Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Tim Scott Is Set to Join 2024 Race, Already Flush With Campaign Cash

      by

      The South Carolina senator will announce his campaign on Monday and then head to Iowa and New Hampshire.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will announce his candidacy for president on Monday and will enter the race with around $22 million cash on hand, making him one of the most serious competitors for the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, even as Mr. Scott has hovered around 2 percent in Republican primary polls.After announcing his campaign in his hometown, North Charleston, Mr. Scott will head to Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states of the Republican nominating contest. Mr. Scott’s campaign has reserved around $6 million in advertisements across television and radio in those states, according to an adviser with direct knowledge of Mr. Scott’s plans. The Scott campaign also plans to spend millions of dollars on digital ads that will target Iowa and New Hampshire voters and will run through the first Republican primary debate, scheduled to be held in August.Mr. Scott, the most influential elected Black conservative in America, has a compelling life story around which he is expected to build his campaign. He portrays his rise from poverty to become the first Black senator from South Carolina and the only Black Republican in the Senate as an embodiment of the American dream.Mr. Scott rarely criticizes Mr. Trump directly, but his message could not be more different from the former president’s. While Mr. Trump talks ominously of “retribution” — his promise to gut the civil service and law enforcement agencies that he pejoratively calls the “deep state” — Mr. Scott prefers the sunny language of Ronald Reagan.“Americans are losing one of the most inspirational truths we have, which is hope — hope that things can and will get better, hope that education and hard work can equal prosperity, hope that we remain a city on a hill, a shining example of what can be when free people decide to join hands in self-governance,” Mr. Scott said in a speech last year at the Reagan Library on the future of the Republican Party.“America stands at a crossroads,” he said, “with the potential for a great resetting, a renewal, even a rebirth — where we get to choose how we will meet the potential of today and the promise of tomorrow.”There is little evidence, so far, that Mr. Scott’s message strikes a chord with the populist base of the modern G.O.P., which for the last several years has been led by a former TV star who likes to fight. For years, the Republican base has fed on apocalyptic talk that often casts Democrats as enemies bent on destroying America. In a party dominated by Mr. Trump’s message of “American carnage,” Mr. Scott’s talk of the importance of “unity,” “hope” and “redemption” can sound like a message from another time.Mr. Scott’s campaign will have to balance his inherently optimistic message against the brutal realities of Republican primary politics.“We will be authentic to Mr. Scott’s optimistic vision, but we’re also not in any way afraid to draw contrasts where we need to,” said the adviser with knowledge of Mr. Scott’s plans.Mr. Scott will have more than enough money to find out if there’s a bigger market for his ideas than the polls suggest. His support for pro-business policies has made him a favorite of the Republican donor class, and he has billionaires like the Oracle founder Larry Ellison — who was aligned with Mr. Trump while he was in the White House — who are willing to put millions of dollars behind his campaign. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      After Historic Primary in Philadelphia, a New Mayor Will Face Old Problems

