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The demographic makeup of the country’s voters continues to shift. That creates headwinds for Republicans | CNN Politics

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Demographic change continued to chip away at the cornerstone of the Republican electoral coalition in 2022, a new analysis of Census data has found.

White voters without a four-year college degree, the indispensable core of the modern GOP coalition, declined in 2022 as a share of both actual and eligible voters, according to a study of Census results by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in electoral turnout.

McDonald’s finding, provided exclusively to CNN, shows that the 2022 election continued the long-term trend dating back at least to the 1970s of a sustained fall in the share of the votes cast by working-class White voters who once constituted the brawny backbone of the Democratic coalition, but have since become the absolute foundation of Republican campaign fortunes.

As non-college Whites have receded in the electorate over that long arc, non-White adults and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Whites with at least a four-year college degree, have steadily increased their influence. “This is a trend that is baked into the demographic change of the country, so [it] is likely going to accelerate over the next ten years,” says McDonald, author of the recent book “From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

From election to election, the impact of the changing composition of the voter pool is modest. The slow but steady decline of non-college Whites, now the GOP’s best group, did not stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in 2016 – nor does it preclude him from winning it again in 2024. And, compared to their national numbers, these non-college voters remain a larger share of the electorate in many of the key states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential race (particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and control of the Senate (including seats Democrats are defending in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.)

But even across those states, these voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate. And McDonald’s analysis of the 2022 results shows that the non-college White share of the total vote is highly likely to decline again in 2024, while the combined share of non-Whites and Whites with a college degree, groups much more favorable to Democrats, is virtually certain to increase. The political effect of this decline is analogous to turning up the resistance on a treadmill: as their best group shrinks, Republicans must run a little faster just to stay in place.

Especially ominous for Republicans is that the share of the vote cast by these blue-collar Whites declined slightly in 2022 even though turnout among those voters was relatively strong, while minority turnout fell sharply, according to McDonald’s analysis. The reason for those seemingly incongruous trends is that even solid turnout among the non-college Whites could not offset the fact that they are continuing to shrink in the total pool of eligible voters, as American society grows better-educated and more racially diverse.

Given that minority turnout fell off, the fact that the non-college White share of the total 2022 vote still slightly declined “has to be a huge cause for concern for Republicans at this point,” says Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic political targeting firm. If more of the growing pool of eligible minority voters turn out in 2024, he says, “it is not unreasonable to expect” that the non-college White voters so critical to GOP fortunes could experience an even “steeper decline” in their share of the total votes cast next year.

That prospect remains a central concern for the dwindling band of anti-Trump Republicans who fear that the former president has dangerously narrowed the GOP’s appeal by identifying it so unreservedly with the cultural priorities and grievances of working-class White voters, many of them older and living outside of the nation’s largest and most economically productive metropolitan areas.

McDonald’s “data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end,” says former US Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “We saw this in 2018 when Republicans lost the House; we saw it in 2020 when they lost the presidency and the Senate, and we saw it in last year when Republicans were supposed to have big gains in both chambers and [did not]. All of these failures can be attributed to Trumpism. These data just confirm what is visible to the naked eye.”

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, says these slow but steady long-term changes in the electorate leave him convinced that the ceiling for Trump’s potential support in 2024 is no more than 46% of the vote. But Democrats, he believes, still face the risk that the clear majority in the electorate opposed to Trumpism will not turn out in sufficient numbers or splinter to third-party options if they do. Both dangers, he argues, are most pronounced for the diverse younger generations that have never found President Joe Biden very inspiring and have not received sufficient messaging and organizing attention from Democrats.

The political impact of those younger voters, he warns, could be blunted by the proliferation of red state laws making it more difficult to vote and Democrats focusing too much “on chasing this mythical [White] swing voter that doesn’t look like that Millennial or Gen Z voter we are relying on.”

Overall voter turnout in 2022 was high compared to almost all previous midterms, but below the peak reached in 2018, when a greater share of eligible voters turned out than in any midterm election since 1914, according to McDonald’s calculations.

Turnout last year fell most sharply among minorities: while 43% of all eligible non-White voters showed up in 2018, that slipped to just 35% last year, McDonald calculates. Turnout among eligible college-educated White voters also dropped from an astronomical 74% in 2018 to just over 69% last year. White voters without a four-year college degree actually came closest to matching their elevated 2018 performance, slipping only slightly from just over 45% then to about 43% last year.

But turnout is only one of the two factors that shape how large a share of actual voters each group comprises, which is the number that really matters in determining election outcomes. The other factor is how large a share of the pool of potential eligible voters each group represents. Turnout, in effect, is the numerator and the share of eligible voters the denominator that combined produce the share of the total vote each group casts during every election.

As McDonald found, the long-term trends in the eligible voter pool – the denominator in our equation – continued unabated in 2022. Whites without a college degree fell to just over 41% of eligible potential voters. That was down 3.2 percentage points from their share of the eligible voter population in 2018 – which was itself down exactly 3.2 percentage points from their share in 2014. In turn, from 2014 to 2022, college-educated White voters slightly increased their share of the eligible voter pool and minorities significantly increased from 30.5% then to nearly 35% now.

Netting together both the turnout results and these shifts in the eligible voter pool, McDonald found that working-class White voters in 2022 declined as a share overall, whether compared either to the last few midterm elections or the most recent presidential contests.

In 2022, Whites without a college degree cast 38.3% of all votes, he found. That was down from 39.3% in 2018 and more than 43% in 2014, according to his calculations. That finding also represented a continued decline from just over 42% of the vote when Trump won the 2016 presidential election and 39.9% in 2020 – the first time non-college Whites had fallen below 40% of the total presidential electorate in Census figures.

Whites with at least a four-year college degree were the big gainers in 2022: McDonald found they cast nearly 36% of all votes last year, compared to a little over-one-third in both 2018 and 2014 and a little less than that in the 2020 presidential year. Burdened by lower turnout, the non-White share of the total vote slipped to just over one-fourth, down slightly from 2018, but still higher than in the 2014 midterms. The minority share of the total vote was considerably larger in 2020, reaching nearly three-in-ten in Census figures.

All of this extends very consistent long-term trends. Census data analyzed by the non-partisan States of Change project show that non-college Whites have fallen from around two-thirds of the total vote under Ronald Reagan, to about three-fifths under Bill Clinton, to less than half under Barack Obama, to the current level of just under two-fifths. Over those same decades, college-educated Whites have grown from about two-in-ten to three-in-ten voters, while minorities have increased from a little over one-in-ten then to nearly three-in-ten now.

Other respected data sources differ on the share of the total vote comprised by these three big groups: the Pew Validated Voter study and the estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, both put the share of the vote cast in 2020 by non-college Whites slightly higher, in the range of 42-44%.

But both also show the same core pattern as the Census results do, with the share of the total vote cast by those non-college Whites declining by about two percentage points every four years. The Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations, including CNN, changed its methodology in a way that makes long-term comparisons impossible. But, similarly to McDonald, the exits found the non-college White share of the total vote declining to 39% in 2022 from 41% in 2018, with minorities also slightly falling over that period, and college-educated Whites growing.

The trend lines that McDonald documented for last year suggest it’s a reasonable prediction that non-college Whites will again decline as a share of total voters by two points over the period from 2020 to 2024. That would push their share of the national 2024 vote down to below 38%, with more minority voters likely filling most of that gap and the college-educated Whites growing more modestly to offset the rest.

McDonald says the basic dynamic reconfiguring the voting pool is that many Baby Boomers and their elders are aging out of the electorate. That’s both because more of them are dying or they are reaching an advanced age where turnout tends to decline, either for infirmity or other obstacles. Those older generations are preponderantly White (about three-fourths of seniors are White), and fewer have college degrees, which were not as essential to economic success in those years, McDonald points out. Meanwhile, a larger share of young adults today hold four-year degrees, and the youngest generations aging into the electorate every two years are far more racially diverse. According to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank, young people of color now comprise almost exactly half of all Americans who turn 18 and age into the electorate each year.

