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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

At a point in the calendar where the field of presidential candidates should be winnowing, the number of candidates is actually going up. On Thursday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president, which in our book makes him an official candidate (even though his spokesman continues to mince words about it, telling ABC News “it does not mean he has made the decision to run”). We’ll therefore be including him in our various 2020 trackers, like endorsements and our forthcoming polling average, and we’ll devote an article — this article, in fact — to analyzing his chances of winning the nomination.

In short, they’re not very good.

As I wrote two weeks ago, when we first learned Bloomberg was (re)considering a campaign, he is jumping into a race that has no room for him. It would be unprecedented for someone who enters the presidential race this late to win the nomination in the modern era. Other candidates have been building campaign organizations and relationships for months. And the electorate is happy with the existing field. In the most recent CBS News/YouGov battleground poll of 18 key primary states, 78 percent of Democrats were satisfied with their candidates; only 22 percent wanted more choices.

And as I wrote one week ago, Bloomberg’s polling numbers have been uninspiring since pollsters started adding him to their 2020 surveys. He has not yet hit the 4 percent support he needs in any poll that would count toward qualifying him for the December Democratic debate (another disadvantage to starting so late — he’s given himself only a narrow window to qualify before the Dec. 12 deadline). In fact, in the five national primary polls to include him since the beginning of November, he has averaged just 2 percent support.

While some unknown candidates (like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg) have been able to overcome even lower polling numbers early in the race, it is no longer early in the race, and Bloomberg is not unknown. Sixty-eight percent of likely Democratic primary voters are able to form an opinion of Bloomberg, again according to an average of national polls from November. They are split, too, on whether those opinions are positive (37 percent rated him favorably) or negative (31 percent rated him unfavorably). Those mediocre favorability ratings — among members of his own party, remember — are a major hurdle to him winning the nomination. Being popular is, generally speaking, helpful to a campaign (big surprise, I know).

But we know Bloomberg, at least, still thinks he has a shot at the nomination — so what might be his strategy? Geographically, his campaign-in-waiting has already tipped its hand: Bloomberg plans to skip the first four states on the primary calendar and focus on winning the delegate-rich Super Tuesday states instead. (He won’t even be on the ballot in New Hampshire.) Needless to say, this strategy flies in the face of conventional wisdom about how to win a presidential primary, but the Bloomberg team feels it doesn’t have a choice: Other candidates simply have too much of a head start organizing in the early states. However, Bloomberg is a multi-billionaire and has said he will self-fund his campaign, so he probably does have the resources to get off the ground quickly in states where he doesn’t yet face a lot of competition. But there’s no guarantee that his approach would work — especially after a month of exuberant headlines about his rivals winning Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

In fact, previous presidential candidates who tried some version of this strategy failed miserably. For instance, in 2008, when Rudy Giuliani was still best remembered as a former New York City mayor, he counted on a win in the Florida Republican primary to neutralize his expected losses elsewhere. He led in the Florida polls — often by huge margins — right up until Iowa and New Hampshire. But afterward, then-Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney surged past Guiliani in the Sunshine State, and he dropped out after placing third there. Similarly, in 1988, then-Sen. Al Gore attempted to win the Democratic nomination by ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire and focusing on winning a bunch of Super Tuesday contests in the South, his home region. And while Gore did win several states that day, it still didn’t translate into the momentum he needed in subsequent contests, and he too lost the nomination. Indeed, Bloomberg would be trying to join a short list of only two modern presidential candidates who won their party’s nomination despite losing both Iowa and New Hampshire.

As for the coalition Bloomberg might be trying to cobble together, right now there’s only one corner of the Democratic Party that seems like a good fit for him: party loyalists. After all, it was Democratic donors who reportedly encouraged Bloomberg to reconsider his initial decision not to run, and his business-friendly views on economic issues could endear him to the moderate, college-educated Democrats who have fueled Buttigieg’s rise. But those same moderate policies would make Bloomberg a non-starter with the left, an increasingly influential group. And in his final mayoral election in New York City, he did poorly in neighborhoods with large populations of black voters, a major bellwether bloc in Democratic presidential primaries, so it’s hard to see him recreating Biden’s as-yet-effective coalition of party loyalists and black voters.

However, Bloomberg appears to recognize his need to reach out to the black community if he wants to be the Democratic nominee. Last weekend, at a predominantly African American church in Brooklyn, he apologized for his yearslong defense of “stop and frisk,” a policing tactic that a federal court ruled targeted black and Latino New Yorkers discriminatorily. But not all black politicians were satisfied, with former presidential candidate Al Sharpton telling MSNBC, “It’s going to take more than one speech for people to forgive and forget … He’s going to have to earn it.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-how-dr-seuss-explains-bidens-big-win-on-covid-bill/

Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

That stress on cultural complaints reflects the shifting source of motivation inside the GOP coalition, with fewer voters responding to the warnings against “big government” once central to the party’s appeal and more viscerally responding to alarms that Democrats intend to transform “our country,” as former President Donald Trump often calls it, into something culturally unrecognizable.

Rahm Emanuel lived through both of those earlier fights as a top White House side to Clinton and Obama’s chief of staff. Compared with the gyrations required to pass those economic plans, he told me, the changes that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other moderates demanded this time were “a nip and tuck. It’s not even plastic surgery.” The modest changes, he says, shows that compared with those earlier periods, the Democratic congressional caucus today is “much more ideologically cohesive.”

Some Democratic strategists warn that the cumulative price tag of the Biden agenda might still trigger a backlash, particularly if interest rates and/or inflation rise, as some economists warn. But for now it’s clear that Democratic moderates are displaying less fear of being tagged with the “big government” label from the right than their counterparts did during the early months of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. That could help Biden consolidate his party for another expensive proposal he’s likely to unveil soon: a broader, infrastructure-centered, economic recovery plan whose price tag will also likely reach the trillion-dollar level.

“I think it’s very clear that on economic issues, the voters … want them to pass stuff and take action, and there’s not a lot of opposition out there,” says Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch. “So Biden’s got running room.”

Why it’s different this time

As in the famous Sherlock Holmes story, the most revealing dynamic in the legislative debate over the Covid plan may have been “the dog that didn’t bark”: in this case, the absence of a grassroots conservative uprising against the plan, even though its price tag vastly exceeded the Clinton and Obama proposals that ignited more resistance. Polls have consistently found significant majorities of Americans support the Covid relief plan, with Gourevitch’s firm releasing one survey last week that showed it winning support from more than two-thirds of adults, including a plurality of Republicans.

Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who represents a rural-flavored western Wisconsin district that Trump carried by almost 5 percentage points last November, told me he felt no hesitation about backing the Covid bill. Calls coming into his office, Kind told me, have been “10 to one positive. … The reaction has been amazing: overwhelming support.”

Likewise, Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, who also holds a seat in a blue-collar district Trump won by more than 4 points, says that among his colleagues in swing districts, “Teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching: All of those were absent in this.”

Changed circumstances partly explain the GOP’s inability to stir serious resistance to the plan. Obama’s economic recovery package was buffeted by the broader public anger over financial institutions’ role in triggering the 2008 housing crisis and severe recession. This time, despite Trump’s frequent efforts to blame the virus on China, Americans seem much more inclined to view the outbreak as a kind of natural disaster that demands a collective response.

“In ’09 there was so much anger in the air, the big fat cats being bailed out … and people were looking for blood and who do we hold accountable,” Kind says. “And that’s not as easy to do when you’ve got a global pandemic.”

Different, too, is the breadth of the pain the virus has inflicted. Clinton’s economic plan followed a relatively mild recession; and while Obama’s responded to a much more serious downturn, the housing crisis still spared most homeowners while crushing others. The small-government “tea party” movement that helped power the huge GOP gains in the 2010 election began with a television rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who asked, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

By contrast, the coronavirus outbreak has touched virtually all Americans: Even those who haven’t faced illness in their families, or disruption to their incomes, have seen the routines of daily life disintegrate.

In his central Pennsylvania district, Cartwright says, “you would struggle to find somebody who wasn’t affected by this pandemic negatively in some way.”

That includes local Republican officials in cities and towns, Kind notes, who are eager for the bill’s assistance — despite congressional Republican attempts to tag its aid for local governments as a bailout to poorly run Democratic cities and states. “The [congressional] Republicans are overplaying their hand by trying to make this more partisan than it is back home,” he says. One Republican police chief in his district, Kind says, even told him that by opposing the local aid, Republicans “are the ones who are really defunding law enforcement and our first responders.”

Yet just as important as the changed circumstances may be the evolving priorities of the GOP voter base.

“Donald Trump may have shifted the GOP coalition to a more economically populist position or revealed that there’s just less appetite for spending discipline on the right than there was before,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me in an email.

If anything, questions about whether to increase or shrink government are now more likely to divide than unite Republican voters, notes Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. Though Republican partisans still generally recoil at higher taxes and oppose programs they view as transfer payments for the poor, a recent poll of Trump voters that Olsen supervised, for instance, found substantial support among them for spending on Social Security and Medicare (entitlements that benefit the predominantly White senior population).

“I think it’s pretty clear that in the modern Republican Party, spending control for its own sake is a minority taste, not a majority taste, and that partly explains why there hasn’t been this massive uprising at a $1.9 trillion bill,” Olsen says.

GOP anxiety about way of life widespread

As concerns about big government recede, anxiety about America’s changing identity in an era of growing racial and religious diversity has emerged as the core unifying principle of the GOP coalition. A February poll from Echelon Insights, Anderson’s firm, offers one measure of that shift. Asked their top priorities, Republican voters identified illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, liberal bias in media and general moral decline among their top five concerns; high taxes was the sole economic issue that cracked the list.

Olsen’s national survey of Trump voters, conducted in January, found them crackling with the sense that they are culturally and demographically besieged. In that poll, roughly 9 in 10 Trump voters agreed with a series of stark propositions: that America is losing faith in the ideas that make the country great, that Christianity is under attack in the US and that discrimination against Whites “will increase a lot” in years ahead. Overwhelming majorities rejected the idea that Whites have any intrinsic advantage in American society or that Hispanic and Asian immigrants face discrimination. In the recent national American Enterprise Institute survey supervised by Cox, three-fourths of Republicans asserted that discrimination against Whites was as big a problem as bias against minorities.

