In 2012, Fair Elections Center (formerly Fair Elections Legal Network) launched Campus Vote Project (CVP) to focus and expand its work around student voting issues. CVP works with universities, community colleges, faculty, students and election officials to reduce barriers to student voting. Our goal is to help campuses institutionalize reforms that empower students with the information they need to register and vote.
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Agents draw their guns after loud bangs were heard during the White House Correspondents' dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2026. President Trump is attending the annual gala of the political press for the first time while in office.
(Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
Whenever political violence erupts, Washington starts playing the blame game
May 02, 2026
A heavily armed California man was caught trying to storm the White House correspondents’ dinner Saturday with the apparent intent to kill the president.
It didn’t take long for Washington to start arguing. Democrats denounce violent rhetoric from the right, but the alleged assailant seemed to be inspired by his own rhetoric. President Trump, after initially offering some unifying remarks about defending free speech, soon started accusing the press of encouraging violence against him. Critics pounced on the hypocrisy.
The argument about hypocrisy isn’t about mere inconsistency. The point of the accusation is to say that condemnations of violence are insincere. “Your team says it’s against violence” or “your side says my side encourages violence” but just look at what your language inspired!
The hypocrisy is bipartisan.
Indeed, for two decades now, it seems that whenever political violence erupts, there’s a moment where partisans wait to learn the motives of the perpetrator so they can start blaming the other side for inciting it. Sometimes they don’t even wait. Jared Loughner, the man who shot former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others, was instantaneously labeled an agent of the tea parties and Sarah Palin. The truth is he was such a paranoid schizophrenic, a court found him incompetent to stand trial.
I don’t have the space to run through the dozens of examples — the congressional baseball shooting, the Charleston AME church slaughter, the El Paso Walmart massacre, the recent murder of Minnesota lawmakers, the Jan. 6 riot or the failed attack Saturday night. But in the wake of these bloody crimes, partisans of left and the right will scour the killer’s social media or read their “manifestos” and place the blame on the rhetoric of the team closest to the assailant’s ideology.
Now, my point isn’t to say that blaming the rhetoric of nonviolent people for the crimes of violent people is wrong. It is wrong, of course, particularly as a matter of law. If I quote Shakespeare and write, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” I am not responsible for someone who actually shoots a lawyer (nor is the Bard). But that doesn’t mean violent, extremist rhetoric is laudable, healthy or blameless for the sorry state of American politics or society or that it never plays a role in inspiring wrongdoing.
However such rhetoric might encourage violence, it certainly encourages the sense that something is broken in American life. More specifically, it fuels the idea that our political opponents are existential enemies.
“Outgroup homogeneity” is the term social psychologists use to describe the very human tendency to think the groups you belong to are diverse and complex, but the groups you don’t belong to aren’t. A non-Asian person might think all Asians are alike, but for Asians the differences between — or among! — Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian people are both obvious and significant.
American politics right now are almost defined by outgroup homogeneity. Many Democrats and progressives think all Republicans and conservatives are alike, and vice versa. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded by the fact that each side tends to think the consensus on the other side is defined by their worst actors and spokespeople. This is sometimes called “nutpicking.” You find the most extreme person on the other side and hold them up as representative of all Democrats or Republicans.
Partisan media amplifies this dynamic at scale. Pew finds that Republicans (who watch Fox News) are more familiar with the term “critical race theory” than Democrats, the supposed devotees of it. Democrats recognize the term “Christian nationalist” more than supposedly Christian nationalist Republicans do.
Consider the recent debates over Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, both prominent social media influencers, one far left the other far right, who say grotesque, indefensible and stupid things. The arguments within the two coalitions are not over whether they should be spokesmen for their respective sides, but whether their “voices” (and fans) should be welcome inside the broader Democratic or Republican tents. Few accommodationists endorse the worst rhetoric from Piker or Fuentes, but they oppose “purity tests.”
