Part of The power and potential of Latino voters, from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Hispanic Americans aren’t just the largest group of eligible minority voters in the US — they’re the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. And that’s led to a belated, chaotic scramble by Democrats and Republicans to win them over.

Like many minority groups, Hispanic voters have traditionally been assumed to be Democrats. For many years, that assumption was borne out in national voting patterns. But in 2020, the Republican party saw significant growth in its Hispanic support, and recent polls suggest that Democrats’ edge with Hispanic voters has grown even narrower over the past two years. 

That has Democrats concerned, Republicans hopeful, and politicians in both parties trying to better connect with and understand the Hispanic community, realizing correctly that  their short- and long-term success depends on winning broad swaths of it.

The 2022 midterms are the next test of whether the trends of 2020 will continue. Ahead of that, we’ve put together 10 charts that explain the Hispanic electorate, how it’s changing, and how it could affect this fall’s races. 

Hispanic voters make up a significant — and growing — part of the US electorate 

While Hispanic generally refers to people with origins in Spanish-speaking countries, this story uses the definition adopted by the Census Bureau in 1997: “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race,” as much of the data referenced uses US Census Bureau numbers. That means our usage of Hispanic here may also include people of non-Spanish-speaking origin who self-identify as Hispanic.

Hispanics have accounted for about half of US population growth since 2010. That increase has meant an increase in the voter population. The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey samples the US population about its voting behavior after the November election every other year. It found that the share of voters who were Hispanic increased from roughly 7 percent in 2008 to more than 10 percent in 2020, while the share of eligible voters who were Hispanic increased from roughly 9 percent to more than 13 percent over the same period.

As those numbers suggest, there is a voting gap: In 2020, Hispanics made up an estimated 11.1 percent of those who said they were registered to vote, but only 10.6 percent of those who said they actually voted. Activating those registered voters who chose to stay home (a group of more than 2 million in 2020) represents a large opportunity for both political parties. 

And there is an even more significant opportunity in closing the voter registration gap. If all the eligible Hispanic voters actually voted in 2020, there could have been an increase of 14 million votes. 

It’s worth noting that a recent paper from researchers at Harvard, Emory, and Tufts found that the self-reported demographic and voting behavior data from the Current Population Survey tends to overestimate the voter turnout rate for minority groups when compared with voter files that documented the actual voting behaviors. That means the voting gap for Hispanic communities in reality is likely even larger than the numbers above suggest. 

The voter registration gap is the highest among Hispanic and Asian voters. Because of language and cultural barriers, both groups have historically been ignored by mobilizing campaigns of both parties, according to Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas, the director of research at Latino Policy and Politics Institute at University of California Los Angeles. 

Compared to white and non-Hispanic Black voters, fewer Hispanic and Asian voters were reached by the campaigns in 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found. 

That gap between Hispanic eligibility and participation means there is a relatively large untapped population of potential Hispanic voters — and finding a message that resonates with these potential voters could lead to a significant expansion of a given party’s base.

Campaigns — and get-out-the-vote operations — have had some recent success in activating new Hispanic voters. There’s been an increase in the turnout rate in the last two elections as compared to that of earlier years. Forty percent of eligible Hispanic voters voted in 2018 (compared to 27 percent in 2014), and 54 percent did so in 2020 (47 percent in 2016). It remains to be seen whether Hispanic voters will keep up these gains, though Domínguez-Villegas notes current trends suggest turnout may be difficult to predict this year. 

“Voters are less likely to go out to vote if they are generally disappointed at where the country is going,” said Domínguez-Villegas. Many Hispanics are unhappy with the country’s economic conditions, and that could mean fewer voters would turn out. 

At the same time, the Supreme Court’s June decision to roll back abortion rights angered many Hispanic voters, especially women and younger people, Domínguez-Villegas said. There’s also an increasing interest from both parties this year in mobilizing Hispanic voters in contested districts and states — more attention paid to Hispanic voters could mean higher turnout. Although it’s unlikely that the share of Hispanic voters will exceed that of Black voters this year, these factors could mean a significant number of Hispanic voters come out to vote in 2022, according to Domínguez-Villegas. 

