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美國123 – 開欄文
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瀏覽3,569 ｜回應26｜推薦2 |
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我本來想用「美國政情」、「美國報導」、或「美國風情」等做本欄標題；但它們或過於狹隘，或大而無當；難以滿足提綱挈領的功能。現在這個標題雖然不夠理想，至少俏皮一些。
由於當下的熱門話題在「政治」，以下先轉載兩篇這方面的評論。
扎卡瑞阿先生大作討論美國「國力」(本欄第二篇)。我不確定他所引用統計數字和他論點之間的相關性有多大，但一般而言，我同意他的看法。我曾說過，百足之蟲，死而不僵；50 – 100年內美國還是能夠跟中國平起平坐。此之謂：「瘦死的駱駝比馬大」。這也是我一向主張「中、美和則兩利，鬥則俱傷」的原因之一。這篇文章甚長，一時之間我也無法全部消化。有空再寫讀後。
奈教授曾任美國國安和外交官員；他的大作從外交政策討論美國明年大選結果對未來走勢的影響(本欄第三篇)。他對「美國優越論」基礎的分析，我並不苟同。以後有空再做評論。
除了政治評論外，有機會我會選擇一些其它方面的報導與分析。
我在美國住了近26年，在1993回台定居以前，我在美國的時間比我在中國的時間要長。在美期間，除了工作之外，我也花了些時間了解和接觸美國文化、企業、政治、社會、科技、和人群；雖然都只能說是皮毛，但在「認識美國」上還是不無小補。
如上所說，我真正的成長期在美國，根據「社會建構論」，我的行為與思考方式免不了些許美式「作風」。例如，我的「務實模式」與「現實主義」大都源於過去在美國的生活經驗。此外，我的「行文風格」常常不合中國士大夫「溫柔敦厚」的傳統，除了來自盧卡契的「意識型態」理論外，有一部分也受到美國學者間相互批評文字的影響。
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民主政治與貪汙 -- S. Tareen
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請參看此短評(該欄2024/12/13)。
Secretly recorded videos are backbone of corruption trial for longest-serving legislative leader
Sophia Tareen, 12/12/24
CHICAGO (AP) — Hours of secretly recorded videos and phone calls have offered a rare glimpse into how the longest-serving legislative leader in American history operated behind closed doors.
As the corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan stretches into its third month, testimony has covered his multiple alleged schemes, from kickbacks involving the state’s largest utility company to Chinatown developments benefiting his private tax firm.
Jurors have heard from a congresswoman, former state legislators and the government’s star witness: a former Chicago alderman who secretly wore a wire.
Here’s a closer look at the ongoing trial:
The charges
Madigan, who was speaker for over three decades, is charged in a 23-count indictment for bribery, racketeering, wire fraud and other crimes.
Prosecutors allege he exploited his unmatched influence not only as the Illinois House speaker but also as head of the state's Democratic Party for personal gain and to amass even more power. A tax attorney, he’s also accused of benefiting from private work that was illegally steered to his law firm.
The trial has shown how Madigan worked, with the lines between his political and personal roles intertwined.
For instance, meetings often took place at his downtown law office, whether they were for political or legal work. Elected officials or his political advisors were often present alongside business contacts. Even in meetings about tax work, he was called “the speaker," the recordings show.
In one 2014 meeting secretly recorded by a businessman also working undercover, a City Council member introduced Madigan to hotel developers for a Chinatown project. Madigan pitched his firm’s business.
“We’re not interested in a quick killing here. We’re interested in a long-term relationship,” Madigan said. “In terms of the quality of representation that you get from this law firm, we don’t take a second seat to anybody. “
Afterward, the alderman told a businessman: “If he works with the speaker, he will get anything he needs for that hotel.”
Star witness
One of the most-anticipated parts of the trial has been the testimony of former Chicago Alderman Danny Solis. A council member for 23 years, Solis led the powerful zoning committee.
As Madigan sought business for his tax firm, Solis met with Madigan over projects in the alderman’s ward, which then included Chinatown and the trendy West Loop neighborhood near downtown.
But unknown to everyone — including his family — Solis was working for federal agents, recording meetings and phone calls.
“It was critical that the undercover work I was doing remain secret,” Solis, 75, testified in court.
He told jurors that federal agents approached him in June 2016 and he agreed to cooperate to avoid prison for admitted wrongdoing including bribery.
However, Solis could be a problematic witness.
He faced massive financial issues, marital problems after an affair and ethical lapses, including accepting favors from a developer who arranged for Solis to get Viagra and massages “that turned sexual.” He also testified he acted on requests from federal agents, including proposing that Madigan appoint him to a board after he left office.
Defense attorneys called Solis unreliable and blasted his financial wrongdoing, including misspending campaign funds for a trip to Puerto Rico, his son’s school tuition and a car.
“As an alderman and as chair of the zoning committee, you committed many crimes, is that correct?” Madigan attorney Daniel Collins asked Solis during cross examination.
“Yes,” Solis said.
Other witnesses have included U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinksi, who testified about Madigan’s influence in 2018 while she worked as an advisor for Gov. JB Pritzker.
The recordings
Some of the Solis videos are shaky and it's unclear how he recorded them. There’s extended footage of ceilings and office walls. Many calls are short.
But they show how Madigan, who famously didn't have a cellphone or email address, operated.
In January 2018, Madigan called up Solis and asked about a proposed West Loop apartment building.
“Is that going to go ahead? You know why I’m interested,” Madigan says.
Solis asks if Madigan knew the developers.
“No, but I’d like to,” he says.
Solis told jurors that Madigan’s influence would be helpful to him, so he provided introductions.
“I wanted to curry political favor with Mr. Madigan,” Solis told jurors.
The schemes
A sweeping investigation of public corruption in Illinois has already produced convictions of other elected officials and Madigan’s former chief of staff.
Among other schemes, Madigan is accused of using his influence to pass legislation favorable to electric utility ComEd. In return, ComEd allegedly offered Madigan loyalists kickbacks, contracts and jobs where they did little or no work.
“When Madigan saw an opportunity to enrich himself, he took it,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streicker told jurors.
Defense attorneys have painted Madigan as a devoted public servant, calling him "incorruptible.”
