New research quantifies the health of democracy at the state level — and Republican-governed states tend to perform much worse.
In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.
New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.
The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem.
“Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes.
While many researchers have attempted to quantify the health of democracy in different countries around the world, Grumbach’s paper is the first effort to develop some kind of ranking system for US states. It’s still in working paper form, which means it has not been peer-reviewed. But Grumbach’s work has been widely praised by other political scientists who had read a draft or seen him present it at a conference.
“This is one of those papers that makes me proud to be an empirical political scientist. It’s important, carefully done, and just plain smart,” writes Vin Arceneaux, a professor at Temple University. “It helps us not only understand American politics but democratic backsliding in general.”
And it’s yet another piece of evidence that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic political faction.
What the paper found
When I spoke to Grumbach on the phone about his work, he explained that his approach was inspired by V-Dem, the political science gold standard for quantitatively measuring democracy in countries around the world.
V-Dem breaks down democracy into individual component parts, like whether the press is free or the people can assemble peacefully, which can be measured and added together to produce an overall “democracy” score for any one country. You can’t just apply this to American states directly; no place in the United States is violently repressive in the way that China or Russia is, so the measurements might not be precise enough to clearly illustrate differences between states.
Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) is the first attempt to use a V-Dem-style approach to measure the more subtle ailments afflicting democracy in the United States. Metrics include the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether it permits same-day voter registration, and whether felons are permitted to vote. He also includes criminal justice indicators, like a state’s Black incarceration rate, that are designed to measure state coercion.
To turn these metrics into an actual score, Grumbach uses a process that’s part subjective and part algorithmic.
The subjective part strives to determine whether an individual practice, like voter ID laws, is helpful or harmful to democracy. Grumbach then uses an algorithm to determine how much each of these practices should count toward a state’s overall score, either negatively or positively. This automated process ended up downplaying the criminal justice metrics, which barely factor into a state’s ultimate score. By contrast, the algorithm gave significant weight to electoral practices like gerrymandering (negative) and same-day registration (positive).
With a system in hand, Grumbach then proceeded to score all 50 states in every year between 2000 and 2018, from -3 (worst) to 2 (best). The following maps show the changes in state scores; the lighter the color, the worse the score is.
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Jake Grumbach
Just eyeballing the map, you can pick up on the clear pattern of states with Republican governments scoring lower in 2018 than they did in 2000. That year, the average GOP-controlled state was slightly more small-d democratic than its average Democratic-controlled peer. Over the next two decades, the average Republican score declined dramatically.
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Jake Grumbach
There could be all sorts of reasons why this is happening. Maybe Republican states had high levels of demographic change, causing white voters to embrace voter suppression in response. Maybe Republicans won power in states in which the parties were highly polarized, which raised the stakes of political conflict and caused incumbents to try to secure their hold on power.
To test these theories, Grumbach ran a series of regression analyses designed to isolate correlations between a state’s democracy score and variables like percentage of nonwhite voters and measures of state-level polarization. Strikingly, these things either barely mattered or didn’t matter at all.
Only two things really did: whether a state was controlled by Republicans and whether Republicans had gained that control recently. Republican-controlled states in general were far more likely to perform worse in the State Democracy Index over time; Republican states with a recent history of close elections, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, were especially likely to decline from 2000 to 2018.
“Among Republican controlled states … those whose recent elections have been especially competitive are the states to take steps to reduce their democratic performance,” he writes.
The paper’s findings suggest a consistent national Republican policy on democracy being enacted at the state level to make it harder for voters to take away their power.
“Regardless of the particular circumstances or geography, state governments controlled by same party behave similarly when they take power,” Grumbach writes. “The Republican controlled governments of states as distinct as Alabama, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina have taken similar actions with respect to democratic institutions.”
The GOP’s anti-democratic agenda is real
To be sure, this is just one study and not yet peer-reviewed, to boot, so it shouldn’t be taken as definitive. And skeptics can certainly poke holes in some of Grumbach’s choices.
