| | | | | |  | | By Michael Kruse | Presented by |  | | With help from Renuka Rayasam HOPE — An independent FDA advisory committee voted 17 to 4 that the benefits of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine outweigh the risks, setting the stage for the agency to authorize emergency use of the shot for people 16 and older. THE FUTURE OF THE GOP? Jarrod Lowery, a former Marine, a current member of the Lumbee Tribal Council and an up-and-coming local Republican activist and operator in Prospect, N.C., steered his white Chevy Silverado past fallow fields of soybeans and corn, past silos and cow crossings, past doublewide trailers and brick-block homes, past the sign describing the area as "the cradle of Indian prosperity" — and past the lawns, telephone poles and above-ground pools boasting posters, banners and flags exhibiting practically lockstep support for President Donald Trump. "This," said the affable, voluble Lowery, 32, giving me a recent tour, "is the heart." It's the heart of the Native American community that lives here in the low-lying, often forgotten inland portion of North Carolina's southeastern bulge — the Lumbee, the largest tribe in the state, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River. And it's the heart, too, of the reason Trump won Robeson County for the second straight election — and this time not by a little but by a lot. Last month's results here were remarkable in ways that haven't been altogether appreciated for the significance they could hold for the future of both parties. Trump's performance in more than a dozen Lumbee-rich precincts helped him hold on to this swing state even as he suffered notable slippage in the suburbs and lost by yawning margins in the cities. It is one of this state's poorest counties, and one of its least educated. Its population of some 130,000 people is also, though, one of the most broadly diverse in the nation — 42.3 percent American Indian, 30.6 percent white, 23.6 percent black, with a growing Hispanic presence as well. And it is where Trump crafted a sort of template for how the GOP might prevail even without him. As Democrats made marked gains with an increasingly multi-racial mix of voters in and around the most metropolitan areas, Trump did a version of the same out in the hinterlands — defying the conventional wisdom that rural America is a sprawling demographic dead end of a steadily dwindling swath of lesser- educated white voters. On the contrary, Trump juiced his support in these places, drawing from pools of people previously considered all but unreachable for Republicans. In Robeson County, Trump retained the vast majority of the white vote, improved his performance in predominantly Black precincts and all-out romped in Lumbee hotbeds. Trump and his campaign targeted voters regardless of their racial differences with his rural-resonant messages of social conservatism — pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military — and anti-NAFTA broadsides. The campaign also added a hyper-specific and transactional component: very publicly backing the federal recognition the Lumbee have sought since the 1800s. Finally, Trump and his most prominent surrogates kept showing up, a persistence that crested with Trump's rally in the county seat a week and a half before the election — something no sitting president had ever done here. Trump increased his support here in both total votes and percentage more than in any of the other 99 counties in North Carolina. Joe Biden in Robeson actually got four more votes than Hillary Clinton did four years back. But Trump? He got 7,044 more votes than he did in 2016. "The Lumbee population is now performing electorally like non-college rural white voters," Morgan Jackson, one of the state's top Democratic consultants, told me. "And you see this happening in a lot of rural white communities where there are large percentages of minority population." What Trump did in Robeson County amounts to a rather stunning rebuke of Democratic messaging and strategy. "You have a county that's 70 percent minority," said Donnie Douglas, who was the editor of the Robesonian newspaper for almost a quarter-century, "that voted for a guy who is perceived by half the country as being a racist." Urban America is more populous and more diverse, of course, than rural America, and "rural America" comes in many variations. Still, roughly one in five people who lives in America lives in a rural area, and roughly one in five people who live in a rural area is not white. And votes are up for grabs. Read the story in POLITICO Magazine. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out at mkruse@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com , or on Twitter at @michaelkruse and @renurayasam.
| | | | A message from the American Petroleum Institute: Reducing emissions and providing affordable, reliable energy shouldn't be a choice. We can and must do both. Today, America is leading the world in CO2 emission reductions. As we look toward tomorrow and the future, America's natural gas and oil companies are working with the country's brightest minds and organizations to continue that progress while reliably delivering essential energy. Join us to create real, lasting progress – together. | | | | | | FAMILY MATTERS — The Biden family's legal troubles are going to complicate the president-elect's efforts to take politics out of the Justice Department, Ben Schreckinger , who is working on a book about the Biden family, told Nightly's Renuka Rayasam today. Biden has pledged to allow the department to remain independent, but that will get tricky as the FBI investigates Hunter Biden's taxes and the business dealings of James Biden, Joe Biden's brother. See if Ben can unwind the impact of the investigations on Biden's presidency and whether he can beat the buzzer here.