Olsen argues that racial resentment is overstated as a unifying principle for Trump supporters, instead portraying the common thread as a more general “sense that the American way of life is under attack.” Cox, along with many other political scientists and opinion analysts, disagrees: They argue the claim that Whites face discrimination has been the best predictor of not only support for Trump but also of the belief that the “American way of life” is under such threat that anti-democratic means, including violence, are justified to protect it.

Either way, whether these cultural anxieties are motivated primarily by racial resentment or not, what’s clear is they are burning brighter for GOP voters now than hostility to “big government.” “As conservative White Protestants moved from operating at the periphery of Republican politics to becoming the most critical part of the GOP base, their manifest cultural concerns, which have always incredibly important to these voters, have overshadowed the GOP’s traditional economic agenda,” says Cox.

House Republicans effectively acknowledged that shift by devoting so much attention to the controversy over Dr. Seuss — the National Republican Congressional Committee offered copies of his books to donors — while Democrats were passing a spending bill that towered over anything they had approved under Clinton or Obama. Other Republicans, meanwhile, tried to portray Biden’s use of the word “Neanderthal” to criticize GOP governor rollbacks of Covid restrictions as a slur on Republican voters, like Hillary Clinton’s description of some Trump backers as “deplorables.” While congressional Republicans called the Covid plan “socialist” or charged it was stuffed with Democratic pet projects, they hardly pressed that case with as much enthusiasm as these cultural attacks: “It doesn’t seem like they are even really trying” to discredit the package, says Gourevitch, in a verdict privately echoed by some Republicans.

Next up: Big spending on infrastructure

That half-hearted resistance seems likely to encourage Democrats to go big on the next stage of Biden’s economic agenda: the “Build Back Better” long-term growth proposal that will include a substantial infrastructure investment. Though the White House has not decided when to introduce the proposal, it will almost certainly include infrastructure spending in the range of about $300 billion annually, for a cumulative price tag over 10 years in the trillions.

Yet both inside the White House and Congress, Democrats are showing little hesitation about proposing that much new spending immediately after a package this big. Both Kind and Cartwright, holding districts that stretch deep into Trump country, say they would enthusiastically support a big infrastructure plan.

“I’d be very comfortable with it,” Cartwright says. “I have been serving in the US House since January 2013 and the whole time I have been saying out loud we need a big, big infrastructure package. It’s not just that the folks around here who build things for a living will benefit, it’s that the entire American economy will benefit.”

Steve Ricchetti, the White House counselor to Biden, told me the administration expects broad support for the infrastructure package when the President eventually unveils it.

“I believe there will be wide, deep bipartisan support for infrastructure because the need is so great,” he says. “I believe there’s a prospect for securing bipartisan support in Congress for this, but I am certain there will be bipartisan support throughout the country for this: governors, mayors, local officials whose economies are dependent on infrastructure investment, digital, energy, transportation, water. The business community will be enormously supportive of this; it’s an engine for the recovery.”

The open question for Biden, as he finalizes his next proposals, is whether there’s a cumulative weight of proposed spending that awakens the slumbering conservative recoil against “big government.” Both Clinton and Obama saw the grassroots backlashes against their agendas intensify when they followed their initial economic plans with other expensive proposals, particularly their efforts to overhaul the health care system. Each of those dynamics culminated in crushing losses for them in the first midterm after their election.

Compared with the Clinton or Obama experience, Democrats unquestionably feel they have more runway to advance new programs today, largely because the GOP coalition no longer seems as energized by opposition to spending. But if the political limits on new spending seem relaxed, that doesn’t ensure they have been eliminated. It’s possible Americans will accept trillions in spending beyond the Covid plan, but it’s also possible Biden and fellow Democrats might trigger a circuit breaker in public opinion if they go too far — particularly if inflation and interest rates rise from all the economic stimulus as even some Democratic economists have warned. Demands from moderates such as Manchin to find offsetting tax revenues for some or all of the infrastructure plan could also stir more conservative opposition.

The problem is that both the cost of the federal response and the underlying disruption to society from the pandemic are so unprecedented that no one can confidently predict how much more spending Biden can add to his tab without provoking the backlash he has conspicuously avoided so far. Even Emanuel, who rarely expresses doubt, acknowledges, “I’m not even sure I can give you an educated guess on that.”

The safest bet is that so long as the GOP remains fixated on cultural and racial grievance, Democrats will feel confident pushing forward the most aggressive expansion of government’s role in the economy since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society during the 1960s.

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journeyintomanhood · 8 years ago

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FtM Magazine & Racism: A Follow Up

After my previous post about whether or not FtM Magazine was going to be held accountable for their comments about people of colour I had a couple of anonymous questions and replies asking for more information. So, I thought that it was best to make a follow-up post as not everyone knows the story. This post will be long so I’ve bolded some key points.

On August 29th 2016, FtM magazine announced that it was shutting down. Their founder and editor-in-chief Jason Robert Ballard released an article, titled “A Brutally Honest History of FtM Magazine,” with the intention of explaining why the magazine was closing. In it, Ballard discussed his and the magazine’s relationship with the trans people of colour. In this article, he suggested that one of the reasons the magazine was unable to survive was because of this fraught relationship. A lot of blame was put on trans people of colour. At the time there was a little bit of flurry online about how inappropriate, and frankly racist, this was however that quickly died down. There was also a lot of people (read: white trans people) defending Ballard and his reasoning. Admittedly, I was not very involved with the online trans community in the past six or so months (for various reasons) and I don’t know exactly when the magazine re-launched but I found out it did a little while ago as I ventured into the online community again. I looked around to see if Ballard had addressed his previous comments, made a commitment to running differently, or if anyone was trying to hold him and the magazine accountable. I found nothing. If someone knows of anything please let me know.

For now, I will address the comments made in the original article. Now, it was deleted but I kept a copy because I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not the last we were going to see of the magazine and I believe in accountability. For clarity and efficiency, I will directly respond to some of the more concerning aspects of the article:

“I asked about 25-30 companies that had been huge resources in the community if they’d like to be featured in the first issue … I watched as some of the founders of these great online resources for men of color saw my messages on Facebook and never replied. Weeks later, one of them asked me to create graphic for an event he was having through a mutual for free. I discussed my frustrations with the situation, to which our mutual friend said ‘most people won’t work with organizations run by white people, it’s just how it is. So inside the first magazine we had about 5-6 businesses run by white guys, The writers who volunteered to put a couple of stories in were white because they replied to the call for submissions we put out … After the first issue came out, the first set of articles were starting to be written about how racists we were.”

Alright, so first things fist, I would have been interested in more details about this request for companies to be involved in the founding issue such as: what type of companies these were, how people were asked (sounds informally since it was on Facebook), and how the magazine was presented in the request (i.e. was it clear that this magazine was going to strive to be inclusive?). There are a variety of reasons why some of these people did not reply but that doesn’t mean no further effort to find ways to be inclusive shouldn’t have been made. In reference to submissions I also wonder a few things: how were they circulated? And once again, what was the representation of the magazine? People of colour are used to being treated poorly and I know that I’ve gotten pretty good at picking up on when a project doesn’t have inclusion as a priority.

I don’t even want to have to describe why the comment “most people won’t work with organizations run by white people, that’s just how it is,” is 1000 kinds of wrong. What world is this person living in that no one will work with organizations run by white people? Oh yeah, the world of white privilege. Where any suggestion that maybe you aren’t doing something completely right is seeing as a huge inequality. Forget that most companies and businesses are owned and run by white people while POC are heavily marginalized in the workplace across the board.

Now, after the first (all white guy) issue of FtM Magazine came out they received a lot of praise but some people critiqued it for how white it was. Well, criticism is part of the game and it’s not necessarily bad. In fact, criticism can help us grow and get better. In my field, when I produce something it goes through many stages of edits and critiques and even when the final product is finished it is still going to get critiqued more. Does it always feel good? No. However, it’s through that process that I learn, change, and hopefully do better in the future. However, I saw no effort from the magazine to reflect on those critiques and try to do better.

“For the fall issue I put out a poll about which of the youtube guys people were watching. I ranked them based on subscriptions and likes and listed the top 20 and collected interviews from them all … This was the third white guy [Skylar Kergil] on the cover of the magazine and people reacted to it, rightfully. Inside there weren’t as many high ranking youtube stats of color and it also showed. I found myself asking if I should have lied about the numbers and nominations. I also wondered why TMOC had less subscribers to their YouTube channels.”

I can tell Ballard, and everyone else, why TMOC are not as popular on Youtube or anywhere else: racism. It’s as simple as that. Now, for that reason, the Youtubers featured were going to be white but the design of the process of who to was going to be chosen ensured that. So, why wasn’t there an effort to find ways to address this (and no I don’t mean lying) but there are ways to look at different Youtubers to be more inclusive or perhaps an article to address why TMOC did not have as many subscribers as their white counter-parts.

“Some of the feed back on the Adam photo [referring to the Aydian Dowling recreation of the Adam Levine photo] was about what the community looked like and how none of us looked like Aydian. So in response I created the shirts “This is what trans looks like” – If you’re wearing the shirt, then that’s what it looks like, right?” On the Instagram we’d post EVERY PHOTO of the guys who modeled the shirts on their own after purchasing them. Again, mostly fit white guys.”

By this point, FtM Magazine was firmly established and it was firmly established as a magainze by and for fit, white guys. Which is probably why people who didn’t fit into that weren’t modelling their shirts. Also, trying to engage more people in the community solely through a product that has to be purchased isn’t a great way to do things because you’re only going to engage people who have that kind of disposable income which cuts out a huge part of the community.

“I wanted to get more people involved so that there was a wider range of audiences and readers and it would help fill the magazine with all types of stories. I started hosting community stories on our website and sharing them on social media. What I immediately noticed was that if it wasn’t a shirtless white man, no one cared … It seemed to me that there was a pattern, and it sucked. Instagram was the worst … I’ve tried to explain to people so man times that double clicking a poto is free, and it shows the media sources what information and who you want to see. This is a business. If you’re unwilling to double click a photo, I must assume you’re unwilling to purchase a magazine with them in it. Period.”

