Eric Adams, the Democratic candidate, celebrating his victory in the New York City mayor’s race. James Estrin/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Eric Adams, a former New York City police captain whose attention-grabbing persona and keen focus on racial justice fueled a decades-long career in public life, was elected yesterday as the 110th mayor of New York and the second Black mayor in the city’s history.

Mr. Adams, who will take office on Jan. 1, faces a set of challenges as the nation’s largest city grapples with the enduring consequences of the pandemic, including a precarious and unequal economic recovery and continuing concerns about crime and the quality of city life, all shaped by stark political divisions over how New York should move forward.

His victory signals the start of a more center-left Democratic leadership that, he has promised, will reflect the needs of the working- and middle-class voters of color who delivered him the party’s nomination and were vital to his general election coalition.

Michelle Wu  speaks to supporters after winning the election to be Mayor of Boston. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

City Councilor Michelle Wu easily won the Boston mayor’s race, making her the first woman and person of color to win a mayoral election in the city and putting a progressive voice in charge of the largest city in New England.

Wu will be the city’s first Asian-American to serve as the city’s mayor. She’ll replace Kim Janey, the first woman and Black person to serve as mayor, who took over the job earlier this year after Marty Walsh resigned to become Labor Secretary in President Joe Biden’s cabinet.

Wu easily defeated fellow City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, the more moderate candidate in the contest, in the final round of voting.

While Boston has long served as an incubator of liberal politicians on the national level, its local politics has traditionally been more insular and transactional, a political paradise for back-slapping men at the heads of political machines. Wu, who was a Harvard Law student and political protege of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), is pushing to turn the city into a bastion of progressive policy.

While progressives have made key gains in the U.S. House, in state legislatures and in district attorneys’ offices around the country in recent years, they have won few races for executive positions. Wu’s tenure could serve as a policy blueprint and a political test for other left-wing candidates.

Congratulations to Mr. Adams and Ms. Wu!

Tony

Glenn Youngkin

Dear Commons Community,

Republicans claimed the governorship of Virginia for the first time in more than a decade on Wednesday, electing the businessman Glenn Youngkin and presenting their party with a formula for how to exploit President Biden’s vulnerabilities and evade the shadow of Donald J. Trump in Democratic-leaning states.

Mr. Youngkin, 54, a wealthy former private equity executive making his first run for office, elevated education and taxes while projecting a suburban-dad demeanor to demonstrate he was different from Mr. Trump without saying so outright. He defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who, with Mr. Trump out of office, struggled to generate enthusiasm among liberals at a moment when conservatives are energized in opposition to Mr. Biden.

The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Youngkin shortly after 12:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, hours after the polls closed on Tuesday night.  As reported by the AP and The New York Times.

Addressing supporters in Northern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin said the state had reached “a defining moment.”

“Together we will change the trajectory of this commonwealth,” Mr. Youngkin said after taking the stage and clapping along to the blues-rock anthem “Spirit in the Sky.”

The election took place at a moment when voters are deeply frustrated, weary from the still-lingering coronavirus pandemic and irritated at the costs and scarcity of goods. Large majorities in polls say that the country is on the wrong track, a foreboding indicator for the party in power.

No less bracing for Democrats was a second gubernatorial election unfolding in New Jersey: the incumbent governor, Philip D. Murphy, was narrowly trailing a relatively obscure Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, deep into the night. A mainstream liberal with ties to the White House, Mr. Murphy was staking his hopes for a comeback on a strong performance in several solidly Democratic areas where votes were slow to report.

But the unexpected closeness of the race underscored the overall vulnerability of the Democratic Party. Much like Mr. Youngkin in Virginia, Mr. Ciattarelli appeared to benefit from robust turnout in rural and conservative-leaning areas of the state while making inroads in denser areas such as Bergen County, the populous suburb of New York City.

Unlike Mr. Youngkin, Mr. Ciattarelli, a former state legislator, had no vast personal fortune to spend on his candidacy and national Republicans looked at his campaign as an extreme long shot. Even if Mr. Murphy prevails, it is certain to be by a minute fraction of the 16-point margins by which both he and Mr. Biden carried the state in their last campaigns

Mr. Youngkin’s surprise victory in Virginia, however, represents the starkest warning yet that Democrats are in danger. It was likely to prompt additional congressional retirements, intensify the intraparty tug of war over Mr. Biden’s agenda and fuel fears that a midterm electoral wave and Mr. Trump’s return as a candidate are all but inevitable.

“The MAGA movement is bigger and stronger than ever before,” Mr. Trump said in a statement Tuesday night.

In the first competitive statewide election of Mr. Biden’s presidency, Mr. McAuliffe worked assiduously to link Mr. Youngkin to the previous president. Inviting a parade of prominent national Democrats to campaign with him, the former governor sought to nationalize the race and effectively transform a gubernatorial contest into a referendum on Mr. Trump in a state he lost by 10 points last year.

But voters appeared far more eager to register their frustration with the Democrats in control of Washington and Richmond, the state capital, and fissures appeared in the coalition of moderate whites, people of color and young liberals that elected Mr. Biden in 2020. In cities, suburbs and exurbs that Mr. Biden had handily carried, Mr. McAuliffe’s margins shrank dramatically.