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| | | | | LISTEN TO THE NEW SEASON OF GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS PODCAST: Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. The world has long been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, and these issues have exploded over the past year amid a global pandemic. This podcast helps to identify and understand the impediments to smart policymaking. Subscribe for Season Two, available now. | | | | | | | | LOOKING FOR A RAND BARGAIN — Rand Paul is at it again, and his moves could force another brief government shutdown. The Kentucky Republican is objecting to swift passage of the annual defense policy bill , effectively forcing senators to remain in Washington for an extra day as he filibusters the $740 billion legislation. But the government needs to be funded past Friday — and the short one-week spending bill can't be passed before then without agreement from all 100 senators to vote, Andrew Desiderio, Connor O'Brien and Burgess Everett write. Paul, no stranger to filibusters, said in an interview today that he opposes a provision in the bill that would hamstring the president's ability to draw down American troops from Afghanistan. "That amendment alone is enough to make me object to it, as well as the amount of spending," he said. Removing a provision from a conference report would destroy a massive agreement on defense spending. Paul said he would allow swift passage of the stopgap funding bill if GOP leaders allowed a final vote on the National Defense Authorization Act on Monday, which would require the Senate to go through the procedural motions. But Republicans are eager to finish work on it this week.
| | | |   | | | | | | HOLIDAY SPIKE — For the first time since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, daily reported U.S. deaths topped 3,000 on Dec. 9, at 3,142, with a record 7-day rolling daily average of 2,275 deaths. Texas led the nation with a weekly average of 189 deaths per day, while South Dakota had the highest average daily deaths per 1 million population, at nearly 25.
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| COVID MED SCHOOL — The novel coronavirus is called "novel" for a reason. Nobody had ever seen it before. So how did doctors learn how to treat it? Joanne Kenen , our health care editor at large, tells Nightly she had been wondering about this for months: As doctors gained more experience with a virus far more complex than initially believed, how did they share insights with fellow clinicians? And as they worked themselves to exhaustion (physical and emotional), how did they keep up with the avalanche of science about the virus and the disease — which turned out to be way more complicated than it first appeared, involving not just the lungs but the heart, kidneys and brain, among other organs? And sometimes morphing into a chronic condition that's still not well understood? So Joanne gathered experts (including one physician serving in Congress) and asked them a lot of questions at a POLITICO Live event this week. And most of what she learned, she tells us, was reassuring: The flow of information is not perfect, but it's been good and it's been fast. Care guidelines that used to take months to write now take weeks. Preprints — manuscripts that have not yet been peer reviewed but are made public — are spreading findings and stimulating debate, although more needs to be done to make it absolutely clear that these postings are still science-in-progress. Dozens of medical specialty societies are coordinating and collaborating. The CDC has helped fund the Covid Learning Collaborative, which has become a one-stop destination for clinicians in multiple fields to tap into the collective (and scientifically sound) research. The groups pulling this all together are not only sending out information; they are also asking the caregivers in the trenches what they need. Nor are these tools open only to physicians at elite academic institutions. A GP in a small town in rural America can tap in just as easily as a senior physician at Johns Hopkins. Nor are doctors the only parties to these conversations — nurses, pharmacists and others involved in saving the lives of Covid patients join in. Social media can be a double-edged sword. Bad interpretations of pre-prints (or bad pre-prints) go viral. But overall, there's plenty of good stuff — often curated by highly-regarded experts — on Twitter and Facebook. Some websites with guidelines have gotten as many as 1.7 million hits. Webinars get 6,000 or 7,000 views. Tens of thousands of health care professionals join moderated Facebook groups. Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat and physician who took part in the POLITICO event, says the government needs to fund and facilitate these kind of initiatives — and think about how to capture some of the pandemic-driven energy and innovation to start working on the next problems — both those that we know are coming, like antibiotic resistance, and the unknown ones that we will inevitably confront. "The federal government should have been a clearinghouse of information, pushing out the best practices as we got that information," Bera said, and coordinating better with the international community. Asked about how his colleagues on the Hill have learned about the virus, Bera said many have absorbed a lot of scientific information about testing, treatment and now vaccines. But not everyone. Sometimes when he tries to talk to a mask-shunning colleague, he lamented, "It's like talking to a brick wall." If you want to know more, watch the full session. Besides Bera, the guests were Jessica Polka, executive director as ASAPbio, Helen Burstin, CEO of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies and Johns Hopkins' Natasha Mubeen Chida, the medical editor of the COVID-19 Real Time Learning Network. BIDEN'S PANDEMIC TEAM — Biden has chosen the officials who will be at the center of his administration's Covid response. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Tyler Pager and Dan Diamond break down how the picks for Biden's health team were made — and what sort of turbulence they could face during the confirmation process.
| | | | | | Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly's look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, with Biden's pick of Denis McDonough to be Veterans Affairs secretary, we dive into the POLITICO archives to look at how the vice president handled his last battle on a VA nomination: The 2014 Obama pick of Robert McDonald. Below, an excerpt from July 21, 2014's " Biden urges Hill on VA: 'Get it done'": Vice President Joe Biden on Monday said the Obama administration would continue to press Congress to confirm Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Robert McDonald and pass legislation to address problems at the VA. "It's time to get it done now," Biden, speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference in St. Louis, said of legislation on Capitol Hill to reform the VA. "Stop fooling around." The vice president also offered high praise for Robert McDonald, the retired president and CEO of Procter & Gamble who President Barack Obama nominated to head the VA in late June. "He's a man who gets it," Biden said of McDonald, noting that he graduated from West Point and took advantage of the GI Bill to go to business school. "If there ever was an example of how the finest military training, coupled with successful support of veterans' benefits, can elevate a man or women or a family … it's Bob McDonald." McDonald spent five years as an Army captain, earning the Meritorious Service Medal after he left the service. The vice president also praised the nominee's business background and administrative competence, an issue facing the department as it tries to respond to problems at many of its facilities across the U.S. "He knows how to handle things of this scale and scope, and he has the heart committed to veterans, being one himself," Biden said.
| | | Nightly asks you: Every December, the news media reflects on the lives we lost this year, and 2020 has been especially deadly. Tell us who you'll miss the most — a family member, a civic leader, a celebrity — and how you'll remember them. Send us your answers in our form, and we'll publish select responses this week.
| | | | | 4 The number of Arab nations that have normalized relations with Israel in the last four months, after Trump announced Morocco's deal today . As part of the agreement, the U.S. will recognize Morocco's claim over the disputed Western Sahara region. | | | | | BORIS TELLS BRITAIN: GET READY FOR NO DEAL — The U.K. Cabinet strongly feels the EU's proposed trade deal is not one Britain can accept , the British prime minister said today. In a TV clip, Boris Johnson said there is now a "strong possibility" that the U.K. and the EU will trade on World Trade Organization terms from Jan. 1, 2021, rather than agreeing to a free-trade agreement. "I do think we need to be very, very clear, there is now a strong possibility — a strong possibility — that we will have a solution that is much more like an Australian relationship with the EU than a Canadian relationship with the EU," he said. The clip was released shortly after a meeting of his Cabinet this evening, in which Johnson told ministers it was time for the U.K. to prepare for a no-deal outcome. He said the Cabinet agreed "very strongly" with him that "the deal on the table is really not at the moment right for the U.K."
| | | | JOIN FRIDAY - A PATH TO CLEANER SKIES: Before the pandemic, increased demand for air travel resulted in rising global emissions. Then, Covid-19 changed everything. As airlines start to recover from the resulting financial fallout, what is happening with the use of cleaner jet fuel, investments in technology, and international pacts to cut the airline industry's carbon footprint? Join POLITICO for a conversation on the future of air travel, climate change, and sustainability, as well as an executive conversation between POLITICO CEO Patrick Steel and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | RED LINE TO JUDICIARY SQUARE — Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, will be teaching at the Georgetown University's law school in Washington next semester , according to a press release from the university. He'll serve as a "Distinguished Visitor from Practice" and a Distinguished Fellow of the Georgetown Law Institute, Eugene Daniels writes. The course on entertainment and media law will be Emhoff's first teaching gig, according to a transition official. Until recently, he was a prominent entertainment and media lawyer and partner at DLA Piper in Los Angeles. Since Harris joined the Democratic ticket in August, Emhoff has been on a leave of absence from the firm and has plans to completely cut ties before Inauguration Day. Jill Biden will also juggle her official role as first lady with teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College. This will be the first time in history that the spouse of the president and of the vice president keep a day job.
| | | | A message from the American Petroleum Institute: Even as CO2 emissions have dropped, the U.S. has reduced dependence on foreign energy and became one of the world's top energy exporters thanks in part to natural gas. Natural gas has helped provide electricity to millions around the world for the first time. All while American families have enjoyed relatively flat household energy costs over the past 15 years while other costs have jumped. We don't have to choose between making lasting, tangible climate progress and reliable energy; we can and must do both. Join us to learn how we can do even more – together. | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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