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Rhode Island has become a temporary Democratic Party laboratory testing which messages and messengers motivate the base.

The candidates running in the special Sept. 5 primary to replace ex-Rep. David Cicilline offer something for just about every variety of Democrat. Their pitches, policy stances, political styles, and personal backgrounds vary enough to provide insight into which of the partys power centers might have a leg up as they try to regain control of the House next year.

Its a microcosm of the Democratic dilemma nationally, said Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University.

This race can give us hints about the persistent battle in the Democratic Party between White very liberal progressives and candidates of color, she said. Both types of candidates have been successful at attracting outside PAC money, which shows how interest groups can reinforce divisions within the party.

Key groups on Capitol Hill have weighed in.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus BOLD PAC, EMILYs List and the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund endorsed Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos.

Former Biden and Obama administration aide Gabe Amo has the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Bernie Sanders headlined a rally for former state lawmaker, Aaron Regunberg, who has the endorsement of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Regunbergs uncle, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), is a member of the New Democrat Coalition.

Photographer: Kate Ackley

Aaron Regunberg shown in August 2023 while campaigning for the Democratic nomination in a special congressional election.

Theres a lot the party can learn from this economically and ethnically diverse urban-suburban district, said Schiller.

The district, home to waterfront mansions, giant jazz and folk festivals, the CVS corporate headquarters, and significant immigrant communities, has a population thats about 63% non-Hispanic White, according to the Census Bureaus 2021 American Community Survey, which found that languages other than English are spoken in about 27% of the districts homes.

About a quarter of the households were living on less than $35,000 a year, and another quarter had income exceeding $100,000, the survey estimated.

First-Generation Americans Vie to Fill Cicillines House Seat

Its a crowded primary, with a dozen names on the ballot in a district so dominated by the Democratic Party that the primary is the key contest in choosing a successor to Cicilline (D), who resigned to run the Rhode Island Foundation. Several of the candidates including Matos, Amo, and state Sen. Sandra Cano, who is originally from Colombia have the chance to be ground-breakers as the first person of color or female Democrat to represent the state in Congress.

As they make their case to voters via TV, radio, and online ads, the candidates have focused on personal biographies, support for abortion rights, stricter gun laws and climate legislation.

Matos campaign has tried to emphasize her journey as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who learned English on the job at a jewelry factory, but its also been on the defensive because of a controversy related to fraudulent signatures to get her on the ballot.

Matos said a vendor had produced the fraudulent signatures, including from deceased people. I feel awful to know that this may have created any type of mistrust in the democratic process, she said during an interview in her Providence campaign headquarters.

Photographer: Kate Ackley

Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos discusses her campaign for a vacant seat in Congress

An opponent who had been aggressively criticizing Matos, meanwhile, says hes no longer in the race after drawing his own unwelcome attention over text messages sent to a student while teaching college.

Don Carlson, a wealthy investor attempting his first run for office, announced the suspension of his campaign after extraordinary stress on my family and close friends. Early voting had already been underway for 11 days before he made that declaration, and Carlsons name remains on the ballot.

Among the other candidates, frequent themes include the importance of defending democracy and taking on MAGA Republicans consistent with talking points put out by the national party committees.

Regunberg, in a debate this week, was the only candidate who said he would have voted no on this years debt ceiling deal, so long as his wasnt the deciding vote (in which case he said he would have voted yes). Numerous candidates, including Matos and Amo, said Regunbergs position amounted to playing politics. A new super PAC, Committee for a Better Rhode Island, swiftly launched an ad attacking Regunberg on that topic.

Photographer: Kate Ackley

Rhode Island congressional candidate Gabe Amo talks with residents on their porches while campaigning door-to-door in Newport with Mayor Xay Khamsyvoravong.

Amo, who hasnt held elective office, has been telling voters that his experience in Washington, combined with his upbringing in Pawtucket and work for state officials, would help make him effective in the House.

I have been at the heights of government, working for President Biden, he said, while going to voters homes in the Point neighborhood of Newport with Mayor Xaykham Xay Khamsyvoravong, who has endorsed Amo. My experience working for two presidents and working for the governor here equips me with the ability to get things done, like, faster than the normal junior member of Congress.

Even as a late-summer, off-year, low-turnout contest, the race has showcased Democrats internal strife over the role of money in politics, as rhetoric about wanting to banish special interest dollars hits the reality of needing to gin up enough cash and TV ads to have a viable campaign.

Matos and Regunberg, a former state lawmaker who is white and Jewish, have attracted the most outside funding. The two have tangled over political money, super PACs and lobbyists donations.

BOLD PAC and a super PAC tied to EMILYs List have helped fuel nearly $800,000 in outside support of Matos, while the Working Families Party PAC and others have invested more than $360,000 in support of Regunberg, so far, according to federal disclosures.

