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“The people have spoken, and we’re ready for a new direction,” Mayor-elect William Cogswell said Tuesday.
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Tag: Election 2023
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Kentucky gubernatorial rivals offer contrasting themes on campaign trail
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SHELBYVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear pledged Friday to redouble his push for higher teacher pay and universal access to early childhood education if he wins reelection, offering a glowing assessment of Kentucky’s future that he said was fueled by record economic development gains that have occurred on his watch.
His Republican challenger, Attorney General Daniel Cameron, offered a sharply different appraisal while campaigning on the same day. In remarks that largely steered away from the state of the economy, Cameron hammered at Beshear for his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and for the incumbent’s stance on issues related to transgender youth.
Cameron also stressed his staunch opposition to abortion, saying he wants to “make sure that our most cherished and valued asset, our unborn, have every opportunity to reach their fullest and God-given potential.”
Kentucky’s ban on gender-affirming care for young transgender people has been restored by a federal judge.
Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has touted robust revenue collections as another sign of a surging state economy.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Daniel Cameron wants to award recruitment and retention bonuses to bolster police forces across Kentucky.
The two candidates laid out clear differences in this year’s hotly contested campaign for Kentucky’s top political office, a race that could offer fresh glimpses into voter sentiment heading into 2024 elections that will determine control of the White House and Congress.
At a campaign stop that drew an overflow crowd at a Shelbyville coffee shop, Beshear said Kentuckians have “been through a lot together” during his tenure — recalling the global pandemic along with tornadoes and flooding that ravaged parts of the state. Through it all, he said, the state has achieved record-setting economic development gains that have the state primed for greater opportunities.
“I am feeling more optimistic and more hopeful for our commonwealth than ever before.” Beshear said.
Afterward, the governor said he would continue pushing for significantly higher pay for public school teachers. He said Kentucky can’t continue on its trajectory of economic momentum if it lags behind other states in what it pays its teachers.
Beshear said he would again include funding for universal pre-K in the budget plan he presents to lawmakers next year if he wins reelection to a second term in November. Such access to preschool “solves child-care problems” for many parents and “makes sure that no one starts kindergarten behind,” the governor said.
Cameron has said he would push to raise starting pay for Kentucky teachers and reduce their administrative paperwork if he’s elected governor.
On Thursday, Beshear said the state was poised to record its largest-ever revenue surplus of $1.4 billion from the fiscal year that recently ended. The exact amount will be known once accounting records for expenditures are completed this month.
The governor said Friday that he also wants to bolster funding for public safety, which includes equipping Kentucky law enforcement officers with “the most advanced” body armor.
On Tuesday, Cameron proposed awarding recruitment and retention bonuses to bolster police forces
During his campaign stop Friday in Meade County, Cameron offered up his vision for public education.
“It’s about having a world-class education system that is about reading, writing and math and making sure that our schools don’t become incubators for liberal and progressive ideas,” he said.
Cameron pounded away at Beshear’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the issue that dominated the first couple of years of the governor’s term. The Republican challenger said the governor’s virus-related restrictions forced some businesses to close while others were allowed to stay open. Beshear has staunchly defended his actions, saying the restrictions saved lives.
Cameron also took aim at Beshear’s veto of a bill banning transgender girls and women from participating in school sports matching their gender identity from sixth grade through college.
“His is a vision … that said it is OK for biological males to play women’s sports,” Cameron said.
Beshear, meanwhile, accused his opponent of pounding a “steady drumbeat of division, of anger.”
“That is not who we are as people, and it is not what we can allow to win this election,” Beshear said. “Think about it — an election where we run saying everybody has value, everyone should be a part of what’s to come. That is exactly who we are as Kentuckians.”
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Philadelphia’s likely next mayor could offer model for how Democrats talk about crime
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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Democrat who will almost certainly become Philadelphia’s next mayor wants to hire hundreds of additional police officers to walk their beats and get to know residents. She wants to devote resources to recruiting more police and says officers should be able to stop and search pedestrians if they have a legitimate reason to do so.
