One camp says our voters stayed home. The other says our voters switched. JD Vance says "the main problem is not turnout." Ron DeSantis was quoted saying "a lot of our voters stayed home."

They're both right. And the numbers tell you exactly how right.

Trump won 2024 by 1.5 points. Democrats won the 2026 House vote by about 13. That's a swing of about 14 points. I broke it apart using the two biggest surveys of who voted: the network exit poll and NORC's 113,000-person Civic Health and Elections study. Both split the swing almost the same way.

• 7 points: Trump voters who stayed home.

• 5 points: Trump voters who switched.

• 2 points: new voters who skipped 2024 and leaned Democratic.

Bottom line: it wasn't one OR the other. It was BOTH.

Few switched. More stayed home.

Start with the switchers, because this is where the surveys agree most.

The exit poll, NORC and the Economist/YouGov post-election poll are three separate surveys. All three land on the same number: 7% of Trump's 2024 voters backed a Democrat for the House. Only 2% to 3% of Harris voters went the other way.

Seven percent doesn't sound like much. But Trump voters were half the 2024 electorate. Seven percent of half the electorate is a wave.

Now the ones who stayed home. In YouGov's post-election poll, 76% of Trump voters said they voted in 2026. Among Harris voters, it was 87%. The exit poll and NORC tell the same story a different way. Trump won 2024. But the people who showed up in 2026 said they had voted for Harris by about 5 points.

Here's the part you might have guessed. The Trump voters who stayed home were not MAGA diehards who forgot to vote.

In NORC's survey, Trump voters who skipped 2026 approve of Trump's job by just 54% to 44%. The Trump voters who showed up approve 80% to 20%. More than a third of the stay-homes call themselves neither Republican nor Democrat.

Why did they stay home? Their top reasons, in NORC's survey:

• "I don't like the candidates" (27%)

• "My vote doesn't matter" (26%)

• Not interested in politics (25%)

In YouGov's post-election poll, trouble getting a ballot (19%) and distrust of the system (19%) ranked high too.

One more thing. People who voted Republican for the House in 2022 turned out at about the same rate as 2022 Democratic voters (93% vs. 94% in NORC). The party's regular midterm voters mostly showed up. The ones who stayed home were the newer, softer, Trump-only voters.

So Republicans didn't lose their base. They lost the EDGES of it. And the edges went both ways: some switched, some sat it out.

A caveat, because someone will raise it: some Trump voters who regret their vote won't admit it to a pollster. Some of them may show up in these surveys as Harris voters or non-voters. That could make "stayed home" look bigger than it was. The state voter files will settle it. North Carolina's should start showing Nov. 3 votes in the coming days.

Which groups moved

The exit poll is the number everyone quotes. You've probably seen a chart or two built on it. The trouble is that CNN, NBC, Fox and AP all report one survey this year, run by a firm called SSRS. Four networks, one poll.

So I lined it up against every other source I could find:

• NORC's 113,000-voter study

• The New York Times' voter model

• The Economist/YouGov post-election poll

• The UnidosUS / African American Research Collaborative study of Latino, Black and Asian American voters

I averaged them and compared each group with how it voted for president in 2024. The country as a whole moved about 14 points. Here's who moved more and who moved less.

The young swung hardest. Voters under 30 moved about 27 points. Young men went from roughly even in 2024 to Democrats by about 28. Seniors barely moved.

One note: the exit poll has young voters at D+48. That's the highest of the four sources. The average is about D+38. Still huge, just not as huge as the headline.

Latino men swung furthest: about 35 points. In 2024 they voted for Trump by about 10. In 2026 they voted Democratic by about 25. Latino voters overall moved 28 points and Asian voters 25.

Two years ago, Latino men were the proof that Trump was building something new. In 2026 they were the first to leave.

White voters moved about 13 points, right around the national number. Black women didn't move at all; they were already about 85 points Democratic.

The working class moved more than the college crowd. Voters earning under $50,000 moved about 18 points. Non-college voters moved 15. College graduates moved 11 and $100K-plus voters moved 8.

That's the opposite of the story Democrats have been telling about themselves for a decade. It's also the story of prices. When groceries and gas are the top worry, the people who feel it most move first.

Catholics and independents broke away. Catholics went from Trump +20 to roughly even. Independents went from about even to Democrats by more than 20.

White evangelicals held. So did LDS voters, roughly (the two surveys that report them disagree, and the 2024 baseline is shaky). Rural voters moved only about 6 points. The core of the coalition stayed put. Everything around it moved.

What each side was voting on

The two parties weren't even voting on the same thing.

In the exit poll, Republican voters' top issue was the economy (41%), then immigration (28%). Democratic voters' top issue was democracy (47%), then the economy (37%). The Iran war was the top issue for 3% to 4% of either side.

The biggest gap was Trump himself.

• Democratic voters: about 8 in 10 said Trump was a factor in their House vote, as a reason to vote against him.

• Republican voters: only about a third said they were voting for him. More than 6 in 10 said he wasn't a factor at all.

Two separate polls (the exit poll and YouGov) show the same split.

Opposing Trump fired up Democrats. Supporting Trump didn't do the same for Republicans.

