Monthly Archives: July 2020

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. Before the coronavirus pandemic sickened Florida's economy, and before the Black Lives Matter movement widened her eyes to racial injustice, Kelly Johnson had little interest in politics except to occasionally cast a ballot. In 2018, she voted for the Republican in the Florida governor's race, and four years ago she supported Donald Trump.

Now, the unemployed, white single mother of eight is running for office as a Democrat in a bid to oust a state legislator who's one of Florida's rising Republican stars. She knows it's a long shot, but she hopes even a loss will serve a purpose for Democrats: boosting turnout in the race to evict Trump from the White House.

"There's a greater good happening," she said. "And I'm glad to be part of that."

Johnson's campaign is part of a major change in strategy for Florida Democrats. Long accustomed to being on the losing side of razor-close races, state Democrats are mounting challenges in Republican strongholds not necessarily to win but to lose by less. And they're convinced that competing in traditionally Republican areas will help former Vice President Joe Biden eke out a victory against Trump in a key battleground state.

The party is fielding its largest slate of legislative candidates in decades, with Democratic candidates vying in all but one of the 141 statehouse seats up for election in November. (One Democrat is challenging her exclusion from the ballot after being disqualified because of a technical issue.)

"We need to start thinking of candidates as field organizers, people who are on the ground and connecting with the community," said Janelle Christensen, a state party activist in charge of candidate recruitment.

By most accounts, Florida is a must-win state for Trump. While his newly adopted home state has tilted Republican in recent years, the COVID-19 outbreak is threatening to reshape the political landscape. Democrats hope to seize the opportunity to retake the state, and its 29 electoral votes, ever mindful of their prior disappointments.

For years, Florida Democrats largely have focused on running up the score in heavily Democratic urban precincts in South Florida in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. While they've scrapped with Republicans for independent voters in central Florida, they've mostly ceded huge swaths of Florida long dominated by the GOP.

That concession has had consequences.

While a quarter of Florida's 13.9 million voters have no party affiliation, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 275,000.

But Republicans control both chambers of the Florida statehouse. A Democrat hasn't occupied the governor's mansion in 20 years, and both the state's U.S. senators are Republicans.

Four years ago, Trump prevailed over Democrat Hillary Clinton by a little more than 1 percentage point not even the closest of recent heartbreak races for Democrats. In 2018, Republican Rick Scott ousted incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson by just 10,000 votes out of nearly 8.2 million cast.

"These margins are microscopic for such a large state as Florida," said Dr. Fergie Reid Jr., a Democratic activist whose voter registration campaign is often credited with helping flip the Virginia Legislature from red to blue.

This past spring, Reid set his sights on replicating that success in Florida and began reaching out to Democratic groups across the state to help field candidates in every legislative race. By the filing deadline, 29 House seats and seven Senate seats that were previously uncontested had contenders in place.

"Florida is ripe for the taking. All we have to do is take it," said Reid.

Conventional wisdom says it's the candidate at the top of the ticket who draws voters to the polls. But Florida Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm rises from the bottom up and compounds quickly.

"If only for the fact that if that person's friends and family might equal 50 people and you add that up across the state, that's enough to turn more than one election," said Kevin Cate, a Democratic consultant who worked for the only Democrat currently in statewide office, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.

Republicans scoffed at the tactic.

"They are fielding candidates just to say that they have candidates in races. We're fielding candidates to win races, and we think that Trump will win Florida," said Florida Republican Party Chair Joe Gruters, who's running for reelection to his state Senate seat.

"They're going to have a great time coming together on election night and crying on each other's shoulders," he said.

But Democrats are pressing on. On the stump and on social media, the Democrats running in red districts are campaigning on traditional party themes protecting the environment, expanding Medicaid, limiting access to guns and promoting racial equity.

But they are also appealing to Trump voters who have soured on the president and his close ally Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for their handling of the pandemic.