Madigan, who has has “adamantly” denied wrongdoing in the past, hasn't spoken publicly during the trial. He spends the proceedings watching witnesses and jurors intently, often taking notes. Family members including his daughter, former Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, have attended court.
Also standing trial with Madigan is longtime confidant Michael McClain, 76, who already has been found guilty in a separate, related case. Last year, federal jurors convicted McClain and three others of the bribery conspiracy involving ComEd.
The trial is expected to extend into mid-January.
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兩大天后之惺惺相惜 -- Gina Vivinetto
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關於兩大天后的報導請看此欄和此欄。
Taylor Swift gave Caitlin Clark an inspirational note — and a special invitation
Clark, who was named Time's 2024 Athlete of the Year, has a blossoming friendship with Swift.
Gina Vivinetto, 12/11/24
Caitlin Clark had a very big year thanks to a breakout rookie season in the WNBA and a burgeoning friendship with Taylor Swift.
The Indiana Fever guard was named Time's 2024 Athlete of the Year on Dec. 10, and the publication's story on Clark notes that Swift gave her four bags of "Eras Tour" merchandise along with a sweet note about her being inspiring to watch from afar.
In her note, Swift told the 22-year-old pro basketball star, who saw the pop singer perform in Indianapolis, that she and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, were excited to see Clark play in person since the "Eras Tour" was winding down, according to Time. (Swift referred to herself and Kelce as "Trav and I.")
Swift also invited Clark to attend a Chiefs game with her.
The 2024 WNBA Rookie of the Year attended back-to-back "Eras Tour" concerts at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis in November, where she met Kelce and Swift’s mom, Andrea Swift, according to Time.
When Swift's star-struck fans spotted Clark in one of the stadium’s suites, they reacted by snapping pics and tossing friendship bracelets to her.
“People are just going crazy that I’m there,” said Clark. “I thought people would be so in their own world, ready to see Taylor. And it was just completely the opposite.”
Clark’s comments come on the heels of a funny video the Iowa women's basketball team X account shared in January that showed Clark, dressed in a hoodie and puffer jacket, singing along to Swift’s 2010 song “Enchanted.”
At one point during the clip, Clark excitedly screams, “Taylor Swift! Whoo!” into the camera while her then-Hawkeyes teammate Hannah Stuelke looks on with a baffled expression.
Clark then yells out lyrics from the song’s finale that beg a lover not to love someone else.
TODAY reveals Time’s 2024 Athlete and CEO of the year
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行行出大富翁 -- Liz Roscher
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這種天價行情只可能發生在美國，故置於此欄。這個行情反映美國的國力、社會結構、和老百姓的購買力；高唱美國衰敗論者，不是無知，就是在一廂情願。
How does Juan Soto's $765 million contract compare to the richest contracts in NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB?
Juan Soto's new contract is the richest known deal in the history of sports
Liz Roscher, 12/09/24
Juan Soto just got paid. He reportedly agreed Sunday with the New York Mets on a 15-year, $765 million deal, according to multiple sources.
Soto's contract is the richest known deal in the history of sports. How does it compare to the largest deals in the NFL, NBA, NHL and the rest of MLB? Let's take a look.
NFL: Patrick Mahomes, 10 years, $477 million (AAV $47.7 million)
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes signed the richest contract in NFL history in 2020, blowing away pretty much every other "huge" contract in the NFL. At the time, he and the Chiefs (along with head coach Andy Reid) had just won their first Super Bowl together after making the team's first appearance in 50 years. Since then, Mahomes has helped lead the Chiefs to three more Super Bowls, winning the past two.
NFL honorable mention: Dak Prescott, 4 years, $240 million (AAV $60 million)
Mahomes' contract is the largest in total value, but Prescott's four-year, $240 million deal with the Dallas Cowboys deserves a mention. It's less than one-third the size of Soto's deal in both years and money, but it makes Prescott the highest paid player in NFL history for those four years, as he's making $60 million per year, or about $15 million more than what Mahomes makes per year. It's not the richest deal in total, but Cowboys owner Jerry Jones crammed a lot of money into just a handful of years to keep Prescott in Dallas. Prescott's deal does beat Soto's contract in annual value (Soto will make $51 million per year), which is why it gets a spot on this list.
MLB: Shohei Ohtani, 10 years, $700 million (AAV $70 million)
When news of Shohei Ohtani's contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers was reported on Dec. 9, 2023, he broke the record for largest deal in MLB history in both total value and average annual value. The record had, until then, belonged to his former teammate Mike Trout, who signed a 12-year, $426.5 million contract extension with the Los Angeles Angels several years earlier. While Ohtani will likely own the MLB record for AAV for years to come, Soto surpassed him in both years and total value. That said, because of deferrals, MLB calculates Ohtani's deal, when adjusted for inflation, to be worth approximately $460 million for luxury tax purposes. Soto's deal reportedly contains no deferrals.
NBA: Jayson Tatum, 5 years, $314 million (AAV $62.8 million)
Jaylen Brown's five-year, $303 million contract was in this spot until summer 2024, when the Boston Celtics signed Brown's teammate Jayson Tatum to a five-year, $314 million deal. You won't find contracts longer than five years in the NBA, but the annual value of those five-year deals can reach MLB proportions. The annual value of Tatum's deal surpasses Soto's, but Soto still has the advantage in total value.
NHL: Alex Ovechkin, 13 years, $124 million (AAV $9.5 million)
Every other contract on this list is either in process or about to be started. But Alex Ovechkin's contract has already ended. He signed his massive deal with the Washington Capitals in 2008, and it remains the largest in NHL history. Ovechkin has stayed with the Capitals since the conclusion of his contract in 2020, signing a series of shorter deals to keep him with the only NHL team he has ever played for.
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空中大盜是他？！ ----- Tim Newcomb
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請參看本欄2024/02/29貼文。
A Secret Parachute in the FBI’s Possession May Have Finally Solved D.B. Cooper’s Identity
Tim Newcomb, 11/26/24
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
* The children of a D.B. Cooper suspect handed over new evidence to the FBI because they think their dad was the culprit.
* A parachute long hidden on family property in North Carolina is said to match the type used in the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
* The suspect in question was arrested for a similar skyjacking just months following the D.B. Cooper event.