The Trump wing is shrinking

This didn't start on Election Day. Every month, Scott Rasmussen's RMG Research asks voters which of four candidates they'd prefer, all with equal skills and temperament:

• a Republican with Trump's policies

• a traditional Republican

• an AOC-style Democrat

• a traditional Democrat

In July 2025, the Trump-style Republican got 35%. By October 2026 it was down to 26%, the lowest since the question started in 2020. The traditional Democrat was at 24%.

Rasmussen says the Trump option fell from 49% to 32% among white men since January 2025. Those leaving split about evenly between traditional Republicans and traditional Democrats.

That's the same picture as the exit polls: the edges walked away, in both directions.

The money didn't stop it

Trump's super PACs put $372 million into about 80 races this fall. Those races swung toward Democrats by about 15 points. The typical House district swung 14.

To be fair, they spent where Republicans were already in trouble, and Democratic groups spent heavily too. Without that money, things may have been worse. But it didn't beat the wave. The wave rolled right over it.

What it means

Here's what I take from all of it.

1. This wasn't a realignment but coming back will be a slog. Republicans' regular voters mostly showed up. Evangelicals held. Rural America barely moved.

2. It was a rejection at the low-propensity edged. Young voters, Latino men, working-class voters, Catholics and independents came to Trump in 2024. They're the ones who left in 2026, some to the Democrats and some to the couch.

3. The way back runs through prices. The economy and prices were at or near the top for both parties' voters. The voters who left are the ones who feel prices most.

Bottom line: Republicans didn't lose their base. They lost the people who made it a majority. The question for 2028 is whether anyone can win them back.

Sources: the 2026 network exit poll (SSRS; CNN's national file); NORC Civic Health & Elections Project (113,020 registered voters, Nov. 6); Economist/YouGov poll (Nov. 4-6); New York Times Voter Trends (preliminary); UnidosUS / BSP Research / African American Research Collaborative 2026 election poll; Napolitan News / RMG Research; FEC independent-expenditure filings. The 2024 group results are from the 2024 network exit poll. Every 2026 number is preliminary and will move as counting finishes. Every table, source and caveat is on our free page: members.rationalground.com/who-voted. The poll-by-poll rundown is at members.rationalground.com/every-poll.

On November 1, Global Epidemiology published “Twelve-month all-cause mortality after initial COVID-19 vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or mRNA-1273 among adults living in Florida.” The authors are MIT’s Retsef Levi, Fahad Mansuri, Melissa Jordan, and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. These are all people we trust.

If that sounds familiar, it should. This went up as a preprint in April 2025 and was immediately dismissed as unreviewed junk. It is now reviewed. That is the news, and it deserves to be stated plainly before anyone starts arguing about what it means.

What They Did

Florida keeps a centralized immunization registry and links it to state vital statistics. The authors started with 9,162,484 non-institutionalized adult Florida residents who got two mRNA doses less than six weeks apart between December 18, 2020 and August 31, 2021 — 5.3 million Pfizer, 3.8 million Moderna.

From that pool they built matched pairs: 735,050 Pfizer recipients paired 1-to-1 with 735,050 Moderna recipients, matched on seven criteria — age group, sex, race, ethnicity, calendar month of vaccination, vaccination site (nine categories), and census tract. Then they followed deaths for 12 months after the second dose.

Census-tract matching is the part worth pausing on. It means each pair lived in the same small neighborhood, got vaccinated in the same month, at the same type of location, at roughly the same age. The difference between them is which vial they happened to get.

Pfizer recipients died at higher rates on every measure:

• All-cause: 847.2 vs. 617.9 per 100,000 — odds ratio 1.384 (95% CI 1.331–1.439)

• Cardiovascular: 248.7 vs. 162.4 — OR 1.540 (1.431–1.657)

• COVID-19: 55.5 vs. 29.5 — OR 1.882 (1.596–2.220)

• Non-COVID-19: 791.6 vs. 588.4 — OR 1.356 (1.303–1.412)

The gap was largest among recipients over 60. Negative control outcomes showed no sign of meaningful residual confounding. And a sensitivity analysis found that to erase the result, you’d need an unmeasured factor 1.5 times more common among Pfizer recipients and associated with death at an odds ratio of at least 6.4. That is a demanding bar for a hidden confounder to clear.

Why This Design Is Better Than the Usual

Here is the methodological point that most coverage will skip, and it’s the reason this study is worth taking seriously.

Studies comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people are notoriously unreliable, because the two groups differ in ways nobody can measure. People who show up for vaccines also show up for cancer screening, take their statins, and don’t die of untreated diabetes. This is healthy vaccinee bias, it is large, and it has wrecked observational studies in both directions.

Comparing two vaccinated groups largely dissolves that problem. Both cohorts cleared the same behavioral hurdle — they went and got two shots. Whether a Floridian got Pfizer or Moderna in early 2021 was mostly an accident of which clinic had which vial on which day.

That is a genuinely cleaner comparison than most of what gets published in this field, and it’s why the Veterans Affairs system has run similar head-to-head designs — one of which, cited by the authors, found higher cardiovascular event risk after Pfizer than after Moderna over 266 days.