      by

      Cherelle Parker’s win in the Democratic primary is a sign of how the city has changed. But Philadelphia’s challenges remain deep and daunting.PHILADELPHIA — The afternoon before Election Day, Jennifer Robinson, 41, was trying to manage her two small children in the quiet corner of a public library in a pocket of her city that had endured generations of abandonment. She was despondent about the state of Philadelphia, most of all about the crime, but she talked about the mayoral primary as if it had little bearing on any of it.“Nobody has any answers,” Ms. Robinson said, shifting her restless 11-month-old from arm to arm. “It’s a feeling of hopelessness.”This is the city that Cherelle Parker will be leading as mayor if she wins the general election in November, and these are the sentiments she will be trying to turn around. On Tuesday, Ms. Parker, a former state legislator and City Council member, secured a surprisingly decisive victory in a Democratic primary that had been seen as a tight five-way race up until Election Day.The huge number of undecideds in the last polls appear to have broken heavily for Ms. Parker, 50, the only Black candidate of the five main contenders hoping to lead a city where Black people make up more than 40 percent of the population and where the Black neighborhoods have been especially hard hit by gun violence and Covid.If she wins the general election, which she is favored to do given that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Philadelphia more than seven to one, Ms. Parker will be the first woman in a line of 100 mayors.That list of men goes back centuries, before the city had established itself as the cradle of American independence, and long before President Biden came to Independence Hall last September to warn the nation about threats to democracy.For Philadelphia, Ms. Parker’s primary victory is a sign of how the city has changed in just the last half-century. For most of the 1970s, the mayor was Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner who embraced brutal police tactics, particularly toward Black Philadelphians. But the city’s challenges remain deep and daunting.At least a half dozen Philadelphia public schools have been shut down because of asbestos contamination, a predictable debacle in a city where the average age of public school buildings is over 70 years. Housing costs are out of the reach for many residents. There is a city staffing shortage, with thousands of municipal positions unfilled. Hundreds of Philadelphians have died in recent years from opioid overdoses.Jennifer Robinson has become increasingly frustrated with local politicians over the last few years and doubts that any candidates for mayor can make a difference.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesLooming over all of this are the killings. Rates of gun violence have risen in cities large and small across the country, but they have been particularly severe in Philadelphia, a city of 1.6 million, nearly a quarter of whom live in poverty. More than 500 people were killed in each of the past two years, the highest annual tolls for the city on record, and many hundreds more have been injured by gunfire. The number of shootings and homicides has declined this year, but the city is awash in guns; Republican legislators have tried to remove the district attorney over the enforcement of gun laws, while city officials have sued Republican legislators for limiting their ability to enact stricter ones.Philadelphians are virtually unanimous in their alarm about the violence but have been less unified about the solutions. Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney who has insisted that the city cannot simply arrest its way out of the crisis, was re-elected by an overwhelming margin in 2021, with some of his strongest showings in the neighborhoods most scarred by violence.On Tuesday, many of those same neighborhoods voted for Ms. Parker, who pledged to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk.“People are not feeling safe, they’re feeling that a sense of lawlessness is being allowed to prevail,” she said in an interview shortly before she launched her mayoral campaign. “We can’t ignore that.”These proposals have faced strong pushback and skepticism about the ability to hire hundreds of officers at a time when police departments nationwide have struggled with recruiting.Her Republican opponent in the November general election is David Oh, also a former City Council member.Ms. Parker hugged supporters at a polling site during the primary election on Tuesday.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary, Ms. Parker’s pitch to voters was that she understood firsthand what their lives were like, as a Philadelphia native, as a Black woman who was the daughter of a teenage mother and as the mother of a Black son.This appeal has created lofty hopes among Black voters, said Carl Day, a pastor who leads the Culture Changing Christians Worship Center in one of the poorest and most violent areas of the city. “The expectation is definitely there from the Black community that she knows what we’re going through and so she will definitely bring about change,” he said.Still, he said, these hopes appeared to be mostly held by older Black voters, who were also more likely to embrace Parker’s agenda, including her push for more policing.Younger Black Philadelphians, Pastor Day said, were more skeptical of Ms. Parker and even worried about some of her policing plans. Already, Pastor Day said, he had seen younger people online wondering what this means, and saying that nothing was going to change. There is a seeming contradiction here: that a city deeply unhappy with the way things are going just voted for a candidate who was endorsed by dozens of sitting lawmakers, City Council members and ward leaders — even the current mayor, Jim Kenney, a term-limited Democrat who has become highly unpopular, said he voted for her.Isaiah Thomas, who won an at-large City Council seat on Tuesday, said that even with that support, it was not fair to call her the establishment candidate — most of her opponents had their own networks of connections. But he said the breadth of her support, including trade unions and lawmakers, showed that she knew how to build, and maintain, coalitions.“She’s a worker,” said Mr. Thomas, who joined the Council in 2020 and worked alongside Ms. Parker managing its response to the crises of the last three years. “She understands government, she understands the budget.”Carl Day, a pastor, said older Black voters were more likely than younger Black voters to embrace Parker’s agenda, including her push for more policing.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn state government, any Democratic mayor would find a more willing partner than his or her immediate predecessors. Last November, Democrats won control of the Pennsylvania House for the first time in a dozen years, a majority that was reconfirmed after a special election on Tuesday night. The current House Speaker, Joanna McClinton, represents part of Philadelphia, as does the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The new governor, Josh Shapiro, and the majority of the Democratic caucus in the State Senate are from the region.“There’s reason to be more optimistic about Harrisburg’s relationship with Philadelphia than there has been in many years,” said State Senator Nikil Saval, a Democrat, who endorsed one of Ms. Parker’s opponents in the race but praised some of her accomplishments on the City Council, such as a program she helped create that offered low-interest loans to homeowners.Still, in interviews in Philadelphia this week, voters and local politicians alike said that the most urgent task of the new mayor would be to give the city a jolt of optimism. For many in the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, that might start with the attention of someone who has seen up close their daily struggles. But, people insisted, hope would stick only if there were tangible results.“I haven’t seen anyone help; it’s just getting worse,” said Ms. Robinson, the mother in the library. “For me to vote for someone, I’d have to see difference.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court to Consider South Carolina Voting Map Ruled a Racial Gerrymander

      by

      A unanimous three-judge panel found that a congressional voting district anchored in Charleston, S.C., violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a congressional voting district in South Carolina should be restored after a lower court struck it down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in January that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”The new House map moved 62 percent of Black voters in Charleston County from the First District to the Sixth District, a seat that Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 30 years.The move helped make the new First District a Republican stronghold. In November, Nancy Mace, the Republican incumbent, won re-election by 14 percentage points.Republican lawmakers acknowledged that they had redrawn the First District for partisan gain. But they said they had not considered race in the process.The panel ruled that the district’s boundaries must be redrawn before future elections are held. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House voting districts, saying that civil rights groups had failed to demonstrate that the districts had been predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power.The Supreme Court has called for very close scrutiny of a state’s actions when race was shown to be the predominant reason in drawing legislative districts. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of districts that empower minority voters.In the new case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., No. 22-807, the challenge came from the opposite direction, saying that the map hurt Black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to allow a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers in Alabama. A lower court had said the map diluted the power of Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act. The South Carolina case poses different questions, centered on the Constitution’s equal protection principles.In their Supreme Court appeal, South Carolina Republicans argued that the panel should have presumed that they had acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the district as a whole.“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, quoting from an earlier decision, “is a thinly reasoned order that presumes bad faith, erroneously equates the purported racial effect of a single line in Charleston County with racial predominance across District 1, and is riddled with ‘legal mistakes’ that improperly relieved plaintiffs of their ‘demanding’ burden to prove that race was the ‘predominant consideration.’”The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the justices that “the panel correctly found that race was the gerrymander’s primary vehicle.”“That predominant reliance on race is impermissible even if mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics,” the challengers’ brief said. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      In Howard Address, Biden Warns of ‘Sinister Forces’ Trying to Reverse Racial Progress