Those positions, particularly the search policies that have been criticized for wrongly targeting people of color, would seem out of step in a progressive bastion like Philadelphia. But Cherelle Parker trounced her rivals in this week’s mayoral primary with a message that centered on tougher law enforcement to combat rising crime and violence.
While local politics don’t always align with the ideological divides that guide the national debate, Parker’s victory offers a fresh case study for Democrats as they wrestle with how to approach the issue of violent crime, which increased in many U.S. cities during the pandemic and continues to be top of mind for voters across the country. The issue has divided Democrats from city halls to the White House, particularly over how much to rely on policing and incarceration to solve what many see as social problems, such as drug abuse and homelessness.
Parker, a former state legislator and city council member, argued that it’s a false choice to decide between investing in policing and addressing broader societal problems.
“It is not either/or,” the 50-year-old Parker said during the campaign.
That approach helped her defeat progressive rival Helen Gym by more than 25,000 votes. Gym, who advocated for measures including stronger police training and faster 911 response times, was backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and appeared with the lawmakers at a rally on the eve of the election. Gym and her supporters blamed her loss, in part, on late attacks funded by wealthy donors who opposed her progressive policies.
The debate over policing intensified in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police prompted worldwide protests about policing and calls to defund police — a push that the GOP used against Democrats in 2020 elections. While Democrat Joe Biden won that year, some moderate Democrats said the party wasn’t quick enough to denounce it.
In major U.S. cities that are Democratic strongholds, voters also have been divided in recent years.
New York elected Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who vowed to invest more in public safety, and San Francisco voters recalled a progressive prosecutor amid frustration about public safety. In Chicago, progressive Brandon Johnson — who favored investing in areas like housing and youth jobs — topped a more moderate rival who had support from the police union. And progressive prosecutor Kim Foxx, who prioritized violent crimes over lower-level offenses and faced blowback for dropping charges against actor Jussie Smollett, said she will not seek reelection.
In Philadelphia, Parker was the only Black candidate among the top tier of hopefuls on Tuesday and she was backed by majority Black precincts across the city in both early and Election Day ballots. In addition to 300 more officers, her public safety plan also called for fixing broken streetlights, removing graffiti and investing in programs for at-risk youth.
Parker also defended her support for “Terry stops,” or for officers to use “just and reasonable suspicion” to stop pedestrians. She and other candidates faced criticism including a protest at City Hall last month from those opposed to “stop and frisk.”
The policy has riled the city in the past, with critics saying it was used disproportionately against Black and Brown pedestrians. According to ACLU Pennsylvania, Philadelphia police nearly doubled the number of pedestrian stops during Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration in the 2000s. Civil rights lawyers said at least half of the more than 250,000 such stops in 2009 didn’t meet the legal standard, and almost none resulted in arrest. The ACLU sued to stop the practice, and monitors police use of stop and frisk under a settlement with the city.
“We want to build that relationship and we also want folks to know that there will be zero tolerance for any misuse and or abuse of authority,” Parker said in response to questions about her position. “But a proactive law enforcement presence is a key part of that plan, and I am unapologetic about it.”
Tuesday’s result suggests the salience of police reform may be subsiding from the days when people were protesting in overwhelming numbers, said Michael Sances, a political science professor at Temple University.
”(Crime) has crowded out concerns about overpolicing,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that people have become anti-reform, that can easily be surfaced. It’s just a sign of where the public’s attention is, and where political leaders have moved, and that’s really toward the center.”
Philadelphia saw a record number of homicides in 2021, most of them gun-related. That number fell from 562 to 516 in 2022, but was still significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. On Wednesday, an 18-year-old was rearrested in Philadelphia after he escaped from a prison in the city along with another inmate. The man was being held on charges in four slayings.
But in a reminder that there’s no easy trend line on the political dynamics related to crime, voters in Pittsburgh made a turn to the left in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for county prosecutor. Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, in office for nearly a quarter century, is trailing challenger Matt Dugan by double digits in unofficial returns, although Republicans launched a write-in campaign for him so the two could face off again in November.
Dugan, the county’s chief public defender, ran on a range of progressive policies, including eliminating cash bail, diverting low-level and nonviolent crimes, and emphasizing mental health and substance abuse treatment.
