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Tag: 2020 presidential election

  • John Fetterman will defeat Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects | CNN Politics

    John Fetterman will defeat Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democrat John Fetterman will win the Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects, defeating Republican Mehmet Oz, flipping the seat and boosting Democratic hopes of keeping their majority.

    Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor since 2019, and Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, ran one of the most contentious and expensive Senate contests in the country – all of it while Fetterman continued his recovery from a pre-primary stroke that often limited his ability to speak on the trail.

    For Democrats trying to preserve their control of what has been a Senate split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote, Fetterman’s win could prove decisive.

    Republican Sen. Pat Toomey’s retirement in a state President Joe Biden won two years ago created Democrats’ best opportunity to pick up a seat and save their narrow majority, and the Commonwealth entered Election Day as one of at least nine states holding what were expected to be competitive Senate races.

    Fetterman’s victory caps a remarkable ascent from his time as mayor of Braddock, a borough in western Pennsylvania, to the lieutenant governor’s office – which he won after unseating a fellow Democrat in a 2018 primary – to the US Senate. A longtime progressive, he is an outspoken supporter of abolishing the filibuster, raising the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, criminal justice reform and passing legislation to protect same-sex marriage, among other leading liberal priorities.

    His success will also provide inspiration to stroke survivors and other disabled Americans, some of whom took heart from his efforts to carry on campaigning even as he exhibited the lingering effects of his May stroke. Fetterman, though he has not released his full medical records, has said he expects to be at or near full strength by the time he takes office early next year.

    Though Oz himself largely steered clear of disparaging Fetterman over his stroke-related difficulties, his campaign was less cautious, leading the Republican to repeatedly distance himself from his own staffers’ remarks. Asked at one point late in the campaign whether he would speak to his own patients the way his campaign addressed Fetterman, Oz responded with one word: “No.”

    The White House didn’t weigh in on individual races over the course of election night. But following Fetterman’s projected win, it sent a subtle, if pointed message: “The president had a great time with the senator-elect on Saturday,” a White House official told CNN.

    While many Democrats in battleground seats sought to avoid Biden’s presence on the campaign trail, Fetterman embraced the president. Biden made several trips to Pennsylvania and each time in the closing months of the race, Fetterman would appear alongside of him, including in Philadelphia this past weekend.

    Biden’s Pennsylvania roots are an integral part of his story, his win in 2020 is central to the presidency, and now, after 20 visits to the state in his first two years in office, it marks the first Democratic pickup in the critical battle for the Senate majority.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

    Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

    Hopes that Democrats could use the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to an abortion and a flurry of legislative wins to stave off the classic midterm election rout of a party in power are now a memory. Biden faces a dark political environment because of the 40-year-high in the cost of living – and his hopes of a swift rebound next year are clouded by growing fears of a recession.

    On the eve of the election, Democrats risk losing control of the House of Representatives and Republicans are increasingly hopeful of a Senate majority that would leave Biden under siege as he begins his reelection bid and with ex-President Donald Trump apparently set to announce his own campaign for a White House return within days.

    It’s too early for postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

    But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of GOP momentum.

    A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

    That means Democrats are most exposed this time.

    If the president’s party takes a drubbing, there will be much Democratic finger-pointing over Biden’s messaging strategy on inflation – a pernicious force that has punched holes in millions of family budgets.

    Just as in last year’s losing off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia, which the president won by 10 points in 2020, Democrats are closing the campaign warning about democracy and Trump’s influence while Republicans believe they are addressing the issue voters care about most.

    “Here’s where the Democrats are: they’re inflation deniers, they are crime deniers, they’re education deniers,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

    Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic consultant, said on the same show that her party had misjudged the mood of the electorate.

    “I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

    “And this conversation is not going to have much impact on Tuesday, but I hope it has an impact going forward, because when voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them. Stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

    Rosen is not the only key figure on the left uneasy with the midterm strategy. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged the White House to do more to stress economic concerns in recent weeks even while acknowledging the crisis of democracy and the importance of abortion rights. In retrospect, it appears Democrats were slow to recognize that a favorable period over the summer, spurred by falling gasoline prices and a hot streak for the president in passing legislation, wouldn’t last long enough to compensate for a ruinous political environment caused by the economy.

    In effect, Biden’s stress on the threat to US political institutions posed by Trump essentially asks voters to prioritize the historic foundation of America’s political system over their own more immediate economic fears.

    It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. After all, Trump incited an insurrection that tried to thwart the unbroken tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents.

    But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

    The impossibility of the political environment for Democrats was laid bare in a CNN/SSRS poll released last week. Some 51% of likely voters said the economy was the key issue in determining their vote. Only 15% named abortion – a finding that explains how the election battleground has tilted toward the GOP. Among voters for whom the economy is their top concern, 71% plan to vote Republican in their House district. And 75% of voters think the economy is already in a recession, meaning that Biden’s efforts to stress undeniably strong economic areas – including the strikingly low unemployment rate – are likely to fall on deaf ears.

    It’s too simple to say that Biden has ignored the impact of inflation, or doesn’t understand the pain it’s bringing to the country.

    The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. And millions of voters are hurting now and haven’t heard a viable plan from the president to quickly ease prices in the short-term.

    There is no guarantee that plans by Republicans to extend Trump-era tax cuts and mandate new energy drilling would have much impact on the inflation crisis either. And divided government would likely mean a stalemate between two dueling economic visions. But the election has turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration, with no imminent hope that things will get better soon.

    Biden has resorted to highlighting bright spots of the economy – claiming to have reignited manufacturing, high job creation and a robust effort to compete with China. He’s now warning that Republicans would gut Social Security and Medicare on which many Americans rely in retirement.

    And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

    Inflation and high gas prices are also a global issue and have been worsened by factors beyond Biden’s control, including the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, however, economists are debating the wisdom of Biden’s high-spending bills that sent billions of dollars into an overheating economy. And the White House’s repeated downplaying of the soaring cost of living as “transitory” badly misjudged the situation and was another thing that battered Biden’s credibility – on top of the confidence some voters lost in him during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

    The Republican Party also got exactly what it wanted as Trump has delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the midterms, depriving Biden of the opportunity to shape this election as a direct clash with an insurrectionist predecessor whom he beat in 2020 and who remains broadly unpopular. Such a confrontation might have enabled the president to dampen the impact of his own low approval ratings and win over voters who still disdain the twice-impeached former president.

    Ironically, Biden’s struggles in framing a believable economic message could bring about the very crisis of democracy that he is warning about.

    Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. And Tuesday’s election could usher in scores of election deniers in state offices who could end up controlling the 2024 presidential election in some key battlegrounds. GOP dominance of state legislatures could further curtail voting rights.

    High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

    If Democrats do lose big on Tuesday night, Trump will be a beneficiary.

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  • Klobuchar pushes back against Newsom’s claim that Democrats are ‘getting crushed on narrative’ by Republicans | CNN Politics

    Klobuchar pushes back against Newsom’s claim that Democrats are ‘getting crushed on narrative’ by Republicans | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Sunday pushed back on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s argument that their party is “getting crushed on narrative” by Republicans and right-wing media outlets.

    “You know what? He’s out there in California right now, and I am out here and been all over Ohio with Tim Ryan, in Pennsylvania with John Fetterman, with Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin and Cheri Beasley in North Carolina. I think either we are ahead in these races or we are in striking distance,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” referring to Democratic Senate nominees in key contests.

    “We’re going to win these races. So he can talk about all he wants out there. I am in the middle of it,” the Minnesota Democrat added.

    Newsom told CBS in a recent interview that he agreed with the sentiment that a red wave was likely in this year’s midterm elections.

    “It goes to my fundamental grievance with my damn party. We’re getting crushed on narrative. We’re going to have to do better in terms of getting on the offense and stop being on the damn defense,” the California governor said.

    Newsom also said in September at the Texas Tribune Festival that the GOP was “winning right now” as that party controls the national conversation – arguing that Democrats’ failure to offer a “compelling alternative narrative” has put the “entire rights agenda” of the last half-century at risk.

    On Sunday, Klobuchar was asked about her party’s strategy of boosting some Republican candidates during the primary season this year in hopes they would be easier to defeat in the general election. Bash brought up the example of Democrats spending money to benefit Republican Don Bolduc in the primary in New Hampshire now that he is locked in a tight race against incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.

    “I’m not going to at one moment concede this race because Maggie has been ahead every step of the way,” Klobuchar said. “First of all, I’m not going back over past strategy right now two days before the election. … I’m not a big fan of spending money on other candidates and messing around. I will admit that, and I’ve said that.”

    Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general, has consistently pushed election falsehoods, though he has given shifting answers related to false 2020 election claims since securing the Republican nomination.

    Klobuchar, who ran for president in 2020, said that she would support President Joe Biden in the 2024 election after CNN reported last week that former President Donald Trump could launch his next presidential bid as soon as this month.

    “President Biden has made clear he is running, and I support him,” she said. “And what I will say about this is, Donald Trump cannot be president again. The American people know it.”

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  • Trump and other Republicans are already casting doubt on midterm results | CNN Politics

    Trump and other Republicans are already casting doubt on midterm results | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. “Here we go again!” he wrote. “Rigged Election!”

    Trump’s supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. Rather, the article baselessly raised suspicion about absentee-ballot data the article did not clearly explain.

    In 2020, Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was stolen. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

    Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state that could determine which party controls the US Senate.

    After Pennsylvania’s acting elections chief, Leigh Chapman, told NBC News last week that it could take “days” to complete the vote count, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said on a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization Media Matters for America: “That’s an attempt to have the fix in.”

    It isn’t. It simply takes time to count votes – especially, as Chapman noted, because the Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a no-strings-attached bill to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than the morning of Election Day.

    But other prominent Republicans piled on. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted a link to an article about Chapman’s comments and added: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”

    Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.

    Counties of all kinds across the country – including, as PolitiFact noted, some Republican counties in Cruz’s state of Texas – do not complete their vote counts on the night of the election. In fact, it is impossible for many counties to have final counts on election night.

    Even some of the country’s most Republican states count absentee ballots (or, in some cases, specifically absentee ballots from members of the military and overseas citizens) that arrive days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. And some states, including some led by Republicans, give voters days after Election Day to fix issues with their signatures or to provide the proof of identity they didn’t have on Election Day.

    American elections authorities do not declare winners or official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.

    The health challenges of the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, have also been used to cast preemptive doubt on the possible outcome.

    After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, some right-wing personalities insisted the election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate. On Fox last week, as Media Matters noted, prime-time host Tucker Carlson made a similar argument about Pennsylvania’s Senate race – suggesting people should not accept a Fetterman win because it would be “transparently absurd” for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking and auditory processing since a stroke in May to legitimately prevail.

    But there would be nothing suspicious about Fetterman winning in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

    The city of Detroit, like other Democratic-dominated cities with large Black populations, has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories from Trump and others. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.

    Less than two weeks before Election Day, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, filed a lawsuit asking a court to “halt” the use of absentee ballots in Detroit if they weren’t obtained in person at a clerk’s office and declare that only those ballots obtained via in-person requests can be “validly voted” in this election. That request would potentially mean the rejection of thousands of votes already cast legally by Detroit residents – in state whose constitution gives residents the right to request absentee ballots by mail.

    Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

    Nonetheless, the suit sets the table for Karamo, who is trailing in opinion polls, to baselessly reject the legitimacy of a defeat.

    Other Republican candidates have vaguely hinted at the possibility that Democrats might somehow cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.

    Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”

    The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told a similar story at an event in June.

    There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

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  • Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics

    Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    All year, the principal question looming over the 2022 campaign has been whether Democrats could defy political gravity.

    As we’re nearing the end, the answer appears to be: no, or at least not entirely.

    Midterm elections have almost always been bad for the party holding the White House, and they have been especially bad when most Americans are dissatisfied with the economy and the president’s performance. Those conditions are present in force now, with polls showing that most Americans disapprove of how President Joe Biden has handled crime, the border, and especially the economy and inflation. Pessimism about the economy is pervasive. Historically such attitudes have generated big gains up and down the ballot for the party out of the White House – in this case, the Republicans.

    That may be how the election ultimately turns out, especially in House and state legislative races where the individual candidates are less well-known, and many voters are likely to express dissatisfaction with the country’s direction by voting against the party in power. The president’s party, in fact, has lost House seats in all but three midterm elections since the Civil War. If there is a surprise in the House, it’s less likely to come from Democrats maintaining their majority than the Republicans exceeding the average 26 seat midterm gain for the party out of power since World War II.

    But Democrats have remained unexpectedly competitive in the higher-profile Senate and gubernatorial races by focusing attention not only on what Biden has done, but what Republicans might do, with power. Many of these statewide contests have become a “double negative election”: while most voters in the key states consistently say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, most also say they hold negative personal views about the GOP candidates, many of whom were propelled to their nomination by support from Donald Trump. If Democrats hold the Senate, or hold their own in the top governor races, a principal reason will be the large number of voters who viewed GOP nominees as unqualified, extreme (particularly in their desire to ban or restrict abortion), a threat to democracy, or all of the above. The same dynamic could also save some House Democrats in districts where Biden has fallen well below majority support.

    So many races are so close – within the margin of error in public polls – that the results Tuesday could range from a true red wave to a Democratic sigh of relief. The scary precedent for Democrats is that in wave years almost all of the close races often tip in the same direction – toward the party out of power. A reason for Democratic hope is that in the final surveys, their candidates are consistently running better among all registered voters than among those the pollsters consider most “likely” to vote. That means the party could outperform expectations if even slightly more of its key constituencies (particularly young people) show up than pollsters anticipate – an outcome that groups such as the powerful union Unite Here is trying to achieve with 1,000 canvassers knocking on doors each day in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. “We are in the battle every place,” says Gwen Mills, the union’s secretary-treasurer. “All of [these races] are within the margin of effort.”