Again, FtM magazine was well established a magazine for and about white people. So, of course the readership (read: white trans men) didn’t care about TMOC or want to see them represented. On another issue Ballard spent a decent portion of the article mentioning how he was paying out of pocket for expenses and here he admits: it’s a business. It’s about making money. It’s not racist – its’ just good business. Okay, then stop complaining about how you had to pay for certain expenses. If I open a restaurant it is on me to make sure that I am financially sound enough to keep the restaurant afloat and better offer good enough services so that it is successful. If I fail to keep it going then that is on me – not on the people who I didn’t appeal to, even if those people chose to critique my business.

I could keep going but I think I will leave it with this: the actions of FtM Magazine and the words of their editor-in-chief less than a year ago should not be forgotten. If he is going to be considered a leader in the trans community then he needs to be held accountable for his actions. I have not seen an apology or any indication that the magazine is committed to having inclusion as a top priority. If they exist please link me to them.

*The quotes from the FtM Magazine have not been changed in terms of spelling and grammar

#ftm #ftm magazine #long post #trans man #transgender #lgbt

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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To defeat Trump, Dems rethink the Obama coalition formula

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/to-defeat-trump-dems-rethink-the-obama-coalition-formula/

To defeat Trump, Dems rethink the Obama coalition formula

The shift crystallized during last week’s debate as Democrats descended on the majority-black city of Atlanta and fanned out afterward in campaign appearances designed to connect with African-American audiences.

Aides and allies of Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — as well as Julián Castro — have increasingly sounded alarms about whether any other candidate can beat Trump. And Harris, Booker and Castro have been telegraphing for weeks that they would take their campaigns in a more race-conscious direction.

“What we need to talk about right now in this primary is which candidate can actually assemble the coalition we need to win, and that’s a big concern right now with who is leading the polls,” a Harris official said.

The new orientation is animated by doubts surrounding the durability of Joe Biden — a candidate with a broad-based coalition, anchored by his commanding lead with black voters — and a desire to blunt the momentum of a younger, white male candidate, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has failed to demonstrate any ability to win over voters of color, most starkly in a recent Quinnipiac University poll that pegged his support among African-American Democrats in South Carolina at 0 percent.

Castro, the only Latino in the race, attacked Buttigieg’s low polling figures with black voters last week.

“If there’s a candidate that has a bad track record with the biggest base of our party,” Castro said, “then why in the world would we put that person at the top of the ticket and risk handing the election over to Donald Trump when we need places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia to help us win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?”

One day later, Booker implicitly rebuked Buttigieg when he said during the debate that “nobody on this stage should need a focus group to hear from African-American voters.”

Harris lamented that “for too long I think candidates have taken for granted constituencies that have been the backbone of the Democratic Party” — primarily black women.

Then came Sen. Bernie Sanders, releasing a plan to provide billions of dollars to historically black colleges and universities. He told Morehouse College students — gathered in a plaza with a Martin Luther King Jr. statue at its center — that his campaign has “helped build and grow the culture of diversity that makes our country what it is today.”

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who from the beginning has explicitly addressed minority communities in her policies and speeches, told a crowd in Atlanta that “as a white woman, I will never fully understand the discrimination, pain and harm that black Americans have experienced just because of the color of their skin.” But, she said, “When I am president of the United States, the lessons of black history will not be lost.”

The rhetoric has shifted the debate about electability from an ideological plane — where moderates and more progressive Democrats argued for months over policy — to one based more on identity, and which candidate is best positioned to reassemble the Obama coalition of young people, women and nonwhite voters that proved instrumental to Democratic successes in the 2018 midterm elections.

It was an electability argument that Booker was making when he said “black voters are pissed off, and they’re worried.”

“They’re pissed off because the only time our issues seem to be really paid attention to by politicians is when people are looking for their vote,” Booker said. “And they’re worried because in the Democratic Party, we don’t want to see people miss this opportunity and lose because we are nominating someone that … isn’t trusted, doesn’t have authentic connection.”

In part, the appeals of Harris and Booker are a last effort in a campaign slipping away from them. Both have less than 5 percent in national polls, and along with everyone else, are trailing Biden among black voters by huge numbers.

“Part of it is trying to gain traction,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an influential South Carolina state lawmaker. “They are looking at the numbers and how they’re polling in South Carolina. I’m sure they expected to be doing better.”

But the overtures by Booker, Harris and Castro also represent a slim opening that they are attempting to exploit.

Biden is slumping in Iowa, and his opponents believe he may shed support in later-voting states, including South Carolina, if he performs poorly there. Buttigieg, on the other hand, is rising in Iowa and New Hampshire, but performs abysmally with black voters outside those overwhelmingly white states.

Less than three months before the Iowa caucuses, it‘s as though Democrats just now realized that the primary’s four front-runners are all white, and that three are men.

“You’re starting to see these candidates choose states and places and areas to emphasize their strengths, so it’s natural that that’s a piece of it,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way. “It’s not just ideological. These coalitions are also demographic.”

Race isn’t the only issue in the conversation. During last week’s debate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar offered the campaign’s sharpest critique to date of sexism in American politics, with a direct appeal to “any working woman out there, any woman that’s at home” who “knows exactly what I mean.”

Harris has argued since giving a highly billed Detroit speech to the NAACP in May that “electability” is too often a code word for white, working-class male voters, who have emerged as the archetype of those who swung to Trump. She says a narrative centered around who can win the Midwest — and who can beat Trump — too often leaves out women and people of color.

In recent weeks, culminating in Wednesday’s debate in Atlanta, Harris has made the case for her own candidacy more explicitly in this area, contending that the discussion in the primary should shift to which candidate can pull together the diverse coalition needed to win.

Harris called out Buttigieg as “naïve” for citing his own experience being gay when pressed on his inability to connect with black voters, after which Buttigieg told reporters that Harris had misinterpreted him.

“There’s no equating those two experiences, and some people, by the way, live at the intersection of those experiences,” Buttigieg told reporters. “What I do think is important is for each of us to reveal who we are and what motivates us and it’s important for voters to understand what makes me tick, what moves me, and my sources of motivation in ensuring that I stand up for others.”

Like Harris, Booker’s focus, undergirded by fears of nominating the wrong candidate, is on forging multiracial, multiethnic coalitions that unite the progressive and moderate wings of the party.

“The key is really this: We know how to win. Forty-Four showed us how,” Bakari Sellers, the former state lawmaker in South Carolina, said of the road Obama carved in 2008. “Others may try different paths, but that’s unproven.”

It’s not the first time this cycle that Democrats have forced conversations about their past treatment of black and brown voters and what it will take to recreate the big tent that helped Democrats win in 2008 and 2012 — previously, warnings were issued in Detroit, another predominantly black city, when the presidential candidates battled at an earlier debate this summer.

But in recent months, race and gender often became overshadowed by ideological disputes, primarily over health care, and by questions about whether a progressive Democrat or a more moderate one could run a stronger general election campaign against Trump. The party’s focus on winning back Rust Belt voters who supported Obama before turning to Trump in 2016 defined much of the early campaign.

Following an event in Iowa this month, Castro said, “Sometimes what seems like the safe choice is actually the riskier choice,” arguing “we need to nominate a candidate who can appeal to the African-American and Latino communities.”

Yet even candidates injecting issues of race and gender into the campaign acknowledge the potential shortcomings of the case they are making. Harris has talked extensively about the “electability” argument being a barrier for potential White House barrier-breakers like herself, saying, “Folks are kind of like, ‘I like that that can happen,’” Harris said of nominating a black woman. “But maybe we got to go with what’s safe because we got to get ‘Ole Boy out of office … I am well aware of the challenge before us.”

Cobb-Hunter said, “It’s hard to say” how effective Harris and Booker might be in raising issues of race.

Even before, she said, “It’s not like black voters didn’t know they were black.”

Biden told reporters last week that he is confident he will win both Iowa and New Hampshire. In South Carolina on Friday, Biden spoke of his lead there as durable, saying, “I’ve always had overwhelming support from African-Americans my whole career and actually, I do feel pretty confident.”

A Biden senior campaign adviser spent several minutes in a recent briefing with reporters talking about his steady polling, with the person pointing to “the resiliency of his vote.”

“There has been a resiliency and a stability to his vote both nationally and in individual states and it’s because he actually has a broad base of support,” the adviser said. “Unlike some of the other candidates whose votes are based on one demographic group, he actually is strong among almost every demographic group.”

#Coalition #Foreign #Formula #Politics

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educationrickshaw · 7 years ago

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Something became clear to me at AISA Conference 2017 when keynote speaker, Dr. Sonny Magana, asked the educators in the audience to raise their hands if they felt content about the state of educational technology in their schools. For a brief moment a room full of educators from a variety of schools, backgrounds, and teaching positions was brought to a silence when not a single person was able to confidently raise their hand. Teachers aren’t happy with how edtech is going; even U.S. Congress has a better approval rating than zero.

I imagine Dr. Magana has facilitated this same demonstration at multiple conferences, and wielded the same results. You can pick apart the reasons behind this, from poorly funded edtech programs in some schools, to the need for organization-wide edtech training for teachers and administrators. Ultimately for me it points to a general lack of goal consensus and collective efficacy when it comes to edtech implementation.

In an effort to achieve a bit more goal consensus and collective efficacy in education today, I would like to go through eight of the top barriers, reasons, or excuses that I’ve come across for not using technology, and in the process try to knock down some of the barriers that we create for edtech implementation. It’s my hope that the next time we’re polled on the state of contentment towards education technology in our schools, that we might see a few more hands raised.

There are a lot of places with bad internet, and, having lived in the sands of Sudan as well as during a strange shark attack on Vietnam’s undersea internet cables, we definitely sympathize.

This is supposedly a shark biting a cable, thus our unusually crummy internet that lasted 6 months.

As was the focus of one of our earlier posts, “Poor internet connection” not good enough reason to abandon tech, your lessons do not have to be internet dependent, and you can plan ahead to make sure that you’re not scrambling when the internet is not cooperating. In the most desperate of internet circumstances, you can go entirely internet-less, which I picture looking very application-based with absolutely no browser use or streaming. Not ideal, but you can get kids inquiring, brainstorming, note-taking, journaling, etc, in a variety of applications that do not require an internet connection.

