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A bitter and bruising Democratic primary for Philadelphia district attorney comes to a close Tuesday.

Incumbent DA Larry Krasner has spent his first term pushing to reform what he calls an unjust system, focusing on exonerating people wrongly convicted and reducing mass incarceration.

Challenger Carlos Vega, a longtime homicide prosecutor whom Krasner fired in 2018, has promised to continue reforms while returning to a more traditional approach to prosecution and collaboration with police. Vega and his allies in the local police union blame Krasner for surging homicides and gun crimes, which are roughly in line with national trends during the pandemic.

In heavily Democratic Philadelphia, Tuesdays winner is all but certain to win the November general election against lawyer Chuck Peruto, the only Republican candidate. Krasner is seen as the favorite to win the primary, but political watchers credit Vega with making it a competitive race.

READ MORE: The voters who will choose Phillys next DA arent the people with the most at stake

With voters heading to the polls if they havent already cast ballots by mail here are some factors that will help determine the winner.

Races for district attorney take place in off-year elections, which typically attract far fewer voters than contests for mayor, governor, Congress, or president.

So while the rhetoric has been fiery, the voters tuning into it likely make up a very small fraction of the electorate. Turnout in DAs races has been light in the past three decades, sometimes not even cracking 10%. Krasner prevailed in 2017 with 38% of the vote in a seven-candidate primary, but just under 20% of the citys Democrats cast a ballot.

In the 2017 primary, there were slightly more than 155,000 Democratic votes cast for district attorney. Its hard to predict what turnout will be this year following the expansion of mail voting roughly half of Philadelphias votes were cast by mail last year. But registered Democrats had returned about 47,000 mail ballots in the city as of Monday morning, which suggests extremely low turnout.

READ MORE: Philly elected Larry Krasner district attorney to reform the system. Heres what he did.

Campaign advertising, which can help mobilize voters, has also been notably light this year, especially considering the stakes. In 2017, a political action committee funded by billionaire George Soros spent almost $1.7 million to help Krasner win.

Krasner has been the biggest spender in this years race, shelling out almost $160,000 in television and radio ads, according to the advertising tracking firm AdImpact. Protect Our Police PAC, an anti-Krasner group founded last summer by retired cops, has spent almost $134,000 on TV ads. A related Soros group spent $90,000 in radio ads backing Krasner.

Vega put $30,000 into a last-minute radio ad touting his endorsement from former Gov. Ed Rendell, who served two terms as district attorney. He spent $366,000 mailing campaign literature to voters. But he did not air TV ads during the campaign.

The FOP encouraged Republican voters in the city to register as Democrats to support Vega in the primary. City data shows 6,252 Republicans switched over this year. Three out of every five party-flippers live in 14 wards in Northeast Philadelphia, where the FOP is based, and where Vega hopes to perform strongly.

But voters change parties for plenty of reasons. The city has more than one million voters, with 77% Democrats, 11% Republicans, and 12% independents or members of smaller political parties.

Krasner has been happy to highlight the FOPs opposition to his reelection. He frequently links Vega to the FOP, which had a friendly relationship with former President Donald Trump and connections to the Proud Boys, a self-described Western chauvinist organization designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The FOP represents about 14,000 active and retired officers, although many no longer live in Philadelphia.

READ MORE: Carlos Vegas campaign to be Philly DA started in his moms bodega

Vega, in a radio debate with Krasner last week, predicted he will be at odds with the FOP many times if elected because he will push for reforms in city policing.

I am not owned by the FOP, he said.

But Krasner was still at it Friday as he accepted the endorsement of the Guardians Civic League, which represents 1,500 active and retired Black police officers. He criticized the FOP leadership, saying they cater to retired white officers who long for the days of Police Commissioner-turned Mayor Frank Rizzo.

They are a very diverse group of people, Krasner said of police. And many of them want what we all want, which is the system that is balanced and fair and just and that is not racist.

Results from far Northeast Philadelphia, the Delaware River Wards, and Girard Estates will show whether the FOPs efforts translated into votes.

Krasners promises of reforms in 2017 helped mobilize progressive voters still smarting from Pennsylvanias role in helping to elect Trump. With Trump now out of office, will that enthusiasm wane?

Progressive groups such as Reclaim Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Working Families Party say they are all in to defend Krasner, whose first victory was a watershed moment for their movement. But theres concern on the left that Trumps absence and the difficulty of generating enthusiasm for an incumbent with a complicated record will dampen their impact.

