There were plenty of surprises during the 2022 campaign. But what were the two biggest plot twists?
Find out in the grand finale to C-SPAN's coverage of Campaign 2022.
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An Arizona voter drops off a ballot at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Election Day 2022.
Eric Thayer for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Are there hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants on Arizona’s voter rolls?
Sep 10, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Are there hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants on Arizona’s voter rolls?
No.
There is no evidence to suggest that thousands of undocumented immigrants are registered on Arizona’s voter rolls. Non-citizen voting has been found to be exceedingly rare.
The estimate was sourced from a legal complaint filed in federal court by a coalition of conservative groups and individuals, which accused Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes of inadequate voter roll maintenance. The estimate does not refer to undocumented immigrants on voter rolls, but rather voters who have moved or died but remain registered. Arizona’s Attorney General has filed a motion to dismiss the legal complaint, stating there is not sufficient evidence to back up the claim.
It is not uncommon for states to have surplus voters on their rolls. Federal law requires that states follow a sometimes years-long process to remove voters who have moved elsewhere or died.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
DocumentCloud United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Complaint against SOS Fontes
Democracy Docket United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Arizona Attorney General’s Motion to Dismiss
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National Conference of State Legislatures Voter Registration List Maintenance
Brennan Center for Justice Attacks on Voter Rolls and How to Protect Them
Department of Justice The National Voter Registration Act Of 1993 (NVRA)
Government Publishing Office Public Law 107–252 107th Congress, Help America Vote Act of 2002ERIC, Inc. About
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Maira Gonzalez works with students in the preschool and after-school program associated with First United Methodist Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Mark Macias
Why toddlers are motivating an early school educator to vote
Sep 09, 2024
Macias, a former journalist with NBC and CBS, owns the public relations agency Macias PR. He lives in South Florida with his wife and two children, ages 4 and 1.
The Fulcrum presents We the People, a series elevating the voices and visibility of the persons most affected by the decisions of elected officials. In this first installment, we explore the motivations of over 36 million eligible Latino voters as they prepare to make their voices heard in November.
Florida is home to the third largest population of Hispanics, Latinos. In a recent survey of Florida Latino voters by UnidosUS 2024, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris(47%) leads Republican Donald Trump (42%).
__________
Maira Gonzalez vividly remembers the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and today, she sees many similarities.
“I see a pattern between Bush and Trump,” Gonzalez said. “It’s not fair what they were doing years ago and now. I understand there is a lot of crime with immigrants, but they’re blaming it all on Latins. They’re all being lumped together. Just like we have good Americans and bad Americans, it’s the same with Latins. I’m bilingual, so I see both sides, but you can’t blame Latin immigrants for everything.”
As of 2021, more than 4 million immigrants lived in Florida, about 21 percent of the state's total population, which is higher than the national average.
The younger generations may not remember the 2000 election controversy, but history books will surely never forget it. Florida played a critical role in deciding the presidential outcome between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore that year. Bush won by a mere 537 votes in Florida following an intensive vote recount that ended with a controversial landmark ruling by the Supreme Court.
Gonzalez said this year’s election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is just as important as that historic 2000 election. Florida has 3.5 million Latino-eligible voters, per the Pew Research Center, the third largest population of Hispanics, Latinos in the country. In a recent survey of Florida Latino voters by UnidosUS 2024, Harris leads Trump, 47 percent to 42 percent.
“If I don’t vote, I don’t have a voice. That’s what’s driving me to vote. It’s important to have a voice for the people that don’t have a vote,” Gonzalez said.
A global perspective in education
If you spend a day with Gonzalez, you will quickly observe how she leads and guides a mini United Nations.
As assistant director of the preschool and after-school program for First United Methodist Church in downtown Fort Lauderdale, she is surrounded by infants, toddlers, and kids from all over the globe. The preschool has students from Ukraine, Italy, Mexico, Lebanon, France, Haiti and more. It’s a melting pot of cultures.
Nearly 20 percent of Fort Lauderdale's population is Hispanic, reports Data USA.
Gonzalez, who was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Florida in 1990, sees the importance of diversity on a daily basis. She knows every action today will lead to a reaction in the future. “We see children now in high school or college come back to us and say thank you,” she said. “They had their first level of reading here, and now they’re in college. This [school] plants the seed.”