The rise in voter share in recent years has mostly been driven by the enfranchisement of waves of new voters. The share of Hispanic voters among voters who reached their voting age increased over the past seven elections — in 2020, it was up 8 percentage points from 2008, according to the Current Population Survey. The survey does not sample people living in group housing — including many first-time voters living in college dorms. That means the numbers are likely an underestimate for the Hispanic population.

The overall US electorate is becoming more diverse as young people become eligible to vote. The census estimates that non-Hispanic whites will become the minority after 2045. The average age of a Hispanic American citizen was 30 in 2020, compared to 41 for non-Hispanic Americans, according to an analysis of the census data. And that means that while there have been increases in Hispanic vote shares across all age groups, the most significant increase has happened among younger generations.

The share of the Hispanic electorate that’s between 18 and 25 will only grow in elections to come: The Pew Research Center projects that at least 1 million US-born Hispanics will turn 18 every year for the next two decades.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be 2 million new Hispanic voters every election cycle. Just like other young American voters, young Hispanic voters are less politically engaged than their older counterparts, despite being more progressive, according to Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. That’s why closing the youth participation gap — something parties have struggled to do for decades — would be particularly advantageous to Democrats. 

So what does all this mean for November? Essentially, that there are a lot of untapped potential Hispanic voters for parties to engage with. And that Hispanic voters, as important as they will be in the 2022 midterms, will only become more of a political force in each successive election. 

Close to 35 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote in November 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, an increase from 30 million in 2018. Again, not all of those who are eligible will vote, and fewer tend to vote during the midterms. In 2018, about 12 million, or 40 percent, of eligible Hispanic voters actually voted — a particularly high voter turnout rate for the midterms. If the 2022 elections mirror that rate, about 14 million Hispanic people will vote. 

That’s a lot of people, and because of how Hispanic Americans are distributed across the US, they’ll be the decisive voices in a number of key races.

Republicans have made gains with Hispanic voters, but Democrats still have the advantage 

Most Hispanics have voted for Democrats consistently in both midterms and in the general elections in recent years. As previous surveys showed, Hispanic voters have typically had a more positive view of the Democratic Party, and felt that Democrats have Hispanic communities’ best interests at heart.

Democrats’ advantage with Hispanics narrowed in 2020. There are a few reasons for that, but as Ray Suarez explained for the Highlight, essentially: 

The Latino vote was stronger for Republicans than expected in South Florida, as the party and popular GOP politicians made a strong bid for Cuban American voters, and wooed a growing Venezuelan population by slamming Democrats as socialists unduly sympathetic with governments in Havana and Caracas. And in Nevada’s congressional districts, where the late Sen. Harry Reid made sure the state party had strong outreach to large and growing Latino residents, Democratic candidates won, but not by the overwhelming margins seen in earlier races.

And that means that now, more than ever, a state having a large Hispanic voter base doesn’t necessarily mean it will swing Democratic. While an increase in Hispanic voters has helped turn Arizona blue for the first time since 1996, new Hispanic voters helped power Trump’s wins in Texas and Florida. Though Trump did not win the majority of Hispanic votes in either, he captured enough to win both states.

In 2020, seven of the nine states with Hispanics made up at least 15 percent of the eligible voters went to Biden. A higher Hispanic population usually, but not always, meant a Democratic advantage.

Texas saw some of the most radical GOP gains among Hispanic voters. Trump flipped Zapata County, which is more than 94 percent Hispanic, outrunning his 2016 results by about 20 percentage points. And the GOP posted even bigger gains in 96 percent Hispanic Starr County, where Trump got 41.7 percent of total votes, gaining 28 percentage points over 2016 (though Biden still won that county).

An increase in the share of Hispanic voters could swing a state toward Democrats. Texas saw the largest increase in Hispanic votes among all states from 2016 to 2020, and had its election results shift toward Democrats by 3.4 percentage points from 2016. But things can go the other direction, too: California had an equally significant increase in Hispanic votes but saw its margin of Democrats shrink by 0.9 percentage points in 2020 from 2016 levels. 

