| Senator | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|
| MD Open (Hogan, R) | Likely Democratic | Safe Democratic |
| Kathy Hochul (D-NY) | Likely Democratic | Safe Democratic |
| OR Open (Brown, D) | Leans Democratic | Toss-up |
A western gubernatorial focus
One of the fun factoids released by the U.S. Census Bureau every 10 years is the location of the center of population of the United States. The first measurement, in 1790, placed the center of population in Kent County, MD -- east of Baltimore. Now, the center of population is in Wright County, MO, located in what is roughly the south-central part of the state. The movement of the population center west over the course of the nation’s history is an indicator of the country’s western population growth.
In looking at our evolving gubernatorial ratings, we see something similar -- the political center of gravity has moved west over the course of the cycle.
Think about how the races have evolved. Pennsylvania, for instance, looked as though it would be one of the Republicans’ top pickup opportunities this cycle. But the nomination of far-right state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) has many Republicans wondering if it’s even worth spending money there as state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) seeks a third straight Democratic term in Harrisburg following outgoing Gov. Tom Wolf’s (D) 2 terms. Candidate problems and campaign developments threaten the GOP’s ability to unseat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in Michigan, and the party also has had to essentially give up on defending open seats in Maryland and Massachusetts.
In the Southeast, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) does not appear to be in any real danger as he seeks to extend the GOP’s gubernatorial winning streak there to 7. And Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), after demolishing Donald Trump-backed former Sen. David Perdue (R) in a May primary, appears to hold a persistent lead in his rematch with former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D). The decisions by Govs. Chris Sununu (R-NH) and Phil Scott (R-VT) to each seek a 4th, 2-year term means that Democrats almost certainly will have to look at least 2 more years down the road to seriously compete for either.
But moving west, the story is different. In the Midwest’s Wisconsin, a state accustomed to high-level competition, Gov. Tony Evers (D) may have a small lead over the newly-minted GOP nominee, businessman Tim Michels (R), but the race still appears to be a genuine Toss-up. Roughly as vulnerable as Evers are a couple of other Democratic incumbents, Govs. Laura Kelly (D-KS) and Steve Sisolak (D-NV). For reasons we’ll get into below, we now view the 3-way open-seat race in Oregon as a Toss-up; the open-seat race in Arizona also remains a Toss-up. Of all the remaining Democratic-held governorships that remain rated at least Leans Democratic, the one we see as closest to being a true Toss-up is not swing states Michigan or Pennsylvania but, instead, blue state New Mexico, another state out west.
Overall, of our 5 Toss-ups, 4 are located west of the Mississippi -- Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and Oregon -- and the fifth, Wisconsin, touches the river.
We’ll take a closer look at the individual races below. But first, let’s remind ourselves about the current state of the governorships.
Map 1 shows the current party control of governorships. Republicans control 28 governorships and Democrats control 22. Despite the GOP’s numerical edge, a slight majority of the population of the 50 states, 51%, live in states with Democratic governors.
Map 1: Current party control of governorships
Of the 48 states that elect governors to 4-year terms -- New Hampshire and Vermont remain the 2-year term holdouts, and those races are contested in both presidential and midterm years -- 34 hold their elections in midterm years. Map 2 shows the races this year and our ratings of those races. Republicans are defending 20 governorships this year, while Democrats are defending 16.
Map 2: Crystal Ball gubernatorial ratings
Incumbency is a significant feature of this year’s gubernatorial map, which may serve to limit the total number of party flips.
Of the 36 races on the ballot, as many as 28 races will feature incumbents on the general election ballot. In the last 5 midterms (2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018), 57 governorships have changed hands in the general election but only 12 involved an incumbent being defeated, while 45 involved an open seat flipping. So roughly 4/5s of the time a governorship changed party hands, an incumbent was not running in the general election. Incumbents may also be aided this year by a lack of state-level financial problems; as Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson noted in a recent Crystal Ball piece on the popularity of sitting governors, federal stimulus has, at least in the short term, filled state coffers and allowed state governments to hold off on painful cuts that can sometimes be politically damaging.
