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I recently read an advance copy of Andrew Yang’s new book. Here’s my review.
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Evan Barker, The Times
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Tag: Election 2024
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Andrew Yang: I Was Glad To Be Blacklisted by Harris Camp | RealClearPolitics
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5 years after transcript withholding bans began, college students face fewer obstacles but advocates worry about enforcement
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OAKLAND — In 2020, California led the nation in outlawing transcript-withholding, a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Five years later, 24 of the state’s 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey.
The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, the state’s students have benefited from the law.
It “raises questions about what actual institutional practices are at colleges and the extent to which colleges know the law and are fully compliant with the law,” said Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced sociology professor who led the research team that conducted the survey in October.
California community colleges say they are following the law, which prohibits them from refusing to release the grades of a student who owes money to the school — anywhere from a $25 library fine to unpaid tuition. The misinformation on some college websites is a clerical problem that campuses have been asked to update, the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said in an emailed statement.
Without an official transcript, students can’t prove they’ve earned college credits to admissions offices elsewhere or to potential employers. Millions of students nationwide have lost access to their transcripts because of unpaid fees, according to estimates from the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R.
Student advocates argued that the practice made little money for colleges, while costing graduates opportunities that could help them pay back their debts.
California lawmakers agreed; in 2019, they passed legislation that took effect on Jan. 1 2020, barring colleges from using transcript holds to collect debts.
At least 12 other states have followed California’s lead, passing laws limiting or banning colleges from withholding transcripts.
A similar but less stringent federal rule approved during the Biden administration took effect last year.
The new rules have raised awareness about colleges’ debt collection practices and inspired some to find ways to help their students avoid falling behind on their payments in the first place or to pay off what they owe — including by forgiving their debts.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Transcript withholding was never an especially effective collection tool, researchers have found. One 2018 study estimated that Ohio’s public colleges only netted only $127 for each transcript they withheld.
Colleges and universities, however, argued that withholding transcripts was one of the few ways they had to prevent students from bouncing among institutions and leaving unpaid bills in their wake. Some use another tactic, blocking them from registering for new courses until bills are paid.
When colleges choose to withhold transcripts, the burden falls more heavily on low-income students and students of color, according to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Often those students accrue debts when they withdraw partway through a course, leading the college to return part of their financial aid to the federal government and charge the bill to the student.
In states with laws limiting transcript withholding, many colleges have begun communicating earlier and more often with students about their debts and offering flexible payment plans, said Elizabeth Looker, a senior program manager at Ithaka S+R. Some have added financial literacy training or required students with unpaid bills to meet with counselors.
Court documents show Annette Ayala’s legal battle with Professional Medical Careers Institute after they withheld her transcripts over claims of a debt she owed the college. Ayala won in court and is in the process of applying to RN programs near her home in Simi Valley. Credit: Keri Oberly for The Hechinger Report Eight public colleges and universities in Ohio went further, offering a deal to former students with unpaid balances: Reenroll at any of the eight, and get up to $5,000 of the outstanding debt forgiven. Called the Ohio College Comeback Compact, the program, which began in 2002 and concludes this fall, was open to former students who had at least a 2.0 GPA and had been out of school a year or more.
The program was designed to give a second chance to students whose educations stalled because of events outside their control, such as losing a job in the middle of the semester, said Steve McKellips, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Akron.
Since the Ohio College Compact’s inception, 79 students have returned to the university under the program, at a cost to the state of $54,174 in debt forgiven. The university netted five times that, or $271,924, in additional tuition, McKellips said. More than 700 students have used the compact to reenroll, according to Ithaka S+R, which helped coordinate the program and is studying the results.
“I think sometimes people have this image of somebody walking away from a tuition bill because they just don’t care,” McKellips said. “But sometimes there’s just a boulder in the way and somebody needs to move it. Once the boulder was moved and they could move forward, we’re finding them continuing happily along the way they always intended to.”
Related: City University of New York reverses its policy on withholding transcripts over unpaid bills
Another California bill, introduced this year, would have given students a one-time pass to register for courses, even if they owed a debt. It failed after the University of California, Cal State and many private colleges and universities opposed it.
The University of California cited expected cuts to federal and state funding as one reason it opposed the bill. “UC believes that maintaining the ability to hold registration is essential for its ability to reasonably secure unpaid student debt,” UC legislative director Jessica Duong wrote to lawmakers.
Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said that Cal State wanted a flexible approach to debt collection and that campuses had started eliminating registration holds for minor debts such as parking tickets and lost library books.
“Students are able to move forward with their enrollment even with institutional debts in the low hundreds to the low thousands of dollars, depending upon the university,” she said.
Supporters of the failed bill — which also would have barred colleges from reporting a student’s institutional debt to credit agencies — said curbing aggressive debt collection doesn’t just help low-income students; it speeds up the training of workers in industries crucial to the state’s economy.
“Schools think about these institutional debts in a way that is very penny-wise and pound-foolish, and it’s preventing people from participating in the economy,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers.
Related: Colleges fight attempts to stop them from withholding transcripts over unpaid bills
Annette Ayala of Simi Valley, hoping to become a registered nurse, took her for-profit college to court to force it to comply with California’s debt collection law.
She had earned her vocational nursing license from the school, the Professional Medical Careers Institute, and wanted to continue her studies to become a registered nurse. But the college refused to release her transcript — citing a $7,500 debt that Ayala argued in court records she did not owe — and without the transcript she could not apply to other colleges.
In her case, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates for-profit colleges under the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, cited her former school for violating the state’s transcript-withholding law.
Having earned a vocational nursing license from a for-profit college, Annette Ayala of Simi Valley, California, wanted to continue her studies and become an RN. Her college refused to release her transcript, citing a disputed debt, but Ayala took the school to court and won her case, under a California law that prohibits transcript withholding. Credit: Keri Oberly for The Hechinger Report The college was fined $1,000 and ordered to update its enrollment agreement. The school forgave the debt it said Ayala owed. It’s the only case in which a school has been cited for withholding a transcript since the bureau started monitoring compliance with the law more closely two years ago, said Monica Vargas, a spokesperson for consumer affairs.
School officials had been unaware of the California law at the time Ayala sued, the school’s controller, Joshua Taylor, said, and have since updated their catalog to comply with it.
With her vocational nursing license, Ayala has been working in home health care. Now that she has her transcript, she’s applying for RN programs, and said her salary would roughly double once she has the new degree, allowing her to save for the future and help her son pay for college.
“You’ve got to give people the chance to get through their program and pay their debts as they’re working,” she said. “You can’t hold them back from being able to make top dollar with their abilities to pay back these loans.”
Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at 212-678-4078 or mifflin@hechingerreport.org
This story about student debt and transcript withholding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to ourhigher education podcast.
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Felicia Mello
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Trump administration checks off many Project 2025 education goals
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Last year, Project 2025 was a conservative wish list: a grab bag of proposals large and small that would transform the federal government, including in education.
Months later, many of those wishes have become reality. That includes, at least in part, Project 2025’s ultimate goal of doing away with the Education Department.
The department still exists — getting rid of it completely would require congressional action— but it is greatly diminished: Much of the department’s work is being farmed out to other federal agencies. Half of its workforce of about 4,100 people have left or been fired. And Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote after her confirmation that she was leading the department’s “final mission.”
Eliminating the Education Department was just one of many goals, however. While the administration did not meet all the other tasks in this “to-do” list below, compiled by The Hechinger Report and taken directly from Project 2025, there’s still three more years to go.
Early childhood
Eliminate Head Start: NO. Head Start, which provides free preschool for low-income children, still exists, though some individual centers had problems accessing their money because of temporary freezes from the Department of Government Efficiency and the prolonged government shutdown. The federal government also closed five of 10 Head Start regional offices, which collectively served 22 states.
Pay for in-home child care instead of universal (center-based) daycare: NO. Project 2025 states that “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” There have been no moves to fulfill this goal, but the budget reconciliation bill the president signed in July increased the child tax credit and introduced “Trump Accounts” for children under age 18.
Expand child care for military families: YES. The National Defense Authorization Act, passed on Dec. 17 and sent to the president for his signature, authorizes over $491 million to design and build new child care centers for these families, among other provisions. The Department of Defense provides child care to military families on a sliding scale based on income. However, about 20 percent of military families who need child care can’t get it because there is not enough space.
Give businesses an incentive to provide “on-site” child care: NO. Project 2025 states that “across the spectrum of professionalized child care options, on-site care puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.”
K-12 education
Move the National Center for Education Statistics to the Census Bureau; transfer higher education statistics to the Labor Department: NO. Education data collection remains at the Education Department. However, the agency’s capacity has been sharply reduced following mass firings and the termination of key contracts — a development not envisioned in Project 2025. At the same time, Donald Trump directed the center to launch a major new data collection on college admissions to verify that colleges are no longer giving preferences based on race, ethnicity or gender.
Expand choice for families by making federal funding portable to many school options: PARTIAL. In January, the president signed an executive order encouraging “educational freedom.” One of the order’s provisions requires the departments of Defense and Interior — which run K-12 schools for military families and tribal communities, respectively — to allow parents to use some federal funding meant for their children’s education at private, religious and charter schools. However, that initiative for Indian schools ended up being scaled back after tribes protested. The “big, beautiful” spending bill signed in July created a national voucher program, but states have to opt in to participate.
Send money now controlled by the federal government, such as Title I and special education funding, to the states as block grants: NO. In the current fiscal year, about $18.5 billion in Title I money flowed to districts to support low-income students. States received about $14 billion to support educating children with disabilities. Project 2025 envisions giving states that money with no strings attached, which it says would allow more flexibility. While the administration has not lifted requirements for all states, it is considering requests from Indiana, Iowa and Oklahoma that would allow those states to spend their federal money with less government oversight. Also, in his fiscal 2026 budget proposal, Trump floated the idea of consolidating several smaller education programs, such as those supporting rural students, homeless students and after-school activities, into one $2 billion block grant. That would be far less than the combined $6.5 billion set aside for these programs in the current budget.
Reject “radical gender ideology” and “critical race theory,” and eliminate requirements to accept such ideology as a condition of receiving federal funds: YES. Immediately after Trump was sworn into office, he reversed a Biden administration rule that included protection of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal money. Trump also signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal dollars from schools over what the order called “gender ideology extremism” and “critical race theory.” In the months since, the administration launched Title IX investigations in school districts where transgender students are allowed to participate on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. It sent letters to schools across the country threatening to pull funding unless they agree to its interpretation of civil rights laws, to include banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and initiatives. The Education Department also pulled federal research grants and investigated schools and colleges over DEI policies it calls discriminatory.
Pass a federal “parents’ bill of rights,” modeled after similar bills passed at the state level: NO. House Republicans passed a Parents’ Bill of Rights Act two years ago, which would have required districts to post all curricula and reading materials, require schools receiving Title I money to notify parents of any speakers visiting a school, and mandate at least two teacher-parent conferences each year, among other provisions. The Senate did not take it up, and lawmakers have not reintroduced the bill in this session of Congress. About half of the states have their own version of a parentsʼ bill of rights.
Shrink the pool of students eligible for free school meals by ending the “community eligibility provision” and reject universal school meal efforts: NO. Under current rules, schools are allowed to provide free lunch to all students, regardless of their family’s income, if the school or district is in a low-income area. That provision remains in place. The Trump administration has not changed income eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price lunch at schools: Families that earn within 185 percent of the federal poverty line still qualify for reduced lunch and those within 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch.
Higher education
Roll back student loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment plans: PARTIAL. Three income-driven repayment plans will be phased out next year and a new one — the Repayment Assistance Plan — will be added. RAP requires borrowers to make payments for 30 years before they qualify for loan forgiveness. The administration also reached a proposed agreement to end even earlier the most controversial repayment plan known as SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education). Trump officials have referred to the SAVE plan as illegal loan forgiveness. Under the plan, some borrowers were eligible to have their loans cleared after only 10 years, while making minimal payments.
End Parent PLUS loans: PARTIAL. These loans, which parents take out to help their children, had no limit. They still exist, but as of July 2026, there will be an annual cap of $20,000 and a lifetime limit of $65,000 per child. Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate students to borrow directly on behalf of themselves, are being phased out. Under the Repayment Assistance Plan, graduates in certain fields, such as medicine, can borrow no more than $50,000 a year, or $200,000 over four years.
Privatize the federal student loan portfolio: NO. The Trump administration reportedly has been shopping a portion of the federal student loan portfolio to private buyers, but no bids have been made public. Project 2025 also called for eliminating the Federal Student Aid office, which is now housed in the Education Department and oversees student loan programs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the Treasury Department would be a better home for the office, but no plans for a move have been announced.
End public service loan forgiveness: NO. PSLF allows borrowers to have part of their debt erased if they work for the government or in nonprofit public service jobs and make at least 120 monthly payments. The structure remains, but a new rule could narrow the definition of the kinds of jobs that qualify for loan forgiveness. The proposed rule raises concerns that borrowers working for groups that assist immigrants, transgender youth or provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians, for example, could be disqualified from loan forgiveness. The new rule would go into effect in July.