That is a serious finding and it should be replicated in other state registries immediately — which is a thing any state with a linked immunization registry and vital statistics could do this year if it wanted to.

It is also not proof that either vaccine raised anyone’s mortality relative to no vaccine, because the study was not built to answer that question. Both of those sentences are true. The temptation this week will be to keep the first and drop the second.

The authors’ own closing line is the right one to end on, and it is more interesting than the death-toll arithmetic: these results “underscore the need to evaluate vaccines using clinical endpoints that extend beyond their targeted diseases.”

Translated: if you only ever measure whether a vaccine prevents the disease it targets, you will never find out what else it does. That has been the hole in the evaluation framework for twenty years, and it is the reason a study like this had to be run by a supply-chain professor and a state health officer instead of by the agencies that licensed the products.

$56.

We just told you the number on our own side of the argument is wrong. That is the publication. $56 for the year — the FOIA database, the forecast, and a straight read of the evidence whichever way it points.

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Study: Levi R, Mansuri F, Jordan MM, Ladapo JA. “Twelve-month all-cause mortality after initial COVID-19 vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or mRNA-1273 among adults living in Florida: Statewide cohort study.” Global Epidemiology, published November 1, 2026. doi:10.1016/j.gloepi.2026.100296. Open access. Figures above are quoted from the authors’ deposited manuscript, the openly available version of record of this DOI; the study previously circulated as a medRxiv preprint (10.1101/2025.04.25.25326460). Chart by Rational Ground.

The election is over. The counting isn’t.

Democrats have won both chambers. But a handful of races are still too close to call, and a few are close enough to make anyone rethink whether one vote matters.

The Senate

Mississippi: Scott Colom (D) leads Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) by 1,138 votes out of nearly 950,000, with 96% counted. Earlier Wednesday the gap was just 65. Mississippi has no recount law. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day count if they arrive by Nov. 10.

Alaska: Mary Peltola (D) leads Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) by 637 first-choice votes, with 75% counted. Neither has a majority, so the ranked-choice count comes Nov. 18.

The House

Fifty-four House seats are still uncalled. These are the closest:

• North Carolina 5th: Chuck Hubbard (D) leads Rep. Virginia Foxx (R), in Congress since 2005, by 99 votes out of 285,498.

• North Carolina 3rd: Rep. Greg Murphy (R) leads Raymond Smith (D) by 233.

• Tennessee 4th: Victoria Broderick (D) leads Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R) by 280.

• Minnesota 1st: Jake Johnson (D) leads Rep. Brad Finstad (R) by 323.

• Florida 27th: Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) leads Eliott Rodriguez (D) by 1,116. That’s inside Florida’s automatic recount margin of half a point.

In North Carolina, the trailing candidate can ask for a recount when the margin is 1 point or less. In Minnesota, the state pays for a recount on request when a congressional race is within a quarter point.

Closest of all

A Minnesota state Senate seat. Austin Peterson (R) leads Rob Kupec (D) by four votes out of 36,252, in the state’s unofficial count.

So the next time someone tells you one vote doesn’t matter, show them this.

Sources: AP vote counts via ABC News, 8:30 pm ET Nov. 4. North Carolina and Minnesota numbers match those states’ results files. Recount rules: N.C. G.S. 163-182.7; Minn. Stat. 204C.35; Florida’s automatic recount and Mississippi’s lack of a recount law per NBC News and ABC News.

The scoreboard

Democrats flipped seven Senate seats: North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa and Maine. Two more are still be…

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A little hope before the polls close.

Florida's in-person voters today are about 27 points more Republican than Democratic, by party registration. That's redder than Election Day 2022 (24 points) and far redder than 2024 (15). If it holds, Byron Donalds is on pace to win the governor's race by about 4.4 points. Our forecast had him at 4.2.

Now say the evening breaks his way and he wins by 6. That would mean the polls underrated Republicans by roughly 1.5 to 1.8 points. Take that same miss and apply it to every Senate race in the country.

What a 1.5-point miss does

• The Senate goes from a likely Democratic pickup to a near coin flip. Our final forecast gave Democrats a 76% chance, and that already allows for the polls missing either way. Lock in a 1.5-point miss toward Republicans and it falls to about 61%. At 1.8 points, it's 53%.

• Alaska and Kansas tip to Republicans. Iowa, a dead heat in our forecast, leans Republican.

• If every race went to whoever leads after the shift, Democrats would hold exactly 51 seats, the barest majority.

• It all comes down to Ohio and Texas, where Democrats would lead by less than half a point.

• At a 2-point miss, both flip and Republicans keep the Senate, 51–49.

For scale: in 2024, the polls in the close Senate races underrated Republicans by about 2.9 points. A miss that size would make Republicans clear favorites, with Democrats' chance down to about 24%.

One caution. Florida's polls have missed toward Republicans by more than the rest of the country in each of the last two elections. A big Florida night doesn't promise the same miss in Ohio or Texas. That's what tonight will tell us.

