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This is one of those records from history that looks different to us now through our pandemic eyes. But have a look. Here it is. This is closing time at the polls in Birmingham, Alabama, in May of nineteen sixty six because we are all now citizens of pandemic twenty twenty. You see a photo of anybody crowded together like this anymore and it flips your stomach over a little bit, right? I mean, yeah, you're too close together. Nobody's got a mask.

It activates something in us now to see that. But there they are, a thousand people or more, all crowded into that one Alabama polling place that May 3rd. Nineteen sixty six in Birmingham. I can't do that nowadays for any reason, but there's something important to know about this photo, both for them and for us now. Again, that photo is nineteen sixty six. The year before that photo was taken in Alabama, the future Congressman John Lewis was very nearly killed while he was trying to lead a march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama.

John Lewis and his fellow marchers, black and white, mostly black, were set upon by Alabama state troopers and by a mounted posse the local sheriff had rounded up among local white men. And the violence that day against the marchers was horrifying. It turned out the country was watching as it happened and that bloodbath on the bridge in Selma led directly to the passage and then the signing a few months later of the National Voting Rights Act. President Lyndon Johnson signed that law and considerable part because of the horrific blood sacrifices of those peaceful marchers.

President Johnson signed that law to try to make good on the promise of universal voting rights for citizens of this country. And that law that Johnson signed, it made a difference. He signed it in nineteen sixty five. This was nineteen sixty six people all over Alabama lined up in nineteen sixty six to vote. Black Americans who had never been allowed to vote before now lined up in this incredible scene, lined up to register and to vote in the first big southern election where they had federal protection for exercising their right to vote, thanks to John Lewis and his fellow protesters being beaten nearly to death by that sheriff and that posse on the bridge in the spring of nineteen sixty five, thanks to the country recoiling in horror.

And President Johnson getting that law through and signing it in the summer of nineteen sixty five. By the spring of nineteen sixty six, there was a federal law protecting the right of African-Americans to vote in Alabama and everywhere in this country and in Alabama that year in nineteen sixty six, it was a big election for Alabama. For one thing, that was the top of the ticket. On the Alabama ballot in the spring of nineteen sixty six, running in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama was a political novice, a woman named Lurleen Wallace.

Miss Lurleen Wallace was married to the incumbent Alabama governor at the time, the fire breathing segregationist and white supremacist George Wallace, the George Wallace who swore segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. The George Wallace who stood in the schoolhouse door to prevent African-American students from registering for class at the State University.

George Wallace, that George Wallace at that point, the incumbent governor of Alabama, he was term limited out. He couldn't run for governor again in nineteen sixty six. So his wife, Lurleen Wallace, ran in his stead to preserve his power and what would have basically been a puppet governorship where George Wallace was still really in charge, even though technically his wife was the one who held the office. And so Lurleen stood for office and the Alabama Democratic primary of nineteen sixty six and everybody knew exactly what that meant.

And the black voters of Alabama turned out in that primary in nineteen sixty six. Look at this. I mean, between newly having a real right to vote and imminently facing an outcome they devoutly wish to avoid, you can see the drive and the motivation to get up and put on your Sunday best and get out and vote that day in nineteen sixty six. They were trying to stop the racist Wallace machine and they had a way to try to do it and they would be protected in exercising their right to do it, their right to act, to vote and to say no.

Well, now, of course, all these years later, in twenty twenty, we are living through our own time of lining up to vote and of course it's different, but we learn from our past.

What we've got this year is a time of monumental turnout, looks like enormous enthusiasm, patriotic sacrifice on a personal scale replicated by the millions and ultimately by the tens of millions.

Long lines this year in twenty twenty, we will wait. Rain, we will wait in the rain heat, we will wait in the heat. Deadly virus, we will put on a mask and stand six feet apart. While we are there, we will dance, we will send each other pizza, we will offer chairs and make sure the older folks get to the front of the line if we can. Regular American voters in small ways have been turned into heroes this year because voting has been turned into something that too often takes nearly heroic sacrifice.