Rescind Biden-era rules around sexual assault and discrimination: YES. The Department of Education almost immediately jettisoned changes that the Biden administration had made in 2024 to Title IX, which governs how universities and colleges handle cases of sexual assault and discrimination. Under the Biden rules, blocked by a federal judge days before Trump’s inauguration, accused students were no longer guaranteed the right to in-person hearings or to cross-examine their accusers. The Trump Education Department then returned to a policy from the president’s first term, under which students accused of sexual assault will be entitled to confront their accusers, through a designee, which the administration says restores due process but advocates say will discourage alleged victims from coming forward.
Reform higher education accreditation: YES. In an executive order, Trump made it easier for accreditors to be stripped of their authority and new ones to be approved, saying the existing bodies — which, under federal law, oversee the quality of colleges and universities — have ignored poor student outcomes while pushing diversity, equity and inclusion. Florida and Texas have started setting up their own accreditors and said the administration has agreed to expedite the typically yearslong approval process. The Department of Education has earmarked $7 million to support this work and help colleges and universities switch accreditors.
Dismantle DEI programs and efforts: PARTIAL. Though the administration called for eliminating college DEI programs and efforts, most of the colleges that have shut down their DEI offices have done so in response to state-level legislation. Around 400 books removed from the Naval Academy library because of concerns that they contained messages of diversity or inclusion, but most of the books were ultimately returned. The National Science Foundation canceled more than 400 grants related to several topics, including DEI.
Jill Barshay, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Neal Morton and Olivia Sanchez contributed to this report.
This story about Project 2025 and education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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Christina A. Samuels
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Winning One Election Hasn’t Saved America From the Left’s Assault | RealClearPolitics
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The left has captured culture, sports, media, Hollywood, academia, and corporate America thanks to a relentless, 50-year siege designed to remake America in its own image in the face of widespread opposition to its ideas and programs.
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Sean Davis, X
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The conspiracy theorists who claim Kamala Harris really won in 2024
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Election denial has lately come to be viewed as a feature of the political right, reflected by the lawsuits, conspiratorial documentaries, and “Stop the Steal” protests that followed Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. But in the months since 2024, a similar—albeit much quieter—form of election denial has emerged in parts of the progressive left.
These theories range from claims that Elon Musk used Starlink satellites to hack the election to a the quasi-mystical TikTok subculture known as the “4 A.M. Club,” whose members believe the timeline glitched and Kamala Harris won in a parallel reality. But the most prominent claims have been rooted in data-heavy spreadsheets and statistical jargon.
One of the most popular of these theories suggests that a 2024 National Security Agency audit confirmed that Kamala Harris won the election, a claim which gained notoriety after it appeared in This Will Hold, an anonymously published Substack. The post alleges that one of the audit’s supposed participants, an ex-CIA officer named Adam Zarnowski, possessed insider information about a global cabal of corrupt actors, international criminals, foreign operatives, billionaires, and political insiders who conspired together to manipulate the election’s outcome.
As The Atlantic recently reported, there is no independent verification of Zarnowski’s background beyond his own claims. A LinkedIn profile describes him as a “former CIA paramilitary operations officer” but provides no evidence that he is an expert in election security or statistics. Snopes has been unable to “independently verify Zarnowski’s employment with the CIA or his alleged involvement in [the] NSA audit.”
The Election Truth Alliance (ETA), a self-described nonpartisan watchdog group, has used statistical models to push claims that Harris won the election. In Rockland County, New York, for example, Harris received fewer votes for president than incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) did for Senate. The ETA suggests that possible election tampering can be inferred from this discrepancy.
But Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that this apparent discrepancy isn’t unusual and can easily be explained. Stewart attributes Harris’ weaker performance to her unpopularity among the county’s Orthodox Jewish voters relative to Gillibrand, as well as the broader trend of voters skipping races or voting split-ticket.
The organization’s claims go further. In a recent interview with the progressive commentator David Pakman, the ETA’s Nathan Taylor claimed that vote patterns in Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania illustrate a series of unusual relationships between candidate support and voter turnout. Using color-coded heat maps, Taylor asserts that his group has discovered statistical distortions similar to those seen in countries with a reputation for fraudulent election practices, such as Russia and Uganda. Using these maps, Taylor alleges that up to 190,000 votes cast in Pennsylvania may have been algorithmically shifted, which would be more than enough to flip the state.
To lend credibility to these claims, the ETA circulated a working paper by the University of Michigan political scientist Walter Mebane that used statistical techniques to examine Pennsylvania’s 2024 election results. Mebane told The Atlantic that while he was aware the group had used his public methodology and data models, he had not reviewed their findings and did not endorse their conclusions.
To this day, no court case or credible audit has validated any of these claims. Independent experts have repeatedly affirmed that the 2024 election, like the 2020 election before it, was secure and legitimate. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters in November 2024 that her office detected no threat that could “materially impact” the outcome, assuring everyone that “our election infrastructure has never been more secure” and that election officials were better prepared than ever to deliver a “safe, secure, free, and fair” process.
Although this is hardly the first time that members of the left have questioned an election’s outcome, political scientist Justin Grimmer told The Atlantic that this behavior is also “strikingly similar” to that of those on the right who rejected the 2020 election results. “The most remarkable thing,” he added, “is the similarity in the analysis that we’re seeing from the bad claims made after 2020 and these similarly bad, really poorly set up claims from 2024.”
David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research put it more bluntly, telling the magazine that these claims “ring as hollow and grifting as nearly identical claims made by those who profited off the Big Lie that Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election.”
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Jacob R. Swartz
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Was the United States ready for a female president? – WTOP News
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The glass ceiling remains unbroken when it comes to the United States’ highest office. One expert explains to WTOP why that is.
Listen live to 103.5 FM for WTOP’s team coverage of national and local race results and visit WTOP’s Election 2024 page for comprehensive coverage. Click here for more on Virginia’s election results.
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In order to view the video you must disable your ad blocker.Vice President Harris delivers concession speech at Howard
The glass ceiling remains intact when it comes to the United States’ highest office. Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election and Donald Trump will return to the White House. But data shows most voters see gender as less important to a politician’s standing than other factors.
In the summer of 2023, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey about women in leadership. At the time, there was not a specific female candidate on the presidential ballot. Biden was running for reelection, and although Nikki Haley was in the race, the conversation was mostly following Trump.
“We really wanted people to just react to the notion of having a female president and what that means to them,” said Juliana Horowitz, the senior associate director for social trends research at the Pew Research Center.
They asked voters whether a woman would be better at handling certain policy areas than a male president. For the most part, Americans said they don’t think the gender of the candidate matters.
“People do tend to say that it’s really not about the candidate’s gender, that it’s more about the different things they stand for,” she said. “We don’t see a lot of evidence in our work that being a woman or that being a man, for that matter, is necessarily what’s driving people’s decisions.”
Horowitz said 46% of respondents overall said many Americans are not ready to elect a woman to such a high office. Only a quarter of Americans said it’s extremely or very likely they’ll see a female president in their lifetime.
“One of the things that we found is that most Americans did not think it was important to them, personally, for the United States to elect a woman president in their lifetime,” she said.
Early data from the 2024 election does show a gender gap, with women voting primarily for Harris at higher rates than men did. But Horowitz said the gender gap is not wider than what they’ve seen in previous elections.
‘Will there ever be a woman president?’
Imani Cheers is an associate professor of mass communications and media studies at George Washington University in D.C. Cheers said America has always grappled with dichotomies, and the country can be progressive in some ways but traditional in others.
“America has a racism and a patriarchy problem,” she said. “Will there ever be a woman president? I think so. I’m just not sure when.”
Harris could not maintain the support in battleground states that President Joe Biden earned in 2020. Cheers said she believes the economy and religious views influenced many female voters to support Trump.
Harris and other Democrats campaigned on protecting abortion rights following the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. In Cheers’ opinion, she said it was “incredibly disheartening” to not see backlash to the court’s decision.
Cheers talked about “moments of joy” on election night, such as Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks being elected as Maryland’s first Black senator.
Cheers said noted the Harris campaign was put together in 100 days, while Trump had campaigned for reelection for years.
When it comes to electing the next president in 2028, she said, whether it’s a woman or a man elected, remember, “We are currently setting up for ramifications (that are) going to last generations.”
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© 2024 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
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Linh Bui
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Can Direct Democracy Save Abortion Rights?
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In the first Presidential race since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the American electorate appeared to stake out two seemingly irreconcilable positions. Voters gave a mandate to Donald Trump, who appointed half of the conservative supermajority that abolished the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Yet, at the same time, eight states showed majority support for constitutional amendments that codified abortion rights, including five states that went for or are leaning toward Trump. In Missouri, where abortions are completely prohibited except for health emergencies, Trump won easily, but so did an amendment enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution. Trump is poised to win in Arizona, which has a fifteen-week ban, and where voters affirmed an amendment protecting abortion rights until fetal viability. A similar measure in Trump’s home state of Florida, Amendment 4, won a slightly larger majority than Trump himself did—and yet the measure failed, because it did not reach Florida’s sixty-per-cent threshold for passing constitutional amendments. The South Florida Sun Sentinel, reporting on a ballot initiative that received fifty-seven per cent of the vote, ran the headline “Voters Reject Florida Abortion Rights Amendment.”
Florida, in fact, provides a vivid microcosm of large swaths of the U.S., where solid majorities back both reproductive freedom and the man who helped take it away. In Kamala Harris’s campaign against Trump, abortion rights were the Vice-President’s strongest issue. The fury and horror that many voters felt over the Dobbs decision powered the Democrats’ surprisingly robust showing in the 2022 midterms, with Harris’s command of the subject compensating for Joe Biden’s Catholic squeamishness. In March, Harris went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to visit an abortion clinic, something that no President or Vice-President had ever done before. “So everyone get ready for the language: uterus,” Harris said to reporters during the event. “That part of the body needs a lot of medical care from time to time.” Harris’s passion and candor on reproductive rights was well matched to the broad support for this year’s ballot initiatives, but it did not translate into broader support for the candidate herself. She won just forty-three per cent of the Florida vote—five points below Biden’s statewide result in 2020.
Because Florida fell short of a supermajority on Amendment 4, the state will continue under a severe six-week ban, although it makes exceptions for patients at “a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment” and nominally permits abortions up to the fifteen-week mark in cases of rape, incest, or human trafficking. Chelsea Daniels, a family physician and abortion provider in the Miami area who campaigned on behalf of the amendment, said that exceptions in Florida law don’t do nearly enough to protect patients in dire need. Recently, one of Daniels’s patients, a rape survivor, was told by law-enforcement officers that it would take months to procure the police report she needed in order to obtain a legal abortion. Another discovered she was pregnant while undergoing treatment for cancer; the patient’s oncologist wouldn’t continue her chemotherapy regimen unless she got an abortion, but first, Daniels said, “we had to prove she met the health-exception criteria, which meant mountains of paperwork.”
Daniels, with her clinic’s legal and oncology teams, searched for a hospital that would take on the patient’s case; as days and weeks ticked by, her pregnancy continued to progress, and the abortion care she needed became more complex. Eventually, Daniels and her colleagues located a suitable hospital, hours from the patient’s home. “This was a pregnant woman dying of cancer,” Daniels said. She went on, “No one in this state wants to touch abortion with a ten-foot pole.”
Trump has declared that Florida’s abortion ban was “a terrible mistake,” and yet he also said that, as a Florida resident, he planned to vote against overturning it in the 2024 ballot initiative. (Trump delivered his victory speech on Wednesday morning in Palm Beach County, home to Mar-a-Lago, and where sixty-six per cent of voters approved of Amendment 4.) This self-contradictory stance is typical of Trump’s yes-but-no approach to reproductive freedom. He has called himself “very pro-choice,” but also the “most pro-life President ever.” He has suggested that he would support a federal ban on abortion around fifteen weeks, or after twenty weeks, but he has also said that he would veto such legislation. He has said that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who seek illegal abortions, but he has also disavowed that view, and, more recently, he has maintained that his view does not actually matter. In April, when a reporter from Time magazine asked Trump whether he would be “comfortable” with states prosecuting patients for unlawful abortions, he replied, “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.” In August, when Trump was asked whether he would direct the F.D.A. to “revoke access to mifepristone”—one of the two drugs used in medication abortion—he deferred, once again, to direct democracy. “All I want to do is give everybody a vote, and the votes are taking place right now as we speak,” he said.
In the view of our once and future President, Dobbs consecrated abortion as a states’-rights issue. “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative—they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote, and that’s what happened,” he has said. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in Dobbs, claimed that the decision “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” In other words, Alito argued, overturning Roe gave women the right to choose.
But, among the seven states that, in 2022 and 2023, affirmed abortion rights through ballot measures, some have discovered that voting on a constitutional amendment is not the same as waving a magic wand that restores abortion rights to their 1973 settings. Especially in states that placed heavy restrictions on reproductive choice after Dobbs, local officials have not necessarily shown courtly deference to the will of the people.
