Air Date 9/10/2024
[00:00:00]
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. It's said that we live in a melting pot here in the US. Perhaps it's more of a salad bar, who knows. In any case, there are a lot of people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, cultures, histories, and geographies, all about to vote in a few weeks. Today, we try to understand at least roughly how people's backgrounds influence their vote.
Sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today, include the NPR Politics Podcast, What A Day, The Wall Street Journal State of the Stat, AJ+, Brown University, and Vox. Then, in the additional deeper dives half the show, there'll be more on three cohorts, or give or take. Section A is a bit of a mixed bag actually, including discussions on LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish, and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Section B [00:01:00] is on Latino and Black voters, and section C is White and rural voters.
A conversation about how demographic changes could impact the 2024 election - The NPR Politics Podcast - Air Date 9-3-24
SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Let's start with a group we hear a lot about, white voters without college degrees. Domenico, they're a key group because they're just a really big group in this country, right? How have their numbers changed?
DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, they are a big group in the country. In fact, in all of the seven swing states that we're paying attention to—the three blue-wall states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the four sunbelt states: North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—they are the largest, single group, but they're on the decline everywhere, which makes the job for Trump and his campaign to turn out these voters a lot more difficult.
SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: They're a key group for Trump, and they're a shrinking share of the electorate, essentially, right?
DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, they are. And when you look at all the seven states, they've gone down a couple points just since 2020, and if you zoom out and go back to, 2008, [00:02:00] take Wisconsin, for example, was 66 percent non college, white voters. Now it's only down to about 58-59%. So that's a big shift. And you're also seeing an increase in those blue-wall states of white voters with college degrees, which is a group that's now moved more heavily toward Democrats, a group that had been pretty heavily Republican in years past. And now Trump has really traded out those white college educated voters, who tend to vote in higher numbers, for these lower propensity voters. And that is a big warning sign potentially for his team, especially when their turnout operation is also a big question mark.
SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: But one interesting and important thing about this group, the white, non college voters, these voters are actually quite different depending on where in the country you're talking about.
DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: Yeah, that's absolutely true. Voters without college degrees who are white in the blue-wall states, for example, vote very differently than those same [00:03:00] voters in North Carolina and Georgia, the two Southern states that are part of this group of swing states.
When you look at the voters in North Carolina and Georgia, they voted something like 78-79% for Trump in 2020. When you look at the blue-wall states, they're only about the high 50s 60% for Trump, and that really makes a big difference. And that's something that Kamala Harris is continuing to try and do, which is reduce the margins with some of these heavy Trump groups.
ASHLEY LOPEZ - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: What I find most interesting about all this is yes, college educated voters are more likely to vote, so therefore this is a net positive for Democrats, but I would argue this does present a optics challenge for Democrats, right? The party has long promoted itself as the party on the side of the working man, so to speak, so it's not surprising that there is some concern that non-college, white voters having slipping support there is a problem. That's why you see so much jockeying for the union vote, for example. But I think this [00:04:00] concentration of college educated folks in the party is going to present an interesting issue as the party tries to tackle its elitism problem.
I think overall it is going to be interesting to see if this is a high turnout election or a low turnout election, because what we've seen is because so many higher education white voters are concentrated in the Democratic Party, it has been easier for Democrats to overperform in low turnout like special elections, but if this is a high turnout election, I'm curious to see what this would mean.
SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: And Domenico, when it comes to the white voters with college degrees, I think I heard you say they're becoming higher propensity voters. What's happening with that group?
DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: White college educated voters are among the highest propensity voters, about eight in ten of them vote in every election, as compared to white voters without college degrees, only about six in ten of them vote in these elections. The Trump folks see that as an opportunity, but in an election like this one, when turnout experts say it's going to be lower turnout than 2020 because of the lack of mail in [00:05:00] voting everywhere in the same way that it was during the pandemic, that these lower propensity voters tend to then go on the decline in those lower turnout elections.
But what we're seeing is in the blue-wall states in particular, the white population in those states is more educated than at any other time. Whites with degrees are up eight points in Pennsylvania, six points in Wisconsin, five points in Michigan since 2008. In Wisconsin alone, they're up four points just since 2020. And this really has to do with sort of the reshaping of the rust belt, where the jobs are.
There was a time, obviously, when people could have jobs in factories, have two cars, own a home, maybe even have a vacation house somewhere. That's no longer the case, and the younger population knows that they need to get college degrees, and we're seeing that. Help increase the college educated white population in those states and that's helping Democrats.
SARAH MCCAMMON - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: So interesting. How does that translate into messaging from the campaigns and a turnout strategy? I'm thinking back to 2016 when we [00:06:00] heard Trump talk about I'm for the educated and the not so educated. He clearly knew who some of his constituency was, but what does it look like now?
DOMENICO MONTANARO - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: The fact is, when we're talking about who these groups are appealing to with Democrats appealing more to white college, educated voters, and Republicans and Trump specifically appealing to white voters without college degrees, that means it's going to be a lot harder work for the Trump campaign to turn out their voters. And generally, now that we're past Labor Day, this is the time for mobilization. And the Trump folks have had a real question mark around their turnout operation.
The Democrats have way more staffers on the ground. They have more volunteers that more offices. Of course Trump bucked those trends in 2016 as well, so we'll see what happens cause he has a very devoted and loyal base.
ASHLEY LOPEZ - CO-HOST, NPR POLITICS PODCAST: This is also why they're trying to increase support among groups that Trump has been doing a little better with compared to Republicans in the past, like Latino men and Black men in particular, because [00:07:00] there's only so much electorally you can draw from with just white, non-college educated.
The Gender Gap Is Widening In The 2024 Election - What A Day - Air Date 9-4-24
Juanita Tolliver: There is a growing gender divide among voters who support Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and a lot of the movement is happening among white voters. According to a recent ABC Washington Post Ipsos poll, Vice President Harris has a 13 point advantage among women voters, and Trump has a five point advantage among men, and that’s an 18 point gap between the two groups.
Priyanka Aribindi: Wow. Okay. Very stark here. You mentioned that most of the movement has been happening with white voters. So how have they been shifting?
Juanita Tolliver: Yeah, the biggest change since the Democratic convention has been among white women, as Trump dropped from a plus 13 advantage among white women pre convention to now only plus two, which is within the margin of error for this poll. And then there are the white men who are flocking to Trump as his numbers jumped from plus [00:08:00] 13 to plus 21 in the same time period.
Priyanka Aribindi: Wow.
Juanita Tolliver: Now, when we consider these numbers, we have to keep in mind the reality that according to the US Bureau of the census, current population reports, women have registered and voted at higher rates than men since 1980. So when it comes to voter power, it’s important to watch how women move.
Priyanka Aribindi: Listen, based on what you’ve told me, that sounds A-okay to me, but really, such a divide here. How much weight should we give this gender gap as we get closer and closer to November?
Juanita Tolliver: Like I always tell you, with every poll, this is merely a snapshot of the current moment. But there are reasonable questions to ask about the gender gap in the context of which issues motivate these splits, like the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs that overturned the right to abortion access. Also, how the divide is impacted when you consider race, age, and more.
To dig into all of this. I spoke with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox, covering challenges to democracy and [00:09:00] author of the book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Here’s our conversation.
So you wrote a piece back in March where you questioned the idea of a growing political divide between men and women, but given the recent polling that shows the gender gap growing between Harris and Trump voters, do you still think that divide’s overstated, at least when we’re talking specifically about American voters?
Zack Beauchamp: The honest answer to that question is I don’t know. I don’t know because pre-election polling when it comes to demographic subgroups it can often be very unreliable. Right now, men and women are a sort of different case because they’re pretty large sample sizes. But also when you look at the attempts to try to figure out where this gender divide is coming from, you often end up looking at really small demographic sub slices like Gen Z men and women. There you’re going to run into significant sample size problems, and there’s going to be a lot of variation in each individual poll. And so you end up getting these polls, you’ve seen them a lot in this cycle, that showed Trump getting an [00:10:00] improbably large percentage of Black voters, for example, one that would defy anything close yeah–
Juanita Tolliver: Cough cough. Yes. Yes. I see that all the time.
Zack Beauchamp: Some of those things are just not happening, and they’re probably a result of there being statistical noise in the sample randomness can generate random stuff, that’s how it works. That’s all a big caveat, though. It’s entirely possible that there is a growing gender divide in American politics. And when I wrote that article that you talked about a second ago, my conclusion wasn’t, this isn’t happening, it’s we don’t have enough evidence to know for sure that it’s happening. There’s some evidence. It’s very preliminary, it’s very new, and we don’t know how durable these patterns are. We don’t know how significant they are, and we know, based on past elections that the gender gap is typically overstated and, generally speaking, dwarfed by gaps inside of genders.
White women and Black women vote much more differently than men and women do. Same thing with white men and Black men. We could go on down the list— race, [00:11:00] religion, sexual orientation, age, all of these tend to be more important than gender, historically. Again, that might change, and there’s some reasons to think it may in fact be changing, but I’m still on the cautious side, just because of how often this kind of thing gets overstated.
Juanita Tolliver: I appreciate the caution, but I do want to focus on the evidence around this election in which gender has become a major issue. Polls show Harris has increased her margin over Trump with women voters by about 13 points, but that divide was there when President Biden was the presumptive nominee. So, we know reproductive rights has been a big issue driving women to Democrats in particular. But what else is pushing women voters to the left right now?
Zack Beauchamp: A few of the plausible guesses include first, there’s a growing educational gap among women and men. Women are increasingly more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than men are. And we know that education tends to make people... well, I should be cautious about that. We know that people who have college degrees are [00:12:00] more likely to be Democrats. We don’t really know why. That’s another one of those fun puzzles that we’ve got in American politics. Where you look at these things and you have a bunch of different theories, you don’t really know why it’s true. But if it’s the case that women are increasingly making up the ranks of college graduates, men are less likely to graduate. That means that women are probably more likely to become Democrats disproportionately.
Another theory is that it’s generational. Like Dobbs is part of it, maybe a really big part. But another part would be that a lot of women who are younger now were socialized in a moment where gender politics and conflict over gender became really salient, a really important part of their experience. I’m talking Donald Trump running for president after the grab them by the pussy comments, the MeToo movement that came after that, the rise of a lot of young men paying attention to misogynist influencers, people like Andrew Tate.
If you’re a young woman in high school and the men are listening to a guy who is, there’s a lot of very good evidence that he’s an actual sex trafficker, and [00:13:00] that’s who they’re looking to for dating advice and advice about how to be a man in the modern world, it would make sense that a lot of women would come to see politics through the lens of gender. And that’s why a lot of the arguments about this, they tend to focus on younger women, because the divide is not very evident in older generations. But there’s some preliminary polling that you pointed to that tends to suggest a massive divide between young men and young women in political preferences. Again, we’ll see if that’s borne out in November. It may or may not be.
Juanita Tolliver: I do want to go to the flip side of that and hear your theories as it relates to men, because American men have been riding with Trump and Republicans.
Zack Beauchamp: But the thing I want to add, this is like a little fun wrinkle, is that it’s actually not that young men are more conservative than older generations. There is some evidence that a fringe of young men listen to these Andrew Tate type figures, but actually, on average, a Gen Z man is more likely to be left leaning than someone in older generations. Maybe not [00:14:00] millennials, but certainly older than that. But what’s really happened is that young women have swung really hard to the left. So a lot of the explanation is less what happened to men then what’s going on with women and why again if the state is right, why are women so left wing. That’s one of the things that we have to puzzle through right now.
Juanita Tolliver: Let’s start to dig into it, because you mentioned a couple of things already. You mentioned the recording where Trump talked about grabbing women by their genitals. We talked MeToo movement. There’s Dobbs that we’ve already discussed as well, and a lot of that came up after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. So how do you see these kinds of events exacerbating, gender divide in American politics?
Zack Beauchamp: There is a sense that the feminist movement and its gains are under attack in a way that they haven’t been in a really long time. And it’s not just a sense. Dobbs wasn’t just one political development among many. A lot of people treated it like that at the time, that it was just one [00:15:00] of those things that’ll happen and then people forget about it by November. We know that’s not what happened. We know it was one of probably the two most decisive issues, maybe the single most decisive issue in Democrats well overperforming in the midterm elections.
This was an epical event for the way that a lot of Americans see their politics. And before that, abortion politics weren’t actually that polarized on gender lines. Men and women were similar when it came to abortion. But I have this theory, and I feel like it’s been borne out by a lot of recent events, that people don’t really appreciate something when it’s going to happen, it’s only when it actually happens that it changes the way they think about politics.
Juanita Tolliver: Oh come on. I feel like Trump’s full administration was a case study in that reality check. Yeah.
Zack Beauchamp: Yeah. It’s like people were like, "okay, maybe this bad thing could happen, but you know, that’s could. That’s that’s a future problem. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t." But once the constitutional right to abortion was gone, and [00:16:00] you started getting states banning abortion altogether pretty much, or doing six week bans that were functionally the same thing, people really changed the way they thought about this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a gender gap emerged as a consequence, a durable and consistent gender gap, because it’s women whose rights are being taken away. Of course, like historically, people would puzzle why don’t women care more about this? And I think the answer we may have is they didn’t think that it was going to be under threat in the way that it is
Why So Many Young Men Are Leaving Democrats for Republicans in 2024 - WSJ State of the Stat - Air Date 8-19-24
NARRATOR: In 2008, 58% of young people lean Democratic. 2012, 53%. And in the last two major election years, that percentage held steady at 55%. But in 2023, that number dipped below 50% for the first time since 2005. And you'll notice right here, they've started to lean more Republican. And that's partly because of one specific group, young men.