Now, some of the fervor we're seeing out there at the polls this year is undoubtedly in favor of the incumbent president, just as surely as some of it comes from the desperate desire to get him out of office.

And some of it comes from real enthusiasm for the ticket that could replace him if he is voted out, just like the Americans in that long ago Alabama polling place.

And that photo from nineteen sixty six, though we can't know what will result from all this effort. We have to do it anyway, not knowing in advance what will happen. Black voters, nineteen sixty six in Alabama. Top of the ticket. Turns out they were not able to stop Lurleen Wallace. She won the Democratic primary anyway, and then she became governor. And so the Wallace regime kept its grip on the neck of the state with that little trick inside the Wallace marriage.

But what those voters did in Alabama mattered for one thing. Part of the way you can tell is it ended up being national news when all those black voters who turned out in Alabama in nineteen sixty six advanced black candidates for the state legislature, even for county sheriffs, The New York Times sent reporters a thousand miles to go cover it for Mrs. Iona Morgan.

Sixty four years old, wearing a hat and a bright red dress, admitted with a giggle that she had had to work up her nerve to go into the Lounds County courthouse and cast her first ballot. She said, seemingly surprised, quote, It wasn't nothing bad. Another voter, William Bolden, eighty one years old, whose grandparents were slaves, took a more positive view. It felt good to me, he said, drawing himself up to his full five feet, three inches.

It made me think I was sort of somebody.

The next county over from Lounds County was Dallas County, home to Selma, where the local sheriff was on the ballot that year, the same sheriff who had charged the marchers on horseback where John Lewis remembered seeing his own death on that bridge where the Voting Rights Act was born. The sheriff who did that was on the ballot for re-election in nineteen sixty six. And you know, what happened on that bridge was was not an outlier in the tenure of that sheriff, even before he sent the horses into the crowd on that Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Sheriff Jim Clark had been a menace. To Selma, four years when high school kids in Selma demonstrated for black voting rights, Sheriff Jim Clark ran them out of town. Look at them. I mean it literally. Look at them running. He literally ran them out of town in a forced march that reportedly involved cattle prods. Two days later, Sheriff Clarke went to the hospital with chest pains and the kids who he had run out of town knelt outside the courthouse and prayed for him to recover.

You believe that photo, that's the kind of sides we had, right, those kind of people who were on two different sides of the fight that year, but one side hitting kids with electric cattle prods, and then the kids would pray for the man who was torturing and persecuting them. You can see Sheriff Jim Clark there in the white helmet the following year. That's him there in the white helmet trying to personally intimidate a man who'd come to register to vote under the new Voting Rights Act.

Why are you wearing your helmet, sir? Set your gun on your hip. In the months leading up to that nineteen sixty six election where Sheriff Clarke was on the ballot, the sheriff sometimes used force, as you can see here, as he tried to stop new voters from registering.

He was violent against black voters with no compunction sometimes. Instead, he stood by and laughed and jeered at them personally as the black people he supposedly served in that county lined up to become his voting constituents when they lined up by the hundreds on Election Day and waited their turn to vote. Sheriff Jim Clark then did his best to stop the counting of their ballots. As sheriff, he personally challenged the contents of whole ballot boxes, entire ballot boxes from six minority precincts.

He said they were all fraudulent and those votes shouldn't be counted. This is how one lawyer from the US Justice Department remembers that moment in time. This was written up in the American Bar Association. Years later, it quotes Justice Department attorney John Rosenberg. Quote, Rosenberg recalls that counting the ballots took a long time. And when six predominantly black wards hadn't finished by late evening, the county's Democratic Executive Committee picked up the boxes and refused to count their ballots.

Rosenberg says, quote, We filed a civil rights action to require them to include the ballots. We were talking about who would win or lose, but the ballots in those boxes needed to be counted. That action that day in that election in Alabama. The year after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the local sheriff who had beat the hell out of people protesting for black voting rights took it to the next step on Election Day, try to block black votes from being counted that day.

That election, that crucible was the first time the federal government intervened in an election like that under the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five to protect the votes of black Americans. Justice Department lawyers entered into a civil rights action to make sure those ballots from those blackboards were counted and it worked. They took it to court. The court ordered that all the votes be counted, even the black ones, even though it was later in the evening than anyone expected, Rozenberg remembers, quote, We were before Judge Daniel Thomas, which we were worried about because he'd been slow in desegregating schools.

