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The election, which took place during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, was held to decide who would serve out the remainder of the term after Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, died last year at the age of 68.

The Baltimore-area congressional district -- Maryland's 7th -- is heavily Democratic, which made Mfume the favorite to win. The most unusual feature of the race, however, was the fact that election officials strongly encouraged constituents to vote by mail as a public health and safety measure amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

The election took place after Mfume and Klacik advanced to the general after a primary held in February.

For Mfume, the win creates the opportunity for a comeback of sorts given that he previously held the congressional seat from 1987 to 1996 after which he was succeeded by Cummings. In the primary election, he beat out Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the late congressman's widow.

In addition to previously representing Maryland's seventh congressional district in Congress, Mfume has served as a Baltimore City Council member and president of the NAACP. He is also a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

This story has been updated with the results of the race.

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Democrat Kweisi Mfume projected to win special election for the late Elijah Cummings' House seat - CNN

WASHINGTON Republican members of Congress were noticeably reluctant to wear masks on the House floor Thursday, sparking a sharp debate with Democrats, who readily accepted the federal guidance.

As lawmakers gathered for a morning debate on creating a coronavirus stimulus oversight committee, the GOP side of the chamber largely left their mouths and noses uncovered, while some Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, dropped their coverings while speaking.

Democrats nearly all entered the chamber wearing either bandannas or masks of many colors. At least two were orange. One wore a mask embroidered with a sparkly sequin American flag.

The sole Democratic exception asof mid-afternoon was recovered coronavirus patientRep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina. He later put on a mask after The Post contacted his staff for comment. His aides did not comment.

House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) lashed into his Republican colleagues who chose not to cover up after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) spoke. Jordan, who coughed repeatedly while awaiting his turn to speak, did not wear a mask while seated on the floor, or at the lectern.

People can do what they want to do, McGovern scolded. But while we all want to show how fearless we are, we should be mindful of the people that are surrounding us. And so until Im advised otherwise, Im going to keep my mask on.

While face coverings are not mandatory, they are certainly recommended, McGovern said. The Office of the Attending Physician has also advised that a face cover will produce a minimal reduction in sound when using a microphone. The face covering is most useful in reducing viral spread while speaking.

Meanwhile, Republicans argued against the proposed new oversight committee, saying it would be a politicized weapon to attack President Trump. Later Thursday, lawmakers will vote on a half-trillion-dollar package of small-business loans, hospital aid and testing funds.

The House gathering was the first since March 27, when masks were rare or non-existent on the floor, as US health officials said at the time that masks were ineffective for the public to protect against the virus. The health guidance about-faced this month, with federal officials advising face coverings as an optional measure to prevent spread of the virus.

In several Asian countries, authorities credit universal mask wearing with preventing major outbreaks of COVID-19. In Taiwan, which has a larger population than New York, there are about 400 cases of the coronavirus after early widespread mask wearing.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) andMinority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) arrived on the House floor without masks, as did many GOP peers.

Nice mask! a colleague told Scalise.

Thanks! I wear it for Halloween, too! the second-ranking Republican said, laughing uproariously.

Those who did not wear masks included Reps. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), James Comer (R-Ky.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), Jody Hice (R-Ga.), David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas).

Some Republicans did wear masks, and the number who did increased around noon when lawmakers pivoted to debating the fourth large coronavirus bill.

GOP Reps. Kevin Brady of Texas, Steve Chabot of Ohio, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, Debbie Lasko of Arizona and Thomas Massie of Kentucky were among those who wore masks.

Aside from Cunningham, the closest to an unmasked Democrat was Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, who wore a mask tied around his neck. It did not appear that Neal ever raised the mask onto his face.

During House votes last month, many New York Democrats ignored guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which urged a 14-day self-quarantine for people recently in the New York metro area.

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House Republicans anger Democrats by refusing to wear protective masks - New York Post

"If there are significant shifts in support demographically then you don't necessarily need to boost turnout," says Democratic consultant Michael Halle, who directed Hillary Clinton's battleground state strategy in 2016.

"The idea that expanding the map comes down to high mobilization of the constituencies that give you the most support doesn't necessarily follow," says Ruy Teixeira, a longtime liberal election analyst and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "You can do the same things by reducing your deficits or becoming competitive among groups where you had been doing quite poorly."