The children of convicted skyjacker Richard McCoy II believed their dear old dad may have been D.B. Cooper, the notorious (and notoriously unidentified) central figure in 1971’s unsolved skyjacking. It’s the only one in United States history, in fact, without an answer—until, perhaps, now.
Just months after the Cooper incident, McCoy was convicted of an incredibly similar skyjacking that also included a parachute jump. His children, Chanté and Richard III (Rick), have long thought the clues added up.
They may now have evidence to back up their suspicions.
Chanté and Rick had kept quiet out of consideration for their mother, Karen, who they believed was potentially complicit in both crimes. But as both parents are now deceased, the opportunity arose for the siblings to come forward with their suspicions. And, crucially, they seem to have hard evidence: a modified parachute that they (and amateur D.B. Cooper sleuth Dan Gryder) believe was used in the daring escape.
“That rig is literally one in a billion,” Gryder told Cowboy State Daily after releasing a series on YouTube about his suspicions. It was that YouTube series, Gryder said, that drew the FBI back into the case.
According to Gryder, the FBI now has the parachute and harness that were once tucked away in a storage shed on family property in North Carolina, along with a harness and a skydiving logbook that Chanté claims show D.B. Cooper’s movements near Oregon and Utah (the locations of the two skyjacking events). This is the first real movement from the FBI on the case since the bureau closed it in 2016—even if some former personnel claimed it remained secretly open.
After receiving the new evidence, the FBI followed up with the family and searched the property where the parachute was stored for four hours with more than a dozen agents, according to Gryder. The unique alterations to the parachute may hold the key to the new evidence’s value in the 50-plus-year-old case. The FBI knows the original parachutes were altered by Earl Cossey, a veteran skydiver, who was working with the FBI until his murder in his home in 2013. If the new find matches what they already know, it could provide a boost in the search for the real D.B. Cooper.
The D.B. Cooper case has taken on a borderline mythical quality, with countless theories posed by amateur sleuths online, in books, and in documentaries. One 1990s book—D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy—even claimed McCoy was the culprit, but the book was pulled from print after Karen sued, claiming libel.
On November 24, 1971, D.B. Cooper—he called himself Dan, but the media misreported the name as D.B.—paid $18.52 in cash for a one-way ticket to Portland, and boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 without offering any identification (due to a lack of regulations at the time).
Holding a briefcase and a paper sack, Cooper passed a note to a flight attendant seated behind him halfway through the flight and whispered that she better look at the note since he had a bomb. Cooper opened his briefcase to reveal what appeared to be a bomb, and relayed his demands for $200,000, multiple parachutes, and a refueling truck waiting in Seattle so he could take off again, bound for Mexico City.
After Cooper’s demands were met, the scheduled 30-minute flight extended into a two-hour loop over the Puget Sound while ground crews prepared. Cooper released the airliner’s 35 passengers and some crew members, then dictated the flight path and aircraft configuration to the remaining crew—demanding specific speeds, flap angles, and more. With these negotiations complete, Cooper and the four remaining crew members took off again.
Somewhere still over Washington, Cooper then opened the rear staircase and parachuted from the plane, but the exact location and timing of that jump is unknown. Immediate searches yielded no evidence, and over the years, experts have been unable to determine an exact search area due to the multiple variables involved in the night jump.
One of the only real pieces of evidence left by Cooper was a $1.49 clip-on tie from JCPenney, which the FBI holds. Sleuths have sued the government for access to the DNA and the particles left on the tie, but to no avail.
Having the actual parachute would expand the evidence in the case by vast amounts.
McCoy is an intriguing suspect—one who was later passed over because many FBI personnel had come to believe that the real D.B. Cooper died in the jump by the time McCoy surfaced as a possibility. And McCoy didn’t exactly match the physical description, as he was much younger—27 years old at the time—than the original estimation of Cooper’s mid-40s age.
McCoy would have had the have the chops to commit the famous crime, though. He proved it in April of 1972, when he successfully pulled off the skyjacking of a United Airlines flight after demanding $500,000. He boarded the plane in Denver, and was able to get it diverted to San Francisco, have his demands met, and force the plane back into the air. McCoy then jumped from the plane over Utah and was arrested by the FBI within three days, thanks to an anonymous tip. That tip then led the FBI to a waitress who remembered serving him a milkshake at a roadside hamburger stand the night of the skyjacking, and a teenager who said McCoy paid him $5 to give him a ride from the stand into a nearby town. Eventually, they were able to match his fingerprints ones left on the demand note.
McCoy was arrested after the FBI raided his home. He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison, but eventually broke out of a maximum-security prison and evaded capture for three months until he was shot by police in Virginia in 1974.
The parachute offers the best chance at evidence that could potentially link McCoy to Cooper. “This,” Gryder said, “will definitely prove it was McCoy.”
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美國大學運動員不再打白工 -- Ross Dellenger
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NCAA, Power Five conferences vote to approve $2.8B settlement in House, Hubbard and Carter cases
Ross Dellenger, Senior College Football Reporter, 05/24/24
In the spring of 2021, attorneys for the NCAA, appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, argued vehemently against providing each college athlete with additional cash annually.
The amount: $5,980.
Three years later, in a landmark agreement that will transform the course of major college athletics, the organization left behind its archaic rules, shook off its long-time amateurism argument and thrust the industry into an era of direct athlete compensation.
The amount: more than $15 billion in new cash is expected to funnel to athletes over the duration of the 10-year agreement.
The NCAA and power conferences cast votes this week in support of settling three antitrust cases (House, Hubbard and Carter), approving terms that feature nearly $2.8 billion in back damages; a future athlete revenue-sharing model that will cost major conferences a cumulative $1 billion-plus annually; and other potential changes to the association’s governance, enforcement and scholarship structure.
While expected for weeks now, the vote is a historic moment, a groundbreaking and seismic shift for an organization that has, for decades, fought against direct athlete pay despite the billions earned from its major football and men’s basketball powers. The result of nine months of negotiations with plaintiff lawyers, NCAA president Charlie Baker and conference commissioners usher into the industry a new age that they hope brings stability to the current unruly recruiting landscape.
Caught in a purgatory between amateurism and professionalism, major college sports is springing forward — though not by its own volition. Begrudgingly forced into this semi-professional world by state laws and the court system, the industry still clings to a shred of amateurism, as the new model is expected to still prohibit pay-for-play and booster payments.