    If Republicans take back either chamber this week, it would mark the fifth consecutive election in which a president who went into a midterm with unified control of government had it revoked by the voters. That happened to Donald Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994.

    No president, in fact, has successfully defended unified control of Congress through a mid-term since Jimmy Carter in 1978 – and he was insulated by the huge Congressional margins Democrats had amassed after Watergate, as well as his party’s strength in what was then still a “solid South” for Democrats. (The sole asterisk on this pattern is that Republicans under George W. Bush regained unified control of Congress in the 2002 midterm held a year after the September 11 attacks after a party switch by a Republican senator in early 2001 flipped control of the chamber to Democrats and broke the GOP’s unified hold on Congress.) A Republican takeover of either or both chambers would extend one of the defining trends of modern politics: Neither party has held the White House and Congress for more than four consecutive years since 1968. That’s a stark departure from most of the 20th century when each side, at different times, cemented lasting control for as long as 14 consecutive years.

    No matter what happens Tuesday, most experts don’t anticipate either party shattering this fragile modern stand-off to establish a lasting edge. “I don’t see either side getting a durable advantage,” says Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. “They are highly polarized parties, and they are very closely balanced overall.”

    From that angle, Republican gains Tuesday would simply continue a long-standing tendency toward instability in our political system, with the initiative rapidly shifting back and forth between the parties. But the election could also ratchet that instability to a combustible new level. The strong tide behind Republicans virtually guarantees victories for some, maybe many, of the hundreds of candidates who have embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections and signaled that they will seek to tilt the electoral rules toward the GOP or simply deny future wins by Democrats. Some of those candidates, if they lose this week, seem likely to emulate Trump after 2020 and refuse to concede, claiming fraud. (Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have each suggested as much already.) The most important legacy of this week’s voting may be the beachhead inside the electoral system it will likely establish for Republican officeholders untethered to America’s democratic traditions as we have known them.

    In more conventional political calculations, Tuesday’s results seem likely to resurface debates, that had somewhat receded during the Trump years, over the structural electoral challenges Democrats face in the battle to control Congress.

    The modern period of Congressional elections arguably began in 1994, when Republicans captured both the House and Senate in the backlash against Bill Clinton’s chaotic first two years. That ended an era in which Democrats had held the House majority for 40 consecutive years, and controlled the Senate, usually by wide margins, for all but six years over that long span.

    Since 1994, though, Republicans have controlled Congress more often than Democrats. The GOP has held the Senate for about 16 and a half years (counting the roughly half year before the party switch cost them their majority in 2001) and Democrats for only about 11 and a half years. The imbalance in the House has been even more lopsided: Republicans have held it for 20 of these past 28 years, and Democrats for just eight. Especially ominous for Democrats is that if they lose the House on Tuesday, it would mark the second consecutive time they have surrendered their majority only four years after regaining it. (The previous case came when they were swept from the majority by the Tea Party uprising in 2010, just four years after they recaptured the chamber in 2006.) By contrast, Republicans held the House for 12 consecutive years from 1994 through 2006, and then for eight from 2010 through 2018.

    What makes this disparity especially striking is that it has come even as Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections since 1992 – something no party has done since the formation of the two-party system in 1828. (No Republican candidate has reached even 51% of the presidential popular vote since 1988.) These results clearly suggest the modern Democratic electoral coalition, on a nationwide basis, is larger than the Republican coalition. And yet, Republicans, more often than not, have controlled the Congressional majorities in this era anyway.

    Aggressive GOP gerrymanders partly explain that difference in the House. But that doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s House advantage and it isn’t a factor at all in the party’s Senate edge. Instead, the Republican Congressional success largely reflects geographic and demographic limitations of the Democratic coalition that almost certainly will be evident again this week.

    Tuesday’s election is likely to remind Democrats again that they are competing in too few places to establish a durable majority in Congress. In the House, Republicans have established such an overwhelming hold on rural and exurban districts that Democrats must win a very high share of urban and suburban districts to reach a majority. In a good year, like 2018, Democrats can meet that test. And even now, the continued resistance of college-educated suburban voters to the Trump-era Republican Party has provided Democrats a chance to hold down their losses in white-collar districts. But ceding so many rural, exurban and small-town seats leaves Democrats too little cushion to lose some of their suburban seats – as they inevitably will when discontent over the economy, and secondarily crime, is this high even in those places.

    If anything, the Democrats’ geographic challenge is even greater in the Senate. A dominant trend in modern US politics is that both parties are winning virtually all the Senate seats in states that typically support their presidential candidates. The challenge for Democrats is that, despite their repeated victories in the popular vote, slightly more states reliably lean Republican than Democrat in presidential races. Democrats already hold 39 of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states that voted against Donald Trump both times (Susan Collins in Maine is the only exception). But 25 states voted for Trump both times, and they provide Republicans an even larger Senate contingent, with the GOP holding 47 of their 50 seats. Democrats have squeezed out their precarious 50-50 Senate majority only by capturing eight of the ten seats in the five states that flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia).

    This geography is what makes this week’s Senate elections so crucial to Democrats. This year’s key races are occurring almost entirely in states that Biden won, albeit mostly narrowly, with Democrats defending seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Washington, and targeting Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (With longer odds, Democrats have also mounted serious challenges to Republicans in Ohio and North Carolina, two states that twice voted for Trump.) Given that map, Democratic strategists recognize it’s critical for the party to expand, or at least maintain, its Senate margin now.

    After this year, the Senate terrain will rapidly become more foreboding for Democrats. In 2024, they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the two-time Trump states (Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana), as well as seats in half a dozen other swing states that could go either way in a presidential contest (including Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.) If most of the toss up Senate races fall to the Republicans on Tuesday, those gains, combined with the 2024 map, could put the GOP in position to dominate the upper chamber throughout this decade. “If Republicans take the Senate, I don’t see in our immediate lifetime how Democrats are going to take back” the majority, says Doug Sosnik, a senior White House political adviser to Bill Clinton.

    Much of the Democrats’ Senate problem is rooted in the constitutional provision that provides two Senate seats to every state. That magnifies the influence of sparsely populated, rural and strongly Republican interior states. There’s no political repositioning that is likely to provide Democrats a realistic chance any time soon to win Senate seats in Wyoming and Idaho or North and South Dakota.

    But many Democratic strategists argue that the party must expand its map in the Senate by finding ways to attract more non-college and non-urban voters, especially with white people, but across racial lines, in at least a few more states. That list of potential targets includes places like Ohio, Iowa and Florida where Democrats competed much more effectively as recently as under President Barack Obama. Rebuilding the party’s competitiveness in those states could take years and likely require a significant change in its positioning and message.

    Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, points out that while the party’s modern coalition of young people, racial minorities and college-educated whites has allowed it to effectively contest the presidency, it doesn’t represent a winning majority in enough states to reliably hold the Senate. “When you look at the electoral college, college educated [and diverse] America is close to enough to elect you president,” Kessler says. “But it is not close to getting you a majority in the Senate.”

    Tuesday’s election could also demonstrate the reemergence of a second demographic challenge for Democrats in the battle for Congress, what analysts in the past have called the “boom and bust” nature of their electoral coalition. The biggest remaining uncertainty for Tuesday’s election may be how many young people, who polls show continue to back Democrats in large proportions, turn out. Usually, turnout falls more for young people than for older generations between presidential and midterm elections (hence the “boom and bust” risk). But in 2018, robust youth turnout helped power the Democratic gains.

    Large-scale polls focused particularly on young adults (such as the Harvard Institute of Politics survey) have found them expressing levels of interest comparable to 2018. Yet their participation in early voting has been lackluster, and several recent national surveys (such as CNN’s poll last week) found their engagement lagging. If turnout among young adults disappoints on Tuesday, it will strengthen those Democrats who argue the party must prioritize regaining ground among middle-income, middle-aged voters, especially those without college degrees. (That includes non-college Latinos, particularly men, who may continue to drift away from Democrats at least somewhat this week.) The sharpest post-election debates among Democrats are likely to revolve around whether the party must embrace more conservative approaches on crime and immigration, two issues Republicans wielded to powerful effect, in order to earn a second look from more non-college educated voters across racial lines.

    History says that a bad result on Tuesday need not panic Democrats about 2024 (though, in practice, it probably will). Midterms have not had much value forecasting the result of the presidential election two years later. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush had relatively good first-term midterms and then lost their reelection races. The president (or his party) did lose the White House two years after bad midterms in 1958, 1966, 1974 and 2018. But Harry Truman in 1948, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012 all won reelection, usually convincingly, two years after stinging midterm losses. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has built models that project presidential outcomes based on economic and public opinion data, says the results of the midterm add literally no predictive value to the forecasts.

    The 2024 presidential election will begin almost immediately after Tuesday – probably before all the last votes are counted. Though midterm gains are the rule for the party out of power, Trump is likely to interpret GOP victories as a clarion call for his return; aides say he could announce a 2024 candidacy as soon as this month. White House officials believe Biden is certain to run if Trump does because he views the former president as an existential threat to American democracy. On Election Day 2024, the combined age of these two men will be nearly 160 years. Polls show that one of the few areas of broad public agreement is that most Americans do not want either to run again.

    Yet, long before any newly elected officials take office, or any gavels in Congress change hands, the first consequence of Tuesday’s bitterly fought election may be to place America more firmly on the path toward exactly such a rematch. And this time, such a confrontation could occur with the electoral machinery in decisive states under control of Trump allies who share his willingness to tilt or even subvert the system. Whatever storms rattle the political system this week, the real tempest won’t arrive until 2024 – and it may bring the greatest strain on the nation’s fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.

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  • Oath Keepers leader testifies 2020 election was ‘unconstitutional,’ paints himself as anti-violence | CNN Politics

    Oath Keepers leader testifies 2020 election was ‘unconstitutional,’ paints himself as anti-violence | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers who prosecutors say called for a “bloody revolution” to keep then-President Donald Trump in power, painted himself as an anti-racist Libertarian who believed the 2020 election was unconstitutional as he testified in his own defense on Friday.

    Rhodes is the first of the five defendants charged with seditious conspiracy in federal court in Washington, DC, to testify.

    The courtroom was packed during his testimony, and Rhodes choked up several times discussing his family, suicide rates among veterans and other subjects highlighted by his lawyer, Phillip Linder. He spoke directly to the jury and appeared very comfortable on the stand.

    Rhodes explained to the jury that he didn’t believe either Trump or Joe Biden won in 2020 because the election itself was “unconstitutional.”

    “I believe the election was unconstitutional, and that made it invalid,” Rhodes testified. “You really can’t have a winner of an unconstitutional election.”

    Rhodes told the jury that, as he saw it, election laws in several states were changed by “executive fiat” and not through the state legislature.

    “In multiple states especially in the swing states … you had them putting in new rules in direct violation” of state laws, Rhodes said.

    “Everyone kept focusing on the computers” and other theories of voter fraud, Rhodes said, instead of the constitutional issues, which they needed to discuss before figuring out “whether there’s fraud on the ground.”

    Rhodes did not detail any specific laws that were changed. CNN has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

    Prosecutors have alleged that Rhodes wanted Trump to remain in power and that the militia leader supported a “bloody revolution” to secure the presidency.

    Rhodes told the jury Friday how he was honorably discharged from the military and went on to study law at Yale, focusing his attention on the Bill of Rights – which Rhodes called “the crown jewel of our Constitution” – and protecting civilian rights in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

    Rhodes, a self-described Libertarian, testified that he founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 to “reach, change and inspire” people about what rights the Constitution afforded them.

    Pushing back on what he saw as narratives that the Oath Keepers were racist or white nationalists, Rhodes said the organization traveled to various cities for racial justice protests, claiming the group protected “minority business owners” in Ferguson, Missouri.

    “Frankly we kind of embarrassed the police, Rhodes testified, “because we showed them how to do it right, protecting the business owners while still respecting the rights of the protesters.”

    Oath Keepers rules, Rhodes claimed, specifically bar any member who “advocates for the overthrow of the United States.”

    During the first several weeks of the seditious conspiracy trial against the far-right organization, prosecutors presented evidence that the Oath Keepers stockpiled weapons at a hotel in Virginia on January 6 as part of a so-called quick reaction force. Prosecutors alleged that the five defendants intended to use those weapons in case called upon by Trump to stop the transfer of power to Biden.

    Rhodes told the jury that wasn’t the case and claimed that the QRF’s were set up at an event the Oath Keepers attended to “respond in case there is an emergency,” including if his men were ever injured.

    The Oath Keepers also used QRFs every time they provided security, Rhodes said, including several events in Washington, DC. After the election, Rhodes testified he was concerned Antifa would “attack the White House,” and claimed the leftist organization was threatening to “drag Trump out” if the president refused to concede.

    In November, “I was concerned that this might actually happen,” Rhodes told the jury, citing his rhetoric on a recorded meeting prosecutors showed the jury in which Rhodes allegedly said that “there’s going to be a fight.”

    If Antifa did try to attack the White House, Rhodes said that “President Trump could use the Insurrection Act, declare this an insurrection, and use myself and other veterans to protect the White House.”

    No such attack at the White House occurred.

    Rhodes is expected to continue his testimony on Monday.

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  • New York Democrats are bracing for stunning Election Day losses, and they already have a fall guy | CNN Politics

    New York Democrats are bracing for stunning Election Day losses, and they already have a fall guy | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democratic officials and strategists in New York tell CNN they are bracing for what could be stunning losses in the governor’s race and in contests for as many as four US House seats largely in the suburbs.