READ MORE: Larry Krasner has progressives in a new position: Defending a controversial incumbent

Even Reclaims endorsement of Krasner highlighted frustration with the pace of reform, praising the incumbents efforts to hold police accountable but saying he has failed to implement the transformative change needed to dismantle a fundamentally unjust and unequal system.

Krasner got some 11th-hour help from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who endorsed Krasner in early May and sent out an email blast on Monday encouraging supporters to have his back when it matters most, to make sure he can continue our collective struggle for justice from the DAs office.

Turnout and Krasners margin of victory in neighborhoods such as Fishtown, Cedar Park, Center City, and parts of South Philadelphia east of Broad Street will show whether the progressive movement held its ground.

More here:
What to watch for in the Democratic primary between Philly DA Larry Krasner and Carlos Vega - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Democrats are now the party that cant tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken, said Bill Maher at the close of Real Time on Friday night. He went on to bemoan the increasing rigidity of the Left and the increasing, well, liberalism of the Right.

Once upon a time the Right were offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and black lists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Now thats us. Were the fun-suckers now. We suck the fun out of everything: Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, twitter, comedy.

Maher continued as part of his New Rules segment, American government works best like a mullet: Republicans do business in the front, Democrats party in the back.

[GOP Congresswoman] Marjorie Taylor Green is reportedly into polyamorous tantric sex, said the disbelieving host. And Ashley Babbitt, the MAGA warrior who died storming the capitol was apparently part of a thruple.

Thats a long way, said Maher, from when Jerry Falwell blasted the Teletubbies because one of them was allegedly gay because it was purple.

[Former Democratic Congresswoman] Katie Hillwho, like Ashley Babbitt, was found to be part of a thruple and pictured holding a bongthat was too much for our new puritanical Democratic Party.

Were the thruple people! The bong people! The tantric sex gurus! enjoined Maher. We did f*cking in the mud [at Woodstock] and bra burning and turn on and tune in and drop out. Theyre the party who wont bake wedding cakes for gay people!

Its time to switch back, he said in closing, because frankly, youre not good at being us and being you sucks.

You can watch Maher deliver his New Rules diatribe below.

Original post:
Bill Maher Says Democrats Suck The Fun Out Of Everything: Halloween, The Oscars, Childhood - Deadline

The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans.

The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters who historically tend to back the G.O.P. fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.

The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.

These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isnt doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.

The expanding Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College underscores how the growing diversity of the nation may not aid Democrats enough to win in places they most need help. Just as often, population growth is concentrated in red states like Texas and Florida where the Democrats dont win nonwhite voters by the overwhelming margins necessary to overcome the states Republican advantage.

As for the Republicans, the widely held assumption that the party will struggle as white voters decline as a percentage of the electorate may be more myth than reality. Contrary to what Tucker Carlson says repeatedly on Fox News about the rise of white replacement theory as a Democratic electoral strategy, the countrys growing racial diversity has not drastically upended the partys chances. Instead, Republicans face a challenge they often take for granted: white voters.

One way to think about this is to compare todays electorate with that of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were winning in landslides. Democrats, no doubt, have benefited from the increased racial diversity of the country since then: Mr. Biden would not have even come close to winning Georgia in November if its voters were as white they were back in the 1980s. Former President Donald J. Trump would have probably won re-election if he could have turned the demographic clock back to the 80s and reduced the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. Todays wave of Republican-backed laws restricting voting rights may be intended to do exactly that.

Yet even a return to the racial demographics of the 1980s wouldnt do nearly as much to hurt Democrats as one might expect. Yes, the November result would have gone from an extremely close win for Mr. Biden to an extremely close win for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden would have won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though nonwhite voters had doubled their share of the electorate from 1984 to when Mrs. Clinton sought the presidency. Remarkably, Mr. Bidens fairly modest gains among white voters helped him as much as the last 30 to 40 years of demographic shifts did.

Similarly, Mr. Bush or Mr. Reagan would have still prevailed if they had had to win an electorate that was 29 percent nonwhite, as opposed to the merely 13 to 15 percent nonwhite electorates they sought to persuade at the time.

This is not the conventional story of recent electoral history. In the usual tale, the growing racial diversity of the electorate broke the Reagan and Bush majorities and allowed the Democrats to win the national popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.

