Measles in Pennsylvania- All measles infections are preventable and death associated with the virus must quickly be accurately reported

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Rachael Bedard.

The United States has had at least 2,777 confirmed measles cases this year, the most on record this century and more than the country had in all of 2025. 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, announced that there had been two measles-associated deaths in the state — the first such deaths this year. That’s when a new kind of trouble started.

Over the following 48 hours, the public received conflicting information about the deaths from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Lancaster County coroner, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (aka "RJKjr") the secretary of health and human services. The parties disagreed about exactly what led to the two deaths. Much of their discord played out over social media, where a cacophony of voices amplified the acrimony and confusion.

The stakes of this moment — measles transmission is high, confidence in government and public health is low — require a standard of engagement, clarity and transparency that the initial Pennsylvania response failed to meet. We should be honest about what’s gone wrong here and try to correct course.

Pennsylvania is the country’s most recent measles hot spot, and Lancaster County, where there are large Mennonite and Amish communities with lower vaccination rates, has had a majority of those cases. On Aug. 25 the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced there had been two measles-associated deaths; “associated” is careful language that conveys that measles was detected but not confirmed as the direct cause of death. During a news conference, Mr. Shapiro emphasized that both “individuals were unvaccinated” and said that deaths from measles were “completely preventable.”

The governor went on to describe a phone conversation he’d had with Kennedy, during which Mr. Shapiro said he’d been “blunt” about the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine talk. “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation,” he said he told  Kennedy.

In response to inquiries from a Lancaster County commissioner, Josh Parsons, a Republican, the county coroner’s office reported that it had no current cases of people who had died of measles and only one who had tested positive for measles: a newborn with evidence of a measles infection acquired before birth whose immediate cause of death was a laceration to the spleen. Measles was listed on the baby’s death certificate as a factor implicated in the death; the coroner then made public statements saying he didn’t believe measles played a role in the baby dying. The other measles case was not in the coroner’s charge.

Mr. Parsons, Kennedy and a host of the Kennedy (deranged❗) supporters seized on these details to suggest that the state’s initial statements were misleading. And, indeed, they might have been — at a minimum, they were premature, and the apparent lack of coordination between the coroner’s office and state officials left room for doubt. The governor’s claim that the deaths were “completely preventable” was perhaps too definitive. And referring to the infant as an “unvaccinated individual,” without the context that a baby would not have been eligible for vaccination, could be seen as disingenuous and in service of an agenda to scare and shame people who are hesitant about vaccines.

A laceration to the spleen in a newborn implies injury. It’s plausible that the baby’s measles led the spleen to rupture and that birth trauma caused the laceration, but that is not yet confirmed, and other explanations are possible.

When pushed for details, state health officials declined to provide additional information, citing privacy concerns. That’s hard to justify. Confirming the age ranges of the people who died and providing general information about comorbidities, hospitalization statuses and exposures would not have made the cases identifiable. The state had already, of course, confirmed the vaccination statuses of the two individuals; vaccination opponents seized on what they perceived as hypocrisy, and recriminations escalated again.

(Stupid and incompetent)...Kennedy got into a social media dust up with Governor Shapiro.  Kennedy wrote an essay-length post on X saying the governor had dismissed some Americans’ religious concerns about how the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine contains the tissue of aborted fetuses. (A component of it was developed in the 1960s, on a fetal cell line, but the vaccine does not contain such tissue.) He accused the governor of “gaslighting” the public. In response, Mr. Shapiro posted an equally long response in which he challenged the secretary’s claims and accused him of stoking vaccine hesitancy.

Kennedy posited that perhaps the measles deaths had been completely fabricated. A coterie of anti-vaccine personalities with large follower counts echoed the accusation, seizing on inconsistencies and filling the void of official information with their own speculation. On Thursday the C.D.C. posted that “discrepancies” in what had been announced about the deaths “raise important questions.”

This is our low-trust, politicized public health reality, in which every ambiguity creates space for conspiracy. This means that there’s no room for error.

I understand why Mr. Shapiro, a decisive communicator who has demonstrated strong leadership during prior crises and who seems to have presidential ambitions, wanted to say that measles-associated deaths reflect politically badly on Kennedy and Donald Trump. 