“We are right now at the teetering edge of the influence of the baby boomers,” says McDonald. “They are just starting to enter those twilight years in their turnout rates, while other [more diverse] groups are maturing. So we are right at that cusp – that critical point of where things are going to start changing.”

The impact of these changes on the outcomes of elections, as McDonald says, is very incremental, “like the proverbial frog in the boiling water.” One way to understand that dynamic is to assume that Whites without a college degree on the one hand, and minorities and college-educated Whites on the other, all split their vote at roughly the same proportions as they have in recent elections. If the former group declines as a share of the electorate by two points from 2020-2024 and the latter groups increase by an equal amount, that change alone would enlarge Biden’s margin of victory in the two-party vote from 4.6 percentage points to 5.8, Bonier calculates. Republicans would need to increase their vote share with some or all of those groups just to get back to the deficit Trump faced in 2020 – much less to overcome it.

Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic electoral analyst who has become a staunch critic of his party, argues exactly that kind of shift in voting preferences could offset the change in the electorate’s composition – and create a real threat for Biden. Even though Biden is aggressively highlighting his efforts to create blue-collar jobs through “manufacturing and infrastructure projects that are starting to get off the ground,” Teixiera recently wrote, a “sharp swing against the incumbent administration by White working-class voters seems like a very real possibility.”

Teixeira, now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also maintains Democrats face the risk Republicans can extend the unexpected gains Trump registered in 2020 with non-White voters without a college degree, especially Hispanics.

Curbelo, the former congressman, shares Teixeira’s belief that Democratic liberalism on some social issues like crime is creating an opening for Republicans to gain ground among culturally conservative Hispanics. “If they are not careful, they can jeopardize their potential gains from Republicans doubling down on Trumpism by alienating themselves from minority voters who may identify with some of the [Democrats’] economic policies but who do not necessarily identify with the party’s victimhood narrative about minorities,” Curbelo says.

Still, Curbelo warns that Republicans are unlikely to achieve the gains possible with minority voters so long as they are stamped so decisively by Trump’s polarizing image. And polling has consistently found that while many non-college Hispanic voters hold more moderate views on social issues than college-educated White liberals, those minority voters are not nearly as conservative as core GOP groups, like blue-collar Whites or evangelical Christians.

As Teixeira has forcefully argued in recent years, such demographic change doesn’t ensure doom for Republicans or success for Democrats. Among other things, that change is unevenly distributed around the country, and the small state bias of both the Electoral College and the two-senators-per-state rule magnifies the influence of sparsely populated interior states where these shifts have been felt much more lightly.

Yet, even so, the long-term change in the electorate’s composition, along with the Democrats’ growing strength among white-collar suburban voters, largely explains why the party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.

And even though Whites without a college degree exceed their share of the national vote in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, their share of the vote is shrinking along the same trajectory of about 2-3 points every four years in those states too, according to analysis by Frey. Meanwhile, in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, more rapid growth in the minority population means that blue-collar Whites will likely comprise a smaller portion of the eligible voter pool than they do nationally.

Trump, with the exception of his beachhead among blue-collar minorities, has now largely locked the GOP into a position of needing to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups, particularly non-college Whites. It’s entirely possible that Trump or another Republican nominee can meet that test well enough to win back the White House in 2024, especially given the persistent public disenchantment with Biden’s performance. But McDonald’s 2022 data shows why relying on a coalition tilted so heavily toward those non-college Whites becomes just a little tougher for the GOP in each presidential race.

While Trump or another Republican certainly can win in 2024, Bonier says, “he has reshaped the party in such a way that they have a very narrow path to victory.”

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May 15, 2023
Why Biden’s orbit isn’t worried about Robert F. Kennedy’s 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

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President Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t respond to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign kick-off because, though there is now a major donor summit on the books for next week, there still technically is no Biden campaign.

What there is instead is an acceptance among most Democratic leaders that they may still have to wait a while for Biden to make it official – and a grudging embrace of that.

To the confident advisers in the Biden orbit and their wider circle of supporters, the Kennedy challenge only serves to reinforce the president’s strength. Kennedy and spiritual author Marianne Williamson – mocked at a daily White House press briefing after her primary campaign launch – are the extent of the challenge Biden has drawn.

The Democratic National Committee has made very clear, meanwhile, that the party apparatus is aligned with Biden. No plans for primary debates are underway. A White House aide did not respond when asked for comment about Kennedy’s kick-off.

The furthest that New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, who has been critical of Biden’s efforts to stop his state from holding its traditional first-in-the-nation primary, would go when asked about Kennedy’s candidacy was to say, “You just never know what catches the fancy of the voters.”

“I think the president’s done a fantastic job. The amount of accomplishments is simply breathtaking,” Buckley said. “I don’t see a singular issue galvanizing opposition to him.”

For at least a few hours on Wednesday, though, it looked like a real challenge. Like the bar across Boston Common that has the iconic “Cheers” sign but doesn’t actually look much like the set of the sitcom inside, Kennedy launch event at the Boston Park Plaza – with the “I’m a Kennedy Democrat” signs waving, the security with earpieces buzzing around – could, with a squint, look like any of the many campaigns from his famous family, including two against incumbent Democratic presidents, both of which ended with Republican wins.

What many attendees were there for, they said, was Kennedy-style truth telling. What many of them cheered most loudly for through his meandering speech – “this is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” he joked with an hour left to go – were the oblique references to his Covid-19 vaccine skepticism. That skepticism has ostracized Kennedy from nearly every scientist, most Democratic leaders and many members of his family.

Kennedy acknowledged that distance from his family, previously reported by CNN, by naming those family members who did attend the event, as well as others he said had written him “beautiful letters of love” about his launch even though they are opposed to him running.

Inside the crowded ballroom on Wednesday, Kennedy told hundreds of supporters he knows he’s already being counted out.

That, he said, was part of the point, and what made him just like his father and namesake, whose 1968 primary campaign took on Lyndon Johnson.

“He was running against a president in his own party. He was running against a war. He was running at a time of unprecedented polarization in our country,” Kennedy said, calling his father getting into the 1968 race feeling like he had no chance to win.

“That hopelessness of his campaign,” Kennedy said, “freed him to tell the truth to the American people.”

Former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a two-time presidential candidate from the left, compared Kennedy to Paul Revere in his own introduction of the candidate. Kennedy noted that he’d timed his campaign launch to the anniversary of that ride, even reciting a bit of the famous Henry Longfellow poem, which he noted his grandmother Rose had made all her 29 grandchildren memorize.

A new American Revolution is coming, he said, calling his campaign a mission to “end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”

But much of Kennedy’s speech returned to themes of how he had been trying to tell people what he thought was right, despite the government working against him – whether in his environmental work or when he called for an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.

As a corner of Twitter lit up with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” jokes following the introduction of his wife Cheryl Hines (a star in the show), Kennedy plowed through his concerns at length. There were mentions of the CIA. There were mentions of the butterflies he worried his grandchildren would never get to see because of environmental degradation and the songbirds they’d never get to hear. There was an extended critique of the American health care system, which he said has failed in not effectively treating chronic diseases. “If I have not significantly dropped the number of children with chronic disease by the end of my second term, I do not want to get reelected,” he said. There were questions about whether the war in Ukraine is in the national interest.

Kennedy knows he gets dismissed as a purveyor of misinformation, he said in his speech, but “a lot of the misinformation is just statements that depart from government orthodoxy.”

More than an hour into his speech, the crowd erupted as he spoke about the rise in autism diagnoses since 1989, arguing that he has never met someone his age with autism.

“Why aren’t we asking the question – what happened?” Kennedy asked.

Over two hours – including when a fire alarm briefly interrupted the speech – Kennedy never explicitly said the word “vaccine” once.

“He’s a truth teller,” said Rich Prunier, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, who remembered meeting John F. Kennedy during his 1956 Senate campaign and attended Wednesday’s event.

Asked what he felt Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells the truth about, Prunier said, “name a subject.” His wife – wearing a matching “I’m a Kennedy Democrat” 2024 T-shirt – held up her copy of Kennedy’s book about “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

Prunier, who said he has received other vaccines but none of the Covid-19 shots, said he had voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020, but abstained in the 2020 general election because he didn’t like Biden or Donald Trump. He said he just peeled his Sanders bumper sticker off and will soon be replacing it with the Kennedy one he just picked up.