Like the nation’s center of population, let’s start in the east and then move west.
A couple of open seats, unsurprisingly, represent the 2 clearest offensive opportunities for either side: Maryland and Massachusetts, a pair of deeply Democratic states that are governed by popular, moderate, and retiring Republican governors: Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker, respectively. Hogan is term-limited; Baker could have run for a third term but decided not to, and he very well might have lost the primary to a Trump-backed candidate, 2018 Senate nominee Geoff Diehl (R). Diehl is the favorite to win the nomination over a more moderate candidate, businessman Chris Doughty (R). Assuming that Diehl is nominated, we probably will move this race from Likely Democratic to Safe Democratic, as state Attorney General Maura Healey (D), the likely Democratic nominee, is very well-positioned to win. We are going ahead and moving Maryland from Likely Democratic to Safe Democratic, as it appears right-wing state Del. Dan Cox (R) does not have any path to victory against veteran and author Wes Moore (D), the political newcomer who defeated more credentialed opponents in last month’s primary.
We are also making the same move in New York state, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is facing off against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1) in her bid for a first elected term. The Empire State has just become too blue to allow a conservative Republican like Zeldin to win statewide.
Republican incumbents are in great shape to hold New Hampshire and Vermont. Elsewhere in New England, Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT) has posted surprisingly robust approval ratings as he faces a rematch with businessman Bob Stefanowski (R). Next door, Gov. Dan McKee (D-RI) -- who took over when his predecessor, Gina Raimondo (D), became Secretary of Commerce -- has to get through a primary against, most notably, Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea (D) and former CVS executive Helena Foulkes (D). The primary victor is likely to face newcomer Ashley Kalus (R). If things break right for Republicans down the stretch of the election, Connecticut or Rhode Island might be like New Jersey’s race was last year -- surprisingly close and competitive.
As of now, the hottest race in New England comes in Maine, where Gov. Janet Mills (D) is seeking a second term against her predecessor, former Gov. Paul LePage (R). Our understanding is that while this race remains a viable Republican target, it has not moved into true Toss-up territory yet. It definitely remains worth watching, though, as we can imagine LePage -- who has been on decent behavior recently, given his typical penchant for stirring controversy -- rallying the state’s large cadre of white, working-class voters to victory once again.
A key thing to watch in Pennsylvania is whether the well-heeled Republican Governors Association actually decides to spend there; as it is now, Shapiro has a ton of money to spend while Mastriano hardly has any. The Keystone State is so competitive that we would not expect Shapiro to win by the big margin that some polls show given what we still expect to be a Republican-leaning overall political environment, but it does appear that Shapiro retains the edge. The same is true of Whitmer in Michigan, which is really the only swing state that appears likely to have a statewide ballot issue on abortion this year. That issue dominating the race is just fine for Democrats, who have already highlighted GOP nominee Tudor Dixon’s (R) stringent anti-abortion stance.
As noted above, GOP incumbents DeSantis in Florida and Kemp in Georgia both appear to be ahead in their races. One very clear bright spot for Republicans is that, in our eyes, all of their incumbent governors are favored to win. Kemp is really the only one who appears locked in a legitimately close race. We’ll see if Florida comes online at some point, but the political trendlines for Democrats in that state are bad even as it remains competitive. We might as well mention Texas in this group; Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is seeking a third term against former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D, TX-16). Like Abrams in Georgia, O’Rourke gives Democrats in Texas an energetic and well-funded challenger -- but also gives Republicans a useful foil to inspire their own turnout.
