The Nevada Assembly on Tuesday passed legislation allowing residents to register to vote on Election Day, as part of a broader measure that expands early voting and provides for online registration.
The sweeping reform package, Assembly Bill 345, now heads to the Senate, which – like the Assembly and governor's seat – is controlled by Democrats.
If adopted, Nevada would become the 17th state to allow voters to register and cast a ballot on Election Day.
Opdycke is the founder and president of Open Primaries, a national advocacy organization working to enact and protect open and nonpartisan primaries and enhance the visibility and power of independent voters. His monthly column, Brash Tacks,offers insights into how a people-powered, non-ideological democracy movement can be most effective in revamping our political process and culture to meet the needs of a complex and ever-changing 21st century landscape.
After the debate on June 27, it seems like the Democratic Party consultant class is starting to catch up with the American people on the question of whether President Joe Biden should run for reelection.
The concern has focused on his debate performance and his physical and mental capacities. But the American people — particularly independent voters who swung to Biden in 2020 — have been expressing a deeper concern for some time: “Hey, Joe, we voted for you to get Trump out of office and take a break from the drama. Your job was to stabilize things and then turn it over to the next generation. We don’t need you to be a transformational president. Are you listening to us?”
Independent voters, now 45 percent of the national electorate, broke for Biden by 14 points in 2020 after having backed Donald Trump by 4 points in 2016 — an 18 point swing. But independents didn't hand Biden the presidency to coronate him four years later. That’s not how independents think and it isn’t how they vote.
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Here’s the irony. The Democrats who are panicking are the same folks who made sure that Biden didn’t face a primary challenge. They drove Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong Democrat, out of the party and ridiculedDean Phillips, who had the guts to give up a promising political career to enter the presidential primary because he believed a Biden coronation would help Trump. For his troubles, Phillips was lambasted, kept off the ballot and driven out of Congress. The Democratic Party swaddled Biden in bubble wrap, demonized anyone suggesting that a competitive primary was a good thing and now are stuck with a presumptive nominee whose capacity to perform the basic duties of a presidential candidate is in question.
The 2024 Democratic presidential primary is Exhibit 1 in the case to change how we conduct primary elections. We the people pay for them. Our state election administrators conduct them. But small bands of partisans determine who is allowed to vote and who is allowed to run. This construct doesn’t work. It concentrates power in the hands of people who want less competition, not more. We need public primaries, not partisan primaries, to make sure the voice of the people is heard.
The Democratic Party believes Biden can win simply by pointing out that Donald Trump lies. But many Americans believe it’s all lies. Biden lies. Trump lies. Washington lies.Some lies are more polite than others, as Yasha Mounk points out. But it's all lies. Arizona State University’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy justcompleted a survey of 1,315 Gen Z voters in Arizona, half of whom are independents. Eighty percent of respondents said that both major parties are out of touch with people their age and that all politicians are corrupt. Democrats yelling “Trump doesn’t tell the truth” is not a strategy, it's a hail mary.
So once again(click here for part I), here is the post debate speech Biden could (but can’t and won’t) give:
Boy, I really screwed that up. I’ve forgotten how much energy it takes to run for president and debate at a high level. First, I need to acknowledge that most Americans voted for me in 2020 to vanquish Trump. I did that and I'm proud of that. I am also proud of the policies we pursued during and after the Covid crisis. But I forgot why you elected me — to be a bridge. Last year, I should have demanded that we have a vigorous primary. It was a mistake to protect me from the voters. We should have had a 10-candidate Democratic primary for president. But we didn’t. That’s my fault.
But we still have time. I’ve asked six polling firms to do a poll unlike any poll ever done. They are going to talk to 50,000 independent voters and 50,000 Democrats and ask them if they think I should bow out and use the convention to decide who our standard bearer should be. If the people prefer I step aside, I will release every delegate and every superdelegate pledged to me.
At the convention, let’s debate and audition candidates. Let’s make up for the fact that we didn’t have a primary. Let’s apologize to Congressman Phillips and then get down to work. Let’s improvise, debate and create a ticket that will inspire. It’s a short time frame but let’s have the discussion.