However, college leaders believe the agreement staves off future legal challenges, binds at least for another decade the power leagues with the NCAA, and brings more regulation to the recruiting environment.
“This would be the biggest change in the history of college sports. Period,” said Gabe Feldman, a sports law professor at Tulane and leading voice in NCAA litigation matters. “There have been significant changes and incremental changes. The NIL era has opened a lot of doors, but to have athletes share revenue with the schools would be not only monumental but would be contrary to what the NCAA has espoused for a century.”
What the new model means for athletes and how much it'll cost schools
All five power conference presidential boards — the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC — voted in favor of the settlement this week. The Pac-12, despite its near dissolution, voted as originally structured. The league provided the final vote Thursday evening on a landmark day.
However, a finalization of the settlement may not happen for many months. The agreement will need approval from a judge and is available for objections from individual plaintiffs — at least a five-month haul, according to experts.
However, within 14 months, at the start of the 2025 fall semester, the industry’s new model is expected to be implemented permitting schools — but not requiring them — to share revenue with athletes up to a certain quasi-salary cap.
The revenue-sharing deals with athletes will be classified as NIL agreements, with schools providing funds for the use and broadcast of a players’ name, image and likeness — a concept at the heart of the House case. Other non-NIL forms of payments are an option.
Though plenty of questions linger around this new system, institutions will be permitted to share with athletes as much as $22 million per year. That figure, still very much in flux, was derived from 22% of an average of power conference revenues. The cap includes exceptions as a combined $5 million in Alston-related money and additional scholarships can be counted toward the total.
A new model is expected to eliminate scholarship restrictions while implementing roster limits, a move to avoid more legal fights but one that could cost schools millions more in additional financial aid amid a hotly recruiting landscape.
At the end of it all is a steep price tag — $200-$300 million per school over the 10-year settlement agreement, or about $15 billion among all power schools. That figure assumes a school meets the revenue-distribution cap annually and expands scholarships by at least $3-5 million.
For many school administrators, sticker shock exists as they dig for extra cash in unusual ways, such as tapping into private equity and capital. A $30 million annual price tag coupled with $20 million in total scholarships is about 40-45% of the average athletic department budget of public schools in the ACC, Big Ten, SEC and Big 12.
However, without a settlement, college leaders risk another loss in court, a $20 billion damages tab and bankruptcy, according to documents obtained by Yahoo Sports.
Aside from the new financials, there are other changes coming.
Enforcement of rules isn't going away
The settlement-related model is expected to have a new enforcement arm and governance structure for, at least, the power conference schools, allowing them to create and enforce their own rules. Finalization around those details may be months away.
For administrators, the enforcement situation is a key piece. The settlement does not eliminate booster-led collectives, but incentivizes schools to bring them within the university’s athletic department, mostly through a stronger enforcement entity — one that potentially operates outside of the NCAA and gains teeth through the settlement itself.
As part of the settlement, the judge is expected to “reaffirm” existing NCAA compensation rules, specifically those that prohibit booster payments for deals that are not “true NIL,” according to a legal document summarizing the agreement. However, few details on the enforcement entity have been shared.
The settlement is expected to also provide what documents term a “release” of antitrust compensation claims from current, former and future athletes for 10 years as part of a “substitution” system for new plaintiffs. In a story at Yahoo Sports last week, such a concept was cited by plaintiff attorney Steve Berman, who said the settlement features a built-in element by which each new class of athletes can opt into the revenue-sharing structure.
The settlement isn’t perfect. It does not protect the NCAA and conference from future lawsuits brought by state attorneys general, does not preempt state NIL or revenue-sharing laws and offers no real ruling on Title IX’s application in such a compensation model.
Title IX “remains at the campus level to be applied,” the document notes — a situation that could lead to schools circumventing the federal law by continuously using outside third parties to compensate athletes.
Jeffrey Kessler, another plaintiff attorney in the case, believes the Title IX issue will eventually be resolved in the courtroom.
“The courts will decide,” he told Yahoo Sports. “It doesn’t impact us. If we have a settlement, we’ll negotiate a system in which athletes will be compensated. The degree in which Title IX applies will be determined [by the courts].”
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美國犯罪率普遍下降 -- Alex Gangitano
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Why homicide rates are falling across the country
Alex Gangitano, 04/21/24
Homicides are falling across the U.S. And that shift could impact the role crime — often a top voter concern — plays as an issue in November’s election.
But it is a phenomenon for which experts don’t have a clear explanation.
Some say homicide peaks come and go in cycles, some say policing improved after the COVID-19 pandemic, and some attribute it to the evolving national conversation about how to handle crime.
A data analysis released last week shows that the number of homicides in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, are dropping.
While many major cities, especially those run by Democrats with liberal-leaning policies and populations, have received backlash from Republicans for being inundated with violent crime, the new data paints a picture of an improving situation.
Experts, though, aren’t agreed on exactly why the number of homicides has fallen so far, so fast.
Boston saw the sharpest decline from 2023 to 2024, with homicides dropping by 82 percent. In Philadelphia, homicides dropped by 37 percent; in Dallas, homicides dropped by 27 percent; and in Chicago, homicides dropped by 6 percent, according to estimates from city police department reports compiled by AH Datalytics.
Jeffrey Fagan, professor of law and epidemiology at Columbia University, attributes the improvements to a typical crime cycle.
“I think there’s something natural in this cyclical nature of homicide and violence. One of the distinguishing features of what happened in the most recent period was that it had to do with murder more so than with other violent crimes. Other violent crimes rose but not nearly to the same extent as murder,” he said. “It’s likely to happen again, we just don’t understand the circumstances when these externalities will create the social and economic conditions for homicide rates to arise again.”
Fagan outlined other cycles, like in the 1960s when homicides started rising and peaked by 1972, then fell sharply. And in the late 1970s, when they took off again to peak in 1981 and then crash. And in the late 1980s, homicide rates skyrocketed and peaked in 1991 before crashing again.
“So, what’s the common denominator other than the fact that there’s this recurring cycle of peaks, crashes, peaks, crashes, peaks, crashes? There’s something natural about these episodes in that they follow an epidemic pattern. Any epidemiologist will tell you that it looks like any other disease epidemic,” he said.