Young men have increased their support of the Republican Party from 35% to [00:17:00] 48%, a 13 percentage point increase in just seven years, and this is a new trend. While 2020 exit polls show that young men backed Biden by 15 percentage points, a February 2024 Wall Street Journal poll found they favored Trump by 14 percentage points. And this loss of young male voters is a major issue for the Democratic Party going into November. The question now, can Kamala Harris bring some back?
Here's what's driving young men to support Republicans and what it could mean for the presidential election to come.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: When we ask young voters, "what issue is most important to you when you go to cast a vote?" Among young men, it's the economy. Among young women, it's abortion.
NARRATOR: 17% of men say the economy is the most important issue, followed by democracy and immigration, whereas for young women, the top issue is abortion, by a lot.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: Why is this happening? Well, we put the reasons [00:18:00] into two different buckets. One is the life experiences that young men and young women are having. Those life experiences are diverging.
NARRATOR: Young men without a college degree have seen the greatest decline in labor force participation. Meanwhile, a record 87% of college educated women are in the workforce. And today, women make up 60% of college graduates.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: This division that we're seeing between young men and young women, it goes beyond who they're going to vote for for Congress or President. It goes to a range of policy issues. So then let's look at what is offering. The Biden administration has moved to forgive federally funded student loans. That affects young women more than young men.
NARRATOR: During the 2019 2020 school year, 49% of female undergraduate students took out loans, compared to only 42% of male undergraduates. And 66% of all student debt is carried by women.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: The young women favored forgiving student loans by [00:19:00] 45 percentage points. The young men were about equally divided. That's a big difference.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, young men support extending Trump's tax cuts by 23 percentage points, which cut the corporate tax rate and reduced some individual income tax.
DONALD TRUMP: And now because of our tax cuts, you can keep more of your hard earned money.
NARRATOR: But women oppose the proposed extension by 20 percentage points, a full 43 point difference.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: That's data that goes like this. Young men headed in one direction and young women in the other. That's a big difference. Data does not usually segment young voters that remarkably. This is something new.
NARRATOR: Which brings us back to this chart. 22% of young female voters say abortion is their number one issue in this election, a key aspect of Harris' campaign.
KAMALA HARRIS: We trust women to make decisions about their own body.
NARRATOR: Only 3% of young male voters said the same. And young men and women stacked up differently on other issues [00:20:00] as well. With immigration, Trump's policies are much more likely to be supported by men than women. Men support deploying troops at the border by 10 percentage points, whereas women oppose this policy by 15 points. And when it comes to building the wall, one of Trump's key immigration policies, men are only slightly leaning towards opposition, but women overwhelmingly oppose it.
These gaps are hard to explain just by differences in lived experience, which brings us to the second thing that explains the gap between young men and women.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: What are the candidates and what are the parties saying to young voters? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are putting out a lot of messages expressly intended to appeal to young men. Donald Trump has gone to ultimate fighting championship matches. He recently appeared on the podcast of Logan Paul. He went to a sneaker convention to sell his own brand of sneakers.
DONALD TRUMP: We gotta get young people out to vote.
AARON ZITNER - WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER: These are audiences that are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly filled with young men. And it's a way that [00:21:00] Donald Trump and his campaign have been saying, "Hey, young men, I'm with you. I'm on the same page as you. I understand you."
A lot of the messaging from the Democratic Party has been towards issues that are more salient for women.
KAMALA HARRIS: When I am President of the United States, I will sign into law. the protections for reproductive freedom.
NARRATOR: So what does this mean for November? Young women historically vote at higher rates than young men, but experts say that with a tight election, the Democratic Party will need to draw in as many votes as possible. The next challenge for the Republican Party will be figuring out how to turn these young male supporters into actual
What Will Black Male Voters Do In 2024? - AJ+ - Air Date 7-7-24
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: The US's next president may be chosen inside sanctuaries like this. Detroit's Bethel AME Church is the largest precinct in Michigan. It had the highest number of voters registered and the highest number of ballots 2022 midterms. This year, Michigan is one of the most [00:22:00] important states in the election.
CHAD KING: Say hello to Coretta.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Is that the name of your gun?
CHAD KING: Yes, Coretta.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Coretta. As in the civil rights activist?
CHAD KING: As in Coretta Scott King, yes. I name all of my guns after historic Black women.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Gun rights are central to Chad's political views.
CHAD KING: They always say you vote with your heart in the primaries, but in the general election, you vote with your brain. I haven't gotten to a point where I feel like I can confidently say, yes, Joe Biden is the person I should vote for.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: What are you iffy on him about?
CHAD KING: I'm iffy about him, certainly on the firearms issue.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Gun ownership is almost universally seen as an issue for conservatives, white conservatives. It's a tenet of the Republican platform.
CHAD KING: I think that gun rights are just as important as voting rights in my opinion. In fact, I think they're inextricably linked.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: But Chad, who is the legacy of Black people's historic relationship with gun ownership, is no Republican. He's a self described moderate voter who never views his ballot solely through the lens of gun rights.
CHAD KING: The [00:23:00] economy is a significant issue for Black men because without economic sustainability for themselves, they cannot sustain a family. If they can't sustain a family, they can't build communities.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Chad's focus on the economy echoed what I'd hear from so many Black male voters I spoke with in Michigan.
BLACK MALE VOTER: We need economic balance amongst us.
The economy, obviously.
Economy.
Just talked to a brother the other day and he said, I can't hear anything that a politician Is saying with the echoes in my pocket.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: This reflects Black voters concerns nationally. The economy has ato, their list of priorities along with improving education, reducing healthcare costs, and dealing with problems in impoverished communities.
CHAD KING: We aren't being heard about what the issues are that are important to us as Black men. The ad is that what one won't do another will. That may be, some of the cause for a small migration over to another party.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Who do you plan to support this year?
CHAD KING: I have no clue yet. I know I can't, in good conscience, support Donald [00:24:00] Trump. That's a non starter.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: US establishment news media continually has said Republicans are successfully courting large numbers of Black male voters.
NEWS REPORT: The recent New York Times Siena poll shows 23% support among Black voters for former President Trump. That's up 19 points. I think that what you see is a decline, especially Black men, in support for President Biden.
Basically, it's Black men under 30 that are moving towards the Republican Party.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: The reality is, Black people, including Black men, are the Democratic Party's most loyal voting bloc. In a May 2024 poll of registered Black voters, 83% were Democrats, or leaned that way. Here's the caveat. US citizens actually vote for the Electoral College, and then it votes for the President. The Electoral College distorts the vote because it's disproportionately weighted, and it lets a winner of a state take all of its votes. Only six states effectively will decide this year's election. This is [00:25:00] why who turns out to vote is so important.
Kermit Williams is a progressive organizer canvassing a Detroit neighborhood.
KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: So I used to tell people if they didn't vote, shut up, you don't have anything to say, because I thought that it was laziness, really. But I had to realize that not voting is just as much of a choice as voting. I think that a lot of people are making that choice right now, not if they're going to vote Republican or Democrat. What I'm concerned about mostly is that there's a number of Black men that won't vote.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Kermit says he's seen Black men targeted on social media with specific talking points.
KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: And so I started noticing that the algorithm and their YouTube clips or everything else used to have a commercial that was really leaning toward that conservative or culture war thing to say that Black men don't have a place.
They had one social media influencer going so far to say, "Oh, the president doesn't make any difference in your life. So you should just vote for your state representatives and others."
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT: Black people, pull, pull your minds out of the [00:26:00] presidential election. Don't entertain that president talk. That's a distraction because you don't pick it.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: This is an example of what Kermit says Black men are seeing online. He sent it to me. He also sent me this as an example of social media parroting conservative talking points to Black people.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT: We're giving one party our vote because they've successfully gone about the business of convincing our community that the other party, the Republican party, is completely against the interest of the Black community.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: What do you think the GOP and Republicans are doing to woo Black men?
KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: They're spending the money, and they're paying attention to Black men, and I think their messaging is working with some, because they've been intentional in spending dollars.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Trump supporters have even doctored and shared fake AI images online. None of these Black people exist because they aren't real.
NEWS REPORT: There's at least a dozen images like this going around on social media. They found it's been dating back at least since back in October.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: [00:27:00] Then there's the fact. Trump debuted $400 sneakers at Sneaker Con in February, 2024.
NEWS REPORT: This is connecting with Black America because they love sneakers or into sneakers.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Many viewed it as a racist trope.
KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: At the end of the day, offering tennis shoes with a sprinkle of racism is not the way to get people out and encouraged to vote.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: Trump even uses his criminal indictments as an anecdote to relate to Black voters.
DONALD TRUMP: And then I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time. And a lot of people said that that's why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: One thing that I've consistently heard from Black men who plan to support Donald Trump is that their primary issue is the border.
KERMIT WILLIAMS - CO-DIRECTOR OF OAKLAND FORWARD: And that's because they've been targeted with it. I've got at least 17 social media videos sent to me about the border, but I don't really believe that that is a major issue.
IMAEYEN IBANGA - HOST, AJ+: All this targeting is important because voters of color make up a third of the electorate, though [00:28:00] they only cast 22% of the ballots. You'd think any increase in their participation would be influential, but that's not exactly accurate. More than half of Black people live in the South, but thanks to policies like gerrymandering, voter restrictions, and the Electoral College, the presidential voting power of a Southern Black voter is diluted. It's far less influential than that of a in a Midwestern battleground state like Michigan.
Ian Haney López, "Dog Whistle Politics: Coded Racism and Inequality for All" - Brown University - Air Date 8-23-17
Ian Haney López: So, here's Mitt Romney. 2012, here are the campaign themes, he's saying, "Vote against Barack Obama, he's all about welfare and giveaways," even if it's not true. "Vote for me, I don't care about half the country, but I do plan to cut taxes for the very rich, allow corporations the freedom to write their own regulations, and slash social services that might help anybody who's poor, or at least in the bottom half."
And how'd he do? Now, most of you know. [00:29:00] He lost. How about among whites?
This is what the electoral map would look like if you only counted white votes in 2012. Mitt Romney won three out of five white votes across the country. It wasn't just old white men. He won among white women as well. He won among every age cohort of whites. Three out of five whites voted for a candidate who warned them, who lied to them about Barack Obama and welfare, and who promised to give control of the government over to the very rich.
And this is where we are today. This is a sort of dog whistle politics. A couple of points. This is not a story of race declining in influence since 1964. If you want to find [00:30:00] presidents who've done better than Mitt Romney among whites, than Mitt Romney did, you have to look to Reagan's re-election in 84, or Nixon's re-election in 72.
Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote. 62 percent of whites voted Republican in 2014. We are deep in the heart of dog whistle politics. A politics that is wrecking the middle class through racial themes.
Okay, I'm out of here. Oh, no, wait. I guess we should talk about what to do, maybe. Okay, let's talk about what to do, and this is where I'm gonna wrap up.
First, demography will not save us. Listen, you know how I was saying the Democrats have said we should stay silent? They're saying we should stay silent again, right? They're saying, don't talk about race in politics, don't worry about it. Why not? Because, take heart, America, whites will soon be a minority.
Right? So the Democrats are saying to themselves, hey, you know, whites are 65 [00:31:00] percent of the country now, but by 2043 they will be a minority and dog whistle politics will stop working then. And there's two reasons why that's ludicrous. Reason number one, it turns out when you tell white people that are declining share of the population, they don't get more liberal and they don't get more racially tolerant.
They go the opposite direction. Levels of racial anxiety among whites goes up, and conservatism among whites goes up. It is not helping for Democrats to be saying, we're not worried about this sort of politics because whites, your time has passed. Right that's not helping.
Second, the idea that whites are going to be a minority in 2043 depends on the white category remaining stable. And indeed, more than that, it depends on the white category remaining the white non Hispanic category. But [00:32:00] already, half of all Latinos think of themselves as white. Now, that's different from how many whites think Latinos are white, but half of all Latinos think they're white. And when you look at the census numbers, and if the census includes among whites, not just non Hispanic whites, but Hispanic whites, Then in 2043, what will be the percentage of the white population in the country?
We're 65 percent now. What will it be in 2043 if you include Latinos? 72%. If, over the next 30 years, a significant segment of the Latino population comes to be accepted as whites, we may be in the midst of a historic expansion of white identity, not a move to whites as a minority in this country. And believe me, The Republicans/Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio understand this, right?
And this is why it's so important to understand this is not [00:33:00] about racism. They don't care if they win votes by bringing in Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Herman Cain. They don't care. They care about winning. They care about power. And if dog whistle politics can succeed by wrapping in new groups who can be made racially anxious, that's exactly what it'll do.
And at least within, among Latinos, and also among certain Asian communities, East Asian communities especially, but I think also South Asian communities, there is a receptivity to the idea that a chance of racial upward mobility is possible, and that they are under racial threat from poorer and darker and more recent immigrants.