On the merits, I think both should be shunned and condemned. But even if the question is purely a political one, they should still be ostracized. Why? Because people outside the respective coalitions will — however fairly or unfairly — hold up the extremists on the fringe as representative of the whole. The only way for either party to prove it opposes extremism to people outside the tent is by opposing it inside their own tents first. Otherwise, their hypocrisy will continue to define them.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Explore how China is overtaking the U.S. in the global innovation race, from electric vehicles to advanced research, and why America’s fragmented science policy, talent loss, and weak industrial strategy threaten its technological leadership.
Getty Images, Willie B. Thomas
America’s Greatest Geopolitical Blind Spot
May 01, 2026
The global hierarchy of innovation is undergoing a structural shift that Washington is dangerously slow to acknowledge. For decades, the prevailing narrative in the United States was that China was merely the "world’s factory"—a nation capable of mass-producing Western designs but inherently lacking the creative spark to invent its own. This assumption has been shattered. Today, Beijing is no longer playing catch-up; in sectors ranging from electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear power to hypersonic missiles, China is setting the pace.
The central challenge is that China has mastered the entire innovation ecosystem, while the United States has allowed its own to fracture. Innovation is not just about a "eureka" moment in a laboratory; it is a relay race that begins with basic scientific research, moves through the training of specialized talent, and ends with the large-scale commercialization of "hard tech." China is currently winning every leg of that race.
The foundation of American primacy since World War II has been federal support for basic science. As Vannevar Bush, science adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, famously argued, new products do not arrive mature; they are built on fundamental principles discovered in university labs. Bush envisioned a "tessellation" of government, academia, and industry that would ensure the United States remained at the frontier of knowledge. Yet, current U.S. policy is treating these vital institutions not as partners, but as rivals. Since early 2025, research funding has been disrupted by political freezes, and the merit-based system of peer review is being threatened by ideological litmus tests.
Meanwhile, Beijing has recognized its historical weakness in basic science and has moved aggressively to correct it. China has quadrupled its investment in basic research over the last decade. The results are visible in the data. In 2016, the Nature Index featured five American universities among the world’s top ten research producers. By 2025, nine of those top ten spots were held by Chinese institutions. This is a staggering reversal of roles that suggests the intellectual center of gravity is shifting eastward.
Beyond funding, there is the question of talent. The American "secret sauce" has always been its ability to attract the world’s best minds. Historically, 40 percent of American Nobel laureates in the sciences have been immigrants. However, a combination of funding cuts and restrictive visa policies is fueling a "brain drain." Top researchers are increasingly looking toward Europe or returning to China, where the state provides the patience capital necessary for long-term breakthroughs. When Harvard announces a halving of doctoral admissions in the sciences, as it did for the upcoming academic year, it is not just a campus budget issue; it is a national security failure.
China’s success in electric vehicles is a case in point. By providing massive state support through initiatives like Made in China 2025, Beijing created a fertile environment for companies to scale up complex physical products. In contrast, the American venture capital model is often optimized for "soft tech"—software and apps that offer quick returns. Hard tech, such as new battery chemistries or carbon-neutral cement, requires billions of dollars and years of development before reaching commercial viability. This "valley of death" between the lab and the market is where American innovation often goes to die.
The current administration’s reliance on tariffs and direct state equity in firms like Intel is a poor substitute for a coherent industrial strategy. Tariffs can shield domestic firms from competition, but they also reduce the incentive to innovate. Furthermore, when the government becomes a direct shareholder in private tech companies, success becomes a matter of political ties rather than technical excellence. When the U.S. government holds "golden shares" in industrial icons or demands a portion of profits from companies like NVIDIA in exchange for export licenses, it distorts the market signals that have historically driven American efficiency.
What the United States needs is a new institutional framework: a national version of the Engine incubator pioneered by Rafael Reif. This would ideally take the form of an independent federal government corporation. Such an entity, shielded from two-year political cycles and led by a board of scientists and business leaders, could provide the long-term loans and procurement guarantees necessary to bridge the gap for hard-tech startups. It would act as a catalyst for private investment by proving that revolutionary technologies—like grid-connected fusion or electrochemical cement—are commercially viable.
