,” another aide to a senior Republican lawmaker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations.
Jason Miller, a former Trump White House and campaign official, said Friday that if McCarthy “wants a chance of being speaker, he needs to be much more declarative of supporting President Trump.”
“It’s going to be a MAGA-centric caucus,” he said on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “We need leadership to match.”
But without an alternative, McCarthy’s allies believe he may be able to hold on. The most credible potential alternatives, such as Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.), Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Banks, remain supportive of McCarthy.
Moreover, past speakers have benefited from missed attendance and members voting “present” to lower the majority threshold of 218 to help them clinch the top spot.
A senior Republican Party official, who criticized McCarthy for overhyping election expectations, said that a House Republican majority was a win at the end of the day — no matter the margin of victory. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, added that the party doesn’t need McCarthy to govern an unruly House GOP conference majority or pass any legislation, but needs him to simply unite the conference as a firewall against the Biden administration’s agenda to be a successful speaker.
Senate Republicans want election delay
A group of Senate Republicans on Friday also called for a delay in GOP leadership elections after the party’s failure so far to claim the majority — a move that poses a direct challenge to McConnell.
Six senators — Marco Rubio (Fla.) Rick Scott (Fla.,) Josh Hawley (Mo.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.) — have called for delaying the vote, scheduled for Wednesday, in which McConnell was expected to be reelected in a secret ballot. Hawley suggested waiting until after the Dec. 6 Senate runoff in Georgia, a delay of weeks.
“Holding leadership elections without hearing from the candidates as to how they will perform their leadership duties and before we know whether we will be in the majority or even who all our members are violates the most basic principles of a democratic process,” Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Lee wrote in a letter they circulated to their GOP colleagues, according to Politico.
A Rubio adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the internal dynamics of the caucus, said Republicans are “frustrated” by their lackluster midterms performance, after they hoped to decisively win back the majority on Tuesday. Rubio, who won his race in Florida by a large margin, wants Senate Republicans to figure out “what in the world happened” before they elect their next leaders, the person said.
The Rubio adviser did not rule out that Rubio himself would seek a leadership spot, but said the senator’s focus was on getting Republicans to focus on their policy priorities before deciding who should lead them.
Rubio wrote on Twitter on Friday that the caucus needs someone “genuinely committed” to “fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida.”
Hawley quickly endorsed the idea, writing on Twitter, “I don’t know why Senate GOP would hold a leadership vote for the next Congress before this election is finished.” In addition to the Georgia runoff, ballots are still being counted in Arizona and Nevada.
Spokesmen for McConnell and Scott declined to comment. Email and telephone messages for Lee were not immediately returned.
The rebellion represents the most serious challenge to McConnell’s lengthy leadership tenure and comes after Republicans spent millions of dollars on losing Senate races in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, along with saving GOP candidates in Republican-leaning states like Ohio.
The Senate Leadership Fund PAC, closely associated with McConnell, spent more than $230 million this cycle backing Republicans in races across the country.
In the Senate, McConnell faced criticism from some Republicans in August when he played down the party’s chances of winning control, citing “candidate quality.”
Trump also has repeatedly mocked and criticized McConnell, while pressing Republicans to oust the GOP leader. McConnell recognized Biden’s win in December 2020, angering Trump, and then blamed the former president for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Leadership elections had been set for Wednesday and, so far, no Republican senator has formally announced they would run against McConnell. On Friday, Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), a close ally of McConnell, sent a message to senators directly saying elections are still on for Wednesday.
The Republican Senate leadership votes are done behind closed doors and by secret ballot. McConnell would need only a simple majority to win and he has said he has the votes he needs. If he does win, McConnell will surpass Mike Mansfield’s record for longest stint as party leader in the Senate.
In their letter, Scott and Lee also wrote, “We are all disappointed that a Red Wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” according to Politico. “We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to why and what we can do to improve our chances in 2024.”
In an interview published Friday, Hawley told RealClearPolitics, “I’m not going to support the current leadership in the party,” citing gun control and climate-change legislation. “We surrendered when we should’ve fought.”
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Activists rallying to defend DACA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
Wahabzada, 32, moved to Toronto, where she was born to Afghan refugee parents before they joined extended family in Nevada, where she grew up.
She thought starting over would be exciting, that she’d be busy making new friends, exploring her new surroundings and traveling. Instead, the pandemic shutdown kept her indoors and Wahabzada had to face the full weight of her decision. Lonely and isolated, she wanted to make sure others in her position wouldn’t have the same experience.
“I basically had to confront the consequences,” she said. “But I made myself a promise: If I’m 30 and I still have DACA, I’m going to leave. I can’t wait for an idea. I spent my 20s in this survival mindset and I couldn’t really enjoy life.”
