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Just outside of Shawano, a billboard advertises the COVID-19 vaccine.

"I got the vaccine so I can protect myself and all the people I care about," it reads, alongside a photo of state Assembly Rep. Gary Tauchen, of Hartland.

Tauchen is a Republican, and his district is a conservative area. And like other rural parts of the state, uptake of the vaccine has been slow. Only 42 percent of Shawano County residents are fully vaccinated, according to state data, making it the county with the fifth-lowest vaccination rate in Wisconsin.

Tauchen, who is part of a coalition of leaders called the Community Health Action Team that is behind the new public messaging campaign, wants to see that change.

"I'm a farm boy by trade," Tauchen said. "We don't vaccinate part of our herd, we vaccinate the whole herd. And I think it's important to get as many people vaccinated as you can."

Tauchen is one of a relatively small number of elected Republican leaders in Wisconsin who've been willing to be a part of campaigns to publicly encourage vaccinations. GOP leaders like U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson have spent months promoting false or misleading information about the vaccine. In August, state Senate Majority Leader Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, encouraged hospital workers to defy their employers' vaccine mandates.

Public health leaders say the politicization of the vaccine campaign has had deadly results.

Consistently for the last year Republicans have been more likely than Democrats or independents to tell opinion surveys they are skeptical of the vaccine. A study published in April found that unlike other groups, self-identified Republicans became more skeptical of the vaccine over time.

By October, the death rate from COVID-19 in rural areas was double what it was in urban regions of the Unites States, according to an analysis from the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Relatively low vaccination rates in rural areas were at least part of the explanation, according to the report. In Wisconsin, the latest data show that in September unvaccinated people were five times more likely than fully vaccinated people to be infected with COVID-19, nine times more likely to be hospitalized and 19 times more likely to die.

That's why the Community Health Action Team, which is organized by the health system ThedaCare, launched the new campaign using grant money from the state Department of Health Services. In addition to the billboards, it includes a series of radio ads in which a Shawano parent and a school board member urge vaccinations as a way to keep schools open; and a doctor describes overloaded conditions at the local hospital.

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"So, when will this pandemic end?" the ads say. "It'll end when those who are able to get vaccinated, are vaccinated."

Public health campaigns promoting the COVID-19 vaccine have been going on for months. DHS paid for billboard campaigns across the state that featured local health providers doctors and nurses who might be recognizable, trusted sources of information to people in their communities. Like most of the country, Wisconsin saw a spike in vaccinations when they became widely available in the spring, followed by a precipitous decline in June. In early November, the state was averaging about 3,600 new vaccinations per day.

Julie Chikowski, vice president of ThedaCare Medical Center-Shawano,acknowledged persuasion happens slowly, and any gains from the new campaign in the Shawano area are likely to be incremental. But she said the group also made efforts to tailor their messages to that specific community.

"We tried to make it more about keeping the schools open, keeping the businesses open," Chikowski said. "We're not saying, 'You need to go get a vaccination,' because that's a huge turn-off for the community ... (People) want to understand: What's in it for Shawano?"

Chikowski said shehopes those messages and the messengers they've chosen can break through the politicized nature of the vaccine debate, at least for some people.

"The goal is to try to open minds, get the politics out of the vaccination process, and have people really look at the science," she said.

Tauchen, who was first elected in 2006, announced in January he would not seek reelection next year. He acknowledged his decision to retire also gives him political freedom to speak in favor of the vaccine without worrying about a backlash from vaccine-skeptical members of the Republican base.

"This is my last term, so I'm not really worried about getting elected again," he said. "I think it's the right thing to do."

Chikowski said she knows a lot of people are tired of thinking about the pandemic. But with cases and hospitalizations once again rising in Wisconsin, that's not a luxury health officials have.

"Is there fatigue? Absolutely, there's fatigue," she said. "But people are still dying, so we don't get to be tired. We get to try to find a new way to have a new message that somehow reaches people that says: Get a vaccination, please."

Originally posted here:
Republican lawmaker's pro-vaccine messages are part of an effort to 'get the politics out of the vaccination process' - Wisconsin Public Radio News

1. Colin Powell's death: The end of an era for moderate Republicans?  USA TODAY
2. The Colin Powell Republican no longer exists in the Republican Party  CNN
3. What Colin Powell said about Barack Obama and Islamophobia  NPR
4. Republicans wanted Colin Powell to run for president in 1996, but he declined  The Washington Post
5. As a Black Republican, Colin Powell challenged party to be more inclusive  Yahoo News
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Colin Powell's death: The end of an era for moderate Republicans? - USA TODAY

In his first public appearance after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-President Donald Trump sought respite in South Texas. His visit was billed as a way to promote the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, but it also gave him a welcome escape from the turmoil in Washington. Thats because, just months prior, voters in Texass border region shifted sharply toward Trump.

