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A woman evacuating from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in August looks out from a train car to say goodbye.
Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
On Ageism Awareness Day, consider the impact of war on older people.
Oct 08, 2024
Kilaberia is an assistant professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
We know the toll that war has on youth, but older adults are suffering displacement, too.
We have talked about age-friendly cities, age-friendly health care systems, age-friendly universities, age-friendly workplaces dementia-friendly communities. We are not talking about age-friendly or dementia-friendly humanitarian responses.
Tomorrow is Ageism Awareness Day and it offers us the opportunity to draw attention to the impact of ageism, particularly in the many war zones around the world.
The United Nations and its partners set up play centers for children transitioning from place to place while fleeing Ukraine, for respite and a little joy. Volunteers left baby carriages, prams and strollers for fleeing Ukrainian mothers at the border. But I did not come across news about a respite center for older people fleeing. Or volunteers leaving walkers, canes and wheelchairs for older refugees at the border — at least not as ubiquitously as for youth.
Before Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, there were Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And other wars before that. In all of them, older people were displaced.
Larissa Andreeva, 76, fled Ukraine with her family but then got separated, ending up in a village in Moldova. From there, she was forced to move to a transitional refugee shelter in the capital. Alone and isolated, she did not always share a language with other refugees who came and went. After seeking permission from the shelter director, Andreeva cordoned off her bed with fabric dividers for some “privacy” as weeks turned into months and months into one and a half years during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Dementia did not make things easier: One day, Andreeva walked out of the refugee shelter, got lost and was not able to say who she was or where she lived when asked. She was safely brought back and did not dare venture out again. Then the refugee shelter closed. She was moved to what seemed like a group home. Younger residents there shunned her because she was old and confused.
In 2024, a family friend helped her relocate to Georgia (the country) where her own family, temporarily living in the Czech Republic, was able to place her in a nursing home. Andreeva had already been an internally displaced person in Georgia three decades prior, suffering bodily harm and lifelong health consequences.
Risks from displacement can be cumulative. Older people in the United States have shared that they feel invisible in stores, restaurants, theaters and elsewhere in peacetime. Public health professionals may recall the decision-making around catastrophe medicine in Italy during the pandemic that prioritizes saving younger people over older people based on limited resources. Ageism is potent in its power to obscure the intersectionality of old age and refugeehood in wartime.
Forced displacement increases risk of abuse and neglect, especially of older women, persons with disabilities and older LGBTI persons, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
A cab driver taking Andreeva to the refugee shelter overcharged her manyfold, and what she had in her purse was all that she had in the world. She worked as a yard hand in the Moldovan village where she was first sheltered to earn her keep. Nobody may have made physical labor an explicit condition of her stay, but nobody told her she did not need to work.
I am not old, but I lived in a retirement community as a young person, and learned about older people directly from them. I am safe now, but I was displaced in an armed conflict in Georgia and suffered the loss of family and friends who were murdered. I not only grew up with displaced older people, I’ve worked with older refugees in a refugee resettlement program. I have focused on age-friendly health systems and elder mistreatment in my work.
Somehow, the neglect of older refugees seems flagrantly age-unfriendly, and translates to elder abuse, except there is no clear agent perpetrating the abuse. It’s the war. It’s the politicians and their decision-making. It’s the separation from the family. It’s the refugee shelter that closed.
Older refugees with dementia and other health issues are no less vulnerable than children. As women’s rights advocate and social worker Ollie Randall noted six decades ago, “old persons in need of help are not apt to be naturally appealing, as is a helpless child … In the field of social action, we have tended to place our hopes—and our dollars—on youth.”
People 65 or older are expected to rise to 17 percent of the world population by 2050. Given internal and cross-border displacements in past, ongoing and likely future regional wars, older refugees should be everyone’s concern.
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"Women's rights are super important to me because women raised me. Women brought me into this world,” said Rico Cortez, with his mother, Rebececca Guerrero.
Courtesy Rico Cortez
Latino families in Nevada are a deciding factor this election cycle
Oct 07, 2024
Couraud is a bilingual multimedia journalist.
