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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injusticeIt was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.What I learned from my interview with Pamela Moses, imprisoned for a voting errorRead moreTo make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.In 2015, Moses pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.When Moses pled guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws have persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.Bar chart comparing felony voting disenfranchisement of Black Americans to all AmericansMoses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.Bar chart of the five states with the highest estimated rates of Black felony voter disenfranchisementThat uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknownst to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”‘It’s a scare tactic’: Pamela Moses, the Black woman jailed over voting error, speaks outRead moreMay responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pled guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.TimelineTimeline of Pamela Moses caseShowMarch 2014 After a felony conviction more than a decade earlier, Moses successfully has her right to vote restored.April 2015 Moses loses her voting rights again after she pleads guilty to several felonies, including tampering with evidence and perjury.July 2019 Moses is blocked from running for mayor of Memphis because of a prior felony conviction. A judge says she is still serving a probationary sentence from her 2015 conviction.August 2019 Shelby County Elections Commission tells Moses she is ineligible to vote and will be removed from voting rolls.September 2019 Probation office and local clerk fill out and approve a form saying Moses is eligible to vote. Election officials reject Moses’ request, telling her she is permanently banned from voting.November 2019 Moses is indicted for illegal registration and voting. She is arrested while traveling through customs at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. November 2021Moses is convicted of making false entries on an official registration or election document. January 2022 Moses is sentenced to six years in prison.February 2022 A judge orders a new trial for Moses, in part because of documents not turned over to her defense.April 2022 Prosecutors announce they are dropping charges against Moses.Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was okay with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.Harsh punishments for Black Americans over voting errors spark outcry | The fight to voteRead moreRemarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.In August, for instance, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”Brandon Dill contributed reporting from MemphisTopicsTennesseeThe fight for democracyLaw (US)US politicsUS prisonsUS voting rightsRaceMemphisfeaturesReuse this content More

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      In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history

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      In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history An absorbing pictorial history of a key component of the Black Power movement shows its relevance has not receded todayJeffrey Henson Scales is a New York Times photo editor. His latest book is most compelling in how it helps place the relentless quest for equal treatment in easily understood context. Beyond beauty or mere appealing images, In a Time of Panthers is a highly valuable work.Sisters of the revolution: the women of the Black Panther partyRead moreCharacterizing the Black Panther movement as “the vanguard of the African American civil rights struggle”, Henson Scales shows how it emerged. The movement became “focused on police violence and community needs in over-policed and under-served communities of color”. To Henson Scales, “So much in all of our lives would continue to change in ways unforeseen to me … so many of the issues that motivated us during these inspired years of activism in America remain unresolved.”For sure, the scourge of urban crime is still hotly debated. The writer Adam Gopnik once remarked that so long as you promise to keep them safe, even in Manhattan, the white middle-class is “pretty much content to look away when the rights of others are being violated”.This, according to a Bronx politician who spoke on condition of anonymity, “is why New York state’s recently hard-won amelioration of bad police policy is threatened now”. Jeff Mays, a Times reporter who lives in Harlem, concurred. He observed the irony of how closely the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, echoed the Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a Trump supporter. Repeatedly, as hard as he could, Zeldin hit Governor Kathy Hochul with the upsurge in crime attendant to the Covid pandemic. Though making their other differences clear, Mays said of Adams and Zeldin: “Certainly their rhetoric has been very similar on things like bail reform.”Changing discriminatory bail laws, an historic accomplishment meant to equalize justice, was hardly easy. In reaction to Black Lives Matter activists, responding to a rash of police murders, progressive leaders sought to finally fix one of the many issues raised by the Panthers.“Even with it taking until now to address, there’s pushback,” said the Bronx official. . “Some seem eager to retreat to where we were. Man that’s a pitiful shame! And, without a shred of evidence, Adams connecting crime to the bail law – that was just short of a Willie Horton ad. And for Democrats, in the most enlightened place there is, New York, it was just as destructive too.”To Henson Scales, crime is complicated.