This sort of politics will remain available couched primarily in terms of immigration and darkness, in terms of language [00:34:00] proficiency, in terms of professional credentials, this sort of dog whistling will continue. So what are we to do? Three quick things. We need to reclaim government. And this is just so foundational, and yet so many people have given up on government.
So I attend sort of progressive social justice conferences. I love all the conversation about creativity, and social media, and volunteerism, and new NGOs, and sharing. I got that. In our society, we will not have a broad, fair, and inclusive society. Unless government's on our side. If government remains on the side of the 1%, we're doomed.
All the volunteerism and creative NGOs and whatever, notwithstanding, we need government on our side. We're not going to win government on our side in the last two weeks of a campaign, right? We need a broad social movement that demands that government return, that government help everybody. So that's number one.
Number two. We need to reject racism. The minute we [00:35:00] begin to talk about government that helps everybody, we're going to be met with dog whistle narratives that say, "Don't you just mean give away stuff to minorities?" Because that's exactly how conservatives have been fighting, and Democrats themselves have been fighting this effort to make government meaningful for all of us.
So we need to reject that sort of racism. We need to surface dog whistling, we need to call it out, we need to repudiate it. This is just an aside. Think about what has happened with Indiana and Arkansas in the last week. That was dog whistling, right? Those states said, hey, religious freedom as code for homophobia.
And they got hammered, and they're backing up, right? This is what we need to do around race. I'm happy to talk about why it's much more difficult around race. I'll do that during Q& A. This is the sort of thing we need to do.
Third, take pride. Democrats, progressives, for the [00:36:00] last 50 years have been saying, "Hey, people are being bamboozled by these identity issues. We just need to talk to them about how important this is to their checkbook, to their retirement, to their children's future. Let's talk to them about the hard reality of finances."
And how's that worked? Because people, they think in different terms. They think about their pocketbook. They do. But they also think about themselves, their sense of self, their sense of social position, who they are, whether the work that they've dedicated their life to is esteemed, whether their values are respected.
People think in those terms, and that means we need to respond in those terms. We need to respond in terms that give people pride in who they are when they resist divisive dog whistle politics. What would that look like? I think a campaign that focuses on Americans as hard working, [00:37:00] Americans as patriotic, Americans as generous, most importantly, tolerant.
Right? 90 plus percent of Americans identify tolerance as a quintessential American value. Now, I know, in lefty circles, "tolerance" is not such a great word. We would much rather "esteem" or sort of "inclusion," because tolerance implies this sort of mental reservation. I'll tolerate you, but the truth is I don't really like your kind.
I got that. But people don't need to like everybody. They need to tolerate them, and they specifically need to tolerate them in the sense that they need to refuse to be divided by dog whistling. By this sort of coded demagoguery that is so constant.
Last point. I like the phrase "take pride" because take pride also has this sort of activist element and also this sense that we're taking it from someone, that we're taking it in opposition to someone. It's just not enough to [00:38:00] tell people let's hold hands and feel good about ourselves. You also need to tell people, especially people in crisis, who did this?
Who's doing this to you? Who is the threat in your lives? Because clearly things aren't going right. Who's doing this? And so take pride, not only in the sense of collaborative, shared effort, but also in the sense of who's not generous, who's not tolerant, who isn't hard working. Who are these people, the Koch brothers, who are doing this to us, right? We need that affirmative sense.
Last, and here's where I'll end. Maybe this seems like it's at this sort of high level of abstraction, and in a sense it is, 40 year, 50 year phenomenon and how are we going to respond, broad social mobilization that reclaims government, rejects racism, takes pride. I get that that's abstract.
What does that mean for you as individuals? Dog whistling has skewed just about every area of American life. [00:39:00] Education, immigration, welfare, incarceration, the environment, the infrastructure. Every area. Pick an area. Whatever area you care deeply about. Get involved. Join an organization. Commit to shared mobilization and commit to building bridges.
To helping others in your area see that this is part of a larger practice, a larger pattern, in which government has been hijacked by the very rich through manipulations of status.
How Michigan explains American politics - Vox - Air Date 1-11-24
Adam Freelander: This chart shows how many people voted in Detroit in different elections over the years. You can see that turnout in presidential elections is typically higher than turnout in midterm elections, and that's true pretty much everywhere. But, look at the turnout in 2016. It's almost as low as, for example, the midterm election of 2006.
Now, two things are happening here. Detroit is getting smaller during this time. Its population is shrinking, so [00:40:00] fewer voters. But Trump had a role here, too.
DONALD TRUMP: "Look how much African American communities have suffered under Democratic control."
Unknown Speaker #1: The thing that I think Trump did effectively as far as interacting with African American voters is not getting them to become Republicans or switch their vote to the Republican Party. It's to get them to not be comfortable voting for anyone.
DONALD TRUMP: America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: Republicans don't have to move the needle that much in those communities to, to have a incredible impact on election outcomes.
Unnamed, WXYZ: I'm not convinced African Americans like Hillary Rodham Clinton as much as they liked Barack Obama.
Unnamed, Detroit Public TV: No one in this race, on either side, has that same pull.
Adam Freelander: If you don't like either side, maybe you don't vote. Now, there are of course other factors, [00:41:00] too. That outcome is just one more of many that take us from blue Michigan to red Michigan.
But remember, after 2016 is when Michigan starts to swing back. In 2018, the state elected a Democratic governor by a big margin. In 2020, it voted for Biden. And to see how we got there, we have to talk about white women.
This chart comes from exit polls of white women in Michigan over 10 years of presidential and gubernatorial elections, and it shows us in the early 2010s, including 2016, white women in Michigan were voting more for Republicans.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: In 2016, white women across urban, rural, suburban, educational level gave Trump a chance.
Adam Freelander: But after 2016, something changes, a big swing among that demographic towards Democrats. Now this chart doesn't tell us the reason for that, but there was something big [00:42:00] happening around that time. A kind of adjustment in the way that many women in the US were participating in politics.
Demonstrators: "I'm Vice President! I'm Vice President! We will not be ignored!"
Unnamed News Anchor: Millions of people around the world marching for women's rights today.
Adam Freelander: One part of Michigan was particularly energized during this period.
Unnamed News Anchor: The largest of all was in Washington, D. C.
Kimberly Gill: Everywhere we turned, we ran into somebody. From Michigan.
Various Demonstrators: "I'm from Huntington Woods."
"Michigan."
"Waterford, Michigan."
"Franklin."
"We're from Ferndale!"
Adam Freelander: Huntington Woods, Waterford, Franklin, Ferndale. All in Oakland County. Women, especially white women in places like Oakland, were a big part of what drove the Democrats to their victory in 2018 and led to Trump losing the state in 2020.
Oakland County Voter 1: I didn't think I'd ever have to worry about whether or not the president of the United States was a good [00:43:00] role model, and I do now.
Oakland County Voter 2: I spent every day from 2016 through now, making sure I did everything that I could to make sure he's not re elected.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: In some ways, Oakland is the mirror image, or maybe a 180 from Macomb County.
Adam Freelander: Oakland is the wealthiest county in Michigan and the second most well educated. And at one time, those things made Oakland a very Republican county. But those types of voters,wealthy, well educated, they vote differently than they once did. And you see that in exit polls, too. This one shows how college educated voters across Michigan have voted over the past few elections.
They've been trending heavily towards Democrats. You can really see the backlash to Trump in the raw voter turnout numbers in Oakland County. Turnout in 2016 was kind of unremarkable, basically in line with earlier years, but look at how many people voted in the first election after Trump won, the midterm election of 2018.
Almost as many as in a presidential election. And the 2020 count [00:44:00] was unprecedented.
Okay, we finally made it to 2022. Democrats win it all. Okay, so sorry, one more thing.
News Anchor 2: Proposal 2, the anti gerrymandering proposal.
News Anchor 3: The state overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2.
Adam Freelander: In 2018, by a big margin, Michigan voters approved an anti gerrymandering measure that took redistricting out of the hands of the legislature and gave it to an independent commission.
Over the next three years, that commission would replace these maps with new maps. And the first year that these maps would be in effect was 2022. In 2022, if you added up all the elections for Michigan state representatives, Democrats won every 51 percent of that vote. And under the new district alliance, they won 56 out of 110 seats, which is 51%.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: Michigan's independent redistricting commission gave Michigan Democrats the [00:45:00] opportunity to finally have maps that weren't overly biased to Republicans.
Adam Freelander: Redistricting unlocks a big part of how this happened. But there was more going on here. To really understand 2022. We have to look at these two stories.
One started with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. In Michigan, activists responded to that by putting Proposal 3 on the ballot that year, a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The measure was really popular and passed easily by more than 10 percentage points.
The other big thing was something happening in the Michigan Republican Party.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: By the time 2022 gets around, the Trump wing of the Republican Party had taken over entirely.
Adam Freelander: These are photos from a Stop the Steal protest at the Michigan State Capitol just after the 2020 election. By May of 2022, a poll found that a majority of Michigan [00:46:00] Republicans supported overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Among Michigan voters as a whole, though, only around a quarter agreed with that. But Republicans running for statewide office in 2022 largely endorsed that idea.
Ralph Rebandt: How many of you believe that the widespread election fraud was enough to swing the election toward Biden? Raise your hand with me.
Adam Freelander: That is Tudor Dixon, who Michigan Republicans nominated for governor in 2022.
Kristina Karamo: The city of Detroit has been plagued with election corruption for years.
Adam Freelander: And that is Kristina Karamo, the Republican who ran to be in charge of Michigan's elections. Both Dixon and Karamo would lose to Democrats by more than 10 percentage points. One place you could really see the reaction to abortion rights on the ballot and to the Republican focus on election fraud was the Michigan suburbs, which exit polls tell us had historically voted Republican until 2022. And the next year, Michigan Republicans met at their convention and they [00:47:00] chose Kristina Karamo as their new party leader.
Kristina Karamo: We have to fight to secure our elections. It's the reason I did not concede after the 2022 election.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: It's almost like that's all you hear from them.
Adam Freelander: It's tempting to think that Michigan is just a blue state now, but it won't take much to make it swing back. For example, Michigan is about 3 percent Middle Eastern, North African, doesn't sound like much, but that actually makes it the most Arab American state in the country by far. And that would be worth paying attention to if, for example, something were to happen that made Arab American support for Joe Biden go way down.
News Anchor 4: President Biden shows unwavering support for Israel with the civilian death toll in Gaza rising.
Wayne County Voter: I did vote for Joe Biden in
CNN Reporter: Do you plan to vote for him in 2024?
Wayne County Voter: I do not.
Adam Freelander: Still, if we look back at some of the big moments in this story. You might notice two things. First, it's Donald Trump who's actually [00:48:00] been the main character in Michigan politics going back almost a decade now.
And second, you probably saw some of these things happen outside of Michigan, too. This chart shows how every state voted in the most recent presidential election, 2020. If you put how the whole US voted onto this chart, it would go here. And here is Michigan. In other words, by at least one measure, Michigan is the state closest to the country as a whole.
Redistricting battles like Michigan's are happening all over the country. National exit polls show that college educated Americans everywhere have been voting more Democratic, just like in Michigan. And that non college educated Americans are doing the opposite. That's pretty indicative of where the parties are headed.
Unnamed Vox Interviewee: I do think that you're seeing party coalitions shift.
Adam Freelander: There's also evidence that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a powerful motivator everywhere, not just in Michigan, with voters rejecting abortion bans in surprising places like Kentucky, Montana, Kansas, Ohio. [00:49:00] So, you know, Michigan can make or break a whole national election.
But, there's a better reason for Americans to be watching Michigan really closely. And it's that when we do, we're looking at ourselves.
Note from the Editor on the nature of demographic cohorts and the movement of the Democratic Party
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with the NPR Politics Podcast, breaking down college versus non college educated voters. What a Day look at the growing gender divide among white voters. The Wall Street Journal State of the Stat zeroed in on the gender divide among the youth. AJ+ focused on how Black men are being targeted to either vote Republican or stay at home. Brown University featured a lecture explaining dog whistle politics and VOX focused in on what can be learned from Michigan.
And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by [00:50:00] members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. Sometimes just trying to make each other laugh.
To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes. Through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app.
If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives half of the show, I have a couple of thoughts. The first came to me as we were putting this episode together. Breaking down the United States population into all of these different cohorts and trying to understand where everyone is coming from, this is a perfect example of exactly what Republicans try to criticize about the left. Right? Why talk about all of our [00:51:00] differences. It's part of their sort of mirror world vision of how racism works. They argue that acknowledging differences actually exacerbates them. And therefore the left are the real racists in the country, trying to drive people apart. As with all of the best propaganda talking points, there could be a kernel of truth in that, but in this case only if you take that logic to absolutely absurd lengths. You know, they say the left recognizes differences between groups of people, and so did the Nazis, right?
But just because taking this idea of dividing and categorizing people can be taken too far, even catastrophic, dangerously too far. Doesn't mean that the best path forward is to attempt to paper over or ignore differences either. If we do that, we end up not being able to actually see people for their full selves. There's a huge amount that all people have in common. But it's often the [00:52:00] small differences in background geography, gender, race, and all the other factors we're talking about today, that help define our personal and collective culture, helps define how we think. It sort of makes us who we are.