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 installment, we explore the motivations of over 36 million eligible Latino voters as they prepare to make their voices heard in November.
According to the NALEO Education Fund,Latinos make up 28 percent of Nevada's population, and one in every five registered voters in the state is Latino. With Nevada being a crucial swing state in November's election, the Latino vote has become increasingly important.
Although Nevada has a sitting U.S. senator who is Latina (Catherine Cortez-Masto), Latino political representation still lags. This could explain why some Latino voters feel discouraged or why — despite such high population numbers — Latino voter turnout is lower than that of other demographics in the state.
A study by the Pew Research Center found that 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2024, up 4 million from the 2020 election. This makes Latino voters one of the most critical voting blocs, leading both Democrats and Republicans to ramp up their efforts to tap into such potential support. In Nevada, Latinos are projected to be crucial in both the presidential race and the contest for the state’s other Senate seat, pitting incumbent Jacky Rosen (D) and against Republican Sam Brown. Ads from both parties populate platforms like YouTube — one of the three most used apps by Hispanics — trying to win over the Latino voter bloc.
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What these ads, as well as the political machine, seem to miss is that Latinos are not a monolithic group. This can lead politicians to miss out on the many different factors that shape Latino identities. Voter tendencies can vary significantly between different Latino groups — and even within Latino families.
A multigenerational perspective
Rico Cortez is a Mexican American living in northern Nevada. He was raised by a single mother, Rebecca Guerrero, and his Latino roots, along with growing up with a strong matriarch, have shaped his political views. “Women's rights are super important to me because women raised me. Women brought me into this world,” Cortez stated.
Latinos tend to put a larger emphasis on family than that of non-Hispanics. According to the Pew Research Center,84 percent of Latinos believe that family members are more important than friends. Cortez moved back to northern Nevada five years ago to care for his aging mother because his connection to his family is so important.
Rebecca Guerrero was born in Verdi, Nev., in 1929, making her 95 years old. Despite her age, she is still civically engaged and has consistently voted throughout her lifetime. For her, it was important to pass on this civic duty to her children. Her political identity has shaped Cortez, and today, both Guerrero and Cortez represent a unique part of the Latino vote in Nevada.
As a young mother, Guerrero struggled with the cost of living in Nevada. “Well, it was no picnic. It was rough because the man that I was married to didn't care too much. And we had to go on welfare to get my kids what they needed,” she remembers. Rising rent prices, inflation and increasing the minimum wage have become increasingly important to Guerrero and her family.
This falls in line with the priorities of other Latino in Nevada. In the state with the largest Latino middle class, the cost of living is one of the most significant issues for many Latino voters. Eighty-four percent of Latinos in Nevada agree that it is difficult for middle-class families to prosper in the United States. Republicans — like GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo — have capitalized on this by touting their ability to do things like loosen requirements for business licenses in the state and tighten immigration laws to save jobs.
Immigration is another critical issue for Latinos in Nevada, and Guerrero has her own immigration story. At 10 years old, she had to leave her dying grandfather in Durango, Mexico, to travel to live with her aunts in California. Leaving him behind was hard for her., “I had to kneel and have my grandfather do the sign of the cross and bless me. Then I crossed, he stayed on that side, and I came to this side,” she says.
While some Republicans have used immigration as a selling point to Latino voters, the Trump campaign has pushed anti-immigration rhetoric and massive amounts of disinformation, leaving some voters, like Guerrero, upset; when asked about Trump, she stated, “If you don't have a good president, well, everything goes to pot. If we get Trump, well, Trump is an asswipe.”
According to aUnivision poll, Latino voters in Nevada favor Kamala Harris by 18 points. While both Guerrero and Cortez will be voting for Harris in November, 41 percent of Latino voters are undecided. Issues like abortion and border security are making some lean toward the former president.
Abortion is one of the most significant issues for Cortez in this election cycle. He sees reproductive rights as an essential part of supporting women, “I’ve just always been an advocate for women. I don't want to see my little nieces having to fight for things that my mother already fought for.”