“It requires nuanced thinking,” he maintains. Yes, today’s increase of violent crime is still “only” producing a few hundred annual homicides, versus a few thousand in the smaller city of 1990. “But with many, many more guns, with magazines capable of cutting down hundreds of victims in seconds, sometimes I do feel as unsafe as I did in the 1990s.”He cautions: “It’s imperative not to overreact and at all cost to avoid unintended consequences, like the mass incarceration that accompanied the Rockefeller drug laws [of 1973]. Black preachers and politicians, thousands of African Americans, favored and voted for such laws. But look where they led.”How did Henson Scales come to produce his book, which morphed into an exhibition associated with Art Basel, on display in Miami’s Black Overtown neighborhood, across from the Red Rooster Restaurant?“Well,” he said, “Four years ago, not long after my mother’s death, my family was preparing our house for sale. It’s a cool place, big enough to have a ballroom and a darkroom too. In one spot they discovered this stash of 40 rolls of film. They reasoned it was mine. And it was. I was so glad they were not lost.“This stuff dated from the late-1960s. I was around 14, a high-school freshman. My dad was a hobbyist photographer and my mother was a painter. Even before I turned 11, when dad gave me a Leica camera, both patiently instructed me. That earliest footage of mine contained a mixed bag of images. There were people and places I hoped to remember. I photographed protest and riots in my home city of Berkeley, California. Sly and the Family Stone and other acts that appeared at the Fillmore, across the bay in San Francisco, were represented too. And then among it all, was this cache of 15 sleeves with negatives showing various aspects of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The two of us, we grew up together.”Oakland and Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro, LA, the summer of love, women’s liberation, Vietnam, uprisings in urban ghettos.“They were,” recalls Scales, “all of a piece. But the Panthers were the coolest people.”He seems caught up in the dynamic of art utilized in the service of action and change, taking note of great style.“The whole presentation with the leather jackets, the berets. They were very cool. You had the hippies … and then you had the Black Panthers … and it was very powerful … The movement was feeling like we could change society. We could have an effect. It was a very exciting place to be. It was dangerous because of police violence against the Panthers … As a teenager that’s all very exciting because you’re not that concerned with safety like you are as you get older.”In discussion, Henson Scales squarely addressed this short-lived Black empowerment movement’s flaws, its misogyny, homophobia, infighting and FBI infiltration. By contrast, his book is more a testament to the group’s strides in overcoming such drawbacks. In pursuit of recognition, handsome Huey P Newton, the Panther’s minister of defense and co-founder, stressed the value of alliances among all oppressed outcasts:.css-rj2jmf{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say ‘whatever your insecurities are’ because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.”Coming to boast a membership of more than 10,000, 50% of whom were women, the Panther party shone a spotlight on police and political corruption, brutality and injustice, a story also related in a film by an early Panthers member, Henson Scales’s Harlem neighbor Stanley Nelson.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution debuted in 2015. It elaborates on the party’s wide-ranging social programs. They established community support systems including food and clothing banks, clinics, transport for families of inmates, legal seminars. In the 70s the Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children, nationwide, fed thousands. All this was achieved amid near-constant surveillance by police and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who demonized the BPP as “the greatest internal threat to national security”.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution review – blistering account of a misunderstood movementRead moreRather than giving a daily rundown of all they did and didn’t do, Henson Scales’ portrayals show these revolutionaries as part of the pantheon of Black valor.When Viola Davis’s recent film The Woman King appeared, many critics were astonished. Projected to gross around $12m in its opening week, it grossed $19.05m. Worldwide, the “history-based” epic has earned nearly $100m. A similarly misunderstood historical fantasy, the astutely named, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, has earned more than three times that.As history, both are unashamedly inventive and melodramatic – much like Shakespeare. The “African-inspired” costuming and architecture is highly inauthentic. Heavy reliance on spectacle is akin to Braveheart or Gladiator. Resoundingly praised performances notwithstanding, some have wondered aloud about the appeal of such movies to Black people.If African American motivations and culture seem inscrutable to many, they ought not. Only now are we both able and fully prepared to embrace our heritage.In a Time of Panthers is an arresting look at some mighty heroes from the recent past. We revere them along with never-enslaved Blacks and those held in captivity. We celebrate our ancestors and adhere to Neo-Africanism. Whether such sources are accurately drawn or totally fabricated, the inspiration we take is legitimate. This is today’s aesthetic and intellectual answer to white supremacy’s neo-classical domination: a realization that we too are the heirs of greatness.