What to watch tonight

Most of Florida's polls close at 7 pm Eastern. Ohio closes at 7:30, and most of Texas at 8. We'll be live all night, with the polling-miss meter updating as the votes come in: members.rationalground.com/election-night

How we did this. Our election-night model with our final forecast (Nov. 3). We moved every Senate race by the same polling miss, kept each race's and each state's own error, and ran 40,000 simulated elections at each step. At 50–50, the vice president breaks ties for Republicans. Florida's Election Day numbers come from our turnout tracker, built from the county election offices' files, as of 1:30 pm Eastern.

Members get the full 2026 forecast, every Senate and House race: rationalground.com.

Watch live

I'm going live at 5:45 pm Eastern (2:45 pm Pacific), right before the first polls close. Watch on YouTube or on X (@justin_hart). Our forecast will be on screen the whole time, updating as results come in.

The one number to watch

Every result tells us a little about how far off the polls were. Put the first hour's races together and, by about 8 pm Eastern, we'll know the polls' miss to within about a point. That one number decides the night.

Our forecast gives Democrats a 75% chance at the Senate and 96% at the House. Republicans need the polls to overrate Democrats by about 2 points to be favored to keep the Senate. In 2020 the polls were off by 3.9.

What to watch, hour by hour (Eastern)

• 6 pm: Kentucky's 6th district is the first race on our watch list. We expect the Republican by about 1.

• 7 pm: Georgia governor, the Florida Senate race and South Carolina.

• 7:30 pm: Ohio, the first coin-flip Senate race. We expect Brown by about 2. If Husted leads by more than a point, it's a red night. If Brown is up 5 or more, it's a blue one.

• 8 pm: Texas, Michigan, Kansas and Maine. By now, about 88% of any polling miss is visible.

• 9 pm: Iowa and Nebraska, Republicans' best chances to hold on.

• Midnight: Alaska. It counts for days, so if the Senate comes down to Alaska, we won't know Tuesday night.

Follow along

Free: our live election-night page shows the polling-miss meter and the Senate and House odds, updating all night: members.rationalground.com/election-night

Members: the full board. The path to 51 with our coin-flip coins landing as races are called, every race we're watching in poll-closing order with the blue and red signs, the Election Day math for each close Senate race, our live notes, and a scorecard of how Claude, ChatGPT and Grok called it.

Last call: $56 for a full year

Our election special is good through Election Day: $56 for your first year of Rational Ground, 20% off. Paid subscribers get the members' site: the full forecast for every Senate, House and governor race, the AI Anchor Desk, every outside dollar race by race, the early vote, and our COVID FOIA database.

Get in at members.rationalground.com.

On Wednesday I'll score my predictions, our forecast and the AIs against the results, right or wrong.

See you tomorrow night.

Justin

Election special, good through Tuesday: a full year of Rational Ground for $56 (20% off), with all our 2026 election data and forecasts, plus the COVID FOIA database.

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Election special, good through Tuesday: a full year of Rational Ground for $56 (20% off), with all our 2026 election data and forecasts, plus the COVID FOIA database.

Get the election special

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So we checked. For every state with a contested Senate race this year, we went back to the last three elections and measured how far that state's polls mi…

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The …

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Most of it is on one side. In those reports, groups helping Democrats put $217 million into Senate and House races. Groups helping Republicans put in $65.5 million.

Who

• House Majority PAC, the House Democrats' main super PAC: $71.2 million across 52 House races, almost all of it against Republicans. The most went to Florida's 25th ($4.8 million), Michigan's 7th ($4.3 million) and Florida's 22nd ($4.2 million).

• WinSenate: $52.2 million across 10 Senate races. The most went to Ohio ($21.7 million: $12.7 million against Jon Husted and $9 million for Sherrod Brown), then Michigan ($8.4 million) and Iowa ($7.9 million).

• No Going Back PAC, the biggest Republican-side spender: $36.2 million across 44 races, $30.5 million of it in the House. The most went to Texas's 35th ($3.1 million) and Florida's 14th and 22nd ($3.0 million each).

Where

• Ohio Senate: $25.6 million for Democrats, $1.7 million for Republicans.

• Texas Senate: $22.4 million for Democrats, $0.1 million for Republicans.

• Iowa Senate: $11.9 million to $3.3 million. Kansas: $9.9 million to $2.3 million.

• Michigan Senate was the one big Senate race where Republicans got more: $16.4 million to $13.2 million.

What it means

These are closing ad buys. Almost all of it is TV, digital and other media, and most is dated Tuesday, Oct. 27.

For the whole year, Republican-side groups still lead in the races we track, $1.54 billion to $1.21 billion. But this one drop cut that lead from $473 million to $333 million in a single day.

One caution: 71% of these dollars are listed as estimates. Groups correct them in later filings.

Source: the FEC's bulk file of independent expenditures (outside spending), reports received Oct. 28–29, latest version of each, downloaded Oct. 29 at 8:10 am PT. Spending for or against Democratic and Republican candidates for Senate and House.

We update the money every morning: rationalground.com

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members.rationalground.com/countdown

It's a live page with a countdown to the first polls closing, our Senate and House odds, every close Senate race, the early vote, the money pouring in, and a slider that shows what happens if the polls are wrong. …

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1. Republicans have the bigger checkbook

Groups backing Republicans have put about $1.07 billion into Senate races. Groups backing Democrats: about $650 million. That’s roughly 1.6 to 1.

