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In Hillary Rodham Clintons most recent autobiography, What Happened, the former first lady, US secretary of state and presidential nominee writes: My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. The third time I said yes. And Id do it again.

But what if Hillary hadnt married Bill? What would have happened then? These questions are explored with gusto and flair in Curtis Sittenfelds brilliant new book, Rodham, her sixth novel. From her home in Minnesota, Minneapolis, via Zoom, the author of the wildly successful debut novel Prep explains her motivation for a book which so boldly rewrites recent American political history.

I do think the book is, in part, intended to change the outcome of the 2016 election, which I was, you know, horrified by. At this point, maybe I wasnt sufficiently horrified by it, she says referencing recent events in her country and the ongoing Trumpocalypse. There are some people who are so distressed by what happened in 2016 that they might not be able to read a book with Hillary on the cover but those, actually, are the people who would be sort of comforted by it.

Shes right. If you went to bed with, or woke up to, news of Donald Trumps election victory and were distraught by the outcome, as many were, Rodham is nothing short of a soothing read. (Those who were happy that Clinton narrowly lost out to Trump, may have a very different experience reading this book.)

Rodham offers the reader an alternative narrative, a chance to ponder how events might have turned out had the famous couple passed through Sittenfelds exquisitely drawn sliding doors. At one point in the book, Sittenfelds imagined Hillary says isnt there a song about thanking God for unanswered prayers . . . is there a parallel universe where I married Bill and if there is, did we stay married?

The genesis of the idea came from a story Sittenfeld wrote for Esquire magazine called The Nominee, six months before the 2016 election.

If Hillary had become president I wouldnt have written Rodham . . . but I had that experience of writing from her point of view, and it was in the back of my head. And then after the election I had this realisation that kids who had known Hillary was running for president often didnt know that Bill Clinton existed and so I did wonder. That was the thing that made me write this specific novel. What if adults had also seen Hillary as being totally separate from Bill?

It took her three years to complete the novel which is written in the first person, from the point of view of Hillary Rodham, the Hillary that in Sittenfelds fictional retelling never became Hillary Clinton. The book makes for compulsive reading, its a bona fide page turner as you race to see how these alternate lives turn out. (In the interest of avoiding spoilers, its best to just say that in the absence of Bill, Hillary ends up as a lawyer and eventually enters politics. For everything else, read the book.)

The success of the novel, for this reader, comes from how deftly Sittenfeld pulls off the enormous task of telling a made-up story involving real life characters, people so famous we have a sense of somehow knowing them, in a way that feels plausible.

Much of this is down to the authenticity of Rodhams voice in the novel. Sittenfeld read books about her subject Hillary Clinton has written three memoirs which gave her a deeper sense of the woman but mentions, in terms of helpfulness, a podcast produced by the Clinton Foundation, in which Hillary is clearly very relaxed with the interviewer.

So I could hear the way she talked when she knew she was in friendly territory, which is so often not the case in interviews where journalists tend to talk to her with scepticism. When you read interviews with her from the fall of 2016 that scepticism is so interwoven into every sentence. And in the absence of that she seemed much more relaxed . . . so after hearing that the voice was something that came easily.

While it was important that the voice was authentic she did not stop after every sentence and say to herself, does this sound like Hillary? I mean, its a novel and so I think its understood that liberties are being taken. Creative liberties.

Those liberties and creative leaps are nowhere more apparent than in her depiction of the prolific sex life of the young lovers. The beginning of the novel is set in Yale Law School where the couple met. (Oh Bill Clintons smile! More than forty-five years have passed since that night in the library, and at times its crossed my mind that his smile may have ruined my life, says Rodham.) It follows pretty faithfully the real life trajectory of the students that were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton apart from intimate, unknowable scenes which have to be filled and imagined by the author. Soon after their meeting at Yale, for example, Rodham gets to witness the insatiable appetite of Clinton in a diner, where he devours order after order of French fries, the scene suggests other appetites that cannot be sated. Later we are treated to the image of a young Bill Clinton playing the saxophone naked and an unforgettable sex scene on a road trip to Arkansas that happens while Hillary is driving. (Again, read the book.)

Given what we know about real-life Bill Clinton, was including lots of sex important? The premise of the book is what if Hillary had said no to Bills third proposal and gone her own way . . . in order for it to feel like it mattered [when she said no], they had to convincingly fall in love in the book and its supposed to heartbreaking and their physical attraction was a really natural, important part of that story.