We may not have a strong handicap in aforementioned Wisconsin until the weekend before the election -- and even then, we might not feel very confident about it. In picking businessman Tim Michels (R) as their nominee, Republicans probably rolled the dice a bit more than if they had picked former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R): Michels may have some added appeal as more of an outsider candidate, although he’s also less vetted than Kleefisch, who served a couple of terms as former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) no. 2. Next door in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) faces former state Sen. Scott Jensen (R), a one-time moderate who moved to the right during the political battles over the pandemic. The environment will be the main determinant of how vulnerable Walz truly is.
Kansas, where Gov. Laura Kelly (D) is seeking a second term, remains the most obvious Republican pickup opportunity, if only because it is by far the reddest state that Democrats are defending. But Kelly, despite running in a clearly Republican-leaning state, is not dead in the water, and there are questions about how strong of a campaign her opponent, state Attorney General Derek Schmidt (R), is running. Kelly’s approval rating remains above water, it appears, and she may be able to thread the needle much like Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) did in 2019. Edwards, like Kelly, initially won office by defeating a weak Republican opponent -- Edwards beat scandal-plagued then-Sen. David Vitter (R), while Kelly beat the very right-wing Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) in 2018. Edwards then survived in 2019 against businessman Eddie Rispone (R), who was a better candidate than Vitter but was not exactly top-tier, either. Schmidt is probably comparable in candidate quality to Rispone, and that very well may be sufficient for him to win. But we thought this race might’ve drifted into clear Leans Republican territory by now, and our understanding is that it has not. Pro-abortion rights forces just won a major victory on abortion in Kansas earlier this month as voters strongly rejected a statewide ballot issue that would have given the state’s GOP legislature the power to restrict abortion rights. We do wonder if the Democratic intensity over abortion will remain in this state, or if the August vote put the issue more on the backburner for November (certainly Republicans are hoping for the latter, given the lopsided margin against their side in the vote a couple of weeks ago).
Nevada is another Toss-up defended by a Democratic incumbent, Gov. Steve Sisolak (D). Back in June, Republicans picked Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo (R) as their standard-bearer, and he was probably the best candidate running. Most of the time, one wouldn’t consider a county-level official to be all that prominent, but in Nevada -- which is in some ways a city-state -- Las Vegas’s Clark County casts about 2/3rds of the statewide vote. With crime an issue, Sisolak and Lombardo are trying to see whether they can blame the other. The Senate and gubernatorial races likely will run fairly closely to one another -- in 2018, Sisolak won by 4 points and now-Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) won by 5 -- and as we wrote a couple of weeks ago, we think Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is the most vulnerable Democratic senator this year. If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that Sisolak is awfully vulnerable too.
We mentioned above that we are moving Oregon’s open-seat race from Leans Democratic to Toss-up. This is despite the state’s blue lean and the fact that Republicans have not won a gubernatorial race there since 1982. However, the state is hosting an unusual 3-way race among a trio of women who are all recent members of the state legislature: former state House Speaker Tina Kotek (D), former state House Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R), and former state Sen. Betsy Johnson, an unaffiliated, former Democrat who is more conservative than most of the members of her former party and who has been backed by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. The race sets up an unusual situation where the winner may not need to crack even 40%. Additionally, the 3 candidates all served concurrently in the state legislature, which should provide the campaigns ample opportunities to draw contrasts among the candidates. Outgoing Gov. Kate Brown (D) is deeply unpopular, and there may be some desire for change in the Beaver State. Johnson, the independent, would still be the most surprising winner, and Kotek and Drazan both will be working to try to prevent their voters from flocking to her banner. There’s just enough uncertainty here that we’re looking at the race as a Toss-up now.
We are not quite there yet in another western blue state, but it’s becoming clearer to us that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) is locked in what appears to be a very close contest with 2020 Senate nominee and former TV meteorologist Mark Ronchetti (R). Unlike many other Republicans, Ronchetti has tried to show some nuance on the abortion issue, and Lujan Grisham has a number of vulnerabilities, as documented by Axios’s Russell Contreras and Josh Kraushaar, that by themselves aren’t much, but could be harmful to her taken together. We still give Lujan Grisham a small edge, owing to incumbency and the state’s overall lean.