With what seems like a rising phenomenon of cell phone addiction and device obsession, it can be easy to become an activist and find yourself wanting to use the classroom as a place of escape from the perils of our digital world. The funny video below proposes one way to increase face-to-face interactions in today’s society.

Every educator I’ve ever met, including edtech’s greatest proponents, believes in face-to-face. Across the board. We all need kids to be speaking, listening, and being submerged into language-rich learning environments. I’m a huge fan of the face-to-face class debate, socratic seminar, and turn and talk. However, I also see value in the social interactions and the language used in online forums, podcasts, instant messaging, email, social media comments and updates, and blogging, for example.

In my classroom, the conversation can start face-to-face and then get extended through technology, but sometimes it starts online and then gets extended through a face-to-face class discussion. When you visit my classroom, you will typically see students socializing, communicating, and exchanging with, yes, an iPad in their hands. Everyone believes in face-to-face learning, and it is clear that digital tools can also enhance the learning and extend the conversation beyond the classroom walls.

I don’t like the use of the word “balance” to describe technology integration. Perhaps a better word than “balance” is “authentic”; Instead of choosing to use an iPad one day and then a pencil the next, but I look at the goal of the learning task and ask the question, “How best might students learn this?”

Since technology is merely a tool for learning, we shouldn’t plan our lessons around which tool to use or not use, or waste our time trying to determine the perfect ratio of time spent on analog vs. digital technology. That would be like if I decided one day to live a “balanced life” by cooking on a strict regimen of 50 percent spatula-prepared meals and 50 percent chopstick-prepared meals. Doesn’t it make more sense to plan your meals around the goal of nourishment, rather than the bizarre balance of cooking utensils? Technology is a tool for learning, not the goal of teaching.

Processed with VSCOcam with c1 preset

I believe that the classroom should reflect the reality of our digital world. I teach in a 1:1 device classroom, and students use technology in some capacity for every lesson. The key for integration in my classroom is that technology is never used for the sake of using technology. Technology is used to enhance instruction, to maximize learning opportunities, and to redefine and transform what it means to be a learner in the 21st century.

It is natural for us to rely heavily on their own experiences to inform our practice. But in a world that is changing before our eyes, we professional educators have to look beyond how we learned and start imagining the classroom of the 21st century. You may not have learned with digital devices on hand, so you are rightly skeptical and wary of the implications for changing how you teach when you haven’t seen anyone teach or learn that way. For a while I was equally skeptical – Afterall, my first reaction to the iPad was that it was just an oversized smartphone, and now I’m using them in my classroom everyday!

I see my own education as being something between how many veteran teachers learned, and how my students are learning today. I graduated highschool in 2007, and mobile technology was already an integral part of my social life. It just hadn’t yet taken a truly prominent role in the classroom yet. While my education might have been largely traditional and lo-tech, one could sense what was on the horizon. As we learn more and more about the transformative nature of technology that is integrated with research-based models, we have to act on the research while also keeping a critical eye on the latest developments.

Too much screen time is a concern that I’ve heard from educators and parents alike, and it is something to be thinking about. Rather than delve into it deeper here, let me point you to a great blog post on Mr. Hill’s Musings, titled “Screen Time: What Does the Research Say?” In his post, Adam enlightens us with a line that I think every teacher should have on the tip of their tongue when faced with a worried parent: Not All Screen Time Is Equal.

“Instead of obsessing over the quantity of screen time, we should focus on improving the quality of it”

– Beth Holland, Edutopia

Let’s face it, these devices are not going away. In order to improve the quality of the student learning experience, we need to continuously ask ourselves some important questions. Do we wish to use technology for passive consumption, or for creative contributions and inquiry design? And since so much of a students’ unsupervised screen time takes place after school, how might we best educate parents so that our young people are not using these devices right before bed, or solely for entertainment purposes? Finally, if we do take the device away at home, what is replacing it? Are kids going to simply fill their unsupervised iPad time with unsupervised television time?

Screen time is an important issue of our time, but it should not be used as an excuse for not using technology to enhance learning. Not all screen time is equal, and we should be focusing on improving the quality of the time students spend in front of a screen.

Ask any teacher and they will tell you that they are pressed for time. The demands of curriculum, pastoral care, reporting, assessing, and planning make it so that every year feels like a race against the clock. Adding “technology lessons” feels like just another thing thrown on the plate of overworked and underpaid educators.

The time is now!

However, most good schools are not adding technology as an extra subject to a classroom teachers’ workload, but rather are prescribing an integrated approach to education technology. Technology should enhance and transform curriculum and instruction – not create more work for anyone. I teach math using technology. I teach reading using technology. I rarely teach technology, and I try to never use technology for the sake of technology. While there will always be some need for stand-alone technology instruction, especially when it comes to introducing a newer technology to students, I find that these small lessons lead to increased efficiency and independence by the students, which saves us time during our busy day.

Compared to my first year of teaching where I felt that the copy room had become my second home, my planning now feels much more laid-back as I am able to deepen learning experiences within a virtual learning environment without the frustrations of paperjams and botched copy jobs. My students are often the ones that create the online resources that we use in class, and the permanence of these resources allows for me to use them next year and the year after that. Technology gives me more time to do the real stuff of teaching, and it puts the onus on the student to take control of their learning and to do the thinking.

There are so many ways to rethink and re-conceptualize all of the subjects at school – art, music, P.E., drama, etc – so that they meet the needs of the 21st century learner. What is important is that the goal of the learning is identified, and that the teacher uses the best tools available to facilitate the learning of the skills and concepts. Nobody (I hope) is advocating that art teachers throw away their brushes and music teachers trash their instruments and do everything entirely on ArtSet or GarageBand. That just wouldn’t be the best way to learn art or music.

Check out the above sketch of educationrickshaw.com’s logo during the drafting stage. This image is a PNG file, it was rendered completely with digital tools, and the artist lives in the U.S and I live in Sudan. The original file is currently on my computer and saved to my DropBox and Google Drive. Our collaboration wouldn’t have been possible without the help of email, Facetime and IM. Technology might have been the medium in this piece, but it was also used for communication, sharing, archiving, and publishing.

In another example, I want you to think about two dance teachers for a moment: One that doesn’t use technology (A), and one that does (B).

Teacher A: Teaches dance moves to class through modeling and whole group direct instruction. Has students pair up and practice dance moves together. Students plan a dance and perform it to the rest of class. The end.

Teacher B: Teaches dance moves to class through modeling, whole group direct instruction, and through supplemental YouTube videos from expert dancers. Has students watching dance videos embedded on their class LMS and had created a shared, public space for planning, reflecting, commenting, liking, and exchanging ideas. Students record their dances, edit their dance routines on iMovie and published them onto a shared blog that includes their parents, their international pen pals, and the larger school community.

The above teaching archetypes are ones that I’ve witnessed in schools I’ve worked in and you can tell which I prefer. The technology-rich learning experience in Teacher B’s class was made much more meaningful than the more traditional approach of learning dance in Teacher A’s class.

If your school isn’t doing anything to teach you how to use the tools you’re required to teach with, then educate yourself. Take a free online training (See: Is it worth becoming recognized as an Apple Teacher?) or simply sit on your couch and play around with your device (See: The Couch Potato Approach to Educational Technology). Form a club of teachers who want and need to sit together to play around edtech tools (See: Teachers Need Tech Sandbox Time. How many times this week have you talked with your Director of Education Technology, or your technology support crew? The time to learn is now, even if your school just isn’t doing anything to help you.

Thank you for reading this post, and engaging in some of the ideas on this blog. Having started my career in outdoor education as a camp counselor at a summer camp I’m a big fan of going unplugged once in awhile. I also understand that we live in a digital world that is constantly changing, and that our classrooms have to reflect this reality. While I respect the opinions of all teachers that are guilty of erecting these false barriers, I also think that these ideas are going the way of the dinosaur. Once we remove these barriers by imagining the classroom of the 21st century, we can truly transform and redefine learning opportunities for our students.

– Zach Groshell @MrZachG

Come join our Facebook Group, Over-Posting Educators!

Top Barriers for Not Using Tech in The Classroom Something became clear to me at AISA Conference 2017 when keynote speaker, Dr. Sonny Magana, asked the educators in the audience to raise their hands if they felt content about the state of educational technology in their schools.

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flauntpage · 7 years ago

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Solving Philadelphia’s Sports Talk Radio Problem

If you’re under the age of 50 and above the age of 15, it’s obvious that Philadelphia has a sports talk radio problem. This city is big enough for two separate stations to fill nearly 24-hours of original content every single day, so why do listeners have to restrain themselves from putting a boot through their radio after listening for an average of two minutes?

The answer isn’t an easy one, but I’d like to propose a potential four-step solution that I think will help improve sports talk radio in Philadelphia.

Step 1: Fill a room sky high in both the 97.5 Fanatic and 94 WIP studios with wheels of mozzarella, arms of salami, slabs of mortadella, Rocky Blu-rays, back issues of Playboy from 1984 and knock-off Chinese made Eagles jerseys.

Hang a sign from the door marked “Free.”

Step 2: Wait until room is filled. When at capacity, crack open door and throw in smoke bomb.

Step 3: Amidst confusion, send in army of interns with large burlap sacks. Stuff hosts into said sacks with notices of termination. Tag each host with tracking device to collect valuable data on the mating habits of the morbidly obese. Hire a forklift if interns alone cannot successfully remove hosts from their respective stations. Be prepared to widen doorways throughout each building. Unceremoniously dump fired, confused hosts in alleyway. Congratulate self on job well done.

Step 4: Hire new hosts.

Sure, it may seem harsh, but the unoriginality of the medium is so deeply entrenched in both stations that they need to be completely uprooted. They have such an incestuous relationship that it’s not a matter of “if” a fired host will find another job at the rival station, but only a matter of “when.” Rob Ellis. Anthony Gargano. Jon Marks. Tony Bruno. Mike Missanelli. All failed or otherwise flamed out at their respective stations…all found homes at the rival station.

