Evening Wrap

Thirteen states held general elections on Tuesday, including marquee races for governor in Kentucky and Mississippi, key mayoral contests in Philadelphia and Houston, and a pair of proposed constitutional amendments in Ohio that would enshrine abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana. Polls will close after I file this newsletter, so I won’t have results for you until Wednesday (the perennial plight of the Election Day reporter), but fear not — I’ve still got plenty to tell you (the other perennial plight of the Election Day reporter).

Among Tuesday’s marquee matchups is a gubernatorial race in Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is vying for a second term against Democrat Brandon Presley, a former mayor and state utilities regulator (and cousin of Elvis). Republicans have controlled the governorship for the past two decades, but this year’s race has been unusually close, thanks to Presley’s well-funded campaign and Reeves’ connection to a massive welfare scandal that unfolded during his tenure as lieutenant governor. If neither candidate clears 50% of the vote, both would advance to a runoff contest three weeks later — a first in state history.

You’re probably at least passingly familiar with Georgia’s Fulton County Jail, either because of Donald Trump’s weird mugshot or because of its notorious reputation as a dilapidated and dangerous place. Like virtually every other jail, the facility is severely overcrowded, understaffed, and woefully ill-equipped to deal with the hundreds of inmates who require behavioral health treatment. Those chronic issues have worsened amid funding shortfalls, crumbling infrastructure and unsanitary conditions, creating an unstable and increasingly violent environment that’s the subject of both a federal investigation and a state probe, the Georgia Recorder reported.

Behavior among a certain set of Republicans has deteriorated noticeably since 2015, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and described Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. (This was astonishing at the time. He apparently said it again in 2018. I didn’t notice.) By last January, most of the party had embraced Trump’s repeated lies about the 2020 election. 

Here’s a quick statistical snapshot of our mental health care system (or lack thereof). From 2019 to 2020, more than 20% of American adults experienced a mental illness, but fewer than half of them received treatment, according to the nonprofit Mental Health America. Of those, 42% didn’t seek care because they could not afford it. Nearly a third said they simply couldn’t find the type of treatment they needed. 

Today’s first piece of inspiring democracy news comes from Florida, where lawyers representing the state in a redistricting lawsuit likened a congressional map that preserved Black voting blocs to South Africa’s defunct apartheid system. The ludicrous argument, filed in a brief with an appeals court on Friday, was an attempt to bolster Gov. Ron DeSantis’ equally ludicrous argument that drawing district boundaries to ensure that Black voters can actually elect the person they’d prefer to represent them is the same thing as racial gerrymandering, the Florida Phoenix reported.

Maine police on Friday found the body of the 40-year-old man suspected of murdering 18 people in a pair of mass shootings in Lewiston, ending a two-day search that kept thousands of residents sequestered indoors for safety, the Maine Morning Star reported.

A dive team joined a sprawling manhunt in Maine Friday as hundreds of law enforcement agents continued to comb the state in search of an Army reservist suspected of killing 18 people in a pair of mass shootings in Lewiston. The divers will be deployed in the Androscoggin River, near where police found the suspect’s car and other evidence after the shootings on Wednesday, the Maine Morning Star reported.

Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies conducted a massive manhunt Thursday in Maine, sweeping the central swath of the state in search of a gunman believed to have killed 18 people and injured at least 13 others in a pair of shootings — one in a bowling alley, the other at a bar — in the southwestern city of Lewiston Wednesday night, the Maine Morning Star reported.

Let’s begin our little health journey by revisiting everyone’s least favorite virus, COVID-19. First, an obligatory disclaimer: Do not panic. We are not in a pandemic. There are no looming global shutdowns. We are, in fact, so extremely not in a pandemic that it’s difficult to find reliable, up-to-date data on COVID cases. That information has been hard to come by since May, when the public health emergency expired and states either stopped reporting COVID data, or began updating it far less frequently. For the most part, the change went unnoticed. It’s not that COVID is gone — it’s that we’ve accepted the fact that it’s here to stay.

As both a lifelong reader and a mom who will soon have two children in the public school system, I loathe the idea of book bans. Most of us feel this way, it turns out — 71% of voters oppose removing books from public libraries, and two-thirds object to banning reading materials from school libraries.

More than two dozen states will hold elections next month, including 11 statewide contests that will determine governorships (Mississippi, Kentucky), legislative majorities (New Jersey, Virginia), and, in Ohio, the future of abortion, which will be enshrined in the state constitution if voters approve a proposed amendment. As always, it’s a complicated issue — particularly for religious voters, who find themselves weighing personal experience and science against scripture, doctrine and the teachings of their faith, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.