"At first there were some good things about Trump. A lot of things made sense early in his presidency," said Johnson, who became a community activist after losing her job because of the outbreak and struggling to get benefits from the state's broken unemployment system.

"But there was this underlying tone of not all people in America are created equal -- and I didn't like that. Now with the pandemic, things have just totally fallen apart."

In Florida's conservative Panhandle, another Democrat says Trump prompted her to run making her the first Democrat to compete in Senate District 1 in two decades.

"You can't be on the sidelines and complain to your friends on Facebook," said Karen Butler, a 20-year Air Force veteran running in a region with a strong military presence.

In an overlapping House district, Democratic candidate Angela Hoover says she's clear-eyed about her chances.

"I don't care what anybody says. I did the research. I know the demographics, I know the issues. And I know the odds," said Hoover, the first Democrat to run for House District 3 since 2010.

"We don't just campaign for ourselves," she said. "We're also campaigning for the party and everybody up the ticket. When we talk about Joe Biden, we don't just put ourselves out there. We're all campaigning for each other."

Continue reading here:

Florida Democrats running to boost Biden from the bottom up - Minneapolis Star Tribune

1. Trump threatens to send more troops to Democrat cities  The Mercury News
2. Trump to send federal law enforcement to Democrat-led cities  Al Jazeera English
3. Trump threatens to deploy federal agents to Chicago and other U.S. cities led by Democrats  The Washington Post
4. Trump is sending unidentified ICE agents to arrest protesters in Democratic-run cities.  Slate
5. Trump uses homeland security agency to fight his political battle against Democratic cities  CNN
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

View original post here:

Trump threatens to send more troops to Democrat cities - The Mercury News

Behind the congressional Democrats warning are the efforts of a Ukrainian lawmaker, Andriy Derkach, who was educated in a K.G.B.-backed school and was, until recently, closely aligned with a pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine. In May he released tapes of what he said were fragments of telephone conversations between Mr. Biden, then the vice president, and Ukraines president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko.

The purported tapes did little to change the understanding of the elder Mr. Bidens engagement with Ukraines leadership. Mr. Biden had publicly insisted that aid to Kyiv could be tied to the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor, whom the United States and European nations had accused of corruption. So far, the accusations emanating from Mr. Derkach and others about Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter, have either been debunked or not been substantiated by any independent sources.

But the accusations, fueled by release of the tapes, led to more online conspiracy theories, which American intelligence officials have warned may well have their origins in Russia. Mr. Johnson has at various moments said he would subpoena evidence surrounding the dealings with Ukraine in the last years of the Obama administration, and The Washington Post reported this month that there was an effort among Ukrainian officials to pass the tapes to Mr. Johnsons committee.

Mr. Trump has cheered his work. Pressure Mr. Trump put on Ukraines leaders last year to investigate some of the same issues ultimately led to his impeachment, and in addition to raising questions about Mr. Biden and his son, Mr. Johnsons investigation has lent some senatorial legitimacy to Mr. Trumps claims about the matter.

The investigation focuses on Hunter Bidens work for a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma Holdings, and whether his presence and lucrative paycheck were meant to improperly curry favor with the Obama administration. Politico first reported that the Democrats concerns were connected to Mr. Johnsons work.

A spokesman for Mr. Johnson, Austin Altenburg, said the chairman and his staff had already requested briefings from F.B.I. officials, and he accused Democrats of hypocrisy for ignoring recently declassified documents that suggested the F.B.I. may have relied on potentially tainted information in its investigation of ties between Mr. Trumps campaign and Russia.

The letter from the Democrats asked for the F.B.I. to share what it knows with all lawmakers, given the seriousness and specificity of these threats. The Democrats requested a briefing on the matter by the end of the month, when lawmakers are scheduled to leave Washington for several weeks.

Continued here:

Democrats Warn of Possible Foreign Disinformation Plot Targeting Congress - The New York Times

OAKLAND, Calif. (KRON) President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to send federal agents to major US cities including Oakland to deal with unrest.

