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For the first time, women of color will completely comprise New Mexico's House delegation, including Democratic Rep.-elect Teresa Leger Fernandez, who becomes the first woman to represent the 3rd district since its creation in 1983.

Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell, R-N.M., becomes the first Republican Native American woman in Congress.

Rep.-elect Marilyn Strickland, D-Wash., will be the first Black woman to represent her state in Congress.

Incoming Republican North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, 25, has replaced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as the youngest member of Congress.

As for the Senate, incoming Sens.-elect Roger Marshall (Kansas), Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico) and Lummis (Wyoming) all have served in the U.S. House. Lummis was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus.

Reps.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., made headlines earlier this year for their support of QAnon, a fringe movement that has launched baseless, far-right conspiracy theories about the U.S. government.

In October, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning QAnon.

Several younger, more diverse and progressive candidates ousted longstanding Democratic incumbents this year.

It's quite possible some of these progressives will quickly become household names in the way that Ocasio-Cortez and members of the so-called "squad" have (which includes Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass).

Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a formal school principal, won his general election after triumphing over Rep. Eliot Engel in the primary. Engel was a 16-term incumbent who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Bowman was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ocasio-Cortez.

Should both Democrats prevail, control of the Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.

Hospitalization data, which the Covid Tracking Project collects at the state level, shows that the number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus reached record highs in almost half of states in recent weeks.

Recent studies have provided some hope that improved treatment has led to a better survival rate among those ill enough to be hospitalized. But experts worry that the 46 percent increase in hospitalizations compared with a month ago could overwhelm hospital capacity — especially in rural areas with limited health resources — and roll back improvements in survival rates.

In the past month, about a third of U.S. counties hit a daily record of more deaths than any other time during the pandemic.

The recent surge in cases has not yet brought a similar surge in reported deaths, which can lag cases by up to several weeks. But already deaths are increasing in about half of states.

The daily death toll is lower than it was at its peak, but on average, about 800 people who contracted the coronavirus are dying each day

It also calls on each doctor to pledge to learn about the social determinants of health "to use my voice as a physician to advocate for a more equitable health care system from the local to the global level."

Some doctors have said they worry that the proliferation of different versions of physician oaths could weaken their intended effect on the profession

The Working Families Party, aligned with high-profile progressives, such as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is battling on behalf of liberal candidates in contests that will decide who holds positions as sheriffs and prosecutors.

"We're going from protests to the polls," Angela Angel, a former Maryland state legislator who is a senior adviser to the new Black Lives Matter PAC, told CNN. "We understand in this moment that the real power is in exercising our right to vote."

the group has targeted young voters in more than a dozen key states with a particular focus on reaching people who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them.

In Georgia, a traditionally red state now in play in this year's presidential and US Senate elections, the Black Lives Matter PAC is backing Joyce Barlow, a Democrat running for the Georgia House of Representatives to represent a swath of rural southwest Georgia.

A study released earlier this year by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina's Law School at Chapel Hill examined more than 2,300 prosecutors' races around the country and found contested elections in fewer than 700 -- or less than a third -- in either the primary or general election.

The groups engaged in electoral politics include Black Lives Matter, the sprawling social justice organization closely associated with this year's protests.

Tuesday's election "isn't just about the presidency. Your money, your minimum wage is on the ballot."

"We saw that very different outcomes were realized by Black people killed by police violence, based on the prosecutors elected in their jurisdictions," said Arisha Hatch, who oversees the Color of Change PAC.

Taylor's mother has sought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case. In September, Cameron announced that a grand jury indicted one former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison, with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment in connection with his actions on the night of the raid.

But the Color of Change PAC and other liberal groups are putting their political muscle into local prosecutors' races around the country

In Florida, meanwhile, the PAC is urging a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, which would phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the Sunshine State by 2026.

Rural counties might lack enough lawyers to mount a challenge to an incumbent. Prosecutor elections don't generate much attention. And voters don't always understand the power local county and district attorneys wield.

The Working Families Party mailers in the race tout Rucker's opposition to cash bail for non-violent offenses. "People shouldn't be sitting in jail because they can't afford to not be there," Rucker said in an interview with CNN.