And yet it is hard to find a single state where the increasing racial diversity of the electorate, even over an exceptionally long 30- or 40-year period, has been both necessary and sufficient for Democrats to flip a state from red to blue. Even in states where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, like Georgia and Arizona, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.

One reason demographic change has failed to transform electoral politics is that the increased diversity of the electorate has come not mainly from Black voters but from Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters. Those groups back Democrats, but not always by overwhelmingly large margins.

In 2020, Democrats probably won around 60 to 65 percent of voters across these demographic groups. These are substantial margins, but they are small enough that even decades of demographic shifts wind up costing the Republicans only a couple of percentage points.

The new census datas finding that the percentage of non-Hispanic white voters in the countrys electorate dropped by about two percentage points from 2016 to 2020 might seem like a lot. But with Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters representing the entirety of the increase, while the Black share of the electorate was flat, the growing nonwhite share of the electorate cost Mr. Trump only about half a percentage point over a four-year period.

Another factor is the electoral map. The American electoral system rewards flipping states from red to blue, but many Democratic gains among nonwhite voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and often noncompetitive states. By contrast, many traditional swing states across the northern tier, like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, have had relatively little demographic change.

The ability of Democrats to flip red states has been hampered by another pattern: the tendency for Republicans to fare relatively well among nonwhite voters in red states.

Its often said that Latino voters arent a monolith, and thats certainly true. While Hispanic voters back Democrats by overwhelming margins in blue states like New York and Illinois, Republicans are often far more competitive among Latinos and members of other non-Black minority groups in red states including those Democrats now hope to flip like Texas or Florida.

Texas and Florida really would be blue if Latinos voted like their counterparts in New York or Illinois. But instead, Latino population growth has not quite had a strong pro-Democratic punch in the states where the party hoped to land a knockout blow.

At the same time, white voters are easy to overlook as a source of Democratic gains, given that these voters still support Republicans by a comfortable margin. But Democrats probably improved from 39 to 43 percent among white voters from 1988 to 2020. Its a significant shift, and perhaps even enough to cover the entirety of Mr. Bushs margin of victory in the 1988 election, without any demographic change whatsoever.

Its a little easier to see the significance of Democratic gains among white voters at the state level. According to AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won white voters in states worth 211 electoral votes. Democrats like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004 probably didnt win white voters in states worth much more than 60 electoral votes, based on exit poll and other survey data.

Mr. Biden even won white voters in many of the states where the growing diversity of the electorate is thought to be the main source of new Democratic strength, including California and Colorado. And he also won white voters in many big, diverse states across the North where Republicans used to win and where nonwhite demographic change might otherwise be considered the decisive source of Democratic strength, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, which voted almost entirely Republican at the presidential level throughout the 1980s.

According to the AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won seven states Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia while losing among white voters. In these crucial states, Democratic strength among nonwhite voters was essential to Mr. Bidens victory.

But of these states, there are really only three where Mr. Biden clearly prevailed by the margin of the increased racial diversity of the electorate over the last few decades: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. He did not need to win any of these states to capture the presidency, but he would not have done so without long-term increases in both nonwhite voting power and Democratic strength among white voters.

The story is quite different in the Northern battleground states. White voters still represent more than 80 percent of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the new census data. The nonwhite population in these states is predominantly Black; their share of the population has been fairly steady over the last few decades. But Mr. Biden won these states so narrowly that the relatively modest demographic shifts of the last few decades were necessary for him to prevail in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Its just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016.

See the original post here:
Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope - The New York Times

It all adds up to a punishing test for congressional Democrats, who are looking for concrete legislative wins but also can't alienate progressive groups if they want to hold on to the House and the Senate in 2022. And they're trying to stay hopeful.

We are close, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), the lead sponsor of House Democrats policing bill, said this week at a panel hosted by Brave New Films. Yet Bass noted in the next breath that the urgency of last year's massive protests against Floyd's murder has faded somewhat: "There are not hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets right now. So we need the pressure.

House Democrats and activists can find common ground on eliminating the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, which currently shields officers from civil liability for misdeeds, but Republicans have no interest in outright abolishing it. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), his party's lead negotiator on the issue, called qualified immunity's axing a poison pill for the GOP.

On other issues, however, the two parties are getting closer to an accord. As of late Friday, staff were nearing compromise on provisions limiting chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and the transfer of military equipment to police. That progress, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was confirmed by a source familiar with the negotiations.

