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nightmare-afton-cosplay · 5 years ago

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This ‘Incredibly Powerful’ Home-Insurance Policy Will Make Payouts Even if Your Property Isn’t Damaged

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Climate change is making extreme weather worse and, right now, Americans are paying the price.

Over the past two years, wildfires in California, floods along the Mississippi River and hurricanes in the Southeastern United States have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. In 2018, weather-related catastrophes prompted $215 billion in losses across the globe, according to a January 2019 report from Aon, a global insurance and reinsurance firm. That was well above the inflation-adjusted average since 2000. Aon said 2018 wasn’t even the costliest year on record. That honor goes to 2017, when weather events caused a total economic loss of $438 billion.

‘The one industry that’s not debating the nature of climate change is the insurance industry.’

Ruth Foxe-Blader, managing director at Anthemis

“The one industry that’s not debating the nature of climate change is the insurance industry,” said Ruth Foxe-Blader, a managing director at venture investment firm Anthemis and an insurance-industry veteran. “The insurance industry woke up really hard and really fast to the weird weather we’ve been having. We keep having 100-year storms within a few years of each other.”

Of the $215 billion in economic loss caused by weather-related catastrophes in 2018 globally, less than half was insured, highlighting a dilemma that many Americans are experiencing in their everyday lives. In the U.S. real-estate market in particular, there’s a major protection gap. Flood damage is excluded from standard homeowner’s insurance policies, yet only 15% of American homeowners had a flood insurance policy as of 2018, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

As the insurance industry grapples with covering the growing losses these extreme weather events cause, the cost of policies is becoming prohibitive, worsening the protection gap. A solution may come through a relatively new form of property-casualty insurance that only recently began being sold to homeowners: Parametric insurance.

What is parametric insurance—and why is it well-suited to climate change

Unlike traditional casualty insurance that reimburses a policyholder for the cost of damage incurred to property, parametric insurance covers the probability of some event happening that is likely to cause an economic loss.

Here’s how that works: Parametric policies require pre-defined events to occur for a consumer to receive a payout. The event itself doesn’t trigger a payout, but insurers will issue payouts if a certain threshold is met; for example, if a storm reaches a certain intensity level. Some policies are based on an honors system, others will automatically issue a payout, experts say.

Parametric insurance is not unlike life insurance, which pays a predetermined amount based on a triggering event, the policyholder’s death.

Events can include everything from hurricanes and floods to droughts and earthquakes. The trigger could be something as simple as the category of storm or the amount of precipitation. For instance, if a homeowner purchased a parametric insurance policy to cover earthquake damage, the insurer could set a threshold of where on the Richter scale an earthquake must fall in order for a homeowner to receive a payout.

As a result, parametric policies can be designed with climate change in mind. A policy could pay the owner of a beach-front property a certain amount if sea levels were to rise another few inches.

There’s one major quirk to parametric insurance that may seem unusual to those familiar with more traditional property insurance: The homeowner doesn’t necessarily need to experience any damage to get a payout.

For instance, if a family’s home doesn’t sustain damage in a Category 3 hurricane, but they had a parametric policy that triggered a payout when a Category 3 hits, they may receive a windfall. (On the other hand, if an insurer sets a very stringent parameter, a homeowner could go without an insurance payout if the weather event wasn’t severe enough even if they incurred damage to their property.)

It helps to think of parametric insurance as akin to life insurance. A life-insurance policy pays a predetermined amount based on a triggering event, the policyholder’s death.

Unlike traditional property-casualty insurance, parametric policies typically don’t have exclusions, deductibles or require adjusters to assess damage.

Unlike traditional property-casualty insurance, parametric policies typically don’t have exclusions, deductibles or require adjusters to assess damage. Because payouts are triggered by a discrete event, the payouts can happen almost immediately.

“In a world where the climate is becoming more and more uncertain, the certainty offered by parametric products can be incredibly powerful and make communities more resilient,” said Matthew Jones, a principal at Anthemis and an insurance industry veteran.

Parametric insurance, also known as index-based insurance, is a relatively new product. The first concept for index insurance was developed in the 1920s by Indian economist J.S. Chakravarti to provide insurance for farmers based on rainfall amounts, according to the International Finance Corporation. Farmers in Sweden began experimenting with this type of insurance in the 1950s, and it came to the U.S. in 1993.

Beyond agriculture, parametric insurance has been the domain of institutions and governments. The State of Louisiana has a parametric policy that pays up to $1.25 million to the state if it is hit by a named storm with sustained winds of at least 80 miles per hour. And the government of Quintana Roo in Mexico has purchased a parametric policy for the coral reef around Cancun and Puerto Morelos that would pay out if the area the reef is located in is hit by a hurricane.

Floridians can buy parametric hurricane insurance

A few companies have begun to offer direct-to-consumer parametric products designed as supplements to traditional insurance policies.

One of those firms is Silicon Valley-based Assured Risk Cover, which offers a product called StormPeace that provides insurance coverage for hurricanes in Florida. The company was founded in 2017, and its product has received the stamp of approval from insurance regulators in the Sunshine State.

A homeowner with a $6,000 StormPeace policy would likely pay an annual premium of approximately $390 to $420.

Alok Jha, CEO of Assured Risk Cover, said people don’t always get the money their due in a timely manner after a disaster. “Our desire was to get cash into the hands of the individuals almost immediately in the aftermath of a catastrophe,” he said.

StormPeace pays out claims on a graduated basis, based on the severity of the storm. It determines the payout using two metrics: the strength of the storm and the distance between the insured property and the storm’s track. Assured Risk Cover uses data from the National Hurricane Center to make its calculations.

When a storm hits an area where Assured Risk Cover provides coverage, the company will send an automated email to potentially affected policyholders notifying them of how much they are entitled to in terms of a claim. Each person can then reply to the email to attest that they need a payout because of the storm, and then Assured Risk Cover will send them the money, Jha said.

How much a StormPeace policy costs varies based on how much coverage a homeowner wants. Most homeowners purchased enough to cover the hurricane deductible on their traditional homeowners insurance policy. Jha said most home insurance policies have around a 2% hurricane deductible.

After Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Michael in 2018, Assured Risk Cover said it paid most claims from parametric policy holders within 24 hours.

Based on the coverage amount selected, StormPeace charges a premium that ranges between 6.5% and 7% of the coverage amount, Jha said. So someone who buys a $6,000 policy for their home might pay a premium of $390 to $420 per year. (Jha declined to provide the average cost of policies provided by Assured Risk Cover.)

Since the product was launched in 2017, two hurricanes have made landfall in Florida: Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018. All of the claims from both storms have been paid out, Jha said, and most payouts occurred within 24 hours of when each storm hit.

Paying a claim quickly following a catastrophe is critical. “Imagine a hole in the roof,” Jha said. “If money’s not paid to them right away to fix that roof, water gets in and then mold accumulates.”

Getting a payout quickly in theory allows the homeowner to begin repairs right away and avoid worse damage.

Getting a payout quickly in theory allows the homeowner to begin repairs right away and avoid the damage getting worse. When that effect is multiplied across multiple homes within a community, it can play a major role in preventing a disaster from causing widespread ruin.

Jha points to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an example of how the current insurance paradigm can fail communities. Many people lacked insurance to cover the losses the storm’s torrential flooding and storm surge caused. Those who were lucky enough to have insurance had to wait for the claims adjustment process to happen before they received their money.

These factors, Jha said, contributed to the permanent exodus of many residents from the city. “If a recovery happens quickly, people get back on their feet and get back to their jobs quicker,” Jha said.

How parametric-style insurance could benefit the insurance industry

Industry experts argued that parametric policies could help close the existing protection gap among consumers, even if they are just supplemental policies.

As of today, most parametric policies are not designed to cover the total value of a property. While a drawback potentially for consumers who might lack other insurance coverage, that generally makes them a more affordable product because insurance companies can charge a lower premium given the lower risk.

“It’s a way of increasing take-up rates,” said Christopher Hackett, underwriting regulation analyst at Zurich North America ZURVY, +0.82%, an insurance company. “They may not be fully indemnified for the loss, but they’ll at least have some money to help them.”

‘It’s less expensive to offer these products because there is no formal claim adjustment process.’

Christopher Hackett, underwriting regulation analyst at Zurich North America

For insurance companies, parametric policies have a separate set of benefits — namely, they are cheaper to offer than traditional homeowner’s insurance policies.

“From the insurance company’s perspective it’s less expensive to offer these products because there is no formal claim adjustment process,” said Hackett, who previously was senior director of personal lines policy at Property Casualty Insurers of America.

Because parametric policies rely on data to approve payouts, there’s no need to maintain a large staff of claims adjusters. Assured Risk Solutions doesn’t employ any claims adjusters in fact, Jha said. “We have software developers, who have been in the risk-modeling industry and data scientists,” he said.

Companies could also consider a hybrid home-insurance policy to shorten the claims-review timeline, Jha said. The typical claims-adjustment process could be eliminated thanks to new technology, he said. Drones are one way to speed the process, he added, enabling human cost adjusters for the most difficult or costliest of claims.

Parametric insurance’s drawbacks

Parametric insurance policies are not without downsides. Perhaps the biggest is so-called basis risk — the potential that a policyholder could incur a loss without the necessary trigger being met.

Let’s say a tree falls on a home during a storm with 25 mile-per-hour winds, but the homeowner’s policy requires the storm to have wind speeds of at least 30 miles per hour to issue a payout. In that situation, the homeowner wouldn’t receive a payout, despite having a parametric policy.

Parametric insurance cuts both ways: a policyholder could incur a loss without the necessary trigger being met.

The basis risk posed by a given parametric policy can be higher if the insurance company is relying on less reliable data.

A 2010 study of a parametric-style insurance product for farmers in India centered on rainfall amounts found that the product proved less popular among farmers who were located further from stations where rainfall amounts were measured. The insurer used the data from these stations to determine payouts.

These farmers’ disinterest in the parametric insurance policies reflected their concern that the location of their farm and the land’s topography could exacerbate the effects of a major rainstorm, but that the nearest weather station may not reflect that.

In this case, the data being used to trigger payouts was “noisy,” Jha argued, meaning it wasn’t robust enough to be easily interpreted for the purposes of paying out policies. “If you use a noisy parameter to pay a claim, that’s where the problems happen,” Jha said.

Assured Risk Cover avoids that issue by using the macro-level data from the National Hurricane Center. Hurricanes behave in more predictable ways — for instance, a tropical storm is going to weaken when it passes over land, not strengthen.