And Trump isnt the only Republican to see success in South Texas. In June, Javier Villalobos, a former Hidalgo County GOP chair, narrowly bested Veronica Vela Whitacre in a McAllen municipal election. Though the race was technically nonpartisan, local GOP officials insisted Villalobos was the first registered Republican elected mayor of the city this century. The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First, former Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes tweeted at the time.

Its why Republicans, headed into the 2022 midterms, plan to campaign in the area more heavily now than they did before. Moreover, through the redistricting process, which Republicans control in Texas, they have positioned themselves to hold a sizable and long-term majority of House seats, including by making it easier to win at least one border-area district currently represented by a Democrat. Whether Republicans will continue to make inroads in the Texas counties along or near the border is unclear there is conflicting evidence over just how much Hispanic voters moved toward the GOP in 2020 but if Republicans are successful there, it might not mean a death knell for Democrats hoping to turn Texas blue. Thats because Democrats have made sizable gains in the Texas suburbs.

The state as a whole has long voted reliably Republican, but about two-thirds of Texass population lives in one of the states four huge metropolitan areas Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. If you combine all the votes there, Democrats improved their margin by more than 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, carrying these areas 52 percent to 47 percent in November. This shift is significant because even though Texass border counties moved sharply to the right in 2020 Starr County, for instance, swung a staggering 55 points toward Republicans Democrats gains in those four big cities and their suburbs added almost five times as many votes as Republicans gains in 28 counties along or near Texass border with Mexico.

This is not to downplay Republicans gains along the border and in South Texas. Trump ultimately won 14 of these 28 counties eight of which he flipped from 2016 with many more counties than Starr lurching to the right: Maverick County moved 46 points to the right, Zapata County moved 38 points, Webb County moved 28 points and Hidalgo County moved 23 points. Hidalgo, with around 871,000 people, is the most populous county in the border area (edging out El Paso Countys 866,000), which made its shift toward Trump especially impactful in terms of raw vote totals. To be clear, President Biden still won the overall vote across the border and South Texas counties by 17 points, but this was about half the margin Hillary Clinton had in 2016, when she won the region by 33 points.

Why Texass border region shifted so dramatically toward Republicans compared with the rest of the state has no one answer. According to Jason Villalba, the chairman and CEO of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and a former GOP representative in the state House, some national Democrats leftward shift on issues like clean energy and fossil fuels and policing including calls to abolish or restructure U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement likely turned off Hispanics along the Texas-Mexico border, who make up 85 percent of the population in those 28 counties and 23 percent of all Hispanics in the state. Being labeled as against fossil fuels and supportive of defunding the police is not a winning message when the majority of the communities in the region are economically impacted by those two drivers, Villalba said. Then, layer on a cult of personality figure like Trump and the Democrats are going to have a real problem, which they did.

Of course, Hispanic voters arent a monolith, and without Trumps name on the ballot, its hard to tell whether Republican gains in South Texas will last. But so far, Biden isnt polling particularly well with Hispanic voters in the state. A September poll from The Dallas Morning News/University of Texas-Tyler put Biden 19 points underwater with Hispanic voters in Texas, while a separate Quinnipiac University poll the same month had him down 18 points among Hispanic registered voters in Texas. On top of that, Villalba said Democrats took the border region for granted in 2020, focusing much of their campaign on turning out Democrats in the states suburbs rather than Hispanic voters at the border with Mexico.

South Texas and the border area is also very rural, which may also have played an outsize role in why Republicans gained so much ground there. In 2020, the more rural the area, the better Trump tended to do, and places with large Hispanic populations were no exception. This may explain in part why Trump performed so much better in more rural Starr and Maverick counties than in El Paso County, where Trump did only about 8 points better in 2020 than in 2016. This cant explain all the differences, however, as Hidalgo and Webb counties are also more urban, yet Trump improved by more than 20 points in both.

Another factor driving what we saw in 2020 could be educational attainment among Hispanics. Polarization by education has been a trend among white voters for years now, as Democrats have steadily picked up support among those with at least a four-year degree while losing support among those without one. But this trend may be affecting Latino voters, too, as Pew Research Center found Biden won 69 percent of Hispanics with a college degree nationally, but only 55 percent among those with some college or less. As a whole, the Texas border area isnt as highly educated as the states metro areas, so this also may have played into the disparate shift to the right in many parts of the border region and South Texas. However, the share of Hispanics with a college degree in the border area is actually similar to that of the major metro areas as a whole, so this is far from clear-cut.