      by

      The president’s commencement address at Howard University, a historically Black institution, came as Democratic strategists have expressed concerns about muted enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters.President Biden called white supremacy “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to the United States during his commencement speech at Howard University.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesPresident Biden declared on Saturday that white supremacy is “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland” and warned a predominantly Black audience that “sinister forces” embraced by his predecessor and putative challenger are trying to reverse generations of racial progress in America.Mr. Biden never named former President Donald J. Trump in his sometimes stark commencement address to the graduating class of Howard University, the nation’s most prestigious historically Black college. He alluded, however, to Mr. Trump’s past statements to link him to racist elements in American society and suggest that the presidential campaign that has just gotten underway will determine whether justice will prevail over hate, fear and violence.“There are those who demonize and pit people against one another,” Mr. Biden said. “And there are those who will do anything and everything, no matter how desperate or immoral, to hold onto power. That’s never going to be an easy battle. But I know this — the oldest, most sinister forces may believe they’ll determine America’s future. But they are wrong. We will determine America’s future. You will determine America’s future.”Wearing blue and white academic robes, the president sought to enlist the young graduates in what he presented as the cause of this moment. He cited the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, which touched off widespread protests against police brutality, and expressed empathy with Black drivers who are fearful when they are pulled over by officers.“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” he said. “That’s because hate never goes away. I thought when I graduated that we could defeat hate. But it never goes away.”Likewise, Mr. Biden said that “after the election and re-election of the first Black American president, I had hoped the fear and violence and hate was significantly losing ground.”He discovered otherwise, he said, when neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, and he recounted Mr. Trump’s reaction. “What did you hear?” he asked. “That famous quote: ‘There are very fine people on both sides.’ That’s when I knew, and I’m not joking, that’s when I knew I had to stay engaged and get back into public life.”Mr. Trump’s supporters have said his line has been distorted and note that he did at one point condemn neo-Nazis. But as he has opened a campaign to recapture the presidency, Mr. Trump has more openly embraced racist and extremist elements in American life. Last winter, he hosted for dinner the rap artist Ye, who has made antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist who attended the far-right Charlottesville rally.The choice of Howard offered Mr. Biden an opportunity to shore up support in the most loyal constituency in the Democratic Party, one that he needs to win re-election next year. While polls show continued strong support for Mr. Biden among Black voters, political analysts and party strategists have expressed concern about an enthusiasm gap that could complicate prospects for the president, who needs high turnout from his base.Mr. Biden has been stymied on goals like cracking down on police brutality and bolstering voting rights. He did sign an executive order on federal law enforcement last year, although crucial pieces of the order have not been implemented. Many supporters say he has fallen short on his pledge to make systemic changes to the criminal justice system.But he chose Kamala Harris (a Howard graduate) as the first Black vice president; appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson; and has put more Black women on the federal bench than every other president combined. Unemployment among Black Americans fell to a record low of 4.7 percent in April, and the gap between white and Black jobless rates shrank to its smallest ever measured.Of particular interest to his audience on Saturday, Mr. Biden has developed a program to forgive $400 billion in student loans over the next few decades, wiping out up to $20,000 apiece for those who qualify. But the Supreme Court appears poised to invalidate it.Mr. Biden won 92 percent of Black voters in 2020, but only 58 percent said they approved of his performance in the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. A May survey by The Economist and YouGov put his approval among Black adults at 71 percent, but only 46 percent wanted him to run again.Mr. Biden found a friendly but not exactly exuberant crowd on Saturday. Graduating seniors and their families filled much of Capital One Arena, the home of the Washington Capitals and Wizards, and greeted him warmly, although a dozen stood in protest, some holding signs about issues like military research. The ambivalence among students and graduates was evident in interviews on campus before the ceremony.“He’s a pretty good person,” Mariah Davis, 19, a mechanical engineering major, said of Mr. Biden. “He’s just really trying to advocate for a lot of groups of people who are unheard.”But some students said they were not sure they could connect with him. “We feel a little strange about him coming to commencement because obviously he can teach us things about values, but what is he going to say that hasn’t been said before?” said Alisa Drake, 19, a sophomore. “What can Biden say to us as Black students going out into the work force?”If the choice next year was between Mr. Biden and a Republican, she said she would vote for Mr. Biden. But she was lukewarm about it. “I’m not really excited,” she said. “I feel like there hasn’t been a candidate recently that has just caught my eye, that is just like, ‘Wow, they’re really about something and interested in helping my generation.’” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      As Biden Runs for Re-election, Black Voters’ Frustration Bubbles

