May 22, 2020

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. The University of California is dropping the SAT. China is cracking down on Hong Kong. And Joe Biden is considering Elizabeth Warren for V.P. despite their differences.

Biden-Warren: Really?

There is a long history of bad feelings between Joe Biden’s inner circle and Elizabeth Warren.

She accused Biden of protecting banks rather than ordinary families during debates over bankruptcy legislation in the 1990s. Later, Obama administration officials regularly bad-mouthed Warren for criticizing their response to the financial crisis.

And yet Warren has emerged as a serious candidate to be Biden’s vice president, as Adam Nagourney and Jonathan Martin explain.

To understand why, I think it helps to look at political history. As strange a pair as Biden and Warren might seem, they also might be the ticket that most closely matches successful previous tickets.

When pundits talk about the selection process, they often imagine that a vice-presidential nominee can excite voters from the same state or demographic group. But there is little evidence that’s true.

In 2016, Tim Kaine didn’t seem to help Hillary Clinton win more white men. In 2012, Paul Ryan didn’t help Mitt Romney win Wisconsin, and John Edwards didn’t win North Carolina in 2004 for John Kerry.

Only one strategy has a long track record of success: ticket balancing. Winning presidential candidates have often chosen running mates with obviously different political personas — who shore up weaknesses at the top of a ticket.

Consider: Donald Trump, a divorced reality-television star, chose a religious conservative. Barack Obama and George W. Bush, both worried about seeming inexperienced, chose party elders. Ronald Reagan, who was labeled a radical conservative, chose an establishment figure: George H.W. Bush. (Bush’s harsh earlier criticism of Reagan — for “voodoo economics” — is reminiscent of the Biden-Warren history, Adam Nagourney told me.)

Biden’s biggest weakness among the Democratic coalition is young, progressive voters. And many of them are Warren fans. Stan Greenberg, a top Democratic pollster who has pushed for Warren, recently told the Biden campaign that such voters were “dangerously not” united behind Biden.

Biden has multiple options for vice president (and in future newsletters, I’ll focus on others, like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar). If anything, though, the candidate who seems most different from him may be the one who’s historically most typical.

For more: The Times story has details on the latest conversations between Biden and Warren. Jamelle Bouie, a Times Opinion columnist, has made a case for Warren as the vice president who could get the most done. And a 2019 Politico story had details on the long-running feud between Obama’s team and Warren .

FIVE MORE BIG STORIES

1. China tightens its grip on Hong Kong

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives for the opening session of China’s National People’s Congress in Beijing today,Pool photo by Ng Han Guan

China moved to assert more authority over Hong Kong, partly to crack down on the pro-democracy movement there. Details of the new legislation are expected to be released today. A similar 2003 proposal, ultimately abandoned, would have allowed China to close newspapers and conduct searches without warrants.

“This legislation is what Hong Kong residents have feared for many years and now seems to be happening,” Keith Bradsher, The Times’s Shanghai bureau chief, told us.

2. A major blow to college entrance exams

The University of California system plans to eliminate the SAT and ACT as requirements for applying to its 10 schools. The decision could accelerate the decline of standardized testing, which critics say put poor, black and Latino students at a disadvantage.

But it’s not clear who will benefit from the change: A task force commissioned by the University of California found that the tests often gave a leg up to low-income and minority applicants who might have been rejected based on grades alone.

3. New questions about Biden’s accuser

Antioch University has disputed that Tara Reade, the woman who has accused Biden of sexual assault, received the degree that she claims to have received. Lawyers in California are now reviewing whether that undercuts Reade’s prior testimony as an expert witness in court cases there, The Times reports.

Stories in several publications — CNN, PBS, Vox and Politico — have recently raised questions about the consistency of Reade’s statements, in the Biden allegation and other matters.

4. Bad news on jobs, momentum on stimulus

The federal government released another grim report on job loss yesterday, and there were new signs of momentum behind another stimulus bill. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged a “strong likelihood” that another bill would be needed.