Elsewhere in the crowd, a small group posed for an iPhone photo while saying, “Freedom!”

Karen Huntley, a 60-year-old bookkeeper who’d come from Connecticut after reading about the launch from a well-known vaccine skeptic, said she wasn’t ready to commit but that Kennedy “sounds like a good candidate” because of his position on vaccines.

Huntley said she’d voted for Trump twice, but wouldn’t again – because of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration effort that helped accelerate development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

“I consider Trump the father of the vaccine,” she said.

His opposition to the vaccine, many leading Democrats say, disqualified Kennedy immediately.

“Being a vaccine denier and causing harm to public health is not progressive,” California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, one of the newest progressive leaders elected to Congress, told CNN. “The Democratic Party – and the progressive wing – will be solidly behind President Biden. There is no support or appetite for a challenger.”

Vaccine skepticism led Kennedy to a meeting at Trump Tower during the 2016 transition, after which he said the then-president-elect asked him to chair a commission on vaccines (the Trump transition later denied this, and the commission never came to be).

Asked back then what his father or late uncles Ted Kennedy or John F. Kennedy would think of Trump as president, Robert F. Kennedy said, “He’s probably come into office less encumbered by ideology or by obligations than anybody who’s won the presidency since Andrew Jackson. We’ll see what happens.”

By 2020, he said he had fully turned on Trump.

“He’s a bully, and I don’t like bullies, and that’s part of American tradition. I think in many ways he’s discredited the American experiment with self-governance,” Kennedy told Yahoo News three years ago.

While Kennedy says he’s running as a progressive, his first interview after declaring his candidacy was with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, in which he insisted that the American government is lying about the casualty rate in Ukraine.

Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser and proud dirty trickster, wrote up his own thoughts about a campaign he called “intriguing and potentially substantially impactful on the 2024 presidential race.”

“I believe that if he can pull together a minimally effective campaign, he could garner as much as a third of the Democrat primary vote,” Stone argued about Kennedy.

Stone predicted that Democratic Party leaders would try to block that from happening, but if he turns out to be wrong, “Given America’s state of peril, if RFK performs better than expected, the former President should consider the drafting of RFK as the Republican vice presidential candidate in a ‘bipartisan’ unity ticket.”

But though he and Kennedy were in a photo together backstage at an event last July, as part of the far-right Reawaken America tour, Stone said he has nothing to do with this campaign.

“We are acquaintances,” Stone told CNN about Kennedy. “I met him once. I have no idea who is running his campaign, and therefore no contact with them.”

In a long tweet last week, Kennedy denied speculation that has circulated in news reports that ties him to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

“Is it a sign of my campaign’s strength that the Elite of DC’s establishment media simultaneously and shamelessly published an orchestrated and baseless lie to smear me, even before I announce my presidential campaign?” Kennedy wrote. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign. I have never discussed a presidential run with Mr. Bannon.”

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April 20, 2023
GOP blocks Democratic effort to replace Feinstein on Judiciary panel | CNN Politics

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Republicans on Tuesday formally blocked a request from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to temporarily replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, something Democrats hoped to do in order to advance stalled judicial nominations.

Senate Democrats are seeking to temporarily replace Feinstein on the powerful panel that processes judicial nominees as the California Democrat remains absent, recovering from shingles.

Senate Republicans, however, have made clear that they have been prepared to block Democratic efforts to replace Feinstein on the committee, ratcheting up pressure on the 89-year-old California Democrat to resign or return quickly.

Feinstein’s return date is still unclear and she asked just last week to be “temporarily” replaced on the committee as she recovers.

Schumer introduced his motion on Tuesday by talking about his friendship with Feinstein, and highlighting her accomplishments.

“Today, I am acting not just as Leader but as Dianne’s friend, in honoring her wishes, until she returns to the Senate,” Schumer said.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, objected to Schumer’s request, though he also praised the California Democrat. He argued that Schumer’s move is to get more judges confirmed.

“She’s a dear friend and we hope for her speedy recovery and return back to the Senate. With all due respect, my colleague, Senator Schumer, this is about a handful of judges that you can’t get the votes for,” Graham said.

Democrats could still force a vote to replace the Feinstein, but that would require the support of 10 Republicans and it’s unlikely they would use a lot of valuable floor time for something with little chance of success.

Feinstein, who has already announced she’s not seeking reelection, initially said she expected to return to Washington “by the end of the March work period,” but that her return got “delayed due to continued complications related to my diagnosis.”

She recently said she plans to return “as soon as possible once my medical team advises that it’s safe for me to travel.”

Cardin told CNN Tuesday he had discussed with Schumer being the temporary replacement on the committee but that he had not discussed the decision with Feinstein.

The Maryland Democrat said he and Feinstein have not spoken since she’s been out of the Senate and that it is his understanding that this is only a temporary move until she returns.

“I recognize the importance of the numbers on the committee, and this way we can be able to conduct business. I look at this as a way of dealing with a current situation,” Cardin said.

Democrats would need 60 votes to replace Feinstein on the panel, but senior Republicans in leadership and on the committee made clear Monday that they would not give them the votes to do that. If Feinstein does not return soon, at least 12 nominees, or possibly even more, could be stalled.

If Democrats are unable to replace Feinstein or if she does not return to Washington soon, they could see key agenda items thwarted – both on the committee and on the Senate floor.

Asked if the California Democrat should consider resigning if she can’t return by May, Schumer responded that he’s “hopeful” she will return “very soon.”

“Look, I spoke to Senator Feinstein just a few days ago and she and I are both very hopeful that she will return very soon,” Schumer said at his weekly policy press conference in the US Capitol.

Feinstein announced in February that she would not run for reelection, and a number of Democrats have already launched campaigns for her seat in 2024 in what is shaping up to be a competitive primary.

Many congressional Democrats have remained largely supportive of her decision to remain in office while absent from the Capitol as she recovers from shingles.

But Feinstein has faced calls to resign from two House Democrats – and if Democrats are not able to replace her on the committee, that number could start to grow.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin recently acknowledged to CNN that Feinstein’s absence had slowed down the party’s push to confirm nominees. But Durbin has stopped short of calling on Feinstein to resign, saying he hopes that Republicans will help to temporarily replace her on the committee and recognize that “the rain can fall on both sides of the road.”

Asked if her absence has longer ramifications for the Democrats’ ability to confirm nominees, the Illinois Democrat said, “Yes, of course it does,” pointing to the long process of getting nominees scheduled for votes during precious floor time.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a senior member on the Judiciary Committee and close adviser to McConnell, told CNN that he opposes the effort to replace Feinstein on the panel.

“I don’t think Republicans can or should help President Biden’s most controversial nominees,” the Texas Republican said. “I support having Sen. Feinstein come back as soon as she can. But this effort to confirm controversial and in many instances largely unqualified nominees, I don’t think you can expect any Republican cooperation.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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April 18, 2023
Democrats bash Justice Clarence Thomas but their plan to investigate ethics allegations is unclear | CNN Politics

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Senate Democrats railed against Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday amid reports that the Supreme Court conservative failed to disclose luxury travel, gifts and a real estate transaction involving a GOP megadonor, but their plan to investigate the conservative jurist remains unclear.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin has promised that his committee will hold a hearing on the alleged ethics violations in the coming weeks, but shared no details when pressed by CNN on whether lawmakers will seek testimony from Thomas or others who might have knowledge about his relationship with the donor, Texas-based billionaire Harlan Crow.

Asked if subpoenas were on the table, Durbin said that no decision has been made on that yet. He said that it was “too soon” to share more information about what his committee’s hearing on Supreme Court ethics might look like. He and other Judiciary Democrats sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts last week calling for him to open an investigation into the Thomas allegations.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Tuesday that “the American people deserve all of the facts surrounding Justice Thomas’s blatant violation of law.”

“I hope that [Thomas] will voluntarily appear, and if not, we should consider subpoenas for him and others, like Harlan Crow, who have information,” Blumenthal said.