Ohio is a case study. After Dobbs, a six-week abortion ban was in effect in the state for close to three months until a judge put it on temporary hold; then, in 2023, voters passed an amendment insuring the individual “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” by a fifty-seven-per-cent majority. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, a Republican, conceded that the ballot measure rendered the state’s ban unconstitutional. But Yost maintained that the amendment should not disturb other rules on Ohio’s books which were explicitly designed to hinder access to abortion, including a twenty-four-hour minimum waiting period and a requirement of two in-person doctor’s visits, among other restrictions. Doctors would still be required to discuss alternatives to abortion, distribute “fetal development guides,” test for “cardiac activity,” perform unnecessary ultrasounds, and obtain patients’ signatures acknowledging receipt of information that “the unborn human individual the pregnant woman is carrying has a fetal heartbeat.” Skipping one of these steps might still leave abortion providers vulnerable to felony charges, civil penalties, or loss of their license. It was only two weeks ago that a court in Ohio officially struck down the state ban in its entirety, saying it contravened the new amendment. (Yost’s office has said that it was reviewing the order and would decide within thirty days whether to appeal.)
Erika Boothman, an ob-gyn in Columbus, told me that, one year after Ohio voted in favor of reproductive freedom, legal battles over abortion continue to create a “quagmire” for physicians in the state. “Patients don’t know what’s legal, which laws have a stay or a temporary injunction or have been overturned or aren’t being enforced, and that goes for my colleagues as well,” she said. “It’s been kind of a week-by-week thing. If you don’t follow it really closely, then you don’t know what the actual laws are at that very moment.”
Recently, Boothman saw a patient whose water broke in her second trimester, a condition known as PPROM. Boothman’s patient “did not want to continue the pregnancy because she was at risk of infection that would threaten her uterus and her life,” Boothman said. “But the fetus still had a heartbeat, and so we had to consult our ethics and legal team to see if I was legally allowed to do a D&E” —dilation and evacuation, in which the physician uses suction and surgical instruments to empty the patient’s uterus. Boothman did ultimately receive permission to perform a D&E. “But all of us were kind of, like, ‘We hope we don’t get in trouble for this,’ ” Boothman said. “We didn’t have an expert in, you know, ‘What is abortion law in Ohio on this day in this month?’ ”
In Kansas, as in Ohio, popular support for abortion rights cuts against the conservative politics that dominate the state. In 2022, just months after Dobbs was handed down, fifty-nine per cent of voters in Kansas rejected a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. Yet, last month, Kansas’s Republican attorney general, Kris Kobach, joined his counterparts in Idaho and Missouri in a lawsuit that would place extreme restrictions on medication abortion, which accounted for close to two-thirds of all abortions performed in the U.S. last year. The lawsuit, which was filed in Texas’s hard-right Fifth Circuit, is essentially a do-over of the challenge to the F.D.A.’s rules on mifepristone that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected last term (the Justices found that the plaintiffs, a consortium of anti-abortion physicians, lacked standing). “We’re pursuing this case to protect Kansas women,” Kobach said in a statement last month.
The revised complaint, which uses the word “baby” fourteen times, asks that patients seeking medication abortion make three in-person visits to a provider, bar doctors from offering this care after the seven-week mark, and ban minors from accessing it altogether. A provocative component of the attorneys general’s argument is that access to mifepristone would, by reducing teen pregnancy, eventually harms states by shrinking their tax base.
The suit also advocates for entirely eliminating telehealth abortion—which currently accounts for nearly one in five abortions nationwide—and for enforcing the nineteenth-century Comstock Act, which outlaws the mailing of abortifacients. Justice Alito and his colleague Clarence Thomas both invoked Comstock during oral arguments in the earlier, failed mifepristone case, which may have helped guide the approach of the new complaint. And now that Trump has been reëlected, he could, if he wished, simply instruct the Department of Justice to begin enforcing Comstock in order to restrict the distribution of mifepristone.
Despite the proven efficacy and popularity of medication abortion, the manufactured controversies about its safety have led some hospitals and providers to take a stance of preëmptive caution. Recently, Boothman, the ob-gyn in Ohio, asked that mifepristone be added to the formulary at the hospital where she works. She told me that she explained to a hospital administrator that the drug, which softens and dilates the cervix, is often used after a patient suffers what is known as intrauterine fetal demise, a tragic situation in which a physician needs either to induce a stillbirth or perform a D&E. Boothman also submitted numerous articles from peer-reviewed medical journals to back up her request. But the administrator turned her down. “My hesitation here is that there are multiple layers to this pharmaceutical that sadly transcend evidence-based medicine, especially here in Ohio,” he wrote.
“Mifepristone is safe, it decreases induction time, it makes it easier for the patient to deliver the baby and start the grieving process, it reduces the bleeding that they have afterward and any risk of complication, and we’re not allowed to use it,” Boothman said. She added, “It’s been a really bizarre last couple of years.”
The ongoing battles in Ohio and Kansas will inevitably add notes of caution and contingency to the amendment victories in states like Missouri and Arizona. So will the conservatives’ 6–3 lock on the Supreme Court, which is guaranteed to hold under a second Trump Administration. “Even when a majority of voters passes an initiative that is supportive of abortion rights, that doesn’t mean that anti-abortion activists and political élites are ever going to leave the issue alone,” Alesha Doan, a professor at the University of Kansas who studies the intersection of gender and public policy, said. “One of the limits of the ballot initiative is that it gives a false sense of security that this right has been decided, and we can move on.”
In a less imperfect world, the essential and long-established right to one’s own body would not have to be decided by majority vote (or, if your body is in Florida, by supermajority vote). “From an advocacy perspective, there are some states where the situation is sufficiently dire that ballot initiatives are a direct way to get people access,” Katherine Kraschel, an assistant professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University School of Law, said. “If those initiatives are successful, people are going to receive life-saving care in those states.” At the same time, she went on, “Our Constitution should have some floor of liberties in order for all of us to be meaningfully able to participate in democracy. We should still want a federal Constitution that protects our right to reproductive autonomy.”
It is not possible to piece together a nationwide right to abortion, state by state, through citizen-initiated ballot measures—such referendums are allowed in only twenty-six states. They are not an option for motivated voters in Georgia, for example, where, two weeks after the state implemented a near-total abortion ban, twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman, the mother of a six-year-old son, died of septic shock after she was made to wait twenty hours for a D&C. Nor are they available in Texas, where, according to recent reporting in ProPublica, at least two women have died as a result of the state’s ban. Texas is also the home of Amanda Zurawski and Ondrea Lintz, both of whom were denied timely abortion care after suffering PPROM, developed catastrophic infections, and, as a consequence, may never be able to have children. Zurawski appeared in an unforgettable campaign spot for Joe Biden before he dropped out of the Presidential race, and Lintz made an equally searing ad for Kamala Harris.
In states where citizens are permitted to initiate abortion-rights referendums, their elected representatives often obstruct their efforts. In Arkansas, which has the nation’s highest maternal-mortality rate and one of its most draconian abortion bans, volunteers gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures in support of a pro-choice amendment, but the Republican secretary of state blocked it from the final ballot, citing a paperwork error. In Florida, people who provided signatures for the state’s ballot measure received visits from state police investigating spurious allegations of fraud, and local television stations were threatened with criminal prosecution for airing an ad for the amendment. And in Missouri, which is one of the states bringing the revised mifepristone lawsuit, the Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, attempted first to plant inflammatory language in the proposed Amendment 3—alleging that it would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth”—and then to unilaterally decertify it. (The state Supreme Court overruled Ashcroft on both counts.)
Opponents of Missouri’s proposed amendment also used billboards and local radio as the vehicles for a disinformation campaign. “I drive past billboards here that say absolutely false, baffling things,” Mark Valentine, an ob-gyn in St. Louis, told me, including one alleging that Amendment 3 would strip patients of their right to sue for malpractice and one linking the ballot measure to “child gender surgery.” Another baselessly claimed that the amendment would permit abortions through the ninth month of pregnancy. The political-action committee behind at least some of the billboards, Vote No on 3, reportedly received a last-minute, one-million-dollar donation from an advocacy group linked to Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the Federalist Society.
Valentine is a board member of the Missouri Abortion Fund, which provides financial aid to people in need of abortion care, particularly those who are forced to travel long distances and struggle to cover the costs of transportation, lodging, child care, and lost wages. (In 2022, J. D. Vance, who is now the Vice-President–elect, said that a “federal response” was needed to block women from travelling out of state for abortions; last month, when a reporter from the Times repeatedly asked about this comment, Vance would not disavow it.) For Valentine, the referendum battle in Missouri has underscored the painfully finite resources that abortion-rights advocates have at their disposal. “The political and legal organizations have definitely had an influx of support and cash for the amendment, and the abortion funds are seeing that money dry up,” he said. “People have needed abortions this whole past year, and they will need them after the election, and they will have less and less support because abortion funds have less and less money.”
The financial struggle that Valentine describes is not unique to Missouri. Nationwide, the flood of post-Dobbs donations to abortion funds has slowed to a trickle, even as the cost of care has increased. Both Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, which help cover medical costs for low-income patients seeking abortions, recently announced cuts to this funding. The executive director of the Abortion Fund of Ohio recently said that the passage of the state’s abortion amendment has not attracted new donors to her organization, despite the enormous influx of patients seeking abortion care in Ohio from states with bans still in place.
Leilah Zahedi-Spung is a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist who relocated to Denver from Chattanooga after Tennessee enacted a near-total abortion ban. “I started in January of 2023, and it was March before I saw a patient from the state of Colorado,” she told me. Most of Zahedi-Spung’s out-of-state patients are from Texas, but she has also seen patients from Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. She has even received referrals from her old practice in Tennessee, more than a thousand miles away.
Colorado’s Amendment 79, which passed on Tuesday with more than sixty-one per cent of the vote, repeals a ban on public funds being used for abortions. Although Colorado places few restrictions on reproductive rights, “there are still a lot of people in the state who can’t get abortion care, or it’s very hard for them, because they have Medicaid,” Zahedi-Spung said. Medicaid recipients are, on average, more at risk for complications than other groups; they are also more likely to need abortion at a later stage in pregnancy, often because of the time it takes to pull together the necessary cash. “If we could cover all of our patients in Colorado through insurance, then we could focus all of our funds on people coming out of state, and become even more of a haven,” Zahedi-Spung said. “Right now, we’re just hoping that we’re not missing anyone.”
Valentine is optimistic about what Missouri can eventually accomplish through its ballot measure, which prevailed with nearly fifty-two per cent of the vote. “In a state that leans politically the way that ours does, that outpouring of support is huge,” Valentine said. “If we can do that at the state level in Missouri, then surely there’s enough national support for protecting abortion in a much more complete way.” In the short term, though, Valentine said, “the next day, nothing will have changed. The next month, nothing will have changed, except that maybe we’ll have started a legal battle. There’s going to have to be multiple lawsuits, or maybe one very large lawsuit. I worry that people think that voting for this amendment is going to change the landscape of abortion in Missouri, and that’s unfortunately not true. We are still years out from restoring access to abortion in any meaningful way.” ♦
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Jessica Winter
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OPINION: Trump is back. We’re still waiting on his plan for schools – The Hechinger Report
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OK. I guess we’re doing this (again).
It feels awful for lots of reasons, of course, but mostly it’s because the country chose political vibes over policy ideas. As a researcher who spends his days trying to find evidence-based ways to make schools better, I’m at something of a loss.
See, whatever you thought about the Harris-Walz ticket’s particular proposals, the Democrats had things to say about education issues that genuinely shape children’s development: affordable early care and learning, access to nutritious school meals, funding for English learners, and more.
President-elect Trump’s education platform was made of much vaguer stuff — mostly culture war vibes. For instance, conservatives are eager to get the government involved in biological screenings to determine if kids have the “correct” genitalia for peeing in a particular bathroom or playing on a particular sports team. Trump talks about schools secretly imposing gender transition surgery on children. Finally, it’s likely that the administration will try to voucherize more public dollars to support families sending their children to private schools.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
But, again, all of this is light on substance. It’s pretty hard to see how bathroom-usage policies will help kids recover from the pandemic’s academic consequences, or get more children ready for kindergarten, or more third graders ready to read on grade level. School voucher programs may give anxious parents public money to pay for private education, but there’s not much evidence that they help students or the public schools they’re leaving behind.
Worse yet, some of conservatives’ K–12 ideas are at war with themselves. The Republican platform calls for federal defunding of schools teaching curricula that conservatives don’t like, but it also pledges — immediately afterward — to “veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education [sic].” So they’re promising not to nationalize how schools teach history, except when they don’t like how certain schools teach history.
Now, there was a detailed conservative plan for federal K–12 education drifting around during the campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate” and “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” But Trump claimed to want nothing to do with it.
Related: How would Project 2025 change education?
Maybe he’s telling the truth — perhaps he’s realized that Project 2025 would significantly reduce his ability to enact any sort of affirmative education policy agenda. It would be harder to remake American schools in a Trumpian image without a federal Education Department, after all.