2. Texas is the most expensive race in the country

$378 million and counting. About $298 million of it backs Ken Paxton. About $80 million backs James Talarico. And Talarico still leads by about 2 points in our polling average.

Money isn’t everything. Ohio is right behind Texas at $354 million.

3. The money just moved to the heartland

Three weeks ago, the money in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska was barely moving. Now it’s speeding up faster there than almost anywhere.

In the last week alone, Lower Costs Now (a Future Forward group) put $30.1 million into Iowa, about 21 times its recent pace, and $14.4 million into Kansas. The Senate Leadership Fund network added $5.2 million in Kansas. Fairshake, the crypto PAC network, put $4.1 million into Nebraska.

All three races are within half a point in the polls.

Members get the full forecast, every race updated every morning, with the money and the early vote. Through Nov. 4, an annual membership is 20% off.

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Our forecast gives Democrats a 66% chance of taking the Senate. That number assumes something we know isn't quite true: that the polls, on average, are right.

They usually aren't. So we built a way to see what happens when they're wrong.

Slide it yourself: members.rationalground.com/if-the-polls-are-wrong

How it works

Every animal on the boat is one Senate seat: donkeys for Democrats, elephants for Republicans, and moose for the independents (Angus King and Bernie Sanders, who vote with Democrats, and Nebraska's Dan Osborn, who has said he won't join either party's caucus). The 65 seats not on the ballot this year ride at the two ends.

Slide the polls toward one party and every race moves by that many points. When a race's likely winner changes, its animal flips, a buoy pops up with the state's name, and the boat leans toward the heavier side. The odds on the sail don't come from a shortcut. For every point of miss, we re-ran the forecast's 20,000 simulated elections with every margin moved by that much, and the slider blends between those runs.

The misses we've actually had

The notches on the slider are real. The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) measured how far the final two weeks of polls missed, across all races:

• 2016: polls overstated Democrats by 3.1 points.

• 2018: by 0.1 points. Essentially right.

• 2020: by 4.6 points.

• 2022: they overstated Republicans by 0.6 points.

• 2024: they overstated Democrats by 2.7 points.

Here's what each would do to this year's Senate:

• A 2018 miss: no seats flip. Democrats are 65% to take the Senate.

• A 2022 miss: Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa flip. Democrats, 73%.

• A 2024 miss: Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine and Michigan flip. Republicans are 67% to keep the Senate.

• A 2016 miss: the same five flip. Republicans, 72%.

• A 2020 miss: the same five flip. Republicans, 86%.

The tipping point is small. A miss of just 1.3 points toward Republicans makes them the favorites.

The pattern worth watching

Look at the years. The big misses, all toward Democrats, came in 2016, 2020 and 2024: presidential years, with Donald Trump on the ballot. In the two midterms in between, the polls were nearly dead on.

2026 is a midterm. If this year's polls behave like 2018 and 2022, Democrats stay favored. If they behave like the presidential years, Republicans are favored to keep it. Nobody knows which kind of year this is. That's the honest answer, and it's why we built the slider instead of just giving you one number.

What it doesn't do

Real polling misses aren't tidy. In 2020 the polls missed more in some states than in others. The slider moves every race by the same amount, which is a simplification. Treat it as a way to see how fragile the Senate is, not as a prediction of where any one race lands.

And yes, it has sound. Tip the boat and the crowd on deck will tell you about it.

Try it: members.rationalground.com/if-the-polls-are-wrong

The full forecast, with every Senate, House and governor's race, is for members at members.rationalground.com/elections.

Forecast as of Oct. 22, 2026. Polling misses: AAPOR, Task Force on 2024 Pre-Election Polling, executive summary.

Everything below came out of the Rational Ground COVID FOIA database — every quote checked against the source page, every page number recorded. This week it grew by fifteen findings, including nine from a brand-new release and six from diary pages that had no searchable text at all until we ran OCR on them and read them by hand.

That is what a membership pays for: somebody reading 270 pages of scanned lab email so you don’t have to, and then telling you honestly which parts hold up.

👉 Join at $56 and search the whole database at members.rationalground.com.

A new FOIA release shows an NIH lab chief suggesting a furin-like cleavage site in a bat coronavirus spike — two months before COVID surfaced. Here is exactly what that email says, and exactly what it doesn’t.

On October 15, U.S. Right to Know published 270 pages of email from the lab of Vincent Munster, chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. Lewis Kamb wrote the story. The documents are real, the reporting is solid, and one email in that batch is going to travel a very long way this week.

The Email

Sunday morning, October 6, 2019, 9:31 a.m. Mountain Time. Munster writes to his postdoc, Michael Letko. The subject line — carried over from earlier in the thread — is “Definitely on the right track.”

“So they focus on S rather than the receptor, but your work suggests more receptor activation, right?