Other Democrats on the committee said Tuesday that they were deferring to Durbin, who huddled with Democrats on Monday evening to discuss their strategy towards Thomas.

Meanwhile, Republicans appear mostly united in defending the Thomas, suggesting the court can handle its own affairs.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attacked Democrats for criticizing the court, and said he has confidence in Roberts “to deal with these court internal issues.”

“The Democrats, it seems to me, spent a lot of time criticizing individual members of the court and going after the court as an institution,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.

Bringing more transparency to the high court has had some bipartisan support in the past, but the court’s jerk to the right – particularly with the three justices that former President Donald Trump put on the bench – has raised the partisan stakes around the issue. In recent years, the conservative majority has handled pivotal rulings undoing abortions rights, dismantling gun regulations and reining in the powers of executive branch agencies – all prompting outcry from Democrats.

Even as Senate Democrats have yet to settle on a plan for their own response to the Thomas allegations, they sought to highlight the issue and framed it within their broader push for a code-of-ethics for the Supreme Court, which is excluded from many of the ethics rules that apply to lower rungs of the federal judiciary.

“I’m disturbed by the recent reports detailing potentially unethical – even potentially illegal conduct – at the highest levels of our judiciary,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said at a Judiciary Committee hearing for three lower court nominees on Tuesday. “It should go without saying that judges at all levels should be held to strict and enforceable ethical standards.”

Durbin said in a speech that Congress shouldn’t have to wait for the court to act.

“The Supreme Court doesn’t need to wait on Congress to clean up its act; the justices could take action today if they wanted to, and if the court fails to act, Congress must,” Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Back-to back-reports in ProPublica this month detailed how luxury travel and gifts to Thomas from Crow – and even a real estate transaction – went unreported in Thomas’ annual financial disclosures.

Thomas has said that the travel and gifts to him and his family that were financed by the Crows went unreported because he had been advised that he was not required to do so, under an exemption in the court’s disclosure rules for so-called “personal hospitality.” After scrutiny of those rules by lawmakers, the Judicial Conference – which operates as the policy-making body for the federal judiciary – recently closed a loophole in those rules that appears to have covered some of the hospitality Thomas received. Thomas said that he intended to follow that updated guidance in the future, and a source close to the justice also told CNN in recent days that he planned to amend his disclosure form to report the real estate transaction, the sale of his mother’s home to Crow.

“If the reports are accurate, it stinks,” Sen. Mitt Romney said Monday evening, in rare comments from a Republican criticizing Thomas’ lack of transparency.

Other Republicans lined up in defense of the justice – who was named to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 – and said it wasn’t Congress’ place to push an ethics code on the high court.

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, suggested that the accusations against Thomas were part of a “multi-decade effort now to target Clarence Thomas by these liberal activist groups.”

This is not the first time Thomas has been at the center of an ethics controversy. Last year, CNN reported that his wife Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist, was texting with Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about the former president’s efforts overturn his 2020 election defeat, and her political lobbying has long raised questions about when justices are obligated to recuse themselves from cases.

Yet Republicans have shown little interest in joining Democrats in using legislation to impose an ethics code on the justices.

“The Court, kind of historically I think, has sort of policed itself,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the GOP’s Senate Whip, who said Thomas had been a “solid justice on the court through the years and has acquitted himself well there.”

“Let’s see what the court does,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN Tuesday. “I prefer them to do it internally.”

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April 18, 2023
Six takeaways from campaign fundraising filings by Trump, Haley, Santos and more | CNN Politics

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Former President Donald Trump’s criminal indictment helped jolt his fundraising. GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley faces questions about her campaign math. Embattled New York Rep. George Santos refunded more contributions than he took in. And some – but not all – of the Democratic Party’s most vulnerable Senate incumbents have stepped up their fundraising ahead of tough 2024 election fights.

Here’s a look at a few takeaways from new first-quarter campaign filings covering the first three months of 2023:

Trump raised about $14.4 million for his main campaign committee in the first quarter of this year – with donations spiking at the end of March as news broke of his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury.

The new filings suggest that the former president’s legal troubles have helped him politically and financially as he makes a third bid for the White House. But the amount only captures the start of what the campaign said was a fundraising surge that continued into the beginning of the second quarter.

Even so, Trump’s first-quarter haul lagged behind the pace he had set in earlier campaigns.

Earlier this month, Haley;s campaign publicized what it boasted as a strong haul for her 2024 presidential bid: The former South Carolina governor had raised “more than $11 million in just six weeks,” according to a campaign release.

But official filings with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday night show that the campaign appears to have double-counted money routed among Haley’s fundraising committees, overstating the topline figure.

The three committees connected to Haley raised a total of $8.3 million – still a sizable showing for a first-time presidential candidate but not the figure publicly touted by the former UN ambassador’s campaign.

Fundraising serves as one benchmark of support for a campaign, and candidates are often eager to tout big numbers in advance of their official filings with federal regulators.

In an email to CNN on Sunday, Haley campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso defended the $11 million figure, saying the accounting mirrored how other candidates have previously described their fundraising.

Other candidates have sought to present their campaign filings in the most favorable light. Trump’s campaign, for instance, touted a $9.5 million haul during the first six weeks of his campaign. But, in that window, only about $5 million flowed into the joint fundraising committee that powers his political operation.

Embattled Rep. George Santos’ campaign refunded more contributions than it took in during the first three months of the year, according to a campaign report the New York Republican filed Saturday.

The freshman congressman from Long Island received $5,333 in contributions during the first quarter and refunded more than $8,000 in donations. It’s highly unusual for a sitting member of Congress to report a net loss on a fundraising report.

By contrast, another first-term congressman, Republican Anthony D’Esposito, who represents a neighboring district, reported more than $670,000 in receipts during the first quarter, including more than $300,000 from political action committees and other lawmakers’ campaign committees.

Santos, who has lied about his education, work history and family background, faces a House ethics inquiry, along with local and federal investigations into his finances.

His campaign reported $25,000 in remaining cash as of March 31 and $715,000 in debt – which Santos has described as personal funds he loaned to his successful 2020 effort for New York’s 3rd Congressional District.

(How Santos, who in 2020 reported a $55,000 salary and no assets when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress, amassed the money to fund his campaign two years later remains one of the biggest questions surrounding his political rise.)

Last month, Santos formally filed paperwork for a 2024 reelection bid, but it followed a demand from the FEC that he declare his intentions after he crossed a fundraising threshold that required him to file a statement of candidacy.

Some of his fellow Republicans have urged the scandal-plagued congressman to resign or not seek reelection. Last month, when asked by CNN whether he intended to run again, Santos responded, “Maybe.”

In the closely watched race to succeed California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Adam Schiff outraised the rest of the Democratic field, bringing in $6.7 million during the first quarter – topping the nearly $4.5 million raised by Rep. Katie Porter and roughly $1.3 million collected by Rep. Barbara Lee.

Schiff also led the field in available cash, ending March with more than $24.6 million stockpiled in his campaign account.

Porter, who transferred nearly $11 million from her House campaign into her Senate account this year, had more than $9.4 million in cash still available on March 31. Lee trailed with a little more than $1.1 million in available cash.

Feinstein, who at 89 is the oldest sitting senator, has announced she will not seek reelection next year – although she is facing calls from some Democrats to retire now after being sidelined with shingles since early March.

Last week, she asked to be temporarily replaced on the Senate Judiciary Committee while she continues her recuperation.

In Arizona, the leading Democratic candidate for Senate, Rep. Ruben Gallego, outraised independent incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, bringing in nearly $3.8 million to his opponent’s $2.1 million.

Sinema, who changed her affiliation from Democrat late last year, continues to caucus with her former party. She has not formally declared an intention to seek a second term. But she has the resources to compete in what could be a costly, three-way general election battle for the seat. She ended March with nearly $10 million in available cash to Gallego’s $2.7 million.

Mark Lamb, an Arizona sheriff aligned with Trump, this month became the first major Republican candidate to enter the race, but he won’t file his first fundraising report until July.