Mr. McAuliffe never fully articulated his own vision for a second term and received no favors from Mr. Biden or his party’s lawmakers. They spent much of the fall locked in contentious negotiations over Mr. Biden’s infrastructure and social welfare proposals, failing to reach a consensus that could have at least offered Mr. McAuliffe some good news to trumpet.

Democrats in Virginia have tended to win statewide elections on a message of can-do pragmatism. The stalemate in Washington cast the party in a different light.

Taking the stage in McLean before the race was called, Mr. McAuliffe thanked his family and supporters but did not concede. “This is a different state,” he said of Virginia following his governorship and that of his successor, Gov. Ralph S. Northam. “We are going to continue that fight.”

Significantly, Mr. Trump appeared unusually content to be kept at arm’s length by Mr. Youngkin, remaining mostly silent as the Republican candidate declined to invite him to the state. Mr. McAuliffe even acknowledged to reporters on Monday that “from a political perspective” it would have been better for him had the former president not been banished from Twitter so Mr. Trump could have had a platform from which to insert himself into the campaign.

For Republicans, particularly those uneasy with Mr. Trump and battered by the party’s string of losses on his watch, Mr. Youngkin’s triumph delivered a moment of exultation. Their win in Virginia demonstrated that they can reclaim some suburban voters without fully embracing or rejecting Mr. Trump.

Clad in a fleece vest and sporting a smile on the campaign trail, Mr. Youngkin happily claimed support from so-called Never Trumpers and Forever Trumpers, while otherwise voicing a center-right agenda in a state where Republicans have not won statewide since 2009.

In part because Mr. McAuliffe was so dedicated to his strategy of inserting Mr. Trump into the race, Mr. Youngkin evaded scrutiny about his own views on policy, which on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage were to the right of most Virginia voters.

The race illustrated that voters are chiefly focused on day-to-day quality of life issues related to the economy and the pandemic, and they blame Democrats for failing to fully address these matters.

The Virginia results also suggest that Mr. Trump’s exit has at least loosened the Democrats’ hold on the college-educated voters who powered their gains over the last five years.

It’s highly unlikely, however, that the former president will let other Republicans sidestep him in next year’s midterm elections the way Mr. Youngkin did. The party’s victory in Virginia may only lull Republicans into believing that Mr. Trump no longer poses a dilemma and can be indefinitely averted, the sort of thinking many party leaders have clung to for more than six years.

For now, though, it’s Democrats who will suffer the most as their moderate-versus-liberal intraparty tensions flare in Washington and beyond and officials blame one another for the defeat.

The Democrats have a year to get their act together!  Not likely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The sooner most cancers are discovered, the better the odds they can be successfully treated.

CBS reported yesterday that the Mayo Clinic has been conducting research on a test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer.  Doctors are calling it a game-changer in the fight against cancer.  As reported  by CBS.

Dr. Julia Feygen, a member of the team at a Menlo Park, California-based company called GRAIL that’s introducing the blood test, called Galleri,  says can it catch hard-to-detect, aggressive and often deadly cancers like pancreatic, ovarian and esophageal.

“If cancers can be detected early, we can dramatically improve patient outcomes,” Feygin said.

Feygin explains that our blood contains a DNA signature. The blood test tracks the DNA a cancer cell sheds.

Two tubes of blood are drawn and sent to GRAIL’s lab for analysis.

“We can find and sequence these tiny bits of tumor-derived DNA in the blood and, based on the patterns we see, we can reveal if there is a signal for cancer present. We can predict with very high accuracy where in the body this cancer signal is coming from,” Feygin said.

The results are sent back to the health care provider in 10 business days.

An interventional study that included Mayo Clinic with 6,600 participants returned 29 signals that were followed by a cancer diagnosis.

Another study found a less than 1% false positive rate.

There are some caveats on who can get the test.

“It’s intended to be used for people at an elevated risk for cancer. This can be something as simple as age,” Feygin said.

Right now, the test is by prescription-only. Insurance doesn’t cover it. You would pay out of pocket with a current cost of $949.

“In the year 2021, this is so far beyond anything else we’ve been able to do. This is a game-changer,” said Dr. Greg Plotnikoff.

He has prescribed the test for patients and family members with risk factors, saying cancers caught early are in more treatable stages.

“If we can catch things earlier, we have a chance then to make a significant difference,” Plotnikoff said.

He also chose to screen himself, since he is over 60.

“If there was any kind of signal, I wanted to know it and be able to do something about it,” Plotnikoff said.

The American Cancer Society says 71% of cancer deaths come from types of cancer that have no recommended screening.

Feygin says they hope to change outcomes for families like hers in the future.

“It really presents an unprecedented opportunity to bend the cancer mortality curve and really save so many lives,” Feygin said.

GRAIL says Galleri “is intended to be complementary to, and not a replacement of, U.S. guideline-recommended cancer screening.”

GRAIL is still working on full FDA approval. You can ask your doctor to request the test.

Before the end of the year, Galleri will be available at Mayo Clinic locations in Rochester, Minnesota, Jacksonville, Florida, and Phoenix. It will also be available at Mayo Clinic Health System sites in southern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Remarkable development that should save many lives.

Tony