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Here is what seems to be the USC Marshall School of Business Dean’s response about the controversy:
September 6, 2020
Dear Marshall alumni and friends,
I wanted to take a moment to clarify my message to students at the Marshall School. It was absolutely not my intention to cast any aspersions on specific Mandarin words or on Mandarin generally.
The student complaints we received had nothing to do with the Mandarin language but focused on the use of a polarizing example Professor Patton used when trying to make a reasonable and important point about communication. In his apology to students, he noted he could have chosen a better example to illustrate his point. With Professor Patton’s agreement, he did not finish his accelerated course for our MBA students that ended last week. We are now following standard university procedures to explore the complaints students have raised.
Since I began my tenure at USC Marshall just two months ago, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the school’s ongoing and future globalization efforts. USC Marshall is blessed with students, faculty and staff from many countries and cultures. I want nothing more than to build relationships with all members of the Trojan family, including and especially the extensive network in Asia.
One of the reasons I am so thrilled to be dean is that the Marshall community is committed to developing and strengthening a learning environment that values greater cultural understanding, one in which all members feel seen, heard, and valued. We respect and honor unconditionally all languages and cultures of our students, faculty and staff and believe each has an important place in our community.
And here is the USC Provost’s response:
September 6, 2020
Dear Marshall alumni and friends,
I wanted to take a moment to clarify my message to students at the Marshall School. It was absolutely not my intention to cast any aspersions on specific Mandarin words or on Mandarin generally.
The student complaints we received had nothing to do with the Mandarin language but focused on the use of a polarizing example Professor Patton used when trying to make a reasonable and important point about communication. In his apology to students, he noted he could have chosen a better example to illustrate his point. With Professor Patton’s agreement, he did not finish his accelerated course for our MBA students that ended last week. We are now following standard university procedures to explore the complaints students have raised.
Since I began my tenure at USC Marshall just two months ago, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the school’s ongoing and future globalization efforts. USC Marshall is blessed with students, faculty and staff from many countries and cultures. I want nothing more than to build relationships with all members of the Trojan family, including and especially the extensive network in Asia.
One of the reasons I am so thrilled to be dean is that the Marshall community is committed to developing and strengthening a learning environment that values greater cultural understanding, one in which all members feel seen, heard, and valued. We respect and honor unconditionally all languages and cultures of our students, faculty and staff and believe each has an important place in our community.
It seems to me, though, that the statements don’t really discuss the core problem here. Prof. Garrett was talking about business communication, and in particular about filler words (“um,” “er,” and the like). In the process, he gave an example not from Albanian (to give some arbitrarily selected language), but from the most widely spoken native language in the world, and one with which Prof. Garrett—as an expert on business in China—was understandably quite familiar.
That word, often transliterated “neige,” sounds somewhat like the English-language slur “nigger.” But to the extent that this is “polarizing” because it upsets some students, it is the job of USC to teach those students that they should not be upset by such accidents of language. Rather, they should be taught that business school graduates should expect to hear this word if they ever find themselves around Chinese speakers, and to react to it without upset.
Instead, USC concluded that this incident should lead to an utterly extraordinary remedy (whether or not truly voluntary on the professor’s part): replacing the professor a third of the way through the course. That’s not just a message that the professor gave an example that “could have been better chosen” (even if one agrees that a different example should have been chosen). Normally, in such a situation of simply an ill-chosen example, the professor would simply say “Sorry, I could have chosen a better example.”
Rather, the message is that the professor did something very wrong indeed—that English-speaking listeners should rightly treat ordinary use of “neige” when talking about Chinese as a grave offense, rather than catching themselves and saying to themselves “Oh, wait, this is Chinese, of course this is just an accidental homonym.” And implicit in that is the message that Chinese speakers should watch what they say, not just in examples but in ordinary conversation that could be overheard, or risk being pushed into similarly extraordinary (even if supposedly “voluntar[y]”) remedies for acting in an “[ill-]chosen” or “polarizing” way.