    With crime dominating the headlines and the airwaves, multiple Democrats watching these races closely are pointing to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, accusing him of overhyping the issue and playing into right-wing narratives in ways that may have helped set the party up for disaster on Tuesday.

    “He was an essential validator in the city to make their attacks seem more legit and less partisan,” said one Democratic operative working on campaigns in New York, who asked not to be named so as not to compromise current clients.

    Other Democrats argue this has it backwards. While they accuse Republicans of political ploys they call cynical, racist and taking advantage of a situation fostered by the pandemic, they insist candidates would be in better shape if they had followed Adams’ lead in speaking to the fear and frustration voters feel.

    But going into Election Day, New York Democrats worry about a double whammy from how they’ve struggled to address crime: Swing voters turned off by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and suburban House Democrats go vote Republican, while base Democrats in the city, dejected by talk of how awful things are, don’t turn out at all.

    “Crime today has been compared to the ’80s and the ‘90s, and the fact of the matter is that crime is lower now than it was then,” said Crystal Hudson, a Democratic New York City councilwoman from Brooklyn. “That’s emboldened the right to use crime as their narrative and put Democrats in a bad spot for these midterm elections.”

    Rep. Lee Zeldin, Hochul’s GOP opponent, has taken to regularly invoking Adams on the campaign trail, to the point that some Democratic operatives have grimly joked that Zeldin could just run clips of Adams talking about crime as his closing ads.

    There are national ripples: Democratic groups like the Democratic Governors Association are moving in millions of dollars to prop up Hochul in a deep-blue state instead of spending that on tight races elsewhere, with Vice President Kamala Harris flying in on Thursday in one of her own last campaign stops and President Joe Biden heading to Westchester County, north of New York City, on Sunday to rally with the governor. Republicans, meanwhile, are seizing opportunities to pad a potential House majority by targeting seats that Democrats had been counting on as backstops.

    Adams was elected mayor last year on a tough-talking, tough-on-crime message, then embraced as such a hero among many Democratic leaders that rumors circulated he might be eyeing a 2024 presidential run himself. In office, he’s often talked about the bad shape the city is in, including citing statistics he says demonstrate connections between the rise in crime and a 2019 progressive-led state law change that barred judges from setting cash bail for all but the most serious offenses.

    Multiple top Democrats argue that Adams could have used his credibility to buttress Hochul – whom allies point out is in a tricky political spot talking about crime in New York City as a 64-year-old White woman from Western New York – instead of loudly pushing the governor to call a special session of the legislature to roll back more of the new bail laws. Hochul also seemed to be caught surprised by the attacks and unsure of how to defend her record, with several elected officials and operatives saying she appeared to be balancing between different factions of the party rather than setting a firm agenda of her own.

    That’s fed an increasingly tense relationship in the campaign’s final weeks, though Adams recently appeared with Hochul at both an official government event announcing she’d allocate state money to pay for overtime for police patrolling the subways and at a campaign stop in Queens as she seeks to prove to voters that she’s taking crime seriously. Adams has also shifted to blaming the media for sensationalizing the crime problem.

    Appearing on “CNN This Morning” on Friday, Hochul said there’s never been a governor and mayor in New York with as strong a relationship as the one she has with Adams. While she acknowledged that violent crime is up and that the issue was rooted in voters’ sincere fears, she said Republicans were “not having a conversation about real solutions.”

    She cited her record of getting more cops and cameras on the street and help for the mentally ill, and Zeldin’s opposition to gun control.

    “Crime has been a problem,” she said. “I understand that. Let’s talk about real answers and not just give everybody all these platitudes.”

    Rep. Kathleen Rice, a retiring moderate Democrat from just outside New York City and a former Nassau County district attorney, said at first she was encouraged by Adams. As a former police officer, he understands the problem, she said, but “the general consensus is that he hasn’t shown he has focused on the issue enough for it to have made a difference.”

    Rice said she’s heard from constituents from just outside the city who are turned off by reports of Adams spending late nights at pricey private restaurants juxtaposed with stories about murders on the subways and other horrific incidents.

    “People want to feel safe first before they go to a club,” Rice said.

    Rice’s seat is one of two Democratic-held seats on Long Island now seen at risk. Democrats are also in danger of losing two seats north of New York City – one held by Rep. Pat Ryan and the Lower Hudson Valley district of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

    “It is an issue for voters, but it is not because they have personally experienced crime in the Hudson Valley or their neighbors are talking about crimes committed in the Hudson Valley as much as it is the narrative pushed by the industrial fear machine at Fox and the New York Post describing New York City as a lawless hellscape,” Maloney said in an interview. “That, understandably, is raising concerns among suburbanites.”

    Months ago, Maloney warned other House Democrats, in conversations and in a March memo sent around by the DCCC and obtained by CNN, to be ready to respond and rebut attacks for being weak on crime. The guidance started with telling candidates to be firmly against calls to “defund the police” but also to talk about the more than $8 billion Democratic lawmakers had secured for law enforcement in bills such as the American Rescue Plan.

    Maloney pointed to his votes for legislation to fund programs for body cameras and plate reading technology for local police departments in his district, as well as for the gun control measures enacted over the summer.

    He also stood by a remark he made last July – catching several Democratic operatives’ attention at the time – when he stood with Adams on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and called him “a rock on which I can build a church.”

    “What I meant is that I like his combination of respecting good policing and understanding the need for public safety with a genuine passion for justice and fairness in our system,” Maloney said in an interview. “He may not get everything right, and it may not be everything I would do. But he recognizes that we’re not where we should be. And I support his efforts to clean it up.”

    Others have not been convinced.

    “The concern over crime is real. It is acute,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones, a progressive Democrat who lost a primary to represent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after Maloney opted to run for a redrawn suburban seat that also included parts of Jones’ district. “But once this election is over, I hope people have an honest conversation about how Democrats like Eric Adams have validated a hysteria over crime that is uninformed and that has been debunked.”

    Conversations about crime in New York are bound up in the debate over reforming the bail laws, and in well-worn internal political power struggles among officials. In phone calls and meetings at the beginning of the year, Adams urged top officials in Albany to change the laws, warning them that crime would likely be a major political liability in the fall, according to people familiar with the conversations.

    Legislative leaders have already passed two partial rollbacks, including one supported by Hochul earlier this year. But they have resisted doing more, despite warnings from suburban members.

    Adams has charged that the “insane broken system” of bail laws now puts criminals back on the street who then tend to get back to committing crimes. According to figures from the New York Police Department, in the first half of the year, 211 people were arrested at least three times for burglary and 899 people were arrested at least three times for shoplifting, increases of 142.5 percent and 88.9 percent, respectively, over the same period in 2017. The mayor’s office also pointed to statistics that show double-digit jumps in recidivism for felony, grand larceny and auto theft.

    Still, crime statistics don’t tell as simple a story as what shows up in political ads. Suburban counties are reporting safer streets and communities – a report in February by the Westchester County executive from just north of New York City, for example, showed a 26.5 percent drop in its crime index.

    Murders and shootings are down in the city from last year, but rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft are all up, by over 30 percent from 2021 in several categories, according to New York Police Department data.

    But those are the stories which play on the same local news – and campaign ads during the breaks – that reach into the homes of suburban voters who may not have been crime victims themselves, or even spent much time in the city for years. And that’s left Hochul and Democratic House and state legislative nominees leaching support in Long Island, Westchester and the northern New York City suburbs.

    “A lot of the story that’s being told is of New York City crime,” said Democrat Bridget Fleming, a former prosecutor who’s been endorsed by police unions in the House race for much of the area Zeldin currently represents on Long Island. “We’re making sure law enforcement is supported – and other than gun crime, we’re keeping crime down here.”

    Evan Roth Smith, a pollster working on several local races, said Adams “may be a drag on Democratic trustworthiness on crime.”

    But Adams spokesman Maxwell Young said the mayor’s job isn’t to put a rosy spin on things in a way that could benefit Hochul’s or any of the other candidates’ campaigns.

    “We can’t, and won’t, ignore the reality,” Young said. “Those who claim we aren’t making progress or, conversely, that we’ve been crying wolf aren’t paying attention and have no idea what they’re talking about.”

    Evan Thies, a top Adams political adviser, said he wished other Democrats had taken lessons from the mayor’s win last year.

    “You have to convince people you’re worthy to lead by following their lead on issues and meeting their urgency, not by disagreeing with them,” Thies said. “The mayor became mayor by listening to and advocating for people in high-crime communities – he’s not going to abandon them now.”

    Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district covers Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, points to how many systemic, as well as larger societal and economic issues, are involved in making a real impact on crime – and that Adams has only been on the job for 10 months.

    “He’s really trying hard. This is not easy,” Espaillat said. “It’s going to take some time.”

    Biden had his own bromance with Adams, from hosting him in the White House weeks after he won his mayoral primary to offering him half of his peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich as they rode together in the limo in February during a presidential visit to New York to talk about gun violence. White House chief of staff Ron Klain praised Adams for tapping into the same coalition of pragmatic, working-class and African American voters, which won Biden the 2020 Democratic nomination.

    Through an aide, Klain did not respond to questions about how he and the president view Adams these days.

    But what many Democrats are left with as they approach the end of campaigning in New York is a potentially devastating example of failing again to break a decades-long paradigm of Republicans capitalizing on calling them soft on crime.

    “The paradox here is: Crime is high in some of the reddest parts of the country where they have the weakest gun safety laws. We needed to tell that story and done so loudly to neutralize the issue. You can’t sit idly by and wish it away,” said Charlie Kelly, a political adviser to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun safety group Everytown and former executive director for the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC.

    In New York and beyond, some Democrats are already hoping for a post-election recognition and realignment that pushes their party both toward a tougher attack on Republicans and a more forceful deflection of their own left flank.

    “We can’t dismiss people’s concerns,” said Justin Brannan, a New York City councilman from a moderate district in Brooklyn. “It’s another thing to be a Republican, to say, ‘If you go outside, you’re going to die.’”

    “It’s both true that crime is down from the 1990s and that it has been increasing and that people feel uncomfortable,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president. “Democrats have to be able to talk about that and offer real solutions.”

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  • Obama and Trump bring dueling visions for America in return to campaign trail | CNN Politics

    Obama and Trump bring dueling visions for America in return to campaign trail | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Midterm elections are almost always about incumbent presidents, especially when they are unpopular. But in a unique twist this year, two ex-presidents who lost control of the House while in office have turned into their parties’ closing messengers.

    Barack Obama and Donald Trump personify two rival visions of the meaning of America itself and are extending their bitter years-long duel as they find themselves on opposite sides of a profound confrontation over the future of US democracy.

    Obama remains an avatar of progressive change and an increasingly diverse nation, who’s far more popular than current Democratic President Joe Biden. He’s the most sought-after political fireman for Democrats struggling to survive tight swing state races and is being used to energize young, minority and suburban middle-class voters.

    Trump has mobilized his Make America Great Again movement, which first emerged as a backlash to the first Black presidency and is built around the notion that the cultural values of a largely White, working-class nation is under siege from political correctness, undocumented migration, experts and the establishment.

    Obama is lambasting politicians, celebrities and sports stars who peddle conspiracy theories, fear and social media “garbage” of which Trump is the most prominent exponent. And he’s delivering searing take-downs of the 45th president’s proteges who are running for election on the platform of his 2020 election falsehoods – like Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

    “Why would you vote for somebody who you know is not telling the truth about something? I mean, on something that important, I don’t care how nicely they say it. I don’t care how poised they are or how well-lit they are,” Obama said of the former local TV news anchor, who has emerged as a rising MAGA star, in Arizona on Wednesday.

    “What happens when truth doesn’t matter anymore?” Obama added. “If you just repeat something over and over again, and it’s a lie, and yet because your side is saying it, it’s okay.”

    Trump adopted exactly that tactic in his return to the campaign trail in Iowa on Thursday night, in what was ostensibly an appearance for veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, but felt like a first-in-the-nation caucus warmup for 2024.

    He falsely claimed that he had won in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2020, two of the states that helped Biden win the White House.

    “Your favorite president got screwed,” Trump told his crowd on a frigid night in Sioux City, in which he repeated false conspiracies that Obama spied on his campaign in 2016.

    One interesting comparison of the styles of Trump and Obama on show in their rival rallies is in their use of humor. Trump has long used comedy – often dark and cruel – to bind himself to his audience, a feature that doesn’t always come across on TV. Often his crowds look like they are having a whale of a time, enthralled by a rule-breaking bull in a china shop trashing decorum with every word and lacerating his opponents with outrageous accusations and belittling nicknames.

    On Thursday, Trump had his crowd in stitches in a digression from an otherwise dystopian speech as a stiff wind blew around the teleprompters showing his prepared remarks.

    “I’ve got these teleprompters waving like a flag,” he said. “I’m going to get sea sick!”

    Obama’s humor is typically warmer, although no less cutting, but he uses it effectively to ridicule Republicans before delivering a devastating political hit. For instance, in Wisconsin last weekend, he branded Republicans as the party of the rich when he accused Sen. Ron Johnson of voting for a tax break for private plane owners.

    “He fought for this. And then, his adult children bought not one, not two, but three private planes because apparently, carpooling was not an option. Now, I mean, you need three?” Obama joked.

    People in Obama’s extended circle have remarked that their former boss has been on fire this campaign season. Lacking the burdens of presidential office, unlike his former vice president, Obama has shown the kind of freedom and relish for big political rallies that rocketed him to the Democratic nomination in 2008.