Sittenfeld had a couple of editorial decisions to make early on in the writing of the novel. One was, did she use their real names. She decided it would be almost too complicated not to. Another question was am I going to include sex? The answer was yes, because it feels very organic. Then I made peace with those decisions and kept writing . . . I knew I was inviting this line of questioning by including them but I just felt like it made the novel stronger. And my deepest obligation is to the novel. Its not to a reviewer. Its not to Hillary herself. My primary responsibility is to write the best book that I can.

The result is a Bill Clinton character who comes across as a deeply unlikeable sex addict. Youre a smug bitch who drives people away because you think youre smarter than everyone else, he says to Hillary at one point in Rodham. Of course you dont find it hard to be faithful when you dont have other options. His infidelity is only one of several reasons Hillary refuses Clintons proposal in the book. I ask Sittenfeld about the potential legal problems such speculative fiction might have risked. She says she wrote it knowing the book would be legally reviewed, which it was but I didnt go to to law school. I think that some of the ins and outs of what can and cant be written is almost better explained by a lawyer.

The book may be about what might have happened if Hillary had turned Bill down, but did Sittenfeld get a sense, during her research, of why Hillary Rodham said yes and ended up getting married to Clinton? Yes, she says. I feel like if it was 1975 and Bill wanted to marry me, I would have said yes. Ive heard anecdotally, sometimes in real life people plan to not like him then in his presence they just sort of melt at his magnetism and charisma. I think I totally understand why she married him. I dont think that makes her foolish and I dont think it was like this feminist failure. As part of her research, she read the first quarter of Bill Clintons 1,000-page autobiography My Life and has said, reading it, she felt herself falling in love with him.

She was interested, she says, in examining the tension between fate and free will and alternate lives. The margin between staying and leaving was so thin, Hillary says in the book. Really it could have gone either way. When I point out that Bill Clinton does not come out of it well she says it depends on the page . . . Its not supposed to be an unequivocal condemnation of Bill Clinton . . . one of the reasons I like reading and writing novels is that they acknowledge how complicated people are, how one person can have appealing qualities and very unappealing qualities. Sometimes in life we dont acknowledge that but in novels we do.

This complexity is what makes the characters in Sittenfelds books so compelling, from her acclaimed debut Prep about life in an elite American school through to her last book before this one, a stunning collection of short stories called You Think It, Ill Say It. In real life, she is more interested in people with both great qualities and off-putting qualities. I probably spend more time thinking about that person than someone who is really nice or someone who is just awful.

She is obviously fond of Hillary, I suggest, could she have written it if she werent? There is a strange space I have to occupy where I really admire and respect her. But I think if I had written this as a love letter, nobody would have wanted to read it. I think I had to make her flawed and have her make questionable decisions. If I had written this novel where the end goal was for me to meet her and have lunch with her, I think readers would have been put off.

She doesnt expect to be asked to lunch or even for the Clintons to read it. The book, she thinks, falls into the category of many articles and books written that will have rubbed them up the wrong way. She says this is a creative artistic project, not a bombshell biography . . . I dont think they are required to engage with it. She does, however, know people close to the Clintons who are reading the book.

This is not the first time Sittenfeld has delved into the behind-the-scenes world of a First Lady. American Wife, published 12 years ago, featured Alice Blackwell, who bore many similarities to Laura Bush, wife of George. People have asked whether shed be interested in exploring the story of another first lady, Melania Trump. I never would, she says. When I am writing fiction its like spending time in that persons company. And you know I dont really want to spend time imagining Melania Trump or imagining being married to Donald Trump. And also I dont feel the compassion for her . . . if I dont admire the subject it could turn into mockery or satire or even a little bit of sadism on my part.

Sittenfeld grew up in Ohio, attended Vassar College in New York and Stanford University in California and now lives in Minneapolis with her two children and her husband, a professor. She prefers to do audio interviews, she says, but appeared on the Zoom screen when I put the request to her through the book publicist. Shes wearing a grey hoodie and is instantly recognisable if youre a fan, with her dark hair and glasses. At one point she puts her elbow to her nose, my first Zoom sneeze.

Im privileged in my education and even in my professional stability in an unstable field, she says when I ask about the fact that many of her books explore people moving through elite worlds. I like to think of myself as a class traitor. Like I dont think I am writing about elite people as a celebration of them, I think its the opposite.