But the governor made a mistake by not speaking carefully enough. In a polarized environment where vaccine-hesitant Americans lean Republican, his approach was geared toward the wrong public: affirming to liberals and alienating to the very people he needs to reach.

Kennedy, in turn, exploited a public health crisis to score points with his base. His approach for years has been to weaponize misstatements, inconsistencies and ambiguities about public health claims, and he has been employing that playbook here. As a result, Pennsylvania’s health leaders have seemed reluctant to share information with the C.D.C. at a time when they’d normally rely on the federal agency for maximum support.

Pennsylvania's measles outbreak does not appear to be ending any time soon, and there’s still time to rebuild confidence and trust. Luckily, the profession has a well-established crisis communications playbook to employ in just these situations. It’s time everyone started using it.

The C.D.C.’s longstanding crisis and emergency risk communication protocol is based on six core principles: Be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action and show respect. To those tenets, I’d add four: Be transparent, be consistent, acknowledge uncertainty and stay apolitical.

Pennsylvania's Department of Health is doing heroic work getting people vaccinated: Its staff members have administered over 2,100 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine this month, more than three times as many as they administered in July. Public health teams are tracking cases, advising sick families and supporting people who are unvaccinated, as well as those who are willing to get the vaccine. That necessary work is where attention should be focused — not on trying to score points against political opponents.

A designated state health official should deliver all updates to the public. The updates should be frequent and, when possible, scheduled well ahead of time and should focus on the steps the state is taking to contain the outbreak. The official should err on the side of giving more information, not less, including when there is uncertainty.

Saying “This is what we don’t yet know, and here’s how we intend to find out” increases trust in the competence and integrity of a response.

The public is entitled to know about measles-associated deaths, but in this case the information provided would have better served a fractured ecosystem had it been more complete, honest and clear. For instance, an official could have said: “This is an unusual case. Measles was associated with an infant’s death, but we have yet to establish the role of the virus. We’re working with the coroner to establish what happened and will share additional updates as soon as we can.”

Donald Trump and maga Republican are flat out wrong to point fingers at the causes of deadly political violence

Echo opinion published in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper by Anita Chabria.  How Much More Political Violence are Americans Going to Tolerate❓

We are going to hear politicians, commentators, bloggers and others remind us that political violence is never OK. There is no room in a healthy democracy, or a moral society, for killings based on vengeance or beliefs — political, religious, whatever.

I would add President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809- d. 1865) 

But herein is the sad reality. Our democracy is not healthy and violence is a symptom of that. Not the make-believe, cities-overrun violence that has led to the military in our streets, but real, targeted political violence that has crept into society with increasing frequency.

Our decline did not begin with the horrific slaying on September 10th, of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, and conservative media superstar, and it will not end with it. We are in a moment of struggle, with two competing views for where our country should go and what it should be. Only one can win, and both sides believe it is a battle worth fighting.

The painful and hard specter of more violence to come has less to do with far-right or far-left than extreme fringes in either political direction. Occasionally, it’s ideological, but more often it isn’t MAGA, communist or socialist so much as confusion and rage cloaking itself in political convenience. Violence comes where hope is ground to dust.

A few months ago, we saw the horrible political massacre in Minnesota, aimed at Democratic lawmakers. 

Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed by the same attacker who shot state Sen.  John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. 

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in the United States. Hortman, the leader of the state House Democratic caucus, was killed alongside her husband, Mark.

Authorities found a hit list of 45 ❗ targets in the killer's possession❗ (Hmmm ❓Is it coincidental that MAGA cult leader Donald Trump just happens to be the 45th president of the US❓)

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was a victim of political violence when his Harrisburg home was firebombed this year on the Jewish Feast of Passover. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer faced a somewhat bumbling kidnap plot in 2020. In 2017, a shooter hit four people at the congressional softball game, including then U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner.

Despite the fact that these instances of violence were aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, we live under a Republican government at the moment, one that holds unprecedented power.