So seeing the differences in people, whether it be individuals or large demographic groups and trying to understand how all of these factors play into how people think, what they value and then ultimately how they vote. Isn't patronizing or insincere. It's a genuine attempt to see people more fully.
Republicans by the way are completely full of shit about this. They'd like to claim that the only honest political message is one size fits all because we're all the same and you shouldn't divide us. But they obviously target different demographics with different messages as we're hearing about in the show today, even. So I'm giving this argument more credence than it really deserves, but sometimes it's nice to explain ourselves more fully, even if we shouldn't have to.
The [00:53:00] second thing I wanted to mention today is about another cohort of voters, but a political rather than demographic cohort. Progressive's like me. There was this article that I came across as part of our research, "Bernie’s DNC Speech Sounded Like Everyone Else’s. That’s Astonishing." And it reads in part, "When on Tuesday night, Sanders said his vision was not a radical agenda. He was absolutely right. Much of it has become the actual agenda of the democratic party. There were very few themes in Sanders' speech that other democratic speakers hadn't already covered on Monday and Tuesday. Senators and governors and members of Congress alike made explicit mentions of class driven policy designs to help the working and middle class." And then the article goes on to describe a few more details and policies of the democratic party that are clearly Bernie influenced. And then it goes on , "It's an astonishing amount of influence for a man who [00:54:00] has never won the Democratic presidential nomination and doesn't possess once in a generation or a torical skills still in the eight years in Sanders failed to become the nominee the first time and the four years since he failed the second time he has managed to push the party toward dramatic policy and rhetorical changes. The substance of the 2024 DNC is a testament as much to his political legacy as to the party's actual presidents."
Now, I don't want to dampen the mood too much. I want Bernie to get his due. I'll just also mention that what's being described here. Is also evidence of the macro shift in the culture, moving us slowly away from the failure of neo-liberalism into a new, as yet not fully defined form of economic populism that people are clamoring for across the political spectrum. Just coming at it from very different angles. So, Bernie didn't do it all on his [00:55:00] own, but he certainly helped push that change along.
And it is his vision much more than, you know, Trump's bullshit vision. We did a whole episode about this recently. Go check out "Republican Nonsense, Populism" episode about JD Vance for more details. So clearly Bernie's vision is the one that we need to be sort of following the path on. But it is very exciting that this change is happening. I am very grateful to Bernie and the degree to which he helped bring it about. And for this entire confluence of events, we should all be happy.
SECTION A - THE MIXED BAG
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper in three sections. Next up, Section A, is the Mixed Bag, including LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Section B is about Latino and Black voters. And Section C, White and rural voters.
'Impossible to be biracial in America'- Harris nomination shines light on mixed-race Americans - Morning Joe - Air Date 8-30-24
This was a fascinating conversation, just to [00:56:00] say the least. We talked to six people across a range of different racial, ethnic, and political backgrounds in my home state, the swing state of North Carolina, and many of them said that, look, the census forms and the boxes on polls, they give them pause, sometimes even panic because of the choices that those boxes force them to make.
But even though they said those boxes are getting better and a little bit more inclusive over time, people's perceptions politically can still be pretty narrow. Take a look. Identify as Indian American and white, Hispanic, Haitian. They're the face of a changing nation. When anybody asks, I just say I'm black and Puerto Rican.
All my grandparents are from a different ethnic background. Multiracial Americans are now the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the country over the last decade. And their voting power will be significant. In six battleground States, the population with two or more races has surged by more than 200%.
Including here in North Carolina's Mecklenburg County. Can you raise your hand if you are a Republican, [00:57:00] Democrat, Independent? Does the way that you identify racially impact your politics or specifically how you plan to vote this election? Absolutely. How so? I'm not going to lend my support behind someone.
Who does not support people who look like me. I don't think he sees me as a who I am. Former President Donald Trump. Yes. What about the rest of you? I just don't think that Kamala Harris has anything vested in the air finger quote black or hispanic experience in so much as it would be identified by anybody that lives in those communities.
You're saying you don't think that she can help black or brown people. No, I mean going to Howard don't make you black. A conversation that quickly turned to this moment in a July interview at the National Association of Black Journalists. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.
So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? What did you think when you heard those [00:58:00] comments? Highly offensive. I mean, I think Probably every multiracial mixed race biracial person has had the experience of someone else telling them that they are not something enough. I think it's kind of triggering, right?
I think it is. impossible to be biracial in America. And I think that it requires that you're covering all bases at all times. And um, it requires constant recognition of both identities. And I think when Donald Trump says stuff like that about Kamala Harris and implies that she's like picking a race for political advantage, it's tapping into an incredibly familiar sentiment that I think everyone on this panel can understand.
Lemarie and Adul, as Trump supporters, when you heard that comment, As mixed people, how did it register with you? Well, my first thought was, no, that wasn't very well thought out. At the same time, though, when I heard it, I didn't hear it as an attack on blacks or Indians. I heard it more so of him commenting towards [00:59:00] identity politics and the appeal that some take.
to play up one side of their race over the other. Adol, I see you nodding your head. I agree with him. I didn't know, I didn't know she identified as black because everything I saw was first South Asian, first Indian, there's none of that identified as black. Regardless of her parents, I mean She was born in this country, and she identifies as a black person in this country in an American way, in a uniquely American context.
I've never heard her identify herself as a black woman. She said multiple times she's a black woman. I've never heard it. But I'm black. Yes. And I'm proud of being black. Politics sometimes becoming personal this year, with mixed race Americans having representation on both tickets. I don't agree with anything J.
D. Vance has to say. I mean, almost nothing. But, um, I think it's incredible that we've gotten to a point where The vice president of the United States can have a wife named Usha Chilakari and a son named Vivek. That doesn't mean I won't vote against him in November. Even though you disagree with Kamala Harris politically, do [01:00:00] you feel some kinship towards her as a mixed person?
Not personally. I find a lot of her trajectory to not be my brand of woman, leader. We've got three major international crises going on and someone applying to be commander in chief. As a woman. I want to see you do more than, you know, appeal to giggling and having a girl moment on the stage. Was there ever a moment that sort of forced you to confront the concept of race?
For me, it's more about ethnicity. As you guys can see, I have an accent, right? And I speak with an accent. I don't think when an accent, you just learn to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. A conversation with implications beyond the ballot box. I think every time we see polling, it's about race.
Um, and, you know, as a candidate of color, you put a lot of, uh, stake into how this candidate represents, say, the black experience or the indian american experience. I think we will never ask Donald trump or joe biden. [01:01:00] Clinton or George Bush to do the same thing. I think white people are expected and people of color aren't.
To do what? To be in the highest office in the United States.
Plugged In: How LGBTQ voters could shape the upcoming presidential election - WABE - Air Date 6-21-24
You spent some time looking at how the presidential campaigns are engaging LGBTQ voters. But before we get there, can you tell me a little bit about what we know about this voter demographic in Georgia? Sure, Sam. So LGBTQ voters are a highly engaged and a growing voting bloc in Georgia as they are nationally.
They're reliable Democratic supporters, so much so that they might have made the difference for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Nearly 90 percent of LGBTQ voters in Georgia voted for Biden in the 2020 election. That's according to an analysis of AP voter data. And of course the state was decided by less than 12, 000 votes that year.
So getting those voters to come out again and force [01:02:00] this year, as they did four years ago, will be a key to Biden repeating his success in Georgia. And that's what Georgia Equality Executive Director Jeff Graham reiterated to me in an interview. There's been so much talk about people just being dissatisfied with the status quo, being dissatisfied with, um, the choices that they have before them, and they're just going to sit this election out.
We want people to understand that that too has very serious implications for the LGBTQ community. And, you know, LGBTQ voters, of course, care about a lot of the same issues as other voters. You know, cost of living, housing, healthcare, but maybe could you talk to me about a couple of specific policy issues that touch the LGBTQ community really directly?
So, LGBTQ people are strongly affected by non discrimination laws, and that's especially as it relates to housing, employment, and public accommodations. There's a long [01:03:00] history of LGBTQ people being discriminated against in those areas, whether it's getting evicted, or fired, or refused service because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
And there's been a movement in recent years by local cities and counties in Georgia to pass such a non discrimination law, as Gwinnett County did earlier this month. Thank you. But there are no statewide non discrimination protections in Georgia, which is something that LGBTQ advocates and groups like Georgia Equality have been really been pushing for recently.
Another issue is protecting and empowering LGBTQ youth. Now, here we're talking about anti bullying measures. There's also been a growing number of restrictions or bans on books in school libraries that feature LGBTQ people or themes, and transgender youth have been targeted by policies when it comes to playing in a sport that matches their gender or getting gender affirming medical care.
Okay, so let's stick with healthcare for a minute, Patrick. Tell me more about that. Yeah, I mean, taking a look at the HIV epidemic, you know, getting [01:04:00] access and funding for prevention, testing and treatment of the virus, you know, this is something that heavily affects LGBTQ folks, gay men and trans women in particular.
And it's an issue that's not gone away, Sam. It's still a major pain point, you know, and Atlanta has the third highest number of new HIV infections of any city in the US and while it might be hard to imagine since this has been law for nearly a decade, uh, Uh, same sex marriage rights is another, uh, big issue.
We have a very conservative US supreme Court now. And after the fall of Roe v. Wade, uh, LGBTQ folks are very nervous about a similar fate for the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage. Patrick, before we get to Washington, D. C., many of these policies that we're talking about are shaped under the gold dome at the state capitol here in Atlanta, where Republicans currently control the levers of power.
What have we seen pass in this space in recent sessions? Sure. So in 2022, as you and I closely followed, Sam, the legislature passed a law that empowered the Georgia High [01:05:00] School Association to ban transgender boys and girls from playing on the school sports team that matches their gender. And shortly after Governor Kemp signed into law, that's exactly what the GHSA voted to do.
Um, in 2023, the following year, the legislature passed a ban on most gender affirming healthcare for transgender children. And in this year's session, uh, Republicans in the legislature tried to expand that to a ban on puberty blockers for transgender kids. But that measure failed, and in fact, In fact, all the proposed measures that caused alarm among LGBTQ advocates in Georgia this session failed to pass, which was surprising considering the ramping up of such measures targeting LGBTQ folks in recent years.
All right, so let's extend that to Washington DC. What are some of the ways that control of the White House, of Congress and the US Supreme Court shape life for LGBT people and communities? Yeah, let me count the ways. So with presidency, a lot of [01:06:00] that power to shape life for LGBTQ people comes from their decision whether to sign or veto legislation passed by Congress.
A president can also throw their weight around in Congress as a measure is making its way through the process, either to help it pass or squash it. An example of that is a hate crimes measure that President Obama signed into law that protected LGBTQ people and ban on the don't ask, don't tell policy that prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the military.
Um, there's also executive orders. The president can also enact a slew of executive orders, protecting LGBTQ employees and protecting LGBTQ kids in schools, and they can appoint pro or anti. LGBTQ federal judges who have lifetime appointments to the courts. And the Supreme Court's actions are, of course, huge.
As I mentioned, the same sex marriage ruling in 2015, the concern over that being stripped away, and in recent years, the court passed landmark protections for LGBTQ workers. And you know, Patrick, I think you're [01:07:00] right. The court's ability to shape American life in fundamental ways is so huge. I was actually a Supreme Court runner for a network news correspondent on the day that the Supreme Court handed down that decision on same sex marriage in 2015.
And the crowds that were gathered outside and around the country, as I'm sure you covered here in Atlanta, Patrick, reacting to that decision and such a sea change in American life in a snap was Pretty striking to
How could Arab and Muslim voters' disaffection with Democrats impact the US election? - DW News - Air Date 7-23-24
Beyond campus protests, how big an issue is the Gaza war amongst voters? I think it's one of the main primary issues, um, that for Muslim American voters, um, on their current like agenda.
But I will start by saying that the concept of the Muslim American vote is a bit reductive, um, considering that it's a very diverse community in the United States. Both in terms of racially, economically, with regards to foreign [01:08:00] policy, and with regards to domestic policy. Um, just to give an example, to a study that was done in 2017, about a fourth of the Muslim American community identified as Black and African American, a fourth identified as White, where White has been conflated with many different groups like Arab, Persian, North African, and so on.
About a fifth identified as Asian, a fifth identified as Arab, and like, The remaining were mixed across the board for Hispanic and Indigenous American as well as other groups. So it's difficult to pinpoint a single Muslim voice on Harris as a presidential candidate. Um, but also with the issue of Gaza, um, that is still one of the main concerns for the Muslim American community.
Okay, so, I take your point about we're not dealing with a monolithic block here. Talk to us about How disaffection with the US position on this Gaza war has affected or has [01:09:00] swayed Arab or Muslim voters? And how that might affect November's outcome? Yeah, um, so based on what I'm hearing on the ground, um, there are four major perspectives with, um, Harris as a candidate, which this is only unfolding in the last couple of days, but, um, the first perspective I've heard the most commonly is this sense of apathy because Harris is viewed as basically an extension of Biden.
Um, and this segment is mixed across those. across the board wanting to vote third party or independent. Some of them are hoping for another Democrat to run against her. And in some cases, some people are choosing to be rational non voters. Um, and, you know, keeping in mind the Abandon Biden campaign that was taking place.