Did Rob Ellis, the human equivalent of a deep coma, need TWO chances at TWO sports talk stations to put listeners to sleep? Did he really need a daily morning television show? I assure you his failures were NOT due to people being unable to see his weak-chinned face.

If someone’s tired schtick wasn’t getting ratings at WIP, it will CERTAINLY do better at The Fanatic! Anthony Gargano’s “cuz” act had worn out its welcome… uh, everywhere, so of course The Fanatic jumped at the opportunity to hire him to anchor its flagship morning show! At least they gave him a unique slant this time around with Brian Baldinger and human dynamo Maureen Crowley Williams. WHAT FRESH-FACED TALENT! The most interesting thing about Baldinger is his gnarled finger. Has anyone cared what he’s had to say in the past, oh, let’s make it a conservative 25 years? No. No they haven’t. But they’ll reinvent the morning show they will, one recycled bit after another. LET’S GO TO THE MEATLOCKER AND TALK TO FREDDIE MITCHELL FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, WHAT A CRAZY MEATBALL! OH MAMA MIA.

(Just a side note for a moment, can each station please have a moratorium on booking Freddie Mitchell? He played four seasons, very poorly I might add, and he hasn’t stepped foot on a football field since 2004. Do we need to hear him complain about Donovan McNabb again? We do not. You were garbage, Freddie. It wasn’t McNabb’s fault that you washed out of the NFL. I do not need to hear another unsubstantiated story about how everyone on the team hated McNabb…which was probably true, but god damnit I don’t need to hear you tell it AD NAUSEAM.)

Wing Bowl was fun like 20 years ago, right? Tits, wings, huge slobs eating themselves into an early grave as greasy Angelo Cataldi cackles in the background and their soon-to-be widows beg them to stop, disappointed Wingette fathers…it’s a Philadelphia tradition! So what does The Fanatic do? Creates Fantasy Fest, an annual event that gives 35 mouthbreathers from Kensington the excuse to begin drinking at noon and ogle the one unlucky stripper from Delilah’s who is NOT getting paid enough to be there.

This caller to The Fanatic last weekend perfectly encapsulated the Fantasy Fest experience:

Caller: "Hey I just left Fantasy Fest."

Host: "Wasn't that the best party ever?!"

Caller: "I'm not going to lie, no." ::hangs up:

Perfect

— CogginToboggan (@CogginToboggan) August 26, 2017

I didn’t make that up. That was a real call. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed anything more that has been aired on The Fanatic.

The one host in the past decade who attempted to do anything different was Josh Innes, and he was ran out of town in his husky boy jeans faster than Pete Rose running to an alleged underage sex party.

Innes dared to step away from the tried and true Philadelphia sports talk formula of cliched topics and “hilarious” daily polls. You know the ones…. “Call in, we’re taking your top Philly guys who ever played linebacker for the Eagles…Jeremiah Trotter is up there for me, I tell ya. Call in, 610-632….”

For every one host or producer willing to try something different, there are 25 Jason Myrtetuses in the background rehashing and pushing the same old garbage. “How about a fake caller? He could call in when things are slow, really rile Mike up! Just make him black, don’t worry about it, we’ll call him Dwayne. He’ll be outrageous and say really stereotypical things that I think a black person would actually say if I knew any in real life. THINK OF THE RATINGS!”

In the words of the immortal Digital Underground, “It’s just the same old song.”

Here’s what one of the stations could actually do if they want to break the cycle: You know the person on your staff who is behind the scenes that has pitched an idea for a show that seems “out there” or “too different” from what you’re used to hearing on-air? Promote them to on-air. My god, do us all a favor. I beg of you.

Take a chance, get a different opinion on-air for a change. Do you really need to hear Mike Missanelli or Angelo Cataldi breathing heavily into a microphone every day and taking the contrarian view on EVERY SINGLE TOPIC because it “creates content?” Get a new voice on your airwaves, get someone who is going to take a chance, who will do something we haven’t heard a million times already, and who won’t publish terrible polls on Twitter. Spare us, please.

Or, better yet, listeners should just stop listening. Go ahead and put that foot through your radio and don’t replace it. Read the Coggin Toboggan and Crossing Broad instead. Fuck it. There are a ton of writers here now. Everyone here can mash their hands onto their keyboards and come up with semi-coherent sentences, I guarantee you that. WHAT AN ENDORSEMENT!

All angry emails and letter bombs from WIP and Fanatic hosts/producers should be addressed to Kyle Scott at Crossing Broad. He’s the one who allows this nonsense to be published on his site. [Editor’s note: Shaggy defense.]

Like what you saw? Did you only dry-heave once or twice reading this piece of garbage? Then follow me on Twitter @Coggintoboggan.

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Solving Philadelphia’s Sports Talk Radio Problem published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Why is Pete Buttigieg doing so poorly among black voters?

This is an increasingly important question, both for his campaign and for the overall state of the Democratic primary. Black voters will likely make up about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters, and they’ll be a majority in states like Alabama and Mississippi. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor will have a hard time winning the delegates he needs to secure the Democratic nomination without support from black voters. And if his numbers among nonwhite voters stay low, Buttigieg could also have issues with white Democrats, who are increasingly conscious of racial issues and might balk at being part of an overwhelmingly white coalition.

Exactly why Buttigieg is struggling with black voters is a complicated question. And it’s a question many, many reporters are also looking into. So what I tried to do, using survey data and my own reporting, was to look at some of the explanations being offered and break down which of them seem particularly compelling and which I feel more skeptical of.

Relatively clear problems for Buttigieg

Lately, Buttigieg is doing great in Iowa polls and pretty well in New Hampshire polls, but he’s still behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in many polls of Nevada and South Carolina, and in most national polls. Maybe this will change in the next few weeks, but for now, Buttigieg still isn’t that popular with Democrats, including white Democrats, outside of Iowa and New Hampshire. And Buttigieg, as Politico detailed recently, also has weak support among Latino Democrats, which partly explains his lower numbers in Nevada, where about 20 percent of Democratic caucus voters were Latino in 2016.

In other words, Buttigieg doesn’t have a ton of support overall, and is thus struggling with lots of groups. Late-November surveys from both the Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac University suggest Buttigieg is relatively weak with voters under 30 and those with incomes below $50,000 a year. “Why are Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire (basically all of whom are white) so enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” is just as valid a question as “Why are black voters so not enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?”

Of course, this isn’t to say Buttigieg isn’t doing especially badly among black Democrats. He is. In the Quinnipiac survey, Buttigieg is at 23 percent among white Democrats and 4 percent among black Democrats. The Economist/YouGov survey put him at 16 among white Democrats and 2 percent among black Democrats. Which brings me to another obvious challenge for the mayor (and every other candidate) in winning black support: Biden. The former vice president is doing substantially better with black voters than he is overall, getting more than 40 percent of black voters in both the YouGov and Quinnipiac surveys. Buttigieg, I would argue, is going to have a hard time pulling that support from Biden. Older black voters in particular are more familiar with Biden from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president and have a pragmatic streak that may make them reluctant to help nominate a 37-year-old small-town mayor to take on President Trump.

I worry that political observers are making the same mistake that we did in 2008 and 2016: attributing a candidate’s challenges with black voters to something that candidate is doing wrong (Hillary Clinton in 2008, Sanders in 2016) as opposed to a rival candidate just being more popular with black voters ( Obama in 2008, Clinton in 2016). Maybe black voters, particularly older ones, just really like Biden, at least at this stage in the race.

What about younger black voters, who, according to polling from Morning Consult, aren’t as enamored with Biden? Here, Buttigieg may have more of an ideological problem. Even the recent polls that found Buttigieg surging also showed Sanders and Warren polling ahead of him among black voters in the polls I looked at. That might be simply because they are better known — and currently have more total support — than the mayor. But there is something of a “black left” that skews young, and it is wary of Buttigieg’s more moderate politics. Buttigieg’s “lane” among white voters — people who might think Sanders and Warren are too liberal but are not comfortable with Biden — may not exist, or may simply be much smaller, with black voters.

Potential problems for Buttigieg

I think the evidence is fairly clear that black Democrats as a group are not as supportive of gay relationships or gay marriage as white Democrats. So, it is plausible that Buttigieg, as an openly gay candidate, starts at a disadvantage among black voters.

So why do I list this a potential reason, as opposed to a clear problem? Well, because I’m not sure that black political behavior is particularly influenced by black views on gay rights. In 2012, there was speculation that Obama would lose sizable support among black voters once he started supporting gay marriage. Not only did that not happen, but African Americans have also remained as supportive of the Democratic Party as ever over the last decade, even as the party has increasingly allied itself with LGBTQ rights. I don’t want to make too much of a local election, but to take one notable example: In April, America’s third-largest city, Chicago, elected Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian woman, as its mayor. In a runoff, Lightfoot won all of the city’s 50 wards, including those in the city’s heavily black South Side, in her contest against fellow Democrat Toni Preckwinkle, who is also a black woman.

So I think we should be cautious about naming homophobia as a principal factor when assessing why a 37-year-old, white small-town mayor might lose the black Democratic primary vote to Barack Obama’s vice president in a primary where black voters are desperate to find a candidate who they think will defeat Donald Trump. We shouldn’t rule it out, but I wouldn’t give it too much weight. My expectation is that if Buttigieg were nominated, he would get around 90 percent of the black vote in a general election, as Democratic presidential nominees typically do.

Another potential problem Buttigieg faces in winning black support: a lack of backing from prominent black figures. The New York Times recently published a piece showing that Buttigieg trails way behind other candidates in terms of endorsements from current or former black elected officials. (According to the Times, Biden has 154 such endorsements, Kamala Harris has 93, Sanders 91, Cory Booker 50, and Warren 43, compared to six for Buttigieg.) Would it help Buttigieg if he had more support among black elites, to signal to black voters that he is a candidate who cares about their interests? Probably. That said, Harris has a lot of endorsements from prominent black figures, and she also has weak numbers among black voters (7 percent, per the YouGov survey).