Many people don’t recognize the consequences of climate change

Experts say there’s a need to rethink traditional insurance. Much of the public has yet to reckon with the realities of climate change and realize that it will ultimately affect their lives and property, said Andrew Hoffman, a business professor at the University of Michigan.

Only 30% of the flood damage caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was covered by insurance.

Making matters worse — insurance can be very expensive, and it’s not comprehensive. In particular, traditional homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. For that, you need a separate policy.

On average, flood insurance policies purchased through the National Flood Insurance Program cost $700 per year, but that figure can go much higher depending on a home’s flood risk. And consumers have few options for flood coverage — very few companies provide private flood insurance.

The combination of these factors means that when disaster strikes in the form of a flood — a more common occurrence, meteorologists say, thanks to climate change — most homeowners are on their own.

Hurricane Harvey caused an estimated $37 billion in flood-related residential real-estate losses thanks to its storm surge and a devastating amount of rain the storm unleashed on Texas and Louisiana, according to real-estate data firm CoreLogic. It is estimated that 70% of that damage was not covered by any insurance.

But the industry may have a challenge getting people to take note. “One of the challenges of climate change is making it personally salient,” Hoffman added. “I can’t see greenhouse gases, and I can’t feel the global temperature go up.”

The post This ‘Incredibly Powerful’ Home-Insurance Policy Will Make Payouts Even if Your Property Isn’t Damaged appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

from https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/this-incredibly-powerful-home-insurance-policy-will-make-payouts-even-if-your-property-isnt-damaged/

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kansascityhappenings · 5 years ago

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6 KC Public Works employees plead guilty after lying about road signs to collect overtime

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Six employees of the Kansas City public works department admitted they conspired over three years to collect about $58,000 in overtime pay they had not earned.

The employees were first charged in July, 2019, after the conclusion of internal and FBI investigations.

When the city receives calls about downed or damaged signs that are considered essential — such as stop signs or yield signs — public works employees are called to work overtime to repair or replace the signs.

Prosecutors said the defendants admitted they or their friends and relatives reported damaged signs on evenings or weekends in order to be called out to fix them. They then submitted time sheets and work orders indicating they fixed the signs, when they had not done so. Signs that were actually damaged often were not fixed until the next working day.

The conspiracy lasted from January 2013 to November 2016. An internal investigation found about 75 percent of callouts for damaged signs between Aug. 23, 2016 and Nov. 13, 2016, were fraudulent. City officials then alerted the FBI.

Prentis M. Rayford, 37, Eric McKamey, 47, and Edward Lee Ellingburg, 48, all of Kansas City, pleaded guilty Wednesday to participating in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Co-defendants Paul Myers, 62, Kenneth Gethers, 34, and Julio Prospero, 49, all of Kansas City, have also pleaded guilty to their roles in the conspiracy.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/news/6-kc-public-works-employees-plead-guilty-after-lying-about-road-signs-to-collect-overtime/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/02/13/6-kc-public-works-employees-plead-guilty-after-lying-about-road-signs-to-collect-overtime/

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katie-the-bug · 7 months ago

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Just started Left Behind and I already have Thoughts.

So for reference, the book, which nominally focuses on the Rapture and its aftermath, switches between the perspectives of our two "heroes": Rayford Steele, an airline pilot who fantasizes about cheating on his wife (Irene) until she dies gets Raptured, and Buck Williams, a journalist said to be one of the best in his field based on no textual evidence.

In Chapter 1, before the Rapture hits, we get this sequence of events: Israel develops a magic fertilizer. Rather than exporting the fertilizer or licensing its formula, it uses it exclusively on its own land and exports the food it grows. Russia sends its entire military to completely obliterate Israel because reasons. The Russian military is supernaturally destroyed without doing any harm to Israel. The only consequence for this explored in the story is that a single reporter starts to believe in God. The world at large does not care about the destruction of Russia as a military power and explicit proof of God's favor over Israel. I don't know how the authors think people react to major international situations, but this isn't it.

"The terrifying truth was that he knew all too well. Irene had been right. He, and most of his passengers, had been left behind." *Cinemasins guy voice* Roll credits!

Chapter 2 shows the immediate aftermath of the Rapture: driverless cars crashing on the freeways and unmanned planes falling from the sky, causing untold casualties, and depleted emergency services unable to handle the carnage. I'm pretty sure that in order to get Raptured, you have to believe in the Rapture first. This raises the question: if these people genuinely believed that they could die be Raptured at any time, why the hell would they drive cars or fly planes, knowing that their disappearance would put people in immediate danger, and why would they risk leaving people without critical assistance in crisis? Do they just not care about the safety of others as long as they get their eternal reward? Do I want to know the answer to that question?

Buck tumbles slapstick-style down an inflatable airplane slide and hits his head. This has no bearing on the story, but I think it's funny.

In Chapter 3, When Buck gets in contact with his editor Steve, he gets a laundry list of things to write about that aren't the Rapture that just happened. Steve literally says "I know all anyone cares about are the disappearances. But we need to keep an eye on the rest of the world." One paragraph later, he lists off all the relatives he's lost with no emotion whatsoever. I don't know if the authors planned to establish this character as devoid of human feeling, but they did a pretty good job anyway.

Buck is shortly accosted by a doctor with a full medical kit and "nothing to do." The previous chapter described the massive and unmissable state of emergency the airport, and indeed, the entire city of Chicago are in. Do the authors know what doctors even do?

In Chapter 4, Buck's narration casually mentions that his niece and nephew have most likely disappeared. This does not affect him at all, as "His mind was already whirring with ideas for the story behind the disappearances. Talk about the assignment of a lifetime!" He then proceeds to, for no real reason, search up an obscure Romanian diplomat. I am forced to conclude that either Buck is insane or the authors have no understanding of how normal humans react to things.

Rayford, surprisingly, does experience human emotion in the face of his wife and son's death Rapture, but I will award no points for the bare minimum.

Chapter 6: "If somebody tried to sell a screenplay about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off." I understand that, naturally, this book was written before the three or four movies based on it were made, but I still think this is funny.

"I'm being overrun by Jews." That's it, that's the sentence. Yes there's context but I won't give it to you.

It's been hinted at throughout the story thus far that every child under the age of twelve has been wiped from existence. In the real world, this would be a devastating blow from which civilization as we know it would never recover. In the world of Left Behind, is is a secondary concern to the fact that two Jewish groups are meeting in New York at the same time. I am starting to think that the authors have never met a human being in their life.

...And I think that's enough for a single post. See ya tomorrow.

#katie reads left behind #left behind #stay tuned #long post

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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‘Joe is an uncle to our state’: South Carolina polls show Biden with blowout lead

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/joe-is-an-uncle-to-our-state-south-carolina-polls-show-biden-with-blowout-lead/

‘Joe is an uncle to our state’: South Carolina polls show Biden with blowout lead

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a town hall in South Carolina. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Joe Biden is blowing away his Democratic rivals in South Carolina, according to three new polls that show he’s the only candidate with outsize support from African-American voters in the first-in-the-South primary.

While the former vice president has lost ground in surveys of overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden is pulling in about a third of the overall primary vote in South Carolina. His lead there is powered by a 44 percent backing from black voters, surveys from Quinnipiac University and the University of North Florida released Monday show.

Another survey released Monday, from CBS News/YouGov, shows even stronger support from black voters in South Carolina. Biden receives more than half of his support from African-Americans and has 45 percent overall support.

His next-closest opponents in South Carolina are Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at 17 percent, and Sen. Bernie Sanders at 15 percent in the CBS poll.

In the Quinnipiac poll, Biden has 33 percent support and Warren and Sanders are at 13 and 11 percent, respectively. In the UNF survey, Biden registers 36 percent support, with Warren and Sanders tied at 10 percent.

The polls bolster claims by Biden’s allies that he’s the only candidate in the race who can point to a broad base of support with a pillar of the Democratic Party – African-Americans.

Their continued backing is essential to Biden’s bid — particularly in the South—since black voters could account for one-in-four total voters during primary season. High black turnout is also crucial to any Democrat’s chancesin a general election.

While Biden is benefitting from his status as vice president to the first black president, his longstanding ties to South Carolina and the attacks on his character by Donald Trump have also reinforced his position, according to state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, a Democrat from North Charleston who is neutral in the race and has hosted numerous candidates in his majority-black district.

“Ironically, Trump has helped Biden here,” Kimpson said.

“People I talk to believe Biden doesn’t get a fair shake. And there’s some ownership of him. He has been friendly to our state. He was President Obama’s vice president. There’s sort of a feeling of kinship with him,” Kimpson said. “And people don’t like folk picking on their relative. They believe Joe is an uncle to our state. And Trump’s preoccupation and fascination with taking him out has resonated.”

Kimpson and the pollsters cautioned that the race is still fluid and anything can still happen. The surveys show that many voters have indicated they could switch their votes. There’s also a sizable pool of undecided voters, about a fifth of the stateelectorate

“If Biden goes into Atlanta in the debate this week and says something stupid, well, he can’t afford any major problems,” Kimpson said.

The newestpolls are a gut-punch to the two African-American senators who have looked to the state as a springboard, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. They’ve premised their candidacies on doing well enough in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada in order to gain momentum and capture the support of South Carolina’s black voters — estimated to be as much as two-thirds of the primary vote in the state.

The senators’ calculus also counts on the implosion of Biden’s campaign, which has so far failed to materialize.

Harris only has 3 percent overall support in South Carolina and 6 percent support from black voters there, while Booker has 2 percent support overall and from black voters in the state, according to Quinnipiac’s survey. In UNF’s poll, Harris has 4 percent overall support and also from black voters, while Booker is at 2 percent in both categories.

UNF surveyed 437 Democratic voters by cell and landline phones for its poll, which has a margin of error of +/- 4.7 percentage points. Quinnipiac surveyed 768 likely voters by cell and landline phones. And CBS surveyed 933 Democrats in the state via internet-based web panels. CBS/YouGov did not provide detailed breakdowns of poll respondents by race.

The polls suggest South Carolina, the final early state to vote on Feb. 29, is an uphill climb for Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is the leader in a recent flagship poll in Iowa.

In the UNF survey, Buttigieg had 3 percent support overall and 1 percent support from African-American voters. In Quinnipiac’s poll, Buttigieg registered no support among black voters and was at 6 percent overall.

“It’s certainly a warning sign for all of the other candidates,” UNF political science professor Michael Binder said, referring to the preferences of black voters so far.