      In a Time of Panthers: Early Photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales is published in the US by SPQR Editions
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      US House votes to remove bust of judge who wrote Dred Scott decision defending slavery

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      US House votes to remove bust of judge who wrote Dred Scott decision defending slaverySupreme court justice Roger Taney wrote 1857 decision justifying slavery, widely regarded as one of worst rulings in history The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the supreme court justice who in 1857 wrote the Dred Scott decision, justifying slavery and denying that Black people had rights any “white man was bound to respect”.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreIf the new measure is signed into law by Joe Biden, the bust will be removed from outside the old supreme court chamber and replaced by a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice.The measure that passed the House by voice vote was reduced from one which would also have removed statues of Confederates who fought the civil war to protect slavery and which was re-introduced in the aftermath of the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters carried Confederate flags into the Capitol.On Wednesday, Zoe Lofgren, a House Democrat from California, said she would have preferred to remove Confederate statuary too, but to remove the Taney bust was literally about “who we put on a pedestal”.“The United States Capitol is a beacon of democracy, freedom and equality,” said Lofgren, a member of the January 6 committee. “What and who we choose to honor in this building should represent our values. Chief Justice Taney … does not meet the standard.”The Dred Scott case concerned an enslaved man who lived in Illinois and the Louisiana territory, where slavery was forbidden, then with his wife sued for freedom when taken back to Missouri, a state where slavery was legal.The court ruled 7-2 for Scott’s enslaver, John Sandford, an army surgeon.Taney wrote that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit”.The text of the bill to remove the bust of Taney called the ruling “infamous”, adding that its the effects “would only be overturned years later by the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution of the United States”, thereby “render[ing] a bust of his likeness unsuitable for the honour of display to the many visitors to the Capitol”.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreIt also quoted the withering judgment of Frederick Douglass, the great writer and campaigner who escaped slavery in Taney’s native Maryland in 1838.In May 1857, Douglass lamented “this infamous decision of the slave-holding wing of the supreme court”, which “maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the constitution of the United States, property … in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property”.On Wednesday Chris Van Hollen, a senator from Maryland, said: “We should honour those who advanced justice, not glorify those who stood in its way.“Sending this legislation to the president’s desk is a major step in our efforts to tell the stories of those Americans who have fought for a more perfect union – and remove those who have no place in the halls of Congress.”TopicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsWashington DCAmerican civil warRaceSlaverynewsReuse this content More

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      Georgia Senate voters have a moral choice. White Christians are choosing hypocrisy | Steve Phillips

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      Georgia Senate voters have a moral choice. White Christians are choosing hypocrisySteve PhillipsEvangelicals show their true colors in voting for a Republican mired in unchristian scandal Why do we have such low expectations for white voters? The midterm elections brought into stark relief just how many white voters are willing to make a mockery of showing any pretense of concern for democracy, good governance or even the barest qualifications for our country’s highest offices. As unfortunate as that behavior is, what’s even more dangerous for the future of the country is how resigned the rest of the country has become to the anti-democratic and intellectually unjustifiable voting patterns of much of white America.How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy | Steve PhillipsRead moreOn one level, we shouldn’t be surprised because white Americans have been voting against whatever political party is aligned with Black people for more than a century – the civil war itself began when seven slaveholding states, all dominated by the Democratic party, refused to accept the outcome of the 1860 election, seceded from the Union and launched a violent and bloody war. While many would like to believe that such whites-first electoral decision-making is a thing of the past, the most recent midterm elections reveal just how little progress has been made.The slew of inexperienced and unqualified candidates elevated by Donald Trump this year was markedly different from prior elections over the past several decades. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states, Republicans put forward as nominees for the US Senate people who’d never held any elected office or expressed much interest in participating in government at all. And yet, in state after state, the majority of white voters opted to back the candidate with no demonstrable qualification for the office other than that they were endorsed by the former president, who sought and seeks to make America white again.The situation is most stark in Georgia, which has its Senate runoff election on 6 December. After the African American civil rights leader and minister Raphael Warnock was elected to the US Senate from Georgia in 2021, Trump recruited the former Georgia football player Herschel Walker – who lived and may still live in Texas – and persuaded him to throw his hat in Georgia’s 2022 Senate race. Beyond Walker’s blatant lack of qualifications – or for that matter even interest – in government, his candidacy has been repeatedly rocked by scandal. From alleged domestic violence and stalking (including allegedly holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head) to reportedly fathering at least four children he has not publicly acknowledged (while opining in the media about the ills of absentee fathers) to the rank hypocrisy of championing anti-abortion views while having allegedly paid for two abortions of women he impregnated, the scale of Walker’s previously disqualifying revelations is at a truly Trumpian level.The pretense that Georgia’s white voters were conducting a good-faith exercise in democracy is laid bare by looking at the behavior of the those who self-describe as “white born-again or evangelical Christians”. Georgia’s white Christians faced – and still face – a choice between a man who has zero qualifications for the office and a mountain of unchristian immorality and scandal on the one hand, and an incumbent senator who is a Christian minister and the successor to Martin Luther King Jr. (Warnock is the senior pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the faith-based home of Dr King.)The pastor v the football player: can Raphael Warnock tackle Herschel Walker?Read moreWalker’s melanin notwithstanding, he is nonetheless the handpicked errand boy of Trump and all who subscribe to his whites-first view of the world. As Georgia pastor Jamal Bryant put it, “When the Republican party of Georgia moved Herschel Walker from Texas to Georgia so that he could run for Senate, it was because change was taking too fast in the post-antebellum South, and there were some … who were not prepared for a Black man and a Jewish man to go to the Senate at the exact same time.”In deciding between the Christian church leader and the unrepentant and unqualified hypocrite, 88% of white born-again Christians voters chose against the church leader. Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that it was not the Christian part of their identity that determined their political choice. It was their whiteness.Despite the absolute absurdity of this situation, the rest of the country has collectively shrugged its shoulders and moved on without any expressions of outrage or attempts to insist on some shred of fidelity to the notion that we’re supposed to be choosing responsible leaders to serve in our highest governing body. Where are the articles and stories interviewing Georgia’s white Christians about why they are voting for the decidedly unchristian Walker over the Christian pastor Warnock? Where are the calls, tweets and emails to reporters demanding that they ask such questions?The national silence brings to mind the words of Georgia native Dr King in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”Beyond the morality of the matter is a question of practical politics. We now know that ignoring white racial preference in elections is ineffective. Letting white people off the hook doesn’t work; what does work is holding the line, insisting on standards and challenging whites to rise above the race-based pandering they are offered by modern-day Republicans.America is built on a racist social contract. It’s time to tear it up and start anew | Steve PhillipsRead moreWhen Barack Obama’s opponents attempted to weaken his support among whites by endless and out-of-context repetition of seemingly controversial comments by his then pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he tackled the challenge head-on with his now-famous “race speech”: “In the white community,” Obama said, “the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that … the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds.”Fears were calmed, and Obama went on to secure the highest percentage of the white vote of any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976.Academic research has also affirmed the effectiveness of this approach. In her book The Race Card, Princeton professor Tali Mendelberg revealed how Republicans’ use of coded racial messages, and their impact on voters, lost power when the implicit was made explicit. She found that “when campaign discourse is clearly about race – when it is explicitly racial – it has the fewest racial consequences for white opinion”.Trump and his electoral success broke many norms of America’s fragile democracy, and we are still trying to pick up the pieces. One norm we should not and must not relinquish is outrage at obvious and unapologetic racist behavior in the electorate. It is imperative that we hold voters to a higher standard.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good
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      Georgia candidates’ starkly divergent views on race could be key in runoff

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      Georgia candidates’ starkly divergent views on race could be key in runoffSenate hopefuls Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker’s contrasting beliefs will influence how voters turn out As senator Raphael Warnock faces off against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the most expensive race of the 2022 midterms, they also encounter a historic moment: it’s the first time in modern Georgia history that two Black candidates were nominated by both party’s voters to vie for a US Senate seat in the deep south state.Warnock and Walker both had experiences with poverty and Christianity during their upbringings yet their views on race and racism in society are now in stark contrast.In campaign speeches and previous remarks, Walker, who has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump, has argued racism in America doesn’t exist, asking supporters at an event earlier this year: “Where is this racism thing coming from?” Warnock, meanwhile, has spent years decrying racism, including lambasting Republican efforts at voting restrictions on the Senate floor as “Jim Crow in new clothes”.The pastor v the football player: can Raphael Warnock tackle Herschel Walker?Read morePolitical scientists and historians say that the contrasting views – Walker’s belief of an America “full of generous people” without racism, as he declared in one ad; Warnock’s belief in America dealing with racism as an “old sin” – influence how voters, specifically Black voters, will turn out and who they will support.Exit polling from November’s race showed that Black, Latino and Asian voters supported Warnock while Walker captured 70% of white voters.