There are other potential causes for Buttigieg’s lack of black support — ones I wouldn’t ascribe much explanatory value to. Some black leaders, for instance, both nationally and in South Bend, have criticized Buttigieg’s dealings with his city’s black residents, particularly his demoting South Bend’s first-ever black police chief in 2012. Liberals, black and non-black, are also criticizing Buttigieg’s presidential campaign for weaknesses in its approach to black outreach. For example, the campaign put out a list of supporters for Buttigieg’s “Douglass Plan for Black America” that included lots of white Democrats, as well as a number of African Americans who said they have not endorsed the proposal or Buttigieg.

Neither of these narratives are good for Buttigieg, because they play into some of the problems that I listed above. They will probably make decidedly liberal black voters who were not likely to back Buttigieg in the first place even more wary of him. And if you are a black elected official who is considering endorsing the mayor, these stories might give you pause.

But I doubt a ton of rank-and-file voters of any race are following these kinds of stories in detail. I think it’s more likely that Buttigieg’s struggles with black voters in polls gives these stories more resonance, as opposed to the stories causing Buttigieg’s problems with black voters.

For right now, though, whatever the cause, Buttigieg’s lack of support among black voters is a huge hurdle for his campaign. If the race winnows to just Biden and Buttigieg, for example, I think Buttigieg could lose the black vote by more than 50 points like Sanders did in 2016, killing his chances of winning the nomination.

Alternatively, there are two potential positive scenarios for Buttigieg. First, maybe three or four candidates (say Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren) remain viable through much of the primary season, dividing up the black vote so Biden is not getting 80 percent of it. Secondly, maybe Buttigieg’s efforts to appeal to black voters pay off in the next few months and his numbers rise. He’s working hard on this front; for example, he made an appearance at the North Carolina church of black civil rights activist William Barber on Sunday. If the race comes down to Buttigieg vs. Biden, the South Bend mayor may have some appeal among black liberals who are particularly wary of the former vice president.

But that really gets at the bottom line for Buttigieg — and every other candidate besides Biden — with regards to black voters: It may not be that black voters hate Pete Buttigieg, really, but rather that they like Joe Biden. Unless that changes, a lot of candidates will struggle to gain meaningful black support.

Moreover, with the field so divided — this isn’t 2016, when Hillary Clinton was polling at or above 50 percent nationally for most of the race — most candidates, including Buttigieg, will be doing poorly with one group or another; if you have only about a quarter of the vote overall, there’s really no way around that. A candidate’s issue may not lie with any single group, but with their strength overall.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Brett Kavanaugh has never been a popular Supreme Court nominee — and he’s probably becoming more unpopular still following allegations earlier this month by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had attempted to sexually assault her when they both were in high school. No one this unpopular has ever been been confirmed to the Supreme Court; the only previous nominees who polled as poorly as Kavanaugh either had their names withdrawn (Harriet Miers) or lost their confirmation vote (Robert Bork). And all of this polling was taken before at least two other accusations surfaced of potential sexual misconduct involving Kavanaugh1 — and before Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled for Thursday.

President Trump and Congressional Republicans are not afraid to take unpopular actions in pursuit of their ideological goals. Last year, they spent many months trying and failing to pass a repeal of Obamacare, even though those efforts were extremely unpopular. And they passed a tax bill that was highly unpopular at the time of its passage, although its numbers have since improved some. The Supreme Court is at least as much of a priority for Republicans.

The difference on Kavanaugh is that there are several other conservative nominees who could potentially replace him — and who may have been better picks in the first place. In other words, you would think Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have better options. Amy Coney Barrett, for example, a judge on the 7th Circuit and one of Trump’s reported finalists when Kavanaugh was chosen, has several advantages from the GOP’s point of view. She’d potentially be more conservative than Kavanaugh, at least on issues such as abortion; she’s already been confirmed (to her circuit seat) by the current Senate; and it might not hurt Republicans to choose a woman when the four conservatives on the current Supreme Court are all men.

Barrett also isn’t facing several accusations of sexual misconduct, as Kavanaugh is.

But there’s a midterm coming up in just six weeks. And there’s about a 3 in 10 chance that Republicans lose the Senate, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Could Republicans really get Barrett or another nominee confirmed before then? And if not, could they confirm her in the so-called “lame duck session” after the midterms but before the new Congress meets on Jan. 3.

The answers are “possibly” and “probably” — but the timing is getting dicier by the day. As of Tuesday morning, we’ll be 42 days away from the Nov. 6 midterms, and exactly 100 days away from when the new Congress convenes. The eight current members of the Supreme Court variously took between 50 and 99 days to be confirmed:

How long does it take to confirm a Supreme Court justice?

Days from nomination to confirmation for current members of the Supreme Court

Justice Days from nomination to confirmation Ruth Bader Ginsburg 50

–

John Roberts* 62

–

Neil Gorsuch 65

–

Sonia Sotomayor 66

–

Stephen Breyer 73

–

Samuel Alito 82

–

Elena Kagan 87

–

Clarence Thomas 99

–

Days until midterms 42

–

Days until next Congress 100

–

*Roberts was initially nominated for associate justice and then withdrawn and re-nominated for Chief Justice; our count of his confirmation time includes the combined time from both nominations.

Source: WIKIPEDIA

That makes the timing awfully interesting (and makes Republican complaints about Democratic delays to the process a little easier to understand). If Kavanaugh were to withdraw his name today, and Trump were to nominate someone else in his place tomorrow, the GOP might be able to confirm the replacement before the midterms — but the timing would be tight and would require a faster confirmation process than for any current member of the Supreme Court.

The lame-duck session would be a safer bet, but it’s not without risk for the GOP. One problem is that they might lose the Senate — to repeat ourselves, there’s about a 30 percent chance of this. Because the Senate is a much heavier lift for Democrats than the House, in the scenarios where the GOP loses the Senate, they’d probably also lose the House by wide margin; in our simulations, Republicans lose an average of about 50 (!!) House seats in scenarios where they also lose the Senate. The House doesn’t have any say in the Supreme Court nomination process, but would Republicans really want to push forward a nomination after losing by such a landslide margin?

My guess is probably yes — a Supreme Court seat really is that important to them. But the politics are uncertain; there aren’t really a lot of recent precedents for a party taking such significant action during the lame duck session. And several Republican senators, after just having seen their colleagues take a drubbing in the 2018 midterms, might be skittish about what such a vote would mean for their survival in 2020, when the Senate map is a fairly tough one for the GOP.

In addition, there’s the chance the next nominee could have vetting problems, too. Historically, about 25 percent of Supreme Court nominations lapse, are voted down or are withdrawn.

Here’s the thing, though. The longer the GOP takes to replace Kavanaugh, the worse the timing problems become for them. If, say, the confirmation process on Kavanaugh drags out for another two weeks before he’s voted down or withdrawn, and then Trump takes another two weeks to choose a replacement because the overall process has become such a mess, then confirmation before the midterms would be extremely challenging. There also might not be enough time to seriously vet the new nominee before the lame-duck session, giving Republicans less margin for error then, too.

So why not just “plow right through” and vote to confirm Kavanaugh anyway, allegations and everything else aside? Although there’s a good chance McConnell is bluffing, that seems to be the current plan, with McConnell having promised a vote in the “near future” on Kavanaugh and no accusers other than Ford set to testify.

The problem is that this is an extremely live news story; with several new accusations having come out against Kavanaugh over the weekend and debates about the credibility of Ford’s allegations still ongoing. It’s hard to know what would happen to Kavanaugh if more accusations came out after he’d already been confirmed to the Supreme Court, but the possibilities include impeachment and serious long-term damage to the Court’s reputation — along with whatever additional price the GOP had to pay at the midterms. Even if the GOP were able to confirm Kavanaugh before the midterms this year, a landslide election could put the GOP in a considerably worse position to hold the Senate when other Supreme Court nominations come up in 2019 through 2024.

Put another way, there are huge risks to the GOP in both rushing to confirm Kavanaugh and in letting the process play out for several more weeks — which means encouraging Kavanaugh to withdraw now, however painful it might be, is probably their least-worst option.

There is one other possibility, which is that McConnell — who reportedly didn’t want Kavanaugh to be chosen in the first place — could be rushing through the process in the hopes that Kavanaugh will be voted down (or forced to withdraw once it becomes clear that McConnell doesn’t have the votes). Back when Ford was Kavanaugh’s only accuser, this had seemed like a fairly likely exit strategy: The hearings would be engineered to allow Kavanaugh to save face, and perhaps to allow Republicans to stoke some grievances with their base. But wavering GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Jeff Flake would find some excuse to oppose his nomination and his nomination would be pulled. This scenario still seems like a distinct possibility — but the fact that the Kavanaugh story is developing so rapidly, with the stakes continuously increasing with every news cycle, could mean that McConnell is now pot-committed to the bluff even if he’d been hoping to keep his options open before.

I haven’t said much about the potential electoral upsides to the GOP of the confirmation process, such as possibly increasing base turnout, and putting vulnerable Democratic senators such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp to a tough vote on Kavanaugh or another nominee. That’s because I’m a little bit skeptical of them. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it’s not clear that rank-and-file voters care about the Supreme Court as much as party activists and other “elites” do. And despite predictions that Anthony Kennedy’s retirement would help the GOP, Republicans’ electoral outlook has only gotten worse since then (and they’ve had especially poor polling in the past week or two).

For all that said, the Kavanaugh story has become unpredictable enough that its electoral effects are fairly uncertain, even if they’re weighted toward the downside for the GOP. If I were a Republican member of Congress facing reelection in 2018 or 2020, I’d just much rather take my chances with Barrett than with Kavanaugh.

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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You probably know Alabama’s new senator, Doug Jones, because he narrowly won a special election last year against a man accused of molesting underage girls. But there are probably quite a few things you don’t know about him. His first name is actually Gordon, and he is left-handed,1 hitches his head a bit when he’s making a point and is what experts on emotions might call an “active listener.”

That last point dawned on me while I was sitting in the back of an SUV as he praised the virtues of the peanut butter factory we’d just been to — “the technology!” — and we jostled along a central Alabama road on a late May afternoon. Throughout a sweaty, hair-netted tour, he had nodded and peered into things and patiently asked questions. (I, meanwhile, had strained to hear over the nut-rumbling din and contemplated a literal death by peanut butter underneath some sort of hot, belching still that smelled unnervingly like cookies.) The visit was a reminder of just how much the life of a politician is filled with interactions that are mundane for him but momentous for the other person; the conscientious officeholder knows that a bit of attentive listening can go a long way. That’s perhaps doubly the case for Jones, an Alabama Democrat wading through his state’s overwhelmingly Republican politics. Sometimes, he might not agree with what people have to say to him, but, by God, Jones will smile, nod and hear them out.