On Capitol Hill, more members of Congress came out in favor of a policy that appears to be preventing layoffs in other countries: Direct government subsidies for company payrolls. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, announced his support for such a plan, as did eight more House members — four Republicans and four Democrats.

Virus prevention as stimulus: In Business Insider, Henry Blodget and David Plotz point out that airline travel remains at only about 10 percent of normal levels, despite few restrictions on flying. “Even when everything is open, our economy won’t recover until people feel safe resuming their normal lives,” they write.

5. A model for local contact tracing

Paterson, N.J., has pioneered a successful model of tracking coronavirus patients, a challenge many other communities will soon face. The tracers have successfully tracked about 90 percent of the city’s roughly 6,000 coronavirus cases — and the people who came in contact with those cases — and Paterson’s death rate has been lower than the state’s.

Here’s what else is happening

The man who recorded the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, the black man killed in an encounter with two white men in Georgia, was charged with murder in the case.
Facebook says it will allow many employees to work from home permanently.
President Trump will inform Russia that the U.S. is pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated three decades ago to allow nations to fly over each other’s territory without risking military conflict.

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BACK STORY: THE SCRATCH COLUMN

Julia Rothman

Julia Rothman, an artist, and Shaina Feinberg, a writer and filmmaker, are the team behind Scratch, an illustrated column in The Times’s Business section that explores overlooked parts of the economy. (The name is a reference to both money and the sound of sketching on paper.)

They often focus on “people you don’t normally hear from,” Shaina says, including construction workers, drag performers and bodega customers. For their latest column, the pair interviewed more than a dozen public-school teachers about remote education.

“I love being around my students: witnessing their learning, seeing their light bulbs go off,” a high school health teacher in California told them. “All of that happens less frequently now. I feel like I’m teaching into a vacuum.”

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, BAKE

The Great Corona Bake-Off

Flourless Chocolate Cake.Romulo Yanes for The New York Times

It’s been busy in Carbohydrate Camelot — the nickname of King Arthur Flour’s 14-acre Vermont headquarters. In early March, as the country descended into a pandemic-induced baking frenzy, King Arthur’s grocery-store sales rose 600 percent almost overnight. Marker, Medium’s business publication, takes an inside look at how the company’s been faring.

And in England, flour mills are working around the clock thanks to “obscene” levels of demand.

No flour, no problem: This decadent flourless chocolate cake is a great cap to a Memorial Day meal.

This weekend, watch … a hip-hop history lesson

This week, The Times’s Culture editor, Gilbert Cruz, recommends the docuseries “Hip-Hop Evolution”:

Somehow, we’re only a few years away from the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, the musical genre that has long dominated the entire globe, and this 16-episode documentary series on Netflix offers a lively history of it all.

Each installment focuses on a specific city or a scene: the South Bronx DJs who started everything in the early to mid-70s, gangsta rap on the West Coast, free-speech-pushing groups out of Miami. It both feels like a collection of superspecific stories and a sweeping look at the arc of an entire art form.

At home in New York with Spike Lee

Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times

The director Spike Lee has spent nearly four decades and more than 30 films “reckoning with the jagged and brutal course of history,” Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter, writes. Now that Lee is isolating at home in New York, and his only regular contact outside is during daily rides on his orange-and-blue bike (painted in honor of his beloved Knicks), he reflected on his new movie, the pandemic, and speaking truth to power.

Diversions

Tony Hawk made history in 1999 when he landed a 900, spinning two-and-a-half turns on his skateboard. Now, an 11-year-old has landed a 1080.
From the Op-Docs video series: What polar explorers can teach us about how to be alone.
Trump visited a Ford factory in Michigan and appeared without a mask. Here’s how the late-night hosts reacted.

Games

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Planks strengthen them (three letters).

Or try this week’s news quiz.

You can find all our puzzles here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you next week. — David

P.S. This newsletter will be off Monday, for Memorial Day. If you’re looking for some good weekend reads, I recommend my colleague David Segal’s ode to logistics.

You can see today’s print front page here.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the most powerful earthquake to ever strike North America, in Alaska in 1964.

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Lauren Leatherby, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Sanam Yar and Lara Takenaga contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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