“When Walker is talking about racism doesn’t exist any more, for most Black people, that’s a non-starter,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of politics at Emory University. “On top of it, they look at his lack of qualifications. That is what would give them pause to say that they just put up any old Black person to try to run to this office. He was famous. That could be perceived as a sign of disrespect.”Gillespie says that the racial split in voting “maps on to party identification in the state” – meaning that in Georgia, those who align with the Republican and Democratic parties are “racially polarized”. She noted that Walker’s messaging tactics during the campaign to decry “woke” culture and arguing Warnock believes America is a “bad country full of racist people” shows he isn’t talking to Black voters, an influential voting bloc in a state that’s 30% Black.“When Walker uses Republican talking points and wants to talk about Democrats being divisive when talking about race, he is also signalling to white supporters that he’s not going to upset the applecart if you will,” she said. “The hope is that by hitting on personal issues and saying the same things that other folks would say, you hope to engage and mobilize and excite his supporters, the majority of whom are white.”Warnock and Walker’s life experiences shaped their views on race. Long before he became the senior pastor at Dr Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist church, Warnock grew up in a public housing complex in Savannah, Georgia, and immersed himself at a young age in the speeches of civil rights figures at his local library. Warnock eventually graduated from Morehouse College, a historically Black institution in Atlanta, in 1991.Before he became a wildly popular running back at the University of Georgia, Walker, who grew up in Wrightsville, more than 140 miles south-east of Atlanta, defied pleas from civil rights leaders who called for him to join racial justice protests in his community in 1980, which saw a group of whites beat Black protesters at the local courthouse, among other acts of racist violence. Walker chose not to get involved.Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University, said Walker and Warnock’s contrasting views reflect “a common experience for those coming out of the immediate civil rights era: you either put your head down and shut up or you speak out and you fight”.Even so, Walker’s denial of racism does not reflect what a majority of even Black conservatives believe: a recent Pew Research Center study found that more than half of Black conservatives saw racism and police brutality as “extremely big problems” for Black people in the US. In her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican, Rigueur noted that research found that even conservative Black voters would not support candidates who they believe did not have their best interests at heart.Rigueur argues that the Republican party’s choice to back Walker, whose views are in contrast to even a majority of Black Republicans, represents an attempt to “pull a higher number of Black voters and/or disrupt the solidarity that was coalescing around Warnock”.‘Death by a thousand cuts’: Georgia’s new voting restrictions threaten midterm electionRead more“Walker does none of the things required to garner Black support: he’s not well-spoken, not well-versed in policy. He denies racism is an issue. He marches in lockstep with whatever the party line is,” she said, adding that Walker had alienated some white voters as well, particularly white women, who typically vote Republican.The scandals surrounding him, including that he paid for abortions for women, dismantle the “veneer of respectability of what it means to be a Republican”, Rigueur said. His lack of outreach and his decision not to campaign over Thanksgiving during a crucial early voting period, paired with his denial of racism’s existence, also relegates potential Black voters, who Republicans need to win in a changing electorate like Georgia. Rigueur added: “There has been no indication that he respects Black voters or that he actually is interested.“He is precisely the kind of candidate you don’t want to run in a place like Georgia,” she added. “You can no longer delude yourself or the public of these ideas that he’s a hometown hero with great conservative values and happens to be Black. You can’t buy into any of those things because he doesn’t live it and practice it.”What’s unique in the Warnock and Walker case isn’t so much that two Black men are facing off. That often happens in mayoral and state elections, and even at the federal level, just six years ago, South Carolina’s Tim Scott won re-election against Thomas Dixon, a Democratic Black pastor from north Charleston.But in Georgia, where Black voters often overwhelmingly vote Democrat, Warnock’s opponent is a Black Republican at a time when a record number of Black Republican candidates – 28 – ran for office during this year’s midterms and as there are three Black Republicans in Congress, the most since the Reconstruction era. Historically, when it comes to elections to national office, Black candidates have struggled to obtain the institutional backing from national parties and the financial investment needed to run successful national campaigns, Rigueur said.Recent efforts from grassroots, Black women-led civil rights groups in Georgia such as the New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter who have been able to build an influential voting bloc through registration and outreach campaigns but also national investment in Black candidates from donors who see that growing influence.Republicans’ efforts to invest in Black candidates speaks to efforts to persuade a demographically changing electorate but the endorsement of Walker by Donald Trump “doesn’t negate the rest” of Trump’s “racially divisive presidency” nor does it negate Republican party’s “record on race in the last half century”, Gillespie said.