Race and age intertwine politically

"He is not the spark to that flame, for sure," says Republican strategist David Kochel.

Those trends among the young still concern many Democratic operatives. But a closer look at the demographics of the swing states makes clear that for Biden a strategy centered on appealing to older voters, most of them white, could substitute for mobilizing young people, many of them diverse, in all of the places that both sides consider pivotal in 2020.

"It was never clear to me that the way you expand the map was by enormous turnout among young people," said Teixeira. "Other moving parts were just as important, if not more important."

In all six of the Rust Belt and Sun Belt swing states, people older than 45 cast a higher share of the 2016 vote than they did nationally, according to calculations from census figures by William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. In Pennsylvania (62%), Wisconsin and North Carolina (63% each), those older voters constituted a slightly larger share of the total than the national number (61.8%); the gap was greater in Arizona (64%), Michigan (65%) and above all Florida (67%).

Across all six of these pivotal battleground states, age and race intertwine politically. In each of them, the younger generations are more racially diverse than the older. That pattern is especially pronounced in the Sun Belt states. In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls showed that in Arizona nonwhites constituted 44% of the voters younger than 30 but only 12% of the seniors who voted, according to calculations by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta; in Florida, the numbers were 56% among the young and just 21% among the seniors.

In the Rust Belt states, the minority share of the youth vote isn't as great, but even in those places the "racial generation gap," as Frey has called it, is formidable: Minorities constituted nearly two-fifths of the younger voters in Michigan last time, but only 1 in 7 of the seniors. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, whites made up more than 8 in 10 2016 voters aged 45-64 and more than 9 in 10 of those older than 65, Agiesta found.

Because of that demographic makeup, the Rust Belt has always been an uneasy fit for the strategy that many liberals prefer of mobilizing more younger minority nonvoters. Not only do whites represent a larger share of actual voters in the Rust Belt than in the Sun Belt, but they also compose a clear majority of the adults who were eligible to vote but did not in 2018. (At least three-fourths of eligible nonvoters in 2016 were white in all three big Rust Belt battlegrounds, according to calculations by David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report.)

2018 field tests

Mobilization of nonvoters is potentially a viable strategy for Democrats in Sun Belt states that are adding population and rapidly growing more racially diverse, particularly among their younger generations. In those states, there are large pools of younger nonvoters available for the party to activate -- if it can inspire them to the polls.

But even there, a stronger performance among seniors could offer Biden an alternative path to victory, especially in the states that both parties are most targeting in 2020: North Carolina, Florida and Arizona. In each of those three big battlegrounds, Frey found that in 2016 voters older than 45 turned out at much higher rates than younger ones, just as they did in the three critical Rust Belt states.

"If you can trim off a little bit of the folks who you know absolutely will vote, that is far more effective than trying to turn out folks who have a very low propensity of voting," says Mike Noble, a former Republican consultant in Arizona who now polls for nonpartisan clients.

To some extent, these alternative approaches for Democrats were already field-tested across the Sun Belt in the 2018 elections.

Inspiring more turnout among those younger, mostly nonwhite, voters in diversifying states was the strategic underpinning for three of the 2018 campaigns that most electrified Democrats nationwide: the governor campaigns of Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams in Florida and Georgia, respectively, and the Senate campaign of Beto O'Rourke in Texas.

Offering a passionate case for fundamental change, each generated commanding margins among younger people: All three carried almost exactly three-fifths of voters aged 18-44, according to figures provided by Edison Research, which conducts the exit polls for a media consortium that includes CNN.

All three inspired large turnout and enormous enthusiasm from volunteers and donors alike. But each of them nonetheless lost their races because they faltered with older voters. Abrams and O'Rourke each carried only a little more than 2 in 5 voters older than 45, and Gillum did just slightly better, posting 45%, according to the Edison Research results. Among whites older than 45 the results were even grimmer: Gillum carried slightly fewer than 2 in 5 while O'Rourke won fewer than 1 in 3 and Abrams only a little more than 1 in 5. (O'Rourke and Gillum struggled as well with older Latinos, the exit polls found.)