This comes after federal police in Portland, Oregon were seen taking demonstrators away in unmarked cars over the weekend.

Were sending law enforcement, Trump told reporters at the White House. We cant let this happen to the cities.

Trump mentioned New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland as possible places for sending federal forces, noting the cities mayors as liberal Democrats.

Im gonna do something, that I can tell you. Because we are not gonna let New York, and Chicago, and Philadelphia, and Detroit, and Baltimore, and all of these Oakland is a mess, were not gonna let this happen in our country. All run by liberal democrats, he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in his COVID-19 briefing Monday said the answer is no and we would reject it when asked if he had received prior notice about the possibility of federal agents being sent to Oakland or any other city in California.

In an interview the same day, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf called on the president to send COVID relief not troops.

Oakland needs COVID relief not troops from our President, Schaaf said. He should stop slandering diverse, progressive cities like Oakland in his racist dog whistles and divisive campaign tactics.

Schaaf went on to note that her city had not been disrupted by any recent protests.

We are not experiencing any civil unrest right now. But the presence of Trump-ordered military troops to Oakland would likely incite it, Schaaf added.

Latest Stories:

Read the original:

Trump threatens to send federal forces to Oakland, other Democrat cities - KRON4

We are in an era of increasing partisanship. The Pew Research Center found that since 2016, Republicans and Democrats have grown more frustrated with each other. Commentators worry that tension between the two parties could soon make democracy unworkable. If Republicans see Democratic victories as illegitimate, for example, could a defeated President Donald Trump refuse to leave the White House? Would his party support him?

If Republicans see Democratic victories as illegitimate, could a defeated President Donald Trump refuse to leave the White House? Would his party support him?

A presidential election has led to a crisis once before. After Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won in 1860, Southern Democrats refused to accept him as president. Two months after the election, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the union. Nathan P. Kalmoe's new book, "With Ballots & Bullets: Partisanship & Violence in the American Civil War," is an examination of how partisan commitments and division led to violent conflict in the 19th century. It illustrates some of the worst aspects of partisanship. But it also, surprisingly, shows how partisanship can be valuable and even necessary.

It's easy to see the dangers of partisanship in the 1860s. And as Kalmoe points out, America's very bloody Civil War was preceded by decades of escalating partisan violence, often around elections.

Get the think newsletter.

Parties had their own groups of "toughs," who tried to intimidate the other parties' voters; electoral riots and fights injured many and killed a handful of people in the 1830s and the 1850s. Partisan tension in Congress was so high that representatives often carried guns or knives to defend themselves, Kalmoe writes, and there were a number of open brawls. In 1856, Democratic Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina severely beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an antislavery Republican, with a cane in front of colleagues.

Despite this strong record of polarization, historians have often downplayed the role of partisanship in the Civil War. In this interpretation, people voted for Republicans when the war was going well and for Democrats when it wasn't.

In the summer of 1864, for example, the war was going poorly, and Republicans feared that a public sick of defeat would toss Lincoln out of office. Then Gen. William T. Sherman won a resounding victory at Atlanta in September. Lincoln's landslide re-election in 1864 seemed to many at the time and since then to be the result of that military success.

But by analyzing House elections in 1864, Kalmoe uncovered a different story. In the 1860s, congressional contests were held over the course of the entire year, rather than on the same day as the presidential contest. If Republicans were in trouble before September, House GOP candidates should have been crushed by Democratic challengers. But instead, Kalmoe found, Republican vote share changed little over time. Lincoln was on his way to win before Atlanta. Republican partisans supported the president even though the war was going poorly, as they did when the war was going well.

In the Civil War era, partisanship had a strong effect on how people interpreted good or bad news.