Progress Rhode Island, a super PAC supporting Regunberg, drew donations from his family members, including $125,000 from his father-in-law, and is the subject of a Federal Election Commission complaint from Matos campaign. Regunbergs campaign, in response, has criticized the Matos campaigns donations from D.C. lobbyists whose firms represent banking and pharmaceutical clients.

(Keep up with congressional election trends and more with BGOVs Ballots & Boundaries newsletter.)

Regunberg used some of his debate time to criticize Amo for receiving donations from lobbyists, while Amo countered that Regunbergs six-figure family support through the super PAC was a red flag.

We need to get money out of our political system, Regunberg, who has degrees from Brown University and Harvard Law School, said to a crowd from whom he was soliciting campaign donations at a campaign event at the Ragged Island Brewing Co.

It is obscene the way it works, but the fact is right now there is nothing that makes a bigger difference than making sure that we have the resources to pay these wonderful people who are doing this work, said Regunberg, whos running on an anticorporate platform that includes support for Medicare for all legislation.

In special elections like this theres often a bit of a national magnifying glass on them, Regunberg said in an interview at the Portsmouth brewery. Its an opportunity to show that Democrats understand that we face big problems right now, and big problems require big solutions.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kate Ackley at kackley@bloombergindustry.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: George Cahlink at gcahlink@bloombergindustry.com; Katherine Rizzo at krizzo@bgov.com

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Democrats Road Test '24 Themes in Rhode Island Special Election ... - Bloomberg Government

PERRY COUNTY As a day of fundraising and fun, local Democrats held their annual Terry Lock Memorial Golf Scramble Monday, Aug. 28, with tee off at noon.

Democrats populated Hoosier Heights Country Club for the event, filling out all the clubs available carts.

The scramble started in the 1990s by Democrat member Terry Lock. According to current event organizer Dale Poole, former Tell City Water Department supervisor, Lock was the original organizer of the scramble. Upon his death 2012, the scramble was named in his memory.

The event had a good turn out. Teams played 18 holes, with 14 teams, four people per team. People came from all over southern Indiana, forming personal and business teams. Each tee box and putting green displayed scramble sponsors for the event, and those businesses providing or sponsoring a team.

Perry County Sheriff Alan Malone spoke before the scramble began, noting they had a good turnout.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had choice words of advice for Democratic candidates in upcoming elections, including the president himself.

The failed presidential candidate acknowledged during an interview on CBS News's Face the Nation on Sunday that his previous political party needs "to win back a working class" voter demographic. Sanders explained that 60% of the American population is living paycheck to paycheck, with 18 million households putting at least 50% of their income toward a mortgage or rent.

TRUMP HAS 46-POINT LEAD OVER DESANTIS AS MOST GOP VOTERS SEE INDICTMENTS AS 'POLITICALLY MOTIVATED': POLL

"What the Democratic Party has got to do is have the guts to take on corporate greed, which is unprecedented all over the economy," Sanders said. "People who own the large corporations are doing record-breaking profits. We have to create an economy that works for all, not just a few."

According to Sanders, President Joe Biden "has made some progress," but he insisted there was a lot more to do in order to win over more voters and secure a second term. Sanders detailed to anchor Bob Costa what angle the Democratic Party should take, in his opinion.

"Well, I think the issue is: Are Democrats doing enough to win back a working class, which is leaving the Democratic Party?" Sanders said. "So I think, Bob, what this campaign is going should be about is a contrast between the ideas that work for the working families of this country and what Republicans stand for, which is more tax breaks for billionaires and paying allegiance to the needs of corporate America, not ordinary Americans."

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Sanders suggested that the Democratic Party campaign on expanding Social Security and Medicare, with the latter including dental and vision coverage.

Despite his recent visit to New Hampshire, which suggested to some that the senator would attempt yet another presidential bid, Sanders expressed his certainty that Biden would be the Democratic nominee.

Original Location: Bernie Sanders advises Democrats to 'have the guts to take on corporate greed'

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Bernie Sanders advises Democrats to 'have the guts to take on ... - Colorado Springs Gazette

JEFFERSON CITY Missouri Democrats are planning to open up next years party-run presidential preference primary to 17-year-olds who turn 18 by the November 2024 presidential election, according to draft plans out for public comment.

Missouri legislators in 2022 repealed the state-run presidential preference primary, with proponents arguing that political parties and not taxpayers should pick up the tab for the party contests.

Because an effort to reinstate the state-run primary failed this past legislative session, both the state Republican and Democratic parties are moving forward with plans for party-run contests in 2024.

In a 51-page draft released Tuesday, Missouri Democrats said their privately run primary, to take place March 23, would allow certain 17-year-olds to vote. That is despite Missouri requiring voters in official state elections to be 18.