It’s difficult to draw overarching lessons from the state or county data, given the divergent swings seen in places like Texas and California (not to mention due to a preponderance of factors that may have affected how Hispanic voters cast their ballots in each state). As a general rule, however, it does appear that Democrats have not completely lost their traditional advantage with Hispanic voters. 

Vox analyzed the increase of Hispanics as a share of eligible voters and the respective voting margin shift in the 2020 presidential elections for 429 counties (excluding DC) where the data is available. (They cover 79 percent of the country’s Hispanic voting population. Because smaller counties were made unidentifiable to preserve privacy by the census, the data likely overrepresents Hispanics in urban areas and underrepresents those in rural areas). We found that 85 percent of the counties that saw an increase in Hispanic eligible voters of more than 2 percentage points shifted to Democrats; the other 15 percent shifted Republican. Most counties shifted Democrats regardless of their changes in the Hispanic vote share in 2020.

The data shows that, on the county level, there hasn’t been a uniform pattern of Hispanic voters shifting toward Republicans yet, but that Democrats are right to be concerned about losing these voters, particularly in conservative areas where Hispanic population make up the majority. 

Hispanic voters have the power to sway elections in 2022

A number of key races this year are in areas with a sizable share of Hispanic voters. Both parties are vying for Senate and gubernatorial seats for Arizona and Nevada, where one in four eligible voters are Hispanic. In Georgia, where the Hispanic share of eligible voters is about 6 percent, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is up for reelection and is likely to have a close race. 

Democrats are hoping to keep their narrow control of the Senate. They’re on defense in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada and trying to pick up a seat in Wisconsin. Polling suggests tight races in these four states. Keeping their one-seat majority will require Democrats to win Hispanic votes.

In the Arizona Senate race for example, Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly won his 2020 special election by about 2.4 percentage points. Exit polls suggest Kelly won upward of 60 percent of the Latino vote, and that he lost with white voters to his GOP rival, Martha McSally, by 6 percentage points. While there’s certainly a path to victory for Kelly that involves somehow winning over a large segment of the white voters who back McSally, he’s more likely to keep his seat by maintaining — or building on — the Latino support he enjoyed in 2020. As Hispanics make up roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible voters, that community could swing things in 2022. 

Some close House races will also take place in areas with large Hispanic populations or population growth. 

A small percentage of Hispanic voters in toss-up races could ultimately decide the control of the House — or, more likely, the size of the House’s Republican majority. 

In Texas’s 28th Congressional District, for example, Democratic incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar faces another Hispanic candidate, Republican Cassy Garcia. Hispanics make up 73 percent of the eligible voters. 

Hispanic voters could also be pivotal in districts in which Hispanics aren’t the majority, like Colorado’s Eighth Congressional District, a new seat. It is the most diverse district in the state: 38.5 percent of the population there is Hispanic. Biden won in 2020 with a narrow 1.3 percent margin. 

While Hispanic voters hold sizable voting power, they’re far from a homogenous group. Vast generational, regional, and socioeconomic differences mean Hispanic communities care about a wide range of issues. Their concerns are largely in line with what other communities say are top issues facing the country.

Before the 2020 elections, Hispanic voters rated the economy, health care, and Covid-19 as their top concerns. This July, gun violence, inflation, and climate change were among the most important issues to them. 

“Just as every time we have done the survey, the top issues facing the country as identified by the general US public are also the same issues we see Hispanics pointing to as important to them,” said Lopez from Pew Research Center. 

It’s still too early to definitely say how each party will fare with Hispanic voters this year, though Democrats have a historical advantage. Overall, though, the path to recruiting more Hispanic voters is clear: Those who can activate new Hispanic voters and speak to the issues they care about are more likely to hold the advantage entering November. 

The power and potential of Latino voters

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destabilized European security and the global energy market — and now food could be next.

Dozens of countries across the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa that already suffer from food insecurity rely on Russia’s and Ukraine’s bountiful supplies of wheat, corn, and vegetable oil, and experts say the conflict could send food prices rising and increase global hunger.