Of course, that’s assuming 1) that Trump has given K–12 enough thought to work through that strategic calculus, and 2) conservatives actually have an affirmative agenda for making schools more effective, something that goes deeper than lines like this from their platform: “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do.”
Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance
Perhaps there’s a concrete, substantive plan for reforming Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lurking in those words, and I just don’t have the right GOP decoder ring?
So look, conservatives: You’ve got to figure something out. The country’s schools can’t afford another four years like the first round of President Trump’s leadership, which left U.S. public schools reeling.
By 2018, the leadership at the Fordham Institute, the country’s most august conservative education policy think tank, was calling for Secretary Betsy DeVos to resign in the hopes that troubles from her first two rocky years could be sorted out by a replacement.
In a January 2021 piece headlined “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, “The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it.”
Related: Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces
Please forgive me if this reads like I’m being overdramatic. Perhaps it’s my outmoded instincts as a Very Serious Beltway Policy Researcher; I still think about policymaking as an effort to actually solve big public problems.
I’m a hidebound fossil that way. Of course, if you really want to own me, really want to prove experts like me wrong (again), you could shock everyone by setting aside the culture wars and giving substantive education reform a try.
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a founding partner with The Children’s Equity Project, and a father of three children currently enrolled in public schools in Washington, DC. The views here are strictly his own.
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Conor P. Williams
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Analysis: How voters shifted in Maryland and Virginia – WTOP News
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Voting trends that were seen nationally in the presidential election also appeared in Maryland and Virginia.
Stay with WTOP on air, online and on the WTOP News app for the latest local and national election developments. Sign up for WTOP’s Election Desk weekly newsletter to stay informed through Inauguration Day.
Republican Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, outperforming his results in the 2020 election, while Democrat Kamala Harris failed to do as well as President Joe Biden did in winning the presidency four years ago.
Voting trends that were seen nationally also appeared in Maryland and Virginia.
“A lot of polls had Kamala Harris winning by eight or 10 points, but she won by five,” said Virginia political analyst Bob Holsworth, while discussing the polling and election results in the Commonwealth.
Five points is the margin that Hillary Rodham Clinton carried Virginia by in 2016, which was five points below President Biden’s margin in his 2020 victory in Virginia.
There were two close races involving U.S. House seats controlled by Democrats in the 7th and 10th Congressional Districts.
“What was interesting in both the races was in almost every jurisdiction in those two districts, there was a shift of one or two points to the right,” Holsworth said. “We saw this almost uniform pattern of jurisdictions moving a little bit more toward the Republican direction than they had previously in Virginia, and that really was the story of the nation.”
In the 7th Congressional District, which is being vacated by Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, Democrat Eugene Vindman declared victory over Republican Derrick Anderson with about a two-point lead.
The Associated Press declared Vindman the winner on Wednesday evening, nearly 24 hours after polls closed.
In the 10th Congressional District, which Democrat Rep. Jennifer Wexton is leaving due to severe health challenges, Democratic Del. Suhas Subramanyam defeated his Republican opponent, Mike Clancy, by about four points.
“What you saw in the election was that in Northern Virginia and in the big suburbs around Richmond — particularly Henrico and Chesterfield counties — the Democrats did quite well,” Holsworth said. “What you also saw was the complete collapse of the Democrats in rural Virginia.”
Trends in neighboring Maryland
Similar patterns emerged in Maryland, even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state by a 2:1 ratio.
“It’s a safely Democratic state, but the national trend of the shift toward Republicans is something we see in Maryland as well,” said Todd Eberly, a political science professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Trump improved his vote share in Maryland, and Harris pulled in less than Biden did four years ago.
Eberly said the divide between urban and rural Americans was on full display.
“The education divide between those with a college degree and those without is growing, and you see it playing out in Maryland,” Eberly said. “You have these seas of red in the east and in the west, and then you have all of this blue along the urban and suburban I-95 corridor, which also happens to be where most of the folks with college degrees are concentrated.”
Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan lost to Democrat Angela Alsobrooks in the race for Maryland’s open U.S. Senate seat.
Still, Eberly noted, “Larry Hogan looks like he’s going to have probably the best performance for a Republican Senate candidate in 20 years.”
In Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, which is being vacated by Democratic Rep. David Trone, Democrat April McClain Delaney has a very slim lead over Republican Neil Parrott.
As of Wednesday night, the race had not been called by The Associated Press.
“In that district, Democrats should have done better,” Eberly said. “That is a district that is most competitive in off-year elections, but it’s looking pretty darn competitive in a presidential election.”
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Nick Iannelli
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Why AP called Georgia for Trump
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The story of how Donald Trump won the emerging swing state of Georgia is one of margins.
Four years ago, he lost the state by just under 12,000 votes. He reclaimed it by notching microscopic but difference-making improvements in his vote totals in dozens of deeply red counties, many of them small and rural. It was still enough to put him over the top with 50.8% of the vote when The Associated Press called the state for him at 12:58 a.m. Wednesday.
Though the race is likely to narrow as more ballots are counted, there were not enough votes to be tabulated in Democratic-leaning areas for Vice President Kamala Harris to overtake Trump’s lead, which would have required her to get 56.1% of the remaining vote. She also narrowly underperformed Joe Biden in some population-dense counties in the Atlanta metro area. For example, in Fulton County Biden got 72.59% of the vote in 2020. This year Harris got 71.89% when the race was called.
Those small differences were enough to secure Georgia’s 16 electoral votes for Trump. But they are also another salient data point that suggests Georgia will be a fiercely contested battleground for years to come.
CANDIDATES: President: Harris (D) vs. Trump (R) vs. Chase Oliver (Libertarian) vs. Jill Stein (Green).
WINNER: Trump
POLL CLOSING TIME: 7 p.m. ET.
ABOUT THE RACE:
Georgia was long considered a Republican stronghold. But in 2020, Biden’s squeaker victory made him the first Democratic presidential contender since Bill Clinton in 1992 to carry the state, an emerging political battleground made more competitive by changing demographics and the booming Atlanta metro area.
Still, there was little guarantee 2024 would be a repeat.
Harris aggressively campaigned in the state, but Georgia had appeared to be a bit more of a reach for her than other battlegrounds.
Still, Georgia’s political dynamics are volatile. And the state was still up for grabs going into Election Day because the Republican party’s grip loosened as older, white GOP voters died. They have often been replaced by a younger, more racially diverse cast .
But just because many moving to the booming Atlanta area brought their politics with them didn’t mean the fundamentals dramatically changed. Biden beat Trump by only 11,779 votes in 2020. Trump got all of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: At the time the race was called, Trump was leading by 125,000 votes. Almost all advance votes in Georgia had been reported. His lead was larger than what Harris could be expected to make up from the remaining votes in Democratic strongholds. Trump was slightly ahead of his 2020 performance in enough counties to erase the deficit of less than 12,000 votes by which he lost Georgia four years ago.
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Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP 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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Trump makes false claims about federal response as he campaigns in area ravaged by Hurricane Helene
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VALDOSTA, Ga. (AP) — Donald Trump repeatedly spread falsehoods Monday about the federal response to Hurricane Helene despite claiming not to be politicizing the disaster as he toured hard-hit areas in south Georgia.
The former president and Republican nominee claimed upon landing in Valdosta that President Joe Biden was “sleeping” and not responding to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who he said was “calling the president and hasn’t been able to get him.” He repeated the claim at an event with reporters after being told Kemp said he had spoken to Biden.
“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said Monday.
The White House previously announced that Biden spoke by phone Sunday night with Kemp and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, as well as Scott Matheson, mayor of Valdosta, Georgia, and Florida Emergency Management Director John Louk. Kemp confirmed Monday morning that he spoke to Biden the night before.
“The president just called me yesterday afternoon and I missed him and called him right back and he just said ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, we’ve got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process,” Kemp said. “He offered if there are other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.”
In addition to being humanitarian crises, natural disasters can create political tests for elected officials, particularly in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign in which among the hardest-hit states were North Carolina and Georgia, two battlegrounds. Trump over the last several days has used the damage wrought by Helene to attack Harris, the Democratic nominee, and suggest she and Biden are playing politics with the storm — something he was accused of doing when president.
Biden is defiant about spending time at his beach house
While the White House highlighted Biden’s call to Kemp and others, the president faced questions about his decision to spend the weekend at his beach house in Delaware, rather than the White House, to monitor the storm.
“I was commanding it,” Biden told reporters after delivering remarks at the White House on the federal government’s response. “I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday and the day before as well. I commanded it. It’s called a telephone.”
AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports Donald Trump is touring Hurricane Helene’s damage in Georgia, while blasting the Biden administration’s response to the deadly storm.
Biden received frequent updates on the storm, the White House said, as did Harris aboard Air Force Two as she made a West Coast campaign swing. The vice president cut short her campaign trip Monday to return to Washington for a briefing from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Trump, writing on his social media platform Monday, also claimed without evidence that the federal government and North Carolina’s Democratic governor were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Asheville, which was devastated by the storm, is solidly Democratic, as is much of Buncombe County, which surrounds it.
The death toll from Helene has surpassed 100 people, with some of the worst damage caused by inland flooding in North Carolina.
Biden said he will travel to North Carolina on Wednesday to get a first-hand look at the devastation, but will limit his footprint so as not to distract from the ongoing recovery efforts.
During remarks Monday at FEMA headquarters, Harris said she has received regular briefings on the disaster response, including from FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, and has spoken with Kemp and Cooper in the last 24 hours.
What to know about the 2024 election:
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“I have shared with them that we will do everything in our power to help communities respond and recover,” she said. “And I’ve shared with them that I plan to be on the ground as soon as possible without disrupting any emergency response operations.”
When asked if her visit was politicizing the storm, she frowned and shook her head but did not reply.
Trump partnered with a Christian charity to bring supplies
The Trump campaign partnered with the Christian humanitarian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse to bring trucks of fuel, food, water and other critical supplies to Georgia, said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary.
Leavitt did not immediately respond to questions about how much had been donated and from which entity. Samaritan’s Purse also declined to address the matter in a statement.
Trump also launched a GoFundMe campaign for supporters to send financial aid to people impacted by the storm. It quickly passed its $1 million goal Monday night.
“Our hearts are with you and we are going to be with you as long as you need it,” Trump said, flanked by a group of elected officials and Republican supporters.
“We’re not talking about politics now,” Trump added.
Trump said he wanted to stop in North Carolina but was holding off because access and communication is limited in hard-hit communities.
When asked by The Associated Press on Monday if he was concerned that his visit to Georgia was taking away law enforcement resources that could be used for disaster response, Trump said, “No.” He said his campaign instead “brought many wagons of resources.”
Katie Watson, who owns with her husband the home design store Trump visited, said she was told the former president picked that location because he saw shots of the business destroyed with the rubble and said, “Find that place and find those people.”
“He didn’t come here for me. He came here to recognize that this town has been destroyed. It’s a big setback,” she said.
“He recognizes that we are hurting and he wants us to know that,” she added. “It was a lifetime opportunity to meet the president. This is not exactly the way I wanted to do it.”
Trump campaign officials have long pointed to his visit to East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a toxic trail derailment, as a turning point in the early days of the presidential race when he was struggling to establish his footing as a candidate. They believed his warm welcome by residents frustrated by the federal government’s response helped remind voters why they had been drawn to him years earlier.
Trump fought with Puerto Rico and meteorologists while president
During Trump’s term as president, he visited numerous disaster zones, including the aftermaths of hurricanes, tornadoes and shootings. But the trips sometimes elicited controversy such as when he tossed paper towels to cheering residents in Puerto Rico in 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
It also took until weeks before the presidential election in 2020 for Trump’s administration to release $13 billion in assistance for the territory. A federal government watchdog found that officials hampered an investigation into delays in aid delivery.
In another 2019 incident, Trump administration officials admonished some meteorologists for tweeting that Alabama was not threatened by Hurricane Dorian, contradicting the then-president. Trump would famously display a map altered with a black Sharpie pen to indicate Alabama could be in the path of the storm.
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Fernando reported from Chicago, and Amy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Chris Megerian and Aamer Madhani in Washington, and Will Weissert in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
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Chicago volunteers travel to Wisconsin, Michigan to encourage voters ahead of Election Day
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CHICAGO (WLS) — Rainy weather Sunday didn’t slow Chicagoans down in the last two days before Election Day.
Democrats and Republicans are making a last minute push to get voters to the polls. A number of Chicagoans headed to neighboring swing states to reach voters there.
ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch
Dozens of Democrat volunteers geared up Sunday morning in the 47th Ward on the city’s North Side for a trip north to Wisconsin as part of Operation Swing State.
“Not only do they got to vote, get your family member to vote, get your child to vote, go make sure that you get your neighbor to vote,” one volunteer said.
RELATED | Voter guide 2024: Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin
“It’s been astonishing,” 47th Ward Precinct Captain James Janega said. “The last 48 hours have seen just such an influx of people volunteering for these, for these outings, for these, for these volunteer canvassing trips, that we haven’t been able to keep up.”
Armed with Harris Walz signs and a sense of urgency, the group headed to Milwaukee to knock on doors, talk to people and ask them to vote democratic. Similar groups of volunteers also made a trip to Michigan.