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In May 2016, President Trump released his first short list for the Supreme Court. At the time, I was cautiously optimistic about the eleven names on the list. There were two names missing from that list: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. At the time, those omissions did not bother me. But it surely bothered these two judges, and their boosters. In September 2016, Trump added ten more names to the list, bringing the total to twenty-one. Neil Gorsuch was added to the list. Brett Kavanaugh was not. In January 2017, Trump nominated Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Fast forward to November 25, 2017, President Trump added five new names to the list. Now, Kavanaugh was added to the list. At this point, it was obvious why the five other names were added: to bring Kavanaugh into the fold. And after Justice Kennedy retired in June 2018, Kavanaugh was tapped to the Supreme Court.
As of yesterday, there were (by my count) twenty-four people on the short-list. Now, President Trump has added another twenty people. We are up to 44 candidates for zero, one, or maybe two vacancies. Frankly, at this point, the list does not make a difference. If Trump wants to add someone who is not on the list, he will simply put out a new list, as he did with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
I will sort the twenty potential nominees by category.
First, there are 10 Trump-appointed federal judges:
Second, there are three sitting Senators:
Third, there are four current and former members of the Trump Administration:
Fourth, there are two current state officers:
Fifth, there is a category of one:
Several of the Circuit Court judges warrant inclusion. Others are premature. And there are glaring omissions.
From the Fifth Circuit, I heartily endorse Judges Duncan and Ho. But where is Judge Oldham? He is going to be a giant on the federal courts for decades. Judge Phipps has been quite impressive on the Third Circuit. Judge Matey as well.
From the 11th Circuit, I do not know enough about Judge Lagoa to make an informed decision. The only opinion of hers that I have read concerned the recusal motion.
From the Ninth Circuit, I have known Judge VanDyke for some time, and think highly of him. But after his contentious confirmation hearing, I am skeptical that higher office is in his cards. But Nevada might be a swing state. Same for Arizona, which I think explains Judge Bade’s inclusion. I frankly do not know much about her. There are many other deserving candidates from the Ninth Circuit, including Patrick Bumatay. He has written sophisticated originalist opinions. Alas, California is not in play, and his name doesn’t add anything to the diversity of the list (but Googling him would).
Why Judge Pitlyk but not Judge Walker? They were both Kavanaugh clerks who spent a brief period on the District Court. McConnell is certainly grooming Walker for the Supreme Court. Maybe the President did not want more picks from the swampy D.C. Circuit? I’m sure Mitch was none too pleased.
Judge Katsas absolutely warrants inclusion. (His arguments from NFIB v. Sebelius may win the ACA case this term.) But the most glaring omission from the list is Neomi Rao. It is painfully obvious why she was omitted: Josh Hawley tried to kill her candidacy. And he succeeded. Here, Trump has kowtowed to Hawley, and even added him to the list! Hawley has already said he has no interest in the Supreme Court. There is perhaps one possible silver lining here. Rao might be viable for a future Republican administration, as she was not tainted by the Trump list.
The most perplexing addition is Paul Clement. At 54, he is nearly two decades older than some of the other judges. By all accounts, Clement could have been added to any of the earlier lists. But he wasn’t. I can think of two explanations. First, Trump really wants to nominate Clement, and simply added the other nineteen names as filler. Trump made a similar move in November 2017 to bring Kavanaugh into the fold. I find a second option more appealing: Trump is grooming Clement to be his next Attorney General if Barr has to step down. Clement is the perfect pick. He is respected by the left and the right, and could easily skate through a confirmation hearing.
At bottom, I give this list two cheers. Judges Ho, Duncan, Katsas, and Phipps are all viable selections for the Thomas seat. But we all know who will replace the Notorious RBG.
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In May 2016, President Trump released his first short list for the Supreme Court. At the time, I was cautiously optimistic about the eleven names on the list. There were two names missing from that list: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. At the time, those omissions did not bother me. But it surely bothered these two judges, and their boosters. In September 2016, Trump added ten more names to the list, bringing the total to twenty-one. Neil Gorsuch was added to the list. Brett Kavanaugh was not. In January 2017, Trump nominated Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Fast forward to November 25, 2017, President Trump added five new names to the list. Now, Kavanaugh was added to the list. At this point, it was obvious why the five other names were added: to bring Kavanaugh into the fold. And after Justice Kennedy retired in June 2018, Kavanaugh was tapped to the Supreme Court.
As of yesterday, there were (by my count) twenty-four people on the short-list. Now, President Trump has added another twenty people. We are up to 44 candidates for zero, one, or maybe two vacancies. Frankly, at this point, the list does not make a difference. If Trump wants to add someone who is not on the list, he will simply put out a new list, as he did with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
I will sort the twenty potential nominees by category.