Theres a plot line in the book where Rodham loses a close friendship with a woman of colour because she runs against a black politician for the Senate. There is a long history of white feminists often failing black feminists in the United States, says Sittenfeld. The Clintons have had up and downs and better and worse moments, but race is always such a huge part of the American story. And so it would have been hard to imagine not including a plotline that confronted race and racism.

We are speaking three weeks after the killing by a police officer of George Floyd in Minnesota. When I mention it, she says it happened not too far from her home. She drops this fact in casually, in the sense that she does not use it for storytelling purposes or to launch into a dramatic response to that incident, and this seems typical of her understated, thoughtful approach.

The city felt very different for a few days. It still does because a lot of protests are still going on but they seem to get less media attention when they are not violent. She talks to her children about race and racism, they are nine and eleven, but then she always has. There is a conversation among white people, some seem to be acting like racism started three weeks ago which is preposterous. Like that seems like a very, very weird perspective to have.

Its a confusing moment in time, she says. I think there are reasons to feel both optimistic and pessimistic. I do think that there is more white engagement with white racism than I ever remember in my lifetime and a recognition that this is a huge problem for everyone and that racism is interwoven in our society pretty much everywhere. So I think a lot of reckonings are going on right now and its a challenging, uncomfortable moment. But I think good things can come out of that..

She is active on social media. While finishing Rodham last year she tweeted, slightly tongue in cheek: I seriously think (today anyway) that I may have written the great American novel. You might not realize it because Im female and because the cover will probably be either a dress or a woman whose face you cant see, so this is just an FYI. As it happens the cover is a woman, a very young, attractive Hillary Rodham. Sittenfeld loves the design. But does she see a difference in the way womens novels are received in America? I do think that sometimes women writers are not taken as seriously or there is more scepticism about the premise of a book.

Shes been asked whether Rodham is fan fiction that depends on your definition but her publishers are touting the book as a literary landmark and she has deservedly been spoken about in Great American Novelist terms. How does this acclaim sit with her? Does it add pressure? She laughs at the idea.

Ive been at home a lot like everybody else. My kids know I am a writer but in terms of my identity here I am, you know, the person who forgot to get orange juice at the grocery store.

My kids might look at me and say, have you washed your hair lately because it really doesnt look like it. So I would say I definitely am not burdened by feelings of being like, a prisoner of success. I aspire to be a prisoner of success.

Rodham: A Novel is published by Doubleday

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Hillary without Bill? The Clintons alternative life - The Irish Times

Discussed in this essay: Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, 2020. 432 pages.

THE YEAR is 1971. Hillary is a second-year law student at Yale, where she meets a charismatic classmate from Arkansas. Bill is leonine, a Rhodes scholar, voracious. I have found a man who loves my brain, she confides to a friend from Wellesley. For months, the two devour each other. The conversation is as vigorous as the sex. That summer, while interning at an Oakland firm specializing in civil liberties, she discovers him kissing her bosss daughter. She forgives him, but she does not forget.

A few years pass. Hillary works as an attorney on the Nixon impeachment inquiry. Bill teaches law at the University of Arkansas and prepares to run for Congress. Three times he proposes to her; three times she hesitates. Then a former campaign volunteer approaches her in a grocery store parking lot, claiming that Bill raped her. You shouldnt marry me, Bill confesses one night. You should leave.

It is here that Rodham, the new novel from popular author Curtis Sittenfeld, departs from the historical record. Hillary Rodham takes a good long look at her lifeand packs her things. The next morning, she loads up her car, hugs Bill Clinton goodbye, and drives north out of Fayetteville on Interstate 49. She is crossing the Missouri border, tears welling in her eyes, when a blazing tanker truck jumps the median and strikes her used 1968 Buick head-on, killing her instantly.

I LIED. But thats fiction for you. From a falsehood, anything follows; in logic this is known as the principle of explosion. No, there is no fiery car crash in Rodham, nor does its eponymous heroine move to Maine, get a dog, and solve a string of opioid-related murders. This is a shame; if an author is just going to make things up, they might as well be interesting. Instead, the novel obeys what we might call the caterpillar effect: the principle that an apparently major change in the initial conditions of a complex system may, many iterations later, make almost no difference at all.

