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Webinar rewind: Preparing for potential election crises

A pandemic. Battles over millions of mailed-in ballots. The Supreme Court deciding an Electoral College dispute. The accelerated undoing of democratic norms. Dozens of legal battles over election administration and voting rights. Each would be enough to create unprecedented challenges to an election. But all are present this year, positioning Election Day 2020 and the days after to face challenges rarely as intense before. As Nov. 3 approaches, voters, government officials, candidates and the media may become overwhelmed by the many storylines, the shifting landscape and the potential outcomes. Preparation needs to start now.

The Fulcrum convened an expert panel to discuss these issues and more on June 9. Editor-in-Chief David Hawkings moderated the webinar, which also included:


  • Bryan Monroe, associate professor of practice at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. Before joining Temple, Bryan was editor of CNNPolitics and Washington opinion editor for CNN; president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and editor-in-chief of Ebony & Jet magazines.
  • Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center. Trevor is a past chairman of the Federal Election Commission and was general counsel to John McCain's 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

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A Baseball Team Caught Between Two Countries — a Visa Shift and a Shutdown

The Tucson baseball team playing against the Águilas de Mexicali in the border city of Mexicali. Photo courtesy of the Tucson baseball team

A Baseball Team Caught Between Two Countries — a Visa Shift and a Shutdown

NOGALES, SONORA, MEXICO — What was meant to be a historic first for America’s pastime — a Mexican Pacific League baseball franchise anchored north of the border — has become a bureaucratic curveball.

The newly relocated Tucson, Arizona, baseball team — formerly the Mayos de Navojoa from Sonora, Mexico — has yet to fulfill a long-held dream shared by fans on both sides of the border: bringing professional Mexican winter baseball to U.S. soil.

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America’s Tariff Mirage and the Coming Debt Reckoning

Record tariff revenues mask a deepening U.S. fiscal crisis as deficits, debt, and interest costs soar, raising alarms about economic stability and governance.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

America’s Tariff Mirage and the Coming Debt Reckoning

The latest fiscal disclosures from the US Treasury offer a stark reality check for a country that continues to see itself as the global lodestar of economic stability. Tariffs, once an auxiliary tool of industrial policy or bargaining chip in trade negotiations, have quietly morphed into the financial backbone of the Trump administration’s economic experiment. October’s revenue haul - an unprecedented thirty-four point two billion dollars, up more than threefold from a year earlier - has been heralded by the White House as vindication. It is, according to President Trump, not merely proof that tariffs are “working,” but a testament to a new era of American prosperity robust enough to fund direct cash transfers to households. A two-thousand-dollar bonus, he insists, is just the beginning.

The president has taken to social media to cast opponents of this approach as out-of-touch elites, blind to a transformed landscape in which the United States is, in his words, “the richest and most respected country in the world.” Record stock prices, swollen retirement accounts, and subdued inflation are deployed to sustain an alluring political narrative: that tariffs are no longer punitive, but emancipatory - a fiscal engine capable of generating national renewal.

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Mamdani’s Choice

New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference on December 12, 2025, in New York City.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Mamdani’s Choice

I obviously can’t say with certainty what kind of private advice President Barack Obama, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and other DNC establishment consultants may have given New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani during the campaign or in the days after his victory, but I can make an educated guess.

My guess is that they counseled him to subside a bit with the tumult, recede in the background, quietly focus heads-down on delivering something “concrete” (and do it fast) by working with the people who hold power, including the governor, his two senators, the congressional delegation, and especially Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

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