What happens in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh could have national implications as Pennsylvania will again be a prime battleground in 2024.
Biden has walked a difficult line on crime, policing and the communities that have been disproportionately impacted by both. The president has said it’s possible to bring down crime and also reform criminal justice and policing at the same time, though Republicans claim crime is up because of those reforms.
Biden often says he believes police need better tools and training, calling them heroes who do a difficult job. He’s also been vocal about the need to reform how policing has worked in Black and other nonwhite communities in the wake of the deaths of Floyd and other Black people killed by police.
This week, the Senate voted to overturn a local Washington, D.C. law enacted to improve police accountability that was backed by the district’s Democratic mayor. It was the second time this year that Democrats joined with Republicans to reject a D.C. measure amid high rates of crime. Earlier, Biden agreed with the GOP that some of the measures — such as lowering penalties for carjackings — went too far.
Biden was expected to veto this week’s vote, which would mean upholding the D.C. law, saying that while he doesn’t back all provisions in the D.C. law he does support “commonsense police reforms” that are part of it, such as banning chokeholds, limiting the use of deadly force and improving access to body cameras and requiring additional training.
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Burnett reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington and Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
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Brooke Schultz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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Kentucky is latest battleground for secretaries of state facing election falsehoods during primaries
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Kentucky’s secretary of state has won bipartisan praise during his first term in office for expanding voter access during the COVID-19 pandemic and overseeing elections that have been free of widespread problems.
That record still hasn’t paved a clear path to reelection for Republican Michael Adams. He now must persuade primary voters who have been bombarded for years with false claims about rigged elections.
He faces one challenger in Tuesday’s GOP primary who has promoted debunked election claims and another who favors pulling Kentucky out of a multistate effort designed to detect voter fraud, an effort being pushed by conspiracy theorists in conservative states.
The battle for Kentucky’s top elections post follows similar campaigns during last year’s midterm elections, when candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election won GOP primaries in numerous states. A handful of them went on to win the office in deeply Republican states, but each of those candidates lost in the closely contested swing states that typically decide presidential elections.
Adams, a lawyer, soundly defeated Steve Knipper in the primary four years ago. Knipper, who has questioned the result of the 2020 presidential election, is back for another run along with another Republican, Allen Maricle, a former state representative and television station executive. The winner will face Democrat Buddy Wheatley, a former state representative who recently lost reelection. He is unopposed in his primary.
Adams earned praise from both parties for increasing voting opportunities and allowing mail-in ballots in the 2020 elections during the pandemic. He has raised significantly more campaign cash than his two opponents. But he said the political landscape has shifted dramatically for secretary of state races around the country, namely because of a wave of conspiracy theories and false allegations after the 2020 presidential race.
“This job has gotten a lot more high-profile than it used to be,” Adams said. “And I think the big question in this election is, which direction are we going to go in?”
Adams, 47, has had harsh words for election skeptics, calling them “cranks and kooks” who shouldn’t be in charge of Kentucky’s election process.
State and local election officials continue to grapple with the fallout from former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The lies he continues to tell, including during a televised town hall, earlier this week, not only undermine confidence in elections, particularly among Republicans, but have led to harassment and death threats against election officials and their staff.
Reviews in multiple states, including ones controlled by Republicans, have shown there was no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines. Dozens of judges, including several nominated by Trump, also rejected his claims.
Knipper, 52, won the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2015 before losing to Democratic incumbent Alison Grimes in the general election. The former city council member from a small town across the Ohio River from Cincinnati was a staffer under former Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, but was fired by former Republican Gov. Matt Bevin.
Knipper and a former colleague of his in the lieutenant governor’s office who also was swept out by Bevin, Adrienne Southworth, have been touring the state together alleging — without evidence — election fraud in the 2019 governor’s race won by Democrat Andy Beshear and in the 2020 presidential election.
Knipper said he has raised more money and enjoyed more support from the public than during his previous two races, and is running television ads for the first time.
“I’ve had enthusiasm, but I have never had this much enthusiasm behind me,” he said.