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio – who is seeking a fourth term in what will be one of the most closely watched contests of the 2024 cycle – raised more than $3.5 million in the first quarter, up from the roughly $333,000 he collected during the last three months of 2022.

Several Republicans have lined up to challenge Brown, including Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno and former state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians Major League Baseball team.

Saturday’s filings show Dolan collecting $3.3 million – most of which he loaned his campaign. Moreno joined the race in April, after the first-quarter fundraising period had ended.

Brown is one of three Democratic senators who are up for reelection next year in states won by Trump in 2020.

Montana Sen. Jon Tester, another Democratic incumbent facing a tough reelection battle in a Republican state, raised $5 million in the first quarter and had $7 million stockpiled as of March 31.

In deep-red West Virginia – a state Trump won by nearly 40 points in 2020 – Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has not yet declared whether he will seek a third full term in 2024. He pulled in just $370,000 in the first quarter but was sitting atop a $9.7 million war chest of available cash as of March 31.

West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney, the first major Republican to enter the Senate race, collected roughly $500,000 in the first quarter.

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April 16, 2023
DeSantis, on cusp of presidential campaign, defies national abortion sentiments with signing of six-week ban | CNN Politics

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Floridians woke up Friday morning to discover Gov. Ron DeSantis had signed into law a six-week abortion ban overnight, meeting behind closed doors with a select group of invited guests to give final approval to a bill that had just passed the state legislature earlier in the day.

In backing a six-week ban, DeSantis fulfilled a campaign pledge to block abortion after the detection of a heartbeat – just before he is expected to launch his 2024 presidential bid. But as he inches toward a national campaign, DeSantis, who rarely sidesteps cultural clashes, has also become oddly muted on abortion since the fall of Roe v. Wade and has avoided laying out a federal platform before jumping into the race.

Speaking Friday morning to an overwhelmingly pro-life audience at Liberty University, a deeply conservative Baptist college in Virginia, DeSantis didn’t mention the bill he had signed the night before.

The late-night private signing also stood in stark contrast to the celebratory event exactly a year prior, when DeSantis, surrounded by women and children and in front of hundreds of onlookers, enacted a 15-week abortion ban at a Orlando-area megachurch as news cameras captured the scene.

The six-week ban “is going to cause a lot of problems for him,” said Amy Tarkanian, the former chairwoman of the Republican Party in Nevada, where voters have cemented abortion protections in the state constitution. “And I’m pro-life, but I can see the writing on the wall.”

The US Supreme Court decision last June that ended a federal right to abortion access has throttled the national political landscape, energizing Democrats and leaving Republicans grasping for a message that can blunt the fallout. The latest harbinger of trouble for the GOP came last week from Wisconsin, a presidential swing state where liberals took control of the state Supreme Court in an election fought over the future of abortion access.

But with DeSantis on the verge of entering the GOP presidential primary – for which abortion is often a litmus test for candidates – Republican state lawmakers delivered their leader a political victory, flexing their super majorities in both Florida chambers to swiftly push through the new restrictions. The law will take effect if the state Supreme Court overturns its past precedent protecting abortion access, which is widely expected. When that happens, Florida, once a sanctuary for Southern women whose states had made it difficult to legally end a pregnancy, will become one of the hardest states in the country to obtain an abortion.

In an early sign of how Democrats intend to paint DeSantis, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement called Florida’s bill “extreme and dangerous” and said it “is out of step with the views of the vast majority of the people of Florida and of all the United States.”

A Republican fundraiser close to the governor’s political operation told CNN that the six-week ban would play “great in primary,” where DeSantis would face former President Donald Trump, who appointed three of the justices that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, but acknowledged it was “not good in general” election.

“But you got to get to the general,” the adviser added.

In the year following the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Democrats have rattled off a series of victories built in part on voters mobilized by abortion. In solidly red Kansas, voters last year blocked a referendum that would have amended the state constitution to make abortion illegal. In key states like Pennsylvania and Nevada, Democrats pummeled Republican Senate candidate over their views on abortion – with great success, as the party held the US Senate. In battlegrounds like Arizona and Michigan, Democratic gubernatorial candidates won by vowing to lift longstanding state abortion bans that predated the Roe decision.

Whether the issue continues to animate general voters remains to be seen, but opinions on the Dobbs decision do not appear to have shifted. A Marquette Law School poll last month found two-thirds of voters opposed the ruling, nearly identical to the results in its survey following the November midterms.

Amid the national outcry to the SCOTUS decision, the typically outspoken DeSantis has remained uncharacteristically reserved on the topic. Unlike other issues, like eliminating college diversity programs and curbing legal protections for the media, he has elevated with staged news conferences and frequent messaging on conservative media, DeSantis has offered vague commitments to protect life but repeatedly declined to say where Florida should draw the line on abortion access.

In his lone debate last year against Democratic gubernatorial opponent Charlie Crist, DeSantis wouldn’t say what abortion restrictions he would pursue if reelected for a second term. Asked at a March news conference if he supported exceptions for victims rape and incest, DeSantis called it “sensible” and said he would “welcome pro-life legislation,” then quickly pivoted to another topic.

DeSantis signed the bill at 10:45 p.m. ET Thursday in a closed-door ceremony after returning from a political event in Ohio, a rare-late night action by a governor who often times his actions to maximize exposure.

“I can’t speculate on his mental processes and what he decides to speak on,” said John Stemberger, president of Florida Family Policy Council, a conservative Christian organization that supported the bill. “I’m concerned not with words but with action and he is a man of action.”

Some Republican operatives believe DeSantis is better positioned than others to stave off primary attacks from the right without alienating swing voters. In a series of posts on Twitter, Jon Schweppe, director of policy and government affairs at the conservative American Principles Project, suggested that by supporting some exceptions for rape and incest, DeSantis would neutralize a key Democratic talking point.

“What moves voters the most? What did Democrats spend $500M talking about in the 2022 midterms? EXCEPTIONS,” Schweppe said. “Voters want exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. That’s the most important issue. Outside those exceptions, voters are fairly pro-life.”

Schweppe had previously raised the alarm that “Republicans need to figure out the abortion issue ASAP” after last week’s defeat of a conservative judge in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

The exceptions offered by Florida’s proposed six-week ban, though, are limited to 15 weeks after conception and require victims of rape and incest to show a police report or other evidence of their assault to obtain an abortion. Similarly, two doctors would have to sign off that a mother’s health is at serious risk or a fetal abnormality is fatal before a woman can end a pregnancy after 15 weeks.

Bill McCoshen, a veteran GOP consultant in Wisconsin, acknowledged that Democrats have campaigned effectively on abortion there in recent races. But he said it will be harder to attack DeSantis on abortion in his state, where the current law, passed in 1849 and reinstated after the fall of Roe, bars abortion without exceptions.

“To voters here, the perception of his answer will be that it’s better than the 1849 law,” McCoshen said. “If he signs that law, that will be an improvement of the law that’s here. It may not be as middle of the road as some states, but it’s better than what we currently have in many people’s minds.”

Still unclear, though, is how DeSantis will navigate new pressures from conservative voters, many of whom will expect their next nominee to use the powers of the presidency to end abortion nationwide. DeSantis, who has not yet declared but is laying the groundwork for a campaign, has so far not faced any questions about what abortion restrictions he would pursue if elected to the White House.

It’s a question that has already tripped up one potential rival for the nomination. A day after sidestepping a question earlier this week, Republican Sen. Tim Scott said on Thursday that it should be up to states to “solve that problem on their own” – but also said he would sign a federal 20-week ban if it reached his desk.

Nor has DeSantis weighed in on the ongoing legal saga surrounding mifepristone, one of the drugs that has been used safely for more than 20 years to provide abortions via medication.

“Right now, DeSantis represents his state and he has to be the voice of his state, but this is a tightrope he has to walk if he’s serious about running for president,” Tarkanian, the Nevada Republican said. “A lot of people don’t even realize they’re pregnant at seven weeks and if you’re pro-choice that’s a scary thought.”

Katie Daniel, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said Republican candidates risk looking inauthentic if they try to obfuscate their position on abortion. She pointed to Pennsylvania Senate candidate and celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who during the GOP primary called abortion “murder” at any stage but in the general election said he supported exceptions for rape, incest or if the mother’s life is at risk. Later, in a debate, Oz said, “I want women, doctors, local political leaders” to decide the issue at the state level.