“Herschel’s African American, yes, he is a revered native son of the state. But he’s also really inexperienced,” Gillespie said. “He has a lot of political baggage that in an earlier era would have been disqualifying right off the bat. To nominate somebody like that because he shares an identity with the other opponent, to some people, that looks like tokenism. It is something that a lot of voters are going to be turned off by.”Since 1870, just 11 Black Americans have served in the US Senate. If either Warnock or Walker win in Tuesday’s runoff, they would join the Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican senator Tim Scott as the only current Black members of the 100-person US Senate.“The fact that we’ve only ever had three at any given point still demonstrates that there’s a long way to go in terms of proportional representation by race,” Gillespie said.TopicsGeorgiaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRaceDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US is failing to address ‘persistent and lethal threat’ of domestic terrorism, report finds

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      US is failing to address ‘persistent and lethal threat’ of domestic terrorism, report findsFederal government has continued to focus ‘disproportionately’ on international terrorist threats despite spate of racist shootings The FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are failing to properly address the threat of domestic terrorism, predominantly from white supremacist and anti-government extremists, according to a Senate committee report released on Monday.The Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee spent three years investigating domestic terrorism and the federal response.Biden vows to combat ‘venom and violence’ of white supremacy Read moreIt found that the FBI and the DHS have “failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism” and have not allocated sufficient resources to countering the threat.The report comes after a spate of racist shootings in 2022. On Monday, a white man who shot 10 Black people to death in a Buffalo grocery store in May pleaded guilty to murder and hate-crime charges.Both the FBI and the DHS have identified domestic terrorism, in particular white supremacist violence, as the “most persistent and lethal terrorist threat” to the US, the committee said.But the federal government has continued to focus “disproportionately” on international terrorist threats, it found.“Despite this acknowledgement and multiple analyses, plans, and national strategies across multiple administrations, this investigation found that the federal government has continued to allocate resources disproportionately aligned to international terrorist threats over domestic terrorist threats,” the report said.The report added that the federal government “still fails to comprehensively track and report data on domestic terrorism despite a requirement from Congress to do so”.According to the Anti-Defamation League there have been 333 “right-wing extremist-related killings” in the last 10 years, with 73% of those at the hands of white supremacists.Black Americans have increasingly found themselves the target of hate crimes. Between 2019 and 2020, hate crimes against Black Americans rose by 46%, the New York Times reported. Earlier this year, 57 historically Black colleges and houses of worship were targeted by bomb threats.The Senate committee report cites a 2021 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots and attacks in 2020, compared with 65 such cases in 2019 and 70 in 2017 – the previous high.The report found that the FBI and DHS have “different definitions for ‘domestic terrorism’, which could lead to the two agencies categorizing the same event as different types of terrorism”.It said that in 2019 the FBI changed its reporting procedures to combine all forms of racially motivated extremism, including the pre-existing category of “white supremacist violence”, into one category called “racially motivated violent extremists”.“This change obscures the full scope of white supremacist terrorist attacks, and it has prevented the federal government from accurately measuring domestic terrorism threats,” the report said.TopicsUS newsUS politicsRaceUS crimeFBInewsReuse this content More

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      How Republicans and Democrats are missing the mark with Latino voters

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      How Republicans and Democrats are missing the mark with Latino votersStrategists, pollsters and advocacy groups say both parties continue to treat Latino voters like a monolithic group In the 2022 midterms, Latino voters reinforced their power as the second-largest voting bloc in the United States.These voters, who account for nearly 35 million people, or 14%, of the US voting electorate, both tilted the balance for Democrats in key battleground state Senate races in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada and secured a Republican hold in Florida. Since 2018, the number of Latino voters has grown by nearly 5 million people, accounting for more than 60% of newly eligible voters.But Latino strategists, pollsters and advocacy groups say both parties are still missing the mark. They argue Democratic and Republican campaigns continue to treat Latino voters like a monolithic group, failing to contact and reach out to voters early and invest in ads grounded in what communities themselves care about. As Latino operatives ascend the ranks in independent political action committees and campaigns, that’s