Next door, in Arizona, is another open Toss-up. Republicans have nominated a fringe candidate, former TV newscaster Kari Lake (R), who just won the GOP nomination with a backward-looking campaign over imagined voter fraud in the 2020 election. She faces Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), who had to belatedly apologize last year over an employment discrimination controversy dating back to her time as the state Senate minority leader (a Black woman was fired from her job as a Senate aide and successfully sued over the matter). We ultimately have some questions about how well Hobbs can capitalize on Lake’s problems, making Arizona a pure Toss-up, still.
A couple of dark horse races out west that could end up becoming competitive are bids for second terms by Govs. Jared Polis (D-CO) and Mike Dunleavy (R-AK). Polis’s political strength is respected not just by Democrats, but Republicans as well. He faces a credible opponent, state Board of Regents member Heidi Ganahl (R), but he seems well-positioned right now. While we rate both of Colorado’s top statewide races as Likely Democratic, we think it’s likelier that Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D-CO) reelection bid becomes truly engaged than the gubernatorial race (and it may be that both races remain relatively sleepy).
Dunleavy, meanwhile, is trying to become the first Alaska governor to win a second elected term since former Gov. Tony Knowles (D) was reelected in 1998. The incumbent advanced in Alaska’s new top-4 election system, but he has a couple of notable opponents who also advanced: former Gov. Bill Walker, who was elected as an independent in 2014, and former state Rep. Les Gara (D).
Conclusion
Overall, our best guess right now is that there will not be a ton of net change in the governorships. Democrats appear very likely to flip the open seats of Maryland and Massachusetts and they have another prime open-seat target in Arizona, but Republicans may be able to make up for losses (and then some) by flipping a number of the vulnerable Democratic-held governorships we’ve noted above -- with many of the best targets coming west of the eastern time zone.
Growth slowed in China, the world’s second-largest economy, adding to fears of a broader global recession. Read the full story here. |
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With its entrepreneurial spirit and an increasingly efficient welfare state, the country can thrive in a slowing world AUGUST 15, 2022 by Ruchir Sharma Today, President Joe Biden congratulated the people of India on their 75th anniversary of independence, calling out the relationship between “our great democracies” and “our shared commitment to the rule of law and the promotion of human freedom and dignity.” Yesterday, he lamented the recent knife attack on writer Salman Rushdie, calling out Rushdie’s “insight into humanity,…his unmatched sense for story,…his refusal to be intimidated or silenced,” and his support “for essential, universal ideals. Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear. These are the building blocks of any free and open society. And today, we reaffirm our commitment to those deeply American values in solidarity with Rushdie and all those who stand for freedom of expression.” But the news today is full not of the defense of democracy, but of those trying to overthrow it. Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, Aaron C. Davis, and Amy Gardner of the Washington Post broke the story that after the 2020 election, as part of the effort to overturn the results, Trump’s lawyers paid computer experts to copy data from election systems in Georgia. The breach was successful and significant, although authorities maintain the machines can be secured before the next election. Led by Trump ally Sidney Powell, the group also sought security data from Michigan and Nevada, although the extent of the breaches there is unclear. They also appear to have worked on getting information from Arizona. Georgia prosecutors have told Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he is a target in the criminal investigation of the attempt to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, letting him know it is possible he will be indicted. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has tried to quash a subpoena requiring his testimony before a Fulton County grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, but today a federal judge, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May, said he must testify. She said that “the District Attorney’s office has shown ‘extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia's 2020 elections.’” And yet, the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election is still spreading. Amy Gardner in the Washington Post reports that 54 out of 87 Republican nominees in the states that were battlegrounds in 2020 are election deniers. Had they held power in 2020, they could have overturned the votes for Biden and given the election to Trump. In the 41 states that have already winnowed their candidates, more than half the Republicans—250 candidates in 469 contests—claim to believe the lie that Trump won in 2020. In the issue of Trump’s theft of classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration when he left office, over the weekend, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush reported in the New York Times that last June, one of Trump’s lawyers signed a statement saying that all classified documents that had made it to Mar-a-Lago had been given back to the National Archives and Records Administration. But, of course, the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last Monday revealed that assertion to be incorrect. The statement was made after Jay I. Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence officer, visited Mar-a-Lago on June 3. The House and Senate intelligence committees have asked Director of National Intelligence Avril D. Haines to provide the committees with a damage assessment of how badly Trump’s retention of top secret classified documents in an insecure location has damaged national security. Today, the Department of Justice has asked a judge not to unseal the affidavit behind the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, saying that it “implicates highly classified materials,” and that disclosing the affidavit right now would "cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation." CNN, the Washington Post, NBC News, and Scripps all asked the judge to unseal all documents related to the Mar-a-Lago search. But, “[i]f disclosed,” the Justice Department wrote, “the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps.” Legal analyst and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe commented: “This suggests [the Department of Justice] wasn’t just repatriating top secret doc[ument]s to get them out of Trump’s unsafe clutches but is pursuing a path looking toward criminal indictment.” — Notes: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/14/statement-by-president-joe-biden-celebrating-the-republic-of-indias-75th-anniversary-of-independence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/13/statement-by-president-joe-biden-on-the-attack-on-salman-rushdie/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/15/sidney-powell-coffee-county-sullivan-strickler/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/us/graham-georgia-investigation-trump.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/15/politics/lindsey-graham-georgia-investigation/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/us/politics/trump-classified-material-fbi.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/15/politics/justice-department-mar-a-lago-search-affidavit/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/15/election-deniers-march-toward-power-key-2024-battlegrounds/ “Last night, my father killed another political dynasty, and that’s the Cheneys. He first killed the Bushes, then he killed the Clintons. Last night he killed the Cheneys.” So Eric Trump, former president Donald Trump’s son, interpreted the primary loss by Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night.
He is not wrong that the Republican Party has now been captured by extremists who reject the principles associated with that party. Trump’s statement reflects the reality that today’s MAGA crowd rejects the ideology of Reagan’s Republican Party, which was based in the idea—if not the actual execution—that the government must not interfere with markets. Far from trying to free up markets, Trump and those like him, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, have used the government to punish businesses that don’t support their political policies and to reward those that do.
Using the government to reward friends and punish enemies is the province of authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who spoke earlier this month in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference. MAGAs’ support for such tactics fits, as they have rejected the fundamental principles of American democracy.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution established that Americans have a right to consent to the government under which we live and that we are equal before the law. But today’s MAGA movement is based on the Big Lie that former president Trump won the 2020 election, and its adherents are currently engaged in the attempt to make sure that they can rig elections going forward, establishing a one-party state whose leaders can do as they wish.
And at least part of what they appear to want is the establishment of a state religion that overrides the rights of LGBTQ Americans and takes away women’s rights. Indeed, their vision looks much like that of Orbán, who maintains that secular democracy must be replaced by what he calls “Christian democracy,” or “illiberal democracy.”
While Eric Trump might see this as a triumph, others do not. Edward Luce of the Financial Times observed today: “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.”
Shocking though that observation was, it was nothing compared to what came next. General Michael Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, retweeted Luce and commented: “I agree. And I was the CIA Director[.]”
That this movement has dangerous designs on our government got more confirmation today when Jordan Libowitz and Lauren White of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that the Secret Service had notice of a specific threat against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi days before the January 6 attack on the Capitol but didn’t tell the Capitol Police until 5:55 on the afternoon of that day, after the attack had happened.