“Our message to candidates is define yourself or other candidates will define it for you and you’re not going to like their version of you,” Daniel said. “The ostrich strategy of burying your head in the sand is not going to work.”

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April 14, 2023
The GOP’s silence on guns and abortion is a short-term response with a long-term problem | CNN Politics

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Yet another mass shooting and a new blow to nationwide abortion rights left Republicans facing pointed questions on two of the most emotive issues dominating American politics.

But the GOP had almost nothing to say, reflecting the way that it is locked into positions that animate its most fervent grassroots voters but risk alienating it from much of the public.

A controversial ruling from a conservative judge in Texas that could halt the use of a popular abortion drug nationwide, and another shooting spree – this time in Kentucky – sparked outrage among Democrats and calls for strengthening gun safety measures and protecting abortion rights.

Most Republicans stayed silent on the two issues on which they have achieved their political and policy goals but that are threatening the party’s long-term viability.

After the shooting in downtown Louisville on Monday, Kentucky’s Republican senators issued condolences but offered no solutions about how the tragedy, which killed five people and injured eight others, might have been avoided. The gunman used a rifle in the attack after being notified of his impending dismissal from a job at a bank, a law enforcement official said.

“We send our prayers to the victims, their families, and the city of Louisville as we await more information,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell wrote in a tweet that also praised first responders. And Sen. Rand Paul tweeted that he and his wife were “praying for everyone involved in the deadly shooting,” adding that “our hearts break for the families of those lost.”

Democrats offered condolences too, but also had a more practical response. President Joe Biden called for the kind of gun safety reform that is impossible with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and without Democrats holding more seats in the Senate. “Too many Americans are paying for the price of inaction with their lives. When will Republicans in Congress act to protect our communities?” Biden asked in a tweet.

Democratic Rep. Morgan McGarvey, who represents Louisville in Congress, called for action to tackle gun violence. “Thoughts and prayers for those we lost, those who are injured and their loved ones and families are appreciated, but today serves as a stark reminder that we need to address gun violence at the national level,” the freshman congressman said.

Over the last few decades, Republicans have expertly used gun rights and a push to overturn a constitutional right to end a pregnancy to energize their most loyal voters. And on each issue, in a purely political sense, it’s hard to argue that they have not racked up considerable wins.

There are more guns than ever in the US. Republicans around the country are leading efforts to slash firearms regulation and broaden citizens’ capacity to carry guns. Despite a murderous run of massacres in schools, nightclubs, places of worship and, on Monday, in a bank, the party has effectively closed down all significant attempts in Congress to make it harder to buy weapons – including the assault-style rifles used in recent shootings. A bipartisan effort to persuade states to embrace red flag laws, which could help authorities confiscate weapons from people thought to pose a risk, did pass Congress last year. But its success was all the more notable because of the paucity of other federal legislation in previous decades.

On abortion, meanwhile, the 50-year conservative campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade ranks as one of the most stunning victories for a long-term political movement in history. It reached its apex with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year.

Yet it’s possible that these famous wins could carry a significant risk for the party.

South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace calls herself “pro-life,” but also warns that GOP-backed state laws that don’t provide exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother alienate large and vital sections of the US electorate. Mace was a rare Republican to publicly respond to Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s abortion drug ruling last week, which Democratic groups have seized on to renew claims Republicans want a national ban on abortion.

“We are getting it wrong on this issue,” Mace said on “CNN This Morning” on Monday. “We’ve got to show compassion to women, especially to women who’ve been raped. We’ve got to show compassion on the abortion issue, because by and large, most of Americans aren’t with us on this issue.” She called for the US Food and Drug Administration to ignore the judge’s ruling, aligning her with progressive Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

One reason Republicans have been successful in tightening abortion restrictions and loosening those on guns has been that their voters have embraced these two issues. They are make-or-break for many activists, and candidates have shaped their platforms as a result. Democrats, however, have traditionally been less successful in energizing their core supporters on both. The disparate intensity level among the parties was one factor in the sequence of events that led to a new conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe. For years, Democrats trod carefully around the guns issue, wary of alienating more moderate or soft conservative voters.

But there are signs this could be changing. Abortion was a huge motivator for Democratic voters in last year’s midterms and the Supreme Court’s ruling clearly hamstrung Republican candidates in several key swing races. In Wisconsin, which reverted to a pre-Civil War law banning almost all abortions once Roe was overturned, the issue was critical to the victory of a liberal candidate in last week’s state Supreme Court race, which flipped the conservative majority.

Liberal fury over the failure to enact new gun laws stoked a political storm in Tennessee last week. Republicans expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers from the state’s House of Representatives for leading a gun reform protest inside the chamber after a mass shooting at a Nashville school the week before that killed six people, including three nine-year-olds. This highlighted a growing frustration among Democrats at their impotence in the face of endless mass shootings. (One of the lawmakers, Justin Jones, was sworn back into the chamber on Monday on an interim basis after the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted to appoint him.)

Despite this shifting political terrain, there are few signs that top Republican leaders are willing to change the party’s tack on guns or abortion. Or that they have the political room to do so. Even though it makes sense for Republicans to appeal to a more general audience to avoid alienating crucial suburban, moderate and female voters, the vehemence of their core supporters makes this an impossible straddle. It’s a similar dynamic to the one many GOP power brokers have long faced with Donald Trump. The former president remains so popular with base voters that his GOP critics risk their careers by publicly opposing him. And yet, he has long been a liability among general election voters – as proved by the GOP’s performance in 2020 and 2022.

The party’s failure to align with most Americans on abortion and on some aspects of gun safety may not be sustainable. Polls show that many voters, including younger Americans, are being driven away from the party because of its positions.

In a Harvard Youth Poll released last week, which was completed before the shooting in Nashville, 63% of 18-to-29-year-olds said that gun laws should be made more strict, with 22% saying they should be kept as they are, and 13% that they should be made less strict. Young Americans are generally on the same page as the public as a whole. In October 2022, 57% of all Americans said that laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, with 32% saying laws should be kept as they were and 10% that laws should be made less strict, according to a Gallup survey from October 2022.

On abortion, only 26% of Americans favor laws making it illegal to use or receive through the mail FDA-approved drugs for a medical abortion, while 72% oppose such laws, according to a PRRI report that analyzed polling on the issue over the last year. While 50% of White evangelical Protestants favor making it illegal to use or receive those drugs, less than half of any other racial, gender, educational or age group agree.

In a Gallup poll in January, 46% of Americans said they were dissatisfied with US abortion policies and would prefer to see less strict abortion laws. That’s a record high in the firm’s 23-year trend, up from 30% in January 2022 and just 17% in 2021.

Given these numbers, and recent election results, it’s not surprising that some Republicans not actively courting the base may choose not to speak at length on guns and abortion. And such data may also help to explain the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic turn as it seeks to cling onto power – whether in efforts to expel Tennessee lawmakers for disturbing decorum with their anti-gun protests or through Trump’s insistence he won an election he actually lost.

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April 10, 2023
Tennessee House GOP expels 2 Democrats in retaliation over gun control protest, on ‘sad day for democracy’ | CNN

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Two Democratic members of the Tennessee House of Representatives were expelled while a third member was spared in an ousting by Republican lawmakers that was decried by the trio as oppressive, vindictive and racially motivated.

Protesters packed the state Capitol on Thursday to denounce the expulsions of Reps. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson and to advocate for gun reform measures a little over a week after a mass shooting devastated a Nashville school.

Speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon on “CNN This Morning,” Jones decried the actions of House Republicans.

“What happened yesterday was a very sad day for democracy,” Jones said. “The nation was able to see we don’t have democracy in Tennessee.”

Jones confirmed if he is reappointed to the seat by the 40-member Nashville Metro Council, he would serve. “I have no regrets. I will continue to stand up for my constituents.”

Nashville City Council Member Russ Bradford told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota he would be voting to send Jones back to the State House.

