Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Felon voting on the line in Kentucky governor's race

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin says restoring voting rights requires amending the state constitution. His challenger, state Attorney General Andy Bashear, promises to do so by executive order.

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

For advocates of restoring voting rights to felons, nothing on the ballot next week is more important than the tossup race for governor of Kentucky.

The Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Andy Beshear, has used the closing days of the campaign to emphasize his promise to flex the governor's executive muscle to restore the franchise to about 5 percent the state's population — about 140,000 people out of prison after serving time for nonviolent crimes.

The Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin, says that would be an abuse of the governor's powers and that the only way to restore criminals' voting rights is by amending the state constitution, but he has declined to commit himself to pushing that cumbersome process if he wins a second term.

Kentucky and Iowa are the only states that permanently disenfranchise all felons unless the governor grants a reprieve. Bevin has done so in about 1,200 cases. But that is a tiny fraction of the 240,000 people who have completed their sentences but may not vote.


One-quarter of them are African-American, the biggest share of disenfranchised black people in any state according to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Virginia's law is almost as strict as Kentucky's but its current and previous governors, Democrats Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe, respectively, acted unilaterally to broadly restore voting rights. The result has been a boost in turnout that has benefitted the Democrats' resurgence in the state. A similar move seems unlikely to turn Kentucky blue, but it could make the state somewhat more purple.

Beshear's campaign promise is an echo of the executive order issued by his father, the state's last Democratic governor, just before he left office at the end of 2015. Burt Steve Beshear's decision was reversed by Bevin just weeks later.

The governor has declined to say what he would do if he wins a second term and the solidly Republican Legislature musters the required 60 percent supermajority for putting a constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot. Such a bill is likely to get votes in Frankfort next year but passage is considered a decided longshot.

And Beshear has not specified how he would define a "nonviolent" offender or when he would judge that person's sentence as having been complete.

In the interim, a lawsuit by the Fair Elections Center and the Kentucky Equal Justice Center argues the state's system for putting voting rights restoration in the hands of the governor is unconstitutionally arbitrary.

The conventional view is that the restoration of felons' voting rights is on the rise, especially since the historic referendum in Florida last year promised to get as much as 1.7 million ex-convicts back to the voting booth. But, in fact, the roster of states that have enacted tougher felon disenfranchisement laws is much greater. In the two decades ending in 2016, the number of people who were unable to vote because of felony convictions grew 85 percent, to 6.1 million, according to the Sentencing Project.

Read More

Houses with price tags
retrorocket/Getty Images

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. 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 housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

Yes.

The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

Keep ReadingShow less
I Voted stickers
BackyardProduction/Getty Images

Voters cast ballots based on personal perceptions, not policy stances

The Fulcrum and the data analytics firm Fidelum Partners have just completed a nationally representative study assessing the voting intentions of U.S adults and their perceptions toward 18 well-known celebrities and politicians.

Fidelum conducted similar celebrity and politician election studies just prior to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Each of these found that perceptions of warmth, competence and admiration regarding the candidates are highly predictive of voting intentions and election outcomes. Given this, The Fulcrum and Fidelum decided to partner on a 2024 celebrity and politician election study to build upon the findings of prior research.

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand waving an American flag

"Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being," writes Johnson.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

Redefining America's political lingua franca

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino attendees of the Democratic National Convention

People cheer for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats

As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.

Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.

Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”

Keep ReadingShow less