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The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is more specific: It’s aimed at restoring the Voting Rights Act, after the Supreme Court gutted it in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. To that end, it rewrites the V.R.A. to target states with current records of racial discrimination, not just past records; tightens the focus on electoral changes that have traditionally been used to disenfranchise minority voters, like voter ID laws; and empowers the attorney general to send federal observers wherever there’s a threat of racial discrimination in voting.

Let’s start with the For The People Act. The bill would implement nationwide automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration and online registration (did you know there are still states where you can’t register to vote online?). It would limit the use of voter purges — a common tactic in which states throw people off the rolls under the guise of reducing duplication and errors — and restore voting rights to Americans with a past criminal conviction. As far as federal elections go, it would secure at least two weeks of early voting in all states, expand vote-by-mail options and restrict secretaries of state from overseeing elections in which they are on the ballot (they’re looking at you, Brian Kemp).

But while Democrats are debating the best way to make sure Republicans can be heard in the Senate, Republicans in the states are passing legislation meant to silence Democratic voters across the country. The attack on the Capitol failed on Jan. 6, but that doesn’t mean the quiet war the G.O.P. is waging on democracy won’t succeed. There are ways the filibuster can be reformed to ensure that the Senate minority has a voice. But it would be obscene to let the Republican Party use the language of minority rights to deprive actual minorities of the right to vote.

Mr. Trump has denied any explicit quid pro quo — a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something — in his call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He has repeatedly referred to it as a “perfect” conversation.

So what’s the problem?At its most basic level, asking another government for help — whether a quid pro quo existed or not — means that Mr. Trump would find himself indebted to another country.

Isn’t this business as usual?No. Both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have resisted the idea of enlisting help from foreign powers for political advantage.

Is this illegal?Asking a foreigner for aid in an American political campaign is illegal, which Ellen L. Weintraub, the head of the Federal Election Commission, has made clear.

The Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The C.I.A. has planted misinformation and, at times, used cash as a way to achieve foreign policy aims.

“We often consider ourselves and hold ourselves out as an example of how other countries should conduct themselves,” Mr. Potter said. “When we have internal battles or things have gone wrong here, it is much harder to do that.”

Has this happened in previous U.S. elections? Sort of.The only impeachment involving foreign policy came in the case of a senator, William Blount, who was accused in 1797 of scheming to transfer parts of Florida and the Louisiana Territory to Britain. The House impeached Blount, but he fled Washington. The Senate opted to expel him rather than convict him at trial.

Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.

Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population

We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.

You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.

Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.

the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.

While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.

“The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”

These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.

. In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.

The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil

Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”

Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”

the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.

While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.

Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.

Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”

Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.

The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

“Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”

it has become much tougher for either to amass a commanding Senate majority.

The fact that neither side will control more than 52 seats after Tuesday means that either party has held at least 55 Senate seats in only three congressional sessions since 2000.

some observers believe that the narrow Senate division certain to emerge from Tuesday's election will encourage a return to bipartisan deal-making, like the agreement between centrist Republican and Democratic senators that helped break the months-long stalemate over Covid economic relief legislation.

The narrow majorities have also contributed to a Senate that has grown more rigid, with much more partisan conflict and less of the ad hoc bipartisan deal-making that characterized the body through the second half of the 20th century. The Senate will mark a new high -- or low -- in its rising partisanship on Wednesday when about a quarter or more of Republican senators will vote against recognizing Democrat Joe Biden's election as president

So I think the closeness of it -- whether it's 52-48 or 50-50 or 51-49 -- is probably good for him and good for the country, because he is going to know how to deal in that type of a Senate."

almost all of the senators in both parties who had won their split-ticket victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races lost their seats in the next midterm elections (2014 and 2018, respectively).

other observers note that the narrow Senate majorities of recent years have, in practice, produced very few bipartisan compromises.

With control constantly at risk, the majority party faces heightened pressure for lockstep unity, while the minority party never has much incentive to help the majority burnish its record with bipartisan accomplishments that could buttress its advantage in the next election.