The tragedy of the current American approach is its lack of patience. Private sector investors are often looking for a three-to-five-year exit. But the challenges of the 21st century—from climate change to aging populations—require "patience capital." In China, government-backed funds are willing to wait twenty years for a return on hard-tech startups. While this state-led model has its own inefficiencies, its sheer scale and persistence have allowed China to monopolize the supply chains for solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and real-time LiDAR systems.
History shows that the United States is capable of this kind of mobilization when it treats science as a pillar of national strength rather than a political football. During World War II, the federal government successfully created a synthetic rubber industry from scratch when natural supplies were cut off. In the 1960s, the space race drove breakthroughs in microelectronics and materials science that defined the digital age. But these successes were the result of a deliberate, holistic strategy that linked basic science to industrial capacity.
Today, we see fragmented efforts. Programs like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant system or the Department of Energy’s loan office have had massive successes—Tesla might not exist today without a 2010 federal loan—but they are overly vulnerable to the whims of whoever sits in the Oval Office. The cancellation of an $87 million grant for Sublime Systems in October 2025, simply because it dealt with climate-focused technology, is a perfect example of how political volatility strangles the very innovation the U.S. claims to prize.
The innovation race is not a zero-sum game, but its outcome determines who will define the standards and security of the 21st century. It is about who writes the rules for the next generation of semiconductors and who controls the green energy transition. If Washington continues to focus on short-term political wins while neglecting the long-term health of its scientific and manufacturing base, it will find itself a consumer in a world designed and manufactured by Beijing.
To lead again, America must return to the basics. This means re-establishing a pact with the scientific community that prioritizes merit over ideology. It means welcoming international students and giving them every reason to stay and build their companies here. And it means creating the financial tools to ensure that the "next big thing" invented in an American lab is also built in an American factory. We cannot stand idly by and count on China to stumble. Unless the United States mobilizes its unique combination of public and private resources with institutional creativity, it will surrender its future to its greatest geopolitical rival. The engine of progress is stalling; it is time to restart it.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
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Election workers process ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters one week after Election Day on November 12, 2024 in Santa Ana, California.
Getty Images, Mario Tama
Republican Attacks on Citizen Ballot Measures Undermine Democracy
May 01, 2026
In October 2020, Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee delivered a startling but revealing civics lesson in the aftermath of that year’s vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. He tweeted, The United States is “not a democracy.”
“The word ‘democracy,’’’ Lee wrote, “appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic….Democracy isn’t the objective….” The senator said that the object of the Constitution was to promote “liberty, peace, and prospefity (sic).”
As Lee put it, “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
The New York Times reports that Lee’s sentiments are now being echoed in state legislatures in Utah, Missouri, Florida, and other red states, as Republicans seek to roll back citizens' right to make their views known through initiative and referendum.
As the Times explained, “The legislators argue that the nation’s founders never intended a pure democracy, and that in a representative democracy, elected legislators are entrusted to carry out their own judgments….’We live in a republic,’ Stuart Adams, the president of the Utah Senate, declared in a speech last year. ‘We will not let initiatives driven by out-of-state money turn Utah into California.’”
The right to petition the government for the redress of grievances is as old as the Republic itself. That right spurred a movement at the end of the nineteenth century to allow voters to use democratic processes, so-called direct legislation, to circumvent, or check, political institutions, which critics said were dominated by moneyed interests.
Today, twenty-four states, including places like Arkansas, California, Colorado, and Idaho, as well as Florida, Missouri, and Utah, allow citizens “to gather a certain number of signatures to bring a proposed statute or constitutional amendment to a public vote.” The District of Columbia does so as well.
While the nation’s attention is fixed on threats to democracy coming from Washington, DC, we should not neglect state-level efforts to curb popular participation in the political process.