steadily changing. But those who plan to continue with the status quo could make or break party election results in 2024.Bar chart of battleground states’ total and Latino population growth.Beyond politicsCampaigns need to take a page from independent groups, according to Latino political strategists, pollsters and voter mobilization groups. They said political parties need to build trust with voters, listen to what they care about and use that data to tailor culturally relevant messaging to different communities in different states.According to the 2022 Midterm Election Voter Poll, a comprehensive exit polling of thousands of voters led by the African American Research Collaborative and other groups, nearly two-thirds of Latino voters voted with Democrats. Even as Republicans gained ground, the data shows that there wasn’t a drastic shift in Latino voters’ support for political parties.But that doesn’t mean the party will maintain its popularity.“Hispanic voters are sending a message to both parties: they see their own values and policy positions align with the Democratic side but the message to Democrats isn’t so much that they are treating it as a bloc. They are neglecting it,” Clarissa Martinez de Castro, vice president of the Latino vote initiative at UnidosUS, says.Meanwhile, De Castro says that if Republicans want to maintain and grow Latino support they need to realize they’re “radically out of step with what Latinos want”.As the number of Latinos in the United States nearly doubled in the last two decades, strategists say reaching out and contacting Latino voters, and uplifting Latino consultants who are mindful of the electorate’s nuance, will be key to critical elections. “We’re outpacing everyone,” Colin Rogero, a Democratic strategist and partner of the political consulting firm 76 Words, says. “There’s no choice. If you want to win campaigns in the future, the Latino electorate has got to be a significant portion of who you are targeting and communicating with.”But Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic political strategist focused on Latino voters and founder of Solidarity Strategies, says that the lack of diversity in the ranks of political consultants – and the predominant whiteness – frames how Latino voters are often seen.“When you start talking about ‘the Latino vote’, there aren’t Latinos in the room to make the corrective,” said Rocha, a former senior adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders in his presidential bid. He argued that the political strategies from consultants have not adjusted to speaking to Latino voters in culturally or regionally specific ways, despite the fact that these voters have been the fastest growing group within the American electorate for decades.That work, however, was on display from independent advocacy groups that supported Democratic candidates, and civic mobilization organizations that focused on galvanizing Latino voters, Rocha said. They invested in showing up in communities, even during off-election years, and built trust over time. He pointed to Nevada, where super Pacs and groups like the Culinary Workers Union and Somos Votantes canvassed neighborhoods across the state and spent millions of dollars in ads that specifically targeted Spanish-speaking voters.“Our universe wasn’t just reaching Democrats. We were reaching eligible voters. It was about turning out Latinos to vote,” Cecia Alvarado, executive director of Somos Votantes’ Nevada division, says. Issues and immigration patternsClaudia Lopez, who volunteered with the Culinary Workers Union and voted for the first time in Nevada’s midterms. She frequently heard about the rising costs of rents in Las Vegas and heard fears of being evicted. That focus became a centerpiece of the union’s messaging in the weeks ahead of the election.“I care about a change in a good way. I don’t care who’s elected. I don’t care who wins I just want it changed for the for the better,” she told the Guardian in October.Lopez’s perspective – caring less about party politics and more about candidates’ actions – reflects a common thread among Latino voters, said Gabe Sanchez, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and vice president of research at BSP Research.“Because so many Latinos are first-time voters and US born with foreign born parents, you don’t have the same party loyalists,” Sanchez says. “A lot of people describe party politics like sports in the US. I just don’t think that fits the majority of Latino voters.”Beeswarm chart of policy priorities of Latino’s in battleground statesMaría Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, says that there is a generational divide: Latino voters are, on average, younger than the rest of the electorate, consisting of people who are newer to the country as immigrants and migrants compared to other voters of color. And Sanchez found that two-thirds of Latino voters under age 40 supported Democrats compared to 60% of Latino voters over that age. That will play a key role in the upcoming presidential race as campaigns attempt to figure out how to court young voters and make sure they turn out.Kumar said her group addressed this in the midterm by investing in registration in eight battleground states in 2020, registering 650,000 voters. But she said that campaigns did not invest in the same way because Democratic donors and campaigns internalized the idea that they were losing Latino support to Republicans.“For politics, it’s important to think about the issues that are driving individuals and the life experiences they are having in pockets that were once not Latino,” Kumar says.