Since 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals has protected from deportation more than 800,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, allowing them to work, drive and travel legally. But the program, which now has fewer than 600,000 enrollees, never offered a pathway to citizenship. It was “a temporary stopgap measure,” then-President Obama said when he introduced DACA in 2012.
A decade later, the program and the lives of many of its enrollees are hanging by a thread. A small but growing number of DACA recipients, disheartened after years of instability, are voluntarily moving to countries where they can acquire permanent legal status. Some, like Wahabzada, are going back to where they were born; others have transferred jobs or applied for student programs in unfamiliar places.
Last year, Wahabzada connected with two other former “Dreamers”: Monsy Hernandez, who now lives in Germany, and Eun Suk “Jason” Hong, who lives in Spain. Together they formed ONWARD, or Our Network for the Wellbeing and Advancement of Relocated Dreamers. On Facebook, the support group has gained several hundred followers since its inception.
“It’s not that we’re encouraging them to leave,” Wahabzada said of DACA recipients. “It’s a big decision. It’s a scary decision. It kind of feels like a stigma to give up on our status. I felt alone on that journey.”
Requirements regarding age, when the person arrived in the U.S., education and criminal history excluded many immigrants when the program initially rolled out. More than 100,000 others have come of age without benefits because they were too young to qualify before DACA became embroiled in litigation and court rulings prevented additional first-time applicants, limiting the program to renewals.
Last month, a federal appeals court affirmed an earlier decision in Texas by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, that found DACA to be illegal. But the ruling kept the protections in place as a lawsuit challenging the program was sent back to the lower court for further proceedings.
The case is anticipated to reach the Supreme Court, where legal experts believe the conservative majority will also rule that the program is illegal.
DACA earlier withstood the Trump administration’s effort to end it when the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the administration had failed to follow proper procedure to do so.
Meanwhile, the program’s beneficiaries have been on an emotional roller coaster, closely following each court hearing and ruling, and breathing sighs of relief every time the program survives another day. Negotiations on congressional efforts to establish permanent residency for DACA recipients haven’t advanced.
After the latest court ruling, advocates increased pressure on the Senate to pass legislation that would permanently protect Dreamers, seeing the lame-duck period after midterm elections as a new opportunity to act.
DACA recipients from across the country will gather in Washington on Wednesday to make their case to members of Congress. Apple, Google and other large U.S. companies and business groups recently wrote a letter to congressional leaders warning that ending DACA would worsen the worker shortage and cost the U.S. economy $11.7 billion annually. Legislation would require at least 10 Republican votes to pass the Senate.
Roberto Gonzales, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has extensively studied DACA, said beneficiaries are frustrated that while the program provided the possibility of upward mobility, their legal status has remained unchanged.
“If they had a choice to adjust their status, overwhelmingly they would,” he said. “Their roots are here, their education is here, their job experience is here, and they know what it would entail to move to another country. But it’s complicated because that’s not their choice. Their future may be more opaque today than it was in 2012.”
Gonzales, who has tracked the experiences of 500 DACA recipients since 2013, said the calculus has changed with the imminent threat that the program could end. Many have told him they are contemplating two separate futures — one in the U.S. and one elsewhere. A few people have already left.
“While many haven’t gone as far as to get visas or apply for jobs, what they’re doing actively is thinking about where they could live,” he said. “This is increasingly at the front of their mind.”
Selene Hernandez, 33, is among those considering a move. Hernandez, who is in a master’s program at Cal State Fullerton and hopes to become a marriage and family therapist, said it’s highly likely that she’ll move back to Mexico within a couple of years of graduating.
Hernandez was 10 when her parents brought her to the U.S. Before DACA, she paid her way through community college and then got a bachelor’s degree at Cal State L.A. She was unable to participate in extracurricular school activities, or apply for a driver’s license, a bank account or a tutoring job. Her first job as a cashier paid less than minimum wage.
The first time she considered leaving was in 2017. She had applied for a study abroad program through advance parole — a provision under DACA that allows beneficiaries to travel legally for school, work or humanitarian reasons — but when Trump terminated DACA and ended the travel benefit, her trip was canceled.
It would’ve been her first time seeing her mother, who had returned to Mexico after she divorced Hernandez’s father, since she was 18.
Last year, Hernandez finally was able to visit. Earlier this year, she went back again for two months.
She researched what her life could look like if she moved there. She visited the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was shocked to learn tuition is free. She pictured herself opening a therapy practice.
“I felt free. This is my country, this is where I was born, these are my people, they speak my language. It just felt very much like home,” she said. “That’s when it kind of hit me: I can live here.”
Coming back to the U.S., Hernandez said she felt trapped. She started saving money and asked her father, who also lives in Los Angeles, if he would sell her his house near Mexico City. She told her friends about her plan.