“It’s yet one more instance of conflict surfacing in the world at a time when the world just can’t sustain it,” said Steve Taravella, senior spokesperson at the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations. “Hunger rates are rising significantly globally, and one of the largest drivers of hunger is manmade conflict.”

Even before the conflict, global food prices were already at their highest point since 2011, thanks to volatile climate conditions like droughts and overly heavy rainfall, as well as the broader supply chain disruptions created by Covid-19. With 855 million people already suffering from food insecurity, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes at an challenging moment for global hunger. The disruption in food production also puts Ukrainians — at least 100,000 of whom have already been displaced — at higher risk of hunger, underscoring the strong link between conflict and food insecurity.

What happens next depends on the progress of the war and the financial sanctions being put into place against Russia, and experts warn against predicting how exactly the conflict will affect global food prices and supplies. But given Russia’s and Ukraine’s enormous roles in providing food for the world — particularly wheat — instability in the region’s food production and exports could have consequences that will go well beyond the theater of war.

When farms become a battleground

To get a sense of just how critical Ukraine’s and Russia’s farmers are to the rest of the world, you have to understand just how much they export.

Ukraine and Russia are top exporters of major grains and vegetable oils, according to a Vox analysis of the food export data from International Trade Centre in 2020. The two countries account for the majority of the world’s sunflower-seed oil exports, while Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Combined, Ukraine and Russia were responsible for about 26 percent of global wheat exports in 2020.

Wheat and corn prices were on the rise before the war. On February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Chicago wheat futures spiked to their highest level since the beginning of the year. (They’ve since fallen — a partial sign of how much volatility war can inject into global food markets.)

Ukraine and Russia are important food suppliers for low- and middle-income countries in which tens of millions of people are already food insecure. Prices are further rising due to the conflict, and more increases as the war continues could cause greater food instability and hunger — not only in Ukraine, but around the world.

Egypt and Turkey rely on combined Russian/Ukrainian imports for 70 percent of their wheat supply, while 95 percent of Ukraine’s wheat exports went to Asia (including the Middle East) or Africa in 2020. In the Middle East and North Africa region, Yemen, Libya, and Lebanon rely on Ukraine for a high percentage of their wheat supply, while Egypt imports more than half its wheat from either Russia or Ukraine. Countries in South and Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh, are also heavily reliant on wheat from the region. The largest importers of Ukrainian wheat in 2020 were Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan, while Russia is the source of a large percentage of wheat for many sub-Saharan African countries, including Nigeria and Sudan.

Disruptions in these exports will likely only increase the food insecurity already experienced by these countries. According to the WFP, nearly half of Yemen’s 30 million people get insufficient food. In Bangladesh, 29 million people get insufficient food, and over 30 percent of children under 5 are chronically malnourished. Indonesia and Egypt, respectively, are home to 26 million and 10 million people with insufficient food consumption, while over a quarter of Nigeria’s population — 55 million people, more than the entire population of Ukraine — have insufficient food consumption.

According to Alex Smith, a food and agriculture analyst at the tech-focused environmental think tank the Breakthrough Institute, rising wheat prices in countries with already high levels of food insecurity could be particularly devastating. In Yemen, where a long-running conflict was already worsening food insecurity, this is an “added bad element to an already bad scenario,” Smith said. In Libya, a supply disruption and higher prices would add to the existing food insecurity by limiting “the already food insecure people from getting the small amount of food they already are able to get and also puts more people into the category of food insecure,” he added. 

Lebanon, whose wheat silos were destroyed two years ago in the Beirut port explosion and which relies on Ukraine for more than half its wheat, is already seeking alternative import deals, but hunger may increase anywhere that a government can’t afford to substitute wheat they were previously getting from Ukraine.

Russia is also the largest fertilizer exporter in the world, and pre-conflict fertilizer price spikes, according to Shirley Mustafa, an economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), have already been contributing to the rise in food prices. Further disruption to fertilizer production or exports would damage agriculture in Europe, potentially contributing to even higher food prices around the world.