You should be able to make S with a more broader cleavage signature (like furin-like) to enhance infectivity. You can include a motif like this R-X-[K/R]-R↓ Might be cool to get some synthesized

Are you using caco-2 cells as well, I think so but can’t remember out of the top of my head”

“S” is the spike protein. A furin cleavage site is the feature of SARS-CoV-2 most frequently cited in lab-origin arguments — the piece of the spike that isn’t found in its closest known relatives. Here is a senior NIH virologist, in October 2019, suggesting his postdoc engineer a furin-like cleavage signature into a bat coronavirus spike “to enhance infectivity,” and offering the motif to do it with.

That is a real sentence in a real government email, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

What Was Driving It

The thread starts two days earlier, and the context is not sinister. It is competitive.

Friday, October 4, 4:01 p.m., Letko writes to Munster:

“Vineet and Baric just put a paper on BioRXIV showing that trypsin treatment facilitates entry of both PDF2810-CoV and HKU5 into human cells. See attachment. Seems like more groups will be converging on this idea soon…“

Thirty-eight minutes later, Munster:

“Better get your stuff wrapped up! Maybe smtg on trypsin rich environments on mucosal surfaces?”

Then Sunday morning comes the furin suggestion. This is a lab racing a rival group to publish — Ralph Baric’s, as it happens — over a weekend. That framing doesn’t make the proposal harmless. But it does explain the sentence better than any theory involving a conspiracy, and the honest version of this story includes it.

Now the Part That Will Get Skipped

Here is what these documents do not show, and I’d rather you heard it from us than from a fact-check next week.

Nothing in the records shows Letko did it. No follow-up, no synthesis order, no results. USRTK says this in its own story. The suggestion sits there, unanswered in the file.

The lab was working with particles that cannot replicate. This matters more than anything else and it is the least likely detail to survive the next retelling. The lab’s own March 2019 abstract — also in this release — describes the platform:

“All 30 RBDs were synthesized and cloned into a construct we designed to make luciferase reporter viral particles… We then infected human cells with this panel of reporter particles and measured luciferase as a readout for cell entry.”

Reporter particles are not viruses. They enter a cell once, light up, and go no further. The stated purpose of the platform was screening — testing which of 30 known receptor-binding domains could enter human cells, so that newly discovered sequences could be triaged quickly. In the lab’s words, it was “cheaper, faster, and scalable,” and the result was that “only a small subset of the novel RBDs mediated entry into human cells while the majority of RBDs did not.”

The published platform swapped a different part of the spike. The abstract describes swapping receptor-binding domains. The email suggests modifying the cleavage signature. Those are different regions and different experiments — another reason the email reads as an aside rather than a description of work underway.

The motif isn’t SARS-CoV-2’s. USRTK reports that the furin site in SARS-CoV-2 differs from the motif Munster typed. We did not independently compare the sequences, and we’re telling you that rather than implying we did.

And nothing in the records shows this lab held SARS-CoV-2 or a close relative, or corresponded with scientists in Wuhan.

One more thing worth saying plainly: the headline verb — that Munster “proposed making a SARS-like bat virus better at infecting people” — is USRTK’s characterization. The email says “make S.” That means the spike protein, not a virus.

What the email genuinely establishes is narrower, and still worth knowing: in autumn 2019, inserting furin-like cleavage sites into SARS-like spikes was an idea circulating casually enough among American coronavirus researchers that a lab chief could float it in a Sunday email without a second thought. As molecular biologist Alina Chan told USRTK, “different groups of virologists were converging on the idea of inserting cleavage sites in the spikes of potentially dangerous coronaviruses.” The 2018 DEFUSE proposal had put the same idea on paper.

That is a story about a research culture. It is not evidence about the origin of a pandemic, and the two should not be welded together.

The Stronger Document Nobody Will Cover

Buried earlier in the same release is a cleaner, better-documented story.

On March 8, 2019, Munster emailed EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, Kevin Olival and Simon Anthony of the PREDICT project:

“we are seeking additional, unpublished lineage B beta-coronavirus sequences to test in our platform.”

He asked them not to share the attached abstract, because the work was “still unpublished and quite competitive.”

By April, Letko was thanking Anthony for agreeing, noting the sequences would “increase the impact of our story by providing a proof of principle with unpublished sequences.” Then on May 2, Anthony wrote back with what they actually had — and his email is the most human document in the batch:

“we don’t actually have that many 2b spike sequences. Sorry, I thought we had more. We did detect around 5 or 6 novel 2b viruses, but we’ve only managed to get spikes for 2 of them so far. The first comes from Malaysia, and the second from Uganda and Rwanda. Apologies that this is not quite the treasure trove of 2bs you’d hoped for…

Here comes the trickier part: Neither of these sequences have been published yet… We generally adopt a very inclusive authorship philosophy, so would need to include several people as co-authors on your paper… It is COMPLETELY up to you if you would like to proceed, or wait until the sequences are published (then you are free from us, haha).”

__IMAGE5__

Two days later he sent them. Munster: “Absolutely stellar! Will keep you posted on the results!”

Read it for what it is — an ordinary academic haggle over co-authorship credit. And note where the viruses came from: Malaysia, Uganda and Rwanda. Not China. USRTK reports they are too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to have given rise to it.