Already, that power structure is calling not for calm or justice, but retribution.😟😰

“We’ve got trans shooters. You’ve got riots in L.A. They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us,” said Fox News commentator Jesse Watters shortly after Kirk was shot. “What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves.”

“It is extremely important to caution U.S. policymakers in this heated environment to act responsibly and not use the specter of political violence as an excuse to suppress nonviolent movements, curb freedoms of assembly and expression, encourage retaliation or otherwise close civic spaces,” a trio of Brookings Institution researchers wrote as part of their “Monitoring the pillars of democracy” series. “Weaponizing calls for stability and peace in response to political violence is a real threat in democratic and nondemocratic countries globally.”

The slaying of Charlie Kirk is reprehensible, and his family and friends have suffered a loss I can’t imagine. 💙😢Condolences don’t cover it.

But the legacy of his death, and of political violence, can’t be crackdowns — because if we do that, we forever damage the country we all claim to love.

If we take anything away from this tragic time in our history, let it be a commitment to democracy, and America, in all her chaotic and flawed glory.

Anita Chabria is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are AGAIN creating a false narrative about how horrible political violence is an American epedemic

With appreciation to the opinion writer Benamin Wallace-Wells, I must say some of the graphics described are difficult to read but important nonetheless.  

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence
After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity.  Opinion published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.  

Full disclosre, I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until after his brutal assassinaation in Utah, in broad daylight, while hewas speaking to a group of students.  His short bio: Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and was its executive director. He published a range of books and hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a talk radio program. Kirk was a prominent voice of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, and was considered to have become an icon of modern American conservatism. Kirk was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, briefly attending Harper College before dropping out after one semester to pursue political activism full-time.

UTAH- Three thousand people attended the conservative Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q&A portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, in videos, there is a single, audible crack, and Kirk’s body jerks and then goes limp. In the audience, heads turn: someone had shot him, apparently from an elevated position about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon, Kirk’s spokesman announced that he had been killed. He was thirty-one, and left behind a wife and two young children. Donald Trump, a close ally, ordered all flags flown at half-staff until Sunday evening.

Kirk’s death was brutal, and tragic. It also had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic. In the immediate aftermath of a killing with obvious political resonance, there is a period of nervous foreboding, as the public waits for news of the perpetrator’s identity and for any hints of what might have motivated the terrible act, and braces for the recriminations to come. But, as often as not, information brings no clarity. 

We have a fairly good sense of the politics that motivated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., and James Fields, who sped his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, killing a young woman.

But attempts to define the political motives of Thomas Crooks (who tried to kill Trump last summer, in Butler, Pennsylvania), or of Cody Balmer (who has been charged with firebombing Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in April), or even of Vance Boelter (the longtime anti-abortion activist who, in June, allegedly killed one Minnesota state lawmaker, along with her husband, and tried to kill another) quickly become ensnared in the problems of their apparent mental illness or a more basic incoherence. Robin Westman, who stands accused of shooting and killing two children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis last month (and whose transgender identity was the focus of many right-wing media reports), had written “Kill Donald Trump” on some weapons, and neo-Nazi slogans (“Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough”) on others, and expressed alignment with the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza. The motives were strange and idiosyncratic enough that they couldn’t easily be blamed on any one partisan side.

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. 

Unfortunately, the threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading. ♦

Democratic grass roots success playbook lesson 101

The New York Times opinion column by Frank Bruni:

When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.

On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying gasoline lost control as it was attempting to exit the highway and caught fire under the overpass carrying Interstate 95 (I-95) at the Pennsylvania Route 73 (PA 73, Cottman Avenue) interchange in the Tacony neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia.

Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.

“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.

But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.👦😎

In less than two weeks, the road reopened.

Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.

Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024, could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.

Across the country, there are Democrats who have outperformed expectations and had political success in places that aren’t reliably blue. Look at Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who won a second term last year, even though Trump took that state by 26 points in 2020. Trump took Kansas by almost 15 points, but its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, secured her second term in 2022. In North Carolina, where I live, the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won election and then re-election in years when North Carolinians simultaneously delivered the state to Trump. Obviously, some of Trump’s supporters also voted for Governor Cooper.