For Guerrero, abortion has been a bit of a gray area. She comes from a strong Catholic background. Catholic doctrine opposes abortion. And withCatholicism being the largestfaith amongst Latinos, it can sway values and belief systems. While Guerrero is still very religious, time and conversations with her son eventually led her to support a woman's right to choose. Cortez and Guerrero are among the 44 percent of Nevadan Latinos who say they will vote “yes” on a ballot measure that would establish the right to abortion in the Nevadan Constitution.
The issue of abortion reflects how Latino viewpoints can differ significantly depending on factors such as age, religion and party affiliation. While the Latino vote will be crucial in Nevada and across the nation in November, it is not monolithic, and many different cultures and life experiences shape the identities and values of Latinos in the Silver State.
Regardless of the differences, Cortez is proud to be Latino and is excited to see how important the Latino vote has become in Nevada. He celebrates the sense of community he feels being Mexican American: “I love that sense of community. I think we have a strong sense of community, and we care for each other and look after each other.”
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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Liz Michalkiewicz was 29 when she voted in Milwaukee in 2022. Wisconsin is among the states where voters under age 30 can have the biggest impact this year.
Sara Stathas for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Where young voters can have the greatest impact in 2024
Oct 07, 2024
Meyers is executive editor of The Fulcrum.
It’s common knowledge among the politically engaged that the presidential election is going to come down to a handful of states. The same goes for control of the Senate, while just a couple dozen districts will determine which party wins a majority in the House of Representatives.
But which voters will decide the winner in each of those states and districts? While there may not be one, across-the-board answer, researchers at Tufts University have identified the places where young voters (ages 18-29) can have the most influence on electoral outcomes this year.
“Young people can be decisive in states that decide the election,” Kelly Siegel-Stechler, a senior researcher for the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts’ Tisch College, said during a recent briefing. “Youth can have an impact across the country, from Maine to Alaska, and really have the potential to shape politics.”
According to CIRCLE’s research, 57 percent of people ages 18-34 said they are “extremely likely” to vote this year, and they are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates (+21 points).
CIRCLE’s Youth Electoral Significance Index is designed to help campaigns and other organizations identify where to expend resources to drive voter turnout and civic engagement among young adults.
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Young voters set a high benchmark for in 2020, when 50 percent of people 18-29 cast a ballot, according to CIRCLE. Estimates for 2022 show that 23 percent participated in the midterm elections, 5 points below the highwater mark set in 2018.
“They want to vote and they want to effect change,” said Alberto Medina, CIRCLE’s communications team lead.
He explained that the top issues for young voters are: the cost of living and inflation, jobs that pay a living wage, addressing climate change, preventing gun violence and expanding abortion access.
“If you understand their concerns … that can be a really positive first step,” Medina said.
So, where can young voters have the biggest impact? CIRCLE looked at voter registration and past turnout data, demographic and socioeconomic information, and electoral competition.
Presidential election
Not surprisingly, all seven of the presidential swing states are in the top 10 of where young voters can have the most influence, including the top five spots.
Young voters can have the most influence on the presidential election in Michigan, where Vice President Kamala Harris holds a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump. According to CIRCLE, Michigan had the highest turnout among youth voters in 2022 (36 percent) and is among the leaders in youth voter registration. In addition, young voters in Michigan often support different candidates than older voters, so if they come out in droves they could swing the results.
Wisconsin is second on the list, based more on potential than past turnout data, compared to other states. Wisconsin was decided by about 20,000 votes in 2020, and Harris had a very narrow lead heading into October. But Wisconsin has a low rate of youth voter registration, and turnout data was not available.
With same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting (meaning voters can request a mail-in ballot for any reason), there’s potential for youth participation to surge by election day. In a state where, like Michigan, young voters have a tendency to support different candidates than older voters, that could make a big difference.
Young voters can have the third biggest impact in Pennsylvania, according to CIRCLE, where they turned out at the sixth highest rate in 2020. The state makes it far easier to vote than many others by offering tools like automatic and online voter registration as well no-excuse absentee voting. But, the researchers note, Pennsylvania does not have as many nonprofits focused on voter education and engagements as other states. President Joe Biden won the state by 1.2 percentage points in 2020, and Harris leads by about half a percentage point right now.