Whatever the results of Tuesday's Georgia elections between Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, those polarizing dynamics are guaranteed to remain in force, because the party that falls into the minority now will remain close enough to immediately begin plotting how to recapture the majority in 2022

The huge Democratic Senate majorities that persisted from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s were rooted in the party's continued dominance of Senate seats from Southern states that routinely voted Republican for president, notes Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. But over the past generation, it has become much more difficult for either party to win Senate seats in states that usually vote the other way in presidential elections.

As recently as 2008, six Senate candidates (five Democrats and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) won election in states that supported the other side's presidential candidate. In 2012, four Democrats and Republican Dean Heller of Nevada won Senate races in states that voted the other way for president.

in 2016, for the first time since the direct election of senators around World War I, the same party won the Senate and the presidential race in every state.

the meager three majorities of 55 seats or more since 2000 represent the fewest times that any party has accumulated at least 55% of the Senate seats over a 20-year span since the turn of the 20th century, according to official Senate records.

The "return of GOP South and decline in split-ticket voting and increased nationalization of US politics generally" explains "a good amount of the decline in Senate majority margins in recent decades," notes Binder.

Over the past two presidential elections, 20 states have voted both times against Trump; Democrats now hold fully 39 of their 40 Senate seats, all but Collins' in Maine. But 25 states have voted both times for Trump, and Republicans now hold 47 of their 50 seats, all but Joe Manchin's in West Virginia, Jon Tester's in Montana and Sherrod Brown's in Ohio.

In the five states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that backed Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden in 2020, Democrats now hold six Senate seats and Republicans two, pending the results in Georgia

from 1981 through 2000, Democrats held at least 55 seats in four sessions, while Republicans reached that level of control in three

One party also controlled at least 55% of the Senate seats (which were fewer than 100 at that point because there were fewer states) in eight of the 10 congressional sessions from 1921 through 1940 and seven of the 10 from 1901 through 1920. Only the 1950s saw anything like today's precarious balances: While Democrats controlled at least 55% of the seats four times from 1941 to 1950, neither side reached that level through four consecutive sessions beginning in 1951, until Democrats broke through with big gains in the 1958 election.

Unless Republicans win both of Tuesday's runoffs, the party controlling the Senate will hold a majority of two seats or fewer. That would mark the fifth time since 2000 that the majority party held such a narrow advantage.

Again, the growing correlation between presidential and Senate outcomes may be a key factor in the shift. Pending the Georgia results, only three senators in each party represent states that supported the other side's presidential candidate this year. That means the vast majority of Democratic senators have a strong electoral incentive to support Biden --and the vast majority of Republican senators have a comparable incentive to oppose him.

Breaux, the former Democratic senator, believes the narrow balance of power can overcome that centrifugal pressure by providing small groups of relatively centrist deal-makers from each party the leverage to build majority legislative coalitions.

"You can form coalitions starting in the middle and then moving out on each side until you create a majority," he says.

The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.

More broadly, Mr. Trump is facing an avalanche of opposition nationally from women, people of color, voters in the cities and the suburbs, young people, seniors and, notably, new voters. In all four states, voters who did not participate in 2016, but who have already voted this time or plan to do so, said they support Mr. Biden by wide margins. That group includes both infrequent voters and young people who were not yet eligible to vote four years ago.

Melissa Dibble, 47, of Boynton Beach, Fla., is one of those newly active voters. A registered independent, Ms. Dibble said she did not vote in 2016 because she did not believe Mrs. Clinton was “the right president for our country” and found Mr. Trump “laughable.” She said on Friday that she planned to vote for Mr. Biden that afternoon.

Vince Kowalewski, 73, of Muhlenberg Township, Pa., said he had never voted in his life but was intent on voting against Mr. Trump, whom he called “the worst president we’ve ever had.”“I have to go in there and vote against him,” Mr. Kowalewski said.But Mr. Kowalewski said he also appreciated Mr. Biden’s health care policies, including the Affordable Care Act, which he credited with helping his daughter receive lifesaving cancer treatment.

