Search Results for Candidates and Elections

Joe Biden’s Drug-Price ConundrumSuppose the president asked you to design the ideal piece of legislation—the perfect mix of good politics and good policy. You’d probably want to pick something that saves people a lot of money. You’d want it to fix a problem that people have been mad about for a long time, in an area that voters say they care about a lot—such as, say, health care. You’d want it to appeal to voters across the political spectrum. And you’d want it to be a policy that polls well.You would, in other words, want something like letting Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices. This would make drugs much more affordable for senior citizens—who vote like crazy—and, depending on the poll, it draws support from 80 to 90 percent of voters. The idea has been championed by both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin. Turn it into reality, and surely you’d see parades…

How Trump Is Fracturing Minority CommunitiesThe most succinct explanation for how Republicans expect Donald Trump to win in November may have come from, of all people, the firebrand Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.“What I can tell you,” Gaetz said earlier this year, “is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”What Gaetz is saying, in his somewhat stereotypical racial shorthand, is that even if Trump alienates a growing number of well-educated white women (“Karen”), he can overcome those losses by attracting more blue-collar, nonwhite men (“Julio and Jamal”).Even most Democrats agree that Trump appears positioned to gain ground this year among Black and Latino men without a college degree—groups that already moved in his direction from 2016 to 2020, according to studies of the vote such as the analysis of the results released by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. And…

The Undecided Women of Bucks CountyEverybody loves Lynne. At least, that’s what all of her friends kept telling me last week, as they filed through Lynne’s front door in the Philadelphia suburbs, and sipped chardonnay in her crowded kitchen. When you meet her, you see why. Lynne Kelleher, a 66-year-old Bucks County Realtor, is utterly charming. Her pointed questions take you by surprise, and her impressive range of swear words makes you laugh until you snort.Kelleher’s magnetism is why I reached out to her in the first place. Through her work and the local charity group she founded, she has more friends than she can count. Pennsylvania will again be one of a handful of battleground states that will determine the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, and I’d been searching for women in the area to discuss that with. Kelleher was the ideal person to convene my own personal…

The Woman Who Chased a Shredding TruckSalleigh Grubbs was in her office on Friday, November 20, 2020, when she got a phone call from a friend. Susan’s at Jim Miller Park—they’re shredding ballots! the friend said. Susan was Susan Knox, a woman Salleigh had met a week earlier when both were volunteering as election observers at Jim R. Miller Park, an event center in Cobb County, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, where the county government was now conducting a hand recount of the ballots in the presidential election. The recount had been ordered by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, under pressure from President Donald Trump and his allies, who insisted that Trump hadn’t really lost Georgia by more than 11,000 votes. Salleigh didn’t believe the result either. Her own Cobb County had been the largest source of Republican votes in the state, and for decades it had formed the…

Trump Could Use the 1873 Comstock Act to Ban Abortion Nationwide. Here’s How.Last week, in a bid to clarify his historically nebulous stance on abortion, Donald Trump said that if reelected, he intends to leave abortion rights “to the states,” seemingly contradicting his prior stance in favor of a 16-week national ban.  But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and leading abortion historian, thinks that a complete ban could be on the agenda for a future Trump administration—and the vehicle for it would be the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law still on the books. Ziegler and other legal experts warn the law could be marshaled to ban all abortions—even in blue states that protect abortion rights—and possibly even contraception and gender-affirming care, while circumventing the democratic process.  Let’s start with a quick history lesson. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which bars the mailing of “every article…

Matt Gaetz Is WinningUsually, you need about 10 minutes to walk from the Rayburn House Office Building to the House Chamber. But if you’re running from a reporter, it’ll only take you five.When Matt Gaetz spotted me outside his office door one afternoon early last November, he popped in his AirPods and started speed walking down the hall. I took off after him, waving and smiling like the good-natured midwesterner I am. “Congressman, hi,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d worn shoes with arch support. “I just wanted to introduce myself!” I had prepared a long list of questions, hoping for a thoughtful conversation but ready for a tense one. He was a firebrand, after all, or so said the title of his 2020 memoir, Firebrand.Gaetz is a creature of our time: versed in the art of performance politics and eager to blow up anything to get a little something. He…