      by

      In interviews, Black voters, organizers and elected officials pointed to what some saw as unkept promises — raising questions about the enthusiasm of Democrats’ most loyal voters.President Biden began his re-election campaign this week vowing to “finish the job” he started in 2021. No one wants him to do that more than Black voters.Long the most loyal Democratic constituency, Black voters resurrected Mr. Biden’s struggling presidential campaign in South Carolina and sent him to the White House with his party in control of the Senate after two runoff victories in Georgia. In return, they hoped the administration would go beyond past presidents in trying to improve their communities — and they listened closely to his promises to do so.Yet some of Black voters’ biggest policy priorities — stronger federal protections against restrictive voting laws, student loan debt relief and criminal justice and police accountability measures — have failed or stalled, some because of Republican opposition and some because Democrats have declined to bypass the Senate’s filibuster rules. Those disappointments, highlighted in interviews with more than three dozen Black voters, organizers and elected officials in recent weeks, leave open the question of just how enthusiastic Democrats’ most important group of voters will be in 2024.The interviews point to an emerging split between Black elected officials — who are nearly uniform in praising Mr. Biden and predicting robust Black turnout for him next year — and voters, who are less sure.“Folks are just tired of being tired,” said Travis Williams, a Democratic organizer in Dorchester County, S.C. “They’re just sick and tired of being tired and disappointed whenever our issues are never addressed.”Marvin Dutton, 38, an entrepreneur who moved to Atlanta in 2020 from Philadelphia, suggested that Mr. Biden needed to be “a little bit more sincere,” rather than “pandering to us when it’s time to vote.”Marvin Dutton, an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, criticized Mr. Biden for “pandering to us when it’s time to vote.”Piera Moore for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s re-election bid and his renewed pledge to achieve his first-term policy goals have forced some reflection and frustration among Black voters in battleground states. Many believe that the big promises he made to Black communities have fallen flat.Democrats can feel confident that if Mr. Biden is his party’s nominee, as expected, a vast majority of Black voters will choose him over a Republican. But the question for the party is whether Democratic voters will bring the same level of energy that led to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory.In his campaign announcement, Mr. Biden made no secret of the importance of Black voters to his re-election. The Biden allies with the most airtime in his three-minute video, aside from his wife, were Vice President Kamala Harris, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton.“I have not found a lack of enthusiasm,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, who was Mr. Biden’s most important Black surrogate in 2020. “I just haven’t found it. And people keep saying it. But it’s not there.”On Friday, Mr. Clyburn’s annual fish fry, which brings together candidates and hundreds of South Carolina Democrats, offered an early look at that enthusiasm. The state party is preparing to hold its presidential primary first in the nominating process — a move Mr. Biden and Democrats said was made to give Black voters more influence.Mr. Biden’s allies maintain that his administration has delivered for Black voters but that he has failed to trumpet some of his progress. Since taking office, he has provided billions of dollars for historically Black colleges and universities, and he has appointed more Black judges, including Justice Jackson, to the federal bench than any other president. Black unemployment is at a record low. The economy, a top concern for Black voters, has recovered from its pandemic doldrums, though inflation, which spiked last summer, remains higher on a sustained basis than it has been for decades.“The president and vice president have made issues Black Americans care most about a priority and are running to finish the job,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign. “The campaign will work hard to earn every vote and expand on its winning 2020 coalition.”But there is evidence of a drop-off in Black voter engagement during the 2022 midterm election, although the results were broadly seen as heartening for Mr. Biden and his party, despite Republicans winning the House.The share of Black voters in the electorate dropped by 1 percent nationally from 2018 to 2022, the biggest drop of any racial group measured, while the share of white, college-educated voters increased, according to data from HIT Strategies, a Democratic polling firm.Representative Jim Clyburn, who helped President Biden win the state primary in 2020, addressed South Carolina Democrats gathered for his annual fish fry event during the state part convention weekend. Travis Dove for The New York TimesIt does not take much of a decrease in Black voters to alter the outcome of elections in the most competitive states. In 2020, Mr. Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, each by fewer than 35,000 votes.The number of ballots cast for Democratic Senate candidates by voters in Milwaukee — home to a large majority of Wisconsin’s Black population — dropped by 18 percent from 2018 to 2022, while the statewide turnout remained the same, according to Wisconsin voter data. Had Milwaukee delivered the same margin for Democrats in 2022 that it did in 2018, Mandela Barnes, a Democrat, would have defeated Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican.The city’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, attributed the difference in part to Republican efforts in Wisconsin to make voting harder — particularly after Mr. Biden’s narrow victory there in 2020.Mr. Johnson cited an array of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments for Black voters: He appointed the first Black woman, Justice Jackson, to the Supreme Court. He has emphasized the creation of manufacturing jobs, which were once the heartbeat of Milwaukee but have been moved overseas. And, Mr. Johnson added, Black voters credit Mr. Biden for trying to make voting laws less restrictive, even if his efforts failed.“They know that Joe Biden stood in the breach and stood up for them and fought to build the economy that’s beneficial for people of color, namely African Americans, and also fought against some of the hate and discrimination against people of color and African Americans,” Mr. Johnson said.Some Black voters said in interviews that their frustrations with the pace of change promised by Mr. Biden in 2020 had led them to question whether they would support him again, or perhaps sit out the next election.Jennifer Roberts, 35, is a lifelong Democrat and was one of the Black Georgians who helped elect Mr. Biden and Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. She was confident in 2020 that Ms. Harris, the first woman of color to become vice president, would use her background to advance policies related to women of color, and “was praying for them to win.”Three years later, Ms. Roberts’s view of Mr. Biden’s promises has changed. Her mother moved in with her because of rising rent costs in Metro Atlanta. Inflation has put an added strain on the tow-truck business she and her husband own.Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat in Atlanta who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said she believed Mr. Trump’s economic policies could provide the “tangible help” she was looking for.Piera Moore for The New York TimesMs. Roberts now says she would support former President Donald J. Trump if he were the Republican nominee next year. What she wants, and has not yet received, is “tangible help” — and she believes Mr. Trump’s economic policies could possibly provide it.“I understand he’s tried,” she said of Mr. Biden. “When you don’t address the things directly, when they don’t go according to what you said publicly they were going to, you can’t just kind of sweep it under the rug.”In Philadelphia, Lamont Wilson, 45, an information technology manager, voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but said he was not inspired by any 2024 candidates so far. He said Mr. Biden had “done a lot of good” but had not fulfilled his expectations.Mr. Wilson said he hoped Mr. Biden would “hold firm” on his promise to eliminate student debt — the president announced a $400 billion plan to forgive up to $20,000 of debt for certain people, though the Supreme Court may block it. Black college graduates carry an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates, according to the Education Department.“Get rid of that debt and give people a chance,” Mr. Wilson said.Nocola Hemphill, an activist and state party delegate in Winnsboro, S.C., said she had also heard grumblings from Black voters about Mr. Biden. But she saw this as a form of accountability, not evidence of a deeper problem.“Everyone is not happy with the administration,” she said. “And it’s not that we don’t want to see Biden run. We just want to make sure that he’s going to deliver on his promises.”Younger, first-time Black voters such as Evan Spann, 19, a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta, are also hoping Mr. Biden will deliver. Mr. Spann said he wanted to hear concrete plans from Mr. Biden for his second term.Evan Spann, 19, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, wants to hear concrete plans from the president. Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times“I think what he needs to do is directly say what he’s going to do,” Mr. Spann said. “And then I think he needs to really show up and talk to us about it.”Mr. Biden’s proponents say that while some Black voters may be frustrated with the party, Democrats remain a safer choice than Republicans, who have opposed the legislation protecting voting rights and cutting student loan debt that Black lawmakers and voters have championed. In several G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures, lawmakers have sought to cut Black history lessons from school curriculums, outlaw books by Black authors and have drawn congressional maps that curb Black voting power.Democrats plan to underline the G.O.P.’s record on these issues.“Black voters understand all that,” Mr. Clyburn said. “And we’re going to spend a lot of time this year and next reminding them of who is doing this.” At the same time, Democrats must win over voters who are reluctant to support the party again.“It’s a difficult conversation to go back into those communities and explain why we didn’t get criminal justice reform,” said Kevin Harris, a former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus. “It’s a difficult conversation to go into those communities and talk about why we didn’t get the protections that we need with voting rights.”He continued: “That’s a hard conversation to have. But you still go have it.”Jon Hurdle More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      What Are Biden’s 2024 Chances? I Asked These Democratic Campaign Veterans.