Heres what actually happens: Hillary Rodham doesnt marry Bill Clinton. Brokenhearted but determined, she moves to Chicago to teach law at Northwestern. In 1992, incensed by the treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomass Supreme Court nomination, Hillary decides to run for Senate; without the sex-addicted Bill to drag her down, she wins. That same year, without Hillarys guiding hand, Bills presidential campaign quickly flames out following allegations of an affair with a cabaret singer. Over the next 20-odd years, which Sittenfeld largely elides, Senator Rodham develops a reputation as a pragmatic Midwestern centrist and mounts two unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination. During her second rodeo, in 2008, she loses the primary to Barack Obama; as in real life, he goes on to serve as president for two terms. By 2016, when Sittenfelds Hillary runs for a third time, she is indistinguishable from the actual Hillary in all but circumstance: She is married to no one; she is a senator from Illinois, rather than New York; andoh yesshe wins.

To call this speculative fiction would be an insult to that fine genre. Rodham, which seemed to top every must-read summer book list even after Covid-19 threw a wrench into Random Houses trusty hype machine, began life as a short story commissioned by Esquire. Published in May 2016, on the eve of Clintons real-life nomination, The Nominee found a fictionalized Hillary reflecting with patrician distaste on her unfair treatment by the press. For all Sittenfelds pretensions at alternate history, Rodham is an unabashed continuation of that project; it imagines the world not differently but rather, with smug admiration for its subject, exactly as it always was. The resulting book is nothing but a large commemorative stamp, dependent wholly in use and function on the readers willingness to lick it.

Rodham, which Hillary narrates, is actually the authors second first-person foray into the lives of presidents wives. Her first was American Wife, a warmly received 2008 novel that fictionalized Laura Bushs journey from librarian to presidential spouse with undisguised sympathy. That book, too, had its roots in a magazine piece, an unctuous 2004 Salon essay that Sittenfelda self-described staunch liberalhad penned in praise of the first ladys quiet integrity and enjoyment of novels. Laura Bush is a voracious reader of fiction, she explained. Its the reason I believe shes smart: For one thing, her favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov. Incuriosity, disguised as its opposite, already shone through here, with Sittenfeld attributing her interest in Bush to her own artistic sensitivity rather than, as is more likely, the efficacy of the first lady as a political prop. I love Laura Bush, she wrote, too nave to grasp that she was supposed to.

You will therefore not be surprised to learn that Sittenfeld is one of those writers who think they have discovered, always freshly and for the first time, that women are people. They are, obviously; the error resides in the belief that humanitythe sheer fact of someones having itis grounds for a novel. Case in point: Much has already been made of the graphic sex scenes in Rodham, which invite readers to imagine, among other things, Bill fingering Hillary to orgasm while driving on the highway. But this is not juice; it is sugar in water. Such scenes represent only the affectation of candor, carefully calculated to bamboozle reviewers into admitting that the author, like Bill Clintons penis, has adequately plumbed her subjects depths.

In fact, Rodham is a work of maddening prudishness, unwilling at every turn to flash its protagonists motivations above the ankle. Id never had difficulty understanding why someone would run for office, Hillary blandly observes when weighing her first Senate campaign. Changing legislation, improving peoples livesboth were hugely, indisputably important. Thats it: as close as Sittenfeld ever comes to laying bare her heroines deepest desires. In an airport memoir, this would be mere pablum; in a novel, it amounts to dereliction of duty.

One might object that Rodhams prose is meant to recall the clerical, laborious manner of speaking for which Hillary is known in real life. Whether this is a literary accomplishment or not hinges on how well-written you think books should be. I know that only so much may be expected of a book whose epigraph is takenas God is my witnessfrom the libretto of Lin-Manuel Mirandas Hamilton. Yet this is an issue of characterization, not just form. Of her Senate days, Hillary recalls, I loved being able to tangibly and directly take on the problems I had spent my adult life thinking about. How strange that readers, being trapped inside Hillarys brain for 400 pages, should never encounter any of these adult thoughts. If only there were a way for a narrator to communicate directly with a reader! Alas, the plot of this book presumes at every point the readers acceptance of the idea, often touted by the protagonist, that Hillary Rodham is a woman of dazzling, breathtaking intelligence. Why, then, does she sound like Hillary Clinton?

ITS WORTH PAUSING to acknowledge that the real Hillary Clinton is a charming person of moderate intellect and ability whose true talent lies in convincing college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence. Among the striving professional classes there is no greater analogy for career advancement than the presidency, and Clintons bitter defeat at the hands of a mad pretender has only deepened their conviction, successfully branded as feminist, that the height of injustice consists in the withholding of privileges owed.

