Sabato’s Crystal Ball has been tracking how 2022 is different from previous midterm election years, when the party that holds the White House is often punished. The 2022 midterm elections feature an unpopular president, but there are indications that the unpopular president’s party won’t be strongly punished. In this episode, Kyle Kondik discusses how echoes of the 1978 and 1982 midterm elections may be reverberating in 2022.
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Election Overtime project prepares Pennsylvania media for Nov. 5
Oct 01, 2024
A new set of complementary tools designed to support accurate reporting of contested elections will be unveiled by the Election Reformers Network and other election law experts on Wednesday.
The Election Overtime project will provide journalists covering Pennsylvania’s 2024 general election with media briefings by election specialists; guides for reporting on election transparency, verification processes and judicial procedures; and an extensive speakers bureau. The briefing is designed for journalists but is open to the public. Register now.
The Pennsylvania press briefing, taking place at 2:30 pm Eastern, is the second in a series of events in seven key swing states running through mid October. The first event, held Sept. 30, covered Arizona. The schedule of future events and links to videos of prior events can be accessed here.
Election Overtime is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network developed in partnership with the Bridge Alliance, which publishes The Fulcrum. The Fulcrum has launched a parallel Election Overtime series with news and commentary on key issues addressed by the Overtime project, as well as updates on project events.
Materials for the Election Overtime program have been produced with the generous support of The Carter Center, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and the Bridge Alliance. The contents are the responsibility of the ERN and do not necessarily reflect the views of its funders.
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Participants in the Pennsylvania event include:
- John Jones, president of Dickinson College and former judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
- Kathy Boockvar, former secretary of state of Pennsylvania
- Jennifer Morrell, executive director, Elections Group
- Emma Shoucair, attorney, RepresentUs
- Kevin Johnson, executive director, Election Reformers Network
- Heather Balas, vice president, Election Reformers Network
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Become an all-star by joining athletes as they prep for Election Day
Sep 30, 2024
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
The Team is excited to invite you, your teams and your colleagues to the 2024 Virtual All Star Engaged Athlete meeting on Oct 8.
This national nonpartisan event, featuring college athletes, coaches and administrators, is designed to celebrate and expand the unique impact that athletes can have on campuses and communities across America.
With an important election approaching, The Team is redoubling efforts between now and Election Day to amplify its message through civic initiatives like #AllVoteNoPlay andby teaming up with Pizza to the Polls, HeadCount, Athletes Unlimited, the Social Change Fund, More Than A Vote, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and ALL IN , among many others.
In 2022, The Team's All Star meeting gathered over 2,000 athletes around the country to learn from luminaries such as NBA great Stephen Curry, former Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Hosted by UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin, this year's event will again feature student athletes interviewing sports icons and influencers such as NCAA President Charlie Baker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, WNBA all-star Natasha Cloud of the Phoenix Mercury and many more.
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The Team, which partners on programs with the Bridge Alliance (publisher of The Fulcrum), is making a difference as nearly 600,000 student athletes across the country are overlooked by most traditional civics programs, and yet these people are often some of the most powerful voices and influential leaders on their campuses. College athletics provides an opportunity to develop great teammates, inspire tomorrow’s leaders and empower athletes to shape the future. The Team is there to engage and involve student athletes from across the country to be civic leaders.
The Team is led by Joe Kennedy, a former collegiate basketball player and coach who served as a special assistant for the Office of Public Engagement at the White House. In September 2022, Kennedy became the first executive director of All Vote No Play. During the 2020 election cycle, he connected with Stanford’s associate head men’s basketball coach, Eric Reveno, and they became a major force leading a new college athletics movement to expand student-athlete voter registration and create civic resources for coaches and teams.
Kennedy is working towards a future where all student athletes and athletic departments establish civic engagement as a priority:
“More than 500,000 student athletes are largely overlooked by most traditional civics programs, and yet, these athletes are often some of the most powerful voices and influential leaders on their campuses. We are building energy around the importance of athletes, coaches, and administrators becoming more engaged citizens. We offer tools and resources to help them shape the future they want to create.”
Register here. And The Team is willing to send you free pizza if you have a watch party. Sign up for pizza by Sept 27.
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U.S. Hispanic voters: Breaking the monolith myth
Sep 30, 2024
Macias, a former journalist with NBC and CBS, owns the public relations agencyMacias PR.
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 Census Bureau, the Hispanic, Latino population makes up the largest racial or ethnic minority group in America. But this group is not a monolith. Macias explores providing a more accurate and nuanced understanding of this diverse population.
Several new political polls examine how Hispanic voters view former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Not surprisingly, the polls are all over the place, even though they were taken around the same time.