“We are a holistic fabric of all these aspirations, wants and needs but if we are living in a society where our policy issues are not being met that allow our children to thrive, it doesn’t matter if I like arepas or pupusas if I have a politician enacting bad legislation if I have a politician say ‘I can’t invest in you because you’re not a monolith.’”Matt Barreto, a political science professor at UCLA and co-founder of BSP Research, notes that in public opinion polling, Latinos often express shared culture, values, language and customs but politically, they vary depending on the political environment they live in.The 2022 Midterm Election Voter Poll, which Barreto worked on, found that Latino voters described sharing similar issues of concern: cost of living, gas prices, reproductive rights, healthcare costs and gun violence. But when broken down by Latino voters in states polled, those issues vary depending on the state, with the consensus concern over the economy.Midterm resultsThe midterm results offer a roadmap of how parties approached different Latino communities.Carlos Odio, co-founder of EquisResearch, a data firm focused on Latinos, wrote on Twitter that Republicans failed to make the projected “Latino red wave” a reality. It took Dems a great deal of toil & treasure to battle to a point of stability with Latino voters. Right now they should celebrate. Next week they should start putting in the work to strengthen their coalition for the ‘24 election. FL shows what happens when you don’t.— Carlos Odio (@carlosodio) November 21, 2022
      In key races in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Latino voter support for Democrats played a significant role. In Arizona, where two-thirds of Latino voters supported Senator Mark Kelly, he capitalized on an already influential long-term investment in Latino voter outreach by grassroots groups to capture wins in Maricopa and Pima counties.“In Arizona, it’s a dual community effort,” Sanchez said. “They’ve been working with these communities and building trust. It’s not something you can just do when the election cycle happens.”Alvarado, of Somos Votantes, said the group spent $14m on digital, TV and radio ads and voter outreach such as canvassing neighborhoods in support of Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina in Congress who narrowly won re-election.Alvarado, the daughter of Costa Rican immigrants who moved to the US as a teenager, says that without Latino voters, “you don’t win elections in Nevada”. In the state, 64% of Latino voters supported Cortez-Masto over Republican Adam Laxalt, according to the 2022 Midterm Election Voter Poll.In Colorado, where the Latino population has grown 72% since 2000, Sanchez worked with the Latino Victory Fund to survey Latino voters about their concerns, particularly in rural areas. That influenced voter outreach efforts and aided in Yadira Caraveo becoming the first Latina to be elected to Congress from the state.In New Mexico, Rogero, who worked with Democratic campaigns in several states, says his team worked with Democratic congressman-elect Gabe Vasquez’s campaign against Republican incumbent Yvette Herrell to invest heavily and early in Spanish-language ads, particularly in the district’s southern region, framed around Vasquez’s upbringing. That, Rogero says, was key to “not lose a majority” of Latino voters in the state’s largest Latino district, Vasquez edged out a win, and flipped the seat by just over 1,000 votes.Florida represented an outlier, where Latino voters made a shift toward supporting Republicans, with the largest gains among Cuban and non-Puerto Rican voters, allowing incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio to win re-elections by wide margins. But Baretto points out that the strategy remained the same: Long-term investment from Republicans in Florida in English and Spanish ads targeting Latinos since 2020.Rogero, who grew up in south Florida and worked on several races in the state, argued that Democrats’ losses there were a “direct reflection of investment”, He pointed to the recent loss by Democratic incumbent Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the first South American immigrant elected to Congress, against former Miami-Dade county mayor Carlos Giménez. In that race, Powell became one of the few Democrats nationally to outperform Biden among Latino voters, crediting voter outreach, ad investment, and door-knocking.“I don’t think the [Democratic] national infrastructure, the donors, the major party committees understands Florida because it’s a complicated place,” Rogero said. “Miami is not a lost cause. It’s just Republicans have been spending a lot of money there where Democrats have not.”That investment strategy among Latino voters could become important in the Georgia runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican candidate Herschel Walker, where the Latino population is on the rise. While white voters largely supported Walker and Black voters overwhelmingly supported Warnock, Warnock captured 67% of Latino voters, according to exit polling.Somos Votantes, the national Latino mobilization group that supported Cortez-Masto in Nevada, announced it would invest $2m in the runoff.“It used to be that one side would neglect it and would take it for granted, and the other one would just simply ignore it,” Clarissa Martinez de Castro of UnidosUS says. “We’ve seen signs of progress of more outreach happening. But I think there’s still some way to go.”TopicsUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDemocratsRacefeaturesReuse this content More

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      'This is our time': Democrat Wes Moore becomes first Black governor of Maryland – video

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      Democrat Wes Moore has made history after becoming the first Black governor of Maryland. He replaces Republican Larry Hogan, a moderate who managed to twice win election in what is otherwise a solidly blue state. 
      The newly elected official assured the electorate ‘I hear you’ and ‘this is our time’ in his victory speech. Referencing his time in the army, Moore said ‘leave no man behind’. Joe Biden joined Moore in a pre-election rally in Maryland the evening before election day

      Midterm elections 2022: Democrats beating expectations as John Fetterman wins crucial US Senate race – live
      Future of Congress hangs in balance as many races still too close to call More