There is no question that Sittenfelds Hillary, like our own, believes that she deserves to be president. During her first run in 2004, after finishing at the back of the pack in New Hampshire, she snaps at a male TV reporter who questions why shes running. Why do you think it is you ask that of me but not of my opponents? she retorts. Why wouldnt I run for president? Ive been a senator for two terms. Then she makes an unfortunate remark about how she could have been baking cookies; the media roasts her for hating other women.

Which brings us to the fictitious Hillarys other reason for running. I liked doing things I was good at, and I liked being recognized for doing things I was good at, she admits. But as much as I wanted to be president, I wanted a woman to be president. That simple imagea triangle in the Ovalcomposes the entirety of Hillarys vision for America in Rodham. Her platform is like one of Jay Gatsbys unopened books: One must be satisfied simply to know that it exists. Late in the novel, while prepping for a debate, Hillary complains that her detractors dont know the first thing about her voting record. Neither does the reader.

What readers do know is that in the 1992 Senate race, Hillary Rodham ousts former Illinois state legislator Carol Moseley Braun in the primary. In real life, Moseley Braun became the first Black woman elected to the United States Senate, where she served from 1993 to 1999; in Rodham, however, she exits public life after her loss, reappearing only in Hillarys guilty conscience. When Carol calls to concede the race, Hillary assures her that she was only doing what she felt was best for the state of Illinois. For goodness sake, Hillary, Carol tartly responds. Lets not pretend that either of us really believes it.

This is a decisive moment in the novel. Sittenfeld clearly intends to show that Hillary has done something ethically compromising, even racist, in her pursuit of political office. The reader is asked to form this moral judgment not on the basis of the two candidates political platforms or valuesthey have nonebut because the prospect of the first Black female senator is simply more historic than that of the third white female senator.

Hillarys comeuppance for this sin will take three forms. First, her mentor and mother figure, a fictionalized version of childrens rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman, coldly withdraws from their relationship; it is only two decades later, after police shoot a Black teenager in Chicago, that Hillary will send her a tepid apology. I considered myself almost immune to racism, in part due to my work with you, and I thought that my dismissal of Carols candidacy was wholly unrelated to race, she writes. I have come to see that almost nothing is wholly unrelated to race.

Second, she has the misfortune of running against fellow Illinois senator Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, during which media coverage of her campaign becomes more vicious than ever. As in real life, she loses, and Obama ascends. That November, as Hillary watches the returns come in from a donors 20,000-acre Taos ranch, a friend muses, All these years I believed Americans were more racist than sexist. Did you really? Hillary replies, wine glass in hand. Given when the Fifteenth Amendment passed and when the Nineteenth did? You may decide for yourself if that is supposed to be ironic.

Finally, in 2015, Hillary receives a phone call from an old flame. Billnow a tech billionaire rumored to take part in Silicon Valley orgiesis calling to let her know hell be competing against her in the coming Democratic primary. She is filled with fury but keeps her tone calm. If you actually care about your legacy, help put the first woman president in office, she tells him. Dont stand in my way. Bill fires back, Says the woman who started her political career by cockblocking Carol Moseley Braun.

This heavy-handed analogy between what Hillary does to Carol and what Bill does to Hillary forms the closest thing to a moral spine in Rodham. But the suggestion herethat its sexist to run against a woman, just as its racist to run against a Black personis ridiculous, and frankly offensive. This is public relations, not intersectionality. It insultingly implies that such candidates are progressive without even trying, while also being so devoid of actual political content as to be interchangeable. Worse, it obscures the obvious fact that political contests are, by nature, exercises in exclusion. The day when the first woman becomes president will also be the day, and you may quote me on this, when every other woman in America doesnt.

IN REAL LIFE, female politicians are just that: politicians. Apropos of nothing, it may interest you to know that the real Carol Moseley Braun endorsed Joe Biden early in the Democratic primaries last year. Weeks after her election in 1992, Biden showed up unannounced at Moseley Brauns Chicago apartment to recruit her for the Senate Judiciary Committee. As that bodys chairman, Biden had allowed Republicans to vilify Anita Hill the year before; now, he was looking to rehabilitate the committee, and himself. Moseley Braun warily accepted. Today, shes a surrogate for Bidens flaccid presidential campaignher first time stumping in 20 years. This May, a day after Minneapolis protesters heroically burned down a police precinct, she told The New York Times, I just need voters to see the Joe Biden I know, who is very clear on race and racism. And so he is: Biden opposed busing as a tool of desegregation, drafted the notorious crime bill that Bill Clinton signed into law, and has rejected the idea of defunding the police.