Ukrainian agriculture is more likely to be affected by direct conflict than Russia as farmers are pushed off their farms, while port closures are already limiting exports. “In two-three weeks farmers could start the planting season in Ukraine,” Iurii Mykhailov, a Kyiv resident, reported in Successful Farming. “But the Russian invasion changed everything. Because of military hostilities there are going to be big shortages of fuel and fertilizers. There certainly will be a lack of loans. There even may be a shortage of machine operators because of military losses, etc.”

Russian farmers are unlikely to be directly affected by conflict, said Smith, but the country’s exports could be affected in other ways. “The [region’s] major exporters — Ukraine, Russia, and Romania — ship grain from ports in the Black Sea, which could face disruptions from any possible military operation,” another WFP spokesperson told me on February 24; since then, Ukraine has already shut down ports and ships have been damaged by attacks.

“I think there’s less risk that sanctions will stop wheat exports from Russia,” Smith told me. “The real concern to me is actually whether Russia will choose to stop exports themselves in the case of sanctions or the conflict driving economic hardship for the Russian population, in which case Putin could just say we’re going to curb exports down as much as we can to keep prices of food low in Russia.” 

This would not be unprecedented. Following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Russia temporarily halted grain exports for a few months, and the country stopped exports for almost a year in 2010 after a series of droughts and wildfires. That decision raised prices around the world — and not only among Russian grain importers. 

How conflict raises the price of bread

Global food prices have been almost continuously rising since June 2020, said Mustafa, who works on the FAO Food Price Index, which measures monthly changes in international food prices of a basket of commodities. The FAO Food Price Index is now the highest it has been since 2011. 

The rise has been due to a multitude of factors, including the weather anomalies created by the La Niña climate pattern, which has led to too little water in places like South America and too much in Southeast Asia. In the wheat sector, the US and Canada, two vital producers, were also hit by drought. Covid-19 has also continued to be a factor on both the supply and demand sides.

Conflict has historically been a driver of food price hikes. Researchers reported in a study that looked at 113 African markets between 1997-2010 that “feedback exists between food price and political violence: higher food prices increase conflict within markets, and conflict increases food price.” Other researchers have shown that the rise in food insecurity beginning in 2014 across sub-Saharan Africa was attributable to violent conflict, which increased in relative importance compared to drought from 2009-2018. A feedback cycle exists as well: Food price increases driven by war contribute to further conflict even in places that weren’t involved in the original war themselves.  

Mustafa told me the effects of disruption depend on where the crop supply is concentrated. For example, if there’s a high level of export concentration, other countries are not able to compensate for the disruption, but if there are lots of exporters, other countries could make up the difference. “It also depends on the type of disruption you see — the length of it, the duration. If it’s relatively short-term, markets could potentially adapt rather quickly. If it’s a little bit of a longer-term disruption concentrated in just a few players, then you could potentially also see the disruption stimulate production elsewhere to compensate.”

A hungrier world is a less stable one

In a worst-case scenario, the disruption to commodity prices could also contribute to conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders in countries that heavily rely on its producers for grain. Not only does conflict cause higher food prices; higher food prices can contribute to conflict even in areas of the world that are not directly affected by the original event.  Researchers Jasmien de Winne and Gert Peersman found that increases in food prices due to harvest shocks outside of African countries heighten violence within them.

“Although most violence does probably not occur because of higher food prices, but are caused by broader economic conditions or political grievances,” the authors write, “these income shocks can be a trigger to engage in violent events.”

Mustafa said that while the FAO was monitoring the situation, the agency could not give predictions on the specific crisis given the uncertainties in the situation. Taravella similarly said the WFP was in “watch and see mode,” and is ready to provide emergency assistance as soon as feasible.  

The reality is that hunger almost always follows conflict. And when that conflict occurs in a major agricultural exporter like Ukraine and involves another like Russia, the victims could ultimately go far beyond the two countries at war.

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, toured North Dakota this fall, as the state was overwhelmed by one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country. While she commended the state’s testing efforts, she was distraught by the noticeable lack of face masks in public spaces. “This is the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of any place we have been,” she said at an October 26 press conference. 

North Dakota, which at the time didn’t require masks, had the lowest mask-wearing rate in the country in October, according to survey data.

