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Pressure and wind visualization of storm off the coast of New England on Thursday. (WindyTV.com)
Unforgiving cold has punished the eastern third of the United States for the past 10 days. But the most severe winter weather yet will assault the area late this week.
First, a monster storm will hammer coastal locations from Georgia to Maine with ice and snow. By Thursday, the exploding storm will, in many ways, resemble a winter hurricane, battering easternmost New England with potentially damaging winds in addition to blinding snow.
Forecasters are expecting the storm to become a so-called “bomb cyclone” because its pressure is predicted to fall so fast, an indicator of explosive strengthening. The storm could rank as the most intense over the waters east of New England in decades at this time of year. While blizzard conditions could paste some coastal areas, the most extreme conditions will remain well out over the ocean.
In the storm’s wake, the mother lode of numbing cold will crash south — likely the last but most bitter in brutal blasts since Christmas Eve.
The storm: How much snow and wind, and where
The responsible storm is forecast to begin taking shape off the coast of Florida Wednesday, unloading hazardous snow and ice in highly unusual locations not accustomed to such weather. The National Weather Service has already posted winter storm watches from Lake City, Fla. to Norfolk
It is then expected to rapidly intensify, buffeting the Mid-Atlantic beaches and eastern New England, where winter storm watches have also been issued.
The National Weather Service office serving northeast Florida and southeast Georgia cautions that a nasty mix of light freezing rain, light sleet and light snow is expected to develop Wednesday “with significant icing possible.”
In Charleston, one to three inches of snow and sleet is forecast Wednesday, where the Weather Service warns to “plan on difficult travel conditions.”
From Norfolk to the Maryland and Delaware beaches, including much of the southern half of the Delmarva Peninsula, 3 to 6 inches of heavy snow are predicted from Wednesday evening to Thursday afternoon.
GFS model shows accumulating snow from the Georgia-Florida border all the way up the East Coast to Maine.
Farther inland in the Mid-Atlantic, near Interstate 95, the storm’s exact track will be highly consequential. Current computer models suggest most, if not all, snowfall will occur east of Washington and Baltimore on Wednesday night into early Thursday. But small shifts to the west could bring some snow to these cities.
To the north, Philadelphia and New York have a better chance for a coating of snow, but — unless the storm edges closer to the coast — the more significant snow should remain to their east from Atlantic City to eastern Long Island, where at least four to six inches could fall late Wednesday to late Thursday.
By the time the storm reaches the ocean waters east of Long Island and eastern New England on Thursday, it will be explosively intensifying. The storm’s central pressure will have fallen 53 millibars in just 24 hours — an astonishing rate of intensification.
European model simulation of storm pressure drop between Wednesday and Thursday. (WeatherBell.com, adapted by CWG)
“Some computer models are projecting a minimum central air pressure of below 950 millibars at its peak, which would be nearly unheard of for this part of the world outside of a hurricane,” wrote Mashable’s Andrew Freedman. “For comparison, Hurricane Sandy had a minimum central pressure of about 946 millibars when it made its left hook into New Jersey in 2012.”
Winds will crank in response to this pressure drop, howling to at least 30 to 50 mph along the coast. Winds will be considerably stronger over the ocean — exceeding hurricane force — where enormous waves will form.
Peak six-hour wind gusts are forecast by the European model between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Thursday. (WeatherBell.com)
In Boston, the Weather Service is predicting not only four to seven inches of snow but also winds strong enough to bring down branches. Throughout eastern Massachusetts and eastern Maine, the combination of wind and snow could create blizzard conditions, especially if the storm wobbles west.
“Our biggest concern is the potential for damaging wind gusts especially near the southeast New England coast,” the Weather Service tweeted. “Power outage risk followed by arctic air Fri/Sat a big concern!”
The cold in its wake: record-breaking
Temperature difference from normal forecast Saturday morning by American (GFS) model. Note these are deviations from average, not actual temperatures.
The storm’s enormous circulation will help draw several lobes of the polar vortex, the zone of frigid air encircling the North Pole, over the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast by Friday and Saturday. Wicked cold air sourced from Siberia, the North Pole and Greenland will all converge on the region.
Temperatures are forecast to be 20 to 40 degrees below normal, the coldest of the winter so far.
Most locations in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast are predicted to set records for cold temperatures on Friday with highs in the single digits and teens.
National Weather Service high temperature forecast on Friday. Locations circled indicate coldest on record. (WeatherBell.com)
On Saturday morning, subzero cold is forecast over almost all of New England, with single digits in the Mid-Atlantic.
National Weather Service has forecast low temperature on Friday. Locations circled indicate coldest on record. (WeatherBell.com)
Winds, gusting to 30 mph, will make these areas feel 10 to 20 degrees colder.
Top wind gust is forecast for Friday evening from the American (GFS) model.
Finally, after one of the most intense cold spells of such duration on record in parts of New England — including Boston, temperatures are forecast to gradually thaw by early next week.
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House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is joined by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) during a news conference at Union Station in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Aug. 16. (Richard Vogel/AP)
Ask any reporter what his or her most hated question is, and we’ll tell you: It’s asking “why isn’t the mainstream media covering this?” while linking to a story from the mainstream media.
This year started off with a doozy, when congressman-turned-CNN pundit Jack Kingston tweeted a link to a Fox News item about a Hillary Clinton donor offering $500,000 to help women who had stories of sexual misconduct by Donald Trump. “Another story buried by #MSM in 2017,” tweeted Kingston.
The New York Times had broken that story and put it on the front page.