He was more conservative. But Judge Thomas ordered that the ballots be counted. And the result of that counting was that Jim Clark was out. Sheriff Jim Clark was out. The voters had voted. The votes got counted. And the worst of the worst was out. He lost. Governor's race did not go their way that day, but the sheriff who very nearly killed John Lewis, the sheriff who butchered his way through peaceful protesters on that bridge in Selma, who terrorized the people of his city and jeered at them and laughed in their faces and intimidated them personally, tried to block them from voting, tried to block their votes from being counted if they could manage to vote.

He failed. They voted and they voted him out that day in nineteen sixty six decisively. As a side note, you might be interested to hear that while John Lewis went on to become a lion and a beacon of American democracy, Sheriff Jim Clark would ultimately end up in a different way. He ended up serving nine months in prison on a serious drug charge, conspiracy to smuggle thousands of pounds of South American drugs into Alabama for the whole rest of his life.

Jim Clark remained absolutely unrepentant about what he had done on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that day and his jailing of thousands of activists and the forced march of the school kids. We hit with the cattle prods and all of it right up until he died. Absolutely an unrepentant.

As we head into this election this year, with all that we've got on the ballot and all the challenges to getting our votes cast and counted and who stands in the way of that with all the newfound challenges of no longer having the federal voting rights law with any teeth in it and no longer having a Justice Department at the federal level, that will help, thanks to the hard line right wing ascendance in the courts and in Washington as we head into this election.

One of the things that we've got in our pocket are these photos.

These interviews we've got, this lived experience, this history to stand on and to learn from. In nineteen sixty six, when The New York Times sent reporters to cover those long, long, long lines of African-American voters turning out in Alabama and that fraught election and that terrifying time, one elderly first time voter named Mary Reece told the Times, quote, I'm going to vote just as far against Jim Clark as I can against anybody in this world. I've been wanting him out for a long time, a long time.

The reporter put that part in all caps, but the words long in all caps paper found Miss Mary race in line along with another hundred people where she had already been waiting for two and a half hours by the time they talked to her. People began lining up at seven thirty in the morning before the polls opened. This year, we are one week away from Election Day as it stands right now in most states and I think it's twenty nine states, although check the courts, you have to have your ballot in by Election Day or they won't count it.

So even if you put it in the mail well before Election Day and you get it postmarked well before Election Day in twenty nine states, if that ballot isn't received by the close of the polls on Election Day, they're not going to count it. Twenty nine states and twenty eight of those twenty nine states right now, it's on average taking more than six days for local first class mail to get delivered right now. Well, that means it's done, right?

Do the math seven days from now, it'll be six days from tomorrow if your vote isn't in the mail already. And bottom line, it's it's pretty much too late now to submit your vote by mail. Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder saying so quite bluntly this morning, he said this online quote, It's too late to use the mails, it's too late to use the mails. Given Supreme Court rulings, I urge everyone to now vote in person early vote or use Dropbox's protect your health.

But don't let the court, meaning the Supreme Court and the deliberately crippled Postal Service, deprive you of your most precious civil right. The top elections official as secretary of state and swing state Michigan saying much the same thing today in detail for the voters of her state, she put out this press statement today. You see the headline. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says it's too late to rely on US Postal Service for absentee ballots. She says, quote, We are too close to Election Day and the right to vote is too important to rely on the Postal Service to deliver absentee ballots on time.

She says citizens who have already. Excuse me, citizens who already have an absentee ballot should sign the back of the envelope and hand deliver it to their city or township clerk's office or ballot Dropbox as soon as possible. Voters who haven't yet received their ballot should go to their clerk's office in person to request it in person, fill it out, sign the envelope and submit it all in one trip. In Michigan, three million ballots were requested. Two million of those three million have been returned so far.