Biden could say that. But partisan politics is all he knows. And partisan politics is always about what’s good for the party, not good for the country.
Here’s the good news: Independent/reform politics is booming — it’s where the action is! Nonpartisan primaries and nonpartisan redistricting will be on the ballot in eight states this November. Voters in red states and blue are fed up with the parties running the process. The Democratic convention should vote to stop opposing and endorse each and every one of these reform campaigns. If democracy is on the ballot in 2024, as the Democrats say it is, then let's use the ballot to expand our democracy.
Expanding democracy is how we get out of this pickle.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden met for the first debate of 2024 last week.
Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
The fallout from President Biden's miserable debate last week is giving me deja vu.
In the political right's intramural arguments over Donald Trump, I got some things correct and some incorrect. But I believe I was indisputably right in one respect: From the outset, I argued that Trump's presidency would end badly because, to echo Heraclitus, character is destiny.
Trump's presidency did indeed end badly, though sadly his political career did not end with it. Whatever laws he may or may not have broken on Jan. 6, 2021, he spent a large chunk of the afternoon watching TV as violent hooligans stormed the Capitol on his behalf, trying to steal the election, chanting death threats and literally and figuratively defecating on the people's house. He was even impeached on his way out the door.
If I'd made a wager on my prediction, I surely would have collected my winnings that day.
You know what else is destiny? Age.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to make it to their golden years, but those who do inevitably lose the qualities of youth, mentally and physically. Some lose more than others, but everyone declines.
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Even Biden acknowledges that he is not immune to senescence. He just denies that it matters very much. And so does pretty much the entirety of the Democratic Party.
The rhetorical wagon-circling consists of a few interchangeable talking points. "Bad debate nights happen," Barack Obama declared. The Biden family "will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he's been president," first lady Jill Biden told Vogue. "We will continue to fight." The gist of all of this is that the president's performance last week was just a snapshot, an isolated incident.
That's all nonsense. Familiar nonsense. For years, whenever Donald Trump put his unfitness on display, his defenders would say it was a stray remark, a one-time event. You have to judge him in context. He's a good man. He's fighting for you.
In short, they would say all the things Biden's partisan Praetorian Guard is saying now.
But they were isolated events in the way that the frames of a film are when you look at them one at a time. Roll the film, and you see the man in action. Biden's bad 90 minutes weren't a one-off; they were an example of a long-standing problem that, disastrously, was televised for all of America to see.
The deja vu doesn't end there.
After he secured the nomination in 2016, Trump's defenders would respond to any denigration of the candidate, particularly in the wake of the "Access Hollywood" tape that caught him boasting about sexual assault, by saying, in effect, "What about Hillary?"
Anyone questioning Trump's fitness was accused of supporting Clinton. Today, any concerns about Biden's fitness are greeted with the same whataboutism with regard to Trump.
After Trump was elected and the "isolated incident" defense lost all plausibility, his defenders resorted to telling people not to believe their lying eyes. For years, Democrats and other Trump critics called this "gaslighting": trying to make people doubt their own perceptions rather than acknowledging that anything was amiss or untrue.
Now the foes of gaslighting have become the gaslighters.
It was Biden's idea to hold this debate. He set the date and the rules. He locked himself away in seclusion for a week to prepare. Why? Because the Biden campaign knew it needed to rebut the narrative that he was too old and diminished to do the job.
Instead, Biden confirmed it.
Defenders rightly note that Trump's performance was full of lies (though Biden wasn't exactly a paragon of truth). But Biden was utterly incapable of rebutting them.
When asked about abortion, his most potent issue, the president offered a word salad that ended with a garbled morass about how crime committed by illegal immigrants isn't a big deal because American women are getting raped all the time, including by their sisters. In response to Trump's ridiculous diatribe about the national debt, Biden rhetorically meandered into declaring, "We finally beat Medicare."
Old age is different from bad character. But the similarities here are more important than the differences.
If you believe Biden is the best possible choice to defeat Trump, make that argument. If you think a man who is "dependably engaged" only between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., as Axios reported, can do the job for the next six months -- never mind for another four years -- make that argument.