To encourage participation by youth in the delegate selection process, any individual who will have turned eighteen (18) years of age by the date of the general election will be allowed to participate in the delegate selection process, the draft plan says.

The March 23 primary run by the state Democratic Party will be the first step in assigning Missouris 71 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, taking place between Aug. 19-22 in Chicago.

The party said each county will have a polling place and that there would be multiple locations in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas.

The draft plan would allow voters to cast in-person ballots between 8 a.m. and noon on the day of the primary.

The party plans to distribute mail-in ballots starting Feb. 12. The party will require mail ballot requests to be made by March 12.

The Democratic Party must receive the ballots back by 10 a.m. on March 23, the draft said.

The plan states that if two or more candidates make the ballot, the party will use a ranked-choice voting system to allow maximum engagement consistent with a traditional caucus method of achieving viability.

Delegates to the National Convention will be proportionally apportioned to fairly reflect the results, the draft said.

Party members will select or certify Democratic National Convention delegates and alternates at the state partys June 29 convention in Jefferson City.

The Democrats also said in their draft that the voter rolls for this process are registered voters of the state of Missouri who have declared Democrat as their party affiliation.

Legislators last year approved of Missouri voters declaring a political party, which has been seen as a precursor to a closed primary system.

But few voters have taken advantage of the new option.

According to a Post-Dispatch analysis of voter data from the secretary of state, fewer than 1% of registered voters had chosen to affiliate with a political party as of August.

The Democrats also said they are committed to an aggressive fundraising program for the party-run primary. The party said its delegate selection plan was estimated to cost between $250,000 to $475,000.

The party pegged the estimated cost of election administration at $175,000, which it hopes to raise by the end of the year.

If these fundraising goals are not met, the Missouri Democratic Party reserves the right to adjust planned investments in order to administer an election and/or seek an alternative method of voting, the draft says.

The draft is available online and the Democrats said Tuesday they are accepting public comments for 30 days.

The Missouri Republican Party has not yet announced its plans for its 2024 presidential nominating contest. The Missouri GOP state committee is scheduled to meet Sept. 9.

Josh Renaud of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Take a look at some of the video highlights of 2022 from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch staff.

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Missouri Democrats to allow 17-year-olds to vote in party-run ... - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In what has become an annual tradition, Democrats and too many journalists are marking back-to-school season by trying to insist with a straight face that the COVID-era school closures from the autumn of 2020 all the way through 2022 were a bipartisan phenomenon, perhaps even mostly attributable to Republicans.

"Remember," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday, echoing an administration "fact sheet" released the same day, "when the president walked [into office], more than 50 percent of schools were shut down because of COVID, because the last administration didn't have a plandidn't have a comprehensive planto deal with COVID and what it was doing to our economy and what it was doing to our kids. And because the president putschools reopening and businesses reopening and making sure that people got shots in arms, made that a priority, we were able to open up the schools."

There are several insufficiently factual assertions in that statement, beginning with the formulation that K-12 schools still shuttered as of January 20, 2021, remained so "because of COVID." The pandemic was the stated reason, to be sure, but schoolhouse closure at that point was an active policy choice, one that had been rejected by a majority of European countries, American private schools, and the (Republican-run) states of Wyoming, Montana, Florida, Arkansas, South Dakota, Texas, and so on.

President Donald Trump may not have had what the Biden administration would characterize as a "comprehensive plan" to reopen schools (in part because K-12 education in the United States is still governed at the state and local level), but he did as of July 2020when enough research and global experience had already demonstrated that children were overwhelmingly less likely to catch, transmit, and suffer from COVID-19urge schools to "Get open in the fall."

Republican governors such as Florida's Ron DeSantis took Trump's advice, as well as heaps of media/Democratic/teachers-union derision (some of which, defiantly, continues to this day). What did then-candidate Joe Biden say at the time?

"If we do this wrong, we will put lives at risk and set our economy and our country back," the Democrat warned while unveiling a plan that conditioned reopening on $58 billion in additional federal aid. Also: "If you have the ability to have people wear masks and you have teachers able to be in a position where they can teach at a social distancethat, I think is one thing.But it costs a lot of money to do that. If you don't have that capacity, I think it's too dangerous to open the schools."

Such fearmongering was routine for the types of teachers unions that First Lady Jill Biden belongs to. Union demonstrations against reopening in the fall of 2020, usually in Democratic-dominated cities, featured such subtle props as coffins, body bags, and gravestones; an American Federation for Teachers (AFT) anti-Trump ad that August claimed that "our kids are being used as guinea pigs." The states that closed their schools mostHawaii, Maryland, Washington, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusettsdid not have in common levels of infection, or hospital capacity, or mortality; but rather that they each voted for Biden over Trump by double-digit margins.

DeSantis was right, Biden was wrong, and by now even NPR education reporters admit that the remote learning favored by Democratically governed jurisdictions has been a generational catastrophe, triggering a parental stampede out of free-of-charge, government-run schools.