But Democratic losses in the border areas may not frustrate their efforts to eventually turn Texas blue, primarily because the states four most populous metropolitan areas have trended Democratic over the past four years. These opposing trends potentially form a favorable tradeoff for Democrats because a lot more voters live in and around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin than in the border regions. As the table below shows, those four big cities and their surroundings contributed nearly 70 percent of Texass 2020 presidential vote total, and all of them shifted left.

Texas metro areas got bluer in 2020

Shift in presidential election vote from 2016 to 2020, by metropolitan area or region

*This region consists of the following 28 counties near or along the states border with Mexico: Brewster, Brooks, Cameron, Culberson, Dimmit, Duval, El Paso, Frio, Hidalgo, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kinney, Kleberg, La Salle, Maverick, Nueces, Presidio, Reeves, Starr, Terrell, Val Verde, Webb, Willacy, Zapata and Zavala.

Source: Dave Leips Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

These shifts allowed Biden to narrowly carry the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio metropolitan areas after Trump won them in 2016. It also boosted the Democrats edge in the Austin region. And what this did in terms of raw vote totals is telling: Compared with the 2016 election, Democrats added around 416,000 net votes the total Biden gained over Clinton minus the total Trump gained from these four metro areas. In contrast, Trumps improvement in the 28 counties along the border and in South Texas produced only about 89,000 more net votes for the GOP. Although Trump was also helped by the rest of the state, which gave him about 151,000 additional net votes, the Democrats showing in those four big population centers outpaced what was happening outside them. This wasnt enough to turn Texas blue Trump still won the state by about 631,000 votes but it could point to a favorable trend for Democrats in the long run.

Biden didnt make gains just in the core cities in these metropolitan areas, though. He also fared better in the suburban and exurban counties around them. In this way, Texas was a microcosm of what we saw across the nation in 2020, as Democrats made gains in the inner and outer rings surrounding cities, which proved critical to Bidens victory. As the second-most-populous state in the country, Texas has many suburban and exurban areas, too, and there were many striking examples of red areas becoming bluer. With nearly 2 million people between them, Collin and Denton counties, north of Dallas-Fort Worth, shifted markedly to the left: Biden did about 12 points better than Clinton in each, converting places that Trump won in 2016 by 17 and 20 points, respectively, into only single-digit wins in 2020. With 609,000 inhabitants, Williamson County, which contains a small portion of northern Austin and a lot of suburban turf, even went from red to blue, going from about a 10-point Trump win in 2016 to a 1-point Biden win in 2020. Not every suburban or exurban county moved as much, but almost every county in the four big Texas metros got bluer in 2020.

In the suburban and exurban areas, theres been a movement away from Trump and to the left. Hes really been a cancer for moderate-type voters, educated voters and voters who have typically been centrists, Villalba said.

In fact, Democratic gains and changing demographic trends in the Texas suburbs have become such a force that Republicans have opted to cede some of that turf to Democrats to ensure overall GOP control. While Republicans are hoping to win over some of those South Texas seats in the U.S. House, their likely congressional map intentionally draws Democratic Reps. Colin Allred of Dallas and Lizzie Pannill Fletcher of Houston into safely Democratic districts that had formerly been competitive suburban seats. The GOP-controlled state legislature also placed one of Texass new districts in Austin, a Democratic stronghold, to pack in as many Democrats as they could to help make surrounding seats redder.

With all that being said, Hispanic voters trending further to the right in the big metro areas could be an obstacle for Democrats. While Republicans made big gains in South Texas and along the border, heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in cities like Houston also inched toward the GOP, although they still voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Should that trend continue, however, it would complicate Democrats ability to add more votes from the big metro areas. As such, its certainly in the GOPs interest not only to make gains along the border but also to make inroads in Hispanic communities in more populous areas that still lean Democratic.

After all, elections are won at the margins, and thatll be true in Texas moving forward. Considering the magnitude of the Democratic gains in the major metropolitan areas, especially in the suburbs and exurbs, Republicans hold on Texas might be weakening. But depending on how electoral and demographic trends evolve, the GOPs grip could tighten again or slip entirely.

Link:
Why Democratic Gains In Texass Big Metro Areas Could Outweigh Republican Success In South Texas - FiveThirtyEight

Mr. Reed said that the former presidents comments about Republicans not voting should warrant a sanction from the Republican National Committee. He warned, It will impact the 2022 midterms severely.

The tension between Mr. McConnell and Mr. Trump has escalated lately, as the former president has ratcheted up his attacks on the minority leader, accusing Mr. McConnell of folding to Democrats in a recent agreement to raise the nations debt ceiling. He called for the leaders ouster in a recent interview with Fox News, saying, Mitch is not the guy.