    It’s easy to tell when the 44th president doesn’t have his heart in his task. In the early rallies of his 2012 election race, for instance, he was lethargic and weary, and he didn’t approach top form in his events last year in an off-year election in Virginia.

    But his rallies this year have rocked with the pulsating energy and enthusiasm that is often lacking at appearances by the incumbent president, an older, more conventional politician. Obama has also come up with far more relatable and focused economic messages than Biden has managed – ironically performing the same role for the current president as another ex-president, Bill Clinton, performed for him in the 2012 campaign – a service that led Obama to dub the 42nd president “the explainer-in-chief.”

    Obama’s talent for oratory is undiminished and he looks like he’s having great fun showing it off. He’s like a basketball star who after years retired makes a comeback and suddenly starts draining three-pointers. And his popularity means he can drop into the most crucial states where candidates running away from Biden’s unpopularity wouldn’t welcome a visit from the president.

    Yet Obama’s prominence is a reminder of the kind of A-list political talent that the modern Democratic Party lacks. It’s an indictment that its best messenger first ran for president 14 years ago.

    But despite his rhetorical impact, the question is now how effective Obama will be in driving out the vote. The former president often struggled while he was in office to translate his stardust onto other Democratic candidates and lesser talents. And the question in this election is whether he’s simply preaching to the converted in addressing Democrats who already planned to vote, or whether he’s actually making the sale to independents and disaffected anti-Trump Republicans who Biden badly needs to show up to vote for his party.

    Former Obama political strategist David Axelrod, who is now a CNN commentator, said that this onetime boss is being used by his party on a specific electoral mission.

    “In the main, this is the time when you try and get your base out and for Democrats this is really important because the reason why incumbent parties generally lose in midterm elections is that their base is not as motivated as the out-of-office party which tends to come and vote its grievances,” Axelrod said. “There is an enthusiasm gap, at least in the polls, between Republicans and Democrats.”

    While Obama is rekindling memories of a past presidency, Trump is out on the trail seeking to build the foundation for a future one.

    The most recent ex-president has demonstrated the extraordinary hold he still has on the Republican Party by promoting and endorsing a roster of candidates in his election-denying image. There is a question, however, whether Trump’s role in orchestrating inexperienced or extreme nominees, like senatorial candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, could cost his party the critical seats in swing states that will decide control of the Senate.

    Republican officials have worried all election cycle about the former president putting his own political ambitions ahead of his party. Many still blame his false claims of voter fraud for helping two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, win Senate seats in Georgia runoffs, which enabled their party to control the 50-50 chamber with the help of the tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Kamala Harris.

    While he’s heading out in to the country again, Trump has not been doing his normal routine of multiple rallies in the most closely contested states.The GOP has succeeded in the last few weeks in returning the focus of the election to Biden, high inflation and the economic anxieties that are spooking voters.

    But there are increasing signs that Trump may not wait much longer to announce a 2024 bid, not least because he has already signaled he would use a presidential campaign to brand legal investigations he faces related to his hoarding of classified documents in his home in Mar-a-Lago and his conduct leading up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, as proof of political persecution.

    “They are weaponizing the Justice Department,” Trump said at his rally Thursday, accusing Democrats of a transgression of which he himself was guilty when he was in the White House and treated attorneys general as his personal lawyers.

    Former Trump White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway praised the former president for not taking the focus off the GOP’s midterm message, a decision that may repay him with a radical Republican House majority that he could use to weaken Biden in the run-up to the 2024 election.

    “He’d like to have done it already. … I think you can expect him to announce it soon,” Conway said of Trump’s anticipated campaign launch. “He’s being urged by some people to still have a November surprise.”

    “Donald Trump is just getting started. I think you should keep your cellphone on,” Conway told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday.

    The former president used his rally in Iowa to tease a new campaign.

    “I will very, very, very probably do it again,” he said, drawing cheers from the crowd.

    If he follows through, this midterm is unlikely to be the last election when Trump and Obama cross swords on the campaign trail.

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  • Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president.

    In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

    Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.

    “They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.

    “This is the scary thing,” the attorney said.

    Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

    Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

    The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

    The Justice Department has brought in a brain trust for high-level advice on the Trump investigations, according to people familiar with the moves.

    Top Justice officials have looked to an old guard of former Southern District of New York prosecutors, bringing into the investigations Kansas City-based federal prosecutor and national security expert David Raskin, as well as David Rody, a prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer who previously specialized in gang and conspiracy cases and has worked extensively with government cooperators.

    Rody, whose involvement has not been previously reported, left a lucrative partnership at the prestigious corporate defense firm Sidley Austin in recent weeks to become a senior counsel at DOJ in the criminal division in Washington, according to his LinkedIn profile and sources familiar with the move.

    The team at the DC US Attorney’s Office handling the day-to-day work of the January 6 investigations is also growing – even while the office’s sedition cases against right-wing extremists go to trial.

    A handful of other prosecutors have joined the January 6 investigations team, including a high-ranking fraud and public corruption prosecutor who has moved out of a supervisor position and onto the team, and a prosecutor with years of experience in criminal appellate work now involved in some of the grand jury activity.

    Taken together, the reorganization of prosecutors indicates a serious and snowballing investigation into Trump and his closest circles.

    The decision of whether to charge Trump or his associates will ultimately fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom President Joe Biden picked for the job because his tenure as a judge provided some distance from partisan politics, after Senate Republicans blocked his Supreme Court nomination in 2016.

    Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Several former prosecutors believe the facts exist for a potentially chargeable case. But Garland will have to navigate the politically perilous and historic decision of how to approach the potential indictment of a former President.

    In March, Garland avoided answering a CNN question about the prospect of a special counsel for Trump-related investigations, but said that the Justice Department does “not shy away from cases that are controversial or sensitive or political.”

    “What we will avoid and what we must avoid is any partisan element of our decision making about cases,” Garland said. “That is what I’m intent on ensuring that the Department decisions are made on the merits, and that they’re made on the facts and the law, and they’re not based on any kind of partisan considerations.”

    Garland’s tough decisions go beyond Trump. The long-running investigation of Hunter Biden, son of the president, is nearing conclusion, people briefed on the matter say. Also waiting in the wings: a final decision on the investigation of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, after prosecutors recommended against charges.

    It likely won’t take long after the midterms for focus to shift to the 2024 presidential race. That could incentivize top DOJ officials to make crucial charging decisions as quickly as possible, including whether to bring charges against Trump himself or other top political activists, other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s inner workings say.

    “They’re not going to charge before they’re ready to charge,” one former Justice Department official with some insight into the thinking around the investigations said. “But there will be added pressure to get through the review” of cases earlier than the typical five-year window DOJ has to bring charges.

    Matters could also be complicated by the situation in Georgia, where Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there. Willis has said she’s aiming for a special grand jury to wrap up its investigative work by the end of the year.

    Willis has observed her own version of a quiet period around the midterm election and is seeking to bring witnesses before the grand jury in the coming weeks. Sources previously told CNN indictments could come as soon as December.

    Key Trump allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are among witnesses that have tried to fight off subpoenas in the state probe into efforts to interfere with the Georgia 2020 election.

    How those disputes resolve in Georgia – including whether courts force testimony – could improve DOJ’s ability to gather information, just as the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation added to DOJ’s investigative leads from inside the Trump White House.

    The months leading up to the election have provided little respite from the political and legal activity around the investigations. The DC US Attorney’s Office–which is still shouldering the bulk of the January 6 investigations–has dealt with burnout in its ranks, as prosecutors are taking to trial or securing guilty pleas from more than 800 rioters who were on the grounds of the Capitol and still look to charge hundreds more.

    Trump has also foiled the DOJ’s efforts to keep things quiet in the weeks leading up to the election, leading to a steady barrage of headlines related to the investigation.

    Trump’s legal team successfully put in place a complicated court-directed process for sorting through thousands of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, to determine whether they’re privileged and off limits to investigators. But the Justice Department and intelligence community have had access for weeks to about 100 records marked as classified that Trump had kept in Florida.

    The outcome of the intelligence review of those documents may determine if criminal charges will be filed, according to one source familiar with the Justice Department’s approach.

    Yet in both investigations, under-seal court activity never subsided, with the Justice Department trying to force at least five witnesses around Trump to secretly provide more information in their grand jury investigations in Washington, DC, CNN has previously reported.

    On Tuesday a federal judge ordered Trump adviser Kash Patel to testify before a grand jury investigating the handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

    Judge Beryl Howell of the DC District Court granted Patel immunity from prosecution on any information he provides to the investigation— another significant step that moves the Justice Department closer to potentially charging the case.

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  • Biden’s plea for democracy is a strong election-closing argument for a different election | CNN Politics

    Biden’s plea for democracy is a strong election-closing argument for a different election | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Joe Biden’s eloquent defense of democracy was a message Americans needed to hear. But it was not the one voters most want now from their president – that relief is at hand from the soaring cost of living.

    Biden’s speech Wednesday, delivered blocks from the US Capitol that was ransacked by ex-President Donald Trump’s mob on January 6, 2021, was a strong election-closing argument. But for an election other than the one taking place next week.

    That’s not to say that the warning was misplaced. The fact that Biden felt the need to say, “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” underscores the grave threat posed to America’s core values by political violence and election denialism. If a president does not safeguard this historic legacy, who will? The chaos and violence Trump incited after the 2020 election show what unfolds when a president chooses to try to destroy democracy for personal gain.

    Biden’s speech was deeply personal, reflecting his own view of the mission handed him by history. It was also highly political given that the midterm elections, which feature scores of pro-Trump candidates spouting his stolen election nonsense, are only five days away. And it came days after the latest shocking example of political violence – the attack on the 82-year-old husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And since Biden launched his 2020 campaign as a quest to save America’s soul from what he sees as the aspiring autocracy of Trump, it was a statement of a mission unaccomplished – as well as a potential opening volley of a possible 2024 showdown for the White House between the 45th and 46th presidents.

    “You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies, as it always does, with the people,” Biden told voters.

    Elections should be about more than one thing. Voters can walk and chew gum at the same time. But the harsh truth is this: In Washington, where just a glimpse of the towering Capitol dome reminds politicians and their media chroniclers of the January 6 horror, the threat to democracy feels visceral.

    But in the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and cities everywhere, the gut check issue is less the somewhat abstract and age-old concept of self-government. It’s the more basic one of feeding a family. This is an election more about the cost of a cart full of groceries or the price of a gallon of gasoline than America’s founding truths.

    As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”

    Declining stock markets have hurt retirement accounts and Americans with credit card debt took another blow Wednesday when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term borrowing rate by another 0.75%. There are fears the Fed’s strategy could pitch the economy into recession and ruin one of the best aspects of the Biden economy – the low unemployment rate.

    Biden’s argument is implicitly that while inflation will fall, and economic damage can be repaired, the current election – and its legions of anti-democratic Republican candidates – could cause political wreckage that is beyond mending.

    But it’s a tough case to make in such a doom-laden political environment for Democrats. The millions of Republicans who believe Trump’s falsehoods about the last election don’t listen to Biden and his call for national unity anyway. His low approval ratings don’t help. And in a new CNN/SSRS survey published on Wednesday, for instance, 51% of Americans said inflation and the economy was most driving their vote in the midterms. Abortion – the issue Democrats hoped would save them next Tuesday after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer – was the only other concern in double figures, polling at 15% of likely voters. And voting rights and election integrity – the focus of the president’s speech on Wednesday night – polled at only 9%.

    But Biden effectively asked voters to make a concern well down the list of their priorities the decisive factor when they cast their ballots.

    “This year, I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote, and how you vote,” he said. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” he added, at the end of a campaign in which several GOP nominees have not guaranteed they would accept voters’ will.

    In places where Biden is unpopular, Democrats in tight races have made an explicit point about distancing themselves from the national party.

    “You know, the national Democratic Party has never been really good at strategic political decisions. So you know, it is not a surprise here, and thank God that I have enough experience that I’ve built this campaign not needing them and we really don’t want them at this point. We’re gonna do this thing with all the grassroots people we have here,” Rep. Tim Ryan, who is in a tight race for US Senate in Ohio against J.D. Vance, told “CNN This Morning” on Thursday.

    It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

    While Biden may be talking at cross purposes with the electorate on these issues, they are linked, in a fateful way, that he did not mention in his speech at Union Station on Wednesday evening. The president’s failure – whether it is all his fault or not – to quell inflation and the worries of a nation already demoralized by a once-in-a-century pandemic created the electoral conditions that look likely to restore Trumpism to power, in the form of a volatile, extreme GOP majority in the House of Representatives at least, with the Senate still on a knife’s edge.

    Throughout history, inflation has often been a pernicious political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and seeds extremism as a potential response. That’s why politicians fear it so acutely and why it is so curious that the Biden White House initially didn’t take the surge of prices that seriously, repeatedly insisting that this was a “transitory” problem caused by Covid-19.

    The president also renewed his call for national unity that he delivered in his inaugural address in front of a still violence-scarred Capitol in 2021. He explained that American democracy was primarily under attack because “the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.”

    “He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

    The president also argued that Trump’s threat was far broader now than it was in the 2020 election. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

    Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. The 44th president has been making his own searing defenses of democracy and repudiation of Trump on the midterm election campaign trail in recent days.

    “You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. The president is right – the essence of democracy depends on the loser in an election accepting the verdict of the people. This is why Trump’s behavior was so noxious in 2020 since his refusal to admit defeat did not just ruin one election. It tore at the fundamental principle of the political system that made America great two-and-a-half centuries before Trump’s political career and caused damage that will long outlast the shockwaves of one administration.