Then again, in order to care about any of that, you would first need to care about politics. Rodham does not; it is an unpolitical book by an unpolitical author aboutfor all her ambitionan unpolitical person, one who is manifestly uninterested in justice beyond her own professional rewards. This is, against all odds, the books single insight into Hillary Clinton: She knew nothing of power except that she wanted it. The author, insofar as she senses this, is fine with it. Sittenfelds Hillary never promotes her husbands crime bill or votes for the Iraq Warshe is conveniently spared the opportunitybut the one thing you must understand about this book is that it was written by and for someone who doesnt care that the real Hillary did.

The truth is, presidents are small potatoes in historys larder. We can say with reasonable certainty that, were Hillary Rodham Clinton now president, millionaires and billionaires would still hold Washington in a death grip. The healthcare industry would still be bleeding millions of people dry. ICE would still be terrorizing immigrants. The novel coronavirus would still have struck the planet; the response would still have been grossly mishandled by officials local, state, and federal. Police would still be murdering Black people with the approval and encouragement of the state. The current abolitionist uprising, decades in the making, would likely still be underway. We would still have misery; we would still have hope. The only thing we wouldnt have is this book.

Andrea Long Chu is a writer who lives in New York.

Here is the original post:
The More Things Change - Jewish Currents

A compilation of data by the Capital Journal shows that South Dakotas COVID-19 infection rate is nearly four times higher than West Virginias yet while West Virginias Republican governor imposed an indoor face covering mandate this week, South Dakotas fiercely resists such action.

President Donald Trump remains relatively popular in deep red South Dakota after winning the states three Electoral College votes by 30 points over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

If there is anywhere Trump may be more popular than he is in South Dakota, however, it might be West Virginia. There in 2016, Trump defeated Clinton by an astounding 41 points.

Both states are well-known for country life, as places where gun ownership rates exceed the national average. While South Dakota has far more farmers than coal miners or factory workers and West Virginia is known for mountains rather than prairies the spirit of grit, hard work and independence permeates the culture of both states.

However, there now seems to be one key difference in the two states. On Monday, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice issued the order masks to be worn while inside indoor public places amid the COVID battle.

On Thursday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem reemphasized her position that there should be no mask mandate. Noem did so in responding to a question on Twitter: Should there be a national mask mandate?

No. People should have the freedom to wear masks if it makes them feel safe, but the science on masks is very mixed, Noem tweeted.

This followed last weeks declaration from Noem that there would be no social distancing during the Independence Day fireworks display at Mount Rushmore.

Raw Data

The data below are mined from the South Dakota Department of Health, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources and the U.S. Census Bureau. The COVID numbers were effective as of Friday evening.

South Dakota:

Trumps 2016 victory spread over Clinton: 30 points

COVID tests administered 88,542

Confirmed COVID cases 7,401

Persons per square mile (population density) 10.7

Percentage of population under age 65 without health insurance 11.6%

West Virginia:

Trumps 2016 victory spread over Clinton: 41 points

COVID tests administered 199,383

Confirmed COVID cases 3,882

Persons per square mile (population density) 77.1

Percentage of population under age 65 without health insurance 7.9%

Conclusions

If the information provided by both states is correct, it means the following:

COVID-19 infection rate:

South Dakota 1 of every 120 residents has been infected.

West Virginia 1 of every 462 residents has been infected.

This means that South Dakotas COVID-19 infection rate is nearly four times higher than West Virginias.

This is somewhat offset by West Virginias population density being much higher than South Dakotas. In other words, because West Virginia has more people in a tighter area, their likelihood of contracting COVID-19 would be higher in comparison to those in South Dakota.

I know its an inconvenience, but its not going to be much of an inconvenience, Justice said upon announcing West Virginias mask requirement. If you dont decide to wear the face covering for yourself, if you dont decide to wear it for one of your loved ones or your friends, do it for the 95 West Virginians that have died, do it for the 95 people that weve lost.

Despite Noems independence, her own Department of Health maintains the following phase very clearly on its website: Everyone should wear a cloth face cover in public settings and when around people who dont live in your household, especially when other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.

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Data show South Dakota's COVID infection rate nearly 4 times higher than West Virginia's - The Capital Journal

By Rich Lowry

After hes repeatedly survived the unsurvivable, we are supposed to believe that President Donald Trump might quit the presidential race before it truly begins because of a spate of negative polling.

This is the latest chatter among (unnamed) Republicans, according to a widely circulated Fox News report and cable news talking heads.