AReuters/Ipsos pollshows Hispanics prefer Trump over Harris when it comes to immigration, while aUnidosUS poll shows Hispanics overall prefer Harris rather than Trump. Narrowing down the Hispanic voter gets even more complicated when you include language spoken at home. Is it a Spanish-speaking household, bilingual or primarily English? NBC News covered that angle, showing a 16 percent swing between Spanish- and English-speaking households.
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Rafael Mendez, 41, falls under every one of those categories. He is Mexican-American, born in Phoenix, and married to a woman from Sonora, Mexico. He speaks Spanish at home and English at work, where he works with Cubans and Venezuelans. He said all three cultures couldn’t be more different.
“The way they speak and carry themselves, even our Spanish is different,” Mendez said. “The Cubans, they like to keep to themselves and speak to themselves from what I see. The Venezuelans, they love their country. They have their flags everywhere. You can’t tell them nothing wrong about Venezuela because they get offended. And the food is different. [Mexican] food is spicy. The others [Cuban and Venezuelan foods] don’t have our spices. I love my hot sauce.”
Jack Spradlin is not Latino, but on the inside, he might as well be Mexican.
“I grew up in San Diego and was raised by a Mexican lady. She was a live-in nanny and taught me Spanish,” Spradlin said. “I thought for sure I would marry a Mexican woman.”
But he ended up marrying a woman from Venezuela. They met while he was playing professional baseball in Venezuela, giving him a unique perspective on Mexican and Venezuelan cultures.
“It’s a culture shock compared to Mexico. It’s night and day,” he said, referring to the Venezuelan and Mexican cultures. “The accents are different, the vocabulary and words they use are different. The food is different. [Venezuela] is more of a Carribean-type place.”
These different cultures are partially why the majority of the media and pollsters can’t figure out the Latino voter. Hispanics are essentially smaller clusters of cultures — brought together by commonalities, food, family and plight.
Cuba has been under communist rule for decades, where dissidents are persecuted and killed, while Venezuelans have lived under dictators for decades. The government woes in both countries have led to poverty, high crime and brain drain. That common plight from back home also connects these families together.
The Hispanic vote in november
In 2016, I wrote anarticle for CNBC that contradicted what many political pundits were saying about Hispanic voters. At the time, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) were creating a splash with the Republican establishment after they announced they were running for president. Many political pundits predicted the Cuban senators would bring more Hispanics under the GOP umbrella.
I predicted they were going to get it wrong. Latinos experience different plights based on these past experiences. Both Cruz and Rubio are Cuban-American, which is a completely different culture from the Mexican and Venezuelan cultures. It’s nuanced, but if you’re in the middle of these cultures, you will likely have experienced it.
This is one reason I think Cruz will have difficulty beating his Democratic challenger in Texas this November. Cruz is Cuban-American in a state dominated by Mexicans.Roughly 9.6 million people in Texas identify as being of Mexican descent — compared to roughly 130,000 Cuban-Americans in the Lone Star.
On the other spectrum, Rubio’s seat is safe with the large Cuban vote across Florida. The state has the highest concentration ofCuban-Americans with roughly 2 million living in Florida.
The different shades of U.S. immigration policy
When it comes to immigration policy, Hispanics are also treated differently based on their country of origin.
For example, Cuban refugees who reach American soil can stay and apply for a green card after a year. It’s known informally as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, where Cuban migrants who are intercepted at sea are returned to Cuba or a third country, while those who make it to the U.S. soil can stay. TheCuban Adjustment Act of 1966 allows Cuban immigrants or citizens in the United States to apply for a green card after a year of arrival.
Immigration policy for Venezuelans was updated in September 2023, allowing them temporary protected status in the United States for 18 months.Immigrants from Mexico don’t have any of those protections.
Despite the different cultures between Latin countries, Mendez understands the various needs for U.S. immigration policies.
“It makes sense,” Mendez said. “You can’t live in Cuba and Venezuela. You criticize the government, you get killed. The government kills them. Mexico is different. It’s a rich country with a lot of money.”
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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Celebrate Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday and his work on elections
Sep 30, 2024
Merloe provides strategic advice on elections and democracy in the United States and internationally. He worked with former President Jimmy Carter on elections and democratic transitions on four continents.
On Oct. 1, President Jimmy Carter turns 100 years old. According to reports, he is concerned about the dynamics surrounding the 2024 election and hopeful that the United States will turn the page. That is no surprise given his devotion to this country and his dedication to fostering genuine elections around the world.
He first observed a foreign election in 1989 as co-leader, with former President Gerald Ford, of the joint international election observation mission to Panama organized by the nonpartisan National Democratic Institute and what is now the International Republican Institute. His role in helping to expose Manuel Noriega’s attempted fraud in that election had profound effects in Panama and inspired Carter to do more. Often working with NDI, he guided The Carter Center into the forefront of international election observation in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
In my role of almost three decades leading NDI’s international election programs, I had the honor of working closely with Carter in numerous elections. I witnessed him bring together for the first time in years the two antagonistic leaders of Bangladesh and negotiate their renouncing violence in an upcoming election. I saw him help Liberia’s contentious presidential candidates accept electoral results. He brought international attention to the credibility of Palestinian elections and promoted confidence in Peru’s post-Fujimori elections when public trust was fragile.