On December 31 a Parler user posted, “January 6 starts #1776 all over again…Fight for EVERYTHING,” and included Pelosi in a list of “enemies.” Later, the account was more specific about the attack. On the evening of January 6, the Secret Service sent the information along to the Capitol Police with a note: “Good afternoon, The US Secret Service is passing notification to the US Capitol Police regarding discovery of a social media threat directed toward Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”
The Secret Service is under scrutiny because its agents’ texts from the period around the attack were erased from their phones, the phones of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli were wiped, and the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, neglected to tell Congress of the destruction of evidence for more than a year and has refused to make his staff available to testify about the matter.
But it is not clear that the MAGA attempt to take over the government will stay behind Trump. Today, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has recently been in the news for his defamation of the parents of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting, announced on his show that he is switching his support to DeSantis. He was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he spoke at the January 5, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., to fire up the crowd for the next day.
Almost on cue, Trump began to float the idea that he would release the surveillance tape of FBI agents recovering the stolen government documents from his Mar-a-Lago property in what seems to be an attempt to reclaim his base. The argument for releasing the tape is that his supporters will resent the federal officers milling around Trump’s property, feeding the idea he is a victim of political persecution. Other advisors warn that actually seeing just how many boxes of documents, including top secret documents, were recovered, will backfire.
“It’s one thing to read a bunch of numbers on an inventory list, it’s another to see law enforcement agents actually carrying a dozen-plus boxes out of President Trump’s home knowing they probably contain sensitive documents. I don’t see how that helps him,” a person close to Trump told Gabby Orr, Sara Murray, Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz of CNN. It would fit the usual Trump pattern for him simply to say he is going to release it to generate stories that keep him in the news.
Trump’s supporters’ willingness to find another candidate is likely, in part, a reflection of the legal trouble mounting for the former president.
Today, Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified for six hours before a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that is investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Giuliani alleged vote rigging in Georgia even after his theories had been proven fake.
Prosecutors have told Giuliani he is a target of the investigation, meaning it is possible he will be indicted. Ken Frydman, Giuliani’s former press secretary, told CNN yesterday: “He knows he lied for his client, and he knows we all know…. I think, you know, at this point in his life, his goal is to die a free man.”
Tomorrow the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, will plead guilty to 15 felonies associated with conspiring to avoid payroll taxes on $1.7 million over 15 years by taking pay in the form of school tuition for his grandchildren, a free apartment, a car, and so on. The deal with the Manhattan district attorney’s office lets him off with fines and a minimum of 100 days in jail, a very light sentence. In exchange, Weisselberg will testify against the Trump Organization in its upcoming October trial for related offenses, though not against Trump himself.
This deal seriously weakens the Trump Organization’s legal position in the case but leaves Trump and his family untouched. If the case undercuts the Trump family’s business— its traditional financial base— family members might be hoping to cement a new financial base in the American political system. — Notes: https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/secret-service-held-onto-pelosi-threat-until-after-insurrection/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/28/homeland-security-texts-jan6/ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/dhs-watchdog-refuses-to-recuse-himself-from-missing-jan-6-texts-investigation https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/politics/trump-release-surveillance-footage-fbi-mar-a-lago/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/politics/rudy-giuliani-grand-jury-georgia https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/politics/trump-lawsuits-investigations-what-matters/index.html https://www.mediaite.com/tv/giuliani-nervous-over-georgia-investigation-former-aide-says-his-goal-now-is-to-die-a-free-man/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/nyregion/weisselberg-trump-plea-testify.html https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-organization-cfo-allen-weisselberg-plead-guilty-tax-dodge-scheme-2022-8  | BY MYAH WARD | ROCK AND A HARD PLACE — President Joe Biden has just 12 days to meet his self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline to decide whether he’ll use executive action to forgive thousands of dollars in student loans for millions of Americans. The timing matters here: The president’s long-delayed decision is now set to arrive around Labor Day, traditionally the start of the fall campaign. For months, Democrats have nudged Biden to announce loan forgiveness — and fast — with the hope this could give the party a much-needed enthusiasm boost among young voters in the midterm elections. While Biden is expected to