Personal PAC CEO Sarah Garza Resnick was in Muskegon on Sunday.
“I was on the ground for Obama in ’08 and in ’12, and I have never seen the energy like I have seen today,” Garza Resnick said. “We need to be hopeful. We need to work hard for the next few days, and we have to run through that tape, and we need to sprint to the finish line.”
With Chicago solidly blue, Republicans were canvassing in collar counties this weekend, focusing on state races, with Donald Trump and the Republican Party embracing early voting for the first time in a presidential election.
“If you want change, vote Republican, and that message is resonating,” Illinois Republican Party Chair Kathy Salvi. “We’re seeing historic numbers of Republicans early voting, and our get off the vote program, which is historic in 2024, is really working.”
In River North, community leaders gathered for a series of soap box talks about politics important to woman with the election at hand.
“In my role as Kamala’s election co-chair, I can tell you that the excitement is just undeniable,” Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth said.
The line to vote was long at the Supersite in the Loop on Sunday. For those looking to exercise their right to vote for the first time, it was time well spent.
“When we step up, when we lead, when we bring our lived experience to the challenges of the day, great things happen for everyone,” former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said.
Earlier in the day, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson revved up a group of Kamala Harris supporters in Durham, North Carolina.
“People want something to believe in,” Johnson said. “It’s not just about who they get to believe in. It’s what.”
Meanwhile outside Chicago’s downtown Supersite, voters stood in long lines in the rain to cast their vote early.
“We stood in line for a while,” voter Colleen Burnett said. “I knew that early voting was going to take a while, but I know Election day is going to be a lot worse. And actually it was like a lot of fun standing in line, got to talk to a lot of people.”
It’s important that other women have the rights that I do. That’s why I’m here for the first time
Melissa Yousefi, first-time voter
The line to vote at the Supersite in the Loop extended around the corner and into a nearby parking lot.
“I’d actually heard that the Supersite down here was going a lot quicker out in the neighborhoods, it was a lot longer, so I came downtown,” voter Michael Antoine said.
“I think when my 16-year-old daughter sees me waiting in line, when my daughter sees me doing my part, I think she do her part as well,” voter Jorge De La Cruz said.
For those looking to exercise their right to vote for the first time, the waiting was time well spent.
“I mean, it was great,” first-time voter Grace Burnett said. “I actually came with my mom, and we were outside for about an hour, but it was, it was worth it. We’re able to talk to people in line. Everyone was extremely friendly. And, yeah, I’m very excited to be here, and I’m very excited to cast my vote.”
With the race for the White House remaining very close, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have ramped up their courtship of young voters.
“I know it’s two options, but it’s definitely still hard,” first-time voter Elian Perez said. “It’s not like a yes or no question. You have to look into everything. The pros and cons. All of this.”
The latest ABC News/Ipsos poll found Harris leading Trump by 14 points among voters under 30 years old.
“I’m loving that I get to be a part of it so far,” first-time voter Arabella Davis said. “My parents are very into politics. My dad especially. I always grew up knowing that I wanted to vote.
Three friends, all freshmen at DePaul University, spent part of their afternoon waiting in line and determined to make their vote count.
“It feels a bit weird,” first-time voter Leah Walker said. It’s kind of a bit deal. And especially, this election it’s so close. And I feel like everybody’s votes matter this year.
SEE ALSO | Donald Trump no longer leads in a state he carried twice, according to new Iowa Poll
“It feels exciting,” first-time voter Haddie Hohmann said. “It’s kind of, like, I didn’t know it took this long, but it is exciting and it feels, like, historically relevant.”
While young voters are further to the left on the ideological spectrum compared to their older counterparts, they are less likely to vote. In 2020, around 50% of those aged 18-29 turned out to vote, compared to 66% of the general electorate.
Not all first-time voters Sunday were young adults, however. First-time voter Melissa Yousefi is 34. The abortion issue is what brought her to the polls.
“It’s what we have to do,” Yousefi said. “My personal reason is… it’s important that other women have the rights that I do. That’s why I’m here for the first time.”
It is estimated that some 8 million new voters may be eligible to cast ballots in this year’s presidential election. The question is how many will vote.
Copyright © 2024 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.
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Craig Wall
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How last-minute Colorado voters can cast their ballot before Election Day
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DENVER — Are you a procrastinating voter? If so, fear not. There’s still time to cast your ballot for it to be counted in the 2024 election.
Colorado County Clerk’s Association Director Matt Crane told Denver7 that Colorado voters can register to vote until Election Day.
“If you’re somebody who hasn’t voted yet, you still have plenty of time,” said Crane. “You just need to bring with you an acceptable form of ID.”
There are 19 accepted forms of ID in Colorado to vote, including a valid Colorado driver’s license or a state-issued ID card. You can register online to vote at www.GoVoteColorado.gov, where you can also find a list of accepted IDs.
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You can also register in person at a Colorado DMV office, armed forces recruitment office, or any federal, state, or local government office.
If you were planning to vote with a mail-in ballot, you must drop it off in person since the deadline to mail it has passed.
“Do not put it in the mail at this point. It won’t come back to us in time,” said Crane. “You can take it to any drop box in the state, and it will get back to your county.”
You can also read Denver7’s in-depth voter guide which breaks down everything you need to know for the 2024 November election including important dates:
- Friday, Oct. 11: The first day mail ballots are sent out to registered Colorado voter
- Monday, Oct. 21: The first day county drop boxes must be open to accept mail ballots. Drop boxes will stay open through 7 p.m. on Election Day.
- Monday, Oct. 28: The last day to register to vote to be able to receive a ballot by mail. Anyone not registered to vote by this date will have to vote in-person.
- Tuesday, Nov. 5 – Election Day: Not registered to vote yet? You can still register to vote in-person at the closest polling center in your county if you’re in line before 7 p.m.
- Wednesday, Nov. 13: Last day to fix any issue with your ballot before it can be counted (for example, you forgot to sign it or election officials need to confirm your signature).
The Colorado Secretary of State’s website has a ballot drop-off locator you can access here. Denver voters can find their nearest ballot drop-off location (as well as nearest voting center and mobile vote centers) by clicking here.
How last-minute Colorado voters can cast their ballot before Election Day
Coloradans making a difference | Denver7 featured videos
Denver7 is committed to making a difference in our community by standing up for what’s right, listening, lending a helping hand and following through on promises. See that work in action, in the videos above.
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Sam Peña
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Elon Musk’s Pennsylvania Playbook
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Musk at his America PAC event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on October 26.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesMarshall Miller has been canvassing in the crucial and vote-rich regions of eastern Pennsylvania for years. A leader in the local Democratic Party in his hometown of Lancaster, Miller is used to crossing paths with his Republican opponents while out knocking doors. Both sides keep it polite — maintaining a respectful distance if they both happen to arrive at the same house at the same time.
This year, though, it has been lonelier on the sidewalks of the Keystone State. Miller says that there has been scarcely a Republican door knocker in sight lately and that remains true with just hours to go before the polls close.
“Honestly, it feels kind of bizarre,” Miller said when he was on his way to Delaware County for another afternoon of canvassing. “Usually, I would see them and nod or say ‘hi’ or something, but I have knocked on a fair number of doors at this point and haven’t seen them around at all.”
The lack of evidence of a Republican ground operation in Pennsylvania and in many of the swing states comes as the Trump campaign has attempted a novel approach to its get-out-the-vote strategy: relying almost entirely on America PAC, a super-PAC that is largely funded by Elon Musk, who has donated more than $120 million to elect Donald Trump this year.
That effort has been plagued by a seemingly endless series of stories attesting to its mismanagement and lack of focus. Wired reported that canvassers in Michigan affiliated with America PAC were hired from out of state without being told their job was to knock on doors on behalf of Trump; once they arrived, they would be driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, where they were told that unless they met their canvassing quotas, they would have to pay for their own lodgings and airfare without compensation for their work.
Last month, The Guardian reported that a quarter of the door-knocks Musk’s canvassers said they had completed were flagged by an auditor as fraudulent, as the PAC’s foot soldiers were found to be not near the location of the homes they were supposed to have visited; one was even logging door-knocks while sitting at a nearby restaurant. America PAC has been run by a political-consulting firm managed by Phil Cox, a prominent Republican operative who was involved in a similar super-PAC-run canvassing effort on behalf of Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries before DeSantis flamed out in the Iowa caucuses. After Cox was brought in over the summer, the super-PAC terminated its relationship with the vendors who had been working with the PAC previously and brought in vendors that are affiliated with Cox.
“I think it is just an absolute joke,” said one former DeSantis campaign official. “There is so much dysfunction to it. There are like three new articles every day on how awful it is, and it seems like just a cash cow for the people that are running it. If Trump wins, it won’t be because of anything these guys are doing.”
In October, Musk hijacked the X handle @America from its previous owner in order to promote his latest project. Pinned to the top of @America’s profile, just below its mission statement (“PAC Founded by @ElonMusk to support candidates who champion Secure Borders, Sensible Spending, Safe Cities, Fair Justice System, Free Speech and Self-Protection”), are options to submit an application to be a paid canvasser at $29 to $30 an hour. Experienced canvassers, who are usually volunteers, say that is a much higher wage than usual for the work.
Those are not the only ways that Musk has been willing to spend his money. In October, he announced he would give $47 to everyone who convinced even one registered swing-state voter to sign a petition saying they supported the First and Second Amendment to the Constitution. The project was a way both to get potential voters to register without violating the federal law that forbids paying people to register outright and to identify potential Trump voters. A few weeks later, Musk upped the giveaway to $100 for voters in Pennsylvania.
Then Musk went even further, announcing that he would award $1 million every day to one random petition-signer. This caught the attention of Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, who sued, arguing that it amounted to running an illegal lottery. Musk’s lawyers pushed to have the case moved to federal court, and on Thursday, a federal judge put the case on hold before remanding it back to state court a day later.
While canvassing operations tend to be pretty open about their work, since they are often volunteer-driven and involve face-to-face communication out in the open, America PAC has been buttoned up about its approach. The group has no real physical presence in the communities in which it operates, and a spokesperson would only say that it’s pushing mail, text messages, digital outreach, and door-to-door canvassing in its effort to elect Trump. The spokesperson admitted that the secrecy was unusual but added, “You pointing that out is not going to change our approach.”
Musk’s initial foray into electioneering may have been chaotic, but high-ranking Republican operatives and Trump campaign officials say that his utility to them has been significant nonetheless. It has been just over two years since Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, and in that time, a social-media site known for being the meeting space for liberals and the media and a place where elite narratives could take hold has taken on a more right-wing character, while still remaining the digital campfire for beltway journalists and the people they cover.
“He is definitely trying to have an impact on the election; there is no doubt about that,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic operative who is building his own social network, called Sez Us, to act as a counter to X. “He just said that CNN should be called ‘the Disinformation News Network’ and he has 200 million followers. How could that not have an effect?”
Trippi pointed out not only that Musk has enormous personal reach, which he uses to amplify positive messages about Trump and spread negative ones (including some falsehoods) about Democrats — but also that the X platform itself now compounds those effects. Anyone who clicks on the algorithmically controlled “For You” tab on the site is likely to see multiple posts from Musk himself, accompanied by viral posts that skew Trumpian (for instance, clips depicting a country overrun by migrants and criminals).
Trump-campaign officials have looked on with amazement as messages that they struggled to call attention to, such as J.D. Vance’s visit to the border, suddenly go megaviral online thanks to Musk’s boost. The help is even more appreciated, they say, since under the previous regime of the website, many conservatives felt that their voices were being censored or suppressed.
“It’s amazing,” said one Republican operative close to Trump. “He’s engaging in politics in a way that no one in that kind of position has really done before, and he is hitting all of the pro-Trump and anti-Kamala notes you could ask for and making things go viral left and right. It’s not even that he is the owner of the site; it’s the fact that he is engaging in a way he never did. Twitter, or X, or whatever you call it, is still the place where media narratives are created on both sides of the aisle. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is on Twitter, and that includes top Republican and Democratic operatives.”
Musk has been holding town halls across Pennsylvania that, if nothing else, earn the campaign publicity on local-news outlets, which campaign officials say counts for far more than coverage on cable TV and in the national press. When Musk appeared at a town hall in the central Pennsylvania city of Lancaster last week, the headline for the story on the local CBS News affiliate read, “’Harris Is a Puppet’: Elon Musk Returns to Pa. for Town Hall, Promotes Early Voting.” A few days earlier, a local TV affiliate in Harrisburg quoted Musk telling town-hall attendees that “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending” were his reasons for supporting Trump. “To protect the Constitution, especially the right to free speech. These are all things that seem very obvious and frankly normal and they’re in severe danger if the ‘Kamala machine’ wins,” Musk continued, according to the story on ABC27News in Harrisburg.
One Trump campaign official described Musk as being like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who was a relentless promotor of Trump in 2020 — except that Musk is someone “with real money.”
“We just stand back and marvel. He is moving the needle for us with the young and unmotivated male vote that we need in a state like Pennsylvania.” said this official. “Politics is a game of inches. Elon brings a foot.”