The Working Families Party's "people's charter" calls to "shift resources away from policing, jails and detention centers" and into schools, housing and jobs programs.

yet most of these proposals are mere proposals. Even if the goal extends only to reforming Police Departments, pressure must still come from the streets; white people will have to continue to show up.

The speech could also double as a prompt for a full-throated debate on the left about the complex interplay between representation-based identity politics and other political goals.

If every action turns into a voter-registration party, the movement will have failed to secure the bare minimum of what it set out to accomplish: a radical change in policing.

he future of these national protests depends, in no small part, on the careful navigation between Swalwell’s sloganeering, gestural version of identity politics and a Black-centered radical movement that calls, in the words of the C.R.C., for an inclusive politics that also fights for “women, third world and working people.”

I have sensed in them an intense desire for some message of solidarity focused squarely on the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. This, as the City Hall speaker pointed out, cannot be a carrot to keep white people engaged, nor should it stop only at police reform.

In the end, the vote on Cheney was taken by secret ballot, allowing members to express their feelings with less fear of reprisal. She won the backing of more than two-thirds of her colleagues. Greene lost her committee seats based on the en bloc vote of the Democratic majority, but she was supported by all but 11 of her Republican colleagues.

But if you are talking about the mixture of violence and politics ... if you are talking about people who feel they are entitled to power and are being denied it and choose violence as a way to demand it back ... if you are talking about questions of race and dominance ... all these things have deep roots in American history."

And was this merely an expression of the rough-hewn, frontier-flavored behavior of Americans in the years before the Civil War? No, Freeman argues, it was an instrument for the defense of privilege and political power.

The biggest spikes in Republicans leaving the party came in the days after Jan. 6, especially in California, where there were 1,020 Republican changes on Jan. 5 — and then 3,243 on Jan. 7. In Arizona, there were 233 Republican changes in the first five days of January, and 3,317 in the next week

“It’s not a birthright and it’s not a religion,” Mr. Madden said of party affiliation. “Political parties should be more like your local condo association. If the condo association starts to act in a way that’s inconsistent with your beliefs, you move.”

Among Democrats, 79,000 have left the party since early January.

In North Carolina, the shift was immediately noticeable. The state experienced a notable surge in Republicans changing their party affiliation: 3,007 in the first week after the riot, 2,850 the next week and 2,120 the week after that.

It is those actions, some Republican strategists in Arizona argue, that prompted the drop in G.O.P. voter registrations in the state.

Mr. Nunez, the Army veteran in Pennsylvania, said his disgust with the Capitol riot was compounded when Republicans in Congress continued to push back on sending stimulus checks and staunchly opposed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

In Michigan, Mayor Michael Taylor of Sterling Heights, the fourth-largest city in the state, already had one foot out the Republican Party door before the 2020 elections. Even as a lifelong Republican, he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Mr. Trump for president after backing him in 2016. He instead cast a ballot for Mr. Biden.

The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head

The trigger appeared to be gun control. Mr. Calhoun had not always been obsessed with guns, friends said. But in the fall of 2019, some Democratic politicians began talking of ambitious new gun restrictions and it seemed to flip a switch. Mr. Calhoun said as much himself.“I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”

As for the House, Republicans did well last year by recovering a lot of the close seats they lost in swing districts in 2018. But Democrats will have a three-word magic weapon to wield there, too: Marjorie. Taylor. Greene.

Nothing along the line of the Democrats deserving punishment. So far they’ve done pretty darned well, multiple crises considered.But I keep remembering how stunned Barack Obama was when the voters tossed Democrats out of their House and Senate seats two years into his administration. People just get … tired. Or disappointed because stuff they hoped would happen probably hasn’t.

If it wasn’t for Obamacare, millions of Americans would be without health insurance. They wouldn’t be protected from losing coverage because of pre-existing conditions. It certainly wasn’t perfect, in part because of resistance from certain lawmakers who were in the thrall of the insurance industry. But one way to judge its overall success is to look at the Republicans who are now terrified to oppose it.

You mean that his administration deliberately underreported the number of Covid deaths in nursing homes and then tried to cover it up for fear of a federal investigation? Or that he later threatened to “destroy” a state lawmaker who had dared to criticize him?

All I can say is: This is a scandal that could not have happened to a nicer guy.

