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close up of political voting pins for 2020 election on white(Photo: liveslow, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

MUNCIE, Ind. With the election rapidly approaching and the COVID-19 pandemic still in full swing, the usualcircuit of forums and debates associated with an election year have gone virtual.

COVID-19 continues to be a barrier for citizens to meet safely in large gatheringsand for candidates tocampaign like during a normal election.

To combat this, several community partners have created the Community Candidate Forum Series,a lineup ofvirtualforums that will serve as anopportunityfor candidatesrunning for local, state and federal officeto answer moderated questions alongside theiropponentsfor the election.

Eachvirtualforumwill beconductedvia Zoom video conferencing and broadcast via Facebook, as well as on The Star Press website.

Community partners that made the event possible include the Bowen Center for Public Affairs atBall State University, Citizens of Delaware County for Good Government, League of Women Voters of Muncie-Delaware County, Muncie-Delaware County Chamber of Commerce, Muncie Action Plan, Muncie Resists, NAACP Muncie Branchand Shafer Leadership Academy.

All forumswill be moderated by Ball State University'sChip Taylor with theBowen Center for Public Affairs. Taylor has moderated several political forums in previous elections.

Forums for specific races will be on the following nights:

The problem for the forums is there are several campaigns, primarily Republican candidates, who have declined to participate.

Here is who is, and isn't, attending each forum, according to forum organizers:

Commissioner candidates

Delaware County Council candidates

State Representative candidates

6th District Congressional Candidates

Victor Whitehead, the local Republican Party chairman, told The Star Press on Monday that he had not instructed candidates not to attend the forums.

In order to learn more about the debateand submit questions for consideration by the moderators, visitcommunitycandidateforums.com.

Read or Share this story: https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/09/14/local-election-forums-begin-tuesday-without-some-republicans/5791665002/

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Local election forums begin Tuesday, but without some Republican candidates - The Star Press

A Save U.S. Postal Service rally in front of the U.S. Post Office in Santa Ana, California.

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

About a month ago, we laid out five ways that Republicans are making it harder to vote and more generally undermining the electoral process in 2020. We focused on Republicans for two reasons. First, making it harder to vote is a more controversial and anti-democratic goal than making it easier to vote, as Democrats are aiming to do. And second, President Trump is playing a central role in these voting wars. Trump has publicly said that he is opposed to efforts in many states to make absentee voting and voting by mail (the two are functionally the same thing) available to virtually anyone who wants to vote that way. He has also suggested that higher overall voter turnout would make it harder for Republicans to win elections.

Over the last month, with the election approaching, Republican officials from county-level election administrators to the president himself have in some ways escalated their use of these tactics. So heres an update on those efforts to complicate the voting process and oppose moves that would make it easier. These five categories, which we used in the last article, are generally ordered from least alarming to most alarming. (There is no formal system tracking every lawsuit concerning voting and the electoral process in all 50 states, so this article is based on our informal tracking, which means we might have missed a key development in a state or two.) Heres whats happening:

This is different from the prior category (and more concerning) because in these instances Republicans are seeking to overturn decisions already made to ease the voting process.

There are plenty of Republican officials, even in some of the states listed above, taking steps to make it easier to vote. Texas, for example, increased the number of days in which early voting is available. So its not that all Republicans are trying to complicate the voting process. Rather, most of the officials trying to complicate the voting process are Republicans. Also, Republicans arent the only people filing a lot of lawsuits and pushing a lot of changes to the voting system its just that Democrats extensive legal efforts are generally pushing to make it easier to vote.

So the most surprising aspect of the voting process is what we have laid out here: One party seems to be systemically making it harder to vote and taking other steps that undermine the integrity of the electoral process. The big question is whether these tactics will work, either by keeping anti-Trump ballots from being cast or counted, or by throwing the election results (whatever they end up being) into doubt.

Go here to read the rest:
The Latest On Republican Efforts To Make It Harder To Vote - FiveThirtyEight

In a Sept. 8 letter, Trump dishonestly claims GOP is still Lincolns party, the writer correctly points out that during the debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln clearly stated that he thought Black people were inferior to white people. Nevertheless, Lincoln always believed that they should not be enslaved, and he was against the expansion of slavery and wished that it would eventually be abolished.

Then came the Civil War and Lincolns views toward Black people gradually grew more liberal. During the war there was another man by the name of Douglass who Lincoln came to know. The mans first name was Frederick and he was one of the leading abolitionists in the country. In 1865, the president met with Douglass and told him that there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.

Now the question becomes: Which man should the modern-day Republicans claim as their own? Should it be the Lincoln of 1858, or should it be the Lincoln of 1865? Even better, perhaps Republicans should claim that they are the party of Frederick Douglass. After all, Douglass, like Lincoln, was a Republican.

Neil Schechter St. Louis County

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Letter: Which Lincoln do Republicans want to be in the future? - STLtoday.com

On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens described the GOP under Donald Trump as a party of cynics, stooges, racists, and obsequious enablers whose profiles in cowardice bear an uncomfortable resemblance to 1930s Germany. When I talk to Republican politicians, I hear Franz von Papen, he says, referencing the German chancellor who convinced Germans that so-called radical leftists were a far greater threat than Adolf Hitler. They all know that Trump is an idiot. They all know that hes uniquely unqualified to be president. But they convinced themselves that he was a necessity.