Based on the poll, however, it seems that Mr. Biden rather than Mr. Trump could be the beneficiary of record-busting turnout.

In Arizona, for example, the president had an eight-point advantage with men but Mr. Biden was the overwhelming favorite of women, winning 56 percent of them compared with Mr. Trump’s 38 percent.

The other group that is propelling Mr. Biden is college-educated white voters, a traditionally Republican bloc that has fled the Trump-era party. The former vice president is leading by double digits among white voters with college degrees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona and beating him, 48 percent to 45 percent, with that constituency in Florida.

But Ms. Robles also said she believed there was a larger issue at stake in the vote.“I don’t want to be dramatic,” she said, “but I’m voting this year because it feels like democracy is at stake.”

“COVID-19 is the dominant issue for voters and they think Biden would do a better job.”

By a 6-point margin, more pick Biden over Trump on handling Supreme Court nominations. Biden’s advantage is unchanged since September, before Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the high court.

Ratings of the two candidates more closely align on “standing up for what he believes.” Sixty-four percent think Biden does -- and even more, 68 percent, say the same about Trump.

Nearly half of registered voters, 47 percent, think Trump will win re-election. That’s down from 51 percent in September -- and a high of 56 percent who believed he would win in February. 

Eight of the 10 most expensive Senate races ever are unfolding in 2020

Up and down the ballot, Democrats have the financial upper hand this year.

Small-dollar donors, who have lifted Democratic Senate candidates and Mr. Biden in particular, are growing in importance, accounting for 22 percent of the total money raised in the 2020 cycle. These donors, who gave less than $200 to a candidate or cause, contributed 15 percent of the funds raised in the 2016 election.

So-called dark money continues to flood into American political campaigns through entities like nonprofits that do not fully disclose their donors.

More women than ever are giving to federal races, accounting for 44 percent of donors, up from 37 percent in 2016, according to the analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Women have favored Democrats in the voting booth

Separately, the role of traditional political action committees, often used by corporations to bundle donations to incumbent politicians, has been shrinking as a share of political cash, hitting a record low of 5 percent, according to the center.

The top industry for campaign cash remains Wall Street, totaling more than $255 million from the securities and investment world, according to the center’s research. That money heavily favored Democrats: $161.7 million to $94.5 million.

The nonprofit Democratic online donation platform, ActBlue, has processed more than $3.3 billion so far this year.

The total cost of the races for the White House, the Senate and the House is expected to hit nearly $14 billion.

he biggest driver of political spending this year has been — no surprise — the presidential race, as enormous sums have, in particular, poured into supporting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s bid to oust President Trump.

6.6 billion

Editors’ PicksHow the Trump Era

That is one of four Senate races to have crossed the $200 million mark this year — the others are in Iowa, South Carolina and Arizona — something that had never before happened in a contest without a self-funding candidate.

Democratic candidates and allied groups have spent $5.5 billion this cycle, compared with $3.8 billion in spending by Republicans — the largest advantage ever, according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Both parties are taking advantage of disclosure loopholes. One dark money Democratic group, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, has reported more than $51 million in giving to a wide array of other federal PACs, federal records show.

We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.

Two major American assets I didn’t list, and should have, were weather and time.

America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside.

we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days

only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with.

Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway

Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump.

everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.

Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there is plenty of blame to go around:

I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them.

I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately.

I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year?

In Georgia, Mr. Biden’s lead with women essentially matched Mrs. Clinton’s final advantage in the 2016 race. But where Mr. Trump carried Georgia men by 23 points four years ago, he was ahead by about half that margin with men in the state in the Times poll.

Mr. Trump’s tenuous hold on some of the largest red states in the country has presented Mr. Biden with unexpected political opportunities and stirred debate among Democrats about how aggressively to contest states far outside the traditional presidential battleground.

The president’s approval rating is in positive territory in Texas, and voters are almost evenly split in Iowa and Georgia. That is markedly stronger than Mr. Trump’s standing in core swing states like Wisconsin and Arizona.

Mr. Biden still holds a sizable advantage on the issue in Iowa.

