Debilyn Molineaux, CEO/president of Bridge Alliance and co-publisher of The Fulcrum, hosted a conversation about the desire for electoral reforms and cross-partisan support for legislation, two ideals that are seemingly in conflict with the For the People Act.
Watch part one of the conversation.
The 50: Connecticut
The 50 is a four-year multimedia project in which the Fulcrum visits different communities across all 50 states to learn what motivated them to vote in the 2024 presidential election and see how the Donald Trump administration is meeting those concerns and hopes.
Hartford, Connecticut, stands as a living testament to American democracy, ingenuity, and resilience. As the state’s capital, it’s home to cultural landmarks like the Mark Twain House & Museum, where Twain penned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, embodying the spirit of self-governance and creative daring that defines the region.
Connecticut, like much of New England, remains a stronghold of the Democratic Party.
In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris carried the state by a comfortable margin of 14.5 points—though her performance trailed Joe Biden’s 2020 showing. Meanwhile, Donald Trump garnered 41.9% of the vote, marking the strongest Republican turnout in Connecticut since 2004.
With more than 350,000 small businesses anchoring the state’s economy and employing nearly half its workforce, the stakes were high. The contrast in economic and regulatory visions between the candidates resonated deeply across sectors—from manufacturing and health care to floral wholesalers.
The Constitution State is a national leader in advanced manufacturing, particularly in aerospace and defense—a sector that has seen gains during the Trump administration.
Manufacturing companies in Connecticut employ more than 157-thousand people. Made in America excites Catherine Marx, District Director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Connecticut District Office: We're excited about the manufacturing push. Manufacturing comes, especially in Connecticut, in so many sizes. We have a whole ecosystem of small businesses that supply those businesses (large companies).
- YouTube youtu.be
Connecticut’s small business ecosystem is rich with contributors to global commerce—including floral wholesalers who import cut flowers and help sustain the international supply chain. Among these understated players are distributors who rely on steady shipments from Colombia. This country supplied approximately $1.6 billion worth of cut flowers and buds to the United States in 2024, accounting for nearly 60% of the U.S.'s total floral imports.
At the heart of this trade is Flores El Capiro, a leading exporter based in the eastern highlands of Antioquia, Colombia. From its floral farms in La Ceja, the company cultivates and ships millions of chrysanthemums each year, maintaining a year-round supply of fresh-cut blooms to wholesalers and retailers across the U.S.—including Connecticut.
This transnational rhythm, from high-altitude planting to refrigerated maritime transport, underscores the delicate choreography behind every bouquet that reaches American storefronts.
The floral industry faced a near-crisis this year when the Trump administration announced plans to impose a 25% tariff on Colombian imports—including cut flowers—as leverage in a diplomatic standoff over deportation flights. The move threatened to disrupt a booming season for U.S. wholesalers and retailers who rely heavily on Colombian blooms.
“I don’t see any benefits whatsoever from tariffs, when it comes to flowers,” said Guillermo Herrera, a floral industry consultant to small businesses in central Connecticut. “Our industry is based on an impulse purchase. Anything that affects an increase in the price of the product will affect consumption. Small companies like us don’t have the financial reserves to pay for all these tariffs ahead of time because customers will pay us 30, 40, 60 days from the day we deliver the product.”
Tensions eased only after Colombia agreed to resume accepting deportees, prompting the administration to shelve the tariff orders—for now. The episode underscored just how vulnerable global supply chains can be to geopolitical flashpoints, even in industries rooted in beauty and celebration.
Tariffs increase the cost of imported goods, forcing many small businesses in Connecticut to either absorb the losses or pass them on to consumers, thereby threatening their competitiveness and long-term viability.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is also the publisher of the Latino News Network.
The Third Way has recently released a memo stating that the “stampede away from the Democratic Party” is partly a result of the language and rhetoric it uses.
More than fifty years ago, comedian George Carlin delivered a monologue entitled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” It was a tribute to the legendary Lenny Bruce, whose “nine dirty words” performance led to his arrest and his banning from many places.
His seven words were “p—, f—, c—, c———, m———–, and t—.”
Like Bruce, Carlin’s language was thrilling to counterculture aficionados but off-putting to millions of Americans who found it offensive. The Supreme Court sided with the latter group, finding what Carlin said as “’vulgar,’ ‘offensive,’ and ‘shocking.’"
Last week, the issue of language made a return, this time in the world of politics, not entertainment. On August 22, The Third Way, which describes itself as “a national think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” put out a memo warning Democrats and their allies not to use a list of forty-four progressive buzz words.
They highlighted many more words than those on Bruce’s or Carlin’s list. While some may engage in George Carlin-style mocking of the Third Way’s list or call its effort the policing of language, I call it good advice.
While the problems of the Democratic Party go well beyond its embrace of progressive buzz words, it cannot recover its standing with the American people unless it changes the way it talks to them.
Let me say a word about those problems.
Bad news for Democrats is coming in waves. It is coming at a time when the future of democracy in this country requires that they show toughness, inventiveness, and an ability to mobilize the American people.
The bad news for Democrats is thus also bad news for democracy.