There are some exceptions, of course. We drove by a yard overflowing with tchotchkes and an unmistakable sign of the South. “I would probably not stop right there at the house with the Confederate flags waving,” Jones conceded in a creaky drawl that’s faintly reminiscent of another southern Democrat, Bill Clinton. “Probably not much point of me going there.”

Jones is the first Alabama Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate since 1992 (and that guy later became a Republican).2 His election in December 2017 came in no small part because of the strength of the black community’s vote. Black voters made up 29 percent of the electorate in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, matching their turnout for Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election (notable enthusiasm for a special election in an off-cycle year), with 98 percent of black women — who made up 17 percent of the electorate — voting for Jones. Jones also won independents and made inroads with liberal and moderate Republicans, groups that Obama performed poorly among.3 Jones’s coalition is disparate, to say the least.

Jones is a Democrat and a Democrat with pretty standard Democratic positions — he’s pro-abortion rights, for gay rights and the Affordable Care Act, and supports protections for illegal immigrants who arrived in the country as minors. But in tone and style he’s a moderate, and a moderate so convinced of the power of his moderation that he says his candidacy was actually hurt, not helped, by the molestation accusations against Roy Moore, his Republican rival. “We would have won by a larger percentage had those allegations not come out,” he told me. “Once those allegations surfaced, the level of interest increased, and the race became very tribal.” (Before the Moore allegations were reported by The Washington Post on Nov. 9, 2017, the race had been holding steady, with Jones at 42 percent and Moore at 48 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Three days after the allegations became public, it was a 2-point race.)

But two years away from standing for re-election, Jones is faced with the reality of what it means to govern as a Democrat in a blood-red state in a country divided by tribal politics. President Trump won Alabama with 62 percent of the vote, and Jones’s tenuous coalition rests not only on the support of the black community, but also on those independents and Republicans — many of whom are white in a state still riven by racial tensions.

And that’s meant that Jones has had to become a culture warrior of a different sort, preaching peace, love and understanding to both his liberal base and his more circumspect constituents unused to voting for a Democrat. Call it the gospel of moderation. In today’s politics, a certain temperament is required to be a part of the center that’s barely holding. Most people would tire of centrist sermonizing and turning the other cheek, but Doug Jones swears by it. His re-election rests on whether Alabamians buy in.

Much of Jones’s time is spent toggling between Alabama constituencies. He assures some that their interests will receive the attention they’ve long gone without. With others, he’s feeling out how far he can push a Democrat’s agenda before turning them off. But with everyone, he’s preaching the power of forbearance.

That’s why on an evening in late May, Jones got up to address a crowd gathered for a public health fair in Lowndes County, a place where he won 79 percent of the vote, and apologized.

“At the end of the day, we’re all to blame, somehow, some way — we’ve all neglected this area,” he said. The statement could have covered any number of slights. Lowndes is part of what’s known as the Black Belt, a rural strip that stretches across the state and is known for its rich farming soil and its large population of African-Americans. It also has a public health crisis: Many residents don’t have proper sanitation systems.

“I literally had déjà vu the first time I stepped out of the van in one of these situations because it had the smell and the heat and the humidity — it was just like being in rural Vietnam or Cambodia or Haiti,” said Mark Elliot, who’s an engineering professor at the University of Alabama and has researched drinking water and sanitation issues in developing countries. The region’s clay soil can make septic tanks — which many residents of the impoverished area can’t afford to begin with — ineffective. Some people install straight pipes that send sewage directly into the ground only to have wastewater rise back up, puddling in yards.

Jones offered some extremely Jonesian advice to the assembled crowd to get state officials (implicitly he seemed to mean Republican officials) to respond to their needs. “Don’t argue, don’t get mad, don’t get angry, don’t shake your finger. Just say, ‘We need help,’” Jones said. “That’s the way we move forward.”

When I asked her if she was surprised to have a fellow Democrat in the congressional delegation, Rep. Terri Sewell turned to look directly at me. “I worked my ass off for this,” she said.

Jones is not an outsized personality, but he is a decent-sized one. A former federal prosecutor, he can talk, though not in an overly charming, anecdote-strewn way. It’s more that he just sort of says what he’s thinking into a microphone. It is this unassuming quality that dominates the Jones aura. He is not particularly tall, is neither skinny nor plump and has the balding pate of so many other 64-year-old men. He wears sensible shoes with support. Perhaps the one notable thing about his appearance is his pale blue eyes.

After the health fair, Jones and Rep. Terri Sewell, the only other Democratic member of Alabama’s congressional delegation and its sole black member, toured a National Park Service memorial to the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches. Sewell and Jones are a practiced political duo — all chummy side hugs and comfortable banter.

When I asked her if she was surprised to have a fellow Democrat in the congressional delegation, Sewell turned to look directly at me. “I worked my ass off for this,” she said.

“I told him this could happen as long as we didn’t nationalize it — it came on the heels of the Ossoff election, and it was really important that we kept everything local.” (In one of the first special elections after the 2016 vote, Democrat Jon Ossoff lost what looked like a promising seat pick-up in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District after huge media and ad dollar attention to the race.) Jones tried to keep his distance from national figures and the media firestorm surrounding Moore — as much as was possible.

Jones’s real viability as a Democratic senatorial candidate was always going to inspire some excitement. In one recent year, the left-leaning parts of the Alabama electorate didn’t even have an official candidate: In 2014, Jeff Sessions — whose seat Jones now occupies — ran unopposed, receiving 97 percent of the vote. Jones, of course, benefited from a disillusioned moderate Republican electorate in his 2017 race and from the enthusiasm of Democrats who saw at long last a candidate who actually had a shot at winning. But Trump is still wildly popular in Alabama, and he’ll presumably be on the ballot in 2020, when Jones will be seeking re-election. “A lot of it has to do with suburban voters,” Giles Perkins, the 2017 campaign’s “Yoda” (in Jones’s words — “campaign chairman” in others’), told me about what the senator’s 2020 re-election prospects rested on. “We also have to grow our support in the more rural areas as we focus on rural hospitals and small banks and things that are essential to those communities.”

Turnout is always higher in presidential election years, and Jones will likely have to battle for his seat in front of an electorate filled with enthusiastic Trump voters who might want to vote a partisan ticket, aka anyone but Jones, the Democrat.

Jones’s appeal to black voters in Alabama remains key, and it might lie not just in his existence as an actual factual Democratic senator who got elected, but in his moderation. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, the share of Democrats overall who identify as “liberal” has grown to 48 percent (up from 33 percent in 2008), but only 28 percent of black Democrats identify that way. A plurality of black Democrats, 40 percent, call themselves “moderate,” and 30 percent say they are “conservative.” Jones, for one, is well aware that he owes a huge debt of gratitude to the black voters of Alabama.

“I do think there is a sense of obligation for me to pay careful attention because they have been neglected, and I want to make sure that folks know that I appreciate their support and I want to be there for them,” he said. “I also want them to know that I’m talking about that message in other parts of the state.”

The next day, in another part of the state (one country over), at another rural health-care event, Jones was pitching himself to a very different crowd. It was a mostly white group that had gathered in a room at L.V. Stabler Memorial Hospital in Greenville, a small town in Butler County, where both Trump and Jones had won.

Statewide, Jones won independents, receiving 51 percent of their votes. Even though that’s a slim margin, his support among that group stands in striking difference to the 23 percent of independents that Obama won in 2012. Jones’s appeal to right-leaning voters who were turned off by Moore likely contributed to his victory. He also won 21 percent of moderate or liberal Republicans, while Obama won only 1 percent of those votes in Alabama in 2012.

But Terry Lathan, Alabama’s GOP chair, is skeptical of Jones’s chances, saying that many Republican voters stayed home because of Moore but won’t during a Trump year. “I can tell you the Republican Party and the activists are champing at the bit to get to him in 2020, and he’s got to know that,” she said. “You cannot play political middle of the road and not get run over. You’d better get on one side or the other.”

After a few minutes of remarks, during which Jones bemoaned that Alabama had “left a lot of dollars on the table” by not expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, he took questions from the crowd. One came from a man in the back who introduced himself as “a local peanut man, barbecue man” and who wanted to know why the ACA was a good thing: “Because there’s a lot of people in our community who tell me it’s not.”

Southern politics have “always been a folksier, back-slapping good old boy kinda thing,” Jones said. “And I don’t mean that in a sexist way — I just mean it in a country way.”

It was the gracious version of a question that Jones will be asked again and again over the next two years. And he can be impatient with this GOP line. Jones told me that he’s sometimes frustrated by conservative Alabamians who want his help: “They see the federal government as not being good and don’t really fully appreciate the fact that their public officials need those federal dollars to help their roads, to help their schools, to help save their hospital.”

But Jones didn’t say that to the man in Greenville. Instead, he played the attentive listener, seemingly wanting to know how far to the left his constituents will allow him to go. “Let me qualify this because I don’t want you to think that I’m in favor of single payer like Bernie Sanders, but there is more and more talk about not single payer but a public option that people buy into,” Jones said. “I’m curious as to whether any of you have thoughts.”

People did. Some were open to the idea. Many talked about the high insurance deductibles people face under the current system — they can’t pay them. Dexter McLendon, the mayor of Greenville, a jowly man who wore cowboy boots with his suit and voiced some anti-ACA sentiments during the event, wrapped it up by delivering something of a locker-room pump-up speech: “We gonna sit down here and die and rot on the vine? I mean, I’m not!”

In the car, on our way to the event, I’d asked Jones about the way Southern politics is typically performed. “It’s always been a folksier, back-slapping good old boy kinda thing,” Jones said. “And I don’t mean that in a sexist way — I just mean it in a country way.” The Greenville mayor’s style was definitely channeling that legacy. But he seemed to like Jones, seemed to respect his game. “Let’s give him a hand,” he said, turning to the senator. “He and I don’t agree on everything, but he’s very nice to come.”