Maricle has campaigned on his experience in the Kentucky Legislature, saying he is the only candidate who has a voting record on election legislation. That includes support for a bill in the 1990s that allowed voters who were in line at the time of poll closings to remain in line and finish voting.
Maricle, 60, is critical of Knipper’s election skepticism, saying Knipper has provided no evidence.
“He’s said these elections have been stolen through the machines — prove it,” Maricle said.
But Maricle also has campaigned on moving the state out of a multistate system intended to combat voter fraud. He said he is taking a cue from other Republican secretaries of state critical of it and said it is not doing a good enough job helping states clear their voter rolls.
“It’s flawed,” he said. “You have nine Republican states in the last 90 days do away with that system.”
Knipper has also sought to capitalize on the issue, which has divided Republican state election officials. In a March release, he urged supporters to call on Adams to withdraw Kentucky from the bipartisan effort, which has found itself in the crosshairs of conspiracy theories fueled by Trump’s false claims.
In the release, Knipper repeated claims that the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voluntary system known as ERIC, was funded by George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. While ERIC received initial funding from the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts, that money was separate from the money provided to Pew by a Soros-affiliated organization that went to an unrelated effort, according to ERIC’s executive director, Shane Hamlin.
Knipper’s stance on the ERIC system won him the vote of Dae Combs, a 63-year-old Louisville resident who visited an early voting location on Thursday.
“I’m just concerned that it would be easily manipulated,” Combs said. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, but I just think there needs to be more investigation into it.”
Combs said she doesn’t question the results of the 2020 election despite her support of Knipper.
Biden “is our president and we kind of go with the system. This is our system, it’s the best system in the world, but I do think there is room to look at things and not just take things at face value.”
Louisiana has left a group of states using the ERIC system after a series of online posts early last year questioning its funding and purpose. Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia subsequently provided notice that they, too, would leave. Texas has said it’s working on an alternative effort and is unlikely to stay. Kentucky is among six Republican-led states that have so far remained.
Judy Davenport, who was voting in Louisville on her 62nd birthday, said her vote for Adams was influenced by Knipper’s election skepticsm.
“I’m not an election denier,” she said.
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Cassidy reported from Atlanta.
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Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Oklahomans head to polls for one issue: legal marijuana
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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma voters will decide Tuesday whether to make the state one of the most conservative to green light cannabis use for adults.
State Question 820, the result of a signature gathering drive last year, is the only item on the statewide ballot. Other conservative states have legalized recreational cannabis use, including Montana in 2020 and Missouri last year, but several have rejected it, including Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota.
The plan faces opposition from leaders of several faith groups, along with law enforcement and prosecutors, led by former Republican Gov. Frank Keating, an ex-FBI agent, and Terri White, the former head of the state’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.
“We don’t want a stoned society,” Keating said Monday, flanked by district attorneys and law enforcement officers from across the state.
The proposal, if passed, would allow anyone over the age of 21 to purchase and possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, plus concentrates and marijuana-infused products. People could also legally grow up to 12 marijuana plants. Recreational sales would be subjected to a 15% excise tax on top of the standard sales tax. The excise tax would be used to help fund local municipalities, the court system, public schools, substance abuse treatment and the state’s general revenue fund.
The proposal also outlines a judicial process for people to seek expungement or dismissal of prior marijuana-related convictions.
Oklahoma voters already approved medical marijuana in 2018 by 14 percentage points and the state has one of the most liberal programs in the country, with roughly 10% of the state’s adult population having a medical license.
The low barriers for entry into the industry has led to a flood of growers, processors and dispensary operators competing for a limited number of customers. Supporters also say the state’s marijuana industry would be buoyed by a rush of out-of-state customers, particularly from Texas, which has close to 8 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area just a little more than an hour drive from the Oklahoma border.
“We do have one of the most permissible (medical) programs in the country, but the idea that you have to spend your time and money to go to a doctor and basically buy immunity from criminal prosecution is a pay-to-play system that I just don’t like,” said Ryan Kiesel, a former state lawmaker and one of the organizers of the Yes on 820 campaign.
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