I read The New Yorker so you don’t have to, dear reader — but it’s also because occasionally, once in a blue moon, they stumble onto something truly interesting:
More than any drug since crack, the stories of fentanyl’s spread through the United States brush up against the edge of myth. It is a substance so concentrated that tiny amounts are said to be enough to get vast populations high: a saltshaker’s worth supplies a whole neighborhood; two truckloads keep a country of three hundred and thirty million stocked for a year. In the eighties, stories of the crack trade sometimes followed the historic maps of Black migration. The Chambers brothers, for instance, reportedly employed family members from the Arkansas Delta to conduct distribution operations in high-rise housing projects in Detroit, in conditions that we might now call human trafficking. Such stories were easily exploited by politicians interested in racial demonization, similar to the ways in which fentanyl trafficking is now used to stigmatize migrants crossing the Rio Grande.
Like many accounts of illegal activity, these stories, which tend to be sourced from law enforcement, are memorable in a tabloid-noir way, and probably directionally true, but also hard to verify. In the case of fentanyl, they have had a particular resonance for U.S. politicians, who are seeking to make sense of the country’s political turmoil, which might seem out of step with its broadly stable and prosperous society. The fentanyl epidemic suggests that maybe things aren’t really so good here—that instability, violence, and suffering are just below the surface, even though unemployment is under four per cent. It isn’t just Republicans, or cable-news hosts, who have made this an emphasis. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a talented young moderate Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington State, has said that forty per cent of infants delivered in one of the largest hospitals in her district are born to at least one parent who is addicted to fentanyl.
There were times, this summer, on the Presidential campaign trail when it seemed to me that 2024 was going to be a fentanyl election. The drug is generally understood to constitute a third wave of the opioid epidemic, the first being misuse of prescriptions like OxyContin and the second being heroin addiction. But fentanyl’s distinguishing feature for public health is its lethality—the rate of people killed from overdoses in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2008 and is nearly seven times what it was in the early eighties. In politics, this helps explain the intensity and durability of immigration as an issue for Trump, whose most recent pitch on the topic was less about jobs and more about drugs and violence. But fentanyl’s presence might also suggest why some of the public seems so alarmed by crime in places where homicide is not peaking and might even help explain why some politically detached young voters seem to have a bleaker view than the economic statistics would imply, since it is their friends—the young—who are dying.
In September, as part of a profile of J. D. Vance, I spent some time in Ohio, where, among other things, I was interested in what had made the state move, in the course of two decades, from slightly Republican to convincingly red. My assumption had been that the key was economic anger, over the displacement of manufacturing jobs to China and the long-tail effects of NAFTA. But the Republican officials I met, when asked to explain Ohio’s turn toward right-wing populism, tended to emphasize the opioid epidemic rather than jobs. “For folks around here, it really is protecting the southern border from drugs,” Mark Munroe, the longtime chair of the Mahoning County G.O.P., told me. And Jane Timken, the former Republican state chair, emphasized that the partisan changes had been concentrated in “the pockets of Ohio that were hit so hard by the opioid epidemic.”
A few days ago, I came across an economics paper that has been circulating this year, even though it hasn’t yet been formally published. The study, which was authored by Carolina Arteaga, of the University of Toronto, and Victoria Barone, of Notre Dame, takes aim at a specific problem: because the effects of the opioid epidemic have often been worst in areas of the country that have also suffered from depopulation and deindustrialization, and which have been exposed to the NAFTA and China shocks, the social and political consequences of the drugs have been a little tricky to separate from the more general experience of economic hardship and decline.
But, in the documents unsealed as part of the Purdue Pharma lawsuits, Arteaga and Barone discovered that, in the mid-nineties, the marketing of OxyContin had focussed initially on communities with high cancer rates. The idea, apparently, was to build the drug’s brand as a treatment for the terrible pain sometimes experienced by cancer patients before promoting it, in those same communities, as a more general remedy for pain. Arteaga and Barone theorized that by examining the communities with higher and lower rates of cancer, while controlling for measures of economic hardship and social disorder, they could isolate the effects of a community’s opioid exposure from those of a more general decline. Two Appalachian regions might have suffered many of the same injuries, Arteaga and Barone reasoned, but, if only one had high cancer rates, it would have disproportionately got the initial opioid bolus, whose unique effects could then be seen in the differences between regions. “Ingenious,” the Times opinion writer Thomas Edsall called the study’s design, earlier this year.
Arteaga and Barone found that the social harms of the opioid epidemic were substantially exacerbated in the high-cancer regions—what was bad everywhere was worse where OxyContin had first been pushed. By 2012, people in the targeted areas were using opioids at rates fifty per cent higher than those in comparable areas, and dying from these drugs twice as much; in 2020, the populations in these marketing hot zones were about ten per cent more likely to apply for food stamps and social security.
Neither Arteaga nor Barone specializes in U.S. politics—both are originally from South America—but, when they workshopped the paper, they found that other economists often asked whether they could detect any implications for politics, since the other effects were so dramatic. They ran the numbers. The communities that had been pinpointed by Purdue’s reps in the mid-nineties because of high cancer rates became, they found, “increasingly aligned with the Republican party,” across House, gubernatorial, and Presidential elections. Even compared with similar places, which were generally moving toward the G.O.P., and controlling for exposure to economic shocks, the communities targeted by the sales reps—the opioid ground zeros—moved toward the Republicans by an extra 4.6 per cent in the 2020 House elections. In a country on a partisan knife’s edge, this is a remarkable effect. It was as if in their briefcases the sales reps had also carried packets of red dye, its hue still detectable twenty-eight years later in the now-devastated places they’d been.