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David Freedlander
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‘Red, White and Blue’ Director on Why Getting Her Oscar-Nominated Short on YouTube Before Election Day Was So Important
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With abortion on the ballot in several states in Tuesday’s election, writer and director Nazrin Choudhury’s Oscar-nominated short film Red, White and Blue about a single mother searching for access to an abortion feels as timely as ever. The British-born multi-hyphenate doesn’t always see it that way.
“The upcoming election, in which abortion is such a key topic, means that people talk about this being such a timely subject. ‘It was so timely.’ Sadly, it feels like it’s timeless to me,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.
“We seem to keep needing to tell this story. I keep trying to say ‘Oh, let’s try and make it so that my story becomes redundant, and we don’t have to make films like this,’” she continues. “But we have to tell stories of ordinary human beings and Americans at that.”
Red, White and Blue premiered for free on YouTube this week, Majic Ink Productions and Level Forward announced on Monday. “We are getting enormous response and feedback from it,” Choudhury explains.
The film, starring Brittany Snow and Juliet Donenfold and executive produced by Samantha Bee, follows a young single mother from Arkansas, portrayed by Snow, who is forced to cross state lines to find access to an abortion.
The film has been screened throughout the country strategically since its 2024 Oscar nomination, according to a release, with the aim of reaching voters of all political leanings. Getting the film out into the world ahead of Election Day took a village of professionals in film, public relations and more coming together to make it happen.
‘Red White and Blue’ poster.
Courtesy of Majic Ink Productions
On Wednesday, students and faculty from the University of Pennsylvania participated in a national student-led screening and moderated discussion event featuring Choudhury, Black Voters Matter’s LaTosha Brown, Professors Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw of Crooked Media’s Strict Scrutiny podcast and more.
“This event had been planned for a while and was deeply meaningful because I have teenagers who will inherit this legacy,” the writer and director says, explaining that it meant so much to be “in community” with students at UPenn and NYU through a live stream there.
“I think it’s really important because this is the generation that is going to inherit all of our mistakes. I think we need to break the cycle because what happens is we always leave it to them. They have to deal with the messes of their elders,” she explains.
For Choudhury, making this film was both important and deeply personal. She explains that she made the film on her own, asking her children if she could dip into the college savings she had been accumulating. The filmmaker says the team has taken Red, White and Blue to church communities in places like Arizona and Wisconsin. As Choudhury describes it, “Places where you think people would be resistant to having this conversation,” however, she has found people are not unwilling to open up dialogue about abortion.
“Our primary goal has been just to try and figure out which communities to take it to doing these benefit screenings, and then yes, in this final push where our futures as women will be decided at the ballot box” Choudhury begins.
“When the VP, Kamala Harris, says women are bleeding out… as someone who myself was bleeding out, but luckily not in a parking lot, I was in a hospital being taken care of,” she continues. “I just really wanted to make sure that when we landed this film, it was with maximum power, potency and urgency.”
The short film will stream on YouTube through election week. Each view of the film generates a donation to the film’s Purple Parlor Fund, which benefits non-partisan organizations in reproductive rights, justice and the film’s impact campaign.
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Nicole Fell
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Donald Trump gambles with late-stage trips to Democratic New Mexico and Virginia – WTOP News
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Donald Trump is traveling to New Mexico and Virginia in the campaign’s final days, taking a risky detour from the seven battleground states to spend time in places where Republican presidential candidates have not won in decades.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally at Rocky Mount Event Center, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Rocky Mount, N.C. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)(AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Donald Trump is traveling to New Mexico and Virginia in the campaign’s final days, taking a risky detour from the seven battleground states to spend time in places where Republican presidential candidates have not won in decades.
The former president campaigned in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Thursday and was scheduled to visit Salem, Virginia, on Saturday.
The Trump team is projecting optimism based in part on early voting numbers and thinks he can be competitive against Democrat Kamala Harris in both states — New Mexico in particular, if he sweeps swing states Nevada and Arizona. That hope comes even though neither New Mexico nor Virginia has been carried by a GOP nominee for the White House since George W. Bush in 2004.
Over the past few months in particular, the battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — have seen a constant stream of candidate visits, and residents have been bombarded with political ads on billboards, televisions and smartphones. In the past two weeks alone, presidential and vice presidential candidates have made 21 appearances in Pennsylvania, 17 in Michigan and 13 in North Carolina.
In the 43 other states, a candidate visit is an exciting novelty.
Trump retains fervent pockets of support even in states that vote overwhelmingly against him, and he can easily fill his rallies with enthusiastic supporters.
He has made other recent detours from the states most at play, holding rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York and in Coachella, California — states that are even more solidly Democratic than New Mexico and Virginia. Those events satisfied Trump’s long-shot claims that he can win both states, but were also aimed at earning maximum media attention as his campaign seeks to reach voters who do not follow political news closely.
Trump also showed up in staunchly Republican Montana, and both Trump and Harris campaigned on the same day last week in Texas, which Democrats last won in 1976.
Those trips served other purposes, such as highlighting issues important in a state or supporting House or Senate candidates.
Trump said in Albuquerque that he could win the state as long as the election is fair, repeating falsehoods about rigged past elections.
“If we could bring God down from heaven, he could be the vote counter and we could win this,” Trump said. He added he’s visiting New Mexico because it’s “good for my credentials” with Hispanic voters.
Trump’s strategy carries risk.
After losing to Trump in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton was criticized for going to Arizona late in the campaign instead of spending time in Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, states that ended up deciding that election. Arizona is now a battleground, but it wasn’t considered particularly competitive eight years ago, when it voted for Trump by a 4-percentage point margin.
“I don’t think there’s any strategy,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic political consultant who worked on numerous presidential campaigns and now leads Center for the Political Future at University of Southern California. “I think he insisted on doing it. It makes no sense.”
New Mexico stop brings Trump to a border state
The planned visit to Albuquerque brings Trump and his immigration stance to a border state with the nation’s highest concentration of Latino voters, highlighting the campaign for Hispanic supporters.
About 44% of the voting-age population in New Mexico identifies as Hispanic. Many have centuries-old ties to Mexican and Spanish settlements, while the state has a smaller share of foreign-born residents than the national average.
At the same time, federal and local authorities in New Mexico are dealing with a surge in migrant deaths along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Trump’s visit has implications for a congressional swing district stretching from Albuquerque to the border with Mexico. It’s now held by a Democrat as Republicans look to hold onto their narrow House majority. Immigration has been a major issue in the race.
Also on the ballot, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich is seeking a third term against Republican Nella Domenici. She is the daughter of the late Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, who served six terms, from 1973 to 2009 and was the last New Mexico Republican elected to the Senate.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains on the ballot in New Mexico, and roadside campaign signs for Kennedy popped up across the capital city of Santa Fe in late October, about two months after Kennedy’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Trump.
New Mexico voters have twice rebuffed Trump at the polls, and Democrats hold every statewide elected position, all three U.S. House seats and majorities in the state House and Senate.
“He just brings us back to what the U.S. needs to be,” Leandra Dominguez of Albuquerque, 45, said before Trump spoke. “It’s just fallen apart. We just need someone to save us.”
Virginia was once a battleground
While Virginia was considered a battleground as recently as 2012, it has trended toward Democrats in the past decade, especially in the populous northern Virginia suburbs.
Trump lost the state to Clinton in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. This year, Democrats and their allies in the presidential race have spent nearly twice as much as Republicans on ads in Virginia, data show, though it pales in comparison to the spending in battleground states.
“We have a real chance,” Trump said while phoning into a Richmond-area rally on Saturday.
Trump, while in Virginia, is likely to speak about Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling leaving in place a purge of voter registrations that the state says is aimed at stopping people who are not U.S. citizens from voting.
The high court, over the dissents of the three liberal justices, granted an emergency appeal from Virginia’s Republican administration led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Speaking to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday night, Youngkin said from what he’s seeing on the ground, “Virginia is far more competitive than any of the pundits would have believed.”
He noted that two years after Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020, he won as governor.
”Virginians are ready for strength back in the White House,” he said.
Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said Trump’s scheduled visit to Salem on Saturday would only widen Harris’ lead in the state.
“Kamala Harris will win Virginia convincingly, as he knows, and any visit from this deranged lunatic will only widen the margin,” Swecker said.
___
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Olivia Diaz in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
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WTOP Staff
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Maryland voter guide: What you need to know about this historic 2024 election – WTOP News
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It’s not just this year’s presidential race that could be historic, so could Maryland’s U.S. Senate race. Here’s everything you need to know.
Sign up for WTOP’s Election Desk weekly newsletter to stay up-to-date through Election Day 2024 with the latest developments in this historic presidential election cycle.
This year’s race for the White House is going to be a historic one, with Vice President Kamala Harris squaring off against former President Donald Trump.
But the race for the U.S. Senate in Maryland could make history too, as Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks vies for the chamber in a battle against former Gov. Larry Hogan. If Alsobrooks wins, she’d be the state’s first Black senator. If Hogan wins, he could shift the balance of power in the Senate.
Here’s what you need to know.
Dates at a glance
- Deadline to register to vote online or by mail: Oct. 15
- Deadline to apply for mail-in ballot: Oct. 29 (Note: This is the date your mailed or faxed request must have been received, not just sent. You may request your mail-in ballot in person on election day, Nov. 5, at your local board of elections.)
- In-person early voting: You can register to vote the same day. Early voting runs from Oct. 24 to Oct. 31 — and that includes Saturday and Sunday.
- Election Day: Nov. 5. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. As long as you’re in line by 8 p.m., you’ll be able to cast your vote.
- Deadline to return your mail-in ballot: You’ve got two ways to return your mail-in ballot: By mail: Make sure your mail-in ballot is postmarked by or before 8 p.m. on Nov. 5. To make sure your ballot is counted, the Board of Elections recommends you return it as soon as you have filled it out. By hand: You also have the option of hand-delivering your ballot to an approved drop box or local board of elections by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Visit WTOP’s Election 2024 page for our comprehensive coverage.
Voting in-person
The Maryland State Board of Elections said that due to a change in the law, “we now mail every voter an application for a mail-in ballot. The best time to vote in person is on weekends during early voting and between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on election day.”
The full list of early voting centers is available online from the Maryland Board of Elections.
Of course, in-person voting is available on Election Day. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. As long as you’re in line by 8 p.m., you’ll be able to cast your vote.
And you can search for your polling place online.
Voting absentee
These are your mail-in ballots, but the board said they must, by law, refer to absentee ballots as “mail-in ballots,” in case there’s some confusion there.
If you’re voting via mail-in, your ballot has to be mailed, dropped in a ballot drop box location, taken to a polling place, early voting center or local board by 8 p.m. on Nov. 5 for the Presidential General Election. If you mail your ballot, it must be postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted.
What’s on the ballot?
In addition to electing candidates to office, Maryland voters will also be asked about whether an amendment enshrining abortion rights should be included in the state’s constitution.
Presidential race
Democratic ticket: Kamala Harris/Tim Walz
Republican ticket: Donald Trump/JD Vance
U.S. Senate
Democratic ticket: Angela Alsobrooks
Republican ticket: Larry Hogan
U.S. House
District 1
Democratic ticket: Blane H. Miller III
Republican ticket: Andy Harris (incumbent)
Libertarian ticket: Joshua O’Brien
District 2
Democratic ticket: Johnny Olszewski
Republican ticket: Kimberly Klacik
District 3
Democratic ticket: Sarah Elfreth
Republican ticket: Robert Steinberger
District 4
Democratic ticket: Glenn Ivey (incumbent)
Republican ticket: George McDermott
District 5
Democratic ticket: Steny Hoyer (incumbent)
Republican ticket: Michelle Talkington
District 6
Democratic ticket: April McClain-Delaney
Republican ticket: Neil Parrott
District 7
Democratic ticket: Kweisi Mfume (incumbent)
Republican ticket: Scott Collier
District 8
Democratic ticket: Jamie Raskin (incumbent)
Republican ticket: Cheryl Riley
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2024 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
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Will Vitka
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Donald Trump gambles with late-stage trips to Democratic New Mexico and Virginia – WTOP News
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Donald Trump is traveling to New Mexico and Virginia in the campaign’s final days, taking a risky detour from the seven battleground states to spend time in places where Republican presidential candidates have not won in decades.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally at Rocky Mount Event Center, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Rocky Mount, N.C. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)(AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Donald Trump is traveling to New Mexico and Virginia in the campaign’s final days, taking a risky detour from the seven battleground states to spend time in places where Republican presidential candidates have not won in decades.
The former president campaigned in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Thursday and was scheduled to visit Salem, Virginia, on Saturday.
The Trump team is projecting optimism based in part on early voting numbers and thinks he can be competitive against Democrat Kamala Harris in both states — New Mexico in particular, if he sweeps swing states Nevada and Arizona. That hope comes even though neither New Mexico nor Virginia has been carried by a GOP nominee for the White House since George W. Bush in 2004.