But spare me the talk about Biden's legacy, one bad night and "Whatabout Trump?" The only relevant questions are "Can he do the job?" and, in a very distant second place, "Can he win?"
(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
Coming together in shared purpose and mutual celebration is decidedly cheugy (meaning “uncool”… for those of us who are). Americans can hardly agree that 2+2=4 or that Taylor Swift is somewhat popular at the moment. To put it mildly, we are struggling to find common ground.
We have two years to get our act together. America’s semiquincentennial — it’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026 — is a very big deal. It’s a time for rejoicing. The record of successful republics that have lasted this long is tragically short. Rome has a legitimate claim as history’s most eminent republic, but the United States, warts and all, is fast approaching GOAT status. That’s what makes our polarized, severely divided, deeply fissured present moment so dispiriting. We’re better than this, people.
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There is much to cheer about America’s unique story, just as there is much to jeer. Our commitment to the rule of law and to the power of an enduring written Constitution is inimitable. Our dedication to the principle of “unalienable rights,” the power of popular sovereignty, individualism, free will and so much more is unmatched in human history. By most measures, America is closer to “a more perfect union” today than at any other time in its long history.
Of course, the country and its people have a lot to be ashamed about, and we are still not a perfect union by any stretch. Economic disparities, bigotry, intolerance, inefficiency, corruption and the like still painfully afflict. Equality remains our most elusive aspiration. Opportunity vacillates based on the color of one’s skin, one’s gender identity, one’s socioeconomic status, one’s sexual orientation. The list is long. The trick, post-Jan. 6, is whether we can celebrate revolution without descending into it. Indeed, few have articulated the nation’s failures better than Rev. F. Willis Johnson, whose poignantly honest letter to America resounds.
But birthdays, especially ones as momentous as the semiquincentennial, are meant to be celebrated. Progress has been made since America’s bicentennial in 1976. To paraphrase a Virginia Slims ad from that same period, we’ve “come a long way, baby.”
Ella Grasso of Connecticut was the first woman officially elected governor of a state in 1975. Today there are 13 female governors occupying their state’s executive mansions.
Eighteen African Americans and five Latino representatives were elected to Congress in 1976. Today there are 133 lawmakers from traditionally marginalized racial groups, more than a quarter of the entire body.
The #MeToo movement has brought belated attention to the scourge of gender-based sexual harassment. In 1976, workplace predation was shamefully ignored. Today, an overwhelming majority applauds the closer scrutiny.
Progress in civil rights has been apparent, even if slow and spasmodic. In 1976, the Urban League released its first “State of Black America” report. It told a distressing tale. This year, the organization issued its 48th edition and the news is a bit more hopeful. “Doors [for Black people] have been opened, and new access has been achieved,” the report proclaims. “But the problem of full equality … is still elusive.” Truth. The problem of full equality for all those who haven’t ever experienced it remains regrettably elusive.
Progress has been measured in other areas as well — in the growth of the middle class, the innovation of American entrepreneurs, the commitment to renewable energy, etc.
We’re not yet there, though. Not even close. Plainly, we have yet to realize the true promise of a just, fair, free and equal America.
The time has come for something more. For a gift — a 250th birthday present that also amounts to a true reckoning, a long overdue and obviously owed gesture of apology when the nation finally confronts its shadowy past. I’m speaking here of reparations for the descendants of the brutally enslaved and the forcefully relocated. Start modest in the form of income tax relief for descendants of slavery. Then, over time, accelerate the initiative to reflect the NAACP’s proposal. It is time.
“Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said. He is right. He’s also brutally frank in insisting, “We must imagine a new country.” A new country that enters the next quarter millennium with a degree of modesty, a sense of humility, and still a deep well of pride and patriotism.
Regrets and reparations would go a long way towards achieving the lofty aspirations of our founding documents and the hope that, at last, we attain that more perfect Union. The celebration awaits.
Voters should be able to take the measure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., since he is poised to win millions of votes in November.
Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.
CNN’s presidential debate coincided with a fresh batch of swing-state snapshots that make one thing perfectly clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be a longshot to be our 47th president and faces his own controversies, yet the 10 percent he’s often achieving in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and other battlegrounds could easily tilt the presidency.