First, there are 10 Trump-appointed federal judges:
Second, there are three sitting Senators:
Third, there are four current and former members of the Trump Administration:
Fourth, there are two current state officers:
Fifth, there is a category of one:
Several of the Circuit Court judges warrant inclusion. Others are premature. And there are glaring omissions.
From the Fifth Circuit, I heartily endorse Judges Duncan and Ho. But where is Judge Oldham? He is going to be a giant on the federal courts for decades. Judge Phipps has been quite impressive on the Third Circuit. Judge Matey as well.
From the 11th Circuit, I do not know enough about Judge Lagoa to make an informed decision. The only opinion of hers that I have read concerned the recusal motion.
From the Ninth Circuit, I have known Judge VanDyke for some time, and think highly of him. But after his contentious confirmation hearing, I am skeptical that higher office is in his cards. But Nevada might be a swing state. Same for Arizona, which I think explains Judge Bade’s inclusion. I frankly do not know much about her. There are many other deserving candidates from the Ninth Circuit, including Patrick Bumatay. He has written sophisticated originalist opinions. Alas, California is not in play, and his name doesn’t add anything to the diversity of the list (but Googling him would).
Why Judge Pitlyk but not Judge Walker? They were both Kavanaugh clerks who spent a brief period on the District Court. McConnell is certainly grooming Walker for the Supreme Court. Maybe the President did not want more picks from the swampy D.C. Circuit? I’m sure Mitch was none too pleased.
Judge Katsas absolutely warrants inclusion. (His arguments from NFIB v. Sebelius may win the ACA case this term.) But the most glaring omission from the list is Neomi Rao. It is painfully obvious why she was omitted: Josh Hawley tried to kill her candidacy. And he succeeded. Here, Trump has kowtowed to Hawley, and even added him to the list! Hawley has already said he has no interest in the Supreme Court. There is perhaps one possible silver lining here. Rao might be viable for a future Republican administration, as she was not tainted by the Trump list.
The most perplexing addition is Paul Clement. At 54, he is nearly two decades older than some of the other judges. By all accounts, Clement could have been added to any of the earlier lists. But he wasn’t. I can think of two explanations. First, Trump really wants to nominate Clement, and simply added the other nineteen names as filler. Trump made a similar move in November 2017 to bring Kavanaugh into the fold. I find a second option more appealing: Trump is grooming Clement to be his next Attorney General if Barr has to step down. Clement is the perfect pick. He is respected by the left and the right, and could easily skate through a confirmation hearing.
At bottom, I give this list two cheers. Judges Ho, Duncan, Katsas, and Phipps are all viable selections for the Thomas seat. But we all know who will replace the Notorious RBG.
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President Donald Trump has admitted in a series of interviews with veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he downplayed the threat of COVID-19 despite knowing that it would cause considerable harm.
On February 7, Trump emphasized that the novel coronavirus was “deadly stuff.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said on a taped call with Woodward. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
Contrast that with Trump’s remarks later that month: “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year,” he said at a briefing on February 26. “That was shocking to me. And so far if you look at what we have with the 15 people, and they are recovering.” On March 6, he said he “didn’t know people died from the flu.”
According to Trump, the move was strategic. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward mid-March. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
That defense—that he did so on purpose for good reason—has already caught on in some circles. “When media accused Trump of downplaying the virus, he publicly and repeatedly said he was doing so to avoid a panic,” tweeted Charlie Spiering, a correspondent for Breitbart News.
But it remains unclear how lying to the American public and deliberately propagating wrong information, even if it cultivates some false sense of security, is a winning strategy. Just last month, the president said that just 9,000 people had died from COVID-19.
The short-sightedness of such an approach is reflected not only in Trump’s public statements but also in how he approached the virus from a policy perspective in its nascent stages.
Consider Trump’s March 13 announcement that he would pave the way for a public-private partnership to create a robust testing program, as private labs were having difficulty navigating burdensome Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. The decision was a good one but could have been made earlier had Trump chosen to be frank with the American people.
“Our capacity to identify potential outbreaks of #coronavirus early, and intervene to prevent spread, is well served by expanding access to the PCR [Polymerase Chain Reaction] based test for the virus,” tweeted former FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb on February 2. “The test is based on a common Roche platform, and is a fairly routine technology.”