Rounding out the top 10: Arizona, Nevada, Minnesota, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Virginia.
Senate elections
While Trump leads by more than 15 points in Montana, the Senate race between Sen. Jon Tester (D) and Tim Sheehy (R) is much closer. The state has a low rate of youth voter registration, but a high turnout rate (second highest among youth in 2018). So if young people take advantage of Montana’s same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting, the race could get even closer, placing it atop the list of states where young voters can influence Senate elections.
Similarly, the Senate race is much closer than the presidential contest in Ohio, where Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) leads Bernie Moreno (R) by 4 points in the latest poll. (Trump leads Harris by 9 points.) Ohio has a very high youth voter registration rate but just-below-average youth voter turnout. Voter participation may hinge on whether the campaigns and other organizations work hard to get young people to the polls.
Next on this list is Michigan, which leads the nation in youth voter registration (36 percent in 2022) and also has very high youth voter turnout. As CIRCLE notes, Michigan does more to make it easy to vote than most states, offering automatic and online voter registration, as well as same-day registration. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) is leading Rep. Mike Rogers (R) by about 5 points, but the presidential race is much tighter.
The rest of the top 10: Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Texas and Maine.
House elections
The open-seat race to replace Slotkin in Michigan’s 7th district, featuring Tom Barrett (R) faces Curtis Hertel Jr. (D), is among the 24 tossup House elections identified by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. According to CIRCLE, young adults make up a higher percentage of the population in the 7th compared to most congressional districts and, at 36 percent turnout in 2022, it had one of the highest participation rates for youth voters. Barrett leads by 7 points in a district that Slotkin (a Democrat) won by 5.4 points in 2022 and 3.6 points in 2020.
The Oregon 5th district has among the highest youth voter registration and turnout rates in the country (more than three-quarters are registered and 40 percent voted in 2022, according to CIRCLE), although they are a small share of the population. Oregon is among the states where it is easiest to vote. It mails ballots to every registered voter and offers numerous voter registration options. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R) has a two-point lead over Democrat Janelle Bynum. Chavez-DeDeremer won by 2.1 points in 2022 after the incumbent, Rep. Kurt Schrader), lost in the Democratic primary. That broke a Democratic stranglehold on the seat.
Oregon’s neighbor to the north also mails ballots to all registered voters and offers multiple voter registrations options, making it very easy for young, transient voters to participate. The tight race in Washington’s 3rd district is third on CIRCLE’s list of House races where young voters can have an impact. With above-average youth voter turnout and registration rates, under-30 voters may decide the race between Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D) and Joe Kent (R), where the incumbent leads by less than 5 points. She beat Kent when by less than 2,700 votes when they faced off in 2022.
The remainder of the top 10 House races: California 27th, Colorado 8th, Michigan 8th, New Jersey 7th, California 13th, Ohio 13th and California 47th.
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Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth more than $200 billion, shows off new wearabel tech at the Meta Connect developer conference in September.
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse
Oct 07, 2024
Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”
Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.
The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.
The problem is getting worse with time. According to Forbes magazine, “In 1987, the [world’s] 140 billionaires had an aggregate net worth of $295 billion.” But now, in 2024, there are “more billionaires than ever: 2,781 in all, 141 more than last year and 26 more than the record set in 2021. They’re richer than ever, worth $14.2 trillion in aggregate, up by $2 trillion from 2023 and $1.1 trillion above the previous record, also set in 2021.”
Forbes continued: “Much of the gains come from the top 20, who added a combined $700 billion in wealth since 2023, and from the U.S., which now boasts a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion.”
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What could that vast wealth do? Looking globally, Oxfam International recently explained that $1.7 trillion is “enough to lift two billion people out of poverty.” So just a fraction of the wealth of a small number of people could bring billions out of poverty.
The problem, though, isn’t just the top 0.1 percent. As Pew Research notes, America’s upper class is getting richer as its middle class is getting smaller: “The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”
America’s inequality, moreover, is markedly worse than other wealthy nations. The Gini coefficient is a common measure of a country’s inequality. It uses a scale of 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (complete inequality). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2017, “the Gini coefficient in the U.S. stood at 0.434.” This number “was higher than in any other of the G-7 countries, in which the Gini ranged from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK, and inching closer to the level of inequality observed in India (0.495).”
