Good evening, Minnesota's mask mandate will end tomorrow. Gov. Tim Walz announced the abrupt end this evening, a few hours after the federal CDC issued a new recommendation that fully vaccinated people can safely go without masks indoors. The CDC still recommended masking for unvaccinated people, but Walz said his team felt it would be impossible to enforce a dual-tier system. [Read more from Brian Bakst and Peter Cox] Local governments and businesses can still require masks even with the statewide mandate lifted. It's not yet immediately clear if big cities like Minneapolis that imposed their own mask mandates before Walz did will keep it after he lifts it. The mandate was first imposed on July 25, 2020. When it ends on May 14, 2021, it will have been in place to 293 days. Walz is not ending his declaration of health emergency, but by the end of May almost all of his emergency orders that affected ordinary people will have been lifted. Legislative Republicans are still pushing to end the emergency altogether. We'll see if this move makes a compromise on that front easier to reach in the coming weeks. Lawmakers in both parties welcomed the announcement, with some DFL senators throwing off their masks, Mary Tyler Moore-style, on the Senate floor. But Republicans said Walz should go further, with Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka tweeting that he was "disappointed it looks like our kids will still be masked in classrooms and when playing sports when they are not a high risk. Give our kids their lives back." Historical context: Governments imposed mask mandates to try to combat the 1918 flu pandemic, too, and they weren't any more popular. San Francisco, for example, issued a citywide mask order on Oct. 25, 1918; on Oct. 27 alone police arrested 110 people for mask violations. A host of public officials, including the mayor and the health officer, were caught in public attending a boxing match in violation of their own order. Some prominent San Franciscans formed an "Anti-Mask League." San Francisco's mandate ended at noon on Nov. 21, 2018; announced by a citywide whistle; "requests by the health department to conserve gauze amounted to little as residents joyously ripped the hated masks from their faces and unceremoniously tossed them in the streets." But all this celebration was premature; San Francisco got hit with a second wave a few months later and re-imposed a mask mandate on Jan. 17. [Read more from the Influenza Archive] Meanwhile, there are 4 days remaining before the Legislature's scheduled adjournment on May 17. We're now at the part of the legislative process where both sides start walking back from agenda items they have insisted for months were essential. Today, for example, Walz appeared to acknowledge his proposal for significant tax hikes was probably dead. [Read more from Brian Bakst] Another sticking point remaining: Republicans are threatening to block funding for state parks, the Minnesota Zoo and the Science Museum unless Walz agrees to stop pending regulations on auto emissions. With an on-time budget all but impossible now, leaders are now targeting a June special session to pass a budget before the July 1 cutoff at which point state government starts shutting down. They'll likely have to convene then anyway, if Walz renews his emergency powers. The Minnesota House tonight is debating a marijuana legalization bill. The measure is expected to pass, but faces stiff opposition from the Senate majority. A new study found that Donald Trump likely did better in 2020 in areas that saw civil unrest last summer after the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by Kenosha police. Biden underperformed in all the areas closest to the unrest; "if we’d seen a similar level of rioting in say, Milwaukee, it might’ve cost Joe Biden the state." [Read more] So what about Minneapolis? This is harder to untangle because we don't have the same demographic data for Minneapolis precincts that we do for individual cities and suburbs. Take a look at this map of the change in Donald Trump's vote share from 2016 to 2020 in Minneapolis, with Lake Street highlighted. Do you see a pattern?
Something completely different: One of my favorite works of popular political science is The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. Don't let the title mislead you — this isn't a book about dictators, it's about all political behavior, from tyrannies to democracies to local politics to corporate boardrooms. Their model is that all systems for choosing leaders involve three basic groups: a wide group of people who theoretically have a say, a smaller group whose support actually matters, and an even smaller group of essential backers. For a dictator, the "essentials" might be a group of colonels in the army who must be kept happy lest they launch a coup. In a big democracy, the "essentials" comprise millions of people, enough to win a majority. The fundamental difference between a dictatorship and a democracy, the authors argue, is how many "essentials" there are. If the number is small, it's easiest for a leader to just bribe them with money, status, cars, houses, etc. But if the number is large, that's too expensive, so leaders need to provide so-called "public goods" — things that benefit everyone, like "a good economy." This model can help explain everything from why military dictatorships often have really crappy militaries to why corporate boards are often extremely well-compensated relative to the amount of oversight they provide. Check it out! Listen: Let's let Sergei Prokofiev play us off with an excerpt from his ballet "Romeo and Juliet," Act I, No. 12: "Masks." [Listen]