Mr. Secora, 63, an independent, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but had grown fed up. He said he had reservations about Mr. Biden but preferred his “honesty and integrity” to the president’s character.

One of those voters is Casey Andre-Lindsay, 41, of Roswell, who said she planned to vote for Mr. Biden. Ms. Andre-Lindsay, who lost her job this year, said she saw Mr. Trump’s agenda as defined by turning back progress. Of Republicans, she said, “It doesn’t seem like they want it to be a democracy where people speak up anymore.”

A significant danger looming for Texas Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies are increasingly out of step with where the state is today, and where it is heading.

The most important thing, she said, was for Americans to vote and insist their ballots are counted.

Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable,”

It may take longer than usual to know the outcome, but it will be a valid one

“I don’t know what his thinking was, but we have always had a controlled transition between administrations.”

That promise comes as Mr. Graham and other Republicans face sharp criticism for changing their positions on their past vow not to fill a Supreme Court seat during an election year.

The comments by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were made in a message to progressives as a rallying cry after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and were not a call to contest or resist the election results.

Democratic lawmakers warned Americans on Thursday to take deadly seriously President Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of November’s election

Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said that he “has participated in a peaceful transition of power before. He certainly will this time around as well.”

r. Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position i

“Donald Trump is trying to distract from his catastrophic failures as president of the United States in order to talk about something that frankly, you know, spins up the press corps,

Calling Mr. Trump “the greatest threat to democracy,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the party leader in the Senate, demanded that Republicans join Democrats in insisting Mr. Trump accept the election results

everal prominent Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, insisted Thursday that there would be a peaceful transition, but they stopped short of criticizing the president directly for his remarks.

Earlier Wednesday, he flatly predicted that the presidential election would end up in the Supreme Court and said that was why he wanted a full slate of justices, barely concealing his hope for a friendly majority on the court.

The night before that, at another rally, Mr. Trump said the coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” — never mind that the country’s death toll from the virus just crossed 200,000.

The F.B.I. has not seen evidence of a “coordinated national voter fraud effort,”

Any fraud would have to be widespread and well coordinated to change the election outcome, and carrying it out would be a “major challenge for an adversary,”

President Trump paid his respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Thursday morning, standing silently by her coffin at the top of the Supreme Court steps as he was jeered by protesters on the street below.

Mr. Trump continues to face a wall of opposition from women

“Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus

Mr. Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Men prefer the president to his Democratic challenger by 16 points, while women favor Mr. Biden by an eight-point margin.

The number who favor Trump’s re-election lags his 2016 vote share in each state. 

Biden’s leads are not insurmountable.

However, few voters are up for grabs.  In each of the four states, fewer than 10 percent are undecided or support a third-party candidate.  Plus, roughly equal majorities of Biden and Trump supporters, about 8 in 10, are extremely committed to their candidate. 

It’s tough to overstate how important women voters are to Biden.  They prefer him by 19 points in Michigan, 6 in Ohio, 12 in Pennsylvania, and 17 in Wisconsin. And he trounces Trump among suburban women:  Michigan +35 points, Ohio +18, Pennsylvania +29, and Wisconsin +21.

Trump is the choice among rural voters in each state -- by wide margins in Ohio (+27 points) and Pennsylvania (+21), and smaller spreads in Michigan (+11) and Wisconsin (+6).   In 2016, he won rural voters nationally by 25 points, according to Pew Research Center validated voter data.

White men without a college degree were an important constituency for Trump four years ago, and they are still big supporters.  He leads by double-digit margins among this group in all four states

“Trump is polling behind his 2016 support, but remains competitive across these crucial rust-belt states,” says Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducts the Fox News survey with Republican Daron Shaw.

In the Michigan Senate race, incumbent Democrat Gary Peters has a 49-41 percent edge over Republican John James.  Three percent back a third-party candidate and five percent are undecided.

Seniors in Ohio (+6 points) and Pennsylvania (+1) favor Trump, while they pick Biden in Michigan (+13 points) and Wisconsin (+14). 