The Alabama touches in Jones’s Washington office are obvious. The senator’s preferred seat is a wicker rocking chair covered in white cushions, and the mantlepiece of the marble fireplace is bookended by two signed footballs, one emblazoned with the scarlet University of Alabama “A” (the senator’s alma mater) and the other with “Doug Jones U.S. Senate.”

The space is a visual reminder of how much Alabama and its buffeting political and cultural currents have shaped Jones. His political moderation might be strategically advantageous, but it also isn’t insincere. Jones and his politics are very much of a place and time.

In the center of the office mantlepiece is a picture of a young Jones leaning over to whisper in the ear of an older man at a microphone, Alabama Sen. Howell Heflin, a conservative Democrat who represented the state for 18 years. For a time, Jones served as a staff counsel for the senator. Heflin left the Senate in 1997 and was replaced by Sessions, meaning that Jones now occupies the seat of his former boss. (Perkins told me that Jones was originally considering a run for governor but that switched after a conversation in Perkins’s living room. “His heart had always been in the U.S. Senate,” he said.) Jones fondly recalled that he’d called Heflin during law school, asking if he could work for his campaign. The senator replied that he could if Jones raised enough money to pay for his salary. He did, getting the hang of fundraising calls from an early age.

Jones’s ideological evolution was gradual, although he was always interested in politics. “I don’t think there was an epiphany,” he said. “I didn’t consider myself a George McGovern liberal Democrat. I was not that anti-war at all — very socially conservative at the time.” He voted for Richard Nixon the first time he could cast a ballot but grew disillusioned by Watergate during college. He did field organizing in Alabama for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign and then worked for Heflin. In 1988, when Joe Biden ran for president, Jones served as state co-chair for the campaign.

By that time, Jones was a successful lawyer, although he had yet to try the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case, which received national attention for convictions of two KKK members for the decades-old crime that killed four young black girls in Birmingham. After he won the case, Jones considered running for the Senate. “People forget that I was going to do that in 2001,” he said. “I was coming off the church bombing case. It was Jeff Sessions’s first re-elect coming up — I really felt like there was an opportunity and so that summer after I left the U.S. attorney’s office, I started going around meeting folks, raising a little bit money, not a lot. And then 9/11 hit.” After that, Jones said, everything changed. It was too hard to run against an incumbent Republican in a deep-red state during the post-attack atmosphere. He’d wait another 16 years for a shot at the seat.

“I try to just hold my tongue and go off by myself and beat my head against a wall,” Jones said. “There has to be a certain element of discipline that comes with this job.”

Jones’s sense of history was on display during his maiden Senate speech in March, when he invoked something Heflin had written: “Compromise and negotiation — the hallmarks of moderation — aimed at achieving moderate, centrist policies for our country, should not be viewed as negatives.” Jones took to the floor to cite these words a month after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He spoke about the need for better gun regulations, called for senators to support his Democratic colleagues’ bills, but also said this:

“Frankly, I also enjoy guns. I enjoy shooting them. I like how they are made, their power, and their history. I own many of them, all stored in a locked gun safe that is, quite frankly, larger than what my wife initially approved a number of years ago. And collecting them and shooting them at the range or hunting is a bond I share with my son Christopher and many of my friends.”

Though the American South, especially in 2018, can be a much-maligned place in the eyes of many liberals, Doug Jones is a man of his culture. And he talks about it.

Jones certainly seems more at ease in Alabama. In D.C., he was still getting used to the senatorial pace of life, or, as he put it, “still drinking from the fire hose,” with constituent meetings and staff briefings done in “West Wing”–esque walk-and-talks on the way to committee votes. But back home, he was looser. After an evening event, he couldn’t wait to drive to an old Montgomery seafood place — “Jubilee! Jubilee! It’s Jubilee!” he shouted to members of his staff, jubilant that they had remembered the name of the restaurant after collectively blanking on it. In the car on our drive, he ribbed me about the state of football in my home state, Ohio (Jones is an SEC man through and through and has tickets to the Alabama games that entitle him to lockers in the stadium where he can store adult beverages of his choice to sip on, a nice perk, since alcohol sales are banned by the league), and proved most animated when talking about the history of Alabama politics, of which he seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge.

I asked him about segregation — Jones was born in 1954, the same year that Brown v. Board of Education officially ordered that U.S. schools be integrated.

“For me, segregation didn’t really mean anything,” Jones said of his early childhood. “It was just not something that as a child and growing up that you think about.” He acknowledged he grew up “fairly sheltered,” a white boy in an all-white neighborhood, though Jones said “it was not a hateful neighborhood — no one was out burning crosses.” Fairfield, a town outside Birmingham, where Jones grew up, is home to a U.S. Steel mill, where Jones’s father worked until he was 80 years old. I asked if his family had supported George Wallace, the Alabama governor who ran for president on a segregationist platform.

“Hell, everybody in Alabama supported George Wallace, sure!” Jones said. “Everybody was a Democrat too. The thing about the Democratic Party at the time — and I say this a lot when people say they want to bring the Democratic Party back — I say, ‘Hell no we don’t! Not the rooster!” A white rooster was the old symbol for the Alabama Democratic Party, and the logo was often accompanied by the slogan “white supremacy for the right.”

“I’ve tried to think back a lot to those days, and I remember some of the Wallace stuff. But in the back of my mind, there’s also something telling me that my dad was kinda a Ryan deGraffenried supporter,” Jones said. DeGraffenreid Sr., a candidate for governor, was a relative moderate by Alabama standards — meaning that he was still a segregationist — but he condemned Wallace’s inflammatory rhetoric. “I’ve never really talked to dad about that over the last few years,” Jones mused. “He might remember that — he’s got dementia, so you tend to remember things from far back.”

Jones’s long political memory is a reminder that while he is a new senator, he’s no political naif, but someone with a full life experience and a certain confidence in his decision making.

“He’s a good thinker,” Greg Hawley, Jones’s former law partner, told me. “I don’t think he’s what I would call a collaborative thinker. I think he internalizes a lot of things. He’s good at figuring out things on his own without a lot of input.”

Jones has had to think through some difficult decisions of late, particularly when it comes to Trump Cabinet appointments. He joined the majority of Democrats in voting against Gina Haspel to be director of the CIA but voted for Mike Pompeo’s nomination for secretary of state, one of only a handful of Democrats to do so, despite reservations about Pompeo’s history of anti-Muslim remarks and anti-gay rights policy stances. (Since taking office, Jones has voted in line with Trump’s position 56.3 percent of the time. The only Democratic senator who has voted with Trump more often is Joe Manchin of West Virginia.) Jones got pushback from some of his more liberal supporters for the Pompeo decision, including his son, Carson, who is gay.

“He expressed some disappointment in the vote, and I said, ‘I understand, I got it,’” Jones said.

In a highly partisan atmosphere, with the constant thrum of social media as background to nearly every political happening, it’s impossible not to get pushback on votes or public statements. I asked Jones, who seems preternaturally even-keeled, what does actually push his buttons.

“I’ll tell you what really gets me politically are the people who are disingenuous, who will pander, who are intellectually dishonest just to try to get a vote,” he said. “I try to just hold my tongue and go off by myself and beat my head against a wall. There has to be a certain element of discipline that comes with this job.”

It reminded me of some advice a friend had gotten from his father in moments of frustration: Measure your response by how it serves your goal, not by how it serves your fury. The newly elected senator from Alabama has lived long enough to know that immoderate fury does not serve the goal of the radical moderate.

“I guess I need to show you my picture,” Synethia Pettaway said to me, getting up from the dining-room table in her high-ceilinged, colonnaded home that, as she put it, “was not built for me to live in, but God saw fit for me to be able to purchase.” She meant a black woman wasn’t ever supposed to live in this pretty white house in Selma, Alabama.

She came back with a framed black-and-white photo showing five nuns in old-fashioned white wimples beaming down at a baby. There’s another person in the photo — Martin Luther King Jr. He’s looking at the baby, too, holding her hand.

“His birthday and my birthday are the same, so they wanted him to meet me because I was born on Jan. 15, 1965,” Pettaway said. “They say he told me I would be a civil righter, so I have been out there ever since.”

Pettaway is the head of the Democratic Party in Alabama’s Dallas County and one of a network of black political and civic leaders who helped mobilize voters for Jones. The county, which is 69.5 percent black, went for Jones with 75 percent of its vote. When Sessions ran uncontested in 2014, he received 4,825 votes and no write-in votes in the county. In 2017, Jones got 10,492 votes to Moore’s 3,485.

“The honeymoon’s going to be over next year — it’s over in 2019,” Sam Jones, the former mayor of Mobile, told me.

The black community of Alabama has for many years been underrepresented on the federal level, and its struggles for even a shot at equal representation are ignominious legend: police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks. Pettaway is sanguine about Jones’s prospects for success — she wants to get things done, like getting funds for a better highway through the Black Belt — but she also cautions that Jones still needs to do work to build a deeper understanding of the black community. When F.D. Reese, one of Selma’s “Courageous Eight” who marched with Dr. King to register black voters, died in April, Pettaway said, Jones never reached out. Things like that would need to change going forward, she said. Still, Pettaway said, she’s one of Jones’s biggest proponents.

“The honeymoon’s going to be over next year — it’s over in 2019,” Sam Jones, the former mayor of Mobile, told me over the din of cocktail party chatter at the 100 Black Men of Greater Mobile gala, where Jones was delivering a keynote address. That’s when Jones would have to make real, serious decisions and be called more publicly to task. “I’d start planning for that right now,” the former mayor said.

For Pettaway, seeing the collective votes of black Alabamians put Jones into office was powerful — on election day, a video of a woman casting the first ballot of her lifetime went viral. In Pettaway’s eyes, the stakes of voting are too often obscured.

“People that you vote for determine where you’re born, how you’re born, who you’re born by,” she said. “They determine how you live, who you can marry and where you are married. When you die, they determine how you can be buried and where you can be buried. … They determine all of it. So voting is important.”

And Doug Jones needs to keep Synethia Pettaway’s vote.

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