Alex Piquero, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under President Biden, outlined the factors he argues caused the spike in homicides: Community prevention programs were put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, and law enforcement pulled back due to the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and because of pandemic staffing issues.
Piquero, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Miami, said those conditions have been reset. “Their staffing levels are going up, police are around the community more, they’re targeting violent places and violent people using appropriate statistical methodology.”
Piquero looks at crime as a local level issue and noted it’s hard to tell yet if the funding from the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration to combat crime is helping.
Fagan agreed, noting that homicides peak or crash “regardless of what criminal justice or public health policies are in place.”
Andrea Headley, a criminal justice policy expert at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, argued that investments from the federal government, whether from the bipartisan gun safety act or the American Rescue Plan, have made an impact.
Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law in 2021, and it provided $10 billion for public safety. The bipartisan gun safety law was signed in 2022, enhancing background checks for purchasers younger than 21 and funding red flag laws to keep guns out of the hands of people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
“We see funding for law enforcement that happened,” Headley said. “We see, which I think probably is arguably more important, is the funding and the support structures for community violence interventions, wraparound social support services, but also the investments in job programs and mentoring. Things that we know typically are correlates of violent crime. And, kind of this targeted approach of taking money from the federal level and investing it in local communities.”
She noted the holistic approach isn’t new, but the national conversation about it is new — it was launched when the federal government provided that support.
“I think that kind of wraparound strategy of, we’re investing in community safety from all of these angles and in a way that is unprecedented is really powerful in terms of what we’ve been seeing with some of the declines, particularly last year,” she said.
The data comes in an election year, when crime is top of mind for many Americans. Both the Biden and Trump’s campaigns have blamed the other for previous spikes in crime.
The Biden camp argues that the president stands with law enforcement, including billions in funding, while Trump has called for federal law enforcement agencies to be defunded.
“By standing with law enforcement and against Republican officials’ efforts to defund the police, Joe Biden reversed the spike in violent crime he inherited from his predecessor and delivered the lowest crime rates in almost 50 years,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said.
Trump, meanwhile, called for the U.S. to “get back to law and order” and said something with crime prevention is “not working” after attending the funeral last month of New York police officer Jonathan Diller, who was killed on duty. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the dropping homicide rate.
Republicans have also equated crime with Biden’s immigration policies, especially after the killing earlier this year of Georgia student Laken Riley.
Experts, though, push back on that notion.
“It is established that immigrants do not commit more crime than native born Americans, period, period, period, period, that’s been replicated over and over again,” Piquero said.
Republicans also often use Washington as an example of a city with violent crime, pointing to stories of carjackings or other crimes.
Washington last year had its highest number of homicides since 1997 and double the amount of carjackings compared to a year prior. In new data from D.C. police, homicides are down by 27 percent in the nation’s capital compared to this time last year.
Headley said the slower pace of improvements in D.C. could be attributed to the unique structure of the city, considering it is not a state and has a disjointed government structure.
“In terms of why, we could speculate about why the decline hasn’t been as quick or sharp compared to other cities, I think D.C. is unique because of the way in which there’s different levels of jurisdictions,” she said.
Fagan added that the city has extremes of wealth and poverty “that create susceptibility to conflict and violence.”
Another argument about crime is the economy, and if the economy is improving, the crime rate will improve. Biden has worked to combat inflation and seen improvements in his polling about his handling of the economy.
“That argument doesn’t hold across crime types. If a great economy leads to lower crime, that doesn’t affect the kid who put up a gun and he’s 14 years old and [couldn’t] care less about a job,” said Piquero. “So, a lot of crime is very unplanned, it’s situational.”
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
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美國汽車工會在田納西州又下一城--TOM KRISHER/KRISTIN M. HALL
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我對美國和台灣的工運並不熟悉。我1967到美國讀研究所時，美國工會勢力極大；時任最大工會主席的米尼先生，可說炙手可熱。三不五時就可以在電視和報紙上看到他的尊容或大名。
2002後，因為許多社運團體支持釣運，我也開始走上街頭友誼聲援社運。我發現：台灣這個巴掌大的地方，工運團體有四、五個之多。我雖然搞不明白，但也世故到不亂問敏感問題。趁介紹美國工運之便，丟出此困擾我20多年的疑惑。
Tennessee Volkswagen employees overwhelmingly vote to join United Auto Workers union
TOM KRISHER/KRISTIN M. HALL, 04/20/24
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) — Employees at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers union Friday in a historic first test of the UAW’s renewed effort to organize nonunion factories.
The union wound up getting 2,628 votes, or 73% of the ballots cast, compared with only 985 who voted no in an election run by the National Labor Relations Board.
Both sides have five business days to file objections to the election, the NLRB said. If there are none, the election will be certified and VW and the union must “begin bargaining in good faith.”
President Joe Biden, who backed the UAW and won its endorsement, said the union's win follows major union gains across the country including actors, port workers, Teamsters members, writers and health care workers.
“Together, these union wins have helped raise wages and demonstrate once again that the middle-class built America and that unions are still building and expanding the middle class for all workers,” he said in a statement late Friday.
Twice in recent years, workers at the Chattanooga plant have rejected union membership in plantwide votes. Most recently, they handed the UAW a narrow defeat in 2019 as federal prosecutors were breaking up a bribery-and-embezzlement scandal at the union.
But this time, they voted convincingly for the UAW, which is operating under new leadership directly elected by members for the first time and basking in a successful confrontation with Detroit’s major automakers.
The union’s pugnacious new president, Shawn Fain, was elected on a platform of cleaning up after the scandal and turning more confrontational with automakers. An emboldened Fain, backed by Biden, led the union in a series of strikes last fall against Detroit’s automakers that resulted in lucrative new contracts.
The new contracts raised union wages by a substantial one-third, arming Fain and his organizers with enticing new offers to present to workers at Volkswagen and other companies.
Next up for a union vote are workers at Mercedes factories near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who will vote on UAW representation in May.
Fain said he was not surprised by the size of the union's win Friday after the two previous losses.
“I think it's the reality of where we are and the times that we're in,” he said Friday night. “Workers are fed up in being left behind.”
The win, he said, will help the growing unionization effort in the rest of the country.
“This gives workers everywhere else the indication that it's OK,” Fain said. “All we've heard for years is we can't win here, you can't do this in the South, and you can.”
