|
SPLINTERS
ON 2020 ELECTION ISSUES
President
Trump has decided that he is prepared to sacrifice lives of people
of color by his insistence on the reopening of battleground states
with large numbers of minority citizens, many of which are led by
Democratic governors—e.g., California, Michigan, New York, New
Jersey, and Wisconsin.
His
administration’s research model projects that there will be
3,000 deaths per day as a result. Currently, Native Americans,
African Americans, and Latinx Americans have COVID-19 fatality rates
that are more than three to four times those of their white
counterparts.
Even
in the red, more than 90 percent majority white states (e.g.,
Vermont 96.2%,
Maine 95.5 percent, New Hampshire 95.0 percent, West Virginia 94.3
percent, Iowa 92.9 percent, Idaho 92.1 percent, Wyoming 91.6
percent, and Minnesota 90.94 percent), the preponderance of
coronavirus deaths are among minority groups.
Dr.
Rick Bright, Director of the HHS Biomedical Advanced
Research and Development Authority, has filed a whistleblower
lawsuit against the Trump administration after his removal from the
position due to his resistance to giving millions of
dollars in contracts to Trump’s political allies for the
distribution of hydroxychloroquine (a drug touted by Trump as a cure
for COVID-19) which the Federal Drug Administration ruled as
dangerous.
Montana’s
Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock is a favorite to defeat the Republican
incumbent for the state’s U.S. Senate seat while Republican
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in a competitive race with
his Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, in Kentucky.
With
increasingly close Senate races in Colorado, North Carolina, and
even South Carolina, the Democrats have a chance of flipping the
Senate.
Joe
Biden is on the clock for his selection of a vice presidential
running mate for the fall 2020 presidential election. Having
committed to choosing a woman, he is being subjected to immense
pressure by the backers of several female candidates. It is
universally agreed that this will be the most consequential decision
of his campaign.
In
some past presidential elections where races were anticipated to be
close (as is the case for this one), vice presidential running mates
were pivotal. Most political pundits agree that Sen.
John F. Kennedy’s (D-MA) naming of Sen. Lyndon Johnson
(D-Texas), his chief rival, as his VP in 1960, enabled him to carry
Texas with its trove of electoral votes and other southern states.
JFK
may not have won with a non-Southern running mate, and his call to
Coretta Scott King to express his concern about her husband, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who was in a Georgia prison for a civil
rights protest, locked up the black vote. These two decisions gave
Kennedy a huge Electoral College victory that year, even though the
difference in the popular vote between him and then Republican Vice
President Richard M. Nixon was just over 100,000.
Gov.
George W. Bush’s (R-Texas) choice of Dick Cheney as his vice
presidential running mate in the 2000 presidential election provided
him with Congressional, Cabinet-level, and foreign policy experience,
everything that was missing from his political resume. Cheney also
brought along inside knowledge of how Washington works, having served
as President Ford’s chief-of-staff.
Cheney
was not a major asset on the campaign trail in a razor-thin result,
where Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote, but once in
office, Cheney proved to be a helpful, significant, and contentious
sidekick. He was critical to Bush’s decision making during his
first term and instrumental in Bush’s decision to invade Iraq,
which has significantly sullied his presidential legacy.
Jimmy
Carter rode to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 in the
wake of the Watergate controversy. Opposed by the Democratic
Washington establishment, Carter, a one-term Democratic governor of
Georgia, capitalized on the electorate’s resentment towards
Washington during the Watergate debacle.
In
order to make the peace and at the behest of Sen. Hubert Humphrey,
the 1968 Democratic standard bearer, and a mentor of the widely
respected Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN), Carter chose Mondale as his
running mate. In doing so, he got someone who brought 10 years'
experience in the Senate to the campaign which helped him in the
Midwest and assisted him in his defeat of the sitting President,
Gerald Ford.
In
2020, the leading contenders for the VP nod, according to a
CBS
News/YouGov poll of
registered Democratic voters
released last Sunday,
are: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (76 percent), Sen. Kamala Harris (59
percent), former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (50
percent), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (49 percent). Several other white,
Latinx and African American candidates were also mentioned.