That means that a million are still out there. And now if you're holding on to one of those million ballots in Michigan, that hasn't been sent back yet. Now it's got to be brought back in person if you want it to make it in time. In Wisconsin, nearly one point eight million ballots were requested. Most have been filled out and returned already. But more than 600000 Wisconsin ballots are still out there and haven't come back yet. If you are holding on to one of those ballots that hasn't yet been returned, you need to bring it in in person now if you want it to make it in time.

In Pennsylvania, half the ballots requested haven't yet been returned. If you are holding on to one of those ballots in Pennsylvania that hasn't yet been brought back to the state, do not put it in the mail. They need to be brought in by hand now in person, if you're going to make it in time, North Carolina and Arizona, same again. Half the ballots that were requested aren't back yet. If you want your ballot received and counted on time in North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, all those hundreds of thousands of ballots need to come back now by hand in person.

It's too late for the mail in Florida. It's two million ballots that haven't come back yet. You've got a ballot in Florida that you haven't sent back into the state yet, if you wanted it on time, those need to be brought in in person by hand if you want to make it in time now. We have been talking for months now about this election as the first big national vote by mail election because of the pandemic, but not anymore.

That part of it is over. In part because they really did purposely monkeywrench the post office to make that simple and safe solution not work. And in part because they realized that way too many people were still voting. And so now they want to not count as many ballots as possible by any means necessary. All right. We're seeing this flood of cases into the newly hard line conservatives, Supreme Court Republicans fighting in state after state to get the United States Supreme Court to allow them to not count your ballots somehow.

Right. To limit the time you have to get your ballot in to limit the places you can vote, to limit the number of places you can even just drop off your ballot to add to the list of bogus picayune reasons they can allege some imperfection in your vote to disqualify it, to stop the counting, to throw out as many ballots as they can. That's what the next week and beyond is going to be like. And so we stand in line, we take strength from our history, we will line up and do it, we will line up in places where they just want voting to take forever.

So those with the least time and resources to spare have to give up. We will line up in places where they are determined to slow the mail so we can't vote safely from home. Even in the pandemic, we will line up in places where they are determined that even if we cast their ballots, there will be challenges and tricks and rope courses that our ballots have to run through while they try to justify not counting them. The United States Supreme Court, under its previous conservative majority, took the heart out of the Voting Rights Act years ago.

And now the work of protecting the vote and protecting voters lives and protecting voters ability to get this done, it lies as much with non-profits and political parties and legal volunteers and citizen determination as it ever did under the Justice Department in years, going back to nineteen sixty five. Under this court, under this attorney general, under this president, there's not going to be any Justice Department attorneys riding in with the weight of the federal government on hand to protect citizens rights to vote.

It's not going to happen. We will have to patch it together ourselves. And no, importantly, we do not know what will happen at the end of the day, you never do. There are no guarantees. And right now in this election, again, we are one week out tonight. The attention, of course, is on the top of the ticket. The whole world's attention is on the top of the ticket in our country. But watch down ballot to wear a firehose of determined voters can do almost anything despite almost any odds.

Watch down ballot. Watch the House. Watch the Senate. Watch the governorships. Watch the state legislatures. Watch county sheriffs. Think of all Jim Clark when you do so. So much is up for grabs now this week, this time in these next seven days. If you find yourself standing in a line that ought to be a national embarrassment, if you are waiting to put your ballot in the counties, one lonely Dropbox because they closed, all the rest of them know that you are pulling a thread through a lot of history.

You are doing something we have all been taught how to do by some of the bravest, most persevering Americans who ever lived. You stand in the lines, you may not be able to do everything. Not everything may go your way, but you do what you can do and you won't believe what you can do. The Associated Press sent their reporters and their photographers to cover that patient, brave and determined, steadfast surge of black voters in nineteen sixty six Alabama.

Here's the final words of the AP caption under that photo that ran nationwide in nineteen sixty six. It says, quote, All in line. Got to vote. The lines may take forever, I know. Stay alive. We've heard for years that it's important to have a diversified portfolio, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, that kind of thing, but what about real estate things to fundraise? It's easy for all investors to diversify by building a portfolio of institutional quality.