Binder cautioned that early polls like this will change as the campaign grinds on and candidates win or lose in the early states. But at the moment, Biden’s support shows how strong he is with black voters.

“Biden right now is the toughest kid on the block in South Carolina and until someone comes along and punches him in the nose, he’s going to stay that way,” Binder said.

Name identification is a major assetfor Biden in South Carolina. Only 8 percent say they haven’t heard enough about him in Quinnipiac’s poll, the only to survey the leading Democratic candidates’ favorability ratings. Sanders is well-liked, too, but less so than Biden with only 9 percent saying they haven’t heard enough. The rest of the field remains largely unknown to South Carolina Democratic voters in the Quinnipiac poll, by anywhere from a fifth to half of voters surveyed.

“There’s definitely some familiarity with Joe Biden that is helping him. Voters in South Carolina know him and like him,” said Mary Snow, a polling analyst for Quinnipiac, who added that 24 percent of voters in the primary said electability was the most important issue for them and of them, 40 percent supported Biden.

The polls also show that California billionaire Tom Steyer is creeping up in South Carolina, where he has spent at least $7.5 million on TV and radio, about $1 million on Facebook and hundreds of thousands of dollars more on digital advertising and mail blanketing the state.

Steyer is at 8 percent in the UNF poll, 5 percent in Quinnipiac but only 2 percent in the CBS/YouGov poll.

South Carolina state Rep. Russell Ott, who endorsed Steyer, said he believes the race is “up for grabs” but that “Biden is the default candidate for many.”

“I believe that Tom Steyer matches up best against Trump in terms of the economy and bringing back rural America,” said Ott. “I’m unfortunately very concerned that Joe Biden is going to bring more baggage in the race than he is going to need long term to be successful.”

Ott also pointed out that Republicans won’t hold a 2020 primary and many in the state might cross over and vote in the Democratic race, making it potentially more unpredictable.

The Quinnipiac poll bringsSteyer and entrepreneurAndrew Yang closer to the requirementsfor participating in the Dec. 19 Democratic primary debate, which is co-hosted by POLITICO and PBS Newshour.

Steyer’s 5 percent in the Quinnipiac poll pushed him across the required polling threshold to participate in the debate (candidates need to get 4 percent in four polls approved by the Democratic National Committee or 6 percent in two DNC-approved polls in early states). Steyer still needs to hit a donor threshold of 200,000 unique supporters, but his campaign was confident he would hit that mark before the Dec. 12 deadline.

Yang hit 4 percent in the Quinnipiac poll. This is his third qualifying poll toward the December debate and his campaign has said he has already exceeded the donor mark.

The other billionaire who is expected to enter the race, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has upside-down approval numbers, with 16 percent viewing him favorably and 26 percent unfavorably in the Quinnipiac poll.

The Quinnipiac poll also reveals the long odds facing Deval Patrick, Massachusetts’ first black governor, who jumped into the race last week after opting against it months ago, robbing him of time, campaign contributions, an easy-to-assemble staff or debate appearances.

“[Patrick] has his work cut out for him in introducing himself to voters,” said Snow. “Nearly 8 in 10 likely voters say they haven’t heard enough about Patrick to form an opinion of him.”

In North Charleston, state Sen. Kimpson said he doesn’t understand the math for Patrick at this late date.

“Deval Patrick is an excellent candidate … a year ago,” Kimpson said, spelling out the ellipses as “dot, dot, dot” to emphasize how too much time has passed. “I don’t know how he’s going to do it.”

Zach Montellaro contributed to this report.

#Biden #blowout #Foreign #Politics

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prof-kenny · 8 years ago

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Yutong Yuan

A couple of months ago, I found myself in the curious position of examining Joe Biden’s head.

On television, the former vice president comes across as perpetually tanned and coiffed — always with the aviator glasses and the crisp shirtsleeves. He still works out every morning, often lifting weights and riding a Peloton bike, and his face is still golden, his brow remarkably unfurrowed for a man of his 76 years. Up close — like, six inches up close — Biden is slighter than you might imagine. From my aft position in a press gaggle in Dearborn, Michigan, I could see the baby-pink of his scalp peeking through wisps of gleaming white hair and the faint mottling near his ears. They caught me off guard, all those fragile little human details you miss on television.

And it was a very human summer for Biden, if you’re going by “to err is human” standards. On June 18, speaking at a New York City fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel (a swank spot on the Upper East Side where Woody Allen has a standing gig to play jazz clarinet), Biden began talking about the need for consensus-building. According to the pool report, he broke into a southern drawl as he brought up a segregationist senator from Mississippi: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” Herman Talmadge — “one of the meanest guys I ever knew” — was another southern segregationist Democrat who Biden worked with. “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.”

The outrage was swift. The following day, fellow White House hopeful Sen. Cory Booker put out a statement. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” it began, adding, “He is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together.” Biden responded by saying Booker should apologize. “There’s not a racist bone in my body,” he said. “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career.”

So a month later, when a reporter in the sweaty Dearborn gaggle started by asking what Biden made of Booker calling him “the architect of mass incarceration” — a reference to his involvement with the passage of the 1994 crime bill — Biden let out a little gust of a sigh before answering. “Cory knows that’s not true.” He seemed weary of the question, and aware that it wasn’t going away.

Biden has largely led in the polls since entering the Democratic primary. Yet his front-runner status is complex: a cornerstone of his primary support is the black community — a recent poll from YouGov and The Economist showed Biden with as much as 65 percent of black support — even as his decades-long record on racial issues has transmuted into something deeply troubling to some Democratic voters. Though Sen. Elizabeth Warren has nipped at his heels in recent polls, Biden remains a peculiar front-runner — numerically indisputable yet, perhaps, fatally flawed.

Biden has a number of swirling factors to thank for his strength with black Democrats. He was President Obama’s vice president and has staked out a spot in the primary’s relatively uncrowded moderate lane — one that ideologically suits many black voters just fine. He’s also hit on a lurking note of pessimism among some black voters about what sort of person they think might be “electable” in a country that made Donald Trump president after the first black man had the job. Biden’s general election proposition, after all, involves winning over white Trump voters who some Democrats have spent the past three years accusing of racism and xenophobia.

Something about the man himself seems to be resonating with black voters, too. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a Democratic power broker, told me that Biden’s greatest asset with black voters might well be his own life story, which is strewn with personal tragedy. “We can be no more noble than what our experiences allow us to be. And black voters, by and large, see so much of their experiences in Joe Biden.”

The cornerstone of Biden’s candidacy is support from the black community and his long-standing relationships in it. In June, he attended Rep. James Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” and spoke to Rev. Al Sharpton.

WIN MCNAMEE / SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

But while Joseph Robinette Biden, the Irish-American speaker of self-conscious Scrantonese, is black voters’ current choice in a Democratic primary featuring two viable black candidates, there’s a sense that the winds could shift at any moment. He spent the better part of the summer relitigating his decades-long voting record. His opponents have pressed him on what they say is an antiquated outlook on race relations in America, all in an effort to chip away at his support among people of color. Prominent Democrats openly fret that he might be too old for the job. The supposed ephemera has accumulated against him even as the numbers check out nicely on paper.

The oddity for present-day Joe Biden is that he was sure America already knew him and what he was all about. But the politics of 2019’s Democratic Party can be slipshod and capricious. Its candidates are viewed more often than not through a kaleidoscopic refraction of peoples’ frustrations with the system or their anger at the president. Biden isn’t really “Uncle Joe” these days, but he presents a pretty enough picture; squint and you’ll see the halcyon Democratic era of the Obamas. If things stay that way — for black voters most especially — Biden might yet win a presidential nomination. But one or two ticks off the mark and the colors and patterns all change. Suddenly Biden could look like a wholly different man.

Biden’s current resonance with black voters is perhaps chiefly owed to Obama, a man he once called “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

In one sense it’s ironic that Biden’s Achilles heel is the past, since a central argument of his campaign is that he can turn back the clock — but not too far back. He wants voters to remember him from the placid (by comparison) days of the Obama administration. Further back in Biden’s past, things get iffier. To that end, it is Obama’s name that Biden seems to mention most on the campaign trail — so much so that at the recent NAACP national convention, moderator April Ryan asked Biden if he used the former president as a “crutch.” (The answer was no. He then went on to talk about Obama some more.) Obama, it should be noted, is wildly popular among Democrats these days — a Gallup post-presidency poll found that he had a 95 percent favorability rating.

The continued Obama name-dropping might have seemed cringeworthy following Biden’s opponents’ critiques — verging on an I-have-black-friends line of defense — but it was also powerful. Many black voters buy the idea that if Biden was good enough for Obama, Biden’s good enough for them. Sheila Hill, an NAACP convention attendee from Arlington, Texas, was emblematic of many voters when she put her fondness of Biden in familial terms: “Joe came up like he’s a member of the family, like he might sit down and have a bite to eat, pull him up a plate, let him get some greens and cornbread. And you know how everyone was introduced? He didn’t need to introduce himself because he’s part of the family.”

A lynchpin of the Biden campaign’s strategy is embracing President Obama’s legacy whenever possible.

SAUL LOEB / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

A couple of days later, in the midst of the Booker vs. Biden news cycle, I was sitting in the Indianapolis Airport when I spotted Rev. Al Sharpton across the terminal. I was coming home from the National Urban League Conference, where I had squished myself into an uncomfortable chair to watch the crowd titter as Rep. Tim Ryan walked on stage to Johnny Cash. I had spent the morning with one ear on the speeches and one eye on Twitter, where Biden acolytes were touting a general election head-to-head poll that put him several points up on Trump in Ohio, the only Democrat ahead of the president. Sharpton had been there too, addressing the assembled members of the civil rights group.

“I think that he certainly enjoys a lot from the Obama connection,” Sharpton said, wearing a beautifully tailored suit and reclining in his seat just in front of the gate. “That’s what I think Biden’s hidden advantage is, deservedly or not: he gets associated credit for Obama dealing with Trayvon [Martin] and Obama dealing with policing commissions.”

(Despite numerous requests for this story on black voters, the campaign did not make Biden available for an interview with FiveThirtyEight.)

Sharpton, for one, seemed unsurprised by Biden’s lead over Sens. Kamala Harris and Booker. “You can’t now take the black vote for granted, and Joe has relationships,” he said. “And they’re long-standing relationships. You need a Jim Clyburn in South Carolina, I don’t care who you are.” By his estimation, Harris and Booker still had a chance to win over black voters, but their paths were far from assured. “I think that racial politics has changed — not dramatically, but to some degree — post-Obama because the novelty is no longer there.”

