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Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, came to Detroit Monday to try and reach out and and attract African-American voters to the GOP. Wochit

Michigan Republican Party chairman Ron Weiser and Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel came to Detroit Monday to reach out to African American voters(Photo: Kathleen Gray/Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo

The timing couldn't have been more awkward.

Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, came to Detroit on Monday to try toreach out and and attract African-American voters to the GOP.

But her visit came 48 hours after a violent and deadly weekend of rioting in Charlottesville, Va., where white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered to protest the removal of a statute of Confederate Gen.Robert E. Lee.

More: Groups rally in Detroit, Ann Arbor after deadly Virginia protest

Their confrontations with protesters of their movement culminated with an Ohio man driving his car through a crowd of protesters, killing a woman and injuring 34 others.

Unlike many politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties who condemned the violence and the white supremacists who sparked it, President Donald Trump denounced the violence from "many sides" and refused to call out the white nationalists by name.

Trump was widely criticized for his lack of a more forceful denunciation of the instigators.

More: Ex-Michigan Congressman John Dingell's response to Charlottesville goes viral

So when Romney McDaniel stepped into a state Republican Party office in Detroit, she forcefully renounced the actions of the weekend, but declined to criticize Trump.

"As chairman of the Republican Party, I want to be perfectly clear that white supremacy, neo-Nazis, theKKK,hate speech and bigotry arenot welcome and does not have a home in the Republican Party," she said during a meeting with about two dozen African-American voters.

She added that Trump'scomments on Saturday showthat "hate is unacceptable, bigotry is unacceptable. That defines whatwhite supremacy stands for. And today hell address those in a more specific way now that we know more of what happened on the ground."

Later Monday, Trump was more forceful, saying, "Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."

Plenty of people werent convinced of the sincerity of Trumps comments Monday.

U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, tweeted: The President of the United States should not have to be publicly shamed into condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Also read:

President Trump condemns white supremacists after Charlottesville violence

Michigan Republican Party Chairman Ron Weiser echoed Romney McDaniel's comments about Charlottesville, saying, "Extremists who inciteviolence do not speak for me nor do they speak for the Michigan Republican Party. Together we can fight against racism and hatred. If we do that, we honor the best part of America."

He added a quote from civil rights icon Dr. MartinLuther King Jr.: "I've decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Gov. Rick Snyder also weighed in on the violence,saying,"History has shown time and again that hate begets hate and violence begets violence. On the other hand, unity and cooperation have shown how much we can accomplish when we respect our neighbors, embrace our differences and focus our energy on how we can all move forward and prosper together. Hate speech and violence are not welcome in Michigan."

If Romney McDaniel and Weiser came to Detroit looking for votes, the national and state Republican parties will have an uphill climb. Their main weakness in Michigan lies in Wayne and Oakland counties,where Democrats have been making gains over the last decade. And in Detroit, Hillary Clinton swamped Trump by a 95-3% margin in last year's election.

The two party leaders said the lopsided political environment in the state won't deter them.

"I measure success in more ways than just 95-3," Romney McDaniel said. "It's coming into a room as a Republican and saying how have we engaged in your community and how have welistened and how have we expanded our footprint. That's what the Michigan Republican Party has done. It's more about building relationshipsand showing up in communities that haven't seen Republicans here for far too long."

Weiser told the group, "If you give us a chance, we're going to give you a choice. For far too long, Democrats have taken urban centers for granted and truthfully, Republicansare not reaching out to the extent that we should. We're trying to change that."

While Weiser and Romney McDaniel allowed reporters in for a few questions and their opening remarks, they shooed the media out of the meeting when discussions with the African-American voters began.

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430 or kgray99@freepress.com

President Donald Trump said Saturday there was "no place" in the United States for the kind of violence that broke out at a white nationalist rally in Virginia and appealed to Americans to "come together as one." (Aug. 12) AP

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Republicans try to win over African-American voters in Detroit - Detroit Free Press

Pennsylvania sends too many Republicans to Washington.

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Thats not a partisan attack. Its just math.