Trump is a volatile figure and things could get weird if hes far behind in the final weeks. But the idea that he is going to fall on his sword because the conventional wisdom has turned sharply against his chances runs starkly counter to all Trumps predilections and past actions.

Good luck convincing him hes going to lose after he survived the Access Hollywood tape that had GOP officeholders deserting him in droves, and after he prevailed on an election night when many people closest to him thought he was sure to go down to defeat.

Theres nothing any political consultant, pollster or adviser can tell him about his dire political condition that he hasnt heard, and dismissed, before.

If the polling looks bad for him now, Hillary Clinton had sizable leads in 2016, too.

The assumption behind the Trump-might-drop chatter is that the president would want to avoid the psychological sting of a loss, but hes already signaled how hell handle a defeat by saying he was robbed.

The anonymous Republicans speculating about this scenario surely are wish-casting and assume some other any other GOP presidential candidate would be better for the partys chances. This, too, is doubtful.

How would the great drop-and-switch even work? The party would be implicitly conceding that the incumbent Republican president was such a disaster that he couldnt even run for a second term and then turn around and ask voters for four more years of yet another Republican president.

One of the points of this exercise would be to repudiate Trump, but how could the party plausibly do that after loyally and enthusiastically backing him for four years? Who would be a turn-the-page candidate? The natural successor would be Vice President Mike Pence, but hes obviously more associated with Trump than any other figure in the party besides the presidents direct relatives.

How about a Trump critic, say, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse? But such a choice would be a whiplash-inducing change of direction for a party led the moment before by Trump.

The presidents base wouldnt go away even if Trump said he wasnt running again, and its feelings would have to be taken into account not to mention that Trump loyalists would make up a disproportionate share of Republican convention delegates, who would presumably make the choice of a new candidate.

At a time of great populist passion in the GOP, deciding on a presidential candidate without the direct say of any voters would be fraught with peril, to say the least and more likely to produce a civil war rather than comity.

Then, theres the question of Trump himself. Unless the Trump-stepping-aside scenario becomes even more implausible and involves him resigning the presidency and getting dropped off by Marine One at a monastery to begin a four-month silent retreat, hes not going to quietly abide some other Republican soaking up all the public attention that comes with being one of two people who will be the next president of the United States.

Perhaps former Vice President Joe Biden indeed has a durable 10-point lead, in which case theres nothing that the GOP can do to avoid a terrible drubbing. If Biden is that strong, some emergency replacement Republican candidate hastily chosen amid a political panic isnt going to win, either.

Its more likely, though, that the race will naturally tighten, and that Trump will be behind, but within range and have a punchers chance.

Regardless, theres no way he quits without even trying to win the ultimate vindication for any president, and the ultimate repudiation of his critics.

Rich Lowry has been the editor of National Review since 1997. Hes a Fox News political analyst and writes for Politico and Time. He is on Twitter @RichLowry.

Excerpt from:
Commentary: No, Trump isn't going to drop out - The Daily World

One of the great mysteries of 2016 was why so many women voted for Donald Trump.

Despite being caught on a hot mic talking about grabbing women by the pu**y, nearly 20 sexual assault allegations, and well known accounts of treating his multiple wives horribly, Trump still received the votes of 44 percent of white college-educated women and 61 percent of non-college-educated white women.

Many observers were doubly confused because they had expected Hillary Clinton, as the first major party female nominee, to be especially strong with women. And she wasnt. Trump did poorly with African-American and Hispanic women, because he did poorly with all African-Americans and Hispanics. But he managed to actually win a narrow plurality among white women.

But that mystery has been easy to solve. Over the last three years I conducted dozens of focus groups with both college-educated and non-college-educated female Trump voters. And the answer given most commonly for why they voted for Donald Trump is I didnt vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.

In 2016, Democrats understood that Hillary Clinton was a deeply polarizing candidate. But even they didnt grasp the full magnitude of it. Right-leaning and Republican female voters had spent more than a decade hating both Clintons, and they didnt stop just because Hillarys opponent was an unrepentant misogynist.

In fact, Bill Clintons legacy of similarly disgusting behavior with womenand Hillary Clintons defense of her husbandhad the effect of blunting Trumps own execrable track record. These women voters decided that either way, thered be a guy with a long history of sexual malfeasance living in the White House.

Podcast July 10 2020

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Sarah Longwell, Jonathan V. Last, and Bill Kristol join Charlie Sykes to discuss women voter...