Sharpton, who expertly fielded the handshakes of a stream of strangers as we spoke, has himself entertained white candidates like Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem. He was judging the 2020 Democrats, he told me, on the strength of their platforms. For what it was worth, he liked Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan, a framework to solve fiscal and societal inequities that affect the black community.

The quiet stirring of businessmen near the gate told me it would soon be boarding time. I asked Sharpton how much time Harris and Booker had until it was too late. The end of September, he answered. “Unless of course, Joe does something absolutely off the wall,” he said, chuckling. “Which is not beyond the possible — we are talking about Joe.”

Biden has caught heat from activists for unpopular policies of the Obama administration, like deportations.

BASTIAAN SLABBERS / NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

There’s a bookstore near my office that I sometimes browse on my lunch hour, a happy way to avoid the harsh fluorescence of office life. Over the summer, a book caught my eye: “Hope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery.” The cover featured a cartoon Obama dangling from the end of a rope ladder — which itself was dangling from an airborne helicopter — while grasping for Biden, trying to pull him up. A few shelves away was the title, “Hugs from Obama: A Photographic Look Back at the Warmth and Wisdom of President Barack Obama.” While bookstores on Manhattan’s Upper West Side cater to a specific subset of America, the books’ mere existence tells a person something: a lot of Democrats still really like Barack Obama and his moderate-in-2019 policies. That’s why the lynchpin of the Biden strategy is embracing the former president’s legacy and coalition whenever possible.

Sometimes, though, that strategy can catch Biden heat. At the second Democratic debate at the end of July, he said that illegal immigrants should “get in line” and wait to enter the country legally. Julián Castro, Obama’s former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, skewered the administration’s deportation policy. “It looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” Castro told Biden in a heated exchange.

Biden faced fallout from this exchange. Activists said that he had been echoing conservative talking points, so he met with Latino leaders in person to smooth things over.

“To me that was surprising because I had written that line for Barack Obama multiple times in every immigration speech we ever did,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau told me. “Even language that was, in the Obama years, approved and fine and culturally sensitive — it’s suddenly not.” (A former senior Obama White House advisor said of the debate, “On the Obama side we’re not defensive. The party and the country are in different places than we were in 2008. It would be silly to run on the exact same policies and ideas that we implemented.”)

That’s in part because of the conversation happening online. A favorite line of the Biden campaign is that Twitter isn’t real life, a nod to the fact that young, progressive, vociferously anti-Biden voices seem most amplified on the social networking site but are less representative of the broader base of the party. “We’re not going to let Twitter dictate this primary process for us,” said Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to the Biden campaign. “If we did, frankly, I think we’d spend all our time talking about 1994,” a reference to the 1994 crime bill, Biden’s support of which has helped label him as almost-Republican in certain circles.

The campaign operation has been focused instead on messaging Biden’s moderation and his close ties to Obama. On the morning of the third debate in mid-September, the campaign tweeted out a video with the caption, “Barack Obama was a great president. We don’t say that enough.” Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager, wrote, “Barely a week goes by where some Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t directly or indirectly criticize Pres. Obama. The attacks are out of touch with the majority view of the Democratic Party voters.”

In order to win the nomination in a crowded race, Biden needs to cultivate support across demographic groups, to at least feint at his ability to win back the Obama coalition in the general election. His bedrock of support is black voters. Black voters made up around one-quarter of the 2016 Democratic primary electorate and are a crucial demographic group for any candidate. According to Gallup, 63 percent of non-Hispanic black Democratic voters self-identify as moderate or conservative. This, even as the Democratic Party overall has gotten more liberal — 2018 was the first year that over half of Democrats (51 percent) identified as liberal (in 1994, that number was only 25 percent.)

But while black voters have remained more moderate or conservative, white voters have become increasingly likely to identify as liberal — 65 percent of non-Hispanic white Democrats called themselves liberal and have become rapidly more liberal on issues of race over the past 10 years. With white liberals comprising a key demographic not just in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, but also in the media, it’s no wonder that Biden’s campaign has felt the pile-on of Twitter chatter.

Yet Biden has given his progressive critics ample opportunity to say he’s carelessly retrograde when he talks about race. In early August, for example, he said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” While he immediately tried to correct himself, Biden has a long-time reputation for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Favreau told me there was “an anxiety that lasted throughout the White House [years] — ‘will Biden say something sort of off?’ Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch — it was that he was a blowhard,” he said.

While a summer of attacks hasn’t shaken Biden’s black support overall, younger black voters don’t seem to like what they see as much as older black voters. CNN polling analysis from this summer showed that Biden’s overall support from black voters is 44 percent, but his support with black Americans under the age of 50 is lower, at 36 percent. CNN modeling suggested that his support is likely less than 30 percent among black voters under the age of 30. A recent poll suggested that Warren might be making inroads with black voters. She has also gained overall on Biden in key states like Iowa and in some national polls.

Younger voters, black ones included, are concerned about issues of race and justice — things like fixing the school-to prison-pipeline, lowering incarceration rates for black men and curbing police violence. Which is why Biden’s vote on the 1994 crime bill has become such a problem and a fixation for the campaign. It might be that younger voters, who previously only knew Biden as the friendly older man next to Obama, are perturbed when they see the crime bill through 2019 eyes: mandatory life sentences after “three strikes” for federal crimes and incentivizing states to pursue harsher sentencing.

Biden, January 1990

LAURA PATTERSON / CQ ROLL CALL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Obama has reportedly expressed worry that Biden World advisors are too old school for the candidate’s good. Some of his advisors, like Sen. Ted Kaufman and Mike Donilon, have been with Biden for decades.

But younger advisors have come on board, too — Schultz and his deputy, Kate Bedingfield, are of a newer generation — and Sanders, a high-profile hire who served on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, is 29 years old. I asked Sanders, who is black, what if any advice she had given to Biden about talking to younger black voters. “I’m not going to divulge the particulars of the conversations that I have with Vice President Biden, but what I’ll say is that he and I have a good rapport, we have a good relationship and the nature of our relationship is that Joe Biden is a frank guy, he’s authentic and he speaks his mind and he empowers the people around him to do the same.”

The polls, Sanders said, bore out that Biden’s approach was working. “Anyone who purports that we don’t understand this moment or our campaign doesn’t get it — I think we uniquely understand this moment because this has been our argument from day one.”

But the crime bill remains a vulnerability for the campaign, something that engenders defensiveness from the candidate. In June, while answering a question about prison reform he brought up the crime bill, “which you’ve been conditioned to say is a bad bill,” he told the audience.

Biden has spent a lot of time in a defensive crouch about the legislation. His proposed criminal justice reform plan outlines ways to reduce incarceration, a pointed policy rebuke to the effects of the 1994 bill. But at events, he goes to lengths to defend what he calls the good parts of the bill — including the Violence Against Women Act — and his surrogates are quick to say that people are purposefully leaving out the historical context of what America was like when the legislation was passed. Clyburn — who has not yet endorsed a candidate — recalled for me a town hall meeting he had back in the 1990s in a mostly black town in South Carolina. “I spoke out against mandatory minimums, I spoke out against the crack cocaine policy. I almost got physically attacked in that place. There wasn’t a white person in the room,” he said. “To them, crack cocaine was a scourge in the African American community and they supported this crackdown.”

Biden’s grappling with his pre-Obama history is fraught, in part, because before being Obama’s vice president, he wasn’t much of a known figure in black communities. When Biden briefly ran for president in the 1988 election — a June to September endeavor that ended in a plagiarism scandal — he had little apparent appeal in the black community. A pre-scandal poll from that summer shows that he didn’t even register with black voters — he was at 0 percent while Jesse Jackson, one of the first major black Democratic candidates, had 48 percent of the black vote.

Still, hopes for Biden were high, particularly in the political media. One Los Angeles Times story from that June called Biden “the white Jesse Jackson” and noted that his opposition to federally mandated busing was savvy, “a sign of both his keen political instinct and a social imagination — a sense of the real-life consequences of government action that is rare in Washington.” Biden opposed busing because it threatened to destroy “the consensus on civil rights within the white middle class that permitted progress’ for blacks,” the story surmised. Even on hot-button issues like race, Biden was proud of his ability to foster compromise and centrism. It’s a legacy that hasn’t aged as well in a Democratic Party which is more apt to burn its one-time idols than study their historiography.

The day after the second debate, Jonathan Kinloch, a black Democratic Party official in Detroit, sat with me at a local cafe eating forkfuls of something sweet while saying something bitter: “Based on where we’ve come over these past three years and looking at the person, that Tasmanian Devil in the White House, it’s going to take another same sort of type of white man to go toe-to-toe with him.”

Kinloch doesn’t think America is going to elect a black candidate, not right now. “I’ve come to only one conclusion: Trump was elected out of eight years of repudiation for having a black man in the office. I think right now, where this country is, the flames that have been fanned by Donald Trump, we have to take a measured approach to this upcoming election.”

Biden faced blowback in July’s Democratic primary debate for his comments about fostering compromise with segregationist senators and for his stance on federally mandated busing.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

This is the sort of electability argument that the Biden campaign can’t quite say out loud, but to which some black voters seem at least partially resigned. They might not love Biden’s semi-frequent verbal washouts but Trump in the White House grates on them more. It’s this logic, as bright and shining as their candidate’s teeth, that Biden allies allude to. Whatever his sins, whatever his prior stances, Biden’s 2020 intentions are pure — certainly purer than Trump’s. And, the theory goes, he’s got the sort of mass appeal that will talk sense into Obama voters who defected to Trump the last go-round. (Recently, a whistleblower complaint surfaced claiming that Trump leaned on the Ukrainian president to find damaging information on Biden and his son Hunter. In response to the news, Biden said that Trump was going to such extremes only because “he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”)

There’s a risk, of course, that in trying to appeal to everyone, in refusing to play too woke, Biden risks flagging enthusiasm from black voters come the general election. The black vote disastrously didn’t surface for Hillary Clinton in 2016. There’s also some serious doubt that any candidate besides the singular first black president could inspire high turnout in the black community. In a Detroit press gaggle, I asked Biden how he planned to get Obama-era levels of votes in the black community in key general election states. I got a typically-rambling response in return. “They want to know someone — first of all, are they telling them the truth, are they laying out straight exactly what they’re going to do? No double talk. What are you going to do. And then secondly, ‘Do I believe you understand me? Do I believe you know my heart?’ I’m not a black man, to state the obvious, but I’ve gone out of my way to understand the best I possibly can what the concerns are.”