    But the essence of the Trump message exists in direct contradiction to Biden’s logic. Such voters can only love their country when their party wins because they see the Democrats that they lose to as the antipathy of their vision of America itself. These dueling understandings of what America actually means are at the core of the current, great political struggle that will not just play out next Tuesday, but in the 2024 election and beyond.

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  • Warnings about a fragile democracy hit home for some Arizona voters as election deniers compete for key offices | CNN Politics

    Warnings about a fragile democracy hit home for some Arizona voters as election deniers compete for key offices | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The voters who poured into a Phoenix high school to hear from former President Barack Obama were looking to send a message of defiance Wednesday night.

    They said they are determined to defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election deniers – including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem – and will not allow their state’s voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up to monitor ballot drop boxes late last month – some of them armed, masked and wearing camouflage.

    As President Joe Biden warned Americans from Washington, DC, on Wednesday night that democracy is at stake, it’s here in Arizona that democratic institutions look most fragile ahead of next week’s midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election, in which Arizona is likely to be a pivotal battleground.

    Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who successfully defeated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, now finds herself locked in a tight race against Lake, who has said she will accept the results of a “fair, honest and transparent election,” after previously refusing in an interview with CNN to commit to accepting the results if she lost. And Finchem, who could become the state’s chief elections administrator, is still trying to overturn the results of the last election.

    “If you do need one more reason to vote, consider the fact that our democracy is on the ballot. And nowhere is that clearer than here in Arizona,” Obama told the crowd Wednesday, later adding that “democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona” if election deniers fill all the top state offices.

    Maricopa County was the site of repeated “audits” after the 2020 election – including the sham partisan review conducted by the now-defunct firm known as Cyber Ninjas. Both political parties are now girding for another potential battle over the election results in a state Biden won by less than 10,500 votes. And the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket are setting that tone.

    Joann Rodriguez, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said it was scary that “radical Republicans” in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries in part by echoing Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.

    “What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez said. She noted that “a lot of Trumpers” are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her Glendale, Arizona, neighborhood. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – for what reason? I mean, do they think that their intimidation tactics are going to work?”

    Hobbs touted her record as secretary of state Wednesday night. “I stood for democracy when I refused to give into the insurrectionists who surrounded my home after I certified the 2020 election and I’m still doing it today in this race for governor,” she said.

    A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed her in a dead heat race with Lake. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race a Toss-up.

    The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. The fact that those top statewide contests may be decided on a razor’s edge is what brought Obama to the Grand Canyon State as he seeks to fire up the Democratic base and make sure that young voters and Latino voters – who will be critical to victory in Arizona – turn out in a midterm election year.

    Both Biden and Obama have been arguing that the fate of democracy is at stake, but Biden, who has not been invited to campaign in top swing states, had to make his argument from the opposite side of the country.

    The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what brought Keith Greenberg, a registered Republican from Maricopa County, to Obama’s rally. He said in an interview that he wasn’t voting for Democrats in this election, he is voting against the Trump ticket.

    “The Republican Party today is not the Republican Party I’m a part of,” said Greenberg, who described the 2020 election as fair and honest. “That’s more like the American Nazi Party and I can’t put up with that – the lie.”

    If the Trump ticket wins, Greenberg said, “It means that the state of Arizona has lost its mind. And this is no longer a safe place to live. If Mark Finchem wins and says, ‘Well, I don’t care what the people voted. I’m going to do this’ – then what’s the point? We’ve lost our democracy.”

    Arizona’s status as a tinderbox of election controversies is underscored by the fact that two lawsuits have already been filed in federal court on behalf of voters who felt intimidated by the aggressive patrols at ballot drop boxes late last month.

    Voters filed complaints to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office after some activists were taking pictures of voters and their license plates – apparently inspired by debunked conspiracy theories about so-called “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes in 2020. A federal judge issued a ruling in one of the cases on Tuesday barring members of a group known as Clean Elections USA – whose leader has falsely asserted the 2020 election was rigged – from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor within 250 feet of drop boxes.

    Because of the ruling, the group’s members are also now barred from speaking to or yelling at voters who drop off their ballots, and they may not photograph or film voters at the drop boxes. The Justice Department had weighed in on the case that was brought by the League of Women Voters. The DOJ did not formally take sides, but in a legal brief, federal prosecutors said the right-wing group’s “vigilante ballot security efforts” were likely illegal and “raise serious concerns of voter intimidation.”

    The depth of the belief among Republicans about Trump’s election lies was underscored by a CNN poll conducted by SSRS that was released on Wednesday: 66% of Republicans said they don’t believe Biden legitimately won the election.

    That dynamic is even more pronounced in a state like Arizona where Trump acolytes control the Republican Party and have censured figures like outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for what they said was insufficient loyalty to the former president.

    Michelle Gonzales, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said she believes that people came to see Obama Wednesday night “so they could feel hopeful” about the democratic process amid all the noise.

    “With everything, all the rhetoric going on, I think it’s important to really hear from someone – that we trust and we believe in – that we can be hopeful about this election,” she said. “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people waiting. I just want to believe that people want to believe in something better – that they have morals and values that we all should have as human beings and not elect these liars and con people.”

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  • GOP Gov. Chris Sununu on backing election denier: ‘I don’t think anybody should be a one-issue voter’ | CNN Politics

    GOP Gov. Chris Sununu on backing election denier: ‘I don’t think anybody should be a one-issue voter’ | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu believes that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election but is supporting Don Bolduc – a GOP Senate nominee who has consistently pushed election falsehoods – because he is considering a “variety of issues” in making his choice on Election Day.

    “It is not just a one-issue – you can’t say, ‘Well, based on that one issue, we vehemently disagree, so, therefore, we shouldn’t be casting our vote.’ I don’t think anybody should be a one-issue voter regardless of the issue,” Sununu told “CNN This Morning” hosts on Tuesday.

    Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, has shifted his answers related to false 2020 election claims, though he has still pushed some falsehoods after securing the Republican nomination to represent the Granite State in the US Senate.

    “We might disagree on what happened in 2020 or folks are focusing on the conspiracy theories around the 2020 election. At the end of the day, the vast majority of voters, especially those independent voters that still haven’t made up their mind, they’re voting on inflation, they’re voting on the cost of goods, they’re voting on not being able to make their mortgage or find housing,” said Sununu, who is seeking reelection.

    Recent CNN polls conducted by SSRS in battleground states have found that the economy is the foremost issue for voters this midterm season, well ahead of voting rights and election integrity.

    Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins if he thinks congressional Republicans and Bolduc have a plan to combat the inflation that they have often cited on the campaign trail, Sununu said, “Well, one thing I’m really confident of is if you send the same people back to Washington, you ain’t going to get a different result. Not even close.”

    Sununu, who endorsed one of Bolduc’s opponents in the primary race, touted Bolduc as a war hero who has worked on mental health issues and said Bolduc wants “to mix things up.”

    “You can’t say that just by electing the same old Democrats you’re going to get a different result. We want different results across this country and the only way to do that is to bring a different system,” he said.

    Sununu also condemned a joke made on Monday by Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in regard to the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

    “There is just no place for it. This is serious,” he said before adding, “lines are moving on both sides. This isn’t just one party or the other.”

    Sununu then referred to the alleged plot to murder conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as well as the shootings of GOP Rep. Steve Scalise and Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as evidence of escalating violence in American politics.

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  • Black men say they feel ignored by politicians. A historic Senate face-off between two Black men isn’t helping | CNN Politics

    Black men say they feel ignored by politicians. A historic Senate face-off between two Black men isn’t helping | CNN Politics

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    Atlanta
    CNN
     — 

    Aaron Bethea says he has voted election after election for US presidents, governors and senators – and yet those lawmakers have done little to nothing to improve life for him, his family or his community.

    Bethea said he believes the issues he cares about, financial freedom and equal investment in predominately Black schools, have largely been ignored.

    “Where we are from, nobody really cares about what Black men think,” said Bethea, an Atlanta father of six who owns a wholesale company that sells televisions. “They don’t do anything for us.”

    Bethea, 40, said he still plans to vote Democratic in Georgia’s hotly contested gubernatorial and US senate races. But he’s not voting with enthusiasm. He said he is hoping that one day someone will prioritize the needs of Black men.

    Bethea is not alone. Political analysts, researchers and Black male leaders say politicians are failing to reach some Black men with messaging that resonates with them and visibility in their communities. Those shortcomings could particularly hurt Democrats in the upcoming midterms given Black men are the second most loyal voting bloc for the party next to Black women, experts say.

    And while Black men have increasingly supported Republicans in recent years, some say the GOP is still missing the mark. Many Black men say they are concerned that Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker does not represent them in a positive light given his many public gaffes, history of domestic violence and being an absentee father.

    Political analysts worry that the lack of effective messaging could result in Black men sitting home on Nov. 8 and Democrats like Stacey Abrams – who has made a late attempt to reach Black men with a series of events – losing their races.

    “If some of them feel unmotivated because they don’t feel spoken to then you’ve really got a problem,” said Jason Nichols, a professor of African American studies at the University of Maryland College Park. “A lot of these campaigns don’t hire Black male advisers. They don’t hire Black men to actually tell them how to reach Black men.”

    So far, 39% of Black voters have been men, and 61% have been women, according to Catalist, a company that provides data and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit issue-advocacy organizations and gives insights into who is voting before November. Those breakdowns were the same at this point in the early voting period in 2020.

    Some polls have suggested that Black men were gradually leaving the Democratic party to vote for Republicans. In 2020, 12% of Black men voted for former President Donald Trump.

    Ted Johnson, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, said some Black men find Republicans more attractive because they promote individualism and the idea that hard work, not government dependence, leads to financial success. In 2016, Johnson wrote in the Atlantic that a Black person who supported Trump was likely a “working-class or lower-middle-class Black man, over the age of 35, and interested in alternative approaches to addressing what ails Black America.”

    Still, Johnson said Black men are not naive and will vote against a Republican candidate who they feel is unfit. And for some Black men, that is the case with Walker who is running against incumbent US Sen. Raphael Warnock.

    The match-up between Walker and Warnock is one of the closest and most critical Senate races in the country, as Republicans seek to win back control of the body, which is currently split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote.

    Walker has been criticized by his opponents for being violent toward his ex-wife and the claim that he paid for the mother of one of his children to get an abortion. Walker told Axios last year that he was “accountable” for his past violent behavior, and that people shouldn’t be “ashamed” for confronting mental health issues.

    Walker speaks at a campaign event in Carrollton, Georgia, on October 11.

    In an interview with NBC News, Walker acknowledged that he sent a $700 check to a woman who alleges the money was provided to reimburse her for an abortion, but denied the check was for that purpose. Walker has been vocal about his anti-abortion views but has gone back and forth about whether he supports exceptions.

    Walker is currently polling at 11% with Black men compared to 74% for Warnock.

    “(Walker) is just not an attractive, viable candidate for most Black folks,” Johnson said. “I think there are Black men who won’t vote for Stacey Abrams but will vote for Raphael Warnock.”

    Recent polls show Republican Gov. Brian Kemp with support from 16% of Black men compared to 77% for Abrams. Johnson said he believes Kemp has more support from Black men because some men still refuse to vote a woman into office.

    “There is a strain of conservatism in Black men that comes with a strain of sexism,” Johnson said, noting that in 2016 some Black men sat home because they didn’t like Trump but also didn’t want to see Hillary Clinton as the first female president.

    In recent years, Republicans have faced criticism for being sexist, misogynistic and rejecting women’s rights.

    Walker’s candidacy was the topic of discussion for several Black men who gathered at Anytime Cutz barbershop in Atlanta on a recent Monday afternoon. The chat was part of a series hosted by the Urban League of Greater Atlanta’s Black Male Voter Project and Black Men Decide offering Black men a chance to discuss voting and the issues that matter to them.

    Some of the Black men present said they found it offensive that the GOP would pit Walker – a former NFL running back with no political experience and a troubled past – against Warnock, a beloved figure in Atlanta’s Black community who pastored the church once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

    Aaron Bethea, second from right, speaks during a discussion about voting with other Black men at Anytime Cutz barbershop.

    Barber Antwaun Hawkins poses for a portrait in his barber's office at Anytime Cutz.

    “The guy is looking like a fool,” said Antwaun Hawkins, a 46-year-old barber. “That’s who we want to put in place to speak for us? Because he’s a Black man? No. To me, he looks like an idiot.”

    Bethea said after the barbershop event that Walker’s candidacy feels like a “sick joke.”

    “I think he’s embarrassing himself,” Bethea said. “I don’t play the field in a position that I don’t know how to play. Someone talked him out of staying in his lane.”

    Bethea said he plans to vote for Warnock because he’s a more qualified candidate and pillar in the community.

    Moyo Akinade, a 29-year-old soccer coach from Atlanta, said he too will vote for Warnock because he’s a positive role model. Walker, meanwhile, perpetuates negative stereotypes about Black men, Akinade said.

    Those stereotypes are “that we are aggressive, we aren’t intelligent and we are abusive,” Akinade said. “It portrays Black men as being violent. And that’s still inaccurate.”

    But one barber said he doesn’t think voters should judge Walker by his past.

    “Everybody has a past, everybody has done something wrong, everybody has lied before, everybody has done something that they shouldn’t have done,” said Charles Scott who manages Anytime Cutz. “But at one point, people can change. Just like they are bashing Herschel Walker. How do you know he’s not a changed man?”

    Anytime Cutz manager and barber Charles Scott think that voters shouldn't judge Walker by his past.

    Black men interviewed by CNN said they look for more than just character and experience in politicians, but also the issues they address.