For instance, one could question just how bad the anti-democratic infractions Grumbach cites really are. Voter ID laws, to take one example, counted against many Republican states — but the evidence on whether they actually reduce voter turnout is surprisingly mixed. A conservative might object that Grumbach is making a mountain out of a molehill: creating a metric that makes Republican states look worse than Democratic ones when, in reality, the differences just aren’t that big.
But methodological quibbles aside, the paper does seem to capture something real. One of its most valuable contributions is the way it treats gerrymandering.
Drawing lines to give your party a leg up disproportionate to its numbers is one of those practices that no one can really defend in democratic terms. Elected authoritarians abroad, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have abused gerrymanders to ensure that they maintain a hammerlock on national power despite winning less than a majority of national votes.
The SDI shows that, in the United States, gerrymandering is not a “both sides” problem. It uses 16 different measurements of gerrymandering to assess how prevalent the tactic is in different states; 10 of these measures are the most heavily weighted factors in a state’s ultimate democracy score. These metrics show that Republican legislators abuse gerrymandering in a way that Democrats simply do not.
Some of this abuse has happened quite recently. Take a look at North Carolina’s SDI score over time — it starts to plunge shortly after Republicans drew new maps in 2011, ones that allowed them to win 77 percent of the state’s House seats in 2018 with just under 50 percent of the state vote:
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Jake Grumbach
(It’s worth noting that one of the worst abuses by North Carolina’s Republican legislature — stripping Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of key powers after his 2016 victory — doesn’t factor into the state’s score, as Grumbach hasn’t decided on a satisfactory way to quantify it. A similar maneuver performed by the Wisconsin state legislature after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s victory in 2018 also doesn’t count against the state’s already dismal SDI score.)
Offering empirical ballast for a phenomenon we’ve observed in real time these past few years, Grumbach’s paper is another passage in the dominant political story of our time: the Republican Party’s drift against democracy. And, crucially, it’s a drift that began before Trump and his allegations of fraud in 2020. Republicans didn’t need Trump to enact extreme gerrymandering after the 2010 census; his anti-democratic instincts helped bring out something that was already there.
We have every reason to expect things will get worse, not better.
Georgia’s law, for example, is more worrying than even voter ID laws. It gives Republicans more direct control over election administration, allowing them to bend the rules in their favor: enforcing strict standards for ballot disqualification in Democratic-leaning precincts and lax ones in Republican-leaning ones, for example.
Once 2020 census data is available, states will do another round of redistricting. This time, those who want to tilt the field in their favor will have a freer hand due to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymanders can’t be stopped by courts.
There’s a reason that Grumbach calls states, in the paper’s title, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Republicans have been engaging in a series of grand experiments in rigging a political system one state at a time — one that is, slowly but surely, undermining the foundations of America’s free political system.
Soft, no-wire bras are finally getting the support they deserve.
A few months into the pandemic, speculation went wild about the variety of industries it might kill. Influencer culture. Real pants. Lipsticks! One of these prematurely announced casualties was the bra. Finding themselves in new and surprising lockdown conditions, famous and non-famous brassiere-wearers worldwide had stopped wearing them altogether, succumbing to the comfort — or was it the sheer panic? — this new reality brought. The media, looking for pandemic-inspired shifts in our closets, homes, and habits, ate it up.
This wasn’t the first time the bra was pronounced dead. A classic scene from Mad Men comes to mind: Joan, the office goddess, arrives home after a hard day at work and starts taking off her cumbersome bra, revealing the deep marks the straps had left on her shoulders. You don’t need to be a ’60s secretary to identify — wearing a tight bra to work and taking it off as soon as you walk through the bedroom door is a well-known ritual.
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Paul Walters Worldwide Photography Ltd./Heritage Images/Getty Images
Gripping and restricting, the item had long been considered a symbol of oppression. Having begun as a successor to the corset and evolved with perceptions of femininity (and the male gaze that shaped them), they were infamously burned at the 1969 Miss America protest — or, more accurately, tossed into a symbolic trash can. In 2020, as Covid-19 shut down workplaces and day cares, it was perhaps fatigue, rather than feminism, that led many women, myself included, to temporarily dump the bra. Declaring it “over” felt good. Life seemed horrible and unfair, so why not get rid of one small contraption, at the very least?