Of the 18 Pennsylvanian members of the House of Representatives, 13 are Republicans and 5 are Democrats. That split should be more like 11 to 7 or even 10 to 8 if the districts were drawn without attempts at favoring Republicans, according to recent expert analyses.

Its all about the map: Several lawsuits are attempting to get various state legislative and congressional maps declared unconstitutional on the basis of partisan gerrymandering, the idea that one political party drew the lines in a way that benefited them unfairly.

The lawsuits rely on a set of tools that for the first time could convincingly identify skewed maps and persuade the courts that a states map goes too far in favoring one party. A federal court has ruled Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional, the first victory in a partisan gerrymandering case in three decades.

That decision used one of several new mathematical tests to help measure the maps Republican skew, and the Supreme Court will hear the case in the fall; if it upholds the decision, it could create a legal standard, potentially including some of these tests for measuring map bias.

That could spell trouble for Pennsylvania, which fails those analyses.

People have made these claims before, but proof has been elusive. The Supreme Court had said too much gerrymandering could be unconstitutional, but the justices couldnt agree on how much is too much in part for lack of measurement standards.

Anthony Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote in the 2004 Pennsylvania case, laid down a gauntlet: A convincing test hadnt been found, but that didnt make it an impossibility. That opinion and how close the court came to declaring partisan gerrymandering a political issue off-limits to the courts spurred academics and lawyers to put forward a host of mathematical methods to precisely identify skewed maps.

No matter what concept you care about in partisan gerrymandering, Pennsylvania is going to be an outlier, said Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who helped develop the efficiency gap test.

Unlike in many other states, Pennsylvanias congressional district map is drawn by the state legislature, passed as a bill, and signed by the governor. The current map was drawn in 2011 by Republicans, who controlled both houses of the legislature and the governors mansion. New Jersey, which uses a commission of political appointees, has a bipartisan split and tiebreaker vote; its map is generally not flagged as a problem by these tests.

The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divvied up after the census every 10 years, based on population. As populations shift across the country, so, too, does political power Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat every 10 years, while states in the Southwest have grown. Once the state is given its number of representatives, it redraws its map.

Those mapping decisions ultimately can shape government policies that affect millions of Americans.

Pennsylvania is clearly quite extreme. This is not random, said Michael Li, a redistricting and voting rights expert who is senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

According to tests run by Li and others, the 2011 redrawing of Pennsylvanias congressional districts skewed the districts in Republicans favor, giving two or even three seats to Republicans over what would occur with a politically neutral map.

Here is a summary of how Pennsylvania fares in three of the tests that experts believe best capture evidence of gerrymandering.

The primary gerrymandering methods are packing and cracking.

In packing, a rival partys voters are concentrated in a district it usually wins easily. While that districts race is conceded, the rivals voters cant cast ballots in elections that would be more contested. Cracking involves dispersing a partys voters into multiple districts in such ways that they are deprived of majorities.

In the parlance of what analysts call the efficiency gap, certain votes are wasted, defined as ballots cast either for sure losers, or for the victors above and beyond the winning margins.

Using 2016 election results, Pennsylvania has fared poorly in several efficiency gap analyses, including those by the Associated Press, the Brennan Center, and Philadelphia-based mapping firm Azavea.

By their measures, the Keystone State should be sending 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats to the House not 13 and 5.

Princeton University researchers use very well-known and very well-tested, battle-tested statistical tests to measure ways that mapping can affect elections, said Brian Remlinger, the statistical research assistant who serves as the main analyst at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Cracking and packing would result in one partys winning districts with wide margins, while the other party wins more districts, but with slimmer margins. That effect was evident in Pennsylvania in 2016, when winning Democrats on average took 75 percent of the vote, compared with 64 for Republicans. The odds of that happening would have been less than 0.03 percent with a politically neutral map, Remlinger said.

Historically, what percentage of votes did a party receive in Pennsylvania, how many seats did it win, and how does that compare to recent elections?

Pennsylvanias map is the most heavily skewed in the country on this measure, a Brennan Center analysis found. In 2016, Republicans had about a four-seat advantage, compared with the outcomes in a neutral mapping, and about five seats in 2012.