Trump’s 2016 victory in Ohio was by a wider 8-point margin, which is higher than his current 3-point edge in the Buckeye State (45 percent Biden to 48 percent Trump).  That’s a reversal since last month, when Biden was ahead by 5 points in Ohio (50-45 percent). 

In Michigan, by 8 points, more Democrats support Biden (94 percent) than Republicans back Trump (86 percent).  The loyalty gap is 9 points in Wisconsin, with 96 percent of Democrats for Biden compared to 87 percent of Republicans for Trump. 

On the economy, more trust Trump to do a better job than Biden in Ohio (by 11 points), Pennsylvania (+5), and Wisconsin (+7), while the two tie in Michigan. 

By larger spreads, voters prefer Biden to handle coronavirus in all four states:  Michigan (by 17 points), Ohio (+6), Pennsylvania (+11), and Wisconsin (+13).

“The economy is still the key to success for Trump,” says Shaw. “Voters don’t rate him very favorably on handling the pandemic and that’s a big drag on his re-election chances right now.”

Biden is more popular than Trump.  The former vice president gets net positive favorable ratings

Trump’s ratings are net negative

Voters under age 35 back the Democrat:  Michigan (by 34 points), Ohio (+17), Pennsylvania (+33), and Wisconsin (+25).

More voters disapprove than approve of President Trump’s job performance in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  In Ohio, they split: 50 approve vs. 49 disapprove.

Voters in each state give their governor better ratings than the president. 

Across these rust-belt states, most voters casting their ballot by mail support Biden (between 61-73 percent), while over half of those voting in person go for Trump (between 55-59 percent).

Conducted October 17-20, 2020 under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R), these Fox News surveys include interviews with likely voters in Michigan (1,032), Ohio (1,018), Pennsylvania (1,045), and Wisconsin (1,037) randomly selected from statewide voter files, who spoke with live interviewers on landlines and cellphones.  In each state, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the total sample of likely voters. 

Some voters could be voting earlier because they're wary about the performance of the U.S. Postal Service and want to get their ballots in the mail as soon as possible.

It might not be good news, however, for Trump and Republicans, who are lagging considerably behind Democrats in the number of mail ballots submitted.

The advantage for Democrats comes after they requested nearly twice as many mail ballots nationwide than Republicans, likely the result of Trump's months-long assault on the legitimacy of mail ballots

Several states have changed laws since four years ago to either offer early voting or expand early voting periods. In addition, as expected for months, more people are taking advantage of early voting, particularly voting by mail, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

not only did Democrats request more mail ballots than Republicans, they are also returning them at higher rates.

It's a concern if the pandemic continues to rage and if seniors who had voted for Republican candidates in the past get scared to go to the polls at a time when it's too late to vote for mail.

It's a concern for Democrats because mail ballots are far more likely to be disqualified for various reasons than are in-person ballots

Polling has shown that Trump voters are nearly twice as likely to vote on Election Day than Democrats

The other scenario is that Democrats are just more enthused to vote than Republicans and it's showing up in these numbers

McDonald is among election experts who predicted a historically high turnout presidential race even before votes were cast. He estimated last year 150 million people would vote in the 2020 election, 12 million more than the 138 million in 2016

North Carolina has long been crucial to both parties’ hopes of winning a Senate majority

Last month 46 percent of likely voters polled in North Carolina had a favorable view of Mr. Cunningham, compared to 29 percent who saw him unfavorably. Now 40 percent of likely voters have a favorable view and 41 percent see him unfavorably.

In 2016, Mr. Trump carried North Carolina by 3.7 percentage points over Hillary Clinton

Mr. Biden’s standing in North Carolina is consistent with the leads he has built in other battleground states. The former vice president has significant advantages among women and suburbanites, and is far more trusted to deal with the public health crisis caused by the coronavirus.

Mr. Biden had a 10-point advantage among likely voters in Nevada, and a seven-point lead in Ohio.

But the polling shows that Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Tillis and Mr. Trump all suffer from a broad lack of trust, which hampers both their political standing and their ability to launch attacks against their opponents.