      by

      On Monday, when the “Today” show’s Al Roker asked President Biden about seeking a second term, Biden replied, “I plan on running, Al, but we’re not prepared to announce it yet.”That answer strikes me as another in a series of soft launches and quasi-commitments meant to manage expectations, but the president and those around him have been signaling that he intends to seek re-election. When it comes, an official declaration will be just a formality, a campaign mechanism to concentrate attention and coverage.Biden is running now.And in anticipation of the inevitable, in recent weeks I talked to several political advisers who’ve run campaigns for Democratic presidents to get their assessments of Biden’s advantages and challenges.The list includes Timothy Kraft, who ran Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign in 1980 until just before the election, and Les Francis, who stepped in to run day-to-day operations in Kraft’s wake. It also includes James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s in 2008.I wasn’t interested in predictions, which are mostly worthless this far from Election Day. I wasn’t asking how the race would look at the end, but how it looked at the beginning.To start, there was general agreement that Biden’s policy record was strong: The economy, a mixed bag with low unemployment and high inflation, may be a net positive for Biden right now, but some said that how voters feel about it nearer the election is what will matter most. As Plouffe said, “People have one life, and they are living it right now.” It’s about how people feel about that life at the moment they vote, regardless of what the data say or the future holds.Most of these political pros agreed that Biden’s age will be a significant issue to overcome — one reason they’d prefer a rematch with Donald Trump rather than a contest against a younger, first-time Republican presidential candidate who’d be able to draw a more stark generational contrast. It’s unclear how the age issue will play out, but as Kraft put it, the Republicans “are going to do this ‘Sleepy Joe’ thing to the fare-thee-well.”The other reason Trump is the preferred opponent is that, as Francis observed, “he is damaged goods, and he’s going to be more damaged.” The consensus was that Trump’s legal problems will help him in the primaries but weaken him in the general. The consideration is simple: Among those who voted against Trump-created chaos in 2020, who would vote for Trump in 2024 after he’s sown even more chaos?Several of the consultants were conscious of, and concerned about, the country’s growing partisan divide and the dwindling pool of swing voters and swing districts — the shrinking number of minds to change and hearts to woo. An untold number of people in the United States “have probably never met anyone from the other party,” Carville said.He raised perhaps the most interesting concern, one I wasn’t expecting: “The biggest story in my mind out of 2022 is abysmally low Black turnout.” Specifically, he said, “it’s a problem with younger Black voters.”In the most recent midterm elections, even in places where Democrats fielded strong Black candidates against flawed Republican opponents, Carville considered Black turnout underwhelming. But he isn’t sure what’s causing this problem, or how to fix it.I talked to Terrance Woodbury, a founding partner at the consultancy HIT Strategies, which researches Black voter sentiment. A January survey found that three-quarters of Black voters don’t believe their lives have improved since Biden became president, despite his administration’s “initiating or completing” a majority of the Black agenda, Woodbury said.Woodbury underscored what can only be described as a glaring communications failure, particularly when it comes to young people. As he said, “It’s not that we haven’t made progress,” it’s that younger Black voters “don’t know about the progress.”Now, people can chafe at Woodbury’s characterization and criticize voters for not staying abreast of political news‌, but it’s not a winning strategy to place blam‌e on the voters you’re trying to court‌.Kraft echoed the concern, and said it went beyond outreach to Black voters: “The D.N.C. chairman should be on those Sunday talk shows or should have more guest columns, op-ed pieces, anything.”Carville is also worried about Republican weaponization of the term, and idea of, “wokeness.” If being woke “means that people, particularly Black people, should be aware of interactions they have with white power, it’s a totally legitimate word,” he said. “But if it means the triumph of identity over ideology, you lose me, and I think you lose a lot of people.”He went further in his attempt to insulate Biden from the concept, saying, “The most non-woke person is Joe Biden,” even as he’s “become the greatest president for Black America maybe we ever had.”I think that’s a stretch, and his framing could do more harm than good in trying to attract young Black voters, but it could work in attracting another demographic that Democrats are worried about: the non-college-educated. In fact, one of Carville’s central complaints about wokeness is his belief that it was appropriated by white intellectuals.This all bleeds into an issue Plouffe calls “the biggest question in American politics today”: whether Republicans continue to make gains with non-college-educated voters of color in an era in which the “education fault lines are much more severe than they were in 2008 or 2012,” with Democrats attracting more college graduates and Republicans strengthening their position among those who didn’t graduate.My takeaway from these conversations was that, at least at the beginning of his campaign, Biden has obvious advantages but also faces significant obstacles. Often, late in campaigns, Democratic candidates to try to use fear of the opponent as voter motivation. But that can backfire.As Woodbury told me, his firm saw a significant erosion in turnout and Democratic support in 2022 among Black men because they “do not respond to messages of fear and loss.” Instead, he said, “they need a message of what they have gained, not what they will gain.” They respond to a message of being empowered rather than being endangered.This messaging, which should already have been a more central part of Democrats’ overall pitch, has to start now.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Mel King, Whose Boston Mayoral Bid Eased Racial Tensions, Dies at 94