Let
us examine the viability of each of the top four. It is puzzling as
to why Elizabeth Warren is getting such huge buzz given that she was
not a top contender in any of the primaries in which she competed.
The Democratic pollster, Stan Greenberg, has counseled Biden that she
“… would consolidate support across the Democratic
coalition and drive up turnout among young people and liberals ….”
However,
she was unable to do so in her own liberal state during her primary
run where she came in third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. In
addition, she has demonstrated little traction among minority voters,
and her past appropriation of Native American heritage, which she
previously used on job applications, would surely be a bone of
contention during the general election as Trump has already labeled
her ‘Pocahontas.’
Kamala
Harris, who is the preferred African American candidate among whites,
would bring little to the ticket other than her skin tone in what is
sure to be a nasty and hard fought race. Despite belonging to the
world’s largest sorority of black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha,
Harris was never avidly embraced by her sisters.
She
also ranked fourth behind Warren, Biden, and Sanders in an October
2019 California poll in single digits (8 percent), while they all
more than doubled her poll numbers scoring over 20 percent each.
Except for her announcement at her campaign kickoff on January 27,
2020, and her attack on Joe Biden in a Democratic presidential
debate, Harris never resonated strongly with minority and majority
groups.
She
would not be factor in black turnout in 2020 as she has not formed a
strong bond with the national black community.
Harris,
who many progressives view as a cop, would also be hurt in Wisconsin
for “…threatening to prosecute
parents whose kids missed too many school days…”
while she was San Francisco district attorney. A similar policy was
widely reviled in the African American community during the 1990s by
Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.
While
serving as district attorney, Harris also locked up hundreds of
African American and Latinx males on bogus charges which a judge
overturned. These two elements in her electoral record would prove
to be a problem in communities of color as she campaigns in
battleground states where a sizeable number of minority groups reside
and could provide the margin of victory.
Stacey
Abrams is the only one of the four favorites who would add value to
the Biden campaign. She ran against Trump-type voter suppression
tactics during her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial run and came within one
percent of victory. She was able to turnout a considerable vote from
white women along with a huge number of African American and Latinx
voters.
And
her Fair Fight initiative, which fights for voters’ rights and
has field offices in 18 battleground states, would be an advantage
for Biden in his bare knuckle fight with Trump.
Amy
Klobuchar, who like Elizabeth Warren, was a middling candidate during
most of the Democratic primaries, also is viewed as a cop among
blacks in Minnesota and elsewhere. While serving as Hennepin County,
Minnesota prosecutor, she convicted Myon Burrell, a 16-year old black
male of murder in a case where a stray bullet killed an 11-year old
black girl in 2002.
In
later years, the Associated Press reviewed thousands of pages of
records and found the case leaned heavily on a teen rival
of Burrell's and other jailhouse informers who gave contradictory
versions when they named the shooter. Burrell was given a new trial,
and Klobuchar’s former office re-convicted him; he has been
behind bars for 17 years.
In
her last day on the primary campaign trail, an alliance of civil
rights groups--the Minneapolis NAACP and Black Lives Matter Twin
Cities and others—demanded that Klobuchar abandon the
presidential contest due to "her role
in sending an innocent black teenager to prison for life."
These groups shut down her last campaign
stop in Minnesota, and she dropped out the next day.
She
then flew to Dallas, Texas to endorse Joe Biden, escaping the
embarrassment of having been forced out of the race. She was given
credit for Biden’s subsequent win of the Minnesota primary,
although he would have likely won it anyway as he did the
Massachusetts primary over Elizabeth Warren.
Biden
is expected to choose from this crew. He must tread carefully
because he needs a partner who can bring something to the party as he
is dealing with the sexual harassment and/or assault allegations of
Tara Reade and the modest Democratic enthusiasm for his candidacy.
Trump leads him by a 2:1 margin among Republicans. Biden needs help,
lots of it, as did JFK, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter in their
respective runs for the office of president.
Abrams
is the only one of the four who can give it to him.
|