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Start exploring your family story today. Head to Are You Earl at Ancestry.com tram's to get your ancestry DNA kit and start your free trial. That's Ancestry.com streams. Just yesterday, he said that Putin of Russia, Xi of China and Kim Jong un of North Korea want him to win. We know. We know because you've been giving them whatever you want for the last four years, of course, they want you to win. That's not a good thing.

You shouldn't brag about the fact that some of our greatest adversaries think they'd be better off with you in office. Of course they do. What does that say about you? Former President Barack Obama in Orlando, Florida, today on what The New York Times is now referring to as the former president's, quote, new gig at gleefully needling Trump with T minus one week till this election is over. Biden himself heads to Florida Thursday. That will be followed by a doubleheader on Friday.

He'll do Wisconsin and Iowa. Iowa is a state that Trump took by double digits in twenty sixteen. Biden will then be on to Michigan. And on Saturday, Senator Kamala Harris, his itinerary shows Democratic confidence as well. She'll make a stop in Arizona tomorrow, followed by multiple campaign stops in the great state of Texas on Friday, a state where Republicans haven't lost a single statewide office since nineteen ninety four. But Harris will be stumping all day in Texas on Friday.

Democratic ticket is hitting territory that conventional wisdom says shouldn't be on their schedule with one week to go. Today alone, Biden held not one but two rallies in the great state of Georgia. Georgia going on offense in a state that hasn't backed a Democrat for president since nineteen ninety two. Joining us now is Stacey Abrams, the founder of Fair Fight, which works to fight voter suppression. She's a former Georgia governor candidate and a former leader of the Democrats in the Georgia state legislature.

Mr. Abrams. It's great to see you. Thank you so much for making time to be here tonight. Thank you for such an extraordinary opening, laying out what's so important in this election and getting your ballots. And that was really exceptional. Oh, thank you. I got to say, I had a little trouble with it because looking at those photos makes me cry and so trying to explain what I'm trying to say and describing and trying to say keeps getting interrupted, because every time I look at those visuals, it just makes my heart burst.

But that's that's part of what I wanted to talk to you about. I feel like we've got some new dynamics this year and some real calls to learn from our history, in part because even though this is a pandemic, this is supposedly the vote by mail election. We're seeing these huge early voter numbers. You've been among the people who's been suggesting that right now, if you don't have your ballot and already you better get it in in person, even if it is going to be long lines, because it may be at this point, too late to do it any other way, maybe too late to do it by mail.

It's got to feel a lot of I imagine that giving that kind of advice has to have a lot of crosscurrent feelings for you.

Well, I think the most important piece is reminding people that the end goal is to be heard. And while voting by mail was the safest, most accessible option, what we have to remember is once you have that ballot, the mission is to get it in. And mail would be best if people could just go to their very safe mailboxes and drop it off. But in lieu thereof, we live in twenty twenty in lieu thereof. Getting it in the hands of those who will count.

It is what matters most. So going to a drop box, going to your county elections office, bringing it with you if you haven't filled it out and getting it canceled, if you need to vote in person. But making certain that our focus looks like those women and men in those lines that you talked about, it's about being seen and being heard and not letting anyone distract you from that mission. Stacey, are you seeing differences in Georgia specifically in terms of who's been able to get their ballot back?

Obviously, a lot of people are going to vote on Election Day, but in terms of people who have requested ballots from the state and have them and haven't brought them back yet, are you seeing demographic distance differences or age differences in terms of whose ballots are still out there outstanding that need to be brought in now?

Well, we know that there are about seven hundred and fifty thousand outstanding ballots. We know that because, for example, the county of Gwinnett needed larger ballots because of language requirements, that there was a bit of a delay. But overall, what we've seen has been very promising. We have seen young people returning ballots at rates we've never seen before. We've seen black voters returning those ballots at rates we have not expected. And right now we are doing exceptionally well in mail, in balloting.

But we know that seven hundred and fifty thousand votes is a huge number. And so we're hoping that people will hear us and understand that at this point, do not put it in the mail. Georgia is that phalanx of states that requires that your ballot be received by 7:00 p.m. on November 3rd, and that means take it to a drop box. All but thirty one counties have them. And in the thirty one counties without drop boxes, you can take it to the elections office, but make certain you get it in.