Some of the weirdness of the 2020 primary, including Biden’s leading it, is that for a party professing to be fighting for the soul of America — like, for real for real this time — there isn’t much soaring idealism afoot. It’s a contest about pragmatism. As Jill Biden put it, “You may like another candidate better but you have to look at who’s going to win … Joe is that person.”

“People are not excited, they’re not inspired,” said Anton Gunn, Obama’s former South Carolina political director. “Young people want to be inspired, everyone wants to be inspired. I don’t think we have a sense from anyone in the field that’s inspiring.”

When I spoke with Jackson, I asked what he thought about black voters’ support for Biden, his old rival. “The absence of Trump is not the presence of justice,” he said. “In the days to come I’m sure those who put forth the most hope for tomorrow and plans will gain the most traction in time. That may be Biden, but the question is wide open.”

The morning of the second debate, I met Rep. Cedric Richmond, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a co-chair of the Biden campaign, in the lounge of a downtown Detroit hotel. Various suits wandered the halls and a forlorn offering of pasta salad stood sentinel in one corner. I asked Richmond about the same thing I asked Sanders: had the campaign done any additional preparation with the candidate to ready for a new racial discourse?

“I didn’t know we had a new language on race,” Richmond answered wryly. Millennials, he went on, “are the beneficiaries of things that they don’t know they’re beneficiaries of — for example, murder was at an all time high in the early ‘90s. The streets were violent. You had children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sons being killed in the streets, you had rampant carjackings, you had drug dealing everywhere. The African American community was up in arms asking people to do stuff.”

For black voters, Richmond said, the stakes of the 2020 election were clear: “Donald Trump could be a one man end of Reconstruction.” Beating him is what matters. Dwelling on Biden’s vocabulary is just frippery by comparison.

Biden supporters cheer during the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention in June. South Carolina, with its predominantly black electorate, is crucial to Biden’s success in the primary.

LEAH MILLIS / REUTERS

Richmond told me the campaign sees a path to victory through the South, a region packed with black votes. Dave Wasserman, editor at The Cook Political Report, agreed. “I think his strengths lie on Super Tuesday,” he said of the slate of March 3 primaries a month after the very first contest in Iowa. Candidates like Warren are more likely to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, Wasserman said. Biden campaign officials have told reporters they don’t think he needs to win Iowa, where liberal white activist voters hold sway. “But when you’re talking about a massive one-day clearance sale on Super Tuesday where it’s all about mass appeal and name recognition and strength — particularly black voters in the south, that’s where Biden really needs to hold on,” Wasserman said.

South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary is a bellwether for Biden’s Southern strategy with a primary electorate that’s almost two-thirds black. Biden was at 43 percent in a recent CBS News/YouGov poll of the state, and it is a must-win for him. But strategists there hardly seem to think that things are sewn up for Biden. “I don’t believe polls because the same polls at this time in 2007 would show Obama was losing to Hillary Clinton by 18 points,” Gunn said. Obama would go on to win South Carolina. ”We kept organizing. Organizing is about touching people and knowing how many voters you’ve identified.” Booker’s field organization looked pretty good to Gunn, though he said it wasn’t as robust as Obama’s had been in the 2008 primary. “Definitely don’t write off Booker,” said a senior South Carolina Democrat who asked for anonymity to more freely discuss the campaign. “He has the best operation.”

I headed to South Carolina in late August, just as my inbox was signaling crunchtime of the presidential campaign slog: Buttigieg in L.A., Warren in Washington state, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Biden in South Carolina.

As a rule, Biden campaign events — which take place less often than other 2020 candidates’ — tend to be large affairs. His late August town hall in Spartanburg was no exception. Massive rollup American flag displays were stretched taut at either end of an echoing room. The campaign’s “Biden President” logo was slapped up everywhere. The omission of the word “for” was a not-so-subliminal message about the job he wants. A large contingent of media typed in back; a brawny blonde reporter joked with a brawny salt-and-pepper reporter about some home state sports thing.

Basically every Biden event — every 2020 campaign event for that matter — is a chance for a secular revival. And Biden is good at being churchy; he knows what to give a crowd. He can be folksy and familiar — the ghost of Uncle Joe — as well as discursive on issues of morality. When talking about guns or abortion he is most eloquent; you get the sense that Biden has devoted a whole lot of time inside his head to those topics. He starts every town hall or speech by setting the stakes with a mention of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017: “It shocked the whole world.”

Biden’s speech is riddled with “I’m being serious” and “seriously, folks” and “no kidding, folks,” to the point where it’s become a running joke in the press corps. I spoke with a former speechwriter of his who thinks that the “folks” tics might be something Biden has developed over time to deal with the stutter he had in childhood. “It’s how he handles transitions,” he told me.

Biden has struggled to gain ground with younger voters despite his strong showing in the polls overall.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

The childhood stutter is one of many personal details that voters have learned about Biden over the years — people have a relationship with him. Those I spoke with who know Biden all tended to say the same thing: he actually is an earnest guy. The care is real. But there’s also a carefully refined rubric of folksiness at work, all mixed with a 76-year-old’s out-of-date sensibilities. Those things can rub some people the wrong way, but both might be political strengths in the general election. “Above all else, it’s just human, it’s a storytelling voice,” Biden’s former speechwriter told me about the candidate’s preferred public voice. “It actively tries to connect with the people who are literally in front of him. Not with some kind of abstract, ethereal voter demographic or anything like that. It’s personal.” In Spartanburg, for instance, Biden talked about women deserving equal pay, but framed the problem through the lens of blue-collar men wanting their wives to be paid more. It wasn’t exactly a politically correct formulation of the issue, but its practicality rang true.

There is a gentle affect about Biden, too. When telling stories about his adult children, he refers to them as “honey” — the doting dad. Stories about his parents start with “Joey …” and suddenly he’s the adoring son. He apologizes for blocking the sign language interpreter. When he shakes hands with people, he stares deeply into their eyes — the kind of eye contact that some have called creepy but others find intoxicating coming from a very famous person. Biden has an ability to make people feel as if he has really listened. One voter I talked to in Spartanburg, Vanessa Logan, emailed me later to say that she’d asked Biden a detailed question; he had made sure his aides got her contact info so they could send her his book for a more in-depth explanation.

This attentiveness coupled with the routine vulnerability Biden shows is partially why people can’t help but be a little fond of him. “He’s down to earth, has a lot of warmth,” Sheran Littlejohn, a middle-aged black voter who came out to see Biden during his South Carolina swing, told me. “At first I thought about Kamala Harris, but then she started coming down on her own party. She went after Biden.” Somehow, even as Biden is running to protect America from Trump, he’s made voters feel like they want to protect him.

A few hours after the Spartanburg event I was at Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, where it was sweltering hot even a little after 5 p.m. The only breeze came from the pep band flag twirlers entertaining a waiting crowd and the ladies in it who sat fanning themselves. Biden was running late, so I dipped into the library for a few minutes of A/C, then strolled through the crowd. I found Rosa Webber, 64, under the shade of a Magnolia tree, waiting for the event to begin with her friends from the Gaffney Women’s Democratic Club.

Webber had already made up her mind about who she’ll be voting for, come February’s primary. “If he was good enough for Obama, he’s good enough to be my president,” she said of Biden. But Anita Chambers was still candidate shopping. She liked Biden and Harris, but, “also, what’s her name? Elizabeth Warren. I like her. She’s very outspoken, very direct.”

Webber didn’t think any of the women could win, though. I asked why and before she could answer, Annette Byers, 75, interrupted: “Because the men, they’re going to do females just the way they did Hillary.” Webber agreed. “Yeah, the men are not going to vote for women. I don’t think it’s time for the women to step up.” Chambers tried to say something positive about the promise of a reinvigorated women’s movement. Byers wasn’t moved. “They will cheat her out of the election just like they did with Hillary. They will lie, lie, lie.” The conversation ended soon after, as a man with a honey-soaked accent got on the microphone and commenced proceedings.

Biden’s long career in the public eye means that voters have formed a long-standing relationship with him. This familiarity has helped him weather blunders and flare-ups throughout the campaign that might have endangered lesser-known candidates.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

Jalon Roberson, a 22-year-old senior at Limestone, said that when he and other black students talked 2020, he found most of them were still on the fence about whom to support. Roberson liked both Biden and Harris, but saw issues with both. “I like that she’s devoted to law, but a lot of her past doesn’t line up with the angle she’s taking now,” he said of Harris. “A lot of black males are going to jail, getting put away, but now she comes out and she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m for black people, I eat pork chops, blah blah blah.’ I feel like she’s trying too hard to appeal to black people. I feel like there is a way to try and come across as sincere but you have to first acknowledge that you’re an outsider and say, ‘Hey, I want to appeal to you guys.’”

Biden, Roberston said, seemed like a moral guy, a good person. But, “he was in Iowa and he slipped up and he said poor kids are just as talented and bright as white kids. And I know that’s not what he meant and that’s not how he meant it to come across, but you can tell that there is an unconscious bias.” Roberson wanted to ask Biden about how to tackle that bias.

Roberson did get a question in, just not that one. As the beginning of golden hour set in over the crowd and the hottest part of the day came to an end, Biden was taking questions from the crowd in blue-and-white shirtsleeves. “A lot of young people my age, my race, we are trying to find the incentive to vote Democratic. Why should we trust the party, and how would your administration go about holding the party accountable?” Roberson asked him.

A good question, a fair question, Biden said. He began to weave his way through the folding chairs, a meandering walk to make eye contact with students seated a little further back on the lawn. One young black man stood on a short brick retaining wall in sunglasses, a pink button-down and a hoodie. Biden made his way toward the young man while he answered, hoping to drink up some eye contact. Just as Biden approached, almost standing in front of him, the young man flipped his hood up defiantly and Biden skillfully pivoted away. A confrontational moment avoided.

The answer continued for another few minutes, and the young man kept his eyes on Biden throughout. Biden mentioned the number of incarcerated black men and the crime bill — how most black people had supported it at the time. He talked about racial profiling in Newark, New Jersey — his favorite dig at Booker. Then, “We have systemic racism in the United States of America and it’s a white man’s problem. White men are responsible for it, not black men.” The young man on the wall said, “I agree,” to that, and clapped. It was a good answer for Biden, overall. He got applause for lines about teaching prisoners how to read, positioning prisoners to get proper housing after their time served. But Jalon Roberson and the young man in the hoodie are college kids, not prisoners. It struck me that Biden’s answer wholly ignored most of the issues that the black students at Limestone and elsewhere told me they were most worried about: student debt, raising the minimum wage, the environment. Biden’s defensiveness of his past had dominated the answer. Though he did throw in a sentence or two at the end about the American Dream — “that’s why we have to rebuild the middle class and this time, we bring everybody along” — he didn’t offer any specifics.