extend the payment pause , the White House has offered few hints about what the president will do on loan forgiveness. Biden has been slow to embrace the expensive and, depending on who you ask, controversial, move to cancel any amount of student debt. When Nightly asked about Biden’s upcoming decision, the White House responded with an answer from press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s Aug. 9 briefing, in which she said the president would have a decision by the end of the month. “When it comes to the cancellation — look, I just said the president understands firsthand the burden — the burden that a student loan has on families, it puts on families. And we’re just going to continue to assess our options for cancellations. So, no decisions have been made on that,” she said. It won’t be as simple as deciding if $10,000 — the baseline amount the administration has been eying — is the right amount to forgive. Biden will also have to decide if he’d like to target this relief to certain borrowers, such as those earning less than $125,000. Progressives are calling for universal forgiveness — though the president has indicated his preference for limits on who receives the relief. Whatever he decides, Biden is bound to spark a noisy debate. “The one thing this discussion doesn’t lack is people with an opinion,” Jonathan Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents 1,700 colleges and universities, told Nightly. Loan forgiveness will fuel GOP talking points about big government spending, with a populist dimension. As Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s office framed it: “Democrats Want Working Families to Eat Elites’ Grad School Debt.” On the campaign trail, Republicans like Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance has carried a similar tune, calling loan cancellation a “massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America.”
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The University of Michigan. | Bill Pugliano/Getty Images | Many Democrats are also bound to be frustrated. Progressives have called on Biden to go big or go home, and cancel up to $50,000 for student loan borrowers with no income caps. As Fansmith put it, the party’s left wing may dismiss a smaller figure than that as a “half-gesture.” Then you have the school of moderate Democrats — some shudder at the prospect of just $10,000. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, in a floor speech this summer, slammed the notion that loan forgiveness will do anything to “address the absurd cost of college or fix our broken student loan program.” Bennet backs loan forgiveness only if it’s tied to other reforms to fix the lending system. His address tapped into another critique of loan forgiveness — the price tag of the plan. At an estimated $230 billion if Biden moves forward with the $10,000 income-based plan, Bennet argued that this money could accomplish other policy priorities such as a two-year extension of the child tax credit. Among the general electorate, a majority of Americans — 55 percent — generally support a move to forgive up to $10,000 of a person’s student loan debt. But this support narrows as that dollar figure rises, an NPR/Ipsos poll found in June. And Americans, at a whopping 82 percent, would rather the government focus on making college more affordable, while just 16 percent said forgiving debt should take priority. The division is clearer along partisan lines. An Economist/YouGov poll from July showed that just 28 percent of Republicans support forgiveness, compared to an overwhelming 70 percent of Democrats. Fansmith notes that Biden could avoid the fraught middle ground by going all in or all out. The president could move forward with universal forgiveness and please a larger group of Democrats, or he could announce he’s decided against loan relief all together — acknowledging the reality that debt forgiveness is really just “a band aid on a gunshot wound” when it comes to the underlying problems driving the student debt crisis. “Middle ground usually leaves most people dissatisfied,” Fansmith said. “That’s what they say — the mark of a good compromise is that everybody’s a little unhappy. Well, that might be good for a compromise, but it’s not good for political outcomes.” Russia’s heavy losses in Ukraine have forced it to send conscripts and convicts to the front lines. A new center in occupied Ukraine is training Russian military and civilian drone operators for combat roles against Ukrainian forces. Read more »  |
Turkish leader’s first visit since conflict began in February coincides with arrival of UN chief AUGUST 18, 2022 by Mehul Srivastava and Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul  |
Militants linked to al-Qaeda control large parts of Somalia AUGUST 20, 2022 by Andres Schipani in Nairobi Prime Minister Yair Lapid spoke this evening (Wednesday, 17 August 2022), with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two leaders thanked one another for the recent development of bilateral relations following dialogue between them and reciprocal visits by the two foreign ministers. Prime Minister Lapid and President Erdoğan congratulated one another on the decision to restore full diplomatic ties and return ambassadors and consuls general to Israel and Türkiye. The Prime Minister and the President agreed that this latest development is an important additional level in the strengthening of relations that will lead to many achievements, especially in the fields of commerce and tourism. This will be reflected in the resumption of Israeli flights to Türkiye and the upcoming convening of the Joint Economic Commission in Israel in September. The leaders emphasized the great importance of Israel and Türkiye for maintaining regional stability.