So why is this the better story? Because of what Simon Anthony co-wrote two years later. USRTK makes the point, and it’s theirs, not ours: Anthony was an author on a 2021 Cell review arguing it was implausible that anyone would construct a research system around an unpublished virus. In 2019 he was emailing unpublished virus sequences to a federal lab building exactly such a system, and negotiating the author list.

That is a documented inconsistency between what a scientist did and what he later said was unlikely. No inference required.

January 2020, Same Lab

One last item, because the timing is its own kind of document. On January 11, 2020, in a thread titled “Wuhan spike and N,” Munster’s colleague Neeltje van Doremalen wrote:

“if you would get results so quickly we could have a competitive edge. Likely the Chinese will come out with an ACE2 paper with live virus… I still find the lack of H2H suspicious.“

__IMAGE6__

“H2H” is human-to-human transmission — which China was still publicly denying. A working virologist found that claim suspicious on January 11. The rest of us were told not to worry for another six weeks.

Munster’s reply was about moving fast: “We should be able to set this up ASAP to confirm potentially with pseudotypes.”

Why We Published It This Way

We could have run the furin email under a headline with a siren on it and collected the traffic. The reason not to is simple: the careful version survives contact with critics, and the hot version doesn’t. Every limitation above appears in USRTK’s own reporting — the outlet that broke the story put the caveats in, and anyone who strips them out is doing worse journalism than the people who did the work.

The email is real. The suggestion is real. The follow-through is undocumented, the particles couldn’t replicate, and the viruses came from Malaysia and East Africa.

All of that is true at once. Write it down that way.

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Documents: NIH FOIA 65118, released by U.S. Right to Know, Oct. 15, 2026 (270 pp.). Reporting by Lewis Kamb for USRTK. Page citations: furin email p.175; Oct. 4 thread p.176; Letko/Munster abstract p.2; sequence request p.1; Anthony reply p.241; sequences sent p.240; “Wuhan spike and N” p.169. Quotations verbatim, including original typos. The Alina Chan quotation and the characterization of the SARS-CoV-2 furin motif are USRTK’s.

This is the work your membership buys. Nobody paid us to match half a million individual early-vote records against a decade of voter history. We did it because “Democrats lead the early vote” is a headline that has meant nothing for twenty years, and we wanted to know whether it means something this time.

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We matched every early voter in North Carolina to their own voting record. Democrats are up in every group — most of all among people who skipped the 2022 midterm. Republicans are flat among regulars and down among occasional voters.

Every two years the same headline appears: Democrats lead the early vote. And every two years the same answer comes back: Of course they do. Republicans vote on Election Day.

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North Carolina publishes a record of every ballot cast early, with the voter’s ID, plus a separate file showing how each registered voter has voted for the past decade. Put the two together and you can answer the question that actually matters: are these early voters new, or are they the same reliable people who always show up, just voting sooner?

The Headline Numbers

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It is not a record of a meeting or a press hit. It is a note Anthony Fauci wrote to himself about the book he was planning to write. He marked it with four asterisks.

“****Very important issue to discuss in the book.”

What follows is his account of where the lab-leak theory came from. And the useful thing about this document — the reason it is worth your time — is that we can check it against his own file from two years earlier.

I am going to do that carefully, because the honest answer is: he is partly right.

The Note, In Full

Quoting the whole thing matters here. The short version circulating today cuts the middle, and the middle is where he tells you what he thinks he is explaining.

“****Very important issue to discuss in the book. The entire controversy with China as the source of the outbreak and the lab leak theory stems from the tension between Trump and China. Please remember that when it was brought to the attention of Trump that the NIH was funding a grant at Wuhan where the outbreak was first recognized, Trump ordered, with no evidence to support any suspicion, that we cancel the grant. As it turns out it is illegal to do that without cause and we had to re institute the grant and put conditions on it that they essentially were not able to meet. This led both to the deomization of Peter Dascak of EcoHealth and to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak and clouded the picture of our ability to further investigate the very likely cause of the outbreak which was a natural jumping of virus from an animal species to human. Because I am the director of NIAID and was involved in somewhat of a conflict publicly with Trump, I then became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak. This led to the preposterous accusations on the part of people like Rand Paul that I was responsible for the death of 5 million people. This led to my pushing back publicly against people like Senator Paul which among many other issues made me a ‘polarizing figure’. However, remember to emphasize in the book that a lot of this really stemmed from Trump inappropriately ordering the cancelling of the Wuhan grant. This is a critical fact that should be developed in the book.“

The misspellings are his. The diary is dictated.

Missing Pages diary, March 21, 2022. Released by Chairman Rand Paul.

Where He Has a Case

Let me give him the parts that hold up, because they do hold up.

The cancellation did come from the White House. The House Oversight committee’s account is that the instruction ran from chief of staff Mark Meadows through HHS’s general counsel to NIH’s Lawrence Tabak and then to Michael Lauer, who sent the letters of April 19 and April 24, 2020. Fauci confirmed that sequence when the committee put it to him in January 2024. Lauer said he knew of no EcoHealth compliance problem before April 19.

The grant was already a target before NIH moved. On April 18, 2020, Peter Daszak wrote to thank Fauci for “publicly standing up” for natural origin, and noted his grant had been “publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night.” That briefing was April 17. NIH’s first letter went out two days later.