It might come as a surprise, then, that the year of the pandemic, starting roughly in March 2020, was actually very kind to (some) bras. According to a report from NPD Group, the market has seen a 32 percent increase in sports bra sales, while bralettes and wireless bras were up 5 percent. Instead of banishment, the undergarment has been undergoing a reevaluation, emerging for the first time in history as a product that really answers women’s needs for comfort and support.
For many women, this reevaluation looked something like Marisa Speer’s. The pandemic caught Speer, a registered nurse living in Philadelphia, in “two different stages of busy.” First, after graduating from nursing school in late 2019, she was stuck at home looking for a job. Then, having found one at a local birth center in early 2020, she faced long shifts, often stepping in for colleagues who were out of commission with Covid-19. Prior to the pandemic, Speer was an underwire bra kind of woman, favoring lacy European styles. But, “being at home, I was looking for less supportive, comfy bras, just to have around the house,” Speer says.
Upon returning to work, Speer realized that she’s not willing to give up the comfort, but also found herself seeking more support and posture improvement. She found both in Kinflyte Essentials, a brand she discovered via an Instagram ad. Speer was attracted to the promise of posture improvement and size inclusivity. “I find myself cued by the way the bra sits on me, reminding me to sit straighter,” she says. Speer currently wears mostly Kinflyte bras — for work, at home, even for bedtime.
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Kinflyte
The brand, which launched in 2019, just months before the pandemic started, specializes in bras that err on the sportier side of things, with a bonus tech side; they’re constructed in 3D and utilize a patent-pending design that grips the shoulders and supports the lower back. According to founder Vivian Lee, its 2020 sales grew 240 percent, taking off after April. This year is looking good, too. “Based on our 2021 forecast, we’re looking at 450 percent sales growth compared to 2019,” Lee says. The key word in Kinflyte’s vocabulary is “multifunctional” — easy to wear under a Zoom-appropriate sweatshirt, fit for a workout, forgiving enough to lounge in.
Stepping away from padded, underwired bras into a hybrid territory of function and performance has been the leading trend of pandemic lingerie. On the website of the online lingerie retailer Bare Necessities, the bestselling items in 2020 were a wire-free T-shirt bra and a stretchy bralette, among others, reports Heather Garcia, senior director of merchandising. Like Kinflyte, other direct-to-consumer brands that focus on underwire alternatives and strip the bra down to its basics have been enjoying increased interest — especially the ones that underscore high-tech fabrics, advanced engineering, and a clean, simple look and feel.
Intelliskin, which promises to cool the wearer and eliminate bacteria, is a Kinflyte competitor. Its bra fabric is created with antibacterial silver ion technology, and the bras are marketed as the perfect companion for computer work thanks to posture-supporting features. Pepper, a lingerie brand for smaller breast sizes that launched in 2017, is advertising its wireless, lifting bra as the lingerie equivalent of yoga pants.
Soma, a brand dedicated to loungewear and smooth, seamless, no-frills lingerie, is another player catering to post-pandemic clientele; the Enbliss collection, composed of wireless bras and bralettes, includes a new shoulder-supporting, front-zipping racerback that’s easy to put on and take off. Soma’s Vanishing collection is designed to disappear under the thinnest of T-shirts, lifting the breasts without the help of underwires or heavy straps. According to Vanessa Dusold, SVP of merchandising and design, Soma’s fourth-quarter sales in 2020 were the highest in the history of the brand.
What all of these brands have in common is the focus on what the bra is for, rather than how it looks. That is not to say that aesthetics are unimportant, but that details without functional purpose — bows, frills, and scalloping — are filtered out, while posture-enhancing, fabric-smoothing, and contact-reducing touches, such as tagless care labels, are added.
It’s not a coincidence that these bras have taken off in the last year. We dress differently and move differently these days, sinking into soft sofas and working out from our living rooms. Shouldn’t bras get with the program?