Among the wave of that bad news, a few things stand out. Across the country, Democratic Party registration is declining. In addition, the party has less room for maneuver in the ongoing gerrymandering battles than the Republican Party does. Moreover, while the cast of leading Democratic political figures may be able to galvanize the base, they are not all that popular among all voters.
Indeed, the popularity of the party itself is at a historic low.
As Politico reports, a national survey done in July “found Democrats’ popularity at its lowest point in three decades…with 63 percent of voters holding an unfavorable view of the party.” On the other hand, “Only 33 percent of voters hold a favorable view of Democrats, with a meager 8 percent holding a ‘very favorable’ opinion, for a net negative favorability of 30 percentage points.”
That is 19% below the GOP’s favorability rating.
Favorability ratings are snapshots of public sentiment at one point in time, but scholars have found that “favorability ratings as of Election Day predict the party's margin in the U.S. House popular vote to within 2 percentage points.”
It turns out that disaffection with Democrats grows as you move further left on the political spectrum. “About 20% of the Democrats who call themselves ‘very liberal’ have an unfavorable view of the party. That compares to just 8% of ‘very conservative’ Republicans who view the GOP negatively.”
This fact illustrates part of the Democrats' dilemma. Their most liberal voters don’t like what the party is doing. In contrast, the most ideologically extreme Republicans are much more satisfied with their party.
But that too is also a dilemma for democracy. It encourages GOP leaders to keep doing what they are doing, even if it erodes the fabric of the American political system.
One of the things the GOP is doing is trying to ensure that Democrats don’t have a fair shot at taking back the House of Representatives next year. They know that, as unpopular as the Democratic Party is now, the president and his policies are even more unpopular.
That is why gerrymandering is so attractive to the Republicans. This year, they have more places where they can gain an advantage through gerrymandering than the Democrats do.
Republicans have already shown themselves adept at using redistricting to their advantage. According to the Brennan Center, in 2024, Republicans gained “an advantage of around 16 House seats in the…race to control Congress,” compared to what the result would have been using fair maps.
Another problem facing the Democrats is that many of their leading politicians suffer from a “the more they know you, the less they like you” problem. Take Minnesota Governor and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. 84% of voters know who he is, but only 40% say they like him.
Pete Buttigieg’s numbers are 78% and 37%. And California Governor Gavin Newsom is known by 75% of the voters, but only 32% say they like him.
In Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s case, 76% know her, but only 36% have a favorable view of her.
And if that wasn’t enough, on August 20, The New York Times broke the news that in the “30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections—and often by a lot. That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.”
The Third Way thinks that the “stampede away from the Democratic Party” is in large part a result of the language it uses and the rhetoric that has come to dominate in Democratic circles. As its memo explains, “Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace.”
Examples include “birthing person,” “the unhoused,” “cisgender,” and “justice-involved” person.
“The effect of this language,” The Third Way argues, “is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty, and arrogant.”
So-called “plain, authentic language that voters understand often rebounds badly among many activists and advocacy organizations. These activists and advocates may take on noble causes, but in doing so, they often demand compliance with their preferred messages; that is how ‘birthing person’ became a stand-in for mother or mom.”
Recall what I said about the dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party among its far-left voters. If the party heeds the Third Way’s advice and changes its rhetoric, it runs the risk of alienating even more of them.
If it does not, it will give even more grist for Fox News and the world of right-wing podcasters for whom making fun of these words fills their programming. As the Third Way puts it, “The eggshell dance of political correctness…leaves the people we aim to reach cold or fearful of admonishment.”
The result, as one of the people who conducted the survey discussed in Politico noted, is that “the Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party.”
That is very bad news for American democracy since so many of the president’s policies reflect his view that America’s future rests in his hands and his hands alone. If democracy is to survive, the Democrats must be able to be credible critics.
As the Third Way rightly observes, to preserve democracy and resist the policies that erode it, “the most important thing we can do…is to build a bigger army…. Communicating in authentic ways that welcome rather than drive voters away would be a good start.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
Last week, the ultraconservative news outlet, NewsMax, reached a $73 million settlement with the voting machine company, Dominion, in essence, admitting that they lied in their reporting about the use of their voting machines to “rig” or distort the 2020 presidential election. Not exactly shocking news, since five years later, there is no credible evidence to suggest any malfeasance regarding the 2020 election. To viewers of conservative media, such as Fox News, this might have shaken a fully embraced conspiracy theory. Except it didn’t, because those viewers haven’t seen it.
Many people have a hard time understanding why Trump enjoys so much support, given his outrageous statements and damaging public policy pursuits. Part of the answer is due to Fox News’ apparent censoring of stories that might be deemed negative to Trump. During the past five years, I’ve tracked dozens of examples of news stories that cast Donald Trump in a negative light, including statements by Trump himself, which would make a rational person cringe. Yet, Fox News has methodically censored these stories, only conveying rosy news that draws its top ratings.
The genesis for this project was a remarkable event in October of 2021. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had recently died. Accolades for this great statesman poured in from around the globe…except from Donald Trump, who released a statement on Powell’s death. “Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!” The crassness of the message was a stretch even for Trump. I reviewed FoxNews.com to see how they would cover it. Nothing. It appears that producers felt that Trump’s statement was so personally humiliating that they chose to hide it from their viewers.