Over the past few months in particular, the battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — have seen a constant stream of candidate visits, and residents have been bombarded with political ads on billboards, televisions and smartphones. In the past two weeks alone, presidential and vice presidential candidates have made 21 appearances in Pennsylvania, 17 in Michigan and 13 in North Carolina.
In the 43 other states, a candidate visit is an exciting novelty.
Trump retains fervent pockets of support even in states that vote overwhelmingly against him, and he can easily fill his rallies with enthusiastic supporters.
He has made other recent detours from the states most at play, holding rallies at Madison Square Garden in New York and in Coachella, California — states that are even more solidly Democratic than New Mexico and Virginia. Those events satisfied Trump’s long-shot claims that he can win both states, but were also aimed at earning maximum media attention as his campaign seeks to reach voters who do not follow political news closely.
Trump also showed up in staunchly Republican Montana, and both Trump and Harris campaigned on the same day last week in Texas, which Democrats last won in 1976.
Those trips served other purposes, such as highlighting issues important in a state or supporting House or Senate candidates.
Trump said in Albuquerque that he could win the state as long as the election is fair, repeating falsehoods about rigged past elections.
“If we could bring God down from heaven, he could be the vote counter and we could win this,” Trump said. He added he’s visiting New Mexico because it’s “good for my credentials” with Hispanic voters.
Trump’s strategy carries risk.
After losing to Trump in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton was criticized for going to Arizona late in the campaign instead of spending time in Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, states that ended up deciding that election. Arizona is now a battleground, but it wasn’t considered particularly competitive eight years ago, when it voted for Trump by a 4-percentage point margin.
“I don’t think there’s any strategy,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic political consultant who worked on numerous presidential campaigns and now leads Center for the Political Future at University of Southern California. “I think he insisted on doing it. It makes no sense.”
New Mexico stop brings Trump to a border state
The planned visit to Albuquerque brings Trump and his immigration stance to a border state with the nation’s highest concentration of Latino voters, highlighting the campaign for Hispanic supporters.
About 44% of the voting-age population in New Mexico identifies as Hispanic. Many have centuries-old ties to Mexican and Spanish settlements, while the state has a smaller share of foreign-born residents than the national average.
At the same time, federal and local authorities in New Mexico are dealing with a surge in migrant deaths along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Trump’s visit has implications for a congressional swing district stretching from Albuquerque to the border with Mexico. It’s now held by a Democrat as Republicans look to hold onto their narrow House majority. Immigration has been a major issue in the race.
Also on the ballot, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich is seeking a third term against Republican Nella Domenici. She is the daughter of the late Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, who served six terms, from 1973 to 2009 and was the last New Mexico Republican elected to the Senate.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains on the ballot in New Mexico, and roadside campaign signs for Kennedy popped up across the capital city of Santa Fe in late October, about two months after Kennedy’s withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Trump.
New Mexico voters have twice rebuffed Trump at the polls, and Democrats hold every statewide elected position, all three congressional seats and majorities in the state House and Senate.
“He just brings us back to what the U.S. needs to be,” Leandra Dominguez of Albuquerque, 45, said before Trump spoke. “It’s just fallen apart. We just need someone to save us.”
Virginia was once a battleground
While Virginia was considered a battleground as recently as 2012, it has trended toward Democrats in the past decade, especially in the populous northern Virginia suburbs.
Trump lost the state to Clinton in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. This year, Democrats and their allies in the presidential race have spent nearly twice as much as Republicans on ads in Virginia, data show, though it pales in comparison to the spending in battleground states.
“We have a real chance,” Trump said while phoning into a Richmond-area rally on Saturday.
Trump, while in Virginia, is likely to speak about Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling leaving in place a purge of voter registrations that the state says is aimed at stopping people who are not U.S. citizens from voting.
The high court, over the dissents of the three liberal justices, granted an emergency appeal from Virginia’s Republican administration led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Speaking to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday night, Youngkin said from what he’s seeing on the ground, “Virginia is far more competitive than any of the pundits would have believed.”
He noted that two years after Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020, he won as governor.
”Virginians are ready for strength back in the White House,” he said.
Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said Trump’s scheduled visit to Salem on Saturday would only widen Harris’ lead in the state.
“Kamala Harris will win Virginia convincingly, as he knows, and any visit from this deranged lunatic will only widen the margin,” Swecker said.
___
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Olivia Diaz in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
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College Uncovered: Abortion on the ballot … and in the mail – The Hechinger Report
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Greater Boston – a region famous for its sheer number of colleges – is also home to an underground network that helps women get access to abortion pills.
Every week, a group including many Boston-area college and medical students meets to put together abortion pill “care packages” to send to women in states where abortion is illegal or restricted.
While the founders call them “pill-packing parties” the work is not without risk. Women in Texas, Mississippi and other states can be prosecuted for aborting a fetus.
College students have long been active in the abortion movement, but the activism looks very different today than it did in the 1960s. In this election season, College Uncovered takes you to a “pill-packing party” at an undisclosed location in Greater Boston and talks with college students mobilizing to help women get abortion medication wherever they live.
We also look at the re-energized anti-abortion movement in the wake of the Dobbs ruling two years ago and hear from a leader of the “pro-life generation.”
GBH’s Andrea Asuaje, senior producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley hosts this week’s episode, taking a deep dive into the sweeping ways medication abortion and the internet have changed college activism around reproductive rights.
Listen to the whole series
TRANSCRIPT
[Kirk] Hey, everyone, It’s Kirk Carapezza at GBH News.[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.
Thanks for listening to another episode of College Uncovered. We’ve been diving into the politics of college this season. And this week we’re covering abortion.
[Kirk] So for this show, we’re handing the mic over to my colleague, senior producer Andrea Asuaje. Andrea, welcome to College Uncovered.
[Andrea] Hey, Kirk. Hey, Jon. Thanks for having me.
[Jon] Andrea, we’ll let you take it from here.
[Ambient sound] Well, wonderful. Thank you all so much for coming. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started.
[Andrea] In an undisclosed location in Massachusetts, a group of women — from college students in their early 20s to retirees in their mid-60s — sit around a large circular table. For the last year, they’ve been getting together to sit and chat and laugh while putting together special packages for recipients they don’t know and may never meet.
[Woman’s voice] After about six months of doing packing parties, we finally figured out a system that was efficient. And so we’re quite happy with our station system now.
[Andrea] This is a pill-packing party. An abortion pill-packing party.
We’re not going to tell you where this pill packing party is taking place, due to safety concerns, but it is in Greater Boston. Over the course of two hours, they will box up more than 300 packages of mifespristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used to induce abortions.
Then they mail the pills to people who requested them through a website staffed by clinicians. The patients may be from rural Mississippi or suburban Houston, Tennessee, Kentucky or Indiana. For as little as $5, they will send the pills to patients in any state, including where abortion is illegal, and including to college students across the country.
It’s risky work, especially since critics say these volunteers should be prosecuted for committing a crime across state lines. But that doesn’t stop most of the pill-packing volunteers, like Massachusetts college student Andy, who’s originally from Texas.
[Andy] No matter how many activities I’m involved in or what’s going on in my life, I know what we’re doing is so impactful and essential. I always felt very strongly about women’s reproductive health. And so, I mean, that’s why I keep doing it. I’m doing it for these women, for people who don’t have the income or the accessibility to abortion medication.
[Andrea] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you.
I’m Andrea Asuaje with GBH News. Cohosts Kirk Carapezza, my colleague at GBH, and Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report will be back after the election with a special episode.
There’s a lot happening on college campuses that matters during this election season. We’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and how students, families and administrators are responding.
Today on the show: “Abortion on the Ballot … and in the Mail.
So one of the top issues that is mobilizing college students in the upcoming election is abortion. A new generation is talking more openly about abortion, not because there’s less shame or stigma around it, but because recent court rulings, including at the highest level, the Supreme Court, have made it something students have to think about and plan for in a bigger and more personal way.
Women in their 20s account for more than half of abortions, or 57 percent, according to the CDC. Roe vs. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion for 50 years. Then in the summer of 2022, the case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a.k.a. the Dobbs decision, overturned Roe and threw the U.S. reproductive care system into a tailspin. Two years later, with the presidential election looming, abortion is top of mind for both college-age voters and the candidates.
Here’s Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.
[Kamala Harris] This is a healthcare crisis. This is a healthcare crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis. He brags about overturning Roe vs. Wade. In his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it,’ he says.He is proud. Proud that women are dying. Proud that young women today have few more rights than their mothers and grandmothers.How dare he?
[Andrea] Here, in stark contrast is Donald Trump, referring to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during their debate.
[Donald Trump] Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s an execution. No longer abortion because the baby is born is okay. And that’s not okay with me.
[Andrea] Obviously untrue, by the way.
Massachusetts was the first of eight states to pass laws shielding abortion providers from criminal and civil liability, making it a safe haven for clinicians who provide telehealth services that help patients access abortions. Massachusetts, a state packed with colleges where women increasingly outnumber men, has become the home of a relatively underground network that’s helping people across the country get abortion care.
[Angel Foster] My name is Angel Foster. I am the cofounder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or the MAP. And my big-girl job is that I’m a professor in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Ottawa.
[Andrea] Foster studied medication abortion for two decades in humanitarian settings in the global South. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, she lives in both Massachusetts and Canada, using what she learned as a researcher to help create the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which we’ll just call the MAP from now on.
[Angel Foster] Even before the Dobbs decision in 2022, we know that access to abortion care in parts of the United States was horrible. It was hard to access abortion care in most of the South and a lot of the Midwest. And then with Dobbs, 14 states almost immediately banned abortion in almost all circumstances. We now have four states that ban abortion at early gestational ages. Obviously, the landscape keeps shifting. But suffice it to say, about a third of women of reproductive age in the United States now live in a part of the country with a very restrictive abortion law.
[Andrea] People hear that they can get abortion pills from the MAP by word of mouth on campus or on social media, like on Reddit. There’s a few rounds of online screening for medical eligibility that’s reviewed by a clinician, but no video or phone call is needed. Patients can get approval for pills in just a few hours.
[Angel Foster] And the abortion seeker receives information about what to do next, which is to make a payment. And then once we receive the payment, we shift the pills from our office.
[Andrea] The MAP employees and volunteers are the ones filling the orders for pills, and the MAP is a homespun operation. Angel jokingly calls it the Etsy of abortion, since the organization straddles the line between clinic and small business. And for the record, the Food and Drug Administration states that mifepristone the first pill in a medication abortion, is safer than some of the most commonly used medications in the country. The rate of death from mifepristone? Five in 1,000,000. For penicillin, it’s 20 deaths in a million. And for Viagra, it’s 49 in a million.
The MAP, which was founded in October 2023, has been helping hundreds of patients across the country, month after month, particularly low-income people in places where abortion is highly restricted or straight-up illegal. It’s a pay-what-you-can setup for patients. Some get the pills for as little as $5, even though it can cost up to $250.
[Angel Foster] And what we found in our first year was that a third of our patients paid $25 or less. In my mind’s eye, I imagine someone sitting at their kitchen table and kind of counting out pennies to say, ‘How much do I actually have?’
[Andrea] The MAP is able to provide care at these deeply discounted rates thanks to donors big and small and volunteers who gladly give their time. Then there are also the paid employees of the MAP who keep it running like me.
[Maeve] You know, I have a lot of, like, hopes and dreams for my own future. And I know that if I had a child now, that would definitely get in the way. And I think that’s the same way for a lot of women and a lot of people in general.
[Andrea] Maeve is one of three project managers at the MAP, all of whom are local college students.
[Maeve] I love children. I think they’re, you know, a blessing to the world. But, like, when you don’t want a child at that time, you shouldn’t have a child at that time.
[Andrea] Her work with the MAP is simple.
[Maeve] So I mostly do like the shipping. So I, like, will make the shipping labels on the USPS website and then put them on the packages. Take the packages to the … [fades out]
[Andrea] Yes, it may seem repetitive and, well, kind of boring to the rest of us, but Maeve feels that her work is tremendously important to the process.
[Maeve] I know that with every package I ship out, I’m helping someone and I’m, like, relieving an incredible amount of stress from someone’s life and, like, it’s just one package to me, technically, but like, for whoever is receiving it, it’s life changing.
[Andrea] And although she recognizes how essential the work is to MAP’s mission, there’s still a little space in her brain all the way deep down in the back where fear lies. It’s why only a few people in her life know about her involvement with the MAP.
[Maeve] I am, to an extent, putting myself at risk by working for the MAP, even though I’ve never, like, technically done anything illegal. And, like, everything we do is legal. A lot of people are not happy about it.
[Andrea] That sense of fear of potential repercussions isn’t paranoia. Despite Massachusetts being a shield-law state. While Angel, the founder of the MAP, says its strategy is legal, it also hasn’t been tested in the court system.
Then there’s the fact that 30 years ago, Brookline, Massachusetts, was the site of horrific attacks by John Salvi, who was fueled by anti-abortion sentiment. Salvi opened fire in a Planned Parenthood and then at a second clinic that performed abortions, killing two women and wounding five people. It’s the reason we’re keeping specific details about Maeve and the MAP private, because the work is risky. And that’s especially true for people who aren’t from shield-law states. That includes people like Andy, the student you heard from earlier.