41 percent of voters surveyed said they did and 52 percent said they did not. Even nine percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the state said they did not trust his administration to state true facts about his health.

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

Take a look at the five Republican-held seats that are most likely to flip at this point to the Democrats: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina. As of this writing, Democratic Senate candidates hold polling advantages of 5 points in Arizona, 9 points in Colorado, 1 point in Iowa, 5 points in Maine and 3 points in North Carolina.

Those advantages tend to be fairly close to the lead Democratic Senate candidates have in those same states: 3 points in Arizona, 13 points in Colorado, 1 point in Iowa, 15 points in Maine and 2 points in North Carolina. The average difference across these states is just 3 points,

Cases are rising particularly quickly in Iowa, where Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has refused to institute a mask mandate.

Biden now holds an average 2-point edge over Trump in the Peach State, where there are two competitive Senate races.

Those are small enough Republican leads that the Democrats could win in these states, but with Trump ahead in both, it'll be tough.

Biden has been making clear gains against Trump: Georgia.

That could make the difference in a state like Iowa in the presidential race, which could in turn shift the Senate race -- one that ultimately could determine control of the US Senate.

oth parties are succeeding in one of their chief goals this year: to motivate large numbers of infrequent voters or nonvoters to come off the sidelines for what supporters of both nominees call the most crucial election of a lifetime.

where more than 10 million people who didn’t vote in 2016 have already cast ballots this year, making up 25 percent of the early vote in those states.

“Nationally, Democrats have a modeled advantage of 14.5 percent with those non-2016 voters,” Mr. Bonier said.

Despite efforts by the president’s campaign and outside groups to expand his support with the voters most likely to back him — white blue-collar workers — polling shows him trailing his 2016 benchmarks

Nationally, the number of early voters this year who are 50 and over and didn’t turn out in 2016, which was 6.4 million as of Thursday, was greater than those under 30, about 4.9 million. All age groups are exhibiting an intense interest in voting

Mr. Trump’s 44,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania four years ago, in which he won by less than one percentage point, hinged on places like Westmoreland County, once a blue-collar Democratic stronghold, which the president carried by 31 points, a wider margin than in any of the state’s other populous counties.

Without the state’s 20 electoral votes, Mr. Trump would have an extremely narrow path to re-election. Mr. Biden has wider options, based on current polling in battleground states.

Trump supporters are expected to dominate in-person voting on Election Day in some battleground states. The current Democratic advantage with non-2016 voters could even out by Election Day.

The problem for Mr. Trump, though, is that he carried the equivalent of the 16th District by twice that much, 20 points, in 2016, according to a New York Times analysis.

Vaccinations could begin in the second half of December, Fauci said.

Vaccinations are expected to begin with high-risk groups and to be available for the rest of the population next spring

15,000 study participants were given a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effect. Over several months, 90 of them developed Covid-19, with 11 developing severe forms of the disease.

The vaccines deliver messenger RNA, or mRNA, which is a genetic recipe for making the spikes that sit atop the coronavirus

A small percentage of those who received it experienced symptoms such as body aches and headaches.

Fauci says he expects the first Covid-19 vaccinations to begin "towards the latter part of December, rather than the early part of December."

Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and only five of them developed Covid-19. None of the five became severely ill.

Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines have similar results because they use the same technique to activate the body's immune system.

Initially, there won't be enough vaccine for everyone.

No vaccine currently on the market uses mRNA.

"There has always been skepticism about mRNA -- it's brand new and would it work?" Fauci said. "What we saw in the trials is there was no real safety concern, and the efficacy is quite impressive. We saw nearly identical results [with Pfizer and Moderna] and it almost really validates the mRNA platform."

Both vaccines are given in two doses several weeks apart.

While the two vaccines appear to have very similar safety and efficacy profiles, Moderna's vaccine has a significant practical advantage over Pfizer's.

Pfizer's vaccine has to be kept at minus 75 degrees Celsius. No other vaccine in the US needs to be kept that cold, and doctors' offices and pharmacies do not have freezers that go that low.