Hernandez said she feels fortunate to have a job she loves, a career she’s excited about and a generally happy life. But she misses her mother and younger brother in Mexico.
“I feel I’ve done my part,” she said. “I’ve been a good citizen, I’ve done things right, and yet here I am with a two-year membership to this country. I can’t keep fighting the system.”
Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the rise of remote work expanded the possibility for many people to live far away from their jobs. But for DACA recipients, deciding to leave the U.S. involves considering multiple complicating factors, including cost, the possibility of a job transfer, personal connections to the other country and whether the recipient has U.S.-born children or other family to take into account.
Another significant factor is whether a recipient is able to return to the U.S. to visit loved ones. Immigrants who leave the U.S. after entering without authorization are penalized. For example, a person who has lived in the U.S. for six months to a year is barred from returning for three years, and someone who stays longer than a year is barred for 10 years. For the most part, Gelatt said, Dreamers have stayed put in the U.S.
Wahabzada is among those affected by the ban. She especially misses her mother, who is still hopeful for immigration reform, and the grandmother who helped raise her. She doesn’t know when she’ll see them next.
But she has no regrets about her decision to leave her home in Washington, D.C., and continue her work remotely for a global development organization. She said it’s a privilege to keep her job and stay in the same time zone in a city where she has extended family.
Before leaving, she wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times. The headline: “No need to deport me. This Dreamer’s dream is dead.”
“I was so jaded at that point,” she said. “A lot of my friends said, ‘You’re leaving right before the election — what if something happens after?’ But waiting for an idea is kind of self-destructive.”
Wahabzada said her status no longer feels like a burden. A few months after arriving in Canada, she came across an article about another Dreamer who had self-deported and reached out to him. It was Hong, who moved to Spain.
Hong became a DACA recipient his senior year of college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied finance. He landed a job at a life insurance company and felt like he could finally start building a successful future. But when Trump decided to end the program, he said, “that’s when I first realized my life is actually not in my control.”
Hong had considered pursuing a master’s degree in the U.S., but he started looking elsewhere. In 2018, he found a business school in Madrid where he could enroll for a fraction of the cost he would’ve otherwise paid.
Realizing he knew of no one else in his situation, he got cold feet and deferred his enrollment for a year. Then he read Wahabzada’s op-ed, which provided the confidence he needed to leave.
Hong said he’s glad he can now offer support to others. But his feeling of fulfillment is mixed with unease.
“Every time I go into Facebook and see a notification that a person wants to join our group, it’s really sad,” he said.
“Usually when there’s a number-of-followers increase, it’s something to be happy about. Not for this one. We know exactly how that feels.”
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A woman takes a selfie at the COP27 climate summit in the Green Zone in Sharm el-Sheikh. (photo: Mohamed Abd El-Ghany/Reuters)
Security analysts warn smartphone app for Sharm el-Sheikh climate talks could be used for spying as it has ‘highly intrusive’ access to locations, conversations and images.
About 35,000 people are expected to attend the two-week climate conference in Egypt, and the app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times on Google Play, including by officials from France, Germany and Canada.
Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology developed the app for the summit’s delegates.
It is meant to assist attendees in smoothly navigating the conference, but “the government of Egypt may have weaponised the app and now has the ability to surveil all of the summit attendees”, David Bader, an expert in data science and cybersecurity, told Al Jazeera.
Analysts warn the COP27 app can extensively monitor the user’s movement and communications, and is able to read users’ email and encrypted messages, record phone conversations, and even scan the entire device for sensitive information.
Bader noted while the developer states the app does not collect data: “Surprisingly the app does have the strange ability to access the user’s name, phone number and email address, all of the user’s email – with the ridiculous explanation for ‘app functionality’ and one’s photos for ‘account management’.
“Would you want a stranger accessing your private photos, let alone a foreign government?” Bader said, warning there could be more clandestinely going on with the app.
No ‘smoking gun’ on data collection
The majority of apps ask permission to access various aspects of a smartphone, including location for GPS functions or cameras for social media, but users need to be cautious, said Kevin Curran, professor of cybersecurity at Ulster University.
“One has to ask whether each of these permissions are necessary,” Curran said, describing the COP27 app as “highly intrusive”.
“In this case, it is difficult to identify a smoking gun. What we cannot ascertain is whether the Egyptian government is using this for data collection,” Curran told Al Jazeera.
He noted, however, the app could continue to provide information on users even after the climate conference ends on November 18.
‘Refuted completely’
According to an analysis of the app by American media group Politico, it can monitor communications even when the device is in sleep mode.
Egypt’s COP27 ambassador Wael Aboulmagd denounced the speculation, telling reporters a cybersecurity assessment was completed and, “I was told how unlikely, or physically or technically impossible” it would be to use the app so intrusively.