Um, so in order to win this group's, uh, vote, Harris really needs to showcase that her policies are her own and not Biden's, particularly with regards to race. Um, [01:10:00] so back in March, that was quoted earlier, she had called for an immediate temporary ceasefire on the one hand, while at the same time declared that Israel had a right to defend itself.
And for many Muslim Americans, this would be considering, like, batting for both sides of the team, or for, you know opposing sides of the team in that it will be difficult for Harris to win this group over as someone who was in the room during the Biden administration. But in order to do so, she'd have to have a clearer policy agenda with advancements made immediately moving towards peace with regards to Gaza.
Right. Okay. I know you had a list of, forgive me, right? Yeah, that's quite a long list. But let's stick with some of the points that you made there. Um, If her problem, if, um, Harris problem is that she's effectively more of Biden, if the, if, when it comes to a choice of more of Biden or Trump, [01:11:00] what's, what are people telling you?
Yeah, so that was actually the second main group that I've been hearing on the ground and this idea of like, pardon the way I say this, but this lesser of two evils or this rhetoric of that she's better than Trump. Um, so some people, um, this is a smaller group, but some people see Harris As a solid replacement for Biden, given the abandoned Biden campaign, um, as a vote against Trump, um, in the upcoming elections, um, it's a kind of cut your losses type of mentality because people are seeing it, uh, the presidential race as exclusively two party, um, rather than, you know, viewing third parties or independents as having a potential to win.
And so in this case, if the Democratic Party wants to win this group's vote. Um, they'd have to be really strategic in selecting Harris's running mate, um, and her policy platform. Um, but again, like was [01:12:00] noted, Harris is already on the campaign trail, and I listened to her, um, virtually deliver her speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin earlier today, and she's contrasting herself with Donald Trump, um, using her record as an attorney general, juxtaposed to Trump as a criminal or a felon.
And this positioning may be effective for the second segment of the Muslim American population. Um, but, um, again, I think the first group, um, still does not see her. As a viable candidate until she can clearly state her policy platforms, particularly on the issue of Gaza, as well on mass incarceration within the prison system.
Okay, they want to hear more definite policies from her. And given the US's long history of siding with Israel, when do you think that the Biden administration Um, realized, uh, the potential for a backlash from Muslim and [01:13:00] Arab voters, uh, over Gaza. Um, I would say that the Biden administration probably started to feel, um, the backlash when mainstream media started to cover the Abandon Biden campaign.
Um, I don't, Michigan is a swing state and And really, there was a poll that was done. Um, I can't remember who conducted the poll, but there's a stronger leaning towards, uh, Trump in the Republican party currently, and that was done at the end of June. Um, so I'm not 100 percent sure, but what I'll say is that, um, for Biden, And for many Muslim Americans, they see that Biden stepping down isn't only about what the media has talked about with regards to his age and his health, but also a response to the mounting pressure through the Abandon Biden
Trump Trashes Jewish Voters During Unhinged Speech - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 8-4-24
[01:14:00] I've seen some, leftists for Trump, supposedly, uh, claim that Donald Trump has really stuck it.
To Netanyahu versus Kamala stuck it, you mean stuck his tongue in his mouth? I mean, pretty close. Here is, uh, President Trump. Now you may have seen footage or heard audio of Donald Trump six to eight months ago, pre Miriam Adelson basically giving him money. To annex the West Bank. And saying, uh, annex the West Bank for this hundred million dollars pack, money.
Here is president Trump after that fact meeting with Israeli prime minister in Florida I guess in a, in the, the, uh, study room at Mar a Lago or somewhere. I don't know where it is cut. And, uh, I think her remarks were disrespectful. They weren't very nice. Can you pause it? Can you pause it?
We should say he's, he's referring to Kamala [01:15:00] Harris's uh, remarks that were, from our perspective didn't go nearly far enough but, uh, Donald Trump is going to characterize them as having gone too far. I wonder how much BB agrees with that. Probably a lot. That's what he told Axios.
Apparently, uh, they were very unhappy with how cold Harris was in comparison to Biden in that meeting. Probably because the bear hug Netanyahu strategy has been a disaster. Yeah, and from a policy standpoint, Trita Parsi pointed out, like, I think the rhetoric may get overplayed, but she did point out to Netanyahu as the impediment to the ceasefire talks, which is different than Biden.
Exactly. And, uh, I think her remarks were disrespectful. They weren't very nice pertaining to Israel. I actually don't know how a person who's Jewish can vote for her, but that's up to them. But she was certainly disrespectful to Israel, in my opinion. Mr. Trump has your relationship with the prime minister repaired [01:16:00] at all?
It was never bad. We was, uh, I would say it was over president is never bad. Oh, that's good. He was a little bit upset that Netanyahu recognized Biden as the president in 2020. Yeah, it took him a while to get over that. I cannot tell you how sick I am of other Jews or Gentiles, uh, explaining to me, uh, whether I'm a good Jew or not.
I saw somebody say this about like, if you're against Shapiro as the VP to pick, it's anti Semitism. But I didn't know that. Honestly, like it was the first time I even contemplated swearing on uh, on Twitter in years. I think I, that what I was going to quote tweet, it was like a pardon, fucking me. But uh, I didn't, but here is Donald Trump going even further.
I'm going to tell you something 65 to 75 percent of Jews in this country vote for the Democratic presidential nominee. That is both a historical fact. [01:17:00] And I get, I get some very bad news for Donald Trump. It is also a fact in November. It is not going to change. It is not going to change. Wait, let's hear about it.
But let's hear what he's got to say. I mean, maybe this pitch will work. The Democrats hate Israel. The Democrats largely hate the Jewish people. It's time for the Jewish people to stop. Step up and vote for Republicans and vote for Donald Trump. Savior you. We love you, Stanley. We love you Stanley. Thank you.
will you be the Jew that steps up, Sam? I gotta get my Coones go and, or my, uh, my, I gotta get my matza balls in order and step up and, uh, vote for, uh, Donald Trump. Now Kanye will be looking as someone that saved the Jews. the idea that this is going to motivate any Jews to vote for Donald Trump, I think it's really just [01:18:00] honestly about Miriam Adelson and a couple other maybe like a right wing Israeli supporters.
Yeah. Trump giving it to Netanyahu, is that, does he mean, they mean like giving the embassy to where he wants it, Jerusalem? That's what. Adelson's ask was last time. And Trump meeting with Netanyahu, I know no one cares about the Logan Act and it's vi it's invi it's violated all the time, I mean, including, I guess, a few weeks ago by Donald Trump meeting with Viktor Orban, but.
If you're not in government, you're not supposed to be doing any kind of meetings with foreign dignitaries that would approach some sort of official promises as it relates to United States foreign policy. Especially once taking a massive outlays from our military industrial complex.
Yeah. Some sort of top recipient of our military aid. It's technically against the law, but I guess maybe that's why the lighting in the room was so damn dim in that clip. It's under the cloak of
What Matters to AAPI Voters? - Woke AF Daily - Air Date 5-21-24
[01:19:00] You know, with such a vast and rich community, how do you go about, and I know that I ask you this, but particularly as we're heading towards, you know, the most consequential election I think of our lifetimes, how do you part and parcel out what issues Are most affecting this very diverse population and how your community kind of measures against with what let's say the larger democratic priorities, values and such are for this term, it's so important that you're bringing this up because it certainly requires research and polling, right?
Which is which is done in politics every single day. Our community doesn't have the robust Yeah. Amount of polling as say mainstream politics. But that being said, when, when we are able to get access to research and data on what is moving the AAPI electorate, and frankly, and [01:20:00] frankly, we really have to segment it by the ethnicity to know because, uh, certain ethnicities feel stronger or weaker on, on issues.
But I'll give you one example. Gun violence, which is one of the key issues that we're working on in our community has risen to the top. Some polls have it number one as the number one issue going into this election. So think about it for a second. This is not an issue that was even in the top 10 three years ago, four years ago.
And now it's risen to number one. And we believe we have a little bit of data to, uh, to back this up, but the numbers started to really move in terms of the importance of this issue after Uvalde. In Texas, you know, two and a half years ago. And it was the intersection of historically important, uh, theme and issue education and schools.
Right. And the, the fact that this was a shooting in an elementary school, it [01:21:00] really was the, I would say the nexus point for when the numbers started to rise in terms of issue of importance. And we've seen similar parallels in the Latino community as well. And, and that's not something you hear about. I would say.
When you, if you're reading political news or you're reading about, you know, Biden, Trump, or, or the fall matchup is how far this issue has come. Now, reproductive freedom is going to be front and center, part and parcel, like central to this election. And a sleeper issue, I believe is it's going to be gun violence and these issues, they don't get talked about.
In an election without an impetus, without a push, just like the crime narrative is being pushed very hard on the other side right now that, you know, Democrats and the left are weak on, on crime, frankly, they're making that up, but the core of the issue for our community is gun violence. And if we decide to [01:22:00] put some money behind this messaging and this narrative.
I think that we can win on this issue as well. And I believe once again, that this is a once in a 50 year, once in a hundred year opportunity when you have two very galvanizing issues, like the, the, the basic rights that women have had in this country for 50 years, just taken away as well as You know, gun violence.
And I think a lot of API's view, view gun violence in the frame of crime. And so it may not be the winner issue that the Republicans are, I think, really trying to hit us on. They're going to view it in the issue in the framework of gun violence, and they're losing on that issue. And I like this issue specifically because the Republicans don't have a message.
Right now they don't even have a response. They decided that they don't even want to respond at least on reproductive freedoms. They're kind of trying to figure out what the magic number of weeks that might be palatable to restrict abortions, right? It's like pick a dart [01:23:00] and choose on, on gun violence.
They've chose to unilaterally disarm. And I, I like that political equation from, uh, from a math perspective. I wonder, too, as it pertains to gun violence, I mean, the, you know, community was visited upon, right, by a mass shooting, you know, God, what was it, maybe three or four years ago at this point, and I wonder that since that time, coupled with Uvalde, um, and that being a, you know, children being targeted, You know, has there also been a rise, or would your polling show, in gun ownership?
Like, because, you know, on both sides, as violence, you know, escalates when it is directed towards a particular community, like the AAPI community, both people want gun reform. Right, but then they also tend to actually go ahead and purchase guns. So what is, what does that look like for you all? What have you seen in, in your research?
So we went from [01:24:00] being the demographic with the least amount of gun ownership to now on a per capita basis, one of the fastest growing communities of guns. And it all started, frankly, with this cycle that really started with Donald Trump and his. Um, spewing of vicious rhetoric and hatred that led to sort of the next, you know, part of this was that it led to, you know, mass acts of hate and violence all across the nation.
And correspondingly, it led to the direct marketing by the NRA. Uh, because they saw their gun sales starting to flatten in the latter half of the Trump years and they were looking for new markets. They said, Hey, the Asian American community, they've got high net worth income. They've got high incomes, they're low ownership, and they started marketing.
In all their magazines and doing some advertisements, uh, centrally [01:25:00] towards the API community. So we responded in kind by buying guns now at very high rates. And now where we are, and everyone knew this was going to happen, that we have some of the highest suicide by gun rates in the country. 60, 60 percent of all the suicides that happened in the API community are suicide by gun.
Right. So we also know that by any measure that when a gun is in the home, that it leads to a number of negative consequences, intentional homicide, accidental death, accidental injury, intimate partner violence, all of that. And, and so this is what it's. Led to, and it started with the vicious rhetoric and I would say sort of the white supremacist, frankly, the white supremacist elements of not only the NRA, but I would say the gun industry, they, they use this and they capitalize on this fear and we respond because we think this is the only way [01:26:00] we're going to be able to protect ourselves and our protector
SECTION B - LATINO AND BLACK VOTERS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Latino and Black Voters
Why Are More Latino Voters Supporting Trump? - The New Yorker Radio Hour - Air Date 8-16-24
Back in 2013, after Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama, a Republican autopsy of the campaign said that Latino voters were being turned off by the party's hardline stance on immigration. The report said, if Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States, they won't pay attention to our next sentence.
Well, that turned out to be wrong. Since 2015, Donald Trump has said any number of false, misleading, and racist things about people from Mexico and Central America. He put in place policies like child separation at the border. And yet, his share of the Latino vote increased in 2020, and the trend continues.
Comparing Trump and Biden back in July, Latino voters were split evenly. All [01:27:00] of this was on Geraldo Cadava's mind when he covered the Republican National Convention for the New Yorker. That sound you hear is Maracas for Trump and people at this Hispanic leadership coalition event have been instructed to shake them on the convention floor tonight.
This is a subject very close to Cadava's heart. He's the author of a book called the Hispanic Republican. Jerry, there have been a lot of headlines about Donald Trump's support among Latino voters, that it's increasing. And that's a phenomenon that Democrats, a lot of them find utterly baffling. And we'll get to that.
But before we get into the whys and hows, what's the scale of this? What do we know about the numbers and how the vote has shifted? What we know for sure is that Donald Trump increased his share of Latino support between 2016 and 2020 by about eight points. That's [01:28:00] the consensus view. And that was surprising to many because of everything that Donald Trump had said and done, especially in the arena of immigration, all of his anti immigrant policies that were seen to be a real turnoff for Latinos.
