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Official behind Texas’ botched voter purge resigns prior to a forced exit

Texas Secretary of State David Whitley, who sparked a national debate when his office made a failed attempt to purge nearly 100,000 people from the state's voter rolls, resigned on Monday.

Even without the resignation, Whitley, a Republican, would have lost his job this week anyway because the state Senate had failed to approve his nomination before the end of the legislative session. Twelve Democrats blocked the confirmation of Whitley, a Republican, because of the failed attempt to purge the voter rolls.


In January, he had garnered national attention when he announced the startling results of an investigation: 95,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and 58,000 of those people had voted in at least one election in recent years.

The claims even caught the eye of President Trump, who claimed voter fraud was "rampant" across the country.



But Whitley was forced to walk back his claims a few days later after discovering that thousands of those he had mentioned were actually citizens.

Several voting rights groups filed lawsuits over the attempt to remove voters and a federal judge in one of the cases ruled there was no evidence of widespread fraud. The cases were settled in April.

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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.

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I Voted stickers
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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.”

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