But after Trumps victory, something started happening almost immediately. Womeneven those who voted for Trump in 2016began shifting away from the president.

In the 2018 midterm elections that delivered Democrats 40 congressional seats and control of the House of Representatives, support for Republicans from both college-educated women and non-college-educated white women dropped by 5 points.

And the relationship has gotten worse.

A recent New York Times Upshot/Siena College Poll showed Trump trailing Joe Biden by 22 points with women. Thats 9 points bigger than the gender gap was in 2016.

And while much has been made of college-educated women in the suburbs ditching Trump, a recent ABC/Washington Post survey shows that Trumps support with white non-college-educated women has fallen by 11 points.

After nearly three years of conducting focus groups with women who held their nose and voted for Trump in 2016, this decline hasnt surprised me. He was holding on to many of those voters with a wing and a prayer and strong economy. When everything began to fall apart, these female Trump leaners went running for the exits.

From the beginning of his presidency these women gave Trump low marks for his tweeting and divisivenessbut they also gave him credit for the strong economy and relative prosperity of the last few years.

His perceived business acumen was one of the top reasons many of these women were willing to take a flyer on him in the first place. Never forget that for many Americans, their impressions of Trump were formed less by his presidential campaign than by his role on The Apprentice where he was, through the wonders of editing and reality TV storytelling, presented as a decisive, successful businessman.

In late 2019 and early 2020 with a roaring economy and a bunch of abstract foreign policy scandals consuming the media and the elites whom these voters generally despise and distrust, even Trump-voting-women who rated the presidents performance as very bad werent entirely sure what they would do in 2020. There was still a crowded field of Democratic candidatesmany of whom were living, breathing representations of the far-left caricature that Republicans paint of Democrats.

But by March of 2020, everything had changed.

First, Joe Biden blew out Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Democratic field.

In my focus groups, Biden had consistently outperformed all other Democrats among the female Trump voters who were souring on the president. In hypothetical head-to-head matchups, almost none of the women would take Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren over Trump, but a handful would typically (if not enthusiastically) pick Biden over Trump.

It cannot be overstated how much better of a candidate Joe Biden is for attracting disaffected Republican votersespecially womenthan any of the other Democrats who ran this cycle.

Then on March 11 the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. Two days later, the United States declared a state of emergency.

No one in America will forget what happened next: Lockdowns; PPE shortages; 130,000 deaths; staggering unemployment.

And every night on television voters saw a president both unwilling and incapable of providing clear and coherent leadership.

Since March, I have conducted the focus groups virtually and watched Trumps position with women weaken in real time.

Interestingly, in the early days of the pandemic the women in the focus groups were frustrated with Trump, but didnt necessarily hold him responsible for everything that was happening. He hadnt done great, they said, but it was a tough situation for any president to handle.

It wasnt until the killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests that the bottom started to drop out.

Two weeks after Floyds death I ran a focus group with seven women from swing statesall of whom voted for Trump but currently rated him as doing a very bad job.

Only one was leaning toward voting for him again. Three were definitely going to vote for Biden. The other three were still making up their minds. But even these undecideds were unequivocal in their distaste for Trumps posture on race and his handling of the protests. They actively recoiled.

One of the Trump voters who had decided to vote for Biden said, The stakes are too high now. Its a matter of life and death.

Thats a pretty a good distillation of why Trump has been shedding support from women over the last few months. The multiple crises laid bare the fact that Donald Trump isnt the savvy businessman these women voted for. Instead, they see him as a divisive president whos in over his head.

And they see that his inability to successfully navigate this environment has real-world consequences for actual people.

Average voters werent moved by Trumps obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation, or his quid-pro-quo with Ukraine, or his many personal scandals. But when people are unemployed, or dying, and the streets are on fire, they want a president who isnt winging it.

They want someone who knows how the world works and can make the government perform the kind of functions that only it can do. Like managing a coordinated national response to a pandemic. Or using the bully pulpit to bring the nation together during a moment of crisis.

Donald Trump and his campaign think they can stop the bleeding with women by leaning into the culture wars and highlighting looters, rioters, and vandals pulling down statues. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of these voters. They dont see Trump as someone who can protect them from the chaosthey think hes the source of it.

Which isnt to say that the race couldnt turn around for one reason or another. I suppose that crazier things have happened in American politics. (Though I cant think of many off the top of my head.)

But the reality is that no modern president has done more to alienate female voters. His whole life Trump has treated women with disdain. And they are now poised to return the favor.

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What Women Want - The Bulwark