This incident led me to launch this ongoing project over the last few years. When a story ran in a mainstream media outlet that portrayed Trump in a negative light, I would search FoxNews.com for a few days to determine if the outlet ran the story.
Here is a smattering of examples of stories that Fox News viewers never saw.
Twisting Public Policy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that more than seven to 11 million Americans will lose health care coverage due to Medicaid cuts in Trump’s tax and spending bill, signed into law this year. However, Fox News didn’t cover any of the CBO estimates. Similarly, the bill’s cut to low-income Americans’ food assistance, which is estimated to drop two million people from government aid, was also not covered by Fox News.
Holiday Messages. Throughout the year, on holidays that are considered solemn to most Americans, Trump sullies the events with nastygrams, usually attacking perceived opponents. For Memorial Day 2024, he used the occasion to attack the judge who was overseeing the E. Jean Carroll defamation and battery case brought against him. He wrote: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for ‘DEFAMATION.’” Earlier this year, his Easter message was similarly vindictive. “Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.”
Other Weird Stuff. And then there’s the category that just doesn’t fit anywhere. For example, during a 2024 campaign rally, Trump claimed that Kamala Harris and the Democrats “want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings.” Similarly, Trump was irate that during his inauguration, flags in Washington, D.C., would remain at half-staff in honor of the recent death of former President Jimmy Carter—an outburst Fox News chose to ignore.
Thomas Jefferson said, “The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." In this case, the falsehood that Fox News is perpetrating on its viewers is that Trump is a rational politician, devoid of error and irrational rage. One must wonder whether his base would be so loyal if the real Donald Trump were portrayed in all his ugly glory.
Bradford Fitch is a former Capitol Hill staffer, former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, and author of “Citizens’ Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials.”
The age of AI warrants asking if the means still further the ends—specifically, individual liberty and collective prosperity.
If the means justify the ends, we’d still be operating under the Articles of Confederation. The Founders understood that the means—the governmental structure itself—must always serve the ends of liberty and prosperity. When the means no longer served those ends, they experimented with yet another design for their government—they did expect it to be the last.
The age of AI warrants asking if the means still further the ends—specifically, individual liberty and collective prosperity. Both of those goals were top of mind for early Americans. They demanded the Bill of Rights to protect the former, and they identified the latter—namely, the general welfare—as the animating purpose for the government. Both of those goals are being challenged by constitutional doctrines that do not align with AI development or even undermine it. A full review of those doctrines could fill a book (and perhaps one day it will). For now, however, I’m just going to raise two.
The first is the extraterritoriality principle. You’ve likely never heard of it, but it’s a core part of our federal system: one state can’t govern another; its legal authority ends at its borders. States across the ideological spectrum are weighing laws that would significantly alter the behaviors and capabilities of frontier models. While well-intentioned, many of these laws threaten to project legislation (and values) from one state into another. Muddled Supreme Court case law on this topic means that we’re unsure how exactly extraterritoriality concerns map on to the rush to regulate AI—that uncertainty is a problem.
Unclear laws hinder innovation, which is a driver of the general welfare. As things stand, the absence of a bright line as to when state authority to regulate AI begins and ends has invited state legislatures around the country to seemingly compete on which can devise the most comprehensive bill. If and when these bills find their way into law, you can bet your bottom dollar that litigation will follow.
Courts are unlikely to identify the aforementioned line. In the short run, as indicated by conflicting judicial decisions around the fair use doctrine and AI training data, they will likely develop distinct and perhaps even contradictory tests. The long run isn’t even worth considering. The regulatory uncertainty that results from even a few laws with extraterritorial effects may keep that would-be innovator from going all-in on their new idea or give pause to an investor thinking about doubling down on a startup. Those small decisions add up. The aggregate is lost innovation and, by extension, lost prosperity.
What’s more, one state effectively imposing its views on others runs afoul of individual liberty concerns. Extraterritoriality is one part of the Constitution’s call for horizontal federalism, which demands equality among the states and prohibits them from discriminating against non-residents, in most cases. When this key structural element is eroded, it diminishes one of the main ways the Founders sought to protect Americans from once again living under the thumb of a foreign power.
The second is the right to privacy. While you won’t find such a right in the Constitution. It has instead been discovered in the “penumbra” of other provisions. This general, vague right has given rise to a broader set of privacy laws and norms that generally equate privacy with restraints on data sharing. At a high-level, this approach to privacy results in siloed datasets that may contain data in different forms and at various levels of detail. In many contexts, this furthers individual liberty by reducing the odds of bad actors gaining access to sensitive information. Now, however, the aggregation of vast troves of high-quality data carries the potential to develop incredibly sophisticated AI tools. Without such data, then some of the most promising uses of AI, such as in medicine and education, may never come about. Concern for the general welfare, then, puts significant strain on an approach to privacy that decreases access to data.
Reexamining and clarifying these doctrines is overdue. It’s also just a fraction of the work that needs to be done to ensure that individual liberty and the general welfare are pursued and realized in this turbulent period.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