In the Civil War era, partisanship had a strong effect on how people interpreted good or bad news. That shouldn't be a surprise, Kalmoe told me. You can see this in public response to Trump's handling of COVID-19. FiveThirtyEight tracked polls from March to mid-July and found that partisan approval of Trump's response barely changed; Republicans consistently gave him around 80 percent to 85 percent approval, while Democratic voter approval dropped from around 27 percent to 10 percent. "The same folks who liked him before think he's doing well, while those who disliked him before see how disastrously he's performed," Kalmoe said. COVID-19 is "a monumental event, yet partisans haven't moved more than an inch so far."

Republican refusal to abandon Trump seems ominous. Trump's disastrous response to a national health crisis has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. If his voters aren't moved by that, how can we hold government accountable to the people at all? Partisanship seems to be a recipe for denial, dysfunction and death.

But, Kalmoe told me, it's important to remember that "partisanship can be leveraged for good or bad purposes." During the 1860s, partisanship rallied Democrats to the cause of slavery and treason. But it also led Republicans to make great sacrifices for the Union even when the war seemed to be going against them. It ultimately pushed many Republican voters to support the abolition of slavery.

Similarly, partisanship today has rallied resistance and opposition to the Trump administration. Democratic voter turnout surged in 2018, when the party took the House back from Republicans. Intention to vote in 2020 among Democrats was at 70 percent in April, 9 points higher than in 2016, according to a Reuters poll. Voting intention remains high as of mid-July.

Democratic voters in Wisconsin even risked their lives when Republicans refused to postpone an election in April during the pandemic. Anger at Republican intransigence led Democrats to vote in large numbers despite the virus. "People wanted to fight back with everything they could," Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler told The New Yorker. And so they did, handing Republicans a stinging defeat in a key state Supreme Court contest.

Partisans are stubborn and recalcitrant. They can be willfully blind and violent. But Kalmoe's book is a reminder that partisanship also was a key factor in allowing the Union to resist and fight disunion, racist treason and slavery. Pro-Lincoln partisanship, Kalmoe told me, was necessary to combat "partisan violence in service of evil in this case, reinforcing slavery and rejecting legitimate elections." Similarly, Trump is buoyed by partisanship. And if we're going to defeat him, we'll need partisanship to do it.

Noah Berlatskyis a freelance writer and critic in Chicago.

Here is the original post:

Trump, the American Civil War and a lesson for Democrats on the value of partisanship - NBC News

Story Highlights

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Since January, Americans' party preferences have shifted dramatically in the Democratic Party's direction. What had been a two-percentage-point Republican advantage in U.S. party identification and leaning has become an 11-point Democratic advantage, with more of that movement reflecting a loss in Republican identification and leaning (down eight points) than a gain in Democratic identification and leaning (up five points).

Line graph. Fifty percent of Americans identify as Democrats or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party while 39% are Republicans or Republican leaning independents. In January, 47% were Republicans or Republican leaners and 45% were Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Currently, half of U.S. adults identify as Democrats (32%) or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (18%). Meanwhile, 39% identify as Republicans (26%) or are Republican leaners (13%).

These results are based on monthly averages of Gallup U.S. telephone surveys in 2020.

In January and February, the months in which the U.S. Senate tried and acquitted President Donald Trump on impeachment charges brought by the House of Representatives, slightly more Americans preferred the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.

In March, as the nation began to deal with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats gained a slight two-point advantage, which persisted in April and May.

The greatest movement occurred in June -- likely because of increased attention to racial injustice that followed the death of George Floyd while in police custody on May 25, as well as increased U.S. struggles to contain the coronavirus spread.

In June alone, there was a three-point increase in Democratic identification and leaning, and a corresponding five-point drop in Republican identification and leaning.

Democrats typically hold an advantage over Republicans in party affiliation, which has averaged five points since Gallup regularly began measuring party identification and leaning in 1991. Double-digit Democratic advantages have been relatively uncommon.

The party last held an advantage of 10 points or more in January 2019 (51% to 39%), when Democrats were installed as the majority party in the House of Representatives after their success in the 2018 midterm elections. Democrats and Democratic leaners also outnumbered Republicans and Republican leaners by 10 points or more in several months in 2018, including in October (51% to 41%) just before those elections.