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Powerful group of lawmakers has lent its support to the embattled president in exchange for clout and public funds AUGUST 15, 2022 by Bryan Harris in São Paulo  |
First-person testimony in Out of Afghanistan and Kabul Falling reveals stories of turmoil and new lives in the west AUGUST 15, 2022 by Fiona Sturges Cold warrior | Why Eileen Gu ditched Team USA to ski for China | At the Beijing Olympics the superpower rivalry was played out on the slopes
We close out this weekly edition of our "Virtual Route 66" with this from Ryan Halliday:
I have lived on a rural country road for many years. It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people. It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life. It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below. My experience walking and running and biking and driving on this road has been to witness the return of that attitude. People dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump illegal deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs. At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It made me angry at humanity and the place that I lived. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up cameras which did nothing. I despaired about the climate and the future. I thought about moving. But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence. Even if I moved to a place where this didn’t happen, I thought, it would still be happening here. Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing. So I started cleaning it up. The tires went into the back of my truck—and I paid to have them properly recycled. I was down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles and plastic bags. I tossed countless nails and screws into the trash. I have put on face masks and gloves and scooped up dead goats, a dead calf and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place. I can’t say the experience was pleasurable, but it was empowering. The Stoics would agree that the world can be ugly and awful and disappointing. They would just remind us that what we control is what we do about this. We control what difference we try to make. We control whether it makes us bitter or makes us better—whether we complain or just get to work. But the ultimate reward came more recently, because we spent the last few weeks at the beach as a family. My kids were excited to play in the ocean and to build sand castles and have ice cream, of course. Yet they seemed to have the most fun running up and down the empty beach in the morning—unprompted by me—picking up trash left by the beach goers the day before and asking for my help lifting them up so they could put it in those paper bag trash cans that the county puts up every few hundred yards. I posted about it on Instagram once and people showed me there was a whole hashtag of people doing this. It started with a viral Facebook post in 2019, which has 335,000 shares and 102,000 likes (and counting). A guy posted before and after photos with this caption: “Here is a new #challenge for all you bored teens. Take a photo of an area that needs some cleaning or maintenance, then take a photo after you have done something about it, and post it.” The challenge spread globally thanks to the #TrashTag hashtag. You can see people cleaning up a beach in Mumbai, filling up dumpsters full of trash in Kansas City, and collecting garbage in Vietnam. A Daily Stoic reader emailed me a little while back to tell me about how his picking up trash spread locally. In his townhome community, there’s a trash dumping problem. “It was driving me mad,” he wrote. He put up cameras to try to catch offenders. He stayed up late to see if he could run them off. Then he came across the video I made and instead of policing his area, he began cleaning it up. “I saw it rub off on some of my neighbors and family,” he said. And now, the number of neighbors picking up trash outnumbers the number of neighbors dumping trash. The Stoics spoke of our “circles of concern.” Our first concern, they said, is our mind. But beyond this is our concern for our bodies then for our immediate family then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible. There’s a sign by the track I run at in Austin, put there by the football player Hollywood Henderson (who paid for the track). It says, “Leave This Place Better Than You Found It.” To me, that’s a pretty good life philosophy. In things big and small (but mostly small). As Zeno said, “well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” You don’t have to save the planet. You don’t have to save someone’s life. Can you just make things a little bit better? There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness. But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to be one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we decide to leave this place a little better than we found it? That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.
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