By contrast, with much less national attention, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won a US Senate seat in Arizona that same year by moderating her earlier liberalism and running as a centrist who would build bridges across party lines. Like the other three Sun Belt Democrats, Sinema struggled among older working adults aged 50-64, according to the exit polls; but unlike them she carried a majority of seniors, which helped her squeeze out a narrow victory over Republican Martha McSally. Sinema carried 44% of whites older than 45, a measurable improvement on the other three.

One possible model for Biden

One of the most striking aspects of Sinema's win was her victory in Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix. Maricopa was the largest county in the US that Trump won in 2016, but Noble's post-election analyses found that 88 precincts that backed the President in 2016 switched to Sinema two years later. Those included many suburban areas crowded with college-educated voters who broke from Trump nationwide. But when Noble and his team analyzed the Maricopa precincts that moved away from the GOP from 2016 to 2018, he found two retirement communities at the very top of the list: Sun City and Leisure World.

That's catastrophic for Republicans in Arizona, he notes, since the heavy Latino presence in the younger population reliably tilts it toward the Democrats. (Sinema won three-fifths of voters younger than 45 in 2018.) If Biden can maintain an advantage with those older voters through November, Noble says, "it's smooth sailing" for him in the state, especially since Trump and the GOP are also eroding among younger college-educated suburbanites.

Clifford Young, the president of Ipsos Public Affairs, says the firm's own recent polling has found Biden running even or ahead of Trump among seniors in the big three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. After Trump's unusually strong performance among those voters in 2016, he believes, "what you are seeing is some migration back to status quo ante 2016," when Democrats ran more competitively with older Midwesterners.

Kochel says the fact that many older voters in the Midwest live in rural communities that feel a strong cultural connection to Trump -- and have also generally been less affected by the coronavirus outbreak -- will ultimately create challenges for Biden among the region's seniors. But he adds that the movement toward the Democrat among older voters "is no doubt something [Trump] has to be watching real close."

"Just these suburban numbers alone put Biden in a position to win pretty handily," says Halle, who served as a senior adviser in Pete Buttigieg's campaign this year. "If you start to bleed other places -- and the senior numbers is a significant place where Trump is bleeding in the most recent round of numbers -- you just don't have enough putty to patch all the holes."

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Older voters could offer Biden a new path to the White House - CNN

April 22, 2020, 5:25 PM

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ATLANTA -- A Democratic state lawmaker from Georgia said Wednesday that hes stepping down, just over a week after breaking with his party to endorse President Donald Trump.

Rep. Vernon Jones announced that he wont complete his current term representing portions of metro Atlantas DeKalb and Rockdale counties in the state House and wont seek reelection. I intend not to complete my term effective April 22, 2020, Jones said in a statement.

Jones has been the subject of a complaint alleging that he doesnt live in the district. He has called it baseless.

The Democrat made waves last week when he endorsed Trump, saying in a video that hes backing the Republican president because of his support for criminal justice reform and historically black colleges and universities.

The endorsement resulted in swift blowback from fellow state Democrats, many of whom publicly said they were making donations to Rhonda Taylor, a community activist running for Jones seat in the states Democratic primary set for June 9. State Sen. Nikema Williams, chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, issued a statement calling Jones an embarrassment.

Jones is no stranger to controversy. He previously served as DeKalb Countys CEO, weathering allegations of theft in the role, and has often clashed with other Democrats on policy differences around immigration and LGBT issues.

The Left hates me because they cant control me, Jones said on Twitter on Wednesday.

Jones spokesman CJ Pearson said he is exploring other ways to continue serving the community as he supports Trumps reelection.

Joness decision could clear the runway for Taylor to take the seat representing the overwhelmingly Democratic district.

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Georgia Democrat stepping down after endorsement of Trump - ABC News

Democrats are pushing Joe BidenJoe BidenValerie Jarrett: 'No chance' Michelle Obama will be Biden's VP The Hill's Campaign Report: Virus takes toll on campaign fundraising in March Democrats' Potemkin Village of Unity MORE to select his running mate sooner rather than later, saying this would give him more time to raise funds and unite the Democratic Party ahead of the general election fight against President TrumpDonald John TrumpPelosi: Trump 'engaged in distractions' amid 'total failure' on testing Harvard responds to Trump: Taxpayer funds will aid students affected by coronavirus Poll: More than 70 percent of Americans support coronavirus stay-at-home orders MORE.