Biden had wanted desperately to prove himself worthy to the audience of students, but a vast gulf of age and experience separated him from Roberson and the young man in the hoodie. “Let’s hear it one more time for the next president of the United States, Joe Biden!” the MC intoned over the microphone. Everyone clapped. That was that.

If Biden wins the nomination — his third attempt to do so — he will be 77 years old. The party he leads has changed rapidly during his time in public life, becoming more liberal and diverse.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Clyburn said about Biden’s tragedies. How the way he dealt with them had raised Biden in the esteem of many black voters, given the systemic hardships inflicted on them and their families over a couple of centuries in this country. Biden repurposed his suffering so it could be something more — a blessed experience, Clyburn said.

I’ve also spent a lot of time wondering why Biden ran for president this time around. He says publicly it has a lot to do with the wishes of his son Beau, who died in 2015, that he stay involved in public life. There’s ego at work, of course — it takes a massive one for a person to ever even consider running for president. But why after running for president twice, and losing soundly each time, would you do so again at age 76?

Biden might feel some sense of vocation this time around. Being a Catholic, he would recognize the Sunday school-ness of it all: what are you called to do? The way he gets fierce when he talks about winning back the Midwest, the bluster he spits when speaking about Trump’s misdeeds — it makes you think that there’s something twinging inside Biden that says, without a hint of irony, “I alone can fix this.” He wants to give people enough time to come to terms with a new American paradigm, while offering the familiar visage of an older white man standing guard. Biden sees himself as a singular salve and so do many black voters, pragmatic about the ability of America to readily accept change.

Biden isn’t alone, of course. There’s a moral imperative for each of the top three primary contenders, all in their 70s. Bernie Sanders and Warren proffer a promise of a golden, hopeful new system; Biden the restoration of one that was pretty good, if not perfect. If anything, the Democratic primary is something of a paean to old age, to lifelong ambitions and vocations yet to be fulfilled. It’s a monthslong slog as a trio of older white people bid to lead a country more black and brown than it’s ever been. I can see them — with more years behind them than ahead, in a world so different from the one they were born into — lingering longer than the rest of us over the most hashed-out lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

“You and I are old / Old age hath yet his honour and his toil / Death closes all: but something ere the end / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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made-from-galaxies · 5 years ago

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Its now Biden, Warren, Sanders — and everyone else

Only three Democratic candidates are polling above single digits: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

The bottom is falling out of the Democratic presidential primary. And the top-tier — no longer five candidates, but three — is becoming more insurmountable.

For more than a year, Democrats had approached their nominating contest with a widely-shared belief that — like Republicans in the earliest stages of their primary four years ago — they, too, might take turns rising and falling in an expansive field. That expectation sustained the campaigns of more than two dozen contenders this year.

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But in recent weeks, the leading band of candidates has contracted unexpectedly early. Heading into the fall, only three contenders are polling above single digits: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg remain at the periphery, while lower-polling candidates have largely failed to muster sustained, upward movement in fundraising or polling.

According to interviews with about two dozen Democratic operatives and consultants, there is little reason to expect any of them will.

“It was legitimate to say ‘Top 5’ for a long time, but with the exception of Kamala Harris being at the outer perimeter of the top three … you’d have to have a strange confluence of events for someone outside those four to win,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton confidant. “It would require all four failing. Like, you would need all four of them to be in a plane crash or something.”

For every other candidate, Reines said, “It’s too late in the game to keep saying it’s too early.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a town hall meeting about climate change on August 22 in Chico, California | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By this point in the Republican primary in 2016, Jeb Bush was already cratering. Scott Walker had risen and fallen. Donald Trump was in first, still to fend off a surge from Ben Carson before running away from the field.

The 2020 Democratic primary, by contrast, has been defined by its relative stability, with two full fundraising periods and two sets of debates now done.

Anna Greenberg, a pollster who advised former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s since-aborted presidential bid, said there was no boom-and-bust for Democrats because the primary “started so early, before voters really started paying attention,” and because of “the sheer volume of candidates.”

“It’s a little bit surprising because compared to ‘16 on the Republican side, where it seemed like a number of people had their moment in the sun … there hasn’t really been anybody who’s taken a meteoric rise,” said Scott Brennan, an Iowa Democratic National Committee member and former state party chairman.

Brennan said he’s spoken with several campaigns recently whose advisers “feel like they’re poised and ready, they’re poised and they’re waiting for their moment.”

But “for whatever reason,” he said, “they haven’t had that.”

In a spate of campaigning over the holiday weekend, Amy Klobuchar released a plan to address climate change, Sanders previewed his plan to cancel Americans’ medical debt and Beto O’Rourke reiterated his call for stricter gun laws, telling CNN of the nation’s recent mass shootings, “Yes, this is f—– up.”

On Labor Day, the candidates fanned out across the country, with Biden heading to Iowa, Warren to New Hampshire, Cory Booker to Nevada and Harris to California. The activity came on the heels of several candidates dropping out after failing to get traction — and speculation about more to follow — reinforcing the advantage held by the frontrunners.

Last week, Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest campaign casualty, a week after Jay Inslee abandoned his effort. With five months before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, six candidates have already dropped out.

Democratic strategist Matthew Littman, a former speechwriter for Biden who now backs Harris, described the field as “mostly settled” among five candidates, including Harris and Buttigieg in that group. Unlike in 2016, when many Republicans were wary of, if not opposed to, Trump, Democrats are “mostly satisfied” with the range of ideologies and experiences represented by the top tier, he said.

“The other candidates are SOL, and it has been that way for a couple of months,” Littman said.

For Biden, Sanders and Warren, the advancing calendar appears likely to compound their advantage, as early fundraising success and staff hiring allows them to begin advertising and to intensify voter outreach.

The debates have contributed to the early winnowing of candidates. Lower-tier candidates can barely focus on anything else besides meeting the Democratic National Committee’s increasingly arduous fundraising and polling benchmarks for debates.

“In a weird way because of the format of these debates and what it took to deal with the debates,” said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster, “only recently has anyone started spending any significant money in the early states. So, there wasn’t any reason why there would be significant [poll] movement] … until now. And now, we’ll see.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a crowd during a Labor Day house party on Monday in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images

He said, “Really, the 1 percenters and below, they were the ones who really suffered. No one really told them, ‘Hey, you’re in a race where it’s impossible for you to grow at all. There is no room.”

After failing to make the next debate, in Houston, Tim Ryan and John Delaney were compelled to release statements confirming they were still running. Michael Bennet shredded the Democratic National Committee on stage at its summer meeting, while Steve Bullock defiantly released a new round of staff hires. Campaign aides for both said they’d redouble their efforts in Iowa.

“The rules became a proxy for success at a moment when campaigns were just getting started,” Bennet said in an interview with POLITICO. “The DNC is only interested in well-known candidates running.”

Even for candidates who have made the debates, their turns on the national stage haven’t sparked enduring swings in the campaign. As a result, they’ve spent recent weeks spinning their position in the polls.

“Which is more unlikely – 1) going from being a complete unknown to 6th in the polls or 2) going from 6th in the polls to winning the whole thing?” tweeted Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who’s enjoyed improbable success but is still running at 2 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll.

Hickenlooper, Inslee and Gillibrand all participated in previous debates, before dropping out. Julián Castro sparked interest with his chiding of fellow Texan O’Rourke in the first set of debates, in June. And Harris surged in public opinion polls when she criticized Biden for his past opposition to busing and former associations with segregationist senators.

But for both candidates, the effect was short-lived. Harris is now back at 8 percent, according to the latest Morning Consult survey. Castro is stuck at 1 percent.

“It’s just that they happened so quickly,” said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist. “Trump has changed the timeline. Scandal doesn’t last. Problems don’t last. Success doesn’t last. Everything’s a little more vaporized in this timeframe.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden at a town hall event at Clinton College on August 29 in Rock Hill, South Carolina. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images

The progressive wing of the party already has two viable candidates in Sanders and Warren. For more moderate Democrats, only a Biden implosion is likely to create room for advancement.

“Somebody like Buttigieg or Harris, at this moment, they can only succeed with a Biden collapse,” Herman said. “They have an if-then strategy. They are not in control of their destiny.”

More movement will also require candidates to adopt a change in tone, said Tom McMahon, a former DNC executive director.

“Everyone — both in the top-tier and among the also-rans — have to start developing when and how they’re going to go negative,” he said. “Otherwise, this race is going to continue to remain status quo.”

It is possible the dynamic will shift. Former Iowa Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack, who briefly ran for president in 2008, said that even in Iowa, “most people, other than those who are ultra-interested, and ultra-focused, most people are not paying attention to this at all.”

“It’s still an open game here,” he said.

He added, “Having said that, the folks who are at the bottom end of the spectrum here have got to have their moment relatively soon, and here’s why: Because Warren, Sanders and Biden and Mayor Pete have a foundation of fundraising that’s going to continue to pump money into their campaigns.”

Of other candidates, Vilsack said, “They’ve got to move now, but there’s still time for them to move.”