Moderna's vaccine can be kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius. Other vaccines, such as the one against chickenpox, need to be kept at that temperature.

Another advantage of Moderna's vaccine is that it can be kept for 30 days in the refrigerator, the company announced Monday. Pfizer's vaccine can last only five days in the refrigerator

Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV, in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started.

Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19.

SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest.

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community

Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

“There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate

They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months

the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out.

Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled.

negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM, used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions. Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published

Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,

published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,”

In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

entists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured.

New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.

These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research, but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way

COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

“Whether the Delta variant is already at that plateau, or whether there’s going to be further increases before it gets to that plateau, I can’t say. But I do think that plateau exists.”

Antibodies, which can prevent the virus from entering our cells, are engineered to latch onto specific molecules on the surface of the virus, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. But genetic mutations in the virus can change the shape of those binding sites.

“If you change that shape, you can make it impossible for an antibody to do its job,”

But as more people acquire antibodies against the virus, mutations that allow the virus to slip past these antibodies will become even more advantageous.

The good news is that there are many different kinds of antibodies, and a variant with a few new mutations is unlikely to escape them all, experts said.

its sleeve to counteract the evolution of the virus,” Dr. Pepper said. “Knowing that there is this complex level of diversity in the immune system allows me to sleep better at night.”

“It’s a lot harder to evade T cell responses than antibody responses,”

And then there are B cells, which generate our army of antibodies. Even after we clear the infection, the body keeps churning out B cells for a while, deliberately introducing small genetic mutations. The result is an enormously diverse collection of B cells producing an array of antibodies, some of which might be a good match for the next variant that comes along.

Whether the virus will become more virulent — that is, whether it will cause more serious disease — is the hardest to predict,

Unlike transmissibility or immune evasion, virulence has no inherent evolutionary advantage.

Some scientists predict that the virus will ultimately be much like the flu, which can still cause serious illness and death, especially during seasonal surges.

“The virus has no interest in killing us,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Virulence only matters for the virus if it works for transmission.”

It is too early to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will change in virulence over the long-term. There could certainly be trade-offs between virulence and transmission; variants that make people too sick too quickly may not spread very far.

Then again, this virus spreads before people become severely ill. As long as that remains true, the virus could become more virulent without sacrificing transmissibility.

Moreover, the same thing that makes the virus more infectious — faster replication or tighter binding to our cells — could also make it more virulent.

Although many possible paths remain open to us, what is certain is that SARS-CoV-2 will not stop evolving — and that the arms race between the virus and us is just beginning.

We lost the first few rounds, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, but we still have powerful weapons to bring to the fight. The most notable are highly effective vaccines, developed at record speed. “I think there is hope in the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at this point are more effective than flu vaccines have probably ever been,”

“I have great faith that we can sort any detrimental evolutionary trajectories out by improving our current or next generation vaccines,”

be you have a re-infection, but it’s relatively mild, which also boosts your immunity,”

rising vaccination rates may already be suppressing new mutations.And the evolution rate could also slow down as the virus becomes better adapted to humans.

“There’s low-hanging fruit,” Dr. Lauring said. “So there are certain ways it can evolve and make big improvements, but after a while there aren’t areas to improve — it’s figured out all the easy ways to improve.”

Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict. We will never extinguish it, but it will smolder rather than rage.

So far, studies suggest that our antibody, T cell and B cell responses are all working as expected when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. “This virus is mostly playing by immunological rules we understand,”

Others are more optimistic. “My guess is that one day this is going to be another cause of the common cold,”

There are four other coronaviruses that have become endemic in human populations. We are exposed to them early and often, and all four mostly cause run-of-the-mill colds.

much of the world remains unvaccinated, and this virus has already proved capable of surprising us. “We should be somewhat cautious and humble about trying to predict what it is capable of doing in the future,”

While we can’t guard against every eventuality, we can tip the odds in our favor by expanding viral surveillance, speeding up global vaccine distribution and tamping down transmission until more people can be vaccinated

The future, he said, “depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus does.”