When I spoke with Arteaga and Barone, via Zoom, on Thursday afternoon, Arteaga said, “It was not obvious that the opioid epidemic would favor the Republicans.” In surveys through the years, people did not especially blame either party for the epidemic. Even so, she thought there might be two reasons that the most affected areas had tilted so clearly to the G.O.P. “The first,” she said, “and I don’t think this would have happened without trade, was that the economic hardship of mostly white working-class Americans became something that was very important to the Republican Party.” The second reason was simpler. “Conservative media talked about this more,” Arteaga said. She and Barone had measured the mentions, and, for many years, the opioid epidemic was much more widely discussed by the right-wing press than by other outlets. You might criticize Fox News for being interested in these patterns mostly in order to demagogue them, in other words, but you have to credit the network for something more important and fundamental: noticing that it was happening at all.
The Harris Walz Campaign Bleeds It All Out
Woof. Watch this, folks — Jen O’Malley-Dillon, Quentin Folks, Stephanie Cutter, and David Plouffe just cut their arms open and bleed out on air. They learned nothing, people. NOTHING. Here’s Cutter:
“There’s a lot of intrigue around this, a lot of theories, it’s pretty simple. We wanted to do it. I hate to repeat this over and over, but it was a very short race with a limited number of days and for a candidate to leave the battleground to go to Houston, which is a day off the playing field in the battleground, getting that timing right is really important. So we had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team, they were great, they wanted us to come on, we wanted to come on, we tried to get a date to make it work and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date. We did go to Houston and she gave a great speech at an amazing event…
“We were hoping to fit it in around that ultimately weren’t able to do it. As it turns out, that was the day that Trump was taping his Joe Rogan, which they had never confirmed to us, we just kind of figured that out in the lead up to it. You know, she was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan. Would it have changed anything? You know, it would have broken through, not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan, but the fact that she was doing it and that was really the benefit of it. Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows? It didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or another, but she was willing to do whatever it takes.” …
The campaign said Rogan would not travel to do the interview. The Call Her Daddy podcast did this style of interview, recreating their set in Washington D.C. to interview Harris — something that reportedly cost six figures. That interview has just over 900,000 views on YouTube today, while Trump’s appearance on Rogan has more than 50 million on the platform.
Trump’s Minority Shift
Trump’s increased appeal to minority voters, along with poor turnout for Kamala Harris, helped give him an edge in swing states that decided the election. In Pennsylvania, for example, Harris won Philadelphia by 59 points, but that represented a drop from the 63-point margin that Joe Biden secured in 2020. Latinos are 16 percent of Philadelphia residents, and “Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods,” according to an NBC News analysis.
Likewise in Michigan, another battleground that Trump narrowly lost in 2020 and narrowly won in 2024. In Wayne County, which includes heavily black Detroit, Harris won by 29 points, but here again she underperformed Biden, who won the county by 38 points four years ago. The upshot was a net reduction of about 85,000 votes for Democrats in the state’s most populous region.
Trump also made remarkable inroads in large blue states that he lost. Biden carried California by 29 points in 2020, but Harris won it by just 20 points this year. In New York, another liberal stronghold, Harris beat Trump by 11.7 points, or roughly half of Biden’s margin in the Empire State four years earlier. Nor was this a matter of Trump simply turning out more registered Republicans and independents. A New York Times analysis of voter patterns in New York City found that Trump performed in minority areas long regarded as home to the Democratic Party’s base voters.
“In every neighborhood in New York City, from Red Hook in Brooklyn to Riverdale in the Bronx, Vice President Kamala Harris received markedly fewer votes than Joseph R. Biden, Jr. did in 2020, while in most neighborhoods, Mr. Trump notched modest increases compared with his last run,” the Times reported last week. In minority communities, Trump’s gains were the most impressive. Heavily Asian neighborhoods shifted 19 points toward Trump; majority black neighborhoods moved 46 points in his direction; predominantly Hispanic parts of the city shifted 55 points his way.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Trump and the malign effects of foreign election interference.
Mexico hints at retaliatory tariffs.
Maduro purges rivals from Venezuela leadership.
Domestic
Trump’s tariff threat roils markets.
The anti-white anti-west ideology ruining young minds.
DOJ to drop Trump election interference charges.
Jack Smith asks judge to dismiss election interference charges.
Biden admin softens immigration rules.
Democrat senators veer away from anti-Trump resistance.
Boris Epshteyn in the crosshairs over foreign influence.
How Kamala Harris could be the next Richard Nixon.
How Trump could upset the New Jersey GOP governor race.
Kevin McCarthy starts new AI institute.
Conservative backlash at pro-union pick.
Walmart moves ahead of Target in appeal.
Fight over cheap labor already splitting up GOP.
Congressmembers on Cameo: what are the rules?
Health
White House backs expansion of Medicare and Medicaid obesity drug coverage.
Media
CNN panel fumes at Scott Jennings for citing CNN’s own report on X.
Has X become a right-wing echo chamber?
Ephemera
Vincenzo Barney talks about his Cormac McCarthy scoop.
Kendrick Lamar made a Drake album.
Jason Kelce set to host late night show.
The death of the American museum.
An AI boyfriend turned psycho.
Pollack: The Jaguar and Volvo ads are both terrible.
Quote
“The New Federalism also recognizes the role of people---of individuals doing and caring and sharing. The concept of voluntary action, of community action, of people banding together in a spirit of neighborliness to do those things which they see must be done, is deeply rooted in America's character and tradition. As we have swept power and responsibility to Washington, we have undercut this tradition. Yet when it comes to helping one another, Washington can never bring to the task the heart that neighbors can.”
— Richard Nixon