One of the other dynamics that to me has some emotional heft right now for this year's election is that unlike previous years where most of the vote has come in on Election Day this year, it does seem like most of the vote is going to be cast ahead of Election Day votes of voters of all kinds and in all places in collectively will vote more in advance of Election Day than on the day of. And one of the things that does is it creates a lot of energy out there and a lot of potential resources out there of people who have already done their personal part, people ahead of Election Day, they have already got their ballot cast and they are sure that it's going to be counted.

And they still want to help. They still want to do more. They still are anxious about the election outcomes and they want to contribute. What are you telling people who feel that way right now that have have more that they want to do than just casting their own ballot because they've already got it in? Well, no one reach out to everyone, you know, who has a ballot or hasn't decided to vote and make certain that they know to go to, I will vote Dotcom to find out how they can vote in the next seven days or six days.

No, to go to fair fight 20, 20 dotcom and sign up to be a volunteer. We are going to need people not only to serve as poll observers throughout this process and on Election Day, but we're going to have to chase a lot of these ballots, folks who do everything they're supposed to. But make one mistake and a number of our states, they have the ability to fix those mistakes. It's called carrying your ballot. And so we need people to sign up to be part of chasing those ballots and making sure that every vote that gets cast gets counted.

And the last thing is make sure you have conversations. I know everyone's talking about the election, but be having conversations about how to vote, answering questions and getting past the haranguing or the lecturing to the invitation. Look, if you have challenges that you want to see fixed and Rachel, you said this perfectly, we've got to go all the way down the ballot. The closer we are to the ballot, the bottom of the ballot, the closer we are to home.

And so we need to be having conversations not just about the changes we need at the national level, but the changes we need at home. And every voice has to be a part of that that change. Stacey Abrams, the founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count. Stacey, thank you so much for being with us. I know there's going to be very little sleep for you over the next over the next week, but I have a feeling we'll be back in touch with you over these next few days.

Thank you so much.

Looking forward to it. Take care. All right. We've got a lot more news to get to tonight, a night that is both a week before the election and smack dab in the middle of what appears to be the newest and largest yet covid wave that is sweeping across the country. There is a scientific development on the covid side that is clear as a bell and very applicable to all of our lives that you should know about. We're going to talk with a scientist who developed that and explained it coming up next.

Stay with us. Here's the front page of the Greenville News out of Greenville, South Carolina, today. See the headline there, virus downright scary for Clemson residents. And you see the subhead there. Two cases make residents want to draw an invisible line between themselves and students as cases tick up in the college town of Clemson and South Carolina. That article about how fearful those residents are of catching coronavirus that sits on the front page right alongside this other story, quote, Penn's visit to thank Graham, Vice President Pence coming to Greenville despite covid positive staffers just days after a whole bunch, five of his closest staff members and advisers tested positive for covid.

Vice President Pence is refusing to quarantine himself despite admitting he was in close contact with those covid patients. The vice president has nevertheless decided he will make a campaign stop in Greenville, South Carolina, today, foisting himself and his potential infection upon a community that is already freaking out about it all to try to boost Senator Lindsey Graham's campaign against Democrat Jamie Harrison and maybe, hopefully not starting a new local outbreak while he's doing so thanks from the community. Speaking of holding rallies in a pandemic, here's the Chippewa Herald from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin today.

Quote, Doctors again asked to cancel rallies. Plea comes after deadliest week in case Serj, Wisconsin recorded sixty four coronavirus deaths today, its worst day so far.

Doctors pleading with the presidential campaign to cancel their rallies over in Omaha, Nebraska, the Omaha World Herald reports, quote, Nebraska is still near the top of the pandemic's third wave state and Douglas County case records for fourth straight week as West and Upper Midwest feel brunt. And Helena, Montana, this is the front page of the independent record virus. Levels rise in wastewater, 20 fold increase seemed seen in East Helena. Helena levels double that sort of a wastewater testing statistic is useful because it usually tells you how much more prevalent the virus is in your community.