I’ve got two overlapping theories as to why people constantly do this. One: For too many people, “why isn’t the media covering this” is a way of saying “why is this not currently on the TV I’m watching?” Two: Too many people have a built-in suspicion about the media, which is that it covers up “the real news.” And in the fight between reality and suspicion, reality usually loses.
The same phenomenon is responsible for one of 2017′s most persistent political ideas, which is unlikely to stop this year — the idea that the Democratic Party is running on nothing but opposition to an unpopular President Trump. As a beat reporter who covers Democrats and the left, the gulf between what’s happening there, and what is perceived to be happening, is wide and remarkably getting wider.
Why? To be fair, the Democrats did not copy the Republican playbook from 2012, and follow an election loss by conducting an “autopsy” of what they needed to fix. The Growth and Opportunity Project is remembered for recommending exactly what the party did not do in 2016, like a proposal to “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” But its very existence drove news, intrigued columnists, and generated some stories about what Republicans stood for.
The defeated Democrats of 2016 handled this differently, with a hotly contested race for chair of the Democratic National Committee, and later with a “Better Deal” platform that would set out what House and Senate Democrats believed.
Both of those stories got coverage, and both were revealing. In the DNC race, every serious candidate argued that the party needed to stick with mainstream liberal policies but spend more time on grass-roots activism. In the Better Deal, Democrats endorsed a $15 minimum wage, a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, and reforms that would make it easier to organize unions.
But little of the conversation about “what Democrats stand for” mentions any of this. After winning a spectacular upset in Alabama, Sen.-elect Doug Jones’s (D-Ala.) pollster told the Los Angeles Times that Democrats “can’t just be anti-Trump.” In a column pitching six policies Democrats needed to embrace, former secretary of labor Robert Reich argued that the party “can’t just be anti-Trump.” In an interview last month, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) reported that she’s often asked “so what do you guys stand for? What are you about?”
When Democrats say this, they’re often setting up an argument — the party, they say, should rebrand itself by embracing their policy preferences. But the echo effect of all this is a discussion about what Democrats stand for that makes no mention of what the party has said it stands for. In one recent example, a rambling Paul Emerson and Paul Hodes column at HuffPost, the two observers (with long roots in Democratic politics) argued again and again that Democrats needed something passionate to run on. What was that? They could not say.
Trump won with an emotionally resonant message that struck at the core of the fear and anxiety of the American electorate. He talked about rebuilding America that everyone who leaves his or her house can see is in desperate need of rebuilding, from roads, to bridges, to tunnels, to name a few examples of our crumbling infrastructure. Hillary and the Dems talked about various government regulations and programs, and the usual smorgasbord of issues that carried no emotionally resonate energy or believability.
If you can figure out the difference between “talking about rebuilding America” and proposing government programs that would build up infrastructure, good for you. But what was the response to this lazily reasoned column? The authors were booked on “Morning Joe,” for a similarly rambling segment where they concluded that the party must “get down to the grass roots” and reach out to “rural red state voters,” two things every Democrat agrees with.
“A Better Deal is as firm as jello,” said Emerson. “The Democratic Party is not providing relevant messages to drive them to the polls at any level right now.”
It was a strange observation at the end of a year when Democrats did quite well, picking up a Senate seat, a governor’s mansion (in New Jersey), and dozens of the state legislative seats where they’d been wiped out after 2008. The stranger part of the argument, however, was that neither Hodes nor Emerson cited anything Democrats had proposed. It was enough to argue that the “messaging” was not penetrating.
Why pick on Hodes and Emerson? Because the “Democrats can’t just be anti-Trump” feedback loop works even if only pundits are feeding it. In a new article for Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson writes that “there are literally people advocating that Democrats should run flavorless candidates who sound like Republicans.” These people: Politico columnist Bill Scher and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, neither of whom are elected Democrats. At one point, Robinson cites Peter Whoriskey’s new Washington Post story on the fate of older workers who’ve retired from companies that never really offered pensions.
The Post discusses how the decline of pension plans has meant that many workers now face the prospect of remaining employed well into their final years of life, never retiring, never paying off their mortgages. What does the Democratic Party have to offer these people? What is it proposing to do to fix this? Even the reworked “populist” messaging the party tried out after 2016 did little more than emphasize “jobs.”
But Democrats’ reworked messaging — I assume this is a reference to the “Better Deal” — does include an idea for building up pensions. The Butch Lewis Act, introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and then folded into the Better Deal, would create a Pension Rehabilitation Administration, which would invest money to fund any shortfalls in public sector pensions. (Companies would pay back into the PRA with the extra money they got from the investments.) In 2016, President Barack Obama suggested increasing Social Security payments as another way to fight poverty among the elderly, an idea that had been proposed by Brown and adopted during the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
That Social Security concept was an example of how parties usually generate their messages. They pitch ideas; they write bills; they fight in public about what can pass and what can’t. Democrats actually started this process much earlier than Republicans did in previous cycles; the 1994 “Contract With America,” which mostly compiled and repackaged bills that had been stalled by Democrats, was rolled out six weeks before that year’s election.
Robinson is right about one thing. In 2016, while Hillary Clinton proposed scores of new policies, her general election campaign ended up focusing on the unsuitability and scandals of her opponent. Democrats who watched Republicans squirm when asked what they thought about Trump realized, belatedly, that all the time spent talking about him was time not making a positive argument for Democrats. Clinton actually beat Trump by 23 points among voters who wanted a “president who cares about people like me.” But that advantage was lower than the one Democrats enjoyed in 2008 and 2012.
Since then, Democrats have argued plenty, in public, about what they’ll do if voters trust them again. “Why isn’t the media covering it?” We are, and it’s a lot more interesting than the sleepy debate on how they “can’t just be anti-Trump.”
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