I think there's a real debate about how much Latinos are becoming conservative or whether that lower share of Democratic support had to do with Latino dissatisfaction with the candidates. Now, you went to talk to Latinos at the convention, the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Now, these are not your average voters.
They're very engaged political people, and some are truly liberal. Trump supporters, like a guy named Bob Unanwe, who's the CEO of Goya Foods. Why did you want to talk with him specifically? I wanted to talk to him specifically because I wanted to ask him directly about his experience of giving that talk in the Rose Garden at the White House in [01:29:00] the summer of 2020 because he said that we are blessed to have Donald Trump as our president.
First of all, I never knew Donald Trump until July 9th, 2020, when I was in the Rose Garden. I was appointed by him to be a commissioner on the White House Commission on Hispanic prosperity. He was very concerned. about prosperity for Americans and Hispanics. So he appointed a group of commissioners. After he said that we were blessed to have Donald Trump as a president, there were just widespread calls to boycott Goya beans.
And I really thought that Democrats, by going down the rabbit hole of boycotting Goya, really took their eye off the ball. What the event at the White House was about was about Donald Trump announcing new initiatives, including investments in Hispanic serving institutions. And those kinds of things are Core elements of his appeal to Latinos.
Meanwhile, Democrats just got [01:30:00] carried away with this story about boycotting Goya foods. When I said we were blessed, I'd hit home as, as a positive who were offended by that was, uh, Alexander Ocasio Cortez, Julian Castro, Lin Manuel Miranda, you know, the elites who are not, if you ask me, not, not truly Latino, because they, they have a privileged life.
Whoa. He said that Castro and Lin Manuel Miranda and AOC are not really Latino. Why not? Yeah, I should first say that I'm not really comfortable with the language of who is and is not a real Latino because I think, you know, there are 65 million Latinos in the United States and all of them have different ways of relating to their Latino identity, whether it's about family traditions or language or music or anything like that.
So I think that. It doesn't make sense really to talk about who is or is not a real Latino. And it's something you see the Republican party [01:31:00] doing right now. You know, not too long ago, Donald Trump also, uh, said that Kamala Harris was Indian before she was black and she might not be a real black woman.
And I think the Republican party is trying to scramble our concepts about ethnic and racial identity. This question about what people mean in the words they use came up in another conversation that you had with a woman named Betty Cardenas. Now, tell us who she is before we listen to her. Yeah, I find Betty Cardenas fascinating.
First of all, she is part of this kind of, power family in Latino Republican politics because her son is named Abraham Enriquez, and he's the founder of a group called Bienvenido US, but she has also served as national chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. And now she's also the president of the Bienvenidos Action Group.
Let's listen to your conversation with her. As you see Trump coming in, you see a message of more diverse, a little bit more [01:32:00] inclusive in the, in the platform. You even see it. Um, I think there's a, there's still a lot of work to do within the history. I mean, you see Trump, I think he will do a phenomenal, I hope he does a phenomenal job for the America First agenda that, that President Trump has, which America First means it has so much inclusivity and a lot of stuff.
I had never seen these signs. I mean, I'd seen build the wall, things like that. I had never seen a sign that said mass deportation. Now, how do you feel about those signs? Um, I can tell you, I mean, as a, as a, you know, coming from immigrant parents, I think when you see mass deportation, like I think you would, you won't see me raising one of those massive because there's so much significance behind there.
And I know where Trump's policies. That I know the policy makers behind that are going to be behind. And I know what mass deportation he's talking about. He's talking about [01:33:00] the criminals, you know, deport those criminal, those high risk criminals. And I think that's what's missing if they could specify, but also, I mean, it's a message of the, of the campaign.
I know in my heart what it means. I know who's going to be sitting down doing the policy, so it doesn't, I see it and I know it. It would be more like, Oh, mass deportation. Everybody, you know, even the students, the DACA students, everybody that here, I mean, it wouldn't be possible. And you and I know that it's not, it's not true.
So here she gets to a very crucial slogan of the Trump campaign, mass deportation now, which is a sign that you saw at the RNC quite a lot. And she says it just means deporting some criminals. How accurate is that where the Trump campaign is concerned? Well, I don't think it's very accurate if you take him at his word in terms of what he said publicly.
I mean, they're talking about deporting 15 million to 20 million people, which he [01:34:00] believes is the true number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. And it, and it has, it has echoes of, 1954, right? What happened? That's right. Well, it has echoes of 1954 when there was an operation called Operation Wetback that deported some 1.
3 million Mexicans from the United States. And now Stephen Miller and Trump together are calling for mass deportations that would be something like 10 times that, more than 10 million, 12 million deportations. I got this a lot from a lot of different people is that they think, first of all, that we are taking Trump's comments out of context, that what he really means is he's not talking about all Mexicans.
He's only talking about high risk, high threat criminals. And if you think about it, that's not all that different than what Obama was advocating to when he talked about like selective prosecution, he was going to go for the criminals. He wasn't going to prosecute the [01:35:00] people who'd been here for a long time and were just trying to make a better lives for themselves.
So when it gets down to it, I don't know that her vision of how this is going to work and Obama's are all that different, but she says that she has been in rooms with Donald Trump where he has talked to her about his views of immigration. And she knows that mass deportation is not in his heart. It's not what he means.
And she even brought out her phone. She had captured screenshots of old tweets that Donald Trump had sent that were in support of the dreamers. And she thinks that Donald Trump would still like to find a pathway for undocumented citizens, including dreamers. He would still like to fix things for them.
Well, it's striking. It's striking that she mentions the word diversity and inclusiveness as aspects of the Republican party. Those are usually Democratic Party buzzwords. And I almost wondered if she were, um, trolling you in a way, although she doesn't seem to have that kind of [01:36:00] personality. She means something different?
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's what all, you know, not only Latinos, but I saw many Asian American Trump supporters, many Black Trump supporters, Native American Trump supporters there. They really want to believe that because the Republican Party, um, Aligns with their values that it is a truly inclusive message.
And in fact, they will say that Democrats are the ones that like to kind of divide and conquer all Americans by appealing to particular ethnic groups by having messaging that appeals to, you know, divides up the electorate and, uh, sees us all as a compilation of various interest groups. So I think she thinks that her message, the Republican message is more kind of all encompassing and all American
What the Harris campaign is doing to earn the support of Latino voters - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 8-20-24
AMNA NAWAZ: there's been a little bit of a reset with Latino voters in just the last month.
And your own polling from Voto Latino shows that Kamala Harris has 60 percent support in polls.
That's up from Biden's [01:37:00] 47 percent in April.
There's another Equis poll that shows that Harris is up 19 points in battleground states, when Biden led by just five.
What are you attributing that shift to?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: One is, is that she has been cultivating a lot of young Latinos since her president -- she ascended into her vice presidency.
So people are very familiar with who she is.
The biggest challenge, though, is that they like her, but they want to get to know her better.
But the poll -- what was really fascinating to us, the poll was with GQR.
It was 2,000 Latino voters in key battleground states.
And the biggest takeaway was not only was Kamala leading among the Democrats, but she was taking away roughly 17 points away from Kennedy.
And believe it or not, she was also taking away from Trump.
He is now -- so if you -- a head-to-head today, Trump right now is at 29 percent versus, with Biden, he was at 38 percent.
GEOFF BENNETT: And it's the younger voters, the younger Latino voters that account for that?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Disproportionally, yes, [01:38:00] and Latino women.
GEOFF BENNETT: Wow.
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: So, to give you an idea, since he was -- since there was a changing of the guard, at Voto Latino, we had registered 36,000 individual voters.
As of today, we have registered over 100,000.
We're -- 65 percent of them are under the age of 25.
I have been doing this, Amna, for 20 -- Amna and Geoff, for 25 -- 20 years.
I have never seen anything like it.
AMNA NAWAZ: Well, she -- we should also note, she's at 60 percent in your latest poll, right?
But Biden in the last election was at 65 percent.
So she's still polling behind where he was.
Where is the gap?
Why are Dems having trouble shoring that up?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Because we haven't had the convention.
I will tell you... AMNA NAWAZ: This is going to be the difference maker?
Because, in August of 2020, Biden was at 50.
So we don't see the surge of enthusiasm until post-convention, after Labor Day, when all of a sudden Americans are going back to school, going really back to work, paying attention.
And for whatever reason, she has captured our imagination.
There is an opportunity for the Democrats to [01:39:00] cement states, even like Arizona, where Biden went by 10,000 registered voters.
Kamala Harris has the opportunity to capture the 163,000 Latino youth that have turned 18 since Biden was elected.
GEOFF BENNETT: There was a pretty significant ad buy we saw from the Harris campaign a couple of weeks ago that was focused on Latino voters.
And she really leaned into her personal story, talking about the fact that she is the daughter of immigrants and really trying to make inroads with that community based on her identity and personal story.
How resonant is that?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: When Biden -- joined the Biden campaign last time, she gave him a 15-point lift just on that story alone.
And because she was the mother -- she was the daughter of an immigrant single mother, it's really resonates.
What they're going to ask her next, though, is, what are you going to do differently than Biden did for us?
The biggest challenge Biden has had with the Latino community is communicating how he has changed their everyday.
They were [01:40:00] skeptical.
With her on top of the ticket now, they're very open to what is the possibility for an extended - - possibility with an extended four-year term.
AMNA NAWAZ: There has been this sort of long-term trend, though, weakening of enthusiasm among Latino voters, who we should underscore here are not a monolith, right?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Right.
AMNA NAWAZ: Yes.
But there has been really since Obama a weakening presidential election by election.
What do you attribute that to?
And what do you want to see from Harris and Walz that could possibly reverse that trend?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: So what we have found is that the way Latinos vote isn't that they're trending to the Republicans, is that they're not enthusiastic necessarily, so they stay home.
So what they want to be able to demonstrate is that not only is there a vision for the present, but also for the future.
The more that the Harris, the Harris/Walz campaign can talk about economy, small business, that she, yes, is for small business capitalism, because there's so many young Latinos and Latinos in general that are [01:41:00] entrepreneurs, that will penetrate in action, sound, letter, because the Republicans have been trying to pick people off and say, well, the Democrats are anti-business.
She says, no, I'm small business capitalist.
That will all of a sudden open up a whole different conversation.
GEOFF BENNETT: We should say the convention has gaveled into session, and we should apologize for talking through the national anthem, but this timing is sort of out of our control.
The Harris/Walz campaign has said that they see multiple paths to election through the blue-wall, but also through the Sun Belt states, Arizona, Nevada in large part because of the large number of Latino voters.
Are there other states where -- other states that might now be in play because of a similar population?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: I would say that there is an opportunity even in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but perhaps not for the top of the ticket, but in growing the electoral base.
You have the potential Senate pickup in a place like Texas because of the volume of young people that are anxious now to jump in the game, but there has to be a real strategic investment there.
AMNA NAWAZ: [01:42:00] There is, of course, the key issue of immigration that we know is really resonant, particularly with some majority Latino populations in border communities, where we saw many of them actually go for Trump in the last election.
How should this ticket message on this issue that has bedeviled the Biden/Harris administration?
MARIA TERESA KUMAR: Well, I think we saw it when the vice president went down to Central America and convinced business to go to the root of the problem and start creating investments.
The more that she couches what is happening at the border as a Western Hemispheric issue and that we need more people involved, not just government, but our Canadian friends, our Mexican friends, our Colombian friends, for example, and great business, then we could have a conversation with the American people of, how do you actually talk about the undocumented people that have been here for 20, 30 years?
What the president did in June, where he provided and granted authority to stay for spouses of undocumented immigrants goes a long way.
That was roughly two million family households that were impacted.[01:43:00]
There is now a narrative of, we have to fix the border, we have to be tough on it, but we do have pathways to safeguard the folks that are already here.
AMNA NAWAZ: Maria Teresa Kumar... GEOFF BENNETT:
‘¡Sí, se puede!’- Latino voter enthusiasm for Harris skyrockets over issues like housing - The ReidOut - Air Date 8-30-24
It is kind of one of the puzzles that this is the largest nonwhite group in America, full stop, more than black voters. But the voting turnout is really low. It's almost like half their voting strength. Why? Yeah. I mean, even looking at 2022 now, there was this real sentiment of disillusionment among a lot of Latinos, right?
There was a lot of skepticism towards president Biden and a lot of that had to do and was rooted in this idea that. But according to many, there were a lot of broken immigration promises. And then suddenly, in the last two weeks, I've started to hear the si se puede again. And that is once again this idea that perhaps what was missing, the yes we can, but the si se puede in Spanish is so intentional.
And it points to this idea that it wasn't that the Democratic Party was fractured. You know, it was [01:44:00] at what was missing was injecting the inspiration, you know, the hope and change that Barack Obama did. And it is working. Now you do see Latinos being mobilized. That's sort of the messaging standpoint. And then on the other flip side, it's Republicans.
The moment that this country turned into majority minority. Majority minority, no? The understanding that Latinos are at the heart of the multi ethnic coalition that is leading to that change. There is a concerted effort to stop that growth and all of that is also being fueled by this conspiracy theory that is overshadowing everything.
Which is this idea that non citizens Exactly. Great replacement theory in this idea that non citizens are voting and you put those things together And the thing about it is, and let me actually get Mike Madrid in here, because some of it is, is people believe, misunderstand the demographics of Latinos.