Mr. Trumps allies did not deny that he was content to see Republicans pay the ultimate political price for what he and a significant portion of his voters saw as disloyalty.

President Trump is saying: Hey, Im putting you guys on notice. My people arent coming out, said Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist, who has been using his podcast to further amplify Mr. Trumps false claims about the 2020 election. There could not be a bigger shot across the establishment bow.

But the harder Mr. Trumps allies push their election fraud claims, the harder it becomes to satisfy their most hard-core followers. Even Ms. Taylor Greene, who is as far-right and pro-Trump as they come in the Republican Party, cannot seem to always please the fringe. Lately, she has been feuding online with L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta attorney who helped Mr. Trump sow doubts over his loss in Georgia, over which of them truly represents the Trump movement. Mr. Wood has accused her of not doing enough to uncover instances of voter fraud. She has said that Mr. Wood is not one of us.

Such radicalization comes at a cost, said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who is critical of the former president. At a time when the larger political trends are pointing toward trouble for the Democratic Party in 2022, he said, Mr. Trumps actions risk interfering with what should be a good environment for Republicans.

This should be a 100 percent, straight-up referendum on Biden, Mr. Jolly said. Instead, you have Trump the narcissist trying to inject himself into what should be a glide path for Republicans to an incredibly successful election, by making it all about him.

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As Trump Thunders About Last Election, Republicans Worry About the Next One - The New York Times

Texas Republicans approved redrawn US House maps that favor incumbents and decrease political representation for growing minority communities, even as Latinos drive much of the growth in the nations largest red state.

The maps were approved late Monday night following outcry from Democrats over what they claimed was a rushed redistricting process crammed into a 30-day session, and one which gave little time for public input.

They also denounced the reduction of minority opportunity districts Texas will now have seven House districts where Latino residents hold a majority, down from eight despite the states changing demographics.

What we are doing in passing this congressional map is a disservice to the people of Texas, Democratic state representative Rafael Anchia said to the chamber just before the final vote.

The states Republican governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign off on the changes.Civil rights groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, sued before Republican lawmakers were even done Monday.

The lawsuit alleges that Republican mapmakers diluted the political strength of minority voters by not drawing any new districts where Latino residents hold a majority, despite Latinos making up half of Texass four million new residents over the last decade. Abbotts office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Republicans have said they followed the law in defending the maps, which protect their slipping grip on Texas by pulling more GOP-leaning voters into suburban districts where Democrats have made inroads in recent years.

Texas has been routinely dragged into court for decades over voting maps, and in 2017, a federal court found that a Republican-drawn map was drawn to intentionally discriminate against minority voters.

But two years later, that same court said there was insufficient reason to take the extraordinary step of putting Texas back under federal supervision before changing voting laws or maps.

The maps that overhaul how Texas nearly 30 million residents are sorted into political districts and who is elected to represent them bookends a highly charged year in the state over voting rights.

Democratic lawmakers twice walked out on an elections bill that tightened the states already strict voting rules, which they called a brazen attempt to disenfranchise minorities and other Democratic-leaning voters.

The plan does not create any additional districts where Black or Hispanic voters make up more than 50% of the voting population, even as people of color accounted for more than nine of 10 new residents in Texas over the past decade.

Republican state senator Joan Huffman, who authored the maps and leads the Senate Redistricting Committee, told fellow lawmakers that they were drawn blind to race. She said her legal team ensured the plan followed the Voting Rights Act.

The Texas GOP control both chambers of the legislature, giving them nearly complete control of the mapmaking process.

The state has had to defend their maps in court after every redistricting process since the Voting Rights Act took effect in 1965, but this will be the first since a US supreme court ruling said Texas and other states with a history of racial discrimination no longer need to have the justice department scrutinize the maps before they are approved.

However, drawing maps to engineer a political advantage is not unconstitutional. The proposal would also make an estimated two dozen of the states 38 congressional districts safe Republican districts, with an opportunity to pick up at least one additional newly redrawn Democratic stronghold on the border with Mexico, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of data from last years election collected by the Texas Legislative Council. Currently, Republicans hold 23 of the states 36 seats.

Following negotiations between Texas House members and state senators, the Houston-area districts of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who is serving her 14th term, and Congressman Al Green, a neighboring Democrat, were restored, unpairing the two and drawing Jackson Lees home back into her district.

Texas lawmakers also approved redrawn maps for their own districts, with Republicans following a similar plan that does not increase minority opportunity districts and would keep their party in power in the state House and Senate.

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Texas Republicans approve redrawn maps decreasing representation for minority voters - The Guardian