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His successful bridge building in such hyper-polarized circumstances was aided by his reputation for listening, analyzing and offering recommendations based on ethical principles, rather than an advantage of the moment or some personal transactional consideration. In 2005, Carter joined NDI’s then board chair, Madeleine Albright, and other dignitaries at a commemoration led by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to launch the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, which is now endorsed by more than 50 international organizations in an ongoing implementation process that guides their work.
In keeping with that spirit, on the International Day of Democracy (Sept. 15.), five leading organizations — International IDEA, The Carter Center, NDI, the International Foundation for Election Systems and the Kofi Annan Foundation — launched the Model Commitments for Advancing Genuine and Credible Elections. The commitments, already supported by nine other key international organizations, provide a basis for dialogue around safeguarding and improving electoral processes in any country — including in the United States. While the urgent challenges of securing election administration, protecting the right to vote, addressing disinformation and potential disruptions, plus curtailing threats and potentials for political violence are of immediate concern to countries heading to elections, the commitments provide a wider context.
As one of the people involved in developing the declaration of principles and the model commitments, I can attest that they were inspired by the examples set by Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright and so many others who dedicated themselves to bringing about genuine elections and advancing democracy.
On the occasion of his 100th birthday it is fitting to shine a bright light on this aspect of President Carter’s rich legacy of accomplishments in this country and around the globe. Hopefully, we will amplify his legacy as we move ahead, both here and abroad.
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When should you start worrying?
Sep 30, 2024
Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.” This is the fifth entry in a series on political followership.
We recently read in The Washington Post that men in Afghanistan are regretting that they did not stand up sooner for the rights of their wives and daughters, now that the Taliban is imposing severe standards of dress and conduct on them.
Duh.
That’s the oldest regret there is when it comes to oppression:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Martin Niemöller, Lutheran Pastor
Niemöller was initially a Nazi supporter … until the Nazis began to target the Lutheran Church. Once they come for you, it is too late. Start worrying when they come for your neighbor.
But here’s the trick. You can’t just leave it to the “opposition” to speak up. Of course they are going to speak up. And they will get tuned out.
It’s the loyal supporters who need to speak up early. Theirs is the voice that makes a difference and, as I explain in my new book “To Stop a Tyrant,” they can apply the “brakes” to toxic behavior. Here’s the interesting news: They can do this while still supporting the leader if he or she accepts the boundaries of communal decency.
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Take Anna Kilgore. It was she who filed a police report blaming Haitian immigrants when her cat went missing. Whoops.
Miss Sassy was found several days later in Kilgore’s own basement. But the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates were already using the story to whip up anti-immigrant fever.
What to do? Kilgore is a Trump supporter. Because her cat story is already uber-public, this could make the candidate she is supporting look bad. Despite this, what does she do? Anna Kilgore sends an apology to her Haitian neighbors
In Yiddish there is an expression for that: being a mensch. A mensch, while literally meaning “a man,” colloquially means an ethical person who does the right thing.
We need “menschkeit” (the quality of being a mensch) in every walk of life, on both sides of the political aisle. Ideally, this comes from our political leaders. But let’s not depend on them. We, the political followers, have the power to do what is right and — let’s go out on a limb here — the moral obligation to do so.
A colleague of mine is famous for asking, “How many people did Adolf Hitler kill?” Her answer: none.
There is no evidence of Hitler ever having pulled the trigger on a single person other than himself at the very end. Who did kill the millions of prisoners in extermination camps? His followers who did not stop his frothing hate speech early enough to avoid their own horrible complicity, while they still could.
Look around. Who is being targeted now by political vitriol? If it is not you, surely you can go back to sleep. Or can you? Who should you be speaking up for now, so that later there is someone left to speak for you?
When someone does speak up, here’s another wild idea: Support them! When a neighbor, Erika Lee, heard that Kilgore found Miss Sassy, she was appalled that she had inadvertently triggered a national frenzy by having written a Facebook post about the missing tabby. She took down the post. Lee has publicly regretted contributing to the story based on something she heard from yet another neighbor who also heard it from someone …
Whoops again. Whether online or over the clothesline, we are all responsible for verifying salacious tidbits before spreading them throughout the system. (No need to feel guilty. Just don’t do it again.)
The Taliban is at it once more in Afghanistan. Whose behavior needs standing up to here, in our own political system? If we oppose them, have at it. If we support them, it’s even more important to stand up to their overreach.
After all, if they don’t listen to us, who will they listen to?
Another wise man said, “If not now, when?”
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