Also in February, Trump privately admitted to Woodward that the virus would pose a menacing threat. But the president did not shepherd the Roche test, which is particularly efficient at screening for the virus, through FDA approval until that March 13 press conference, hamstringing the country’s ability to get ahead of the problem.
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President Donald Trump has admitted in a series of interviews with veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he downplayed the threat of COVID-19 despite knowing that it would cause considerable harm.
On February 7, Trump emphasized that the novel coronavirus was “deadly stuff.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said on a taped call with Woodward. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
Contrast that with Trump’s remarks later that month: “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year,” he said at a briefing on February 26. “That was shocking to me. And so far if you look at what we have with the 15 people, and they are recovering.” On March 6, he said he “didn’t know people died from the flu.”
According to Trump, the move was strategic. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward mid-March. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
That defense—that he did so on purpose for good reason—has already caught on in some circles. “When media accused Trump of downplaying the virus, he publicly and repeatedly said he was doing so to avoid a panic,” tweeted Charlie Spiering, a correspondent for Breitbart News.
But it remains unclear how lying to the American public and deliberately propagating wrong information, even if it cultivates some false sense of security, is a winning strategy. Just last month, the president said that just 9,000 people had died from COVID-19.
The short-sightedness of such an approach is reflected not only in Trump’s public statements but also in how he approached the virus from a policy perspective in its nascent stages.
Consider Trump’s March 13 announcement that he would pave the way for a public-private partnership to create a robust testing program, as private labs were having difficulty navigating burdensome Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. The decision was a good one but could have been made earlier had Trump chosen to be frank with the American people.
“Our capacity to identify potential outbreaks of #coronavirus early, and intervene to prevent spread, is well served by expanding access to the PCR [Polymerase Chain Reaction] based test for the virus,” tweeted former FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb on February 2. “The test is based on a common Roche platform, and is a fairly routine technology.”
Also in February, Trump privately admitted to Woodward that the virus would pose a menacing threat. But the president did not shepherd the Roche test, which is particularly efficient at screening for the virus, through FDA approval until that March 13 press conference, hamstringing the country’s ability to get ahead of the problem.
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The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center keeps track of the COVID-19 pandemic data reported from most of the countries in the world. One common way to measure how countries are handling the coronavirus relative to one another is to compare their COVID-19 mortality rates per 100,000 people. In that respect, the U.S., at 57.97 per 100,000, is doing better than the Belgium, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Italy, with rates at 86.78, 62.68, 63.34, 60.85, and 58.85 respectively. On the other hand, the COVID-19 mortality rates in Sweden, France, Canada, Germany, and South Korea currently stand at 57.33, 45.93, 24.83, 11.26, and 0.67 respectively.
Another oft-cited statistic is that the U.S., with just 4 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 24 percent of the world’s diagnosed COVID-19 cases and 22 percent of the deaths attributed to the disease. Based on these figures, the U.S. has not been all that great at mitigating the pandemic.
During an interview last week on the BBC Newshour, President Trump’s new coronavirus epidemic adviser Dr. Scott Adams more or less dismissed these figures as misleading and instead pointed to excess deaths as the better way to measure a country’s success in responding to the coronavirus. And he has a point, to some extent.
A September 1 article in Nature noted that during outbreaks of disease, researchers need to tally deaths rapidly. To do so, they usually turn to a blunt but reliable metric: excess mortality. “It’s a comparison of expected deaths with ones that actually happened, and, to many scientists, it’s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic,” explained Nature.
Using death data from 32 countries and four major cities, the Nature article observed that by the end of July, diagnosed COVID-19 deaths across the 32 countries and four major cities numbered 413,041, whereas the figure for total excess deaths stood at 593,344. A small proportion of excess deaths are an indirect result of the conditions created by the impact of the pandemic—people missing cancer treatments or failing to go to emergency rooms during a heart attack—rather than because of the virus itself. On the other hand, deaths may decline due to fewer traffic accidents and increased social distancing.
At the beginning of his interview with Trump adviser Atlas, the BBC Newshour presenter asked Atlas about his credentials and credibility.
“I am a total straight shooter,” responded Atlas. “I am a very direct blunt speaker. I am not shy about saying the truth. I will never say something that I do not believe is correct, period.”