[Andy] Going back to Texas, it reminds me how necessary this work is, because you cannot get an abortion in Texas, which is terrifying. And a third of our patients are from Texas, actually, or close to a third. So where I am from, we are literally helping so many women. Even, like, I’ve sent packages to somebody in my neighborhood, which is insane to me.
[Andrea] You heard her right. She sent packages to someone in her old neighborhood, where her parents live.
[Andy] You know, I was sitting in my chair looking at my computer in this office, and I was just taken aback by the gravity of the situation and what I was doing and the fact that it has reached literally to my hometown — like, in my neighborhood. And realizing that there are so many women out there who need our help.
[Andrea] The gravity of the situation is a mild way of putting it, when you look at how Texas has legally dealt with people seeking or somehow getting an abortion since the fall of Roe. In Texas two years ago, a 26-year-old woman who took medication for an unwanted pregnancy was charged with murder. The charge was eventually dropped, but now the woman is suing the district attorney for $1 million in damages.
These volunteers and employees with the MAP will probably never actually meet the people they’re helping. But project manager and Massachusetts college student Avery said they still feel connected to every patient who needs their help.
[Avery] I think I came back from, like, a break of some sort from school and I came back to the office and our boss had been here and she put up — Angel — she had put up a bunch of different, like, cards. We’d been sent just cards — like, people thanking us over and over again. And I remember coming in and being like, ‘My gosh.’
[Andrea] Avery, who’s originally from Pennsylvania, says living in Massachusetts means living in a place where most people her age in her classes and her friend group friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, most of them support abortion rights.
[Avery] I think a part of this is acknowledging that we do live in this blue bubble. And I think this work shows us that, like, what we believe, what the people in our geographic proximity believe, is not what the rest of the country believes.
[Andrea] Maeve and Andy and Avery spend hours working with the MAP each week, helping to keep it running while taking full course loads in college and being involved with various extracurricular activities. And they’re doing it with only a few loved ones actually knowing they’re a part of this network. It’s a lot of work.
[Avery] When the work gets stressful and the work gets hard, it’s, like, corny, but, like, I kind of just have to stop for a second and, like, think about, yeah, I’m clicking a lot of buttons and I’m running boxes to the post office. But this is going to have a real effect and it’s going to benefit so many women’s lives. And this is something that I should be grateful that I get the privilege to do every day.
[Andrea] Massachusetts has a unique role as a safe haven where people can come to get an abortion or abortion services or access doctors and get help remotely. And college students are active in the effort, if not leading it.
But the Dobbs ruling has also re-energized anti-abortion activists on campuses.
[Kristan Hawkins] Thank you all for coming to tonight’s event. My name is Sam Delmar. I’m the president of the Harvard Law Students for Life. And it’s my honor to introduce Kristan Hawkins.
[Andrea] Kristan Hawkins is the president of Students for Life of America, which has become the largest anti-abortion youth organization in the world under her leadership. The group says it has nearly 1,500 campus student groups dedicated to the anti-abortion cause, up from a few dozen 20 years ago. And Harvard is just one of her stops on a multi-year college speaking tour.
[Kristan Hawkins] I prepared a little with something because, you know, I’m at Harvard Law and you all tend to remind each other and others that you go to Harvard. So I was, like, I got to step up my game a little bit. I’m a bumpkin from West Virginia. I did want to go to law school until I met a bunch of lawyers. No offense.
[Andrea] Hawkins says she likes to argue and found her calling as an anti-abortion activist. She calls herself a Christian wife, mother and leader of the post-Roe generation, and she calls her website unapologetically pro-life. Hawkins tells the crowd that she had an abortion when she was 20 and suffered emotionally from it for decades as a result.
[Kristan Hawkins] I had an abortion. Abortion didn’t solve the problem I thought it was going to solve. It kept me in abusive relationship. It hurt my body. It’s made me infertile. I’ve been suffering from abortion for decades emotionally, because of that decision I made when I was 20 years old.
[Andrea] In her speech, Hawkins echoed the refrain of the anti-abortion movement around what she calls natural rights.
[Kristan Hawkins] Every single abortion is killing, ending the life of a unique whole living human being that never existed before and will never exist again. We in the pro-life movement see all human beings as equally valuable, deserving, at the very minimum, of those natural rights of the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
[Andrea] But mostly, Hawkins encourages audience members who favor abortion rights to ask questions first. She regularly posts her exchanges with her opponents on TikTok, where she has 134,000 followers.
We reached out to Kristan Hawkins for an interview when she was in Boston, but we didn’t hear back from her scheduler.
If Hawkins came ready for a debate, that’s probably because surveys show that most women with some college education or a degree support abortion rights under most circumstances. Pew Research Center found that number is around 75 percent.
In all, about 70 people attended Hawkins’s event at Harvard. But there weren’t protests or open debate, only respectful applause and polite disagreement.
Recent polls have shown that students are increasingly ruling out colleges in states where they disagree with the state’s laws around abortion and reproductive rights.
[Harper Brannock] I have seen in the South increasing anti-abortion rhetoric, violence against women who are seeking health care. And I know people who have been shunned from their communities because they had a medically necessary abortion.
[Andrea] That’s Harper Brannock. She’s 21 and a junior from Huntsville, Alabama. She spoke to us at a recent Boston University event, a drag bingo night held to raise money for an abortion fund in Brannock’s home state of Alabama. Abortions are illegal, except in cases where the life of the mother is at stake. And that’s one of the reasons Harper decided to attend a college in Massachusetts.
[Harper Brannock] I felt that it was just really important to me to come to a place where if something happens to me, even sexual assault or something completely consensual and I just couldn’t have the child, I really feel like it’s important that I can have safe access to health care.
[Andrea] We were curious if these sentiments were shared by students who go to colleges with religious affiliations. So we sent our team out to Boston College, a Jesuit school, to talk to women on campus about the issue. Like other Catholic universities, the college health center doesn’t distribute birth control or refer women for abortions.
Here’s what some of those students had to say.
[Student 1] I kind of stayed away from, like, the southern schools, also because I really just like New England and I like the vibes, but thinking about like, how safe I feel as a woman and like how my choice is valued was, like, very important.
[Student 2] I think it’s telling that we have a pro-life club on campus, and just seeing it at, like, the club fair or things like that, especially my first year last year, was very shocking. And I didn’t really know how to process it. And at first when they came up to and were, like, ‘Do you want to know more about the pro-life club?’ I was, like, ‘No, not really.’
[Andrea] The students all agreed to speak to us without using their names due to privacy concerns. One BC sophomore told us that, yes, BC is a more conservative school known for its academics, but she’s made up her mind on who she’s going to cast her vote for on Nov. 5. And that’s Vice President Kamala Harris.
[Student 3] Yes, 100 percent. I mean, just as a young woman in general, I don’t think I could feel safe voting for somebody who didn’t want to ensure my rights to my own body. So, yeah.
[Andrea] So the abortion movement has been underway for almost two centuries, going all the way back to federal legislation around contraceptives in the mid-1800s and really heating up in the 1960s when the FDA approved the pill.
In many ways, the pill-packing parties and the MAP are the modern incarnation of the Jane Collective, an underground organization in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s that helped women get abortions in the days before Roe. The Janes, the anonymous women behind the collective, were mostly college students and women in their 20s. And the collective itself was founded by then 19-year-old University of Chicago college student Heather Booth. The Janes eventually started performing abortions themselves, and by the time Roe passed in 1973, the Janes had arranged or performed more than 11,000 abortions.
The abortion movement among college students today is very different than it was even a generation ago. The parents of college students listening to this podcast will not be at all surprised to hear this. There were no pill-packing parties in the ’80s, when the previous generation was college age. Mifespristone and misoprostol weren’t approved for use in the U.S. until 2000. The advent of medication abortion changed the landscape entirely.
And the internet wasn’t accessible to most people, unlike today, when organizing and finding access to abortion care or medication is done predominantly online and on social media.
[Loretta Ross] What is happening is that they’re generally not joining the legacy feminist organizations, and they’re developing their own ways of being active according to the conditions that they’re dealing with.
[Andrea] This is Loretta J. Ross, the renowned human rights activist who’s now a professor at Smith College. Ross used to be an organizer for NOW, the National Organization for Women, and helped organize the women’s marches in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan era. Those marches drew massive crowds of supporters unlike ever before. And that was before Trump was elected in 2016.
[Loretta Ross] The Women’s March, the pink pussy march, blew all of our previous numbers away in 2017. After that, all of a sudden, the abortion funds started exploding. We felt like Cassandras in the reproductive justice movement, always pointed at the sky was falling and then it fell down. So I don’t doubt that young women care about these issues.
[Andrea] After her work with NOW, Ross went on to become a founding member of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in Atlanta.
[Loretta Ross] I would argue in one sense that Black women were far more interested in the politics of fertility control even. Man, even [than] white women, because since we were kidnapped here and brought here as slaves and forced to breed for profit, bodily autonomy has always been front and center for Black women, long before the Seneca Falls Declaration, etc., etc.. And so we’ve had a consistent demand for bodily autonomy.
[Andrea] Ross, who was sexually assaulted twice in her youth, says some of her earliest work studied the role religion played in women’s views on abortion and reproductive rights.
[Loretta Ross] There was not only a reluctance in the Black church to talk about reproduction. There was a reluctance to talk about sex because of AIDS. And so it’s like a perfect storm of shame was created around Black women’s sex, sexuality and reproduction. And yet, as I said, the rhetoric doesn’t match the data, because however shameful they feel about it, they still get one third of the abortions in this country.
[Andrea] And Ross makes the point that many first ladies, including most recently Melania Trump in her new autobiography, expressed support for the idea that women should make their own decisions about their bodies. Ross also believes the Republican Party is more committed to using abortion as a political football than caring about actual abortion bans. And that goes for Republicans from former President Ronald Reagan all the way to Donald Trump.
[Loretta Ross] Well, it’s always been a multi-front battle. So you battle in the courts, you battle in the legislature, you battle in the streets, and then you center your ability to provide services to the most vulnerable. I mean, this is what we’ve always had to do. And I think that’s what this new generation of people is doing.
[Ambient sound]
[Andrea] At tonight’s pill-packing party, everyone takes turns at each station, whether it’s folding boxes, packing pills or inserting directions at the big circular table. Avery is double-checking boxes at the end of the line.
Medical student Rasa puts bottles of misoprostol into each box. She keeps coming back because she says this is an important part of her training as a future OB-GYN.
[Rasa] I think it’s some of the most important work that I do as a med student. This is, like, the ultimate dream of how can I help people who my hand can’t reach?
[Andrea] And then there’s Cheryl Hamlin, a physician who performed abortions in the South, including in Jackson Women’s Health — yes, of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health — in Mississippi. She’s the first stop at the table folding boxes.
Cheryl may be retired, but that’s not stopping her from doing the work.
[Cheryl Hamlin] I do think some younger people, especially in Massachusetts, don’t entirely understand how bad it is elsewhere. And, you know, I sort of feel like it’s my duty to whatever I can do to keep people informed. And if there is an opening to make a difference, whether it’s, you know, supporting a clinic or whatever, then I should do that.
[Andrea] The group meets weekly now to eat pizza, sip soda and wine and commiserate. The final touch added to each package at the end of the line is a handwritten note. The women take turns writing them. It’s nurse practitioner Erin’s favorite task.
[Erin] I always like to write the notes that we wish you the best, because I feel that I’m putting a little bit of myself into that box to really tell them this is hard and we’re supporting you and we’re wishing you the best.
[Andrea] The group mailed its 5,000th package this month.
This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Andrea Asuaje.
More information about the topics covered in this episode:
The Hechinger Report “College Welcome Guide,” which includes state abortion laws
An Art & Science Group survey of how reproductive rights laws affect students’ college selections
We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486, and tell us what you think.
This episode was produced and written by me, Andrea Asuaje, and Meg Woolhouse, with reporting help from Diane Adame and Harriet Gaye.
It was edited by Jeff Keating.
Supervising editor is Meg Woolhouse.
Ellen London is executive producer
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
Theme song and original music by Left Roman.
Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins
College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and is distributed by PRX.
It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Thanks for listening.
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A community college could transform a region — and help itself grow. Will voters buy it? – The Hechinger Report
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LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.
There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear.
“Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”
This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.
Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.
That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.
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At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”
Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.
The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.
The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
Representatives of Austin Community College speak with community members to help them learn about the institution at an event in early October in Lockhart, Texas. Voters decide in November whether to accept a tax hike in exchange for the college expanding into their rural region. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report “These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.
ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.
“An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.
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First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.
In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.
The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.
A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report “Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”
Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.
In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.
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On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.
“We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”
A flier provides information in Spanish about Austin Community College during a community event in early October in Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.
The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.
Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”
But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.
“I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”
Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses
Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.
Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.
“I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”
In exchange for paying more taxes, residents in the Lockhart Independent School District would qualify for in-district tuition at Austin Community College, which would also build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas. Lockhart grads also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program taking effect this fall. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.
Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.
This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.
In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.
They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.
Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Austin Community College was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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