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Source: https://opengeekhouse.com.br/2019/09/03/its-now-biden-warren-sanders-and-everyone-else/

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worldtopnewsoftheday · 5 years ago

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In the nomination race, the senators from Massachusetts and Vermont are dominant. Many expect both to pass Joe BidenBernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren hug after participating in the second Democratic primary debate in Detroit, Michigan. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesAmong the what ifs and what might have beens of politics in America there is Ready for Warren, a group that urged Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.“If I’m being quite frank, I’m upset that she didn’t and haven’t really forgiven her,” said Dave Handy, a political organiser who was part of that effort. “We could have avoided a lot of trouble if she had just had the courage to run.”Handy threw in his lot with Bernie Sanders instead. “Even though progressives like myself begged her, Liz refused to run and this whole apparatus that Bernie now has – that I’m a part of and many progressives and now many democratic socialists are a part of – could have been hers. And we could have avoided the whole ‘Bernie bro’ myth that’s been carved out.”Activists such as Handy illustrate divided loyalties and an exquisite dilemma for progressives as Democrats choose their nominee to take on Donald Trump in 2020. Polls show Sanders and Warren running almost neck and neck behind the centrist Joe Biden, begging the question: to avoid splitting the vote, should one drop out and endorse the other?With both candidates drawing bigger crowds than a former vice-president who seems increasingly gaffe-prone and vulnerable, there is no sign of it happening any time soon. Indeed, some on the left believe Sanders and Warren are poised to push Biden into third and go head to head.> Warren and Bernie have been dominating the debate; I feel like the Biden campaign is very much on the defensive> > Charles ChamberlainCenk Uygur, host and founder of the online news show The Young Turks, wrote in the Washington Post this week: “While Warren and Sanders draw thousands, his audiences are far smaller. His campaign is gasping for breath, and we’re only in August. The Biden fade has begun. I’m not sure he will even be in the race by Iowa.”Uygur added: “This race now isn’t between Warren and Biden; it’s between Warren and Sanders. And for progressives, that’s a dream come true.” ‘Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious’Sanders, a senator from Vermont who at 77 is the oldest candidate in the field, no longer has the element of surprise he enjoyed against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He continues to promise free tuition at public universities, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and universal healthcare. He still has a peerless network of small-dollar donors and continues to generate enthusiasm at rallies.Warren, a 70-year-old senator from Massachusetts and longtime critic of Wall Street, has enjoyed a slow but inexorable surge. She has promised to “fight” – one of her favourite words – a rigged system and has released detailed policy proposals on everything from breaking up tech companies to implementing a “wealth tax” on the rich.Her populist economic message has struck a chord, drawing big crowds – 15,000 in Seattle; 12,000 in St Paul, Minnesota – and positive media buzz. “The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren” was Rolling Stone’s headline; “Slowly and Persistently, Elizabeth Warren Is On the Rise” declared New York magazine; “Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious” trumpeted a profile in the New York Times.Charles Chamberlain, chair of the progressive group Democracy for America, said: “She’s the big winner of the last eight months. We’ve seen her steadily climb among our members. It’s a well run, well executed campaign, clearly engaging with voters. But Bernie Sanders has also been campaigning hard – it’s been ‘steady as she goes’.“Warren and Bernie have been dominating the debate; I feel like the Biden campaign is very much on the defensive when it comes to policy. The rallies for Biden are eerily reminiscent of the lacklustre campaign of Hillary Clinton. Warren and Bernie are going to event after event and just getting bigger.”Joe Biden listens to a question from a representative of Moms Demand Action, a pro-gun control group, in South Carolina. Photograph: Sean Rayford/Getty ImagesChamberlain shares the view that Biden will fade.“I think this is going to come down to a Democratic primary with Warren and Bernie at the top,” he said. “Neither should drop out. They need to fight this to the end, even if that means going to a convention where deals have to be made.”Who would win such a fight remains a matter of conjecture. Sanders won his first national union endorsement this week from the 35,000-member United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. But most unions remain on the fence.Liberal groups are also split. In June Warren led a MoveOn survey with the support of 38% of members, followed by Sanders with 17%. In July, Sanders topped a Democracy for America poll with 32%, followed by Warren on 26%. In both cases, Warren had gained ground.Indeed, she has gathered momentum nationally, overcoming controversy about her dubious claims of Native American ancestry, while Sanders has arguably hit a ceiling. There is a perception, at least, that she is gaining at his expense.Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chair now a political analyst for the MSNBC network, said: “You’ve seen, in the rise of Elizabeth Warren, the Bernie Sanders voter falling off of Bernie, finding a better, younger fort to to dock their ship to, if you will. They don’t think that they are losing a step with Elizabeth; in fact, they are probably gaining a few more steps because she checked a number of other boxes for them – in terms of being a woman, for example.> If both campaigns feel that they have traction, you won’t have an incentive there for either one of them to drop out> > John Zogby“We’ve seen that in the numbers, how she’s eclipsed him and now passed him in the polling, where in some polls she’s a lot closer to Joe Biden than Bernie was in the past.”This week Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York became the sixth Democrat to drop out of the race since July. Steele does not expect Sanders or Warren to throw in the towel any time soon.“If both campaigns feel that they have traction and they’re polling relatively close to each other, you won’t have an incentive there for either one of them to drop out. They’re both raising money, they’re both organising on the ground.“I think they’re going to be fairly competitive with each other until one separates clearly from the other. That has not happened yet. If I’m Elizabeth Warren, I’m not going to cede that ground to Bernie Sanders, and if I’m Bernie Sanders I’m certainly not going to cede ground to her that I established going back to 2016.” ‘Bearer of the torch’Imagined as a Venn diagram, there is common ground between Warren and Sanders voters but each has their own distinct base. A survey by the Pew Research Center this month found that about seven in 10 of Warren’s supporters are white, compared to about half of Sanders’ backers. Warren’s supporters are substantially more likely to have a college degree compared with supporters of Biden and Sanders.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “Because of progressive ideology there is some sort of overlap, but they are different. Warren picks up support among women that ordinarily Sanders would not get, including former Clinton supporters who regard her as the bearer of the torch to get a woman elected.“To assume that if one drops out, he or she would back the other is too facile. If Warren dropped out, she would probably consider that she had some leverage in the mainstream of the party and a chance to run again in the future, so would most likely endorse a mainstream figure like Biden.”The senators have differences in style and substance. Warren embraces the term “capitalist” and is seen by some as less disruptive to corporate interests; Sanders characterises himself as a “democratic socialist” and offers fewer policy specifics. Warren refused to appear on Fox News; Sanders held a town hall on the network. Warren has just taken her 50,000th campaign selfie with supporters who wait in long lines; Sanders retains a curmudgeonly persona and showed little appetite for small talk at the recent Iowa state fair.But when the duo, who remain fast friends, appeared together in the second debate in Detroit, distinctions appeared insignificant as they joined forces to fend off centrists on their support of policies such as Medicare for All, which would extend the existing government-run health insurance programme to all Americans, largely eliminating a role for private insurance.In the end, however, even if the progressive dream comes true, there is bound to be disappointment and compromise for someone. Handy, 31, the former Ready for Warren activist, said: “In terms of the entire political spectrum, I would much prefer a Warren administration to a [Kamala] Harris administration or a second term of Trump. But that said, it just won’t go far enough.“What this country needs now more than ever is what we had post-world war two with the building of the American middle class and FDR’s incredible social reform. That is what a Sanders administration will do, and my fear is that a Warren administration will not go far enough in addressing income inequality, in addressing criminal justice reform, in addressing our climate, in addressing all of these problems.”

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polixy · 5 years ago

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5 facts about black Democrats ahead of the South Carolina primary

5 facts about black Democrats ahead of the South Carolina primary;

Voters sign in at the polls in Orangeburg, South Carolina, for the 2016 presidential primary. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

The fourth contest in the 2020 Democratic primary season takes place in South Carolina on Saturday. The views of black Democrats will be front and center: While white adults made up the majority of the Democratic primary electorates in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, black Democrats are expected to make up a majority of voters in South Carolina.

Here are five facts about black Democrats nationwide, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys conducted in the past year.

How we did this

This post on black Democrats draws on previously published data from national Pew Research Center surveys conducted in the past year. Several of these surveys were conducted using the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology. The 2000-2019 trend on ideological self-identification draws on Pew Research Center telephone surveys. For more detail on that methodology, see this post.

Since 2000, black Democrats’ self-reported ideology has remained relatively stable – and moderate. Although there has been a steady growth in the overall share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters who describe their views as liberal over the last two decades, a plurality of black Democratic voters have consistently identified themselves as moderate. In 2019, about four-in-ten black Democratic voters called themselves moderate, while smaller shares described their views as liberal (29%) or conservative (25%). By contrast, 37% of Hispanic and 55% of white Democratic voters identified as liberal.

While black Democratic voters are less likely than other Democratic voters to describe themselves as liberal, there’s a good deal of agreement on several issues between black Democrats and Democrats of other races and ethnicities. For instance, a fall 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that white, black and Hispanic Democrats have broadly similar views that immigrants make a positive contribution to the country and that it’s the government’s responsibility to help poor people and to ensure Americans have health care coverage. One issue where black Democrats differ from other Democrats is same-sex marriage: 88% of white and 76% of Hispanic Democrats say legal same-sex marriage is a good thing for society, compared with a significantly smaller share of black Democrats (52%).

Black Democrats express high levels of religiosity and hold positive views of religious institutions. When asked about their religion, large majorities of black Democrats affiliate with a religion, and they are more likely than other Democrats to say they attend religious services regularly.

On how they see religion’s role in society, most black Democrats (57%) say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm, while smaller shares of white (39%) and Hispanic (45%) Democrats take this view.

Black Democrats also are more likely than other Democrats to say morality is linked to a belief in God. A 55% majority of black Democrats say “it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral,” while 44% say it is not necessary. By contrast, a large majority of white Democrats (89%) and a narrower majority of Hispanic Democrats (57%) say a belief in God is not necessary to be moral.

3Black Democrats are more likely than others in the party to view racism as a very big problem in the country. When asked to evaluate major problems in the country, black Democrats are in agreement with other members of their party on a number of issues: Majorities of Democrats across racial and ethnic groups view the affordability of health care, economic inequality and the affordability of college education as very big problems for the country.

However, black Democrats are more likely than other Democrats to say racism is a very big problem for the country: 79% of black Democrats say this, compared with 70% of Hispanic Democrats and 52% of white Democrats. Black Democrats also see job opportunities for all Americans as a bigger problem for the country than white or Hispanic Democrats.

By contrast, fewer black Democrats (56%) see climate change as a very big problem for the country than white (79%) and Hispanic (72%) Democrats.

About four-in-ten black Democrats want a Democratic president to push hard on policy, even if it makes it hard to get things done. Among Democrats, larger shares of black (41%) and Hispanic adults (42%) than whites (32%) want a Democratic candidate who, if elected, will push hard for Democratic policies, even if it makes it harder to get things done.

Still, a 55% majority of black Democrats say they prefer a candidate who would find common ground with Republicans, a view shared by 67% of white and 57% of Hispanic Democrats.

Black Democrats hold intensely negative views of Donald Trump and his policies. An overwhelming majority of black Democrats (96%) say they disapprove of how Trump is handling his job as president – including 79% who say they strongly disapprove. These views are similar to ratings of Trump among white and Hispanic Democrats.