The folks at Everytown estimated that 22 million guns were sold in 2020, up 64 percent from 2019. And given the fact that there are more than 390 million guns in private hands, you will not be startled to learn that a lot have been going off.

You do wonder how the founding fathers would have felt about the right to bear arms if they knew their nastiest neighbor had just installed a printer that manufactures guns in his basement.

One problem with our gun debate is that it has the wrong starting point. Let’s raise the bar. Demand that nobody be able to purchase a gun without passing a test demonstrating she knows how to aim it. You’d be astonished at how many enthusiastic owners that would eliminate from contention.

With its pages and pages of statistical charts, Race Traits helped catapult Hoffman into national and international prominence as the “dean” of American statisticians. In his day, Hoffman “achieved greatness,” assessed his biographer. “His career illustrates the fulfillment of the ‘American dream.’”

e don’t see any American dream,” Malcolm X said in 1964. “We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.”

A nightmare is essentially a horror story of danger, but it is not wholly a horror story. Black people experience joy, love, peace, safety. But as in any horror story, those unforgettable moments of toil, terror, and trauma have made danger essential to the black experience in racist America. What one black American experiences, many black Americans experience. Black Americans are constantly stepping into the toil and terror and trauma of other black Americans

Because they know: They could have been them; they are them. Because they know it is dangerous to be black in America, because racist Americans see blacks as dangerous.

To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction.

Ask the souls of the 10,000 black victims of COVID-19 who might still be living if they had been white. Ask the souls of those who were told the pandemic was the “great equalizer.” Ask the souls of those forced to choose between their low-wage jobs and their treasured life. Ask the souls of those blamed for their own death. Ask the souls of those who disproportionately lost their jobs and then their life as others disproportionately raged about losing their freedom to infect us all. Ask the souls of those ignored by the governors reopening their states.

The American nightmare has everything and nothing to do with the pandemic. Ask the souls of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Step into their souls.

History ignored you. Hoffman ignored you. Racist America ignored you. The state did not want you to breathe. But your loved ones did not ignore you. They did not ignore your nightmare. They share the same nightmare.

Your loved ones are protesting your murder, and the president calls for their murder, calls them “THUGS,” calls them “OUT OF STATE” agitators. Others call the violence against property senseless—but not the police violence against you that drove them to violence. Others call both senseless, but take no immediate steps to stem police violence against you, only to stem the violence against property and police.

Mayors issue curfews. Governors rattle their sabers. The National Guard arrives to protect property and police. Where was the National Guard when you faced violent police officers, violent white terrorists, the violence of racial health disparities, the violence of COVID-19—all the racist power and policy and ideas that kept the black experience in the American nightmare for 400 years?

perhaps the worst of the nightmare is knowing that racist Americans will never end it. Anti-racism is on you, and only you. Racist Americans deny your nightmare, deny their racism, claim you have a dream like a King, when even his dream in 1967 “turned into a nightmare.”

Black people are supposed to be feared by all, murdered by police officers, lynched by citizens, and killed by COVID-19 and other lethal diseases. It has been proved. No there there. Black life is the “hopeless problem,” as Hoffman wrote.

In the first nationwide compilation of racial crime data, Hoffman used the higher arrest and incarceration rates of black Americans to argue that they are, by their very nature and behavior, a dangerous and violent people—as racist Americans still say today.

Hoffman compiled racial health disparities to argue that black Americans are, by their very nature and behavior, a diseased and dying people. Hoffman cataloged higher black mortality rates and showed that black Americans were more likely to suffer from syphilis, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases than white Americans.

While black Americans view their experience as the American nightmare, racist Americans view black Americans as the American nightmare.

Racist Americans, especially those racists who are white, view themselves as the embodiment of the American dream. All that makes America great. All that will make America great again. All that will keep America great.

Their American dream—that this is a land of equal opportunity, committed to freedom and equality, where police officers protect and serve—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have more because they are more, that when black people have more, they were given more—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have the civil right to kill black Americans with impunity and that black Americans do not have the human right to live—is a lie.