Why did CNN keep him out with impossible-to-meet requirements? The performances, mistruths and misstatements by Joe Biden and Donald Trump would have shocked Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who managed to debate seven times without any discussion of golf handicaps — a subject better fit for a “Grumpy Old Men” outtake than one of the year’s two scheduled debates.
Voters should be able to take the measure of someone poised to get millions of votes that could decide the race, and it’s not like Kennedy’s presence could have made the debate less substantive. Indeed, he might have filled in the debate’s gaps on issues like climate change, poverty and foreign policy.
The major parties can’t wish Kennedy — nor his impact — away. Even earning 5 percent of votes could shift the election. In every state but Alaska and Maine, candidates can win every electoral vote without a majority. A string of states could be won with barely 40 percent of the vote.
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The major parties generally take one of two approaches to minor parties. They either cynically boost them when expected to hurt their opponent, as Donald Trump did when praising Cornel West and Jill Stein last month, or try to knock them off debate stages and ballots while shaming their supporters.
It’s playing with anti-democratic fire to simply write off Kennedy and other candidates. Imagine the rancor if the Electoral College is decided by a single state’s quirk – Georgia free-market backers leaving Trump for Libertarian Chase Oliver, or Arab Americans in Michigan abandoning Biden for Stein or West over the war in Gaza.
There’s a middle ground for 2024 debates — and a permanent solution offered by ranked-choice voting, which is being pioneered at the state level in Alaska and Maine.
Debates offer unique opportunities to educate voters, not just play to major-party campaign interests. Kennedy should have his shot at the September debate if he’s on the ballot in most states and polling in double digits. Trying to marginalize him will only feed his populist appeal. Biden and Trump should explain why they’re the better choice — not just against each other, but as compared to Kennedy and other candidates likely to earn millions of votes this November. Sunshine is always better for democracy than darkness.
Longer-term, the voters — and frankly the parties — should embrace our nation’s values of choice and majority rule. Increasingly proven in state and local elections, ranked-choice voting enables voter choice while upholding majority rule. If more states adopted RCV, there would be no reason to fear more choices on the ballot — which voters so clearly desire and, even moreso after this debacle of a debate. And there would be no reason to deny a podium to a candidate supported by one in every 10 voters.
RCV is simple. Voters get to rank the candidates in order — for example, Kennedy first and Trump second, or Kennedy first and Biden second. If someone wins over 50 percent of first choice votes, they’re the winner. But if no one claims a majority, the lowest candidates are dropped and an instant runoff ensues. If you ranked one of the top candidates first, your vote stays with them. If your candidate is eliminated, your ballot goes to your second choice.
Maine and Alaska will vote for president with RCV, ensuring a head-to-head final “instant runoff” no matter how many candidates make their ballots. In those states’ recent House and Senate races, third parties were welcome. The “spoiler” claim melted away.
The time has come for the rest of the nation to join them. Spoiler fears are hardly new — and given the widespread dissatisfaction and frustration in our system, it’s only likely to increase as a feature of our system in 2028 and beyond.
While so much of what ails our democracy feels hard to fix, we can cure the spoiler problem with common sense. Kennedy can debate and people can see him for themselves. And with ranked-choice voting, we can embrace greater choice and make this the last time “spoiler math” decides the White House.
This fact brief was originally published by Wisconsin Watch. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Cumulative inflation since former President Donald Trump left office in January 2021 through May 2024 was 20.1 percent according to data from the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U.
Trump told a crowd on June 18 in Racine, Wis., that "real inflation" is more than twice that.
Americans have experienced significant price increases since Biden took office, but they aren’t close to the 40-50% inflation that Trump suggested. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic have been the main causes of inflation during Biden’s presidency.
Inflation is measured by a price index to examine the change in prices of many different goods and services. The CPI-U is one of the most common ways to measure inflation. This system is based on spending patterns of urban consumers and measures the monthly change in prices paid for a theoretical market basket of goods and services.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average (CPIAUCNS)
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CNBC Why is inflation so high? An economist explains why everyday essentials cost more
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U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index Frequently Asked Questions : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