Daszak to Fauci, April 18, 2020. A block of the email is withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(7)(A).

So: a politically driven cancellation, of a grant that was already being hammered on cable news, in an election year, against a backdrop of genuine Trump–China hostility. That is a real description of April 2020, and anyone who tells you Fauci invented it is not reading the file either.

Eleven Weeks

Here is the part that does not fit.

The note says the cancellation “led… to an emergence of the theory of a lab leak.”

The first NIH letter was April 19, 2020. The Fox News question was April 17.

Fauci’s own diary entry for January 31, 2020 — seventy-seven days earlier, eleven weeks to the day — records a phone call from Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, who conferenced in Kristian Andersen:

“There have been conspiracy theories that the virus was given GOF by inserted mutations and deliberately or accidentally released in Wuhan… Everyone thinks that is crazy, but the Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”

A note on that last clause, since it will get mangled: “the former” refers to accidental release, not deliberate. He is recording that the scientists thought an accident was the likelier of the two release scenarios.

Fauci’s diary, January 31, 2020.

The next day he convened the call. His diary lists who was on it — Collins, Farrar, Patrick Vallance, Andersen, Christian Drosten, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Ron Fouchier, Robert Garry, Marion Koopmans — and records the split:

“There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this… Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.“

Fauci’s diary, February 1, 2020 — the teleconference and the participant list.

That is not a theory emerging from a grant cancellation. That is the director of NIAID, on January 31 and February 1, 2020, organizing an international call about whether the virus had been engineered — and writing down that the Wuhan connection was why they could not drop it.

The Contemporaneous Emails Say the Same Thing

The diary is dated by Fauci, and the release does not establish when each entry was dictated. So lean on the timestamped email instead. It tells the same story.

January 31, Andersen to Fauci: the virus “looks totally normal” on a phylogenetic tree, but “some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” and “Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He adds, fairly, that “those opinions could still change.” Fauci replies: “Thanks, Kristian. Talk soon on the call.”

February 1, 7:29 a.m. Eastern, Fauci to his deputy Hugh Auchincloss, subject line “IMPORTANT,” attaching a file named “Baric, Shi et al - Nature medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf”: “It is essential that we speak this AM… You will have tasks today that must be done.” Six hours later he forwards the same file to Lawrence Tabak: “Here it is.”

February 2, Farrar: “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!” Michael Farzan, quoted in the same thread: “I am 70:30 or 60:40.” Robert Garry: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario.”

And Francis Collins, the same day, in the line that ages the worst:

“I am coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely. But I share your view that a swift convening of experts… is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate.“

February 2, 2020 — Collins replying beneath Farrar’s “I am honestly at 50!”

By February 4, Farrar was still writing: “’Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possib[ility] of accidental lab passage in animals… Eddie would be 60:40 lab side. I remain 50:50.”

Eleven weeks before the grant was touched, the most senior public-health officials in the United States and Britain were trading odds on whether the virus came out of a lab.

Being Fair About What This Is

A few things this is not.

It is not a lie, and I am not going to call it one. It is a private note, dictated two years after the events, by a man drafting a memoir and working out his own story. Everyone who has written a book has done some version of this. The question is not whether he shaped a narrative — it is which facts he chose to stress and which he left out of his own account.

Read charitably, the note may not even mean what it looks like. He writes that he “became the focal point of the building conspiracy theory that somehow or other NIH played a role in the outbreak.“ That version of the theory — the one that puts NIH money at the center — genuinely did intensify after April 2020. If that is what he meant by “the theory of a lab leak,” his timeline is defensible. It is just not what the sentence says.

Two more cautions. Fauci’s claim that Trump acted “with no evidence to support any suspicion” is his characterization — the documents do not establish what the White House knew in April 2020, and the House committee later argued the opposite. Attribute it to him; don’t print it as fact. And his claim that the grant was reinstated with impossible conditions needs checking: the reinstatement the House report walks through happened in April 2023, a year after this note was written.

There is also the simplest tension of all. In June 2020, asked by the House why the grant was cancelled, Fauci said: “It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it. I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it.” By March 2022 he had a reason, a mechanism, and a villain. He may well have learned more in between. Someone should ask him when.

What’s Actually Here

Strip away the politics and this is a document about sequence.

The lab question did not arrive from Donald Trump. It arrived from Jeremy Farrar’s phone call on January 31, 2020, and from Kristian Andersen’s email the same day, and from a conference call Fauci himself convened the next afternoon — a call where most of the participants thought deliberate insertion was possible and the Wuhan Institute’s gain-of-function work was the reason they could not let it go.

Seventy-seven days later, a grant got cancelled.

Both things are in his file. Only one of them made it into the note about what to emphasize.

I do not claim credit. I claim receipts.

Sources: “Tony’s Diary: The Missing Pages (December 2021–May 2022)” and the July 2026 diary package, released by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, paul.senate.gov. Fauci emails from the Leopold NIH FOIA release and the Tobias productions (documents 120 and 121). Termination chain and 2024 testimony from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic final report, December 2024, pp. 125–127.