So, what is the key to raising successful children who advance in education? Gonzalez believes it all comes down to reading to your children now. “When you read a book, a simple book or simple pages, they can create and use their imagination,” she said. “Even if they only see pictures or three words. It plants the seeds for them to learn. Reading at home helps with their reason and comprehension. I always recommend it.”
US News & World Report recently ranked Florida No. 1 in education. The ranking was driven by metrics in higher education and by the state’s prekindergarten through 12th-grade performance. Preschool education in Florida ranked 12th on the national scale.
Gonzalez partially credits the state's higher rankings to the state’s free VoluntaryPrekindergarten Education Program, also known as VPK. The program, started in 2005, gives 4-year-olds access to early education regardless of family income.
She said the state’s free early education program is a model for others to adopt. She believes this investment in early education will reap benefits over the long term, as Florida already sees.
“VPK has been a good thing because it’s giving 4-year-olds the foundation that they didn’t get before,” she said. “Before VPK, these kids were just at home. It was just babysitting. But now, we are teaching these kids. It’s educational. It’s free for three hours, and these children are interacting with other children. It’s beneficial for everyone.”
And it appears she’s not alone in that thinking. Education is also among the top 10 issues for Latinos, per a national survey conducted by UNIDOS US.
________
In the weeks leading to Election Day, The Fulcrum will continue to publish stories from across the country featuring the people who make up the powerful Latino electorate to better understand the hopes and concerns of an often misunderstood, diverse community.
What do you think about this article? We’d like to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and ideas to newsroom@fulcrum.us.
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Hisham Ibrahim/Getty Images
Project 2025: The Federal Reserve
Sep 09, 2024
Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Few federal agencies are as misunderstood by the general public as the little known Federal Reserve Board. The Fed, as it is known, oversees the central banking system of the United States. That means it superintends many of the most crucial levers for making the economy run, including maintaining the stability of the financial system, supervising and regulating banks, moderating interest rates and prices, maximizing employment and more. Often when Congress is too politically polarized and paralyzed to fiscally stimulate the economy, many look to the Fed for faster executive action.
The Federal Reserve system was created by Congress in 1913, when most Americans lived in rural areas and the largest industry was agriculture. It was enacted after a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907), caused by irresponsible banks with overextended credit, led to an outcry for central control of the monetary system as a step toward avoiding future financial crises.
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Since then, other financial meltdowns such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s have led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve as the “lender of last resort.” The Fed, which is a quasi-public system and in theory makes its decisions independent of the political fray, is nevertheless often at the center of political controversy as both Democrats and Republicans try to alternatively influence it, or in some cases blame it, as a way of deflecting criticisms of their own economic policies.
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, critiques the Federal Reserve based on a controversial reading of economic history. It adopts the debatable view that the Great Depression of 1929 was prolonged by the Federal Reserve’s inept management of the money supply. It observes that there has been an economic downturn roughly every five years, and blames that on “the impossibility of fine-tuning the money supply in real-time,” a task the Fed is seen as ill-equipped to address.
How to solve that? According to Project 2025, it would be better to simply abolish the Federal Reserve system altogether, and return the U.S. economy to some version of the unmanaged financial rawness of the pre-1913 era. The author of this chapter, Trump administration economist Paul Winfree, writes that the Fed should be replaced by a return to a system of so-called “free banking,” where banks are free to issue their own paper currency (banknotes) and would not be subject to any special regulations beyond those applicable to most enterprises.
Under such a system, neither interest rates nor the supply of money would be “controlled by the government.” Free banking, according to this view, would produce a stable and sound currency and a strong financial system, “while allowing lending to flourish.”
All that sounds intriguing except for the fact that there is no strong evidence that free banking actually works as effectively as Winfree describes. In the pre-Fed system, there was no role for a central bank either as a guarantor of money supply or as a “lender of last resort” when the economy is mired in recession or worse. Indeed, the money supply was permanently “frozen,” and the roles filled by the Fed were instead left to the private sector and mega-oligarch bankers like J.P. Morgan. There was no government insurance for bank deposit accounts, and if a bank struggled with solvency or even failed, its currency would become worthless and depositors would lose their savings.