The movement to allow direct legislation was one response to the gross inequality and rampant corruption of the Gilded Age. In 1896, Eltweed Pomeroy, a leading proponent of direct legislation, described the salutary effects of referenda and initiatives on cities and towns in Massachusetts.
“Many of them are so corrupt,” he said, “that the services they render their citizens are poor compared with the services given by the city officials in semi-barbarous countries, like Turkey and Russia.” He added, “If the Initiative was in force, a suitable minority of the voters could petition for any matter to…go to a poll of the people….As constructive is vastly superior to preventive work, the Initiative is vastly more important than the Referendum.”
Pomeroy denounced the “plutocracy,” which “knows full well that it must advocate high and noble principles and then not carry them into effect,” and called on “true patriots and lovers of their kind” to recognize that “democracy is not a failure in cities. Delegated responsibility is a failure.”
Progressives across the country agreed and pushed for direct legislation in their home states. As I have explained elsewhere, “They saw direct legislation as a way to supplement institutional politics, creating a parallel, democratic system less corrupted by the presence of professional politicians and their interests.”
South Dakota got the ball rolling in 1898, when it became the first state to create an initiative process. It was soon followed by Utah, Oregon, and Illinois.
By 1918, the number of states with initiative processes had risen to 22. Along the way, opponents said that direct legislation violated the United States Constitution, which guaranteed to the states a Republican form of government.
However, in 1912, the United States heard a challenge to a provision of the Oregon constitution which said that “the people reserve to themselves the power to propose laws and amendments to the constitution and to enact or reject the same at the polls, independent of the legislative assembly, and also reserve power at their own option to approve or reject at the polls any act of the legislative assembly." It ruled that how states implemented the guarantee of a Republican form of government was up to them.
Since then, putting ballot measures to a vote of the people has become a regular occurrence in the United States. For example, in 2024, Ballotpedia, the best source for information about direct legislation, reports that “159 statewide ballot measures were certified for the ballot in 41 states. Voters approved 102 (64%) and rejected 57 (36%) ballot measures.”
As the New York Times explains, in recent years, “Voters frustrated by one-party control in Republican states…have increasingly turned to citizen-sponsored initiatives to enact policies that their legislatures won’t. They expanded Medicaid, adopted paid sick leave, raised the minimum wage and safeguarded access to abortion. Now, the legislators are striking back.”
It details various devices they are using in this effort. Some states are raising the threshold for passage of a ballot measure to 60%. Others are “imposing a raft of new requirements, fees and criminal penalties around collecting signatures on petitions for ballot measures.”
This year, Missouri voters will be asked to approve a measure requiring that “citizen-sponsored amendments to the state constitution would have to win in each of the state’s eight U.S. House districts.” If it passes, it will be virtually impossible for such amendments to pass again.
That’s the point: Make it as hard as possible for citizens to make their views known directly.
But this is more than a strategy to defeat progressives. A look at history reveals that ballot measures can advance both conservative and progressive causes.
For example, in criminal justice matters, voters often embrace tough-on-crime measures. In 2024, California voters approved an increase in “penalties for certain drug crimes and theft convictions and allow a new class of crime to be called treatment-mandated felony,” by a margin of 68% to 32%. In the same election, they rejected a measure that would no longer have allowed “involuntary servitude” to be used as punishment for a crime, 53% to 47%.
Over the course of a more than one-hundred-year period, those hoping to get voters to abolish the death penalty in their states have repeatedly failed to do so.
And let’s not forget the way opponents of gay marriage used ballot measures to prevent it from being legalized in the states. According to Ballotpedia, “Between 1994 and 2024, there were 45 statewide measures on the ballot related to same-sex marriage. Out of these measures, 36 measures were placed on the ballot to prohibit same-sex marriage or define marriage as between a man and a woman. Of these measures, 33 were approved, and three were defeated.”