Cooper, Kelly, Beshear and Shapiro might have benefited from flawed opponents, propitious circumstances, other lucky breaks. But, many Democratic officeholders in red and purple states also have instructive qualities in common, starting with what Shapiro’s attention to I-95 reflected. They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.

“When people wake up in the morning, they don’t think about their party,” Beshear told me. “They think about their jobs. They think about the schools their children are going to. They think about the roads and bridges they’re traveling on and whether they’re safe.” The first of Gretchen Whitmer’s two successful campaigns for governor of Michigan is perhaps remembered best for her pledge to “fix the damn roads,” which was not only a concrete promise but also a kind of branding: She was more invested in results than theatrics. She cared less about preening than about potholes. She was blunt to the point of cursing.

Governors, admittedly, have advantages. They and other politicians operating at the state and local levels often aren’t expected to tackle — and don’t receive blame for — some of the especially big, tough issues by which presidents are judged.

Inflation is Biden’s problem, not theirs. Immigration, too. While state-level politicians do adopt (or fail to adopt) plans to combat climate change, federal officials are often in the foreground of those debates.

Whitmer tailgates at football games, visits sports bars and has a pronounced Michigan accent. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat in purple Wisconsin, has an uncloaked weakness for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins and speaks in a fashion so folksy that Wisconsinites can buy T-shirts emblazoned with one of his trademark phrases: “Holy mackerel!” Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is seeking a fourth term representing the deep red state of Montana, and Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat elected in purple Arizona in 2020, have careers well outside any Democratic mold. Tester was (and is) a farmer. Kelly, the son of two police officers, was a naval aviator and then an astronaut.

In Shapiro’s first full day in office, he sent a clear message to working-class voters by signing an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. He stresses the dual imperatives of holding college up as a possibility for anyone interested in it and of respecting people without college degrees and supporting careers that don’t call for one.

Cooper frequently visits farming areas and small towns, not just because he grew up in rural North Carolina and is comfortable there but also because he wants to be seen in “places where many Democratic leaders don’t go,” he told me. It sets the right tone. “I’ve spent time listening to people in rural areas about their hospital being on the brink, needing more economic development, needing high-speed internet,” he said. And he has been able to explain to them how his agenda recognizes and addresses those very issues.

North Carolina elected a Democratic Governor Roy Cooper 

While Laura Kelly’s 2018, and 2022, victories in Kansas relied heavily on Democratic voters in urban strongholds, she pays careful attention to rural precincts, too. When we spoke recently — she placed the call, without any intermediary telling me to hold for the governor, and introduced herself simply as “Laura Kelly” — she shared a memory: Decades ago, when she was running for the State Senate, one of her chief advisers told her to ignore the rural part of the district because “there weren’t enough votes to make a difference,” she said.

The framing of issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.

I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.

He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”

“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”

“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.

“That didn’t feel right to me,” she continued. “So I spent an inordinate amount of time there.” She ended up winning by fewer than 100 votes. “If I had not knocked on all those doors, I wouldn’t have been in the State Senate, and I wouldn’t be governor.”

State and local politicians also have relationships with voters unlike the ones forged by Washington lawmakers, who swim (or, really, splash around noisily) in the media-roiled, shark-infested waters of the nation’s capital. Voters largely regard their governors and mayors as administrators and service providers, so governors and mayors can prioritize administration and service in a manner that makes their efforts more visible and palpable to voters.

But in my recent examination of and conversations with Democratic governors, other Democratic officials and political experts in red and purple states, I was struck by the priorities they articulate and by how they articulate them. They take pains to rebut the accusations of elitism that Republicans direct at Democrats, or they have biographies and backgrounds that make those charges laughable. They also find ways in which to establish some separation from their party, and that’s not simply and solely a matter of necessity, given their states’ political leanings. It’s also an assertion of independence and authenticity in an era of profound political cynicism. Even Democrats in the bluest and safest of states can learn from that.

Shapiro proudly displays his deep Jewish faith, and while that puts him in a religious minority, it also distinguishes him from Democrats who often play down religion. He and his advisers have found that it’s a bridge to voters of all creeds, who relate to, and respect, his devotion.