Then you could tell from the case county it can tell you when you're about to see your numbers go up in terms of cases, even before individual testing reveals exactly who's got it. This is the front page of the Dallas Morning News today. Basically a call for help. El Paso County in crisis stage with hospitals. Full officials urge residents to stay home for 14 days. Right next to that, hospitals watch, wait and worry. Numbers begin. Scary, relentless march up, leaving almost no region of us safe from search.

St. Louis Post Dispatch. An expanding pandemic. There is no safe place. In Aberdeen, South Dakota, the American News and Aberdeen, South Dakota, published this article above the fold covid-19 active cases and hospitalizations hit record highs. It's the same story, different state in the Register Herald in Beckley, West Virginia. Their front page today, record hospitalizations, covid cases spike across the country and in West Virginia. Front page of The Washington Post today right there next to Berrett confirmed to the Supreme Court is this stark warning.

Hospitals nationwide see a flood of patients. covid surge sparked fresh fears that facilities will have to ration care. As of tonight, the post counts forty one states plus Puerto Rico that have more hospitalized covid patients now than they did at the end of last month. According to their data set in just the past week, we've had record high hospitalizations in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

We leave any place out.

President says it's all because of testing, testing doesn't put you in the hospital. No matter what metric you are using, none of it is good. But as I mentioned a moment ago, there is one bright spot in the news today, some clarity, some clear, provable clarity that frankly ought to create its own political environment on what we can do provably to get out of this mess.

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That story's next. covid-19 is still in our communities and it is still spreading, the evidence could not be clearer. Wearing a mask is not only safe, but it is necessary to avoid another shutdown. Therefore, I'm announcing that beginning twelvefold one a.m. July 3rd, every kanzen in a public space must wear a mask.

Governor Laura Kelly of the Great State of Kansas speaking this summer announcing a statewide mask mandate in Kansas. Just as cases began to really take off in her state was one problem, though. In Kansas the month before, the Republican controlled legislature in the state of Kansas had held an all night marathon session specifically to neuter the Democratic governors powers to strip her of the emergency powers that she was using to try to fight covid in her state. So Gov.. Kelly could issue whatever mandate she wanted.

But thanks to Republicans in the legislature stripping her powers, her public health orders didn't mean anything statewide. Any and every Kansas county had the option to opt out of her orders if they wanted to. And boy, did they. There's one hundred and five counties in Kansas after Governor Kelly issued her mask mandate. More than 80 of the hundred and five counties in the state opted out of it. A couple of dozen counties in blue there. Those are the only ones that didn't opt out.

In the end, it was actually only 20 counties that enforced the mandate. That has been the situation in Kansas since July, 20 counties with a massive mandate and the rest of the state without one. And among all the other things that that meant and all the other things that means it's an environment that scientists call a natural experiment.

Here's a chart of average daily coronavirus cases over time in Kansas. This was just released by Professor Dorn against her cancer and her colleagues, colleagues at the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. Now, look at this closely for a second. What they've done here. And you see the two vertical lines. They've marked the date that the governor issued the mask mandate. That was July 3rd. And then they've marked two weeks later, July 17th.

That's the point at which you would expect to start seeing the effects of a policy change like a mask mandate. So that's basically when the mandate goes into effect. The blue line here, that's covid cases in the counties that actually did implement the mask mandate. That's those 20 counties. And you can see that two weeks after the mandate goes into effect, cases start dropping. They come back up a little bit over time and they go back down overall.

The basically stays flat in the 20 counties with the mask mandate. Now, look at the red line, the red line. They started off much lower when the mask mandate went into effect. But those are the counties that opted out of it. See the difference? Two weeks after the mandate was issued, the cases started climbing in those counties. And then in mid to late August, the case numbers just took off and never looked back. Look at how the fate of those two sets of counties has diverged.

Mask mandate, counties in blue, those states basically flat, no mask mandate counties. Those are red.

They take off inexorably. Through mid-October, the new case rate in the no mandate counties in the red counties was double the rate of new cases in the counties, with the mask mandate double. In other words, this is as simple as science gets masks work. You can see it in this natural experiment in Kansas. Mask mandates work. I mean, science is really that clear, right? That is a blessing to us that we have such clarity on what we can do to keep our case numbers at least flat if not coming down.