Not surprisingly, Stevens, an adviser to two George W. Bush presidential campaigns and a top strategist for Mitt Romneys 2012 bid against Barack Obama, has become the latest apostate to his party, declaring in his best-selling book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, that Republicans have sacrificed every last belief and principle they held dear on the bonfire of Trumps vanity. And now, not even the catastrophically mismanaged coronavirus pandemic can wake them from their stupor.

It is the combination of the anti-intellectualism, the anti-education elements of the Republican Party, and the anti-elite elements of the Republican Party, so-called, that have culminated in this toxic brew that is killing tens of thousands of Americans, says Stevens, who recently joined the independent Never Trump organization the Lincoln Project. I mean, more Americans are going to die because of this combination of political beliefs than major wars. This virus [is] attacking Americans. And Donald Trump is making it a lot worse, and we all know this. But Republicans wont even stand up to defend America.

Consequently, Stevens calls Trump a traitor to his country. I really think he is against America, he says, blaming the Republican Party for a completecollapse of responsibility that they had to defend democracy inAmerica. The following is an edited transcript of two conversations with Stevens conducted by Joe Hagan.

Vanity Fair: Stuart Stevens, welcome to Inside the Hive. Weve seen a lot of madness this summer and I cant figure out how to think about both the Republican National Convention and whats happened afterwards, and the things that the Trump campaign has decided this election is going to turn on: Chaos in the cities to scare suburbanites, voter suppression, and then the prospect of some kind of fly-by-night vaccine the week before the election. As a tactician, whats your analysis of whether this is a good strategy or not?

Stuart Stevens:I think its fascinating. You have to assume that the Trump campaign did a lot of research, polling, focus groups to determine who does Donald Trump need to be to win this race. And they tried to present that image in their convention. That would be a person who cares about people, who likes Black [people]. Black people like him, women like him. And so then the convention ends and two days later hes celebrating a 17-year-old kid who shoots two unarmed protesters. So its clear they understand that Donald Trump shouldnt be the Donald Trump that he is to win.

I look at the race as very stable. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post saying whats happening in Wisconsin, I think, helps the Democrats. I know it does. Look, this race is about two things that are interrelated: the worst economy in the history of the country and more people dying of a disease than at any time in the history of the country. All the kings horses and all the kings men are not going to make it about anything else. We have a 9/11 every three days in the country, you cant ignore it. You cant just syntactically put it in the past tense and think that works. Youre not diagramming a sentence. Youre living through a pandemic. So until Trump comes to grips with that in some coherent way, hell continue to lose.

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Ill Never Question 1938 in Germany Again: An Ex-Republican Strategist Surveys the Wreckage of Trumps GOP - Vanity Fair

TOPLINE

Though Trump has largely seized control of the Republican party and the loyalty of GOP officials, a number of prominent former GOP officials, and even some of his ex-staffers, have come out in favor of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.

Former Gov. John Kasich, who challenged Trump for the GOP nomination in 2016, has been one of Bidens most vocal Republican backers, lauding his experience and his wisdom and his decency at the Democratic convention on Monday.

Biden has won the endorsements of four Republican cabinet secretaries; Obama administration Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell and EPA Director Christine Whitman, who appeared at the DNC alongside Kasich.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trumps White House communications director for just two weeks, endorsed Biden and called Trump crazy, while former Homeland Security Department Chief of Staff Miles Taylor accused Trump of withholding disaster aid from blue states and claiming magical authorities above the law.

Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett Packard CEO and GOP presidential candidate who was briefly the running mate of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), said she cannot support Trump and that elections are binary choices, while Meg Whitman, another Hewlett Packard CEO, said at the DNC on Monday that Trump has no clue how to run a business, let alone an economy.

Former Rep. Susan Molinari of New York spoke at the Democratic convention on Monday as well, joining former Reps. Charles Djou of Hawaii and Joe Walsh of Illinois, a former tea partier who challenged Trump for the GOP nomination in 2020 and voted for Biden in Illinois open Democratic primary in March, calling Trump a horrible human being who must be defeated.

Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain and mother of The View host Meghan McCain (who also endorsed Biden) narrated a video for the Democratic convention detailing her late husbands unlikely friendship with Biden.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania endorsed Biden ahead of the third night of the Democratic convention, declaring, Its a sad state of affairs when a president endorses a 9/11 truther, in reference to Trumps embrace of Georgia Congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A group of 73 former U.S. national security officials in the Republican administrations, including former heads of the CIA and FBI and Trump administration officials, endorsed Biden, asserting that Trumps corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president.

Numerous Republican media figures, campaign strategists and government officials have even organized PACs dedicated to supporting Biden, such as Republican Voters Against Trump and, most recently, 43 Alumni for Biden. The most notable among them is the Lincoln Project, whose scathing attack ads on Trump have captured the hearts of anti-Trump resistance-minded Democrats.

The last living former Republican president, George W. Bush, has said he wont back Trump. Nor will his brother Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who was mercilessly ridiculed by Trump when they fought for the GOP nomination in 2016. Trumps former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly have both expressed opposition to Trump as well, with Mattis calling him the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American peopledoes not even pretend to try and Kelly saying he wished we had some additional choices. Other ex-Trump officials have spoken out against him as well,including Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, communications staffer Omarosa Manigault, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security advisor John Bolton.

5. Thats how many sitting Republican senators are weighing voting against Trump, according to Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has said he will not vote for Trump and may write-in his wife, while Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she is struggling with the decision. Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.) has also said he will not vote for Trump and is considering a vote for Biden.

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All The Republicans Who Have Endorsed Joe Biden For President - Forbes