They assume that most, I remember a poll back in many, many years ago that showed that Americans believe that like 75 percent of Latinos are undocumented, which is [01:45:00] insane. It's literally like 80 percent are citizens, right? And, and, and so there is this misunderstanding of who this constituency are and assuming, well, they're all undocumented because they may speak Spanish at home.
And so can you give us the real numbers and the real stats on this constituency and also how different it is across the country? Cause it's regionally very different. Yeah, it's it's actually not as different as we think it is. What is happening? This latinization of America is an extraordinary demographic transformation.
That's what I try to explore in the book here. You actually mentioned a lot of it in your intro with this 7 percent growth over just the past decade. It's overwhelmingly US board. right? A lot of this is what is happening with this balancing between the two parties. It's there's a demographic explanation for it as much as there is a political explanation for it.
So I think you accurately pointed out this is the largest ethnic group in America at this point. Yes, our voter participation is lagging every other [01:46:00] racial and ethnic group. I believe that there are strong demographic reasons for that. The fact that we're so young, by the way, is one of the main reasons.
Younger voters have a less propensity, regardless of race or ethnicity, to vote. We're working on that. Uh, Maria Teresa's group specifically has been working to address that for many years successfully. It is happening. The trajectory is on the right path. There's a lot of people who argue that simply by aging into the, into the, um, And to the electorate, Latinos will start to grow into greater numbers.
But of course, with so many eligible citizen eligible folks, we want to make sure that there are people not only registered, but mobilized and showing up to demonstrate that strength. But again, there's a lot of, there's also this endemic poverty problem that we have to recognize, which is also a function of youth, poor people, it doesn't matter whether you're black in the deep south or white in Appalachia or Latino in East LA.
If you're poor and young, you don't vote. They don't vote. Fair return. We've got to look for those policy [01:47:00] explanations as much as looking for these political solutions because it's pretty widespread. It's pretty deep. There's over 70 years of census data telling us that a lot of this is demographic.
Absolutely. And MTK, you've been in votes. I want to bring you in here because you've been working on this project of Increasing that both strength because again, you know, I, we had a guy on, uh, you know, earlier this year who made a really great point that America sort of styles itself as like a quasi European country, but we're really much more a Latin American country.
Our history, our demographics, a lot of it is much more like Brazil, right? That it is like England. And, and, but we just don't, we try to fool ourselves into saying that's not the case, but it kind of is right. And so how do you break that, that cycle? Because part of it is age and part of it is that people aren't voting.
But how do you bring more Latino voters online? So I think it's all it's all intentional. I mean, you cited what happened in 2022. I'll tell you that from 2022 compared to the 2018 midterm election, Latino vote participation [01:48:00] down was 37 percent down 37%. But if you look at who turned out in 2022, it was people over the age of 40 years old, and it was disproportionately Latino voters.
Individuals that were Republican, because what the Republicans did was invest in older Latino voters for turnout. However, when it came down to young voters under the age of 40, turnout was abysmal 24%. And that was because the Democrats read the headline, internalized it and said, Oh my gosh, Latinos, maybe they are going, they're fleeing Republican.
So there was a major lack of investment. When it came to communicating to young Latinos that the issues that they cared about in 2022 were on the ballot, and I think what we're seeing now with Kamala Harris is that she's meeting voters where they are. I can tell you anecdotally just from our work since the moment she came on the ballot, we have registered over 110, 000 registered voters.
But the key is, is that 65 percent of them joy are under the age of 25. I've been doing this for a minute. [01:49:00] I have never seen that type of enthusiasm. But it's not just because of what she represents. It's to Mike Madryn's point is that she's talking about policy they care about. The number one issue for 18 to 29 year olds in this country who are Latino in North Carolina, in Georgia, in Texas, in Arizona, The number one issue is housing.
It's rent. And so when she came out with a policy just last week, meeting people where they are, talking to them about providing affordable rent, affordable mortgages, that all of a sudden perked their interest because like, wait a second, she's someone who identifies me as an immigrant, you know, a child of immigrant experiences, but at the same time understands that what's making me struggle is whether or not I can balance the budget to feed myself or make them or make my ends meet at the end of the month.
And that is transformational
I spent a week with Black Republicans - Mother Jones - Air Date 8-13-24
In talking to Black Republicans, I found that their most consistent ideological North Star was an emphasis on personal responsibility. For those I spoke to, there was a real [01:50:00] value for rigid individualism as opposed to collective progress and identity. Take Topher, for example. He's a Christian rapper, has millions of followers online, and believes, according to him, in an individualistic approach to progress.
And that's one reason why I'm pro Trump and I'm a conservative is because I truly believe in the individualistic approach to the problems that we see within the black community or in America. As a whole, and you can think about it, black Wall Street, Harlem, Renaissance, all that time we was doing great, but when the policies came in and started destroying the black community slowly and slowly.
Matter of fact, it was supposed to get rid of poverty or at least lessen it. But we have more poverty now than we had back then. I think you'll notice a theme of dissonance present in these interviews. On the one hand, for example, Topher endorses and individualistic approach to solving the problems we face as a community.
But on the other hand, he points to Black Wall Street or the Harlem Renaissance. Communities that I would consider on the Mount Rushmore of black collective power, and he points to them as times we should look back on with [01:51:00] admiration. The question is, which one is it? Is it rigid individualism where we get it out of the mud on our own?
Or is it about creating communities where we work together to build our collective resources? What's also interesting is that somehow for him, these communities no longer exist because of liberal or progressive. Policy decisions when the policies came in and started destroying the black community slowly and slowly.
Matter of fact, it was supposed to get rid of poverty or at least lessen it, but we have more poverty now than we had back then. I think it's worth pointing out that this more poverty now than back then line is verifiably false. It falls in line with a theme that people like Byron Donalds have advanced continuously throughout this election cycle.
The idea that we were better off in any way during the Jim Crow era. During Jim Crow. The black family was together during Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative, because black people always have been conservative minded, but more black people voted [01:52:00] conservatively. It's worth noting that the black poverty rate Has been falling ever since black people started receiving civil rights protections.
It's almost as if these progressive policies worked. Now, you mentioned Black Wall Street, brother, and I want to be very real with you. Yeah. Black Wall Street was Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood District, where black people built their own community. Right. Had their own self sustained community. Beautiful economy making it for themselves and white people destroyed it.
Yeah, it wasn't policy. It was white people Well white people it was no. No, no, let's be very let's be very clear. It was white people. Let's be but let's no No, no, it was those white people. It was white people in that community. Absolutely And you know, let me just say this Elaine, Arkansas, Rosewood in Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, Sweet Auburn District, North Nashville in Nashville, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Each one of these communities were booming black economies where white people, not in the same place, but it was, it was the same group of people every time destroyed those communities. So you can't say it's policy when these booming, when [01:53:00] black people do what they need to do and build for themselves and white people destroy it.
So why is it that you would frame it as a policy thing? I didn't, I didn't frame it as a policy thing. We can rewind it, but you said it was white people. You meant something. I said it wasn't white people, it was those white people. And the reason why I'm saying that is because now we're trying to categorize all white people as evil.
No. And what I'm trying to say is back then, because a lot of people don't know this, I'm gonna put this on record. Black Wall Street, we built themselves out of that. Four years after that, Black Wall Street, we built everything they had and they paid for it. Process for the next 40 years until policy came in and destroyed it because they decided to build a freeway over the town and that destroyed.
So what I'm saying is if we look at policy and, and the cultural essence of most things, right? It's not just policy, it's culture. I was trying to draw a distinction between the nature of progressive policy, like. The Civil Rights Act or Supreme Court decisions to overturn segregation and white supremacist policy like destroying black communities.
But the subject kept changing. Lucky for you. I actually made a video about [01:54:00] Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood district was definitely white racism that destroyed black Wall Street and other black communities through explicitly racist acts of state sanctioned violence. This is why an accurate full telling of history is so important.
Black oppression and black. Progress have always had a collective quality to the black people have been throughout American history targeted As a group from slavery to black codes to Jim Crow to mass incarceration to anti inclusion efforts today. But we've also made progress by harnessing the power of collective action during reconstruction and the civil rights movement.
And even today, during the black owned business boom, LBJ, that's why you say we have the Negroes voting Democrat for the next 200 years, but all those policies have not done what they promised. Would you agree? I would not agree. So you think we're better off as black people now than we were before LBJ passed those policies?
Yes, brother. We, we can vote without the threat of violence. Are you [01:55:00] talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Is that what you're describing as, as, as a negative thing? I'm not saying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was, I'm talking about That's LBJ, I just want to be clear. That's LBJ who you said, were we better off before LBJ?
LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I'm talking about the War on Poverty. I just want to answer that one. I want to answer that specific one first. Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a bad thing? I agree with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thank you. But at the same time, I'm also I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
I don't know what that means. Explain more. What it means is I would rather, given the fact that even back then we still had our families together, communities were stronger back then, I would rather deal with the dangerous freedom of not knowing and controlling people with policies as much as possible, versus the peaceful slavery of being married and tied to the government.
Um, given Trump's well documented history of saying and doing racist things, I wanted to know how these black people could be drawn into Trump's political orbit. So I talked to Pastor Lorenzo Sewell. Yeah, so [01:56:00] anyone that wants to come to church, they're able to come. So when President Trump called, I thought about it like you calling me and saying, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who has 34 felonies.
Hey, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who is a womanizer. Hey, Pastor, I want to invite a friend to church who could be a racist. He's the lead pastor at a black church in Detroit that Trump visited earlier this year. And he was also a featured speaker at the RNC. To all my friends back in Detroit who are Democrats, I want to ask you just one simple question.
You can't deny the power of God on this man's life. You can't deny that God protected him. Could it be that Jesus Christ preserved him for such a time as this? Could it be?
Why should black people support the Republican ticket and Donald Trump specifically? That's a good question. You know, what I would say to any black person is this, specifically about the Republican platform. I would say, look, do your research, right? I would say, look [01:57:00] back. 270 years ago in this state, where a group of patriots stood up and they started that grand old party to stop the expansion of slavery.
If a black person said, well, Pastor, Donald Trump is racist, the Republican Party is racist. Well, let's play that theme out throughout history. Let's look at who was the party of slavery. Who was the party of Jim Crow, right? Who's the party of, um, you know, the slave codes? Well, well, you know, Those are Democrats.
Let's have that conversation. And when you look at when the Senate was integrated, those were black Republicans. When we look at Frederick Douglass, black Republican. So that's on the political side. Why believe that a black American should be willing to look at the Republican platform in terms of my convict my political conventions as a pastor, my conviction in my heart.
A black woman's womb is the most dangerous place for a black child to be. So, if a black American, specifically a [01:58:00] black woman, my conversation would be, give our black babies a chance. Look at the Republican Party in terms of President Donald J. Trump. This is what I would say. Don't look at the container, look at the content.
Right? Don't look at the man, look at the mission. Right? Don't look at his past. Look at what your agenda is for your community in the future. Conservatives are leading the charge to remove protections for voting rights, protections for maternal mortality, um, interventions in California, affirmative action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These are all issues that pertain directly to the people that I know that you serve as your community. Why should they support the party behind the hindrance, the advancement of the very things that I know you stand for? Sure. Black people that I know, that I represent, that I've had these conversations with, they don't want to be put in a position because they're black.
There's not one black person I know that, that will say to me, Lorenzo, I deserve this [01:59:00] position because I'm black. But, but, but I want to, you, you, you know that that's not what DEI is. DEI is about fair, fair hiring practices, opening up opportunity, like creating pathways, like. But you're smart. You're, you're an intelligent man.
And those that would say this, I believe they're very intelligent. It costs more money not to hire the person who's the best than to be racist. It actually costs more money. So if you're the best at what you do, right. And I, let's just say I'm a racist. So I'm, let's just say that let's play that out. Right.
And let's just say, Hey, there are 20 white guys that are not as competent as you, but I'm not going to pick you. Because you're black. It's going to cost me more money. They don't even know that this qualified person exists, right? Sure, I hear you. The pathways are the problem. And a lot of what diversity, equity, and inclusion is doing is creating those and helping to clarify those pathways.
And so framing it as an unqualified person getting the job when we know, you and I both know, that there are [02:00:00] plenty of qualified black people or Latino people or women who don't end up with jobs. 100%. 100%. And I agree with you. I do think relationships and proximity matter. In his book, The Grift, Clay Cain details the history of how Black conservatives have thrown Black people under the bus to get ahead personally.
From Black Republicans like Isaiah Montgomery and Booker T. Washington, to modern Black Republicans like Clarence Thomas. Clay Cain makes the case that the modern Black Republican is likely, if not assuredly, a grifter. A person who is doing that which is politically. Expedient rather than doing what is right, doing whatever they need to do to get that all expenses paid trip to fancy places.
I couldn't help but wonder if some of the folks I was talking to fit that description
SECTION C - WHITE AND RURAL VOTERS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section C: White and rural voters.
Keith Boykin on Why White Voters Stick with Trump - Miss Jones Inc - Air Date 8-30-24
The overwhelming majority of black people. are not going to vote for Donald Trump. They're definitely 90 [02:01:00] percent of black people are not going to vote for Donald Trump. Uh, and, and the real issue, I think we should be asking, instead of pointing the finger at black people, why aren't we doing this or that we should be pointing the finger at white people.