The Newshour interviewer then went on to point out that “America’s record is much worse than other countries, 4 percent of the world’s population, a quarter of the confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.”
Atlas’ response was scathing:
You know what that’s a completely incorrect assessment of what’s happening. The only really legitimate way to compare countries is, if you really want to get down to it, it’s something that most epidemiologists understand. And that is something called excess mortality. And what that means is comparing deaths this year, during the pandemic, compared to your baseline, your country’s baseline. And the facts are the following: Europe has done 28 percent worse than the United States in excess mortality. No one talks about this. This is a quantitative appropriate epidemiologic criterion here, excess mortality. It’s really sort of, again, an example of how a sloppy thinking and really amateurish thinking has somehow come to the fore here. This is not a political issue. You have to use the facts. When you read the data you have to know what you’re talking about when you make a statement like that.
As it happens, Atlas’ boss has made several similar assertions in the past month. At an August 11 White House press briefing, the president asserted, “Europe has experienced a nearly 40 percent higher excess mortality rate than the United States.” At an August 17 campaign speech, he once again said, “Europe, by contrast, has experienced a 40 percent higher rate of excess mortality than the United States. Think about that, you don’t hear those stories, they don’t tell you that.” More recently during an August 19 briefing, the president lowered his claim saying that “excess mortality in Europe this year is 33 percent higher than the United States.”
So has Europe done some percent worse than the U.S. in excess mortality? British statisticians Janine Aron and John Muellbauer took a look at the data at the request of Factcheck.org, and find the comparison of excess deaths somewhat misleading.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) calculations, between Feb. 1 and Aug. 8, there have been between 174,930 and 235,728 excess deaths across the country, for a midpoint value of 205,329 deaths.
In comparison, through week 33 of this year, or Aug. 16, 204,634 excess deaths occurred in 24 European countries or parts of countries, according to estimates by EuroMOMO, a group monitoring mortality trends in Europe.
The two numbers—which are about equal—need to be adjusted for population, which reveals that there are 665 excess deaths per million people for the covered European area, compared with 622 excess deaths per million in the U.S., using the midpoint CDC value.
That works out to Europe having around 7 percent more excess deaths per million than the U.S. The percentage rises as high as 26 percent if the lower CDC value is used. Perhaps it is from this calculation that Atlas derives his comparison figure. On the other hand, if the upper-end CDC estimate is used, then the U.S.’s excess mortality rate is 7 percent higher than that of the E.U.
In the Nature article, University of California, Irvine demographer Andrew Noymer noted that people in his field will probably never know the pandemic’s final toll with certainty. “We haven’t even settled on how many people died in the 1918 flu,” said Noymer. “And we’ve had 100 years to sort out the numbers.”
In the meantime, citing only one of a range of calculations that just happen to make your boss look better may not be “sloppy thinking and really amateurish thinking,” but it certainly is “a political issue.”
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In the time of a global pandemic, soaring unemployment, massive wildfires, and racial strife, it feels like the world is going to hell.
It’s not, says Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, the coauthor (with HumanProgress.org’s Marian Tupy) of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting. “In 1820,” Bailey tells Nick Gillespie, “84 percent of the world’s population lived on [the equivalent of] less than $1.90 a day. It took 160 years for that to get down to only 41 percent. But since then, it’s now below 10 percent…and we’ll probably be 5% or less by 2030.”
Bailey’s new book also shows that forests are increasing in size, deaths from natural disasters are declining, and there are fewer autocratic governments than ever. He believes climate change will become a significant problem, but one that can be handled with technology and economic growth. The main reasons for massive and persistent progress are better ideas for organizing human society. “Basically,” he says, “the Enlightenment happened.” With that came the rise of representative government, property rights and markets, and especially a belief in free speech and open inquiry that are essential for technological and social innovation.
If improvements are so ubiquitous, why don’t we recognize it more? Bailey argues that politicians and media outlets have vested interests in focusing on bad news and that humans have a “glitch” that leads us to take progress as a given. “We just take it for granted, he says. “What we’re trying to do with this book is to not let people take it for granted and [remind them], this is what has happened. And look to the future. If we keep the same institutions that enabled this, then much more of it will happen in the future.”
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Turns out President Donald Trump has good reason to be playing rhetorical footsie with former supporters of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson supporters—the road to his re-election may well be blocked by those 7.8 million Americans who voted third-party and independent in 2016.