Worker Vicky Holloway of Chattanooga was among dozens of cheering workers celebrating at an electrical workers union hall near the VW plant. She said the overwhelming vote for the union came this time because her colleagues realized they could have better benefits and a voice in the workplace.
“Right now we have no say,” said Holloway, who has worked at the plant for 13 years and was there for the union's previous losses. “It’s like our opinions don’t matter.”
In a statement, Volkswagen thanked workers for voting and said 83.5% of the 4,300 production workers cast ballots in the election.
Six Southern governors, including Tennessee’s Bill Lee, warned the workers in a joint statement this week that joining the UAW could cost them their jobs and threaten the region’s economic progress.
But the overwhelming win is a warning to nonunion manufacturers, said Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who studies the union.
“This is going to send a powerful message to all of those companies that the UAW is knocking at the door, and if they want to remain nonunion, they’ve got to step up their game,” Masters said.
He expects other nonunion automakers to become more aggressive at the plants, and that anti-union politicians will step up their efforts to fight the union.
Shortly after the Detroit contracts were ratified, Volkswagen and other nonunion companies handed their workers big pay raises.
Last fall, Volkswagen raised production worker pay by 11%, lifting top base wages to $32.40 per hour, or just over $67,000 per year. VW said its pay exceeds the median household income for the Chattanooga area, which was $54,480 last May, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
But under the UAW contracts, top production workers at GM, for instance, now earn $36 an hour, or about $75,000 a year excluding benefits and profit sharing. By the end of the contract in 2028, top-scale GM workers would make over $89,000.
The VW plant will be the first the UAW has represented at a foreign-owned automaking plant in the South. It will not, however, be the first union auto assembly plant in the South. The UAW represents workers at two Ford assembly plants in Kentucky and two GM factories in Tennessee and Texas, as well as some heavy-truck manufacturing plants.
Also, more than three decades ago, the UAW was at a Volkswagen factory in New Stanton, Pennsylvania, east of Pittsburgh. VW closed the plant that made small cars in the late 1980s.
Krisher reported from Detroit. Associated Press journalist Chris Megerian contributed from Washington.
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美國聯邦憲法簡介系列 -- Paul G. Summers
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U.S. Constitution offers this nation structure, direction and strong institutions
This regular feature offers citizens lessons on the founding documents of the United States: Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Paul G. Summers, 04/11/24
Editor's note: This is a regular feature on issues related to the Constitution and civics education written by Paul G. Summers, retired judge and state attorney general.
Our rules of government are established in the Constitution of the United States and the 27 amendments. They are the bedrocks of our government.
They structure government; allocate and establish power and authority; and provide for the three branches of government. Constitutions secure freedoms and liberty. Amendments are just as much a part of the Constitution as is the document which was originally ratified.
The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of America. Our Constitution provides: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land….”
Amendments are part of the Constitution just as is the original document. The first 10 amendments, or Bill of Rights, were submitted to the state legislatures in September 1789. The Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791.
Another view by Paul Summers: Without compromise, American states would never have ratified the U.S. Constitution
How the judicial, executive and legislative branches differ
Our Founders created three separate and equal branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial.
The first two are political; the judiciary is not. Judges must be independent, follow the rule of law, and act as checks and balances on abuse of power by any branch of government.
The Supreme Court ultimately decides whether a law or activity of any branch of government comports with the Constitution. The Court makes the final decision.
We need to keep these principles in mind, especially during political and national debates. The independence of the third branch is the crown jewel of our constitutional republic. We named it the United States of America.
Powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved to the states, or the people.
These are the five freedoms outlined in the First Amendment
Our review will be at the 10,000-foot level to give our readers an overview of each of the 27 amendments.
Our goal is that we have a working understanding of the amendatory part of our Constitution, which is just as important as that which was ratified originally.
Libraries have scores of books and treatises written on just single parts of the First Amendment.
This amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Constitution keeps government from infringing on Americans’ rights
The First Amendment prevents any governmental interference with freedom of religion or freedom of expression.
It prohibits any laws that create a national religion or hinders the free exercise of religion, or abridges freedom of speech or of the press (media publication).
The amendment prohibits any law that interferes with people who peaceably assemble or petition our government over issues or grievances.
We shall explore more on the First Amendment.
Learning, reading and studying the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are times well spent. We applaud the hard work and diligent attitude of our dedicated readers.
Both this publication and the author strive to be nonpartisan and objective. Please understand that the interpretations involving documents are that of the author. Others may have different interpretations of the same words. We always welcome comments from others.
Paul G. Summers, a lawyer, is a former appellate and senior judge, district attorney general, and the attorney general of Tennessee. Raised in Fayette County, Judge Summers resides in Nashville and Holladay.
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《美國大選民調分析》小評
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這篇評論分析當前美國大選的民調結果(請見本攔上一篇貼文)；重點如下：
1) 數字上，川普不但在全國性民調領先拜登；好幾個關鍵州的地方性民調，川普也領先拜登。
2) 但這個事實並不表示2024美國總統大選已成定局；因為：
2)a 在白人選民中，拜登支持率比他2020年的或相當，或增加。
2)b 川普之所以在全國性和地方性民調領先，主要因素是：他在黑人選民與西裔選民的支持率，比他在2020年的有大幅增長。
2)c 川普能不能繼續維持他目前在黑人/西裔選民兩者中的支持率是個變數。
3) 因此，11月投票時拜登仍然有翻盤的可能。
其它民調數字和細部解讀此處就從略了。
我以前分析過：對中國來說，川普在今年11月入主白宮將是大大的利多。
但站在一個支持民主制度者的立場，我認為：像川普這種粗鄙、貪婪、毫無道德底線的人，根本就沒有資格從政。
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美國大選民調分析 -- Ronald Brownstein
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請參考本攔下一篇《小評》。
The unexpected dynamic that could decide the Trump-Biden rematch
Ronald Brownstein, CNN, 03/28/24
Democrats have been growing increasingly anxious about public polls showing former President Donald Trump making unprecedented inroads among Black and Hispanic voters. But there may be reasons for Republicans to feel uneasy about these polls too.
Surveys now consistently show Trump leading President Joe Biden nationally and in almost all of the key swing states. But those same surveys generally show Biden matching or even exceeding his winning 2020 share of the vote among White voters. Trump’s lead in polls is often based solely on him significantly improving on his 2020 showing among voters of color – and in fact, running better among Blacks and Hispanics than any Republican presidential candidate in decades.