It also shows that as blessed as we are by the science, we are coerced in terms of our political leadership. Right. With the president, who in the face even of evidence like that still wants to be like I've heard mixed messages about masks. I don't know, maybe they give you covid. No, actually, this is one thing where actually it is super, super, super, super clear leadership that doesn't get it is the other side of this.

And that is another issue. But the science could not be clearer. How do we make the most of that? Joining us now is one of the people who conducted this new study, Donnegan. There is professor of economics and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. Professor Ginter, it's an honor to have you with us tonight. Thank you so much for sharing some time with us. Well, thank you for having me, Rachel.

If you want another job, we should start teaching economics.

I did very poorly. I did very poorly in economics and college. I don't I didn't want to I wouldn't go there. But let me actually let me ask you if when I was summarizing your findings, is there anything that I got wrong or that I put the wrong emphasis on or something I should have pointed out that I missed I couldn't have done it better myself.

You got the whole point is we're flat in counties that had a mandate and they exceeded the rate of growth exceeded in those counties. So were you so demanding?

Were you surprised to arrive at such clear cut findings? I mean, I am not a scientist, but looking at this, it's sort of the result does sort of leap off the page. I imagine that you and your colleagues had some expectations as to what you find, but did you expect it to be this blunt? We look at it really early on, and you really didn't see any effect until about six weeks later, we did the analysis of that a week ago or so.

And as you said, it just left off the page. We didn't have to do any of the sophisticated statistical model at all. We just ran the regressions and we get those estimates that case rates from.

You're at the University of Kansas. You're the director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research. This is Kansas specific study of a Kansas natural experiment that was created by a sort of peculiarity of the Kansas policy making process in the time of this pandemic. I have to ask if your research and your findings here are proving influential in Kansas, if this has led to any sort of discussion about reconsidering whether there ought to be a statewide mandate or whether some of those Cantet counties that opted out might want to change their minds, the governor and legislative leaders met today and they decided to be more proactive about encouraging local governments to use masks.

They stopped short of a mandate, but they are speaking with one voice about the importance of masks in the state. So I remain hopeful that we can move in the right direction. One of the variables that I was interested in in your study is that while there were 20 states that you described as plainly implementing the mask mandate and those ended up being the states represented by the blue line on that graph, there were a small number of there were a small number of states that decided to go along with the mandate, but you considered them effectively to not have effectively implemented it.

Can you describe that a little bit?

Those in between those in between counties, there are three different types of counties, the ones where the city said a massive mandate, but the county didn't. So those are kind of mixed or partial compliance. There are counties that took the mask mandate very late in the game, and so they haven't had enough time to have the mandate take effect. And then there were the counties that didn't enforce. If they didn't enforce, then the mask mandate wasn't effective.

The partial if we put the partial compliance counties in the case, rates don't fall by 50 percent, they fall by about 30 percent. So what we did with the 50 percent number is we like to compare, always mask wearing to never wear a mask wearing as opposed to the partial compliance. So even with partial compliance, you still see a very large effect. That is that's important because I think sometimes people think that if they can't do it perfectly, they shouldn't try.

We've seen arguments from some governors and other states, for example, that I don't think people I don't think everybody will go along with it, even if I do put in place a mandate. But even with partial compliance, you see a benefit. It's just incredibly, incredibly valuable research. Professor Gunther, thank you. And your colleagues at the University of Kansas for doing it. And thanks for helping us understand it here, here tonight. Long may you wave.

I hope people really understand what this means and take it to heart. Well, thank you for having me. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us. The election ends one week from tonight. Are you pacing yourself, by which I mean, are you doing everything you could conceivably do to wake up a week from tomorrow knowing that you did everything you could possibly do? All right. That's going to do it for me on TV tonight.

I will see you again tomorrow on The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC.

Hey, guys. Willie Geist here this week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. I get together with Drew Barrymore to talk about her long run in the public eye and her new role as talk show host. And hear our conversation now for free wherever you download the podcast.