But as the Panic of 1907 showed, under the relentless expansion of the U.S. economy at a certain point even the J.P. Morgans of the world could no longer play this role. Indeed, centralized bank systems like the Federal Reserve were created in response to the failures of the free banking system, which was sometimes referred to as “wildcat banking” because some banks printed more currency than they were capable of redeeming, leading to runs on banks and bank failures. During the Panic of 1837, 343 out of 850 banks (40 percent) closed. Today the United States has over 4,000 banks, so imagine if 1,600 failed today.
Keeping currencies stable, along with prices and inflation, doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes nonpartisan and non-self-interested experts, fed by the right data, to turn the dials and pull the levers of the economy in a way that prevents economic forces from running amok. But Project 2025 doesn’t just stop there with its historical perspective. It further encourages a new Trump administration to combine free banking with another financial chimera: considering “the feasibility of a return to the gold standard.”
Again, the United States withdrew from the gold standard in 1933 because, at a certain point in the growth trajectory of the national economy, it no longer worked very well. The evidence shows that both inflation and economic growth were quite volatile under the gold standard. During an economic crunch, the gold standard contributed to a run on banks by those who wanted to withdraw their gold before the bank ran out. This problem materialized during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the gold standard contributed to instability and unemployment. Economist Barry Eichengreen wrote: “Far from being synonymous with stability, the gold standard itself was the principal threat to financial stability and economic prosperity between the wars.”
In short, Project 2025 has not learned from past economic failures, and it pedals economic snake oil that is both wrongheaded and ahistorical. However, it also proposes a number of less ambitious plans.
Project 2025 sounds more reasonable when it calls for a focus on regulations to maintain bank capital adequacy, so that during an economic downturn, if depositors get nervous and start withdrawing their savings, banks will have enough reserves to cover withdrawals without spurring a financial panic.
But then Project 2025 quickly goes off the rails again, decrying what it views as the Federal Reserve using its “big government” financial levers to improperly regulate banks as a way to promote politically favorable initiatives, such as those aligned with environmental, social, and governance objectives. It also criticizes the recent Fed policy of “quantitative easing” to increase the money supply and stimulate economic activity. And Project 2025, true to its far-right conservative roots, says that “full employment” should be eliminated from the Federal Reserve’s mandate to focus only on price and monetary stability.
Finally, Project 2025 claims that the Fed, through its lender-of-last-resort function, amplifies “moral hazard” by bailing out irresponsible private firms and banks, such as during the economic collapse of 2008-09. While moral hazard is a real concern, it doesn’t justify abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether.
In short, Project 2025 ignores history and 150 years of economic experience to push a boulder uphill proposing radical and unrealistic reforms that even most Trump Republicans probably don’t support.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- A threat to American values
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Hulk Hogan was part of a testosterone-fueled script for the Republican National Committee.
Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Manhood is on the ballot, as if politics isn't crazy enough
Sep 09, 2024
Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
In case you somehow haven’t noticed, manhood is on the ballot.
Even before President Joe Biden stepped aside to let Vice President Kamala Harris step up to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, insiders from both parties were calling this the “boys vs. girls election.”
And even before the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee in July, spokesmen for Team Trump were telling reporters they hoped to contrast “weak vs. strong” as their social media message — and present a stage show as testosterone-fueled as a Super Bowl.
In that spirit, my most lasting memory from the GOP’s Milwaukee fest is Hulk Hogan’s ruddy red chest exploding across my television screen as he ripped off his black t-shirt.
The message? It’s OK to feel comfortable in your own skin, even if not in your own T-shirt, as you try to win the hearts of those manly-man voters who are already captivated and contained in MAGAworld.
And, hard on the heels of Trump’s MAGAs, along came the Democrats in Chicago to challenge the GOP’s hyper-masculine chest-thumping with their own Hollywood star-studded post-Biden challenge to the polling gender gap.
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Their message: reproductive rights-dominated inclusivity across all racial and gender lines. Rarely has an election campaign been so sharply and unashamedly defined by the gender gap.