Other times when Americans' party preferences favored Democrats by more than 10 points over Republicans were:

The Republican Party has yet to average a 10-point or better advantage in party identification or leaning for an entire month since Gallup began regularly measuring independents' political leanings in late 1991. There were multiple Gallup polls with 10-point GOP advantages in March 1991 after the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War, but Gallup did not measure independents' political leanings in other polls taken that month, so the data are incomplete. The largest GOP advantage Gallup has measured for a complete month was eight points in December 1994, after the major Republican victories in that year's midterm elections.

Four months before Election Day, Democrats appear to be as strong politically now as they were in 2018 when they reclaimed the majority in the House of Representatives and gained seven governorships they previously did not hold. If the strong current Democratic positioning holds through Election Day, Democrats could build off those 2018 successes to possibly win the presidency and Senate in 2020. Many GOP senators up for reelection this year were last elected in 2014, a favorable year for Republicans, and appear to be facing a much more challenging political environment than six years ago. At the same time, Trump -- with a job approval rating currently below 40% -- appears vulnerable to being denied a second term.

This year has been an eventful one, politically. Trump's impeachment acquittal and a strong economy in January and February seemed to benefit the Republican Party. The coronavirus pandemic changed things suddenly, but the public initially rallied behind its leaders. After the public became critical of Trump's handling of the situation and Floyd's killing made racial injustice a major public issue, Americans became increasingly likely to align themselves with the Democratic Party. Whether the current political environment holds or takes another unexpected turn will help determine the balance of power in 2021.

Learn more about public opinion metrics that matter for the 2020 presidential election at Gallup's 2020 Presidential Election Center.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

Read more here:

US Party Preferences Have Swung Sharply Toward Democrats - Gallup

Good morning,

Federal law enforcement agents are still patrolling the streets of Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to disperse the ongoing anti-racism protests there. Now, Donald Trump has threatened to send federal officers into several other US cities whose mayors he described as liberal Democrats, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland.

Critics say the threatened crackdown is part of a re-election campaign strategy, with Trump trying to present himself as a law and order president while repeatedly and falsely accusing his rival Joe Biden of planning to defund the police, thus surrendering cities and suburbs to violent crime.

Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump described Chicago as worse than Afghanistan after more than 63 people were shot in the city over the weekend, 12 of them fatally.

And you know what? If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And were not going to let it go to hell.

The Trump administration has consulted torture lawyer John Yoo who infamously wrote the legal justification for waterboarding during the George W Bush presidency on how the current president could rule by decree on issues including immigration, healthcare and inner-city policy.

More than three months after the US Centers for Disease Control said face coverings could help slow the spread of Covid-19, and long after masks became an unlikely battleground in the US culture wars, Trump at last has endorsed them, tweeting that many people say it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you cant socially distance.

Trump also said on Monday that he planned to bring back his televised daily coronavirus briefings, as he met Republicans at the White House to discuss a new coronavirus relief package, which looks set to be a source of disagreement not only between Republicans and Democrats but also between the president and his own party.

The bad news

The better news

Ed Henry, the former chief national correspondent of Fox News, has been accused of rape and sexual assault by a former co-worker at the cable news channel. A federal lawsuit filed in New York on Monday says Henry groomed and later assaulted the then 24-year-old Jennifer Eckhart, demanding she be his sex slave and threatening her with retaliation if she did not comply. Henry, who was fired by Fox News this month, denies the accusations.

Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are also named in the lawsuit by a second former Fox News employee, Cathy Areu, who says she was publicly humiliated by Hannity and propositioned by Carlson claims that Fox described as false, patently frivolous and utterly devoid of any merit.

US diplomats were reportedly dismayed when Trump in 2018 taunted the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, via Twitter about the size of his nuclear button. Earlier this year, amid tensions between Washington and Tehran, Irans supreme leader Ali Khamenei tweeted an image of Trumps face with a red handprint, as if he had been slapped.