Content writer Kimberly Zerkel is a good example of this shift; she recently left her communications job at a San Francisco restaurant group due to the pandemic and returned to her hometown of Joplin, Missouri, to work from home on writing projects. For Zerkel, lacy, wired bras have always been a part of “feeling nicely dressed from the skin up, especially when I’d go out or to the office.” Now, that doesn’t happen much, and Zerkel spends her days in sports bras, which isn’t ideal. “I’m looking for a comfortable bra with no wire that can either be worn casually around the house under a sweatshirt, or a sports bra that I wear all day long with activewear,” she says. Having said that, a perfect pandemic-era bra, Zerkel suggests, would be “a sexy sports bra, one with soft materials and lots of straps, or sheer mesh or an interesting, plunge-y design.”
Negative Underwear, a lingerie brand that walks the fine line of cute and functional, might just be the ticket. “We’ve always been about less is more — minimalism, removing unnecessary clutter,” says co-founder Marissa Vosper. Their wireless game has been strong since the 2014 launch, Vosper says, but in 2020 their sales tripled, and endless DMs on Instagram followed, with customers asking for the best WFH undergarments. As the size goes up, Negative bras increase in strap strength and sewn-in support. They also feature demure, sheer fabrics. “We are not of the mindset that nipples are offensive and should be hidden,” co-founder Lauren Schwab laughs. In 2021, a sporty mesh style will launch, as well as a silky wireless bra that’s actually made of stretchy nylon.
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Negative
Negative, like Kinflyte, Pepper, and many other new-wave bra brands, relies on online shopping and Instagram advertising, as well as social commerce, i.e., shopping on the social media platform directly. With the pandemic’s social distancing as a priority, more and more find such contactless bra shopping options logical, and it just so happens that wireless, flexible, and adjustable models are simply easier to shop for. “The fact the Kinflyte bra doesn’t have cups certainly helped me go for it online,” says Marissa Speer. Kinflyte bra sizes go from XS to 5XL; Negative — in wireless bras — from 0 to 5; Intelliskin ranges from XS to 2X. When shopping for pandemic bras online, Zerkel, too, was less hesitant. “I never really ordered bras online before,” she says, “but I entered my size and hoped for the best.”
Both Zerkel and Speer still have the bras of yesteryear — structured, textured, intricate, and decorated — in the backs of their drawers, but these are now deemed “special occasion.” In everyday life, it seems like we’ve reached a point of no return. “Women have the default of having underwear to be uncomfortable to look good, but they’re taking comfort back,” Vosper says. Comfort no longer means going braless. Bras didn’t really go anywhere during the pandemic, but those who wear them can finally forget they exist.
J&J says it will still meet US delivery targets for the single-shot Covid-19 vaccine.
After a mistake at a Baltimore manufacturing plant last week ruined millions of doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the Biden administration is putting Johnson & Johnson in charge of the plant, it announced Saturday.
The plant, which belongs to manufacturing contractor Emergent BioSolutions, was previously producing two varieties of Covid-19 vaccine, of which only the Johnson & Johnson shot was approved for emergency use in the United States. Now, Johnson & Johnson will be the sole vaccine produced at the facility as the company takes control, reported the New York Times on Saturday.
The Johnson & Johnson shot, authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in late February, is a single-shot vaccine, unlike the mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that require two doses to be fully effective, and it only requires a refrigerator, rather than a freezer, to store.
It’s also extremely effective — results from clinical trials suggest it prevents about 85 percent of “severe and critical cases of Covid-19” and 100 percent of deaths and hospitalizations after four weeks — despite some early concerns about how the Johnson & Johnson shot stacks up against the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained last month,
[Johnson & Johnson] reported that its overall efficacy in preventing Covid-19 cases that produced symptoms was 66.1 percent. The Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines reported efficacy levels around 95 percent.
That gap in efficacy numbers is fueling some people’s perception that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine isn’t as good.
According to Johns Hopkins University’s Dr. Amesh Adalja, however, such a direct comparison is fraught, and the vaccines are “basically interchangeable.”
“I don’t even look at those efficacy numbers and compare them head-to-head like that,” Adalja told Vox. “Biostats 101: You cannot compare trial results like that unless they were done in a head-to-head fashion.”