Black Democrats’ negative evaluations of Trump’s job performance extend to views on how his economic policies are affecting the country. Nearly six-in-ten black Democrats (57%) say that Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions in the country worse. Smaller shares of white (47%) and Hispanic (43%) Democrats say the same.

; Blog – Pew Research Center; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-about-black-democrats/; https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FT_20.02.26_FactsBlackVoters_feature.jpg; February 27, 2020 at 04:04PM

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gyrlversion · 6 years ago

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What To Know Before Watching The First Democratic Debate, Including: WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

The first Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 election is coming up Wednesday night, and if you haven’t been paying particularly close attention, there’s a good chance you don’t know who half of the candidates are.

We’re here to help!

Before getting into whom you’ll be seeing on stage, here are some basics on what to expect.

The first round of Democratic debates is split into two nights on NBC, with 10 qualifying candidates (semi) randomly selected for each night. Some people are thinking of night one as the Elizabeth Warren debate, given that she’ll be the only candidate on the stage who is consistently polling in the top five. But nine candidates are going to try to take the moment away, and no one on Twitter or elsewhere can seem to agree if being so central in the first debate will help or hurt Warren as she moves up the polls.

Two other candidates have a lot to win or lose Wednesday night: former Texas representative Beto O’Rourke and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Both have at different times been tagged as being the future of their party and have soaked up media attention (Booker was the star of a 2005 documentary about his first mayoral campaign; O’Rourke was the star of a 2019 documentary about his first Senate campaign). They’ve also both gotten off to quiet starts this year — for O’Rourke, that’s come after huge expectations following his Senate race in 2018.

Here’s who is up Wednesday night (at 9 p.m. ET on NBC) and what (in brief) you should know about them.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Cory Booker

Job: Cory Booker has been a New Jersey senator since 2013. Before that, he was mayor of Newark.

Life: Booker, 50, is a former college football player, current vegan, and now one of only three black US senators. He’s also unmarried and, uh, dating actor Rosario Dawson.

2020: Booker’s political identity is built around a message of “radical love” and unity (he’s often characterized as being more than a bit corny). He’s been a leader in criminal justice reform in the Senate and is bringing that policy focus with him to the campaign. He also wants a “baby bonds” program that would give savings accounts to children to fight wealth inequality.

Something else to know: Joe Biden won’t be on the stage until Thursday, but Booker’s gotten traction in the last week in calling on the former vice president to apologize for his comments at a fundraiser saying “at least there was some civility” in the Senate when he worked with racist segregationists.

Sean Rayford / Getty Images

Elizabeth Warren

Job: Elizabeth Warren has been a Massachusetts senator since 2013. Before that, she helped establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and was a Harvard law professor.

Life: Warren, who just turned 70, grew up in Oklahoma. She’s written a slew of popular financial books, including two with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi — The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke (blurbed by Dr. Phil) and All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan.

2020: Warren’s campaign is built around her voluminous policy plans, on everything from canceling student loan debt to breaking up Big Tech. She’s won over audiences by tying her policy to her own biography, pitching herself as a “champion” of “everyday Americans.”

Something else to know: Warren is rising in polls — both nationally and in early-voting states like South Carolina — and could overtake Sen. Bernie Sanders as the top progressive candidate in the field. Which leads to a question that could come up Wednesday night, even without Sanders on the stage: How are Warren and Sanders different? Warren has a tl;dr answer: “He’s a socialist, and I believe in markets.”

Scott Eisen / Getty Images

Beto O’Rourke

Job: Beto O’Rourke is currently unemployed, aside from, you know, running for president all over the country. He represented Texas’s 16th District in the House from 2013 until this January, and previously was on the El Paso City Council.

Life: O’Rourke, 46, is best known nationally for his 2018 run against Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, where he came up just short but in the process became a national figure because of how he campaigned — energetically, across Texas — and whom he campaigned against — again, Sen. Ted Cruz.

2020: O’Rourke’s political identity has been fixed on the grassroots — specifically the idea that meeting as many voters as possible in as many places as possible, listening to their ideas and building those concerns into your campaign, is the way to win. He’s already built up a wide policy platform, particularly on climate change, immigration, and voting rights and government reform.

Something else to know: Beto O’Rourke was a punk. He was in a hacker collective as a teen and wrote some weirdo poetry, and he was in a band with Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who would go on to some fame with At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta.

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Amy Klobuchar

Job: Amy Klobuchar has been a senator from Minnesota since 2007. Before then, she was a county prosecutor.

Life: Klobuchar, 59, has one of the highest approval ratings over any senator in his or her home state, and she plays up her everyday persona (see her memoir, The Senator Next Door).

2020: Klobuchar’s national political identity is tied up in her success in Minnesota, a state Trump nearly won in 2016. She’s pitching herself as a Midwesterner — not too left or right, but someone who can clearly beat Trump. Her “Minnesota Nice” reputation took a dent this year though when former staff detailed how intense she can be as a boss.

Something else to know: Klobuchar is best known politically for her work on the Senate Judiciary Committee, particularly in her TV turns during high-stakes confirmation hearings. She rattled Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, eliciting an unusual apology from the judge.

Joshua Lott / AFP / Getty Images

John Delaney

Job: John Delaney has been running for president for almost two years, since July 2017, way before any other Democrats officially joined the race. He represented Maryland’s 6th District in Congress from 2013 until this year.

Life: Delaney, 56, has founded two publicly traded companies. The first company was HealthCare Financial Partners, which was set up to get financing to health care companies. The second was CapitalSource, which gave financing to companies more broadly.

2020: Delaney is setting himself as a more traditional, business-centric Democrat — he’s recently gotten some attention for picking a fight with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and he’s detailed at length why he believes Medicare for All to be flawed policy.

Something else to know: Delaney is locally famous for his family’s annual Christmas party, which recently has drawn as many as 800 invited people, including all sorts of political celebrities (including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts). “I was a little surprised when John ran for Congress,” Fox News host and friend Tucker Carlson told Bethesda Magazine last year, “but he’s a person who knows everybody.”

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Tulsi Gabbard

Job: Tulsi Gabbard has represented Hawaii’s 2nd District in Congress since 2013. Before that, she worked in local government and as a staffer in the US Senate.

Life: Gabbard, 38, is in the Army National Guard and has served in Iraq. She’s a devout surfer.

2020: Gabbard is unique: She has a progressive domestic agenda that made her a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 (and pulled some of his fans to her) and has a radically noninterventionist view of foreign affairs that has gotten her in trouble with her party (she is maybe most famous for having met with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in the middle of his country’s civil war).

Something else to know: Do you have some time? Read this story about her family and their guru.

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Julián Castro

Job: Julián Castro is currently unemployed, outside of his presidential campaign. He served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under president Barack Obama, and before that was the mayor of San Antonio.

Life: Castro, 44, has been pegged as a future star of the Democratic Party for years — he was the Democratic National Convention’s keynote speaker in 2012, when he was mayor. Castro’s mother Rosie is a legendary Chicano political activist in Texas.

2020: Castro is the only Latino candidate running for president. He’s put forward immigration and housing policy, believes in a host of progressive ideas (like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and universal pre-K) and is running on his executive experience both as mayor and at HUD.

Something else to know: In 2012, Julián Castro, then a city council member running for mayor, had his identical twin brother Joaquin Castro (then a state representative, now a member of Congress) stand in for him on a city council float during the San Antonio River Parade. “When he was waving, they would say, ‘Julián,’ and he would say, ‘No, it’s Joaquin,’ but you can’t really yell at 200,000 people along the route,” Julián Castro later told local press. It was briefly a terrific scandal.

Murray Rix / AFP / Getty Images

Dolphin

Job: EEEEEeeeEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Life: Dolphin, 17, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEE.

2020: eeeeeEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeee.

Something else to know: This is not a presidential candidate; this is a dolphin. You have to stay on your toes.

Zach Gibson / Getty Images

Tim Ryan

Job: Tim Ryan has represented Northeast Ohio in the House since 2003.

Life: Ryan, 45, has been in elected politics from a young age — he was just 29 when he was first elected to Congress, after already serving briefly in the Ohio state Senate.

2020: Ryan’s most famous in national politics for his unsuccessful challenge to Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader in 2016, arguing at the time that the party needed new leadership after a bad year in the Midwest. His campaign is partially centered on trying to revive the economy in places like his Ohio district, where manufacturing and automaker jobs are slipping away.

Something else to know: Ryan is a big believer in mindful meditation (he’s written a book on the topic). “Mindfulness is no silver bullet — it doesn’t make all your problems go away,” he recently told the Los Angeles Review of Books. “But it can impact our lives in such a positive way, and when you experience something so transformative, you tend to want to share that with others.”

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Bill de Blasio

Job: Bill de Blasio has been the mayor of New York City since 2014 (aside: he was sworn in by Bill Clinton). Before that, he was the city’s public advocate.

Life: De Blasio, 58, is a longtime leftist political activist who moved into government in the ’90s. His multiracial family has played a huge part in his campaigns and his mayoral administration (his wife, Chirlane McCray, is a top adviser on all things).

2020: De Blasio is one of the latest candidates to join the race and, in part because of his day job, has done limited campaigning and has few concrete policy proposals, outside his claim that he has shown as mayor that he knows how to govern as a progressive. His biggest accomplishment as mayor has been implementing a universal pre-K system in the city.

Something else to know: De Blasio has long wanted the role of national progressive leader, and now he’s got a chance to make an impression on one of the biggest stages in politics. He’s also a Boston Red Sox fan who is mayor of New York City, which is trying.

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Jay Inslee

Job: Jay Inslee has been governor of Washington state since 2013. Before that, he served in the House for the better part of 20 years.

Life: Inslee, 68, is very on-message: Every year, he writes and illustrates a children’s book for his grandkids focused on climate change and the environment.

2020: Inslee’s campaign is centered on one thing: stopping climate change. His focus on a single issue sets him apart from every other candidate running for office (though he says he has more to offer, and has put out policy plans for other issues, like immigration). He’s set an aggressive climate change goal, calling for the end of coal in America and having net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2045 at the latest.

Something else to know: Inslee, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall (aside: there are a lot of tall people at the Wednesday debate), was a pretty successful high school basketball player, averaging 7.5 points per game during the Ingraham Rams’ ’68–’69 undefeated state championship season.

That’s it for the first night! But don’t worry, there are still a million more presidential candidates, 10 of whom will be up on Thursday: Sen. Kamala Harris, former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Michael Bennet, author Marianne Williamson, Rep. Eric Swalwell, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former governor John Hickenlooper.

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