    A report released by the NAACP in September found that Black men believed racism/discrimination, inflation/cost of living and criminal justice reform/police brutality were the most important issues facing the Black community. The survey also concluded that 41% of Black men disapproved of the job President Joe Biden is doing to address the needs of the Black community.

    The group at Anytime Cutz named financial security, student loan forgiveness, police reform, healthcare reform and improving jail conditions as their top concerns.

    Most said they vote in elections but rarely see lawmakers making decisions that help them personally or their communities.

    “Do something about policing,” Hawkins said. “Do something for the people that can’t really help themselves. I don’t think people choose to be homeless and hungry.”

    Hawkins and Bethea said they have given up waiting for policies that will close the wealth gap and give Black Americans a fair shot at success. They are focused on providing for their families.

    “We can’t sit around and wait for legislation to change because the kids are at home hungry,” Hawkins said.

    Hawkins gestures while speaking about voting at Anytime Cutz.

    Some of those same sentiments are felt by Black men nearly 900 miles away in New York.

    Mysonne Linen, a popular activist and rapper from the Bronx, said he can’t remember the last time a political candidate spoke directly to Black men during their campaign and delivered on those promises after winning. Linen said Black men are tired of “pandering.” Linen wants politicians who genuinely care about Black men living in marginalized communities and will follow through on addressing police reform, livable wage jobs and investment in mental health resources.

    “They have to do a better job with having tangible results,” Linen said. “Tell us how you to plan to invest in the communities to change those realities. Get into office and actually fight to do those things.”

    In the last few months, Abrams has hosted a series of events that targeted Black men in Georgia and released a “Black Men’s Agenda” that details her plans to invest in Black-owned small businesses, expand Medicaid, increase funding to schools and opportunities for job training and hold police accountable.

    Stacey Abrams speaks during a campaign event and conversation with Charlamagne tha God, 21 Savage and Francys Johnson at The HBUC in Atlanta on September 9.

    But Linen and Nichols both agreed that Abrams’ efforts may have come too late. Nichols said he fears that some Black men are already planning to sit home on Election Day or vote for Kemp.

    “I think she didn’t necessarily get the right advice at the right time and now it feels like she’s pandering,” Nichols said. “I think she really is concerned but I think it comes across to some like ‘we’ve been ignored all this time.’”

    Nichols said he urges 2024 election candidates to do more outreach to Black men and Black families. The organization Black Men Vote has already launched a national campaign to register one million Black male voters by November 2024.

    NAACP President Derrick Johnson said those seeking public office must prioritize the needs of Black men if they want to win.

    “It is incumbent upon both political parties and all candidates to understand that the votes of African American men are not guaranteed,” Johnson said. “It’s an important voting bloc and candidates must speak to them so they can see how their vote really can support democracy and their quality of life.”

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  • Paul Pelosi attack unleashes partisan finger-pointing and sows fresh fears of political violence | CNN Politics

    Paul Pelosi attack unleashes partisan finger-pointing and sows fresh fears of political violence | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    America’s toxic politics quickly turned the brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband into the latest vicious partisan fight – even before the full facts are known.

    Police have yet to ascribe a motive to the attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, after a man broke into the couple’s home in San Francisco. They have said the alleged assailant was intentional about going to the house, and he shouted out, “Where is Nancy?” CNN has reported.

    Eight days before critical midterm elections, the intense political reaction had already outraced the investigation even before the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of California on Monday filed charges of attempted kidnapping of a US official and assault against the suspect in the case, David DePape, 42.

    Republicans, while condemning the violence, are denying they have any culpability in fostering a poisoned political environment. Some even used it to pivot to new attempts to sow doubt on the integrity of US elections.

    In another sign of an ugly time, Pelosi’s misfortune is already the subject of outrageous conspiracies – amplified for a time by the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, in a possible sign of how the social network could develop under his leadership. Ex-President Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., also pushed false claims about the attack that were in deeply poor taste.

    Reports confirmed by CNN that the suspect posted memes and conspiracy theories on Facebook about Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection renewed the debate about how much responsibility political leaders have to temper inflammatory rhetoric in order to avoid triggering violence.

    The suspect in the case has not been arraigned, but Democrats, including President Joe Biden, are warning that the attack on the Pelosi is just the latest inevitable consequence of a GOP overtaken by its extreme fringe.

    “What makes us think that one party can talk about ‘stolen elections,’ ‘Covid being a hoax,’ ‘this is all a bunch of lies,’ and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced?” Biden said on Friday.

    “What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate?”

    This was a question even before the Paul Pelosi attack given that many Republican candidates have tried to energize their base by putting Trump’s false claims about a stolen election in 2020 at the center of their midterm election campaigns.

    Trump, who’s still the de facto leader of the GOP, has yet to fully condemn the attack on Paul Pelosi. In an interview on Spanish-language Americano Media on Monday, the ex-President called the attack “a terrible thing” and then quickly connected it to Republican criticisms of rising crime in US cities.

    But dozens of Republicans – from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Vice President Mike Pence and GOP House conference chair Elise Stefanik – have offered stronger condemnations.

    At the same time, top Republicans on Sunday dodged on whether their side especially had fostered a dangerous political climate after embracing election falsehoods and blamed both sides equally for political turmoil.

    The gulf between the two parties in the aftermath of the attack underscored the nation’s internal political estrangement ahead of next week’s election. It suggested Republicans are unwilling to get crosswise with their voters by being more critical of the extremism pulsating through the GOP base. And political shock waves of the incident also showed how Democrats are keen to link rising threats against lawmakers and their families with Trump’s political movement as raging inflation threatens to deal them a heavy defeat at the ballot box.

    Yet the aftermath of the assault represents more than just another fault line between Republicans and Democrats and points to something more than rote arguments of equivalence between rival politicians.

    It took place in a time scarred by the January 6 insurrection, which established that in a festering political atmosphere cultivated and incited by Trump, individuals can be inspired to carry out acts of violence. The overwhelming majority of the ex-President’s supporters have not acted on his false claims of a stolen election. But while leading Republicans are right to argue the political attacks have targeted prominent figures on both sides, only one party features members who are excusing, downplaying, or denying the violence of January 6 and amplifying false claims of a stolen election that have been proven to incite violence.

    It was a sign of a worsening political environment that Musk gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack. He tweeted and then deleted a link to an article on a website that purports to be a news outlet, CNN’s Oliver Darcy and Donie O’Sullivan reported. The conspiracy theory was later amplified on Twitter by Trump Jr.

    And in another troubling development this weekend that wasn’t linked to the Pelosi case but underscored worrying extremism coming to the surface of American politics, a series of antisemitic messages appeared in public spaces – including a football stadium, a highway overpass and a downtown building in Jacksonville, Florida.

    Top Republicans on Sunday condemned the Pelosi attack as a despicable crime, but they tended to see it in isolation from current political tensions, even though the GOP has long demonized the speaker in hard-hitting ad campaigns. Instead, Republicans suggested it’s symptomatic of the rising violent crime they pin on Democrats.

    “It’s disgusting. This violence is horrible,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who runs the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that his heart went out to Paul Pelosi and wished him a full recovery. But Scott quickly pivoted to highlight a Republican canvasser whom his fellow Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has said was attacked in Miami for political reasons. (After the incident, Rubio accused the media of not caring about violence when it targets Republicans.)

    Scott also tried to move on in the interview to tacitly raise fresh suspicions about the US electoral system in coded language. Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether Republicans should do more to condemn dangerous rhetoric and conspiracy theories, Scott replied: “We have to do everything we can to … make sure people feel comfortable about these elections. We have got to do everything we can to get people comfortable that this election in nine days is going to be free and fair, that people’s votes are all going to be counted fairly.”

    The reason why millions of Americans have lost confidence in elections – despite repeated court rulings rejecting Trump’s fraud claims and his own Justice Department’s statement that 2020 lacked major irregularities – is that the ex-President and many GOP allies are still falsely saying the election was stolen.

    Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, rejected the idea that the attack on Paul Pelosi was an inevitable consequence of rising Republican rhetorical attacks on Democratic politicians.

    “We don’t like this at all across the board. We don’t want to see attacks on any politician from any political background,” McDaniel said on “Fox News Sunday.”

    She also claimed that Biden had not condemned a suspect arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s home who has been charged with attempting to murder the conservative Supreme Court justice. (After the arrest, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Biden believed any threats, violence or attempt to intimidate judges had no place in US society.)

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has yet to deliver a full-throated public condemnation of the assault on Paul Pelosi on camera or on his official social media accounts or to release a detailed statement. The California Republican did tell Fox on Sunday he had texted with the speaker to express concern and his hopes for her husband’s full recovery.

    “Let me be perfectly clear, violence or threat of violence has no place in our society. What happened to Paul Pelosi is wrong,” he told Fox.

    The lack of a more public reaction by McCarthy is notable since he could be speaker himself, if Republicans win the House next week, and would have the responsibility of fulfilling the institutional duties of a role that is sometimes supposed to supersede partisan politics. This will lead to questions of whether he is catering to his fervently pro-Trump conference.

    His comments also appear less direct than Speaker Pelosi’s reaction to the shooting of GOP Whip Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice in 2017, which she described as a “despicable and cowardly attack” on Congress itself and said at such times there were “no Democrats or Republicans.” After Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was informed that the deceased suspect in the shooting volunteered on his Democratic presidential campaign, he took to the Senate floor to condemn political violence “in the strongest possible terms.”

    The Pelosi attack is also highlighting concerns about the general tone of some Republican advertising, which sometimes features candidates wielding guns.

    Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s House campaign arm, denied there was anything tonally off about a video he tweeted last week that showed him firing a rifle with the hashtag #FirePelosi.

    Emmer said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the tweet was about “Exercising our Second Amendment rights, having fun.”

    Another Republican who could have a big role in a future majority is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The pro-Trump Republican said such attacks “shouldn’t happen to Paul Pelosi. It shouldn’t happen to innocent Americans. It shouldn’t happen to me,” claiming she received death threats every day.

    In 2021, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments on Greene’s Facebook page showed she repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019, including Pelosi, before being elected to Congress.

    Leading Democrats were quick to make a link between such extremist rhetoric and the rise of violence and intimidation that has seen threats rise against political candidates and even some groups show up to monitor drop boxes in states like Arizona in moves Democrats have criticized as attempts at voter intimidation.

    Some of them reacted to reports that the alleged assailant in the Paul Pelosi incident had asked where his wife was, and immediately drew conclusions not yet supported by details released by police. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, for instance, tweeted that a “far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.”

    Biden was more temperate but also made the link to far-right wing rhetoric at a fundraising event in Pennsylvania on Friday, referring to the alleged assailants’ demands of “where is Nancy?”

    “Every person of good conscience needs to clearly and unambiguously stand up against the violence in our politics regardless what your politics are,” Biden said.

    Former President Barack Obama made a wider argument about how the coarsening of political dialogue risked new eruptions of violence – and squarely put the blame on Republicans.

    “This habit of saying the worst about other people, demonizing people, that creates a dangerous climate,” the former President said at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Saturday.

    “If elected officials don’t do more explicitly to reject this kind of over-the-top crazy rhetoric, if they keep on ignoring it or tacitly supporting it or in some cases encouraging it, if they’re telling supporters, ‘you’ve got to stand outside polling places armed with guns and dressed in tactical gear,’ that’s the kind of thing that ends up getting people hurt.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Obama endorses Karen Bass in Los Angeles mayoral race | CNN Politics

    Obama endorses Karen Bass in Los Angeles mayoral race | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former President Barack Obama on Saturday endorsed Karen Bass in her bid for mayor of Los Angeles on Saturday, saying that the Democratic congresswoman “has always been on the right side of the issues we care so deeply about.”

    “I am asking Los Angeles to vote for Karen Bass for mayor. I know Karen, she was with me in supporting my campaign from the beginning, and Karen Bass will deliver results,” Obama said in a statement. “Make no mistake, there is only one proven pro-choice Democrat in this race.”

    The endorsement was also depicted in a video Bass shared on Twitter account that captured her and the former President on a FaceTime call.

    “I’m confident you’re going to be an outstanding mayor of LA,” Obama told Bass, while also recalling her campaigning for him in 2007 when he was running for president.

    Obama’s endorsement comes just days ahead of the election in which Bass could make history as the first woman and the first Black woman to lead America’s second-largest city. She faces real estate developer Rick Caruso on November 8 after neither candidate took a majority of the vote in the June primary.

    Bass, who was on President Joe Biden’s short list for a running mate during the 2020 campaign, said she was “humbled and honored” to have Obama’s support.

    “It is impossible to overstate the impact of his work leading this country for eight scandal-free years advancing social and economic justice had on the nation and the world,” she said of the former President in a statement Saturday.

    “President Obama’s support underscores the contrast in this race and inspires our campaign as we share our plans to solve homelessness and make LA safer and more affordable for everyone during the home stretch,” she added.

    Obama has recently been wielding his political weight in an effort to help Democratic prospects across the nation.

    The former President hit the campaign trail in Georgia on Friday night to begin a five-state tour that includes visits Saturday to Michigan and Wisconsin. He has recorded nearly two dozen television commercials for Democrats and the party’s campaign committees, with new ads popping up nearly every day this week.

    Bass currently represents California’s 37th Congressional District. She previously served in the California State Assembly, where in 2008 she became the first Black woman to serve as speaker of a state legislature, according to her congressional biography.

    Bass has centered her campaign on tackling the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and increasing public safety.