But even if lawmakers reach a compromise, it's unclear that it would pass muster with activists and progressive Democrats who want outright bans on all three of those elements. The parties are also still far apart on police misconduct prosecutions, an issue as thorny as qualified immunity; both issues are among reform advocates' top priorities in the talks.

Two weeks after the House passed its policing bill in March, the first sign of activist resistance came when leaders with the Movement for Black Lives sent a nine-page letter to the House Appropriations Committee saying the legislation doubles down on failed approaches to police reform.

That group has floated another proposal that redirects funding from police to community services, known as the BREATHE Act. It counts support from a handful of progressives in the House, including Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), but has never been formally introduced in either chamber.

Nonetheless, activists are frustrated that Democrats haven't even given the measure a hearing.

"We're always open to debate and to talk through the legislation," said Amara Enyia, policy and research coordinator with the Movement for Black Lives. "We're open to feedback. But at a minimum, that should be heard."

Leaders of long-established civil rights groups have taken a different approach. While most have not been directly involved in this round of policy discussions, they won't publicly criticize Democratic lawmakers' efforts as insufficient. Rather than setting firm conditions for the talks, they're putting more subtle pressure on negotiators over portions of the House-passed bill that they see as important particularly qualified immunity.

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Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said he was anxiously awaiting an outcome from negotiations but emphasized reforming qualified immunity; changing a federal criminal statute prohibiting officers from depriving people of their constitutional rights; instituting a federal registry of police misconduct; and the military equipment transfer prohibition as his goals for a final deal.

However, Johnson echoed by National Urban League President Marc Morial described changing qualified immunity as a top priority.

If officers cause harm, there must be accountability, Johnson said.

Advocates in touch with negotiators say they see progress compared to last year. Holly Harris, president and executive director of the Justice Action Network, implored "both sides to redouble their efforts" to reach a deal.

As a way to bridge the partisan gap on qualified immunity, Scott has suggested allowing individuals to bring civil suits against police departments rather than individual officers and requiring cities to pay the associated costs. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has proposed a similar change, though neither proposal has been publicly released.

When it comes to police misconduct prosecutions, civil rights leaders of all backgrounds want current law changed to make the process easier. They say the federal prohibition on officers from willfully depriving people of rights sets too high a bar. Scott and other Republicans, however, describe lowering that threshold as a redline.

Even as they face competing pressures from activists outside the Capitol and Republicans inside, Democrats are still optimistic they'll be able to deliver. But they haven't yet committed to the quick timetable Biden set in his first address to Congress last month.

The president urged Congress to find a consensus by May 25 to coincide with the anniversary of Floyds killing. Congressional Democrats, however, viewed Biden's words as an opportunity to speed the pace of negotiations rather than a firm deadline.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyers recent announcement of the chamber's May agenda did not mention police reform. The House-passed bill remains stalled in the 50-50 Senate, where it lacks the votes to clear a filibuster.

And even if they can translate this week's success into a comprehensive bipartisan agreement, Democrats may ultimately find long-established civil rights leaders as hard to win over as younger Movement for Black Lives activists.

Our hope is that we get something concrete done. A real law with teeth in it, said Sharpton, president of the National Action Network. He added that he expects to be briefed alongside other activist groups and Floyd's family on any deal once discussions conclude. If it is not a bill with teeth, then they're going to have big problems with me, and everybody else.

Excerpt from:
Dems have a problem on police reform and it's not the GOP - POLITICO

President Bidens American Families Act makes one political reality officially clear: The Democratic Party has given up on the American dream.

The Biden proposalscoming as they do with the Democratic progressives rise to powerpresent the American people with a once-in-a-lifetime decision about what kind of country they want to live in for the next half-century.

This isnt about the culture wars or standard Keynesian stimulus spending. The Biden plan is about public policies that will redesign American society.

The American Families Plan and other recent Democratic legislation implicitly pose several important questions. Is the traditional American idea of upward mobility still important? If so, how should upward mobility happenthrough Washington or individual effort? Indeed, should the habit of individual striving give way to a presumably more important goal of nationalized paternalism?

It is no surprise that a liberalism that embraced the 1619 Projects rewriting of the U.S.s founding history would not stop there and try now, despite its almost invisible congressional majority, to displace the countrys originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad birth-to-death entitlement state.

Continue reading here:
Democrats Are Killing the American Dream - The Wall Street Journal