There are many reasons for this inequality. Among them: technological automation, inherited wealth, lax corporate regulation, liberal trade policies, outsourced labor, insufficient taxation and broken public schools. Some inequality, of course, is also driven by individual choice (people electing to spend time on less-lucrative activities) and work ethic (some people work more than others).
And, importantly, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with people getting rich. Some amount of inequality should even be encouraged. Hard work and ingenuity should be rewarded, as wealth must be created in order to be redistributed. And high-profile business successes motivate others to innovate and take risks that improve society at large.
But an excessive amount of inequality — see Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk — allows large-scale human suffering to go needlessly unaddressed. This isn't just unfair. As the International Monetary Fund explained, it has widespread societal consequences: “growing inequality breeds social resentment and generates political instability. It also fuels populist, protectionist, and anti-globalization sentiments.”
These problems aren't surprising or complicated. They’re obvious consequences of a deeply flawed economic system. The same nation simply shouldn’t have a few jackpot winners hoarding billions and, at the same time, tens of millions struggling to get by.
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Bloomberg Creative/Getty Images
Become an informed voter – it’s the best way to fight voter suppression
Oct 07, 2024
Harris is director of media engagement at Stand Up America.
This is National Voter Education Week, when activists and organizations across the country mobilize to educate voters on how to make their voices heard in November. This year, that mission is more important than ever. While voting rights advocates are hard at work helping voters find their polling location and voting options, learn what’s on their ballot, and make a plan for voting, MAGA politicians are ramping up efforts to make it more difficult to vote and even purging voter rolls in battleground states.
In MAGA-led states like Florida, Kansas, Missouri and Texas, voter outreach groups face legal barriers and steep fines designed to stifle their critical work. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that targets community-based organizations that help register voters of color, reducing the number of days these organizations have to submit voter registration applications while increasing fines for late submissions — up to $250,000 annually.
Data shows that the impacted groups “enrolled about 1.5 percent of all white registered voters between 2012 and 2023,” but they registered “roughly 10 percent of Black voters, 9 percent of Hispanic voters, and some 8 percent of voters who were members of other minority groups” — demographic groups that favor Democrats over Republicans. No wonder DeSantis wants to stop their work. Voter registration drives in the Sunshine State fell 95 percent in the months after the Florida law took effect in 2023, compared with the same months four years earlier.
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MAGA politicians have found other creative ways to keep some citizens out of the electoral process. Republican-led states are purging voter rolls of eligible voters just months ahead of the November election. In June, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list of over 150,000 inactive voters who were eligible to be removed from the state’s voter registration database. Over half of the voters at risk of being purged live in majority-minority counties. In North Carolina, Republicans sued to have 225,000 voters removed from the rolls after making baseless claims that the state was registering “noncitizens.” In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that his state had removed over 1 million people from its voter rolls since passing a package of anti-voting measures.
These purges and restrictive measures aren’t isolated incidents; they’re part of a nationwide strategy to silence minority voters, boost Republicans, and undermine free and fair elections.
Despite these challenges, we are not backing down. Across the country, groups are standing up to these tired Jim Crow tactics and ensuring citizens are familiar with new requirements. At Stand Up America, we’re using digital ads and texts to reach out to voters in states with the biggest gaps between the number of eligible voters and the number of voters who are actually registered. We’re also partnering with social media influencers and dozens of celebrities to help their fans and followers check their registration, learn what’s at stake in the election and make sure they’re ready to make their voices heard. We’ve registered nearly 100,000 voters since 2020 using these tactics.
We know that voters should choose their leaders — politicians shouldn’t get to choose their voters. The fight for voting rights in the midst of MAGA’s regressive vision for our country is a reminder of what National Voter Education Week is about — building a truly representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln once said, America is a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” We intend to keep it that way.
Not sure your voter status is up to date? Text CHECK to 63033 to find out. Or visit standupamerica.com to help get out the vote. Together we can protect democracy and make sure every eligible voice is heard in this year’s election.
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