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  • Opinion: Democrats just can’t seal the deal with young Americans | CNN

    Opinion: Democrats just can’t seal the deal with young Americans | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Kristen Soltis Anderson, a CNN Political commentator, is a Republican strategist and pollster and author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up.)” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion articles on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Democrats have sensed that younger voters might stay home in November and have turned to “Dark Brandon” for help in times of trouble.

    For those who do not know – and my own polling suggests that is most everyone reading this – “Dark Brandon” is a meme of President Joe Biden, rendered as an all-powerful hero (or villain, depending on your perspective). It started as a right-wing catchphrase before Democrats appropriated it to praise the President.

    The meme reached the height of its powers, whatever those may be, when the Democratic group Building Back Together released a hallucinogenic 30-second ad earlier this month featuring the meme of President Biden, lasers coming out of his eyes and all. The message? Biden is an exciting and successful hero on issues like student loan debt. Or rather, “if you’re unenthused about Biden and the Democratic Party, please don’t be.”

    I’ve sounded the alarm for years that Republicans are in trouble with younger voters and are in danger of losing them for good. This remains the case, as many polls show younger voters still have quite negative views of the GOP.

    But even though Millennials and Gen Z Americans tend to lean leftward on a host of economic and cultural issues such as LGBTQ rights and the size of government, it is clear that in this midterm election, Democrats have not energized the youth vote and may not be able to count on young people as a key part of their coalition.

    Voters under 30 are not exactly enamored with how things are going in America these days. Two-thirds of them say that the economy is bad, according to CBS News/YouGov polling. And accordingly, less than a quarter “strongly approve” of the job Biden is doing. Only 31% say they are “very enthusiastic” about voting in the midterms, compared to two-thirds of voters 65 and older. And only one in six say they are paying a “great deal” of attention to the midterms.

    This isn’t terribly unusual. Younger voters usually drop off in larger numbers than older voters when you go from a big presidential election to a lower-key midterm. According to CNN’s exit polls, voters under 30 only made up 13% of all voters in the 2018 midterms, compared to 17% in the 2020 general election.

    However, my own firm’s analysis suggests that voters under the age of 30 could fall to only 10% of the electorate in 2022 –a year where we expect overall turnout to be historic for a midterm at over 125 million votes.

    While young voters aren’t likely to turn out in huge numbers to power a “red wave,” it isn’t hard to imagine them costing Democrats their majorities by staying home.

    Democrats didn’t always need younger voters to win. In fact, younger voters were a relatively evenly split voter group for much of the 1990s and 2000s. But in the 2006 midterm, before then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) had even announced his bid for the presidency, young voters began bleeding away from the GOP in big numbers. Exit polls showed voters under the age of 30 breaking for Democrats by a 22-point margin in House races in that election, which swept Nancy Pelosi into the speakership for the first time.

    Young voters continued to oppose the GOP even in “red wave” years. The 2010 election, by all accounts a great year for Republicans, saw voters under age 30 still break for Democrats by a 16-point margin. By the time the “blue wave” of 2018 came along, we were seeing blockbuster turnout among young voters in elections that they previously sat out. Additionally, those voters broke for Democrats by an absolutely enormous 35-point margin.

    But then Donald Trump lost the presidency and Biden – not necessarily a favorite among younger voters – became the leader of the nation and the Democratic Party. Even before he was the Democratic presidential nominee, his polling among young voters always left something to be desired; only one third of voters under 30 held a favorable view of him before the 2020 election.

    Issues of importance to many young voters have taken a backseat and our political class continues to age. As a result, in the last few years, there has been a fascinating depolarization along generational lines. Previously, if I knew your age, I could somewhat easily make an educated guess about how you’d vote. That is less likely to be the case today, largely because young voters have become more disillusioned with Democrats.

    What is especially troublesome for Democrats is that this is all happening against a backdrop of young Americans being increasingly vocal about their politics. Companies are grappling with Gen Z and Millennial employees who seem keener than ever to work for employers that align with their political and cultural worldview. I regularly hear from business leaders who know that younger consumers are voting with their wallets and opting for products and services that match their values.

    If younger Americans are increasingly focused on issues and wanting change, but they aren’t turning out to vote in midterms, that represents a huge missed opportunity for those who want to see greater youth participation in politics. And in this election, it could cost Democrats their majorities.

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  • Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

    Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    As a statement of intent, it was about as blunt as they get.

    North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and will never give them up, its leader, Kim Jong Un, told the world last month.

    The move was “irreversible,” he said; the weapons represent the “dignity, body, and absolute power of the state” and Pyongyang will continue to develop them “as long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth.”

    Kim may be no stranger to colorful language, but it is worth taking his vow – which he signed into law – seriously. Bear in mind that this is a dictator who cannot be voted out of power and who generally does what he says he will do.

    Bear in mind too that North Korea has staged a record number of missile launches this year – more than 20; claims it is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to field units, something CNN cannot independently confirm; and is also believed to be ready for a seventh underground nuclear test.

    All this has prompted a growing number of experts to question whether now is the time to call a spade a spade and accept that North Korea is in fact a nuclear state. Doing so would entail giving up once and for all the optimistic – some might say delusional – hopes that Pyongyang’s program is somehow incomplete or that it might yet be persuaded to give it up voluntarily.

    As Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “We simply have to treat North Korea as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.”

    From a purely factual point of view, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and few who follow events there closely dispute that.

    A recent Nuclear Notebook column from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that North Korea may have produced enough fissile material to build between 45 and 55 nuclear weapons. What’s more, the recent missile tests suggest it has a number of methods of delivering those weapons.

    Publicly acknowledging this reality is, however, fraught with peril for countries such as the United States.

    One of the most compelling reasons for Washington not to do so is its fears of sparking a nuclear arms race in Asia.

    South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are just a few of the neighbors that would likely want to match Pyongyang’s status.

    But some experts say that refusing to acknowledge North Korea’s nuclear prowess – in the face of increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary – does little to reassure these countries. Rather, the impression that allies have their heads in the sand may make them more nervous.

    “Let’s accept (it), North Korea is a nuclear arms state, and North Korea has all necessary delivery systems including pretty efficient ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles),” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and a preeminent academic authority on North Korea.

    A better approach, some suggest, might be to treat North Korea’s nuclear program in a similar way to Israel’s – with tacit acceptance.

    That’s the solution favored by Jeffrey Lewis, an adjunct professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.

    “I think that the crucial step that (US President Joe) Biden needs to take is to make clear both to himself and to the US government that we are not going to get North Korea to disarm and that is fundamentally accepting North Korea as a nuclear state. You don’t necessarily need to legally recognize it,” Lewis said.

    Both Israel and India offer examples of what the US could aspire to in dealing with North Korea, he added.

    North Korea held what it called

    Israel, widely believed to have started its nuclear program in the 1960s, has always claimed nuclear ambiguity while refusing to be a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while India embraced nuclear ambiguity for decades before abandoning that policy with its 1998 nuclear test.

    “In both of those cases, the US knew those countries had the bomb, but the deal was, if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t make an issue out of it, if you don’t cause political problems, then we’re not going to respond. I think that’s the same place we want to get to with North Korea,” Lewis said.

    At present though, Washington shows no signs of abandoning its approach of hoping to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nukes.

    Indeed, US Vice President Kamala Harris underlined it during a recent visit to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

    “Our shared goal – the United States and the Republic of Korea – is a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Harris said.

    That may be a worthy goal, but many experts see it as increasingly unrealistic.

    “Nobody disagrees that denuclearization would be a very desirable outcome on the Korean Peninsula, it’s simply not a tractable one,” Panda said.

    One problem standing in the way of denuclearization is that Kim’s likely biggest priority is ensuring the survival of his regime.

    And if he wasn’t paranoid enough already, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (in which a nuclear power has attacked a non-nuclear power) will have served as a timely reinforcement of his belief that “nuclear weapons are the only reliable guarantee of security,” said Lankov, from Kookmin University.

    A TV screen at a railway station in Seoul, South Korea, shows an image of a North Korean missile launch on October 10, 2022.

    Trying to convince Kim otherwise seems a non-starter, as Pyongyang has made clear it will not even consider engaging with a US administration that wants to talk about denuclearization.

    “If America wants to talk about denuclearization, (North Korea is) not going to talk and if the Americans are not talking, (North Korea) will launch more and more missiles and better and better missiles,” Lankov said. “It’s a simple choice.”

    There is also the problem that if North Korea’s increasingly concerned neighbors conclude Washington’s approach is going nowhere, this might itself bring about the arms race the US is so keen to avoid.

    Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute, a Korean think tank, is among the growing number of conservative voices calling for South Korea to build its own nuclear weapons program to counter Pyongyang’s.

    Efforts to prevent North Korea developing nuclear weapons have “ended in failure,” he said, “and even now, pursuing denuclearization is like chasing a miracle.”

    Still, however remote the denuclearization dream seems, there are those who say the alternative – of accepting North Korea’s nuclear status, however subtly – would be a mistake.

    “We (would be) basically (saying to) Kim Jong Un, after all of this tug of war and rustling, (that) you’re just going to get what you want. The bigger question (then) of course is: where does that leave the entire region?” said Soo Kim, a former CIA officer who is now a researcher at US think tank RAND Corporation.

    That leaves one other option open to the Biden administration and its allies, though it’s one that may seem unlikely in the current climate.

    They could pursue a deal in which Pyongyang offers to freeze its arms development in return for sanctions relief.

    In other words, not a million miles away from the deal Kim offered then US President Donald Trump at their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019.

    This option has its backers. “A freeze is a really solid way to start things out. It’s very hard to get rid of weapons that exist, but what is possible … is to prevent things from getting worse. It takes some of the pressure off and it opens up space for other kinds of negotiations,” said Lewis of the James Martin Center.

    However, the Trump-era overtones might make this a non-starter. Asked if he thought President Biden might consider this tactic, Lewis smiled and said, “I’m a professor, so I specialize in giving advice that no one is ever going to take.”

    But even if the Biden administration was so inclined, that ship may have sailed; the Kim of 2019 was far more willing to engage than the Kim of 2022.

    And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem at the heart of all the options on the table: they rely on some form of engagement with North Korea – something entirely lacking at present.

    Kim is now focused on his five-year plan for military modernization announced in January 2021 and no offers of talks from the Biden administration or others have yet turned his head in the slightest.

    As Panda acknowledged, “There’s a set of cooperative options which would require the North Koreans being willing to sit down at the table and talk about some of those things with us. I don’t think that we are even close to sitting down with the North Koreans.”

    And, in fairness to Kim, the reticence is not all down to Pyongyang.

    “Big policy shifts in the US would require the President’s backing, and I really see no evidence that Joe Biden really sees the North Korean issue as deserving of tremendous political capital,” Panda said.

    He added what many experts believe – and what even some US and South Korean lawmakers admit behind closed doors: “We will be living with a nuclear armed North Korea probably for a few decades to come at least.”

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  • Biden and Harris set to make rare joint campaign appearance for Pennsylvania Democrats | CNN Politics

    Biden and Harris set to make rare joint campaign appearance for Pennsylvania Democrats | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will make a rare joint appearance on the campaign trail in Philadelphia Friday evening as they seek to boost Pennsylvania Democrats in the closing stretch of the election.

    Their visit comes at crucial time, with less than two weeks until Election Day, as Democrats are fighting to hold onto their narrow majority in the 50-50 Senate. Pennsylvania represents the party’s best opportunity to pick up a Senate seat, with incumbent GOP Sen. Pat Toomey retiring.

    Biden and Harris’ appearance at the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s annual Independence Dinner, a major state party fundraising event, will mark the first time the President attends an event with Democratic Senate hopeful Lt. Gov. John Fetterman since his high-stakes debate performance against Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz earlier this week.

    Two other Democratic candidates will also be an attendance, per a Democratic official – Democratic gubernational candidate Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Rep. Matt Cartwright, who is facing a tough contest in Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, which includes the President’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

    The President and vice president are set to deliver keynote remarks “about the critically-important choice before voters,” the Democratic official said, when they speak at the fundraising reception that is expected to raise $1 million.

    Biden will once again lean into his economic messaging that has peppered speeches in recent weeks as he tries to draw a contrast with “the Republicans’ mega MAGA trickle down plan,” the official said, including differences on prescription drug costs, Social Security, Medicare and tax plans.

    This will mark the President’s 19th visit to Pennsylvania since taking office, frequenting the commonwealth in a mix of official and political events in the run-up to the election, a contrast to his approach to the majority of competitive Senate races across the country.

    Biden is set to return to the Keystone state in the closing days of the campaign with expected appearances with his former boss, President Barack Obama, in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Biden’s 2020 rival, former President Donald Trump, is expected to campaign in Pennsylvania next weekend as well.

    While the President has eschewed large campaign rallies this election cycle, he has been a frequent presence on the fundraising circuit, crisscrossing the country to raise money for Democrats, including at Friday night’s dinner. Other Democratic officials expected to be in attendance on Friday night include Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, US Sen. Bob Casey, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, and Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair and state Sen. Sharif Street.

    In the final week before the election, the President is set to campaign for Democrats in Florida, including Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist and Democratic Senate nominee Rep. Val Demings, as well as travel to New Mexico for events with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and other local officials.

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  • 4 takeaways from the New York governor debate | CNN Politics

    4 takeaways from the New York governor debate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    New York Gov. Kathy Hochul squared off with Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin on Tuesday in their first and only pre-election debate, offering a series of tense and testy exchanges over crime, abortion rights, the 2020 presidential election and campaign finance ethics.

    Their one-on-one came as recent polls show a tightening race, with the Democrat’s lead having dwindled to single digits in one survey. No Republican has won statewide office in New York since 2002.