Take Minneapolis. Black residents are more likely than white residents to be pulled over, arrested, and victimized by its police force. Even as black residents account for 20 percent of the city’s population, they make up 64 percent of the people Minneapolis police restrained by the neck since 2018, and more than 60 percent of the victims of Minneapolis police shootings from late 2009 to May 2019. According to Samuel Sinyangwe of Mapping Police Violence, Minneapolis police are 13 times more likely to kill black residents than to kill white residents, one of the largest racial disparities in the nation. And these police officers rarely get prosecuted.

A typical black family in Minneapolis earns less than half as much as a typical white family—a $47,000 annual difference that is one of the largest racial disparities in the nation. Statewide, black residents are 6 percent of the Minnesota population, but 30 percent of the coronavirus cases as of Saturday, one of the largest black case disparities in the nation, according to the COVID Racial Data Tracker.

In April, many Americans chose the racist explanation: saying black people were not taking the coronavirus as seriously as white people, until challenged by survey data and majority-white demonstrations demanding that states reopen. Then they argued that black Americans were disproportionately dying from COVID-19 because they have more preexisting conditions, due to their uniquely unhealthy behaviors. But according to the Foundation for AIDS Research, structural factors such as employment, access to health insurance and medical care, and the air and water quality in neighborhoods are drivers of black infections and deaths, and not “intrinsic characteristics of black communities or individual-level factors.”

Americans should be asking: Why are so many unarmed black people being killed by police while armed white people are simply arrested? Why are officials addressing violent crime in poorer neighborhoods by adding more police instead of more jobs? Why are black (and Latino) people during this pandemic less likely to be working from home; less likely to be insured; more likely to live in trauma-care deserts, lacking access to advanced emergency care; and more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods? The answer is what the Frederick Hoffmans of today refuse to believe: racism.

more than half of all mall-based department stores would close by the end of 2021.

Many small mall retailers have clauses in their leases — so-called co-tenancy clauses — that allow them to pay reduced rent or even break the lease if two or more anchor stores leave a location.

Mr. Tibone said he was pessimistic about the ability of most malls to fill vacant spaces, especially during the pandemic. Entertainment options like Dave & Buster’s are off the table, for instance.

Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, said in February that it would close 125 stores in “lower-tier malls” during the next three years, and Nordstrom just recently said it would close 16 of its 116 full-line department stores. While Neiman Marcus, which filed for bankruptcy in May, said it plans to reopen all its stores, landlords are watching warily.

Already this year, Victoria’s Secret said it would close 250 stores in North America, while the Gap brand is closing at least 170 stores globally. Financial troubles are plaguing mall chain companies like Ascena Retail, which owns Ann Taylor and Loft, and the owner of New York & Company. And bankruptcies since early 2019 have included mall staples like Forever 21, Things Remembered, Payless ShoeSource and GNC. Lucky Brand Dungarees filed for bankruptcy on Friday.

When J. D. Greear, the North Carolina pastor who currently serves as president of the denomination, recently recorded a video calling on Christians to say “Black lives matter,” he was careful to clarify that he and his church do not endorse any Black Lives Matter organizations. “The movement, and the website, has been hijacked by some political operatives whose worldview and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own,

Certain kinds of political activism are widely accepted in the evangelical world. “We’ll have sanctity-of-life Sunday, speaking about the great evil of abortion—which I’m on board with, amen,” Pinckney said. But “that same clarity seems very complicated when it comes to issues of race.”

In 2018, a group of pastors led by John MacArthur, an influential white megachurch pastor in California, signed a statement decrying “social justice” and arguing against “postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory.” It condemned “political or social activism” as not being “integral components of the gospel or primary to the mission of the church.”

Even the language of what constitutes “justice” is controversial among evangelicals

White pastors aggressively enforce the boundaries of acceptable conversations on racism, weaponizing any position that bears even a whiff of progressive politics and slapping labels such as “social justice” and “cultural marxism” on arguments about systemic injustice.

“If it’s just a social-justice thing or a cultural thing, it’s easy to dismiss, because that bases the conversation in ideology,”

at the peak of the protests against Floyd’s death, Louie Giglio, the Atlanta megachurch pastor, said in an onstage conversation with the popular hip-hop artist Lecrae and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy that the term white privilege should be replaced with white blessing to “get over the phrase” that shuts down conversations on racism.