There isnt necessarily a need to pick one test, you can have multiple tests and the fact that multiple tests point in the same direction, as in Pennsylvania, suggest this isnt random, Li said.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this fall in Gill v. Whitford, the Wisconsin case in which a three-judge panel relied on the efficiency gap, in part, to declare Wisconsins state legislative map unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court upholds that decision, using the efficiency gap or other measures, that in effect would green-light the use of these measures in gerrymandering case law, experts said, and open the door for other maps to get challenged using these tests.

All of these things tend to point in the same direction, so we think that presenting any of these pieces of evidence could be useful for a court, said Ruth Greenwood, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which is bringing the Whitford case before the Supreme Court.

Pennsylvanias map is already facing a direct challenge: The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania in June sued the state, using the efficiency gap as part of its legal argument that partisan gerrymandering had occurred.

An election system in which one party, whatever party happens to be in control of the election system, can rig it so it can win and keep a majority thereafter, is almost by definition the antithesis of self-government, said Michael Churchill, an attorney at Philadelphia-based Public Interest Law Center, which is representing the League in the case.

It defeats the very purpose of having elections.

Gerrymandering is an age-old process of dividing congressional and legislative districts in such a way as to give one party an advantage.

On Feb. 11, 1812, Gov. Elbridge Gerry, then the governor of Massachusetts, signed into law a redistricting plan aimed at keep his party in power.

The Boston Gazette printed mock map in the shape of a salamander under the headline The Gerry-mander.

The rest is history.

Could Pa. courts do what lawmakers won't? Jun 25 - 11:19 PM

Groups sue Pa. over congressional district gerrymandering Jun 15 - 8:39 PM

Supreme Court to hear potentially landmark case on partisan gerrymandering Jun 20 - 1:07 AM

GOP quietly carved key districts in its favor Oct 23 - 1:08 AM

Published: August 14, 2017 8:00 AM EDT | Updated: August 14, 2017 8:37 AM EDT

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Why Pa. sends too many Republicans to Congress - and why that could change - Philly.com

White nationalists carry torches on the grounds of the University of Virginia on Friday. STRINGER / Reuters

To be sure, many of these areas are extremely hostile to minorities, or outsiders, but while there may be a culture manifested in isolation and poverty among poor whites, racist institutions cannot exist on their power alone. They have neither the money nor the means to fight for oppressive voter registration laws, gerrymandered voting districts, or corporate-friendly tax loopholes that enrich board members who in turn use that money to lobby Congress for even more corporate welfare.

Poor whites, no more than poor blacks or Latinos, are not more likely to find Iraq on a map than they are any number of countries to which we send our soldier youngsters to secure access to whatever resource Congress has deemed a national interest; sugar, bananas, oil, whatever.

Poor whites probably couldnt tell you that the United States spends almost as much money on military power than the rest of the world does combined. The words

And yet, when we think of white supremacy we think of these poor whites. We do not think of our history and the fact that institutions like the police have been infiltrated by white supremacists; we still see how minorities are treated as the enemy. You are as likely to find illegal drugs in wealthy Scottsdale, Arizona or in a fraternity than you are to find it in Compton or East Los Angeles. And yet we see an armada of helicopters flying over the latter and not the former. Poor whites dont make that policy.

We do not think of

We do not think of

Indeed, Cvjetanovic is our future loan officer, or firefighter. A supposed student of history, he may be our kids' high school teacher.

And this is perhaps why the GOP was so quick to condemn these people, not because of who they are, but because of what they reveal about us as a country. Their sin was not to be racist, but to be visible. Promoting obscure policies that have the effect of oppressing minorities is an acceptable American pastime, one can do so while still pretending to advocate for American principles, like liberty, equality, or fairness.

But the GOP's reaction to white supremacy is nothing but a shell game. They created Trump with decades of vilifying immigrants, attacking the black community through coded language about "welfare queens" and being "tough on crime".