North Dakota is not the only state that lagged in a mask policy in the throes of a major outbreak, however: Eight of the top 10 states that saw the highest new cases per capita in October did not have a widespread mask mandate, as the chart below shows. (Several of these Great Plains and Midwestern states were spared significant outbreaks of the virus until the fall.)

But the dramatic surge of Covid-19 across the country this fall and winter has forced some states to change course. On November 8, Utah implemented a mask mandate, as new daily Covid-19 cases continue to rise in the state and across the country. Several other states have implemented or tightened mandates since then, including Iowa and North Dakota. Thirty-seven states now have mandates, according to the AARP.

And on December 4, the CDC issued a new recommendation that people wear masks indoors at all times, unless they are at home.

Over the course of the pandemic, America has been engaged in a massive and uncontrolled mask experiment: Some jurisdictions implemented and enforced mask mandates; others rejected them as public health guidance became politicized. President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned and even scorned the use of masks, and several Republican governors have followed his lead. President-elect Joe Biden, meanwhile, has called for a national mask mandate and for Americans to wear masks for the “first 100 days” he is in office, as vaccines roll out.

But the different state-level approaches mean researchers can now parse the results of a trial they never would have received approval to conduct. New research from Kansas and Tennessee suggests that not only do mask mandates prevent Covid-19 spread, they may also blunt the severity of illness and reduce the number of serious cases that require hospitalization. Other findings support the argument more and more public health experts are making: that masks remain among our cheapest most effective tools to control the pandemic — if worn consistently. 

“If you’re not in the ICU, the only tools at our disposal that we know work are the tried-and-true public health measures, like social distancing, hand-washing, and masks,” says Vin Gupta, a critical care pulmonologist and affiliate assistant professor for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “We’re bearing the brunt of those things being implemented poorly.”

“You’re less likely to get Covid-19 if you’re wearing a mask,” says Donna Ginther, an economist and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. And “even if you do get sick while wearing a mask, you’re less likely to get deathly ill.” 

Let’s walk through some of the latest research on mask mandates and what it means as we head into one of the most perilous seasons in the pandemic so far.

New evidence from Kansas and Tennessee that mask mandates control the spread of Covid-19 

One intriguing piece of evidence of the effect of mask mandates on controlling the spread of the virus comes from Kansas. In July, Laura Kelly, the Democratic governor of Kansas, issued a mandate requiring everyone in public places to wear a mask where 6 feet of social distancing couldn’t be maintained. It prompted an immediate outcry from conservatives. Because of a state law passed in June that allowed counties to supersede the governor’s emergency powers, 81 counties out of 105 opted out of the mask mandate altogether, and only 21 counties decided to enforce it.

Two researchers from the University of Kansas analyzed what happened next.

Ginther, the economist working on this analysis, found that in the counties that enforced mask-wearing, new cases stayed roughly steady. But in the counties without mandates, even after controlling for how often people left their homes, they doubled. “We were stunned by the strength of the effect,” she says. 

The public health officer of Johnson, the state’s largest county, was so impressed he asked Ginther to share her work with the Board of County Commissioners, even though it’s not yet peer-reviewed or even written up into a paper. She is currently working on publishing the results.

Ginther says it wasn’t until 12 weeks after the mandates took effect that the growth in cases began to slow. But she thinks her results are likely conservative. “A 50 percent reduction in cases is likely to be a lower-bound on the true effect of wearing a mask,” she says. “If you had 100 percent compliance, I would expect to see an even larger effect.” 

Other researchers have made related findings. A nonprofit group called Prevent Epidemics recently published a report showing that, following mask mandates, coronavirus cases declined in Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. The CDC found that in Arizona, after a mask mandate was put in place, Covid-19 cases dropped 75 percent. Conversely, cases spiked 151 percent when stay-at-home orders were lifted, demonstrating that behavior has a significant impact on viral transmission. 

In addition to slowing the spread of the virus, new evidence from Tennessee shows that mask mandates could reduce the severity of the virus. A paper by researchers at Vanderbilt found that at Tennessee hospitals where at least 75 percent of Covid-19 patients came from counties with mask requirements, coronavirus hospitalization rates are the same as they were in July. In hospitals where fewer than 25 percent of patients come from places with a mask mandate, hospitalizations are 200 percent higher. What’s more, the researchers wrote, hospitals in areas with mask requirements and other mitigation strategies “are in a much better position to serve the entire spectrum of community health needs, not just Covid-19 patients.”