      by

      The first Black finalist for mayor of the city, he was credited, along with the eventual winner, Raymond Flynn, with running a respectful, calming campaign.Mel King, a Black community activist whose barrier-breaking campaign for mayor of Boston in 1983 helped ease racial tensions there that had been caused in part by court-ordered busing to desegregate public schools, died on March 28 at his home in Boston. He was 94.His wife, Joyce (Kenion) King, confirmed the death.In the decade before he ran for mayor, Mr. King had been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he led the passage of laws creating nonprofit agencies that helped finance and renovate substantial amounts of affordable housing,“He’s the father of affordable housing in Boston,” Lewis Finfer, a longtime community organizer in Boston who is director of Massachusetts Action for Justice, said by phone.During his mayoral campaign, Mr. King drew support from what he called a “Rainbow Coalition” — a core that included Black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive white supporters. That term was soon adopted and expanded nationally by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.Mr. King narrowly finished second to Raymond Flynn in a nonpartisan nine-candidate primary and was then soundly defeated by Mr. Flynn in the runoff general election.Still, Mr. King, the first Black mayoral finalist in the city’s history, received a strong 20 percent of the ballots cast by white voters. (Boston has never elected a Black mayor, but for several months in 2021 Kim Janey served as the acting mayor.)Mr. King and Mr. Flynn, both sons of longshoremen, ran an issues-oriented campaign that focused on working-class voters and reflected their long friendship, which began when they were teammates on a semipro basketball team.The campaign was free of rancor about their opposing positions on enforced school busing between predominantly white and predominantly Black sections of the city — Mr. King was for it, Mr. Flynn was against it. That issue had divided the city, sometimes with violence, since 1974, when a federal court ordered the measure as a remedy to racial segregation.“We set a civil tone, one of good will that changed the racial dynamic and toned it down,” Mr. Flynn said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t what people expected, but they were able to say if these two guys can do this for the city, we can do it as well.”Pat Walker, the field director of Mr. King’s campaign, said in an interview that “both campaigns kept the violence and ugliness from breaking out.”Mr. King himself told The Boston Globe a decade after his mayoral run: “What I believe people want more than anything else is a sense of a vision that’s inclusive and respectful and appreciative of who they are. What the Rainbow Coalition did was to put that right up front, because everybody could be a member.”Mr. King joined a singalong while running for mayor of Boston in 1983. He and his opponent, Raymond Flynn, ran a rancor-free campaign that focused on working-class voters and reflected their long friendship.John Blanding/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesMelvin Herbert King was born on Oct. 20, 1928, in Boston, one of 11 children. His father, Watts Richard King, who was from Barbados, was a union secretary in addition to working on the docks. His mother, Ursula (Earle) King, was from Guyana.Mr. King attended Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., a historically Black school, where he was captain of the football team. He had to adapt to the realities of living, even temporarily, in the Jim Crow South.“I stopped going to the theater where Black people had to sit upstairs and started patronizing the Black theater instead,” he wrote in his 1981 book, “Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development.” “I rode in the back of the bus once and it felt so crummy that from then on I hitchhiked.”He graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a year later received a master’s in education from Boston Teachers College (later Boston State College). He taught at two local high schools before becoming a social worker, first as director of boys’ activities at the Lincoln House settlement house and later as director of youth opportunities for United South End Settlements, a nonprofit social services agency that serves mostly low-income families and that had absorbed Lincoln House.When he was fired in 1967 over a policy dispute with the agency, local residents protested, saying that he had been helping them overcome poverty. An editorial in The Globe called him a “deeply respected leader” of the community.His profile in the city grew.In 1968, Mr. King led a successful demonstration by more than 1,000 people against a city plan to build a parking garage on the site of housing that had been demolished as part of an urban renewal project on the city’s South End; in 1988, a development of 269 mixed-income apartments opened at the site under the name Tent City, a nod to the tents that protesters had earlier pitched and occupied on the property.In 1989, Mr. King, who by then was executive director of the New Urban League, joined with other members of that group to disrupt an awards luncheon of the United Fund, a major local philanthropy, which had recently reduced its financial allocation to the league. Mr. King scooped half-eaten rolls and pieces of coconut pie into a laundry bag marked “Our Unfair Share — Black Crumbs,” held it over his head and dumped it on the head table.“We’ve been getting crumbs,” he said at the time. “We’re no longer going to accept crumbs.”In 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Boston, Mr. King led a march to express outrage over the shooting of a Black high school football player during a game. The player’s wounds left him a quadriplegic. Three white teenagers were charged.“This walk,” he said during the event, “is to indicate that the pope should not come here without helping his flock to overcome their racism and to get the leaders of this city involved in that kind of dialogue that will put an end to the racism in this city.”During his mayoral campaign, Mr. King took controversial positions. He told a mostly Jewish audience that he would welcome Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to Boston if he came peacefully. Given the choice between President Ronald Reagan and the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, he told a radio station, he would take Castro, because he had done more for the poor.Mr. King’s other work included teaching in the urban studies and planning department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 1996. There, he started a Community Fellows Program for leaders nationwide.In 1997, he created the South End Technology Center at Tent City, which offers community residents free or low-cost training in computer technology. He was its volunteer director.In addition to his wife, Mr. King’s survivors include his daughters, Pamela, Judith and Nancy King; his sons, Melvin Jr., Michael and Jomo; and his sister, Olga King. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Virginia Rolls Back Voting Rights for Ex-Felons, Bucking Shaky Bipartisan Trend