The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that since the onset of the pandemic, just 1,689 of the 1,141,899 deaths attributed to COVID, or one out of every 675, were kids under the age of 18, and nearly half of those were under the kindergarten age of 5. K-12 teachers in the pre-vaccine year of 2020 had a lower COVID mortality rate than the average worker. Post-vaccination, the least likely pathway of in-school transmission has been from student to teacher. The one country in Europe that didn't close its schools even in the spring of 2020 is the one that has had the lowest rate of excess deaths.

President-elect Biden vowed in December 2020, if conditionally, that a majority of K-12 public schools would be open within his first 100 days of office. On his first day in office, he quietly downgraded that promise to just K-8 schools. By week three, "open" was reinterpreted to mean "at least one day per week."

There was a practical reason for such expectation-lowering. The administration and its teachers-union allies still wanted one last huge federal payout, in the form of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which (after being passed one month later) directed $122 billion to K-12 schools (on top of the $70 billion in emergency federal school funding those schools had already received), as well as an additional $350 billion to state and local governments, which typically spend about 20 percent of their budgets on pre-collegiate education.

"We need a Marshall Plan for our schools," urged the school superintendents of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago in a December 2020 Washington Postop-ed. (Only NYC of the three was even half-heartedly open.) The hostage-taking was not subtle; neither was the White House's timing.

Just three days after redefining "open" as one day per week, and with the American Rescue Plan still hanging in the balance, the Biden administration unveiled its first major initiative affecting the pace of school reopening. And by "affecting," I do mean "slowing down." The CDC unveiled its long-awaited, allegedly science-based new guidance for how and when to fully reopen schools, and to the shock of epidemiologists, parents, and even some Democratic politiciansand in contradiction to the pre-CDC advice from new Director Rochelle Walenskythe ostensibly independent agency concluded schools should continue to enforce an average social distancing between students of 6 feet. For those many school districts, usually in heavily Democratic polities, that cut-and-pasted CDC guidelines as operational policy, that effectively meant hybrid and remote learning would extend into the indefinite future.

That was on February 12, 2021. On March 11, the American Rescue Plan was passed and signed into law, giving teachers their huge payday (very little of which, by the way, had anything to do with actual COVID-mitigation policies). Literally that same day came word thatta-da!the CDC was now considering revising the social-distance guideline to 3 feet after all, thus finally allowing the dwindling number of CDC-obedient districts to maybe fully reopen sometime.

"They are compromising the one enduring public health missive that we've gotten from the beginning of this pandemic in order to squeeze more kids into schools," complained an ungrateful AFT President Randi Weingarten, whose paw-prints had been all over the original CDC guidance. "Even with the significant investment of American Rescue Plan money," she wrote in a letter of protest to Walensky and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, "districts lack the human resources and institutional planning ability to make changes like this quickly. Is this something that can be implemented in the fall, or perhaps the summer?"

You can understand why Joe Biden wants to falsely portray himself as a champion of reopening, just as you can see whyof all peopleso does Randi Weingarten: Extended school closures, long after the survey data and global experience argued convincingly against them, constituted one of the most egregious public policy failures in modern American history, the aftereffects of which are still massively reshaping American kids, families, education systems, and cities. They are deservedly unpopular, with few people beyond opinion-journalism trolls still attempting to defend them.

What Biden delivered was not school reopening but a gargantuan transfer of federal tax money to local school districts right as their customer base was running away screaming, especially in cities and states that closed schools most. Occasionally, if grudgingly, reporters will note that spending several multiples of the Department of Education's annual budget just on COVID relief to schools didn't exactly make the schools much better ventilated. ("Among the reasons," New York Times pandemic-beat writer Apoorva Mandavilli wrote on Sunday, include "a lack of clear federal guidance on cleaning indoor air, no senior administration official designated to oversee such a campaign, few experts to help the schools spend the funds wisely, supply chain delays for new equipment, and insufficient staff to maintain improvements that are made.")

But sometimes the president himself will let slip what the school-relief bill was really all about: more jobs for an otherwise shrinking industry.

The American Rescue Plan, Biden said last week at a teacher-of-the-year celebration, provided "historic funding for schools to reopen safely so teachers could get back to the classroom, doing what they do best. Before the American Rescue Plan, only 46 percent of schools were open and in-person. Today, that's now 100 percent. Plus, that law has delivered critical support for schools, including funding for after-school programs, summer programs; hiring more teachers, counselors, and school psychologists.Thanks to that law, the number of school social workers is up 48 percent. The number of school counselors is up 10 percent. The number of school nurses is up 42 percent. And since I took office, we've added nearly 80,000 additional public-school teachers80,000."

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Democrats Try To Whitewash Their Starring Role in School Closures - Reason