Mask mandates lead to more people wearing masks

Even if they aren’t always followed, mask mandates appear to be an effective tool in encouraging behavior change. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington found in August that mask use increased 8 percentage points after mask mandates, and increased 15 points if those mandates were enforced.

Only around 65 percent of Americans currently regularly wear masks, according to IHME. But in Singapore, for instance, around 95 percent of people wear masks, and they have one of the world’s lowest coronavirus death rates. “We know that countries that wear masks are doing much better,” says Ali Mokdad, the chief strategy officer of public health at the University of Washington.

Thirty-three states and Washington, DC, implemented statewide mask mandates between April and August. During the same period, an increasing number of Americans began to wear masks regularly, according to a weekly survey started in mid-April by the data intelligence company Premise. 

There is one caveat of all the analyses mentioned above: They simply observe behavior, which means that they can demonstrate associations — like case counts falling after mask mandates are put in place — but not causation. The gold standard to prove that would be a randomized controlled trial. But that’s a hard study to design in a pandemic because of ethical concerns. 

Even without randomized trials, Rebekah Gee, a public health policy expert and secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, says the body of evidence “confirms what public health experts have known since early on in this pandemic, which is that masks work.”

Masks could save 130,000 lives by February, but more Americans would have to wear them consistently

In fact, a study published October 23 in Nature Medicine by IHME’s forecasting team modeled current public health interventions — projecting case numbers based on current behavior — and found that universal mask use could save as many as 130,000 lives by the end of February 2021. 

Mokdad says that’s why it’s essential to have clear, consistent recommendations to wear masks. He adds, “We never debate seatbelts. Is it okay if only 80 percent of people wear them? We say everybody should.” But while he would prefer that 100 percent of people wear masks, Mokdad says at this point, any incremental increase in mask use “for me is a celebration.”

Unfortunately, in many parts of the US, mask use is actually decreasing. In Florida, for example, which grappled with a serious surge in cases this summer, Mokdad says 70 percent of people were wearing masks in August. Now, only 65 percent are. “Wearing masks has been a response to fear rather than a good, persistent behavior,” Mokdad says. 

Vox analyzed the relationship between the frequency of wearing masks from the Premise survey data and the Covid-19 cases in states from April to October. As the charts below show, in states with mandates where cases surged in the spring, more people now wear masks. These states — where more people consistently wear masks — are now less likely to see another huge surge in cases. 

Even though mask use has risen in many states, the nation as a whole is on a troubling trajectory, with new daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all on the rise. Mokdad says he’s very concerned about the holidays. “As we go be with our loved ones — our grandparents, our kids — do you want to go sit at a table and risk the people you care about most, or do you want to wear a mask?” IHME models predict that if some US states increased their mask use from now on, they could reduce the number of future Covid-19 deaths by about 50 percent.

The stakes for getting this right are high — not just for the holidays, but for the rest of the pandemic, however long that might be. 

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently echoed Biden’s call for a national mask mandate. “If you don’t want to shut down, at least do the fundamental, basic things,” Fauci told the editor-in-chief of JAMA, “the flagship of which is wearing a mask.”

Rather than thinking about a mask mandate as something that takes away a freedom, as anti-mask protestors have claimed, Leana Wen, a physician and the former Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore, says, “Mask-wearing allows you to do things.” If everyone wears a mask, it will keep transmission low, allowing businesses and schools to stay open. 

“If you want a more normal life, we need to adjust our behavior, as opposed to locking ourselves away,” Ginther says. “Masks rise to the top as an approach we can take as a society to have a more open economy but not get everyone sick.”

Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.

Editor’s note, November 7: Due to a data error, a previous version of the chart of increases in Covid-19 cases in October did not include Hawaii and miscategorized Louisiana as not having a mandate. In fact, Louisiana implemented a mandate in August. The chart has been updated to reflect these changes.