    Zeldin, a conservative backed by former President Donald Trump, has campaigned furiously on his opposition to the state’s bail reform law and criticized Hochul’s handling of crime, which has ranked high up on the list of voters’ concerns in nearly every survey of the race.

    Both candidates sought to align themselves with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who has pushed for new and substantial rollbacks to bail law, but they predictably diverged on Trump and his successor, President Joe Biden.

    Zeldin praised Trump’s policy agenda during the debate, but, in a nod to a state that voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, did not directly say whether the former President should run again in 2024.

    Hochul, breaking from some tepid statements from fellow Democrats, was clear and concise on Biden’s future. Asked if she thought he should run again, she said, “Yes, I do.”

    Here are the four big takeaways from Tuesday night’s debate.

    Crime has emerged as the central talking point of the election and that held for large portions of the debate on Tuesday, with Zeldin criticizing Hochul for not taking more aggressive steps to combat its rise and promising to fire a controversial Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan.

    Hochul responded by talking up various initiatives but also frequently tried to turn the tables on the Republican, pointing to his opposition to gun control measures, including a bipartisan deal recently passed in Congress.

    “I’m running to take back our streets,” Zeldin said in the first volley of the debate.

    Hochul dismissed her opponent’s attacks as vague and cynical.

    “You can work on keeping people scared or on keeping people safe,” she said, adding, “There is no crime fighting plan if it doesn’t include guns.”

    Zeldin sought to pivot off the gun argument by noting that firearms didn’t play a role in many recent hate crimes or when innocent bystanders have, in recent months, been pushed on to subway tracks.

    “They tell me these stories,” Zeldin said of voters he’s met, “about having to hug a pole or grab a guardrail because they’re afraid of being pushed in front of an oncoming subway car.”

    “All you have is rhetoric,” Hochul shot back. “I have a record of getting things done.”

    The state’s bail reform law, passed in 2019 but rolled back twice since, was also a flashpoint. Even after the moderators rolled out statistics showing it’s difficult to discern whether the law, which makes it more difficult to hold suspects in pre-trial detention, led to a rise in crime, both candidates – Zeldin to a much greater degree – spoke about their desire for further changes.

    Hochul has, before and during the campaign, sought new tweaks. Zeldin wants the legislation off the books entirely – a desire in step with even some liberal New Yorkers – calling it “the will of the people.”

    In a state Biden won by nearly 2 million votes, with more than 60% of ballots cast, Zeldin’s vote in Congress against certifying the election has become a reliable cudgel for Democrats.

    On Tuesday night, Hochul wielded it early and often.

    When Zeldin talked about trying to remove Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was elected to the job, Hochul connected it to the congressman’s actions after the 2020 presidential election.

    “In Lee Zeldin’s world,” she said, “you overturn elections you disagree with.”

    Zeldin said he had the “constitutional authority” and “constitutional duty” to try his best to unseat Bragg, who has been criticized for not more aggressively prosecuting low-level crime.

    Eventually, the moderators offered Zeldin an opportunity of sorts to disavow his past actions. Asked if he would, knowing what he does now, still vote against certifying the 2020 election, Zeldin demurred.

    “The issue still remains today,” the Republican said. “Election integrity should always matter.”

    Pressed then on whether he would accept defeat, should Hochul win in two weeks, Zeldin said he would – but his disdain for the question was obvious.

    “First off, losing is not an option,” Zeldin answered. “Secondly, playing along with your hypothetical question: Of course” he would accept the results, he said.

    The Republican also came under consistent attack over his anti-abortion policy views and celebration of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

    Zeldin has argued the issue is moot: New York state has passed strict abortion rights protections and, even if he wanted to, he could not change them.

    Still, he did not directly answer a question from the moderators asking whether he would sign off on new restrictions if Republicans took hold of the state legislature – something Zeldin insisted was immaterial because “it’s not happening.”

    Hochul returned to the issue frequently, touting the state law and promising to protect it from conservative politicians like Zeldin.

    “What we have in New York state is simply a codification of Roe v. Wade,” Hochul said, when asked if she would put any restrictions on abortion. She then added, “You know why nothing changed the day after the Dobbs decision? It’s because I’m the governor of New York and he’s not.”

    Zeldin also sought to fend off questions about a recent remark, which he has since walked back, stating he wanted to appoint an anti-abortion rights state health commissioner.

    “My litmus test,” he insisted, “is that (the health commissioner) is going to do an exceptional job.”

    Again though, on the issue of whether he would support funding for Planned Parenthood, Zeldin swerved and suggested it would be a bargaining chip with Democratic leaders in Albany.

    “I’ve heard from New Yorkers who say that they don’t want their tax dollars, for example, for people who live 1,500 miles away from here,” Zeldin said.

    The Bills have one of the best records in pro football this year, but Zeldin hopes they might be a losing issue for Hochul, at least outside Buffalo.

    The state this year approved $600 million in funds to build the team, which is owned by a billionaire, a new stadium in Buffalo. The county is also chipping in an estimated $250 million.

    Hochul defended what critics call a corporate handout as a job-creating maneuver – an argument belied by other cities’ past experiences doing the same – and claimed the Bills were “looking elsewhere,” or considering moving to another city, and said she’d heard from people that they’d been in contact with officials in other states.

    “You think about the identity of the community – like Broadway is to New York City, the Buffalo Bills are to Western New York,” said Hochul, a Buffalo native.

    Zeldin became exasperated at the suggestion the Bills were seriously considering leaving the city – “They’re not,” he snapped – and said the eleventh hour deal to secure the money was “irresponsible on process and substance.”

    Throughout the debate, Zeldin also criticized what he described as Hochul’s “pay to play” governorship, accusing her of trading state contract cash for campaign donations.

    Hochul rejected the charge, which has been reported on inconclusively by a number of local media outlets.

    “There has never been a quid pro quo, a policy change, because of a contribution,” the governor said, before pivoting to an attack on Zeldin’s outside support, specifically the more than $8 million invested in pro-Zeldin super PACs by Ronald Lauder, heir to the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder.

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  • Six takeaways from the Pennsylvania Senate debate between Fetterman and Oz | CNN Politics

    Six takeaways from the Pennsylvania Senate debate between Fetterman and Oz | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The first and only debate between Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz quickly devolved into a series of personal and biting attacks in what has become the highest stakes Senate race in the country.

    Throughout the night, Fetterman’s delivery was at times halting and repetitive, with the Democrat – who suffered a stroke in May – dropping words during answers and occasionally losing his train of thought. Much of the attention heading into the debate was on Fetterman’s ongoing recovery and how his struggle with auditory processing and speech could impact a debate against someone who rose to national prominence hosting a syndicated television show.

    But the debate also emphasized the deep policy differences between the candidates, with the two candidates sparring over energy policy, abortion and the economy.

    Oz clearly entered the debate hoping to cast Fetterman as someone too extreme to represent Pennsylvania, using the term “extreme” countless times to describe several the Democrat’s positions. And Fetterman, in an effort to quickly negate many of criticisms, used the phrase the “Oz rule” to describe his opponent’s relationship with the truth.

    Here are six takeaways from Tuesday night’s debate:

    Fetterman struggled to detail his position on fracking, given he once said he never supported the industry and “never” will.

    Oz came prepared on the issue, hitting Fetterman when asked about it.

    “He supports Biden’s desire to ban fracking on public lands, which are our lands, all of our lands together,” Oz said. “This is an extreme position on energy. If we unleashed our energy here in Pennsylvania, it would help everybody.”

    When Oz raised Fetterman’s comments about fracking, Fetterman pushed back.

    “I absolutely support fracking,” Fetterman said. “I believe that we need independence with energy and I believe I have walked that line my entire career.”

    He added, “I have always supported fracking and I always believe independence with our energy is critical.”

    But that isn’t true – Fetterman has a long history of antipathy toward the practice of injecting water into shale formations to free up deposits of oil and natural gas that were not economically accessible before.

    “I don’t support fracking at all and I never have,” Fetterman told a left-wing YouTube channel in 2018 when running for lieutenant governor. “And I’ve, I’ve signed the no fossil fuels money pledge. I have never received a dime from any natural gas or oil company whatsoever.”

    When the moderators noted that position, Fetterman appeared at a loss for words.

    “I do support fracking and I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking,” Fetterman said.

    Oz has declined for weeks to give a firm answer about how he would vote on a bill proposed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    And this debate was no different.

    “There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions,” Oz said when asked about abortion, before turning the issue on Fetterman and calling him “radical” and “extreme.”

    But when directly asked how he would vote on the Graham bill, Oz declined to answer, claiming he was giving a bigger answer by saying he was “not going to support federal rules that block the ability of states to do what they wish to do.”

    The lack of an answer gave Fetterman an opening.

    “I want to look into the face of every woman in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said. “You know, if you believe that the choice of your reproductive freedom belongs with Dr. Oz then you have a choice. But if you believe that the choice for abortion belongs with you and your doctor, that’s what I fight for. Roe v Wade for me is, should be the law.”

    Fetterman, however, went beyond that position during the primary.

    When asked by CNN whether he supported “any restrictions on abortion,” Fetterman said he did not. He took a similar position during a primary debate.

    Oz used the moment, again, to call Fetterman out, saying it was “important” for Fetterman to “at least acknowledge” that he had taken another position on abortion.

    But it was an Oz comment that Democrats, including the Fetterman campaign, have seized on after the debate.

    Oz said he thought the debate about abortion should be left to “women, doctors, local political leaders,” a continuation of his argument that states, not the federal government should decide the issue.

    Top Democrats see the comment as an opening to link Oz with Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a state senator who introduced a 2019 bill that would require physicians to determine if a fetal heartbeat is present prior to an abortion and prohibit the procedure if a heartbeat is detected.

    Their argument: Oz thinks politicians like Mastriano – either as state senator or possibly as governor – should decide the issue.

    The Fetterman campaign announced after the debate it would put money behind an ad highlighting the Oz comment.

    The Fetterman campaign went to great lengths to avoid debating – until the criticism from editorial boards, the Oz campaign and others became too untenable to keep resisting.

    After watching the debate in Harrisburg, even though Fetterman’s speech has shown signs of considerable improvement with every passing week since his May stroke, it’s an open question whether it was a wise decision to put him on the stage with Oz. It was, at many points, difficult to watch.

    Most, if not all, Democrats will almost certainly give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s an open question whether voters will.

    Fetterman struggled to prosecute a consistent case against Oz and to keep up with the speed of the hourlong debate. Oz, for his part, rarely talked about his rival’s recovery from a May stroke. Of course, he didn’t have to.

    If any Pennsylvania voters missed the debate, not to worry.

    There’s sure to be millions of dollars’ worth of new ads – replaying many of the uncomfortable moments – from the top Republican super PAC that doubled down on the race earlier Tuesday.

    Do debates matter? In less than two weeks, Pennsylvania voters will help answer that question. But this one will certainly reverberate for the rest of the campaign.

    In an age when politicians are being careful about how they embrace President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, that caution was not on display Tuesday night.

    When asked if he would back Trump in 2024, Oz – who received Trump’s endorsement during the contentious Republican primary in the commonwealth – said, “I will support whoever the Republican party puts up.”

    “I would support Donald Trump if he decided to run for president, but this is bigger than one candidate,” Oz said.

    And for his part, Fetterman did not run away from Biden, who has made Pennsylvania – which he flipped back to Democrats in 2020 – one of the few states he has repeatedly visited during the 2022 midterms.

    “If he does choose to run, I would absolutely support him, but ultimately, that’s ultimately only his choice,” Fetterman said. “At the end of the day, I believe Joe Biden is a good family man, and I believe he stands for the union way of life.”

    It was clear Oz was more comfortable than Fetterman on the debate stage – something Fetterman aides expected and attempted to highlight ahead of time with a pre-debate memo noting, “Dr. Oz has been a professional TV personality for the last two decades.”

    But the differences were apparent from the outset.

    Democratic Pennsylvania candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman participates in the Nexstar Pennsylvania Senate at WHTM abc27 in Harrisburg, Pa., on Tuesday, October 25, 2022.

    Fetterman appeared nervous on stage, drawing a sharp contrast with Oz, who was at ease, often smiling and seemingly comfortable.

    Fetterman attempted to hit back at Oz’s near constant barbs, at times interrupting while the candidate was answering – most noticeably during the closing arguments.

    “You want to cut Social Security,” Fetterman interjected as Oz was speaking about meeting seniors worried about their Social Security checks.

    Oz kept speaking, as moderator WPXI anchor Lisa Sylvester chimed in, “Mr. Fetterman, it’s his turn for his closing.”

    Oz avoided attacking Fetterman’s stroke recovery, a move that was out of step with his campaign, which at times used a mocking tone to attack the Democrat. But Oz did point out that his opponent only agreed to take the debate stage once.

    “This is the only debate I could get you to come to talk to me on, and I had to beg on my knees to get you to come in,” Oz said.

    Fetterman again declined to release more medical information beyond the two letters his primary doctors have put out. Most recently, Fetterman’s doctor wrote that the Democrat “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.”

    Fetterman said he deferred to his “real doctors” on whether to release more medical information, a subtle dig at Oz, and stressed his presence on the stage and activity on the campaign trail was proof enough that he was fit for the job.

    “Transparency is about showing up. I’m here today to have a debate. I have speeches in front of 3,000 people in Montgomery County, all across Pennsylvania, big, big crowds,” Fetterman said. “You know, I believe If my doctor believes that I’m fit to serve, and that’s what I believe is appropriate.”

    When pressed by moderator WHTM abc27 News anchor Dennis Owens, Fetterman replied, “My doctor believes I’m fit to be serving.”

    This story has been updated with more from the debate.

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