RELATED:

They indulged Trump's assault on President Barack Obama's legitimacy as a citizen through his birther sham, a project he took up with former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a

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Trump ran on not being "politically correct" and vowed to proclaim "Islamic terrorism" by its name, yet he is a coward when asked to confront Nazis or Vladimir Putin. The GOP is led by this very small man. Tweeting their disapproval when a person was killed and dozens injured in a neo-Nazi rally is not nearly enough.

Writing the training manual for the police which allows them to shoot minorities and almost never face any consequences is racism. The GOP should address that. Who sits on these commissions is often an obscure mystery to poor white folks who could care less, but it matters greatly to the Richard Spencers and Stephen Millers.

Minorities are less likely to

If you don't stand with the white supremacists, stand for changing these facts.

Cvjetanovic and his funny foreign-sounding name, which white supremacists of the past would not have distinguished from Nuo or Chen or Weinstein, is a misguided tool, but like the tools he marched with, he was certainly not oppressed and would not know oppression if he saw it. Indeed, he will be a part of our system of oppression before long, and had he not showed his face, his participation in our racist system would have gone largely unnoticed or unchallenged.

Racism is the laws, the institutions, and the policies which oppress minorities, women, and sexual minorities and gives privileged status to people like Tucker Carlson. They want to keep it that way, so they use their influence, education, and resources to buttress a system of rules that maintain their power. This weekend's rally finally put an accurate face on these institutions.

The question now is whether the GOP will be politically incorrect and call out our racist system.

I'm not holding my breath.

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Opinion: Republicans' Reaction to Racism Is a Shell Game - NBCNews.com

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Progressives, Now's Your Chance To Secure Healthcare For All Common Dreams "Health-policy progressives should treat this summer's stunning victory as an opportunity to lock in this national commitment long term, by shoring up the ACA's market-centered design rather than overplaying their hand." (Photo: Vermont Workers' Center). How to fix Obamacare? Look at the system used in the NetherlandsLas Vegas Sun Donald Trump's broken promises on healthcare as sweeping cuts to Medicaid loomsBlasting News all 93 news articles »

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Progressives, Now's Your Chance To Secure Healthcare For All - Common Dreams

Atlanta, GATrust black women, a few dozen protesters shouted during a Saturday morning speech from Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Evansa white Democrat.

They had assembled in front of the stage at the Netroots Nation conference, with bright highlighter-toned signs raised in the air in a rainbow line, some of which compared Evans to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a reviled figure among those gathered at the conference.

A flyer distributed at the protest accused Evans of voting for bills to create a private school voucher program and a constitutional amendment to allow state charter schools during her time in the state legislature. But the underlying message was that white progressives were not being held to as high a standard as black progressives, like Stacey Abrams, an African-American candidate running against Evans in the primary.

Today what we were really trying to put forward is that as folks of color, black women in particular who were leading this action, its really about us having candidates who truly understand what impacts our communities, Monica Simpson, one of the protesters told The Daily Beast outside of the ballroom.

The protestations of those who gathered at Netroots Nation in Atlanta was specific to Georgias upcoming primary. But those demonstrating may as well have been directing their anger at the Democratic party at large.

Throughout the conference, there was palpable tension over the partys approach to minority candidates and minority voters, with African-American progressives pushing back forcefully over what is seen as a myopic fixation with winning back the white working class to the party.

Netroots Nation has always functioned as a forum for the base to air its grievances with the party establishment and even luminaries outside of it. In 2007, Hillary Clinton heard boos from the crowd for voting in favor of the Iraq War. In 2009, President Barack Obamas top friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett was heckled by crowd members just months into Obamas presidency. In 2015, presidential candidates Martin OMalley and Bernie Sanders were confronted by members of Black Lives Matter.

This go around, the fault lines were an extension of those that erupted during the 2016 campaign. Then, and now, there is a belief that Democratic candidates, including Sanders and ultimately Clinton, did not do enough to corral the African-American vote.

It wasnt swing voters who were the key, it was Democrats or people who went to third or fourth party candidates and in some cases that number was greater than the win number for Trump, said Aimee Allison, the president of Democracy in Color, an organization that focuses on race and politics.