“The combined national NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls from this year,” reported NBC News last week, “have interviewed 215 voters who said they backed either [Gary] Johnson or [Jill] Stein in 2016….Forty-seven percent say they’re voting for [Joe] Biden, 20 percent are supporting Trump, and 33 percent are unsure or say they’re backing another candidate.”
That sample size is very small, but the implications are potentially huge, and in line with several other indicators about third-party voters over the past two years. If you crudely assigned 47 percent of the 5,946,559 Johnson/Stein voters to Biden, 20 percent to Trump, and otherwise kept the same totals for the major-party candidates from 2016, suddenly the Democrat is winning 50.2 percent of the popular vote, and the Republican is 4.47 million votes behind. And oh yeah, at least two-thirds of the third party vote goes POOF!
That’s not how life works in the real world, of course, but there’s plenty of other supporting evidence for the theory that the indie vote will collapse, in ways not friendly to the incumbent. To wit:
* The 2018 midterm congressional elections, which featured the highest voter turnout in a century, surpassed almost all expectations for Democrats while being strikingly brutal for third-party and independent candidates.
* Exit polls of Johnson and Stein voters in 2016, while showing a much higher propensity for just sitting out any contest without smaller-party alternatives, nonetheless tilted more positively toward Hillary Clinton. “[We] asked voters [who] they would have cast ballots for if there were only two candidates (Clinton and Trump),” CBS News wrote at the time. “A quarter of Johnson voters said Clinton, 15 percent said Trump, and 55 percent said they would not have voted. Numbers were similar for Stein voters, with about a quarter saying they would have chosen Clinton, 14 percent saying Trump, and 61 percent saying they would not have voted.”
* One of the main reasons why the 2020 race has been so unusually stable, especially compared to 2016, with very few polling zig-zags and a steady Biden lead, is that the number of undecided voters has been much lower. The electorate is engaged (by the derision of the other candidate/party as much as anything) and knows who it’s voting for.
* Four years ago this week, even in the immediate wake of the “Aleppo moment,” Gary Johnson was polling nationally at 9 percent. The 2020 Libertarian nominee, Jo Jorgensen, has polled between 1 percent and 3 percent in each national survey (and all but a couple of state polls), for the past month.
* Meanwhile, Jorgensen has led or been tied with all other non-major candidates—the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, the Constitution Party’s Don Blankenship, rap superstar Kanye West—in every poll taken since August. Support for third-party candidates in 2020 has yet to exceed a combined 5 percent; in 2016 the combined vote for candidates not named Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton was 5.73 percent.
* And don’t forget that polling almost always exaggerates third-party support by at least one-third; Johnson’s final-day polling last time was 4.8 percent, and he ended up with just under 3.3 percent.
* Unlike the Libertarians, who again managed to get on all 50 state ballots plus the District of Columbia, the Green Party is lagging in ballot access in 2020, with just 30 states plus D.C. so far, compared to 44 in 2016.
* According to the Washington Post‘s David Weigel, “At the start of August, Jorgensen had raised less than $1.4 million, on track for far less than the $12 million the Johnson/Weld ticket raised in 2016. A spokesman for Hawkins said he had raised ‘over $300,000’ for his Green Party bid, less than 10 percent of what Stein raised by the end of her 2016 campaign.”
* Third-party presidential totals are cyclical—spike years (1992, 1968, 1948) tend to be followed by a comparative collapse, particularly if the two-party contest was close. Last election was the biggest third-party year since 1996, and the most controversial election since 2000 (which also saw a steep dropoff in third-party enthusiasm four years later). The fundamentals are just bad this year, which is one of many reason that—as predicted—no big-name outsiders swooped in for the Libertarian and Green nominations, nor mounted anything like an organized independent run.
The expected third-party contraction, and projected benefit to Biden, does not mean that Jo Jorgensen or maybe even a lower-polling candidate won’t beat the margin of victory in a battleground state, including one that may go for Trump. Just today, the Libertarian pulled 4 percent in a Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin, site of the narrowest Trump victory in 2016.
But if the president truly believes that the 2020 defectors from the Johnson/Bill Weld ticket (including Weld himself) are “all Republican voters,” let alone that “they have to vote for us,” he is in for a rude surprise come November.
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