These results have provoked a fierce debate about whether those numbers are accurate. But the more important question may be whether Trump can sustain whatever level of support he now has among non-White voters as more of them learn about the aggressive agenda he has adopted on race-related issues.
The presumptive GOP nominee is now benefiting from the best of both worlds politically: he is energizing his base of White social conservatives with incendiary ideas such as the largest deportation drive against undocumented migrants in American history and attracting historic numbers of non-White voters on other issues, principally the economy. If Trump can continue to do both things through November, he will be very hard to beat. Biden’s position would look much better if Democrats can push Trump off of that tightrope by raising unease in minority communities about the former president’s most militant proposals and rhetoric – like his claim that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“I don’t want to say it’s going to come down to any one group, but to me getting these voters of color, especially Hispanic voters, back to the margins where they have been historically for Democrats may be the most important thing” Biden must do to recover, said Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann.
Under any scenario, Trump in 2024 will receive the vast majority of his votes from Whites. But the incremental improvement from 2020 that could carry him to a second term now looks to be concentrated preponderantly among non-Whites.
Both national and battleground state public polls consistently show Trump, at this point, drawing more support from Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican nominee since at least 1960. When The New York Times/Siena College, NBC News, Wall Street Journal and CBS News/YouGov all released national polls a few days apart earlier this month, each of them found Trump winning from 20% to 28% of Black voters and 45% to 48% of Hispanic voters. That’s far more than the 12% of Black, and 32% of Hispanic, voters he won in 2020, according to the Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of news organizations including CNN. (The Pew Validated Voters study found Trump winning slightly fewer Black, and slightly more Hispanic, voters in the 2020 election.) A CNBC poll released Tuesday showed Biden drawing just 57% of all voters of color, compared to 71% in the 2020 exit poll.
Polls in the key swing states are returning similar results. The CNN/SSRS polls released last week showed Biden drawing only 55% of all non-White voters in Michigan and 69% in Pennsylvania – down in each case from about 80% in 2020. Marist College polls released last week showed Biden winning three-fourths of Black voters in Georgia and about four-fifths in North Carolina, well below the roughly 9-in-10 exit polls showed him winning in each state last time. A recent Fox News Poll in Arizona showed Biden winning only about half of Hispanics there, down from over 3-in-5 in the 2020 exit poll. Biden won over 9-in-10 Black voters in Wisconsin according to the 2020 exit poll, but a compilation of the two most recent Marquette Law School polls in the state showed him holding only a little more than 6-in-10 of them.
Some Democratic pollsters who focus on voters of color question the size of the minority polling samples that produce these results and insist they do not find nearly this much erosion for Biden in their own polls. But others in the party acknowledge the trend of diminishing non-White support for Biden is real (even if they do not believe it is always as pronounced as these public polls find.)
The convergence of long- and short-term trends has brought Biden to this perilous point. Alfonso Aguilar, the director of Hispanic engagement for the conservative American Principles Project, said Hispanics are simply following the tracks of earlier immigrant groups like the Italians and Irish who became less likely to instinctively align with the Democratic Party as each successive generation assimilated more fully into American society. Initially those earlier immigrant groups “identified with the Democratic Party but with time they started voting like other Americans, and I think that is happening with Hispanics,” Aguilar said. As the cultural identification with Democrats has waned, Hispanics who hold conservative views have become more willing to “vote their principles and values” by supporting Republicans, Aguilar said; his assessment is supported by Edison exit poll data showing that Trump in 2020 won a much higher share of Hispanics who identify as conservative than he did in 2016.
The other long-term trend lifting Trump is that non-White voters appear increasingly subject to the same long wave of educational realignment that has reshaped voting preferences among Whites for over half a century. Since 2016, Republicans have increased their vote more among non-White voters without a college degree than they have among those with advanced education, according to the exit polls and the detailed voting projections by the Democratic targeting firm Catalist. That has placed minority voters more in line with what I’ve called the “class inversion” among Whites, in which Democrats run better among voters with advanced education than those without it.
Biden’s immediate challenges have compounded these long-term shifts. His numbers are especially weak among younger Hispanic and Black voters, a reflection of the president’s difficulty connecting with young voters of any race. Biden is “a poor fit generationally for a non-White electorate that skews young,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of “Party of the People,” a recent book on the GOP’s gains among non-White voters. “He’s the anti-Obama in his appeal to different segments of the Democratic electorate,” he added.
Inflation, analysts in both parties agree, has also disproportionately hurt Biden with Black and Hispanic voters, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck. And conservative analysts believe Biden is also being hurt because many non-White voters view Democrats as too liberal on cultural issues including LGBTQ rights, crime and even control of the border – although polls make clear a majority of non-White voters side with Democrats on other marquee social issues, particularly abortion and gun control.
Together all these factors have converged to produce the slippage for Biden among non-White voters that has drawn enormous attention in political circles. But there’s been much less focus on the other column in the racial ledger: the polls that now mostly show Biden matching, or even exceeding, his support level among Whites from 2020 – when he comfortably won the national popular vote and carried six of the seven most closely contested states.
The same four national polls that earlier this month showed erosion for Biden with minority voters each put him between 30% to 34% among White voters without a college degree and 50% to 56% among White voters with a degree; both of those results virtually replicate the 2020 exit polls that showed him winning 51% of Whites with a degree and 32% of Whites without one. The latest CNN poll in Pennsylvania, Marist polls in North Carolina and Georgia, the Fox poll in Arizona, and Marquette polls in Wisconsin all showed Biden close to his 2020 share of the White vote. In some of these polls, Biden declined slightly compared to 2020 among Whites without a degree and gained slightly among Whites with a degree, but after those small offsetting shifts, his totals among Whites showed little overall change. In the CNBC national poll released this week, Biden drew 40% of the vote among all Whites, virtually unchanged from his 41% in the 2020 exit poll. (The biggest exception to this trend was the latest CNN Michigan poll, which did show a meaningful decline for Biden among Whites there, although another recent Quinnipiac University survey in the state did not.)
Ruffini, the GOP pollster, said that Biden’s White vote is so stable largely because the two previous presidential elections have already pushed the process of educational resorting among Whites about as far as it can go. “White voters are pretty well sorted after two straight cycles of education polarization,” Ruffini said.