He also indulges his tendency to speak in sports metaphors. The first words of a video that he released in tandem with the announcement of his campaign for governor: “Each of us has a responsibility in life — to get off the sidelines, get in the game.” He tells Pennsylvanians that his goal as governor is “to put points on the board.”

She has created an Office of Rural Prosperity within the Kansas Commerce Department. Just before our conversation, I read a transcript of the State of the State remarks that she delivered a few weeks earlier. It focused largely on jobs, and the word “rural” showed up 43 times, including in the characterization of “rural Kansas” as “fundamental to our identity.” The word “abortion” showed up precisely zero times, which I noticed mainly because the issue was front and center in Kansas just a year and a half earlier, when voters there rejected a measure to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution.

I mentioned that omission.

“Not an accident,” she said. “I am and always have been a pro-choice human being,” she continued, but she determined over the years that raising such “a very divisive issue” with constituents when she wasn’t absolutely compelled to didn’t make sense. “It wasn’t a way that they were going to hear me any better, and it wasn’t a way to find common ground,” she said.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the defense of legal abortion has unquestionably given Democrats an advantage over Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers in red and purple states don’t shrink from it. But “since the Supreme Court overturned” is crucial, because only then did some Americans fully realize that the abortion debate wasn’t an abstract, ideological one: It concerned a fundamental freedom for women. It affected critical medical care.

“The prospect of Republicans banning abortion was not a big winner for Democrats until Republicans actually started banning abortions,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Voters are used to hearing about how apocalyptic the other side is. You have to have actual evidence.” The Roe reversal — and cases like those of Kate Cox, who was carrying a fetus with a deadly chromosomal abnormality and had to leave Texas to end her pregnancy — enables Democrats to discuss abortion rights in blunt, concrete, visceral terms.

“For too long, we’ve made politics too flashy, too Hollywood,” Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor, told me. He was on the ticket with Shapiro, and he explained that their formula for victory was not to be “wrapped up in what’s going on on MSNBC, on CNN, in some local coffee shop that’s 90 percent Democratic. Most people don’t live in those echo chambers.”

Cooper’s long campaign to garner enough Republican support to pass Medicaid expansion in North Carolina — which was finally accomplished three months ago — didn’t hinge on partisan name-calling. But it did involve extensive meetings with law enforcement officials to persuade them that they’d be helped if the mentally ill people who commit some crimes had the treatment options that Medicaid expansion would provide. Toward the end, he said, “we would have some tough-on-crime Republican officials come into the legislature and say these people need health care, not handcuffs.”

The specificity and detail with which state-level Democrats, working on a smaller canvas, can portray problems, sketch solutions and describe successes make me wonder if Democrats would be wise to pitch more of their policies and concentrate more of their energies outside Washington. They often find better traction and make readier connections that way.

I think of Shapiro’s livestreaming of the fleet work on I-95. I think of many key lines from Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth remarks in January, when he advanced measures regarding climate change, economic development and job creation without dwelling on clinical phrases like “climate change,” “economic development” and “job creation.” He gave shout-outs to several companies “building the two largest electric vehicle battery plants on planet Earth, in Glendale, Ky.” He noted that “approximately 400 Kentuckians” had been hired. This was no fancy policy seminar. It was a straightforward report card.

That’s what Mallory McMorrow is always urging. Too many Democrats sound as though “they’re giving a lecture at a university rather than talking like a normal person,” she told me. She is the Democratic state senator in Michigan who captured national attention with a speech denouncing Republicans’ characterization of Democrats who support gay rights as “groomers,” and she has demonstrated a flair for getting a point across. “No matter what issue you’re talking about or how complicated it is, talk about it like you would talk to your friend in a bar, and if you can’t do that, you need to keep trying,” she said.

McMorrow presides over the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, and she said that when arguing for crucial investments, she tells stories, like the one about Michigan missing out on a second Amazon headquarters because Maryland had better transit and education options for the company’s workers. Michiganders felt that loss, she said. They don’t feel statistics about where the state ranks in per capita spending on infrastructure.

Framing the issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.

I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.

He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”

“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”

“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.