With this record, it seems clear that efforts to curb the use of ballot measures are not just about liberal or conservative politics. They are about something much more fundamental: the future of democracy itself.
Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, got it right when he told the Times that the measures being pursued in red states are designed to “create a system that is so cumbersome and so expensive and hard that you’ve taken the teeth out of the will of the people and their ability to make change.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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Housing Insecurity as a Public Health Crisis: From Framework to Action
May 01, 2026
For those of us with deep roots in California, we understand better than most that homelessness is layered and complex. It is not a one-off issue, but the result of multiple, intersecting factors that compound over time.
Los Angeles County has taken a critical step in naming the problem. The challenge now lies in operationalizing this framework, translating recognition into coordinated action that addresses the layered and intersecting harms individuals face.
Through my work researching housing insecurity and homelessness, one reality has become clear: health plays a significant and often overlooked role in this crisis. Housing has long been recognized as a social determinant of health, yet it continues to be treated as separate from healthcare systems and policy design.
With Los Angeles County declaring housing insecurity a public health crisis and advancing local preference policies, there is now a formal acknowledgment of what research and lived experience have consistently demonstrated: housing instability is not only a consequence of inequity, but a driver of adverse health outcomes across populations.
The relationship between housing and health is both direct and compounding. Individuals experiencing housing instability are more likely to encounter chronic physical conditions, untreated mental health needs, and increased utilization of emergency medical services. In 2024, nearly 494,446 low-income renter households lack access to an affordable home, underscoring the scale of housing precarity in Los Angeles County. At the same time, individuals experiencing homelessness visited the Emergency room services about 6 times per year on average, versus 1.6 times for those who are housed, reflecting the downstream strain on healthcare systems when stability is absent.
Research continues to affirm this connection. The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH) identifies a clear relationship between poor health and homelessness and provides critical insight into the depth of need. Nearly half of adults experiencing homelessness rate their health as poor or fair—four times higher than the general population. Chronic disease is widespread, with six in ten individuals reporting at least one chronic condition and many managing multiple illnesses simultaneously. Tobacco use rates are significantly higher, further compounding long-term health risks. At the same time, physical limitations are common, with over one-third of individuals reporting difficulty completing daily living activities.
These dynamics are not theoretical. They are reflected in the lived experiences of individuals navigating multiple, overlapping crises. Consider Alex, a veteran living with post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite efforts to maintain employment, the cumulative impact of untreated mental health challenges led to chronic physical health conditions, ultimately resulting in job loss. The loss of income placed his housing at risk, further exacerbating both his mental and physical health. Alex’s experience illustrates how housing instability, health deterioration, and economic vulnerability operate as interconnected and mutually reinforcing factors.
This intersection highlights a broader systemic issue: individuals are rarely navigating a single point of vulnerability. Instead, they are experiencing layered and compounding challenges that require coordinated, cross-sector responses. However, funding mechanisms and service delivery systems often remain fragmented, reinforcing silos between healthcare, housing, and social services. As funding landscapes continue to evolve, the need for integrated, cross-functional approaches becomes increasingly urgent. Addressing housing insecurity as a public health crisis requires a system capable of responding to the full complexity of individuals’ needs, rather than isolated components of those needs.
Concurrently, the advancement of local preference policies introduces an equity-focused dimension to housing policy. Gentrification and displacement have disproportionately impacted low-income communities and communities of color, often displacing long-standing residents from neighborhoods experiencing new development. Local preference policies seek to mitigate this by prioritizing individuals who already reside within these communities for new housing opportunities. While not a comprehensive solution, this approach acknowledges the structural dynamics of displacement and attempts to preserve community continuity and stability.
The County’s declaration represents an important conceptual shift. By framing housing instability as a public health issue, it opens the door for policy alignment across sectors and prioritizes prevention-oriented strategies essential to individual and community health.
Asha Wasuge is a policy advocate focused on housing insecurity and health equity, working in the service of unhoused and at-risk populations. She is also an OpEd Project Ambassador.
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