“That is who the people of House District 52 elected this last November and so it’s very important that, unlike my state legislature, I will listen to the voice of my constituents and I will do what needs to be done to support democracy in this state,” Bradford said.

Following their expulsion – which House Republicans said was in response to the representatives’ leadership of gun control demonstrations on the chamber floor last week – Jones and Pearson called for protesters to return to the Capitol when the House is back in session on Monday.

Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is White and wasn’t ousted, slammed the votes removing Jones and Pearson, who are Black, as racist. Asked by CNN why she believes she wasn’t expelled, Johnson said the reason is “pretty clear.”

“I am a 60-year-old White woman, and they are two young Black men,” Johnson said. She added that Pearson and Jones were questioned in a “demeaning way” by lawmakers before their expulsion.

President Joe Biden on Thursday called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent,” and criticized Republicans for not taking greater action on gun reform.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Nashville Friday to advocate for stricter gun control measures and highlight the importance of protecting Americans from gun violence. She also privately met with Jones, Pearson and Johnson.

“We understand when we took an oath to represent the people who elected us that we speak on behalf of them. It wasn’t about the three of these leaders,” Harris said in remarks after the meeting. “It was about who they were representing. it’s about whose voices they were channeling. Understand that — and is that not what a democracy allows?”

After a shooter killed three 9-year-old students and three adults at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville last week, Jones, Pearson and Johnson staged a demonstration on the House floor calling for gun reform and leading chants with a bullhorn.

Jones said he and the other lawmakers had been blocked from speaking about gun violence on the House floor that week, saying that their microphones were cut off whenever they raised the topic, according to CNN affiliate WSMV.

Following the three representatives’ demonstrations last Thursday, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton called their actions “unacceptable” and argued that they broke “several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor.”

On Monday, three resolutions were filed seeking the expulsions of Jones, Pearson and Johnson. The three members had already been removed from their committee assignments following the protest.

The resolutions, filed by Republican Reps. Bud Hulsey, Gino Bulso and Andrew Farmer, said the lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.

Tennessee Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison told CNN that the caucus believed the issue did not need to be considered by an ethics committee and accused Jones and Pearson of having a “history” of disrupting floor proceedings.

“It’s not possible for us to move forward with the way they were behaving in committee and on the House floor,” Faison said.

The chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, Hendrell Remus, called the move a “direct political attack” on the party.

“Their expulsion sets a dangerous new precedent for political retribution,” a statement from the party said. “The day that a majority can simply expel a member of the opposing party without legitimate cause threatens the fabric of democracy in our state and creates a reckless roadmap for GOP controlled state legislatures across the nation.”

Historically, the Tennessee House had only expelled two other representatives since the Reconstruction, and the move requires a two-thirds majority vote of total members.

The expulsions have been criticized by Democratic politicians and civil liberties groups who say voters in Jones’ and Pearson’s districts have been disenfranchised. Others, including Jones, have said the move distracts from the real problem of gun violence.

“Rather than address the issue of banning assault weapons, my former colleagues – a Republican supermajority – are assaulting democracy,” Jones told CNN. “And that should scare all of us across the nation.”

Rep. Sam McKenzie, chair of the Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators, said the expulsion of Jones and Pearson overshadowed the issue they were protesting.

“This was not about that kangaroo court that happened yesterday. This was about those three young children and those three guardians, those three adults, whose lives were taken away senselessly,” McKenzie said.

“The world saw what happened yesterday,” McKenzie added, condemning the actions of House GOP leaders. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

The NAACP also condemned the expulsions, calling them “horrific” but “not surprising.”

“It is inexcusable that, while (Jones and Pearson) upheld their oath to serve Tennesseans who are grieving the loss of last week’s mass murder, their colleagues decided to use racial tropes to divert attention from their failure to protect the people they are supposed to serve,” NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.

“We will continue to stand with these champions of democracy, and are prepared to take whatever legal action is necessary to ensure that this heinous attempt to silence the voice of the people is addressed in a court of law,” Johnson added.

On “CNN This Morning,” Jones said, “I think what happened was a travesty of democracy because they expelled the two youngest Black lawmakers – which is no coincidence – from the Tennessee state legislature because we are outspoken, because we fight for our district.”

Jones described the session as a “toxic, racist work environment,” and said he spoke out because the House speaker ruled him out of order when he brought up the issue of gun violence. “If I didn’t know this happened to me, I would think that this was 1963 instead of 2023,” he added.

Prior to the vote, Pearson publicly shared a letter he sent to House members in which he said he took accountability for “not following decorum” on the House floor but defended his actions.

Following their removal, pictures and profiles of Pearson and Jones have been pulled from the Tennessee General Assembly’s website and their districts have been listed as vacant.

More about the three representatives:

Rep. Justin Pearson:
District: 86
Age: 28
In office: 2023-
Issues: Environmental, racial and economic justice
Of note: Successfully blocked oil pipeline from being built in south Memphis
Recent awards: The Root’s 100 Most Influential Black Americans (2022)Rep. Gloria Johnson:
District: 90
Age: 60
In office: 2013-2015, 2019-
Issues: Education, jobs, health care
Of note: Successfully organized in favor of Insure Tennessee, the state’s version of Medicaid expansion
Recent awards: National Foundation of Women Legislators Women of Excellence (2022)Rep. Justin Jones:
District: 52
Age: 27
In office: 2023-
Issues: Health care, environmental justice
Of note: Wrote “The People’s Plaza: 62 Days of Nonviolent Resistance” after helping to organize a 2022 sit-in
Recent awards: Ubuntu Award for outstanding service, Vanderbilt Organization of Black Graduate and Professional Students (2019)

According to the Tennessee Constitution, since there is more than twelve months until the next general election in November 2024, a special election will be held to fill the seats.

Tennessee law allows for the appointment of interim House members to fill the seats of expelled lawmakers until an election is held by local legislative bodies.

In Jones’ case, the local legislative body is the Metropolitan Council of Davidson County in Nashville. The council has scheduled a special meeting Monday afternoon to address the vacancy of the District 52 seat and possibly vote on an interim successor.

For Pearson’s District 86 seat, the local legislative body is the Shelby County Board of Commissioners in Memphis.

It is unclear if or when a special meeting might be called there.

According to Johnson, Jones and Pearson could be reappointed to their seats.

“I think we might have these two young men back very soon,” Johnson said Thursday. “It is my promise to fight like hell to get both of them back.”

Pearson said he hopes to “get reappointed to serve in the state legislature by the Shelby County Commissioners, and a lot of them, I know, are upset about the anti-democratic behavior of this White supremacist-led state legislature.”

Speaking to a crowd following their expulsion, Pearson and Jones insisted they would persist in advocating for gun control measures and encouraged protesters to continue showing up to the Capitol.

The House has only expelled two state representatives in the last 157 years. The first expulsion, in 1980, was of a representative found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office, and the most recent came in 2016 when another member was expelled over allegations of sexual harassment.

Democratic Rep. Joe Towns called the move a “nuclear option.”

“You never use a sledgehammer to kill a gnat,” Towns said. “We should not go to the extreme of expelling our members for fighting for what many of the citizens want to happen, whether you agree with it or not.”

The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, Kathy Sinback, called the move in a statement a “targeted expulsion of two Black legislators without due process.”

She continued, “It raises questions about the disparate treatment of Black representatives, while continuing the shameful legacy of disenfranchising and silencing the voices of marginalized communities and the Black lawmakers they elect.”

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President Joe Biden often envisions what he could accomplish with a second term, advisers and allies who speak with him say, but he has expressed no urgency to formally launch a campaign to win another four years in office.

The president has not settled on a campaign manager, narrowed down whether a headquarters would be placed in Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware, or selected a date to make a reelection bid official.

Long known for stretching out major decisions – including several times as a senator when he was weighing a run for president – Biden is offering up one final wait for Democrats as they look ahead to next year’s vote.

“In what I think is the unlikely chance that he ultimately decides not to run this time, he will need to do so soon enough that other candidates can get into the field to be competitive,” said Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, the president’s close friend and ally. “I am encouraging him to run, and I think he will run. But he will make that decision on his timeline, not mine.”