Presumptive Democratic nominees typically announce their pick before the partys convention.But with the coronavirus pandemic sidelining the campaign and pushing back the Democratic convention from July to August, Democrats say an early pick could boost Biden.

Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo said hes all for an early announcement because it would give the Biden campaign an infusion of campaign donations and double the campaign teams power.

She can help raise more money, get activists engaged, do one-on-one interviews in key media markets and build more enthusiasm for the ticket immediately, Trujillo said of Bidens potential running mate, who the former vice president has said will be a woman.

Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko, who served as an aide on Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonThe Hill's Campaign Report: Virus takes toll on campaign fundraising in March United Auto Workers union endorses Biden Latino groups endorse Biden early in show of unity MOREs 2016 presidential campaign, said it makes a lot of sense to go earlier than later.

People keep saying theyre not hearing from the Biden campaign lately, Parkhomenko said. This is something they could do to help break through.

He stressed that the Biden campaign is going to have to be creative in how they roll out a vice presidential pick to make sureit does providea needed boost to his campaign.

In an appearance on CBSs "The Late Late Show with James Corden" early Wednesday morning, Biden predicted the selection process for his running mate will take until sometime in July to winnow the process down to the one, two, three people.

Sources close to the campaign say the process is in the early stages, noting that advisers are not in the same room and that people are working remotely to set up a secure vetting process.

Not every Democrat thinks Biden needs to worry about moving fast with a VP pick.

The Vice President is doing pretty damn well under the circumstances, so what needs to be fixed? asked Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Clinton.

If Biden were to pick a superstar online fundraiser such as Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenOn The Money: Senate passes 4B coronavirus relief package | Confusion reigns as IRS starts issuing coronavirus payments | Why oil prices fell into negative territory and why it might happen again Valerie Jarrett: 'No chance' Michelle Obama will be Biden's VP The Intercept's Grim: Warren as Biden VP could be 'Dick Cheney situation' MORE (Mass.), that would be a reason to go early with the pick, Reines said. Trump has a big fundraising edge on Biden as things stand, and many do not believe the former vice president can catch up.

He needs money, one Democratic bundler said. And he needs a lot of it. Anything that helps move the needle is valuable. And the more time, the more money.

Democratic strategist Eddie Vale said he would lean toward a traditional approach. But he conceded that if the coronavirus pandemic stretches into the summer or pushes the convention online, it would be a reason for Biden to go early withthe VP selection.

[It] could be worth thinking about trying to do a slightly earlier and different digital VP rollout to try and get some more coverage to make up for a lack of convention, he said.

Democraticstrategist Chris Lehane, who served as a campaign aide to both Al GoreAlbert (Al) Arnold GoreEarth Day goes online amid coronavirus pandemic Why Obama's support may not help Biden win key swing states Al Gore blasts Trump: 'You can't gaslight a virus' MORE and John KerryJohn Forbes KerryEarth Day goes online amid coronavirus pandemic Sanders's fate sealed by the over 40 crowd History's lessons for Donald Trump MORE during their presidential bids, said he would be pushing to announce the pick sooner.

For starters, he said, it moves the dial because this is going to be a time where voters will value the presidential decision making differently by discerning whether this is a pick who makes the team materially better in terms of dealing with a historic crisis.

Lehane also said it would be a way for Biden to get media coverage.

I would produce this like it was a 10 episode Netflix series with surround sound on social media that allows Biden to really occupy media real estate and drive the message, create momentum [and] generate interest, said Lehane, who referenced ESPNs 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

In a world devoid of live entertainment where people are shut in their homes and desperate for information, there is a huge opportunity to take something and rethink about how it could be adapted and deployed for the current times, he said. If there was ever a time to rethink the approach so as to help define and animate the candidacy, electorally position the campaign, and own the conversation by generating ratings, it is now.

Biden could even call this The First Dance, he quipped.

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Democrats want Biden to go early with VP pick | TheHill - The Hill