In recent weeks, as the country has confronted the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of racist violence, white pastors have put out statements and hosted Sunday-morning conversations about the scourge of bigotry in our nation. Yet even these good-faith efforts often indulge “the empty sentimentality that people associate with racism,” Pinckney said, and focus on individual relationships and behaviors: “We need to love each other, to treat each other well.”

This is no accident. “Evangelical theology tends to be very personal, highly relational, and therefore, engaging issues of systems and structures becomes incredibly difficult,”

Many white evangelicals may be on board with the idea of banishing racism from their heart, but may not be ready to confront the policy issues, such as racist policing, that enable the kind of violence that killed George Floyd. As of 2018, 71 percent of white evangelicals believed that incidents of police officers killing Black men are isolated and not part of a broader pattern

“A mainly intrapersonal, friendship-based reconciliation [is] virtually powerless to change the structural and systemic inequalities along racial lines in this country,”

the aftermath of George Floyd’s death is not necessarily a turning point in how white evangelicals think about race, several Black leaders I spoke with argued. “About every four to five years, there’s a larger national-level racial conversation, and many churches will make some gesture at that,” Jao told me. “Then they don’t speak on it again, don’t notice the things that are happening locally or nationally, until the next major explosion.

One test of the effects of this summer’s protests is whether they will shift conversations about race and policing in conservative political circles. Nearly one-third of white people in the United States identify as evangelicals, and a strong majority of this group is Republican. White Christians are distinctively positioned to push politicians to take this issue seriously.

the traditional “summer slide” in which low-income students lose ground during the summer months and told me: “The ‘summer slide’ is now being dwarfed by ‘Covid slide’ projections.”

it may be necessary to shut some schools. But that should be the last resort.

But after Trump, trying to project normalcy, blustered in July about schools needing to open, Republicans backed him and too many Democrats instinctively lined up on the other side.

Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate.

America’s education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low-income children attend struggling schools that hold them back.

while we all want in-classroom instruction, the practical question is whether to operate schools that don’t have optimal ventilation and other protections.

In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk (this is more clear of elementary schools than of high schools).

“Children learn best when physically present in the classroom,”

One child in eight in America lives with a parent with an addiction — a reflection of America’s other pandemic.

It’s true that Trump was simply trying to downplay the virus. If he wanted schools open, he should have fought the pandemic more seriously and invested federal money to help make school buildings safer against the virus’s spread.

Research from Argentina and Belgium on school strikes indicates that missing school inflicts long-term damage on students (boys seem particularly affected, with higher dropout rates and lower incomes as adults)

school closures may lead to one million additional high school dropouts.

No one knows how Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis will affect his presidential campaign, but before falling ill, he repeatedly suggested that he won’t accept the results of the election, should he lose. In that case, Joe Biden should follow Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s example and appeal to the world for help.

They should also lodge a complaint with the Organization of American States, a regional organization that has pledged “to respond rapidly and collectively in defense of democracy,” and which in 2009 used that mandate to suspend Honduras after its government carried out a coup.

Americans are not so inherently virtuous that they can safely disregard the moral discipline that international oversight provides. Wells-Barnett, Du Bois and Robeson understood that from brutal, firsthand experience. Now that Mr. Biden and other white Democrats are tasting disenfranchisement themselves, they need to learn that lesson, too.

The way people have publicly questioned and debated whether I played a role in my own violent assault proves that my fears about discussing what happened were, unfortunately, warranted.

Instead, it happens because too many men treat all women as objects, which helps them to justify inflicting abuse against us when we choose to exercise our own free will.

Black women, who struggle against stereotypes and are seen as angry or threatening when we try to stand up for ourselves and our sisters.

Daniel Cameron, for his appalling conduct in denying Breonna Taylor and her family justice.

the simple phrase “Protect Black women” is controversial. We deserve to be protected as human beings. And we are entitled to our anger about a laundry list of mistreatment and neglect that we suffer.

racial bias in health care.

If we dress in fitted clothing, our curves become a topic of conversation not only on social media, but also in the workplace. The fact that Serena Williams, the greatest athlete in any sport ever, had to defend herself for wearing a bodysuit at the 2018 French Open is proof positive of how misguided the obsession with Black women’s bodies is.

Countless times, people have tried to pit me against Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, two incredible entertainers and strong women.

Or that Black women, too often in the shadows of such accomplishments, actually powered the civil rights movement