Security experts at Kings College London have now published a study examining how political leaders tweets escalate global tensions outside the traditional diplomatic channels. Adrienne Matei reports.

The white couple who pointed guns at anti-racism protesters outside their St Louis mansion last month are to face criminal charges. Personal injury lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey will be charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.

An anti-feminist lawyer suspected of shooting the family of a federal judge was himself found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Catskills on Monday. Police said Roy Den Hollander was the prime suspect in the killing of Daniel Anderl, son of the US district judge Esther Salas.

Rich Americans homes generated 25% more greenhouse gases than the homes of the less affluent, according to a study which found that the most energy-intensive dwellings are in Maine, Vermont and Wisconsin, while the least energy-intensive are in Florida, Arizona and California.

What can we learn from Netflixs all-time top 10?

The streaming service has revealed its 10 most-watched original movies, topped by the Chris Hemsworth action thriller Extraction, seen by 99 million viewers. Benjamin Lee asks what the list can tell us about which films work best online.

Why even the perfect Uighur isnt safe from the camps

Beijing claims its re-education camps in Chinas Xinjiang province are to combat Islamic terrorism among the Uighur Muslim minority. Yet Dilara and her family are educated, hard-working, cosmopolitan model citizens and even they have not been spared. Eveline Chao reports.

Ellen Pao on why Facebook cant beat hate

Tech executive Ellen Pao first broke ground in Silicon Valley with a gender discrimination suit against her former venture capital firm. Then she tried to take on the trolls as the boss of Reddit. She tells Julia Carrie Wong how Facebook and others ought to tackle hate on their platforms: Just do the right thing.

Allowing its stars to wear messages on their jerseys in support of social justice was supposed to show the NBA in a positive light. Instead, writes Hunter Felt, the lukewarm response from players demonstrates the limits of corporate virtue-signalling.

The NBA has gained a reputation as the most liberal of the major US sports leagues, but its a reputation that it has mostly achieved thanks to comparisons to the more conservative leadership of the NFL, NHL and MLB.

The teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has been awarded a 1m ($1.15m) Portuguese rights award, the Gulbenkian prize for humanity and promptly pledged it all to environmental groups.

First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If youre not already signed up, subscribe now.

See the rest here:

First Thing: Trump plans to send federal troops into Democratic cities - The Guardian

The comments by Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal who defeated House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, underline a recognition by Democrats across the ideological spectrum that avoiding the intra-party fractures that helped sink Hillary Clinton in 2016 will be necessary to beat Donald Trump this November.

"In this moment, we're dealing with the second biggest crisis since the Great Depression. We have to get people back to work, we got to get a handle on this pandemic. And I'm right in alignment with Joe Biden in fighting those fights as well as fighting for racial and economic justice in all its forms," Bowman told CNN's John Berman on "New Day" Monday morning.

"The Bernie Sanders-Joe Biden alliance came together to draft policy platforms together. And I'm very happy to see that Joe Biden is a lot more focused on environmental justice and climate change than maybe he was before," said Bowman, who added that the former vice president is "listening" to the progressive wing of the party.

Bowman was considered an underdog in his primary against Engel, who was supported by establishment heavyweights including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Clinton, who lives in a neighboring district.

His victory in the Democratic primary for New York's 16th Congressional District -- which includes parts of the Bronx and Westchester County -- was a surprise given Engel's status as a long-serving congressman with establishment backing. Bowman, 44, ran as a more progressive challenger to Engel, championing policies such as "Medicare for All" and the Green New Deal.

Bowman on Monday downplayed the policy differences between himself and the more moderate Biden by nodding to the ultimate goal of defeating Trump.

"You know Joe Biden, first and foremost, wants to move this country forward in the right direction," Bowman said.

View original post here:

Progressive Democrat who ousted establishment-backed congressman says he's 'right in alignment' with Biden - CNN