Why is it that the majority of white people plan to vote for Donald Trump? Why is it that the majority of white people voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and they didn't vote for Barack Obama in any of his elections? Why is it the majority of white people voted for Donald Trump again in 2020 after all the chaos he created?
Well, what I say is why do birds suddenly appear? What? Because the thing is is like why the rainbows? Why is water wet? Like you understand what I'm saying? Like they Why does everything have to be about race? It's exactly right. Why, why, why? It's, it's, it's like white people are invested in protecting whiteness.
And that, and that's the thing we need to be focused on. Everybody's, everybody's focused on Joe Biden, not getting Muslim support or black support. Yeah, I get that. But you know what, the real [02:02:00] question we should be asking is why is it that white people continue to support Donald Trump? Why is it after, after being twice impeached, quadruple indicted, after having 91 charges against him, after six bankruptcies, after being convicted, after having his company convicted of fraud, after his, two of, three of his lawyers have been, have been convicted, after, Several of his top aides have been convicted after he's run a country for four years with chaos after everything he said about creating a dictatorship, pulling out of NATO, not willing to support our allies.
After all of this stuff that white people Who've been lecturing black people and Brown people for years about what we should be doing and how we should be respectful of our country. And we should be electing serious leaders. Why is it the majority of white people still want to vote for this guy? And that's the real issue that America's facing.
It's not about black and Brown people, not showing up for Joe Biden. It's about white people, racist, white people showing up to support Donald Trump. That's the [02:03:00] problem that America's facing. At the end of the day, they're, they're literally still the majority that gets to decide which way this thing tilts.
Well, yes, and, and, and that's, and that's part of the problem because there has, there has, there's not all white people who feel this way, fortunately, because there has to be some critical mass of white people who don't. That's the reason why Barack Obama was able to get elected because even though he didn't win the white vote, he got enough white votes to be able to support him.
But Donald Trump won the white vote in both of his elections. Barack Obama lost the white vote in both of his elections. What does that say about white people in America? White people in America. I think that you keep asking very rhetorical questions. Because it's all about race. White people are invested in protecting racist white supremacist policies.
That's the reason why they are voting for Donald Trump. That's the reason why they voted for Donald Trump in the past. That is, ladies and gentlemen, that [02:04:00] is the answer. But the reality is we're going to all continue to be gaslit. That that is not what we're talking. That's not the situation. So when we talk about voting, it's always protected in this thing of a civil duty that we don't talk about because it's my right to vote and I, you know, I vote personally and you don't have to discuss it and blah, blah, blah.
Meanwhile, you're living next door. To a Trump supporter and don't even know it. And they're going to blame us and say, well, black people, we only voted 85 percent for Biden instead of 88%. You know what, that's, that's, what the hell, that's how a lot of people are voting for him. But they're not, they're not, they're not pointing the finger at white people who are voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
That is, that is, that is some twisted logic to make us to blame. We are the ones that have to rescue the country from white people who are ruining the country by supporting Donald Trump
How can Democrats win back rural voters? - The 21st Show - Air Date 8-22-24
A highlight. If you want to stay focused on rural America for a moment is Tim walls.
[02:05:00] A little background on my relationship with him. I was first elected to Congress in 2012. I live in Moline, Illinois. The district I represented was until last until a year ago. January included the Quad Cities, the only Quad Cities, Peoria and Rockford, but any in between there, 85 percent of the towns had 5000 people or fewer living in them.
And 60 percent have a 1000 people or fewer living in them. So a very rural district. So I'm elected in 2012. and at the time leader Pelosi had this mentor program where she would look at sitting members of Congress who had similar politics. Or similar districts to the new brand new members coming in. So she assigned Tim walls to me.
And so we started our relationship in 2012 before I was even sworn in in January of 2013 as my mentor in Congress. And so his district, as I [02:06:00] just described the 1 in Illinois that I represented, his district was similar. We have in the 17th congressional district that I serve, we have close to 10, 000 family farms.
He has family farms throughout the district he represented and obviously throughout the state of Minnesota that he served is serving as governor and a lot of manufacturing, not as many college educated voters as many other congressional districts. And so, um, when you saw the video about him leading into it, talked about him growing up on a, on a farm, um, signing up for the military right after he turned 17 and Glenn, you know, this as well, but, um, the military is represented in larger numbers percentage wise by people from rural America than urban America.
And so I think that people all over America could watch that and listen to Tim Walz's speech last night and say, you know what, I get this guy and I think he's going to get people like me. Well, Glenn Bouchard, same question to you and take it where you will. What do [02:07:00] you think about how the Democratic National Convention has been going so far, I guess, in terms of appealing to those rural voters?
Brian, I think this is my convention that I've attended over the years. And this is by far the best organized enthousiastic crowd that I've ever been to. Uh, the people are enthused, particularly the young people. There's a lot of young people here as delegates. And so I'm, I'm very pleased with the way things have turned around.
Uh, I think it's good that we've applauded the courage of President Biden. And, uh, giving up the presidency so that, uh, he could make way for Kamala Harris, who I think is very intelligent, very articulate, uh, is going to make a great president of this country. And I think she's going to get elected. And I think everybody at this convention thinks we got a great shot at this.
Let me, let's, let's now dive into then some of the, [02:08:00] uh, the issues that, that have, or what has changed, I guess, in, in rural and downstate Illinois in the past decades, Sherry Bustos, you are one of a relatively small number of legislators in both parties who won a congressional district that the other party's presidential candidate had won.
You were a Democrat elected in the Trump majority district. How did that inform your approach to politics? Well, in Brian, if I can offer a little more perspective to on the congressional district that I represented, um, it was 1 of the biggest swings in the entire country from Obama to Trump at congressional district.
The 1 I just described that goes. Up to the Wisconsin state line, the Mississippi River on the Western border of the congressional district, and then goes into central Illinois into Peoria. 711, 000 people I already described. It's very agricultural John Deere's world headquarters is in Illinois. So we do have a lot of manufacturing that supports that [02:09:00] caterpillars world headquarters had been in Peoria.
Um, we have a major UAW plant right outside of the district in Belvedere, Illinois. So many of the people in the Rockford area work there. So that's a that's a description, but it swung 17 points. From when Barack Obama won in his 2nd reelect. So, in the 2012 election to then when Donald Trump won in 2016, it was a 17 point swing.
So, um, I could feel it on the ground and Glenn, you can talk a little bit about what you were seeing in more Southern Illinois. Um, I'm a downstater, but you are in southern Illinois, but but I can feel it on the ground. And interestingly, that election that Donald Trump 1, our congressional district that I represented, I want it by 20 points.
So, what that means is about 1 in every 5 voters. That went into the, the voting booth that on that election day, um, 1 [02:10:00] in 5 voted for Donald Trump and then went down ballot a little bit farther and voted for me. Um, and so what what did okay so back to your question. I mean, you, if you, if you're representing a district like this.
That is truly a swing district. Um, you bet you better not be extreme. And, um, because that is not what the, a swing district is looking for. Um, we can talk a little bit about what I think was what proved to be successful for me. Um, but, um, you know, I'm a moderate Democrat, but that's, that's how I, how I was raised.
I come from a long line of family farmers. And teachers, and, you know, we're just we're pretty regular middle class folks. Um, but, um, I, I'm a moderate and that my politics. I don't know if they're always in style. I would say if you fast forwarded to 2018, being a moderate Democrat probably wasn't exactly in style.
I think is. Maybe back in style now, [02:11:00] because I see us as the pragmatists, the, the folks who, while we can always shoot for major change, it is really, really difficult, uh, legislatively to, to have major change. So, I do believe in, in order to make changes that are necessary, sometimes that does have to happen incrementally.
And over
Crossing the Rural-Urban Divide (with Governor Tim Walz) - In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt - Air Date 1-11-23
Minnesota for people who aren't familiar with the state, like a lot of Midwestern states has a lot of democrats and a lot of republicans. That's right. It's got an urban urban center with a lot of, you Democrats, it's got a lot of rural communities with, with, that are with fair amount of Republicans.
You represented in the US congress, a very rural area with, of course, with some nice cities in it too. And, and, you know, you ran against someone who, uh, Scott Jensen, who is sort of out of MAGA central casting. That's right. Yet, The election wasn't, to be honest, it wasn't close and not only that, but you flip the Senate blue.
And for the first time in a decade, [02:12:00] you've got a full democratic governing coalition across the legislature and the governor's office. What happened? Tell us what this tells you about the state of the electorate . Yeah. It's a big deal. And Andy knows Minnesota well. And I think you're right. The one thing in there too, Andy, there is a big chunk of, you know, capital I independence, you know, Jesse Ventura's people, some of those are still there.
So right. Minnesota kind of represents that, that quintessential purple state out in the Midwest. You're right. I represented a district that when I won my last congressional race in 2016, Donald Trump won by 20 percent there. But I think it was the Minnesota, again, it's not, You know, Minnesota exceptionalism, but I think there was just a more grounded focus that the issues of the day coming out of a pandemic, the way we handled it, you know, that was the debate home to the Mayo Clinic, home to the, you know, the heart of the medical research and medical device industry.
And we had folks that were blatantly telling people this was a hoax and things like that. And as you said, you know, my opponent being a [02:13:00] medical doctor of all things and, and falling into that, I think that was. Well, you know, for what it's worth, my pro tip of the day was don't run on that. People were relatively happy.
We had pretty low death rates and things. And then I do think the, uh, the decision on row that came, um, it, there was an energized, you could feel it. You know, it's not, again, you, if you're counting on young voters to win for you, we've always been, all of us have been through this. It's hard to get them to the polls for different reasons.
They showed up this time and, and women again, we're speaking. And so I think what it was is there was a. Uh, basics about, you know what, we handled COVID the best we could. We're coming out of this thing pretty well, you know, focusing on that issue around on women's rights and reproductive rights. And then here in Minnesota, again, one of the things we're very proud of, and we rank very near the top on public education was a full frontal attack from the other side on, on the, just the whole concept of public education, that, that we should just quit funding them.
Right. That we should defund it and that we should go to vouchers for parents. So I think it was a [02:14:00] combination on this. You know, I, it's not the campaign that I would have run against me, um, if I was doing it. But I, I, I think in this, that both the mood out here. The general nature of, of the electorate, it did split on those things that you talked about, Andy, I run on one Minnesota and I, it breaks my heart to see our state so polarized, but you can take our state, just like you can the map of the United States.
And it's, you know, that red and blue as a geographer, there's been no bigger damage done to this country, but my, whoever put that on TV the first time showing these splotches of red and these splotches of blue, when we know that it is not that uniform, you know, right. The city of Rochester, Mankato in the middle, or sure.
So I think it was just voters knew they were there and then I do think it came to this that the candidates I, I think I got a pretty good draw on the candidate that I had, but I'd also like to think we did a pretty good job during covid we listened to experts. Um, we listened to the folks who cared and then I think we tackled head on a generational [02:15:00] reckoning on race after the murder of George Floyd.
So it was a, well, I'll tell you if, if, if you put a list of things together in a first term and thought that you were going to get reelected by a fairly comfortable. Well, margin, I would have bet against us. I think, yeah, that's a lot of challenges. I do want to go back to talk about some of the things that unite us because, because I think you make a really important point, you know, I think all of us are used to seeing elections where people have policy differences, you know, you're, you're used to running against people who you just adamantly disagree with from a policy standpoint, yet at some level.
It's okay because you know, they're being truthful with the public. That's right. What felt new and what feels like a new phenomenon is this cycle. You and a number of other, you know, national candidates for governor and for Congress were running against people who basically premised a lot of they're willing to premise a lot of their campaign on a lie.
That's right. Whether it's the lie of the 2020 election, whether it's just boldface, um, lying and telling [02:16:00] mistruths that worries a lot of us. I don't know how much it worries you. It was, it's, it's certainly confirming to see people like you who play it straight, whether the truth is good or whether the truth is bad, win against someone like that.
But how do you run against somebody who just is willing to invent their own playbook like that? Yeah, it was hard because I say this, I've run against really good people and I would have to say this. My, my first term for governor in 2018, I ran against a man who honorable, good guy, good father. I mean, lives up just, I think tells the truth every day, you know, kind of lives the life you'd like to see.
We just disagreed on tax policy, disagreed on some of those things, and we had a good spirited campaign on the issues. This one was just. You know, just wild out of nowhere, accusations, you know, I don't know if you followed it asking how you run against it. You have a good team around you to keep you from losing your mind on some of this because it was just, you know, I'm in a debate arguing that it wasn't COVID that killed [02:17:00] people.
It was the ventilators, you know, it was the vaccine and things. But I also was getting, I did 24 years in the military and someone who didn't do time, they came right at you that I somehow. Quit and deserted my people type of thing. You know, I don't know where it comes from. And now you're in the public who is predisposed for these massive attacks and massive lies.
We needed to be talking about how are we going to, in Minnesota and aging population,
And so what I said is how you run on this is, is my team did a great job of staying focused on the issues. What are we going to do to improve the lives of Minnesotans? I think, you know, the thing that my team and I remind myself is talking about the issues and talking about solving them and being as honest as you could with the public is That
Credits
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