Dems Cant Forget About The Base

There were few interruptions at the mainstage during this years Netroots Nation conference, which also featured a mix of science-fair esque booths with everything from leftist organizations to kitschy hawking of Resist Rings to red-sweater meme-man Ken Bone.

But on the smaller panels, the criticism of the Democratic Party was evident.

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From the standpoint of many black activists and political strategists at Netroots, far too little time has been spent figuring out why reliably Democratic black voters sat out the 2016 election, even though that trend--attributed to a combination of restrictive voter ID laws, disenfranchisement and lack of outreach--was highly determinative to the overall outcome.

At a Friday panel called Pivoting Left, Allison expanded on her belief that minority voters flocked to alternative options because both major parties essentially declined to compete for their support. Republicans barely tried. But Democrats, she said, were acting presumptuous and risked misdiagnosing the problem in their post-election autopsies.

A conversation about refining an economic message must be paired with an open acknowledgment about the role of racial injustice in limiting economic opportunities for nearly half of the base of the party, said Allison.

Participants in a particularly animated panel later in the day, entitled Running from Trump, Running for the People, were even sharper in their critique that Democrats were making a dangerous electoral bet in assuming that black voters would simply support any generic D.

I think African-Americans in particular, African-American women specifically, have gotten a worse return on investment from the Democratic party than anyone who got screwed over by Bernie Madoff. Period, Anthony Rogers-Wright, a climate justice activist and U.S. coordinator with the Naomi Klein-led climate change advocacy group The Leap, said during the panel to applause in the room.

Focusing on Racial and Economic Injustice

Since Trumps win, the Democratic Party has taken concrete steps to address what precisely went wrong in 2016. Theres been attention paid to cyber vulnerabilities. Theres been talk of combating redistricting and of addressing draconian voting laws. But above all, there has been a readjustment of the party platform around concepts of economic populism and anti-corporate, anti-monopoly planks.

It has been widely characterized as a Bernie Sanders-ification of the Democratic Party, who frequently polls as the most popular politician in the country especially among young people of all colors. And in the wake of Trumps win, some Democrats have viewed this approach as a dichotomy: the prioritization of working class white voters or a renewed focus on minorities.

A former staffer for Sanders didnt see it this way. Marcus Ferrell, the former African-American outreach director for the Senator, argued that the problem wasnt prioritization but outreach. Campaigns, he said, need to do better at translating bigger, aspirational goals into explanations for how they will specifically help the black community.

Whats the point of a platform if nobody knows about it? said Ferrell. Theres no resources going into taking that same $15 minimum wage message, that same health care for all message and putting it in the hood. This is how it affects black neighborhoods. This is how universal health care will help your life. No one does that.

Democrats who hit the main stage of the conference, many of whom were either up for reelection or running as first-time candidates, seemed to recognize that the partys future depended on bridging this divide; on speaking up about both racial and economic injustice. And where they intersect.

Randy Bryce, the Wisconsin ironworker challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has become an emblem for the Democratic Partys efforts to win back working class voters, pointedly declared that Democrats cant only talk to the African-American community when theyre being shot by police or going to jail. We need to start including food islands and food deserts as part of the conversation.

Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous acknowledged that Democrats cant take an either/or approach with white working class voters and black voters. And Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) decried what she framed as a false-choice between voting blocs.

In the wake of the last election, Ive heard people say we need to decide whether were the party of the white working class or the party of Black Lives Matter, Warren said to a rapt audience just a couple hours after protesters interrupted Evans.

I say we can care about a dad whos worried that his kid will have to move away from their factory town to find good work and we can care about a mom whos worried that her kid will get shot during a traffic stop, Warren said. The way I see it, those two parents have something deep down in commonthe system is rigged against both of themand against their kids.

There was hearty applause, as was the case when she careened from topics of criminal justice reform, the fight for a $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. At one point, a portion of the crowd erupted into a Warren 2020 chant. She was the only buzzed-about 2020 presidential candidate to speak over the weekend

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Black Progressives Say The Democratic Party's 2016 Autopsy Has Ignored A Critical Point - Daily Beast