The President has been notoriously deliberate over the course of decades in public office, often putting off major decisions until the 11th hour. But holding off on making a reelection announcement is rooted in far more practical considerations, aides say, first and foremost of which is focusing on governing matters such as raising the debt ceiling and avoiding getting drawn into the political fray a moment sooner than he must.

“He’s not ambivalent about serving a second term, but he’s in no rush to be a candidate again,” a longtime Democratic adviser, who has worked closely with Biden over the years, told CNN. “What’s the upside?”

That question came into sharp view this week, given how former President Donald Trump dominated the conversation and commanded outsize attention with his arraignment on criminal charges in New York. And the Democratic Party has largely coalesced behind Biden, particularly since the midterm elections last fall, and know the lack of a serious primary threat offers him “the ability to move on his own time,” a senior White House official said.

Biden has told several elected officials in private conversations that he’s in – “I am definitely running,” he told one person a few weeks ago, according to that person – but he has been less forthcoming on timing.

April had for a while been seen as a likely timeline for announcing his candidacy, given that it comes four years after he jumped into the race in 2019. And as vice president, he joined then-President Barack Obama in opening a reelection campaign in April 2011.

The timing of a Biden announcement is now more likely to be the summer rather than spring, three Democratic officials say, with a target date still not determined.

“President Biden has been clear that he intends to run, and his focus is on finishing the work he’s doing for American families: continuing to bring manufacturing back from overseas, further cutting the deficit by having rich special interests pay their fair share, and standing up for fundamental rights like the freedom to choose,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN. “There has never been a timeframe for any announcement.”

Outside of interviews, Biden has remained mostly silent about his reelection plans.

That made two nods he gave recently to a likely run more notable. During an event handing out national Arts and Humanities medals at the White House last month, Biden said certain people were “ready to run” and, noting novelist Colson Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prizes, said he was “kind of looking for a back-to-back myself.”

The allusions were hardly lost on anyone in the East Room, many of whom were ardent supporters of Biden’s last presidential bid and are eager to back a campaign for a second term.

For other observers, including some in touch with the president that week, the asides also felt like subtle brushback against those who still question whether he actually plans to run again.

Signs of a pending campaign have been hard to miss.

Biden has spent the opening months of the year traveling the country to promote the accomplishments of the first half of his term at events that could easily be confused for campaign stops. He has intensified his attacks on Republicans, including taking aim at anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely contender for the GOP nomination. And a string of moves on immigration, crime and energy have bolstered Biden’s image as a moderate while angering some liberals for appearing to back off his prior promises.

Anita Dunn, at left, senior advisor to President Joe Biden who is part of the team working on Biden's reelection strategy, is seen the US Capitol on July 22, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Taken together, the portrait is of a candidate-in-waiting. Yet Biden has put off making a final decision about running again, and the time frame for a potential announcement – never set in stone – appears to be extending further into the year.

Last year, senior advisers to Biden discussed launching the reelection campaign early in the new year, and some members of Biden’s family, too, are said to have favored an announcement as early as February. But that once-debated aspirational timeline has come and gone. Now, sources say, a reelection announcement taking place even by the end of April doesn’t appear guaranteed.

So far, the stretched-out timeline doesn’t appear to be worrying Democrats, at least outwardly.

“I have no doubt President Biden will run again and will win,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democratic congressman who has long been a booster of Biden running, attended his very first fundraiser in April 2019 in Philadelphia on the day he launched and who hosted Biden a few weeks ago in his district for the official release of the budget. “As far as when he exactly officially announces his reelection campaign, I couldn’t care less. It’s meaningless.”

Obama formally launched his reelection campaign in April 2011. George W. Bush filed official papers to run for reelection in May 2003 but didn’t begin actively campaigning until much later. Donald Trump declared his intention to run again the day he entered office in 2017.

President Barack Obama (R) holds a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House April 14, 2011 in Washington, DC.

All of those presidents’ reelection bids were considered givens. While Biden has said from the get-go that he intends to run again, he faces perpetual misgivings over his advanced age and soft approval ratings. In a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS released Thursday, just a third of Americans said Biden deserves to be reelected, with a majority in his own party saying they would like to see someone else as the Democratic nominee for president next year.

One person familiar with internal deliberations said a reason there is not a great sense of urgency is because potential Republican presidential candidates, too, have been slow to launch their campaigns. So far, the only major GOP candidates to have formally declared runs have been Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

Sources also said Biden feels that as an incumbent president, without any serious primary challengers, he has more time to make a final decision. And some close to Biden suggest there is political upside to waiting.

“Why not just let the Republicans try to out-crazy each other for a little while?” asked one former White House official.

As Democrats wait for Biden to officially declare a bid for a second term, some crucial decisions for the party remain in limbo. Among those is the location for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, as well as where a Biden reelection campaign would be headquartered – both decisions that need final sign-off from the President himself. He is said to personally favor a Wilmington, Delaware, base for his reelection campaign, though there has been active talk of centering it in Philadelphia as well.

Inside the White House, deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior adviser Anita Dunn – in consultation with other senior Biden aides – have been running point on preparations for a reelection campaign.

Multiple sources said that names that have emerged for potential senior roles on the campaign include Jenn Ridder, national states director for Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Sam Cornale, executive director of the Democratic National Committee. Preston Elliott, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s former campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, director of White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Quentin Fulks, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock’s ex-campaign manager, are also said to be up for possible senior jobs.

Other names in the mix include Emma Brown, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s former campaign manager, Roger Lau, deputy executive director at the DNC, Addisu Demissie, former campaign manager for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign, Mitch Stewart, founding partner of 270 Strategies, and Rob Flaherty, director of digital strategy at the White House.

Other top Democratic strategists who have been approached for jobs on the campaign declined to sign on, citing personal or professional reasons. And Biden himself hasn’t engaged deeply on the staffing for the senior levels of his potential campaign – another sign that an announcement, at least for now, appears to remain in the distance.

Many of Biden’s longest-serving and most trusted advisers are expected to remain at the White House for the duration of the campaign, setting up a potentially awkward dynamic for any campaign manager. There is a general expectation that at least one of Biden’s longtime advisers would transfer from the White House to a campaign job, but it remains to be seen whom that would be.

Other recently departed White House officials, including former chief of staff Ron Klain and ex-communications director Kate Bedingfield, have also suggested they are prepared to assist the campaign.

At the handful of Democratic fundraising events the president has held over the past month, he has made only vague allusions to reelection.

“We have a real choice in this election – unrelated to me, unrelated to me – between the Democrats and Republicans and what they stand for and what they’re about,” Biden said in Las Vegas, careful not to run afoul of federal rules barring fundraising before officially declaring his candidacy.

Even as those around the president wait for an official 2024 decision, there is an air of inevitability about an eventual announcement. Those close to the White House have pointed to some of Biden’s recent policy decisions that have tacked to the center as sending an important signal that his mind is all but made up.

Earlier this year, Biden blindsided many Democratic lawmakers when he announced that he would not veto legislation to block a controversial Washington, DC, crime bill that critics had painted as being weak on crime. The Biden administration has also rolled out a number of tough proposals aimed at curbing the entry of migrants at the US southern border, to the dismay of many Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists.

A number of other domestic policy announcements aimed at eliminating so-called “junk fees” and lowering the price of insulin – all moves considered to have broad appeal – have also signaled to Biden allies a pivot to reelection mode.

Hear what first lady thinks about Biden’s reelection plans

But that air of inevitability is also creating jitters among some Democrats, who worry that an unexpected scenario in which Biden decides not to seek a second term would spell disaster for the party.

“Because there’s no clear backup plan. There’s no one else to get fired up about,” said one Democratic congressman. “It’s not like you see anybody else lining up in the wings to really to take him on.”

Biden himself, along with his wife, have said in interviews they intend to mount another campaign barring unforeseen events.

Yet both have given themselves some room to back away.

“It’s Joe’s decision,” the first lady told CNN’s Arlette Saenz during a trip to Africa earlier this year. “And we support whatever he wants to do. If he’s in, we’re there. If he wants to do something else, we’re there too.”

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