Since it is available on Google Play and the Apple Store, those companies “would never allow that” because of security protocols, he added.
“There has been a cybersecurity assessment done and it refuted that completely,” said Aboulmagd.
But Bader warned delegates with the app on their phones remain vulnerable. “Intelligence may be gathered not just about their positions on climate change, but also on trade negotiations, political activities and military operations,” he said.
Some rights activists have criticised the decision for Egypt to host COP27, citing a long track record of cracking down on political dissent. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have been jailed.
A number of attendees have shared that the WiFi at the climate conference blocks access to websites such as Human Rights Watch and Egypt’s independent outlet Mada Masr, as well as Al Jazeera.
For those concerned about the COP27 app, cybersecurity experts recommend using a “burner phone”, or secondary device, while being aware their conversations and other communications could be monitored.
Those who already have the app should uninstall it as a first step, they say.
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"Grizzly reintroduction in the North Cascades became a hot issue in the Northwest." (photo: Janko Ferlic/Unsplash)
The plan to reintroduce bears to North Cascades National Park could eventually see the grizzly population grow to about 200.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced Thursday they have restarted the on-again, off-again process to reintroduce grizzlies to North Cascades National Park.
“This is a first step toward bringing balance back to the ecosystem and restoring a piece of the Pacific Northwest’s natural and cultural heritage,” North Cascades Superintendent Don Striker said in a news release. “With the public’s help we will evaluate a list of options to determine the best path forward.”
Grizzly reintroduction in the North Cascades became a hot issue in the Northwest and during the Trump administration, when restoration plans were subject to changing political whims.
Federal agencies started a public planning process to reintroduce the bears in 2015, but it was suspended in 2017 by Ryan Zinke, then the secretary of the interior during the Trump administration. In 2019, Zinke reversed course and reopened a new public comment period. A year later, the new interior secretary, David Bernhardt, shuttered the process once again, with little explanation.
The Center for Biological Diversity in 2020 sued over the Trump administration’s halt to the federal grizzly restoration effort. The lawsuit continues.
Grizzlies haven’t been spotted with certainty in the North Cascades since 1996, the National Park Service said in a news release. Hunters and government agents killed thousands of bears, once found throughout the region, for fur and to remove them from the region entirely, the Center for Biological Diversity said in court filings.
“It wasn’t a lack of habitat. It wasn’t a lack of food or other resources. People killed them,” said Jason Ransom, who leads the wildlife program at North Cascades National Park. “The North Cascades is one of the largest wilderness areas in the Lower 48. There’s lots of real estate for bears to occupy.”
But in the past 10 years, there have been four confirmed grizzly sightings in the North Cascades, all across the Canadian border, the court filings say.
Ransom said that a few bears might be wandering the woods but that there aren’t enough to be considered a viable population and that there’s little chance bears from other regions could travel far enough to jump-start populations.
“The population is functionally extirpated, which means there’s not enough reproduction going on for there to be any long-term grizzly population on both sides of the border,” Ransom said.
The North Cascades is one of six areas where the federal government is looking to restore the grizzlies.
The federal agencies will evaluate several options to restore bear populations as part of an environmental impact statement process.
The agency outlined a preliminary plan to create an “experimental population” by adding three to seven captured grizzly bears to the North Cascades for five to 10 years, with a goal of building an initial population up to about 25 bears. The bears would be captured and transported from interior British Columbia or Northwest Montana, according to a notice about the proposal.
After that, the agencies would manage the bear population, expecting the bears’ population to grow to about 200 in another 60 to 100 years.
Ransom said restoring grizzlies would enhance biodiversity and could make the ecosystem more resilient to future changes.
The agencies’ proposal surprised the group suing over the 2020 halt.
“We had no idea this announcement today was going to be made,” said Andrea Zaccardi, the carnivore conservation legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re pleasantly surprised they’re reconsidering augmenting the population. It does make for a very long road again to start from scratch, pretty much.”
Grizzlies have been a popular and divisive topic.
The previous federal efforts to restore bears in the North Cascades drew about 143,000 public comments combined, Ransom said.
Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse, who represents rural central and eastern Washington communities, has opposed restoring grizzly populations in the past and indicated he would do so again.
“My constituents and I have consistently opposed proposals to do so under multiple administrations because introducing an apex predator to the area would threaten the families, wildlife, and livestock of North Central Washington,” Newhouse said in a statement Thursday.
The National Park Service has scheduled several virtual meetings to discuss the proposal. A final decision could take years.
CORRECTION (Nov. 11, 2022, 11:30 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated one of the services helping to reintroduce grizzly bears. It is the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, not the U.S. Forest Service.
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