Of course, considering how the last time the race was so sharply defined by the gender gap may have been 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, it was prudent of Harris to pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
In contrast to the famously bombastic style of Trump, Walz presents what feminists have called “positive masculinity.”
He’s also been predictably slammed by attack campaigns, to limited effect.
Walz spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, having joined at age 17. However, he never served in an active combat zone. Nevertheless, at a public meeting about gun violence in 2018, he said, "We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at."
His use of the phrase "in war" on this one occasion was seized upon by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, although not in combat.
The Harris-Walz campaign responded that Walz "misspoke."
Frankly, as a Vietnam War veteran who also missed actual combat, I honor both men for serving their country. That service, too, offers an example of positive manhood.
Positive masculinity is an assortment of attitudes and behaviors that build on the qualities positively associated with traditional masculinity, while avoiding its negative aspects. Those include thoughtless aggression, domination and violence — behaviors that too often victimize women and girls.
One particularly striking anecdote from Walz’ past might well have sealed the deal in his favor. When he was asked in 1999 to be faculty adviser for his southern Minnesota high school’s first gay-straight alliance club, Walz, then a geography teacher and football coach, agreed to do it — much to the relief of then-student Jacob Reitan, now 42.
“It was important to have a person who was so well liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military,” said Reitan, in an interview with The New York Times. “Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the gay-straight alliance made me feel safe coming to school.”
Indeed, by doing his duty as an educator in this instance, Walz set an example that may not grab as much attention as, say, ripping his shirt off in front of a national television audience. But as lessons for life go, it’s a lot more valuable.
The meaning and value of manhood is an endlessly debated topic, as it should be. It should not be endlessly exploited.
Honor, courage, leadership, honesty, integrity and fairness are just a few of the qualities we should associate with positive manhood. It’s easy to think of more. Unfortunately, it can be a lot harder to live up to them.
©2024 Tribune Content Agency. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Keep ReadingShow less
kbeis/Getty Images
Why Democrats hate Texas and Republicans detest California
Sep 09, 2024
Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”
A few years ago, a class of senior honors students at the University of Louisville learned firsthand the harsh reality of political stereotypes. They developed an ad for a hypothetical candidate running for Congress to get the reaction of 1,500 randomly selected people across the country. Two versions were created from the same script, using two different actors. One with a Southern accent, the other with the flat Midwestern delivery.
The students asked a couple of questions: Do you think this person is trustworthy, intelligent? Would you vote for this person? What political viewpoint would you ascribe to this person?
The students were taken aback when the Southern speaker got trashed.
“The feedback was harsh,” said Gracie Kelly, who helped run the project. “I have a Southern accent. The people we polled immediately assumed the candidate was conservative, didn’t support climate change and wanted very strict immigration policies. It was insulting. It did make me angry.”
We all use stereotypes, but in politics it amplifies our divisiveness, says DePaul University professor Christine Reyna.
“One of the most sophisticated things our brains do is categorize things. If I tell you something's a chair, you instantly know lots of things about it, right? And we categorize human groups, too. We categorize people by age, by gender, by race and by politics,” she said.
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Consider a few snapshots from across the partisan divide from a Florida State University study. On economic issues, Democrats said nearly 50 percent of Republicans belonged to the 1 percent, when it is actually closer to 3 percent. When asked what percentage of Democrats were gay, Republicans responded more than 40 percent. It's actually less than 5 percent.
I will never forget a contribution I received from a classmate at St. Rita’s grade school in Milwaukee. Scott Robideaux had penned a quick note that he attached to his check. “Hey best of luck. I can’t figure out who will be more offended my gay friends that I am supporting a Republican, or my Republican friends that I am gay.” Hard to believe decades later the same tension remains.
“When we talk about the other side, we talk with very negative traits,” says Brigham Young University assistant professor Ethan Busby. “We sort of say, ‘If I'm a Democrat, Republicans are bigoted and ignorant and selfish.’ And if I am a Republican talking about Democrats, I would say, ‘They're elitists who don’t understand people who go to church.’”
In our podcast episode on political stereotypes, the gang at Lost in the Middle thought it would be fun to frame the issue by examining why Democrats hate Texas and Republicans detest California.
Can a Washington bowling league get Congress to work together? by Scott Klug
We'll throw in the pizza and beer.
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