      by

      State after state has eased restrictions on voting for former felons in recent years. But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s reversal suggests growing wariness on the right.WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, states around the country have steadily chipped away at one of the biggest roadblocks to voting in the United States — laws on the books that bar former felons from casting a ballot.But there are now signs that trend could be reversing.Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican who took office a year ago, revealed that he had rescinded a policy of automatically restoring voting rights to residents who have completed felony sentences.In a February hearing, North Carolina’s Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, appeared deeply skeptical that a lower court had constitutional authority when it restored voting rights last year to people who had completed their sentences. A ruling is expected soon.And then there’s Florida — whose Republican-dominated Legislature effectively nullified a citizen ballot initiative granting voting rights to a huge number of former felons in 2020. That left all three states on a path toward rolling back state policies on restoring voting rights for former felons close to where they were 50 and even 100 years ago.Experts say that Virginia’s reversal, which does not affect people who have had their rights already restored, is unlikely to represent a dramatic change in the long-term trend among states toward loosening restrictions on voting by people with felony records. Such restrictions still deny the vote to some 4.6 million voting-age Americans — one in 50 potential voters. But that number is down nearly 25 percent since 2016.Last month, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, signed legislation expanding voting rights for former felons in the state, and the New Mexico State Legislature, also Democratic, enacted a law doing the same.What is clear, though, is that a shaky bipartisan consensus — that those who have paid their debts to society should be able to cast a ballot — has eroded, as political polarization has risen. The action by Mr. Youngkin is especially notable because it leaves Virginia as the only state in the nation that disenfranchises everyone who commits a felony. Under the State Constitution, a former felon’s rights can be restored only with the governor’s authorization.“We’d reached a point for the first time in recent memory, maybe ever, where there was not a single state in the country that disenfranchised everyone,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It is disappointing that on an issue in Virginia that had gotten support from both sides of the aisle, they do seem to be taking a step backwards.”The backtracking spotlights the often-overlooked significance — legally and also politically — of a practice that has likely had a far greater impact on access to the ballot than more notorious voter suppression measures have.Voting rights battles are usually fought over cogs in the election machinery — ID requirements, drop boxes, absentee ballots — that can make it easy or hard to vote, depending on how much sand is tossed into them. The extent to which those battles shrink or expand the pool of voters is often impossible to measure.Not so with restoring the vote to former felons: Minnesota’s new law gives about 56,000 people access to the ballot; the North Carolina court ruling last year made another 56,000 eligible. The law awaiting the signature of New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, would add another 11,000 to the list.The rollbacks, however, are significant. In 2020, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law that effectively negated a 2018 citizen ballot initiative that restored voting rights to perhaps 934,000 residents, according to the latest estimate. The law limits the vote only to former felons who pay all court costs, restitution and other fees, a yearslong task for many, made surpassingly difficult by the state’s jumbled record-keeping on court cases.That legislative change not only halted the nation’s largest rights-restoration effort but also led to the arrest — in what Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, billed as a crackdown on fraud — of 20 former felons who had registered or voted illegally — many, if not all, out of confusion over their eligibility.In Virginia, governors have used their constitutional powers to restore the vote to more than 300,000 former felons since Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, first made restoration automatic for some in 2013. Two Democratic governors, Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, expanded that policy to include anyone freed from prison.By the time Mr. Northam left office in January 2022, a huge backlog of people eligible for restoration had been wiped out, said Kelly Thomasson, the official who handled rights restoration during Mr. Northam’s tenure as governor, in an interview. She said that roughly 1,000 to 2,000 newly eligible felons were being released from prison each month.After succeeding Mr. Northam, Mr. Youngkin initially restored voting rights to nearly 3,500 people in just his first four months in office. But that pace slowed dramatically to just 800 others in the next five months.A spokeswoman for Mr. Youngkin, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement that the governor “firmly believes in the importance of second chances for Virginians who have made mistakes,” and that he judges individual cases based on the law and the “unique elements of each situation.”She did not respond to requests to explain why new grants dropped sharply, or whether Republican resistance to restoring voting played a role in that decline.Although a Republican state legislator had once led Minnesota’s effort to give the vote to former felons, the policy became law this year with only a handful of Republican votes. In 2020, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, used her executive power to implement an automatic restoration policy much like the one Virginia had in place before Mr. Youngkin changed it.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa reacts after signing an executive order granting former felons the right to vote in August 2020.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressBut Iowa, Virginia and Kentucky, another Republican state whose governors’ executive orders have loosened restrictive restoration policies temporarily, have been unable to win legislators’ support for amendments to state constitutions that would make those orders permanent.Some experts say that the resistance stems in part from the common but questionable belief among Republican partisans that allowing former felons to vote would boost Democratic turnout.Although an outsize share of those who complete felony sentences are members of minority groups that broadly tend to vote Democratic, most felons are white, and those with their demographic characteristics — below-average income and education, to name two — increasingly skew Republican.Disenfranchisement has complex legal roots, including the 14th Amendment, which, in addition to granting citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to formerly enslaved people, forbids withholding the right to vote “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.”In Virginia, there are also antecedents that reflect the state’s history of suppressing the African American vote. The policy on rights restoration that Mr. Youngkin revived is rooted in a 1902 Virginia constitutional convention in which keeping Black residents from voting was an overriding priority.Experts say the potentially fleeting nature of executive actions like those in Kentucky — where Gov. Andy Beshear now automatically restores voting rights to former felons who had committed nonviolent crimes — and in Virginia sows confusion about voting rights. Critics say that bestowing a basic civic privilege becomes subject to the political whim of whoever is governor.Virginians who complete their prison sentences this year may wonder why those who left prison in 2021 are more entitled to cast a ballot than they are, said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota sociologist and an expert on the disenfranchisement of former felons.“It harkens to an era when the king can give a thumbs up or thumbs down,” he said. “We wouldn’t necessarily accept this if it were happening in another area.”Kirsten Noyes More