Even a small additional decline among the non-college White voters present in such large numbers in the key industrial states could doom Biden. But today, many Democrats believe Trump has less opportunity for further gains among non-college Whites than Biden has to expand his margins among college-educated Whites, who mostly take liberal positions on social issues like abortion and are more receptive to Democratic arguments that Trump represents a threat to democracy.
If Biden can hold his current overall support among Whites, the key question in the race may flip to whether Trump can sustain his support among non-Whites while offering such a bristling message and agenda on race-related issues.
Even as polls show Trump posting unprecedented Republican numbers among Hispanics, he is promising the largest deportation drive of undocumented migrants in American history, including the creation of detention camps and the use of the National Guard to participate in mass round ups; military action against Mexico, including a naval blockade, to combat drug cartels; the end of birthright citizenship; and the possible reinstitution of his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.
Activists working in the community say that very few Hispanic voters know that Trump is proposing any of this. “I don’t think people are really tuned into it at all,” said Melissa Morales, founder and president of Somos Votantes, a group that mobilizes Hispanic voters.
Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster and political scientist advising the Biden campaign on Hispanic voters, said “there’s no chance” Trump can maintain his elevated level of support in the community as more learn about his language and proposals. Barreto maintains that Trump improved among Hispanic voters in 2020 because he dialed back his anti-immigrant rhetoric from 2016 and focused instead on reopening the economy from the Covid pandemic – a position that appealed to many economically struggling Hispanics. But now, Barreto said, Trump is “definitely running a more extreme cultural White supremacy … agenda than he did in ’16.”
Given that two-thirds of Hispanics in Barreto’s polling say they know someone who is undocumented, he believes the threat of mass deportation and detention camps will prove especially damaging to Trump’s support as more voters become aware of it. “I’m not saying Trump’s going to lose all his voters, but the worse and the louder he gets on immigration, the harder it is for a financially conservative Latino … to stick with Trump,” Barreto said.
Ruffini and Aguilar both express confidence that Trump’s hardline immigration proposals and rhetoric won’t hurt him among Hispanics nearly as much as Democrats expect – largely because Hispanics also feel Biden has lost control of the border. When Trump talked about mass deportations in 2016, “that became an issue immediately. This time it’s not,” Aguilar said. “And why is that? I think it’s because the circumstances have changed and people are open to a deportation campaign because of this mass wave” of asylum seekers at the border.
Leaders of several groups that work to mobilize Hispanics told me that they believe Trump’s immigration proposals will damage him, but they still anticipate that the centerpiece of their message this year will be the populist economic contrast with Trump that Biden drew in his State of the Union address this month. “I think the economic arguments are really top of mind for people,” Morales said.
For years, the most effective force organizing and turning out Hispanic voters in Nevada has been the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 workers on the Las Vegas strip and in Reno. In an interview, Ted Pappageorge, the local’s secretary-treasurer, told me that higher prices for food, rent and gas are by far the top concerns for his mostly Hispanic membership. “For Democrats, this idea of taking on big food, big oil and Wall Street landlords, that is their lane,” Pappageorge said. The union, he added, will make the case to its members that “Trump is a boss and a landlord, and those are all his buddies.”
“When we roll out our program and talk to working class voters face to face, workers talking to workers, that’s the path to victory here,” Pappageorge said. “We beat Trump before and we can beat him again, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”
The situation with Black voters is similar. Even as Trump is posting historic numbers among Blacks, he has proposed, as a condition of receiving federal funds, to prohibit school districts from discussing “critical race theory” in classrooms, and to require local police departments to implement the “stop and frisk” tactics that civil rights leaders say unfairly target young Black men. Many Black leaders see Trump’s unwavering defense of the January 6, 2021, rioters as a clear signal of his embrace of White supremacists – including those who evoked dark memories of lynching by constructing a gallows outside the US Capitol that day.
For all those reasons and more, Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who advised Barack Obama’s campaigns on reaching Black voters, believes Trump will not receive anywhere near as much Black support on Election Day as polls now show for him. “If the story doesn’t make any sense you have to question it,” Belcher said. “Someone who has a well-documented history of discrimination and racism and corruption, along with being fundamentally mispositioned on almost the entirety of African American issues … that person is going to do better than George W. Bush, than Ronald Reagan, than John McCain, than any Republican over the last four decades?” Belcher said. “It’s absurd on its face.”
Ruffini agrees that he would not be surprised “to see some movement back to the previous historical norm among Black voters.” But he added that emphasizing the claim that Trump is racially biased is unlikely to provoke the turnout Democrats need unless they can also convince Black voters that Biden has a plan to improve their economic condition – which polls show many of them now doubt. “Leaning into cultural and racial identity as a motivator has been a losing strategy,” Ruffini said.
Belcher and other Democratic operatives focusing on Black voters acknowledge that even if Trump’s vulnerabilities ultimately limit his African American support, frustration over high prices and a sense that Biden has not accomplished much for the community could still threaten him. “Really people are looking for an offramp because they feel the president hasn’t done enough, and that offramp is third-party candidates,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, a group that organizes Black voters. “That’s the thing [the Biden campaign] needs to really pay attention to.”
Most of the arguments Democrats are hoping will recapture minority voters look forward – to create a contrast between what Biden and Trump would do with a second term. The risk for Democrats is that many voters of all races primarily may be looking backwards – to compare their lived economic experience under Trump’s presidency to Biden’s.
Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster who advised Obama’s campaign on courting Hispanics, already sees that comparison opening more Hispanic voters to Trump. “The nightmare phrase I keep hearing in focus groups … is ‘I really dislike Trump, I don’t like what he says, I don’t like what he stands for, but if I’m being honest, when he was president prices were a lot lower and I was doing a lot better economically,’” Amandi said.
Biden is undoubtedly facing much deeper discontent over his performance than Democratic presidents have usually confronted in minority communities. But from the “birther” slur against Obama, to the echoing of Nazi imagery about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, Trump throughout his political career has systematically stoked White racial resentments with inflammatory and racist language.
The supreme irony taking shape is that Trump’s fate in the 2024 election may turn on whether he can hold, for seven more months, more support among Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican presidential nominee since the Civil Rights era six decades ago.
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