Some States Target Voter Registration Drives With Restrictions - The New York Times

How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters

"Florida and some other states have put restrictions on voter registration drives, often with stiff fines that are dissuading some civic groups from taking part.

July 26, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Jacob Langston for The New York Times

LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because she wanted, she said, to give others the voice she was denied as a Black student in a largely white high school. In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls.

That ended last year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposed tough new rules on voter registration drives in the name of stopping fraud — and made voter registration groups that break the rules liable for fines as high as $250,000.

These days, Faith in Florida canvassers no longer help would-be voters fill out registration forms. Instead, they hand out slips of paper with a QR code that links to the state’s online registration website. And it’s not just small-time civic groups that are affected: The Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters has scaled back its trademark voter registration drives, too.

“These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea,” said Cecile Scoon, a lawyer and the president of the Florida league.

The political right has long sought to winnow voter rolls in the name of stopping fraud, including a stream of challenges this year. As Democrats prepare for a sprint to capitalize on the excitement of a new presidential ticket by signing up new voters, they are finding entirely new barriers in Florida and some other states to the sorts of voter registration drives that have been a campaign staple for both parties.

Chloe Chaffin, left, and Anita Alexander are members of Loud Light, a group in Topeka, Kan., that says it can no longer conduct voter registration drives without running afoul of state law.John Hanna/Associated Press

The Florida law imposes new regulations, with criminal penalties for violations, on groups that sign up new voters and deliver the collected applications to election officials. For example, it allows fines of up to $2,500 if a registration form delivered to election officials contains a mistake. If a registration drive allows people with certain felony convictions to sign up new voters or handle registration applications, the fine could rise to $50,000.

The Florida League of Women Voters and other groups sued in federal court to block the law last year, and a trial was held this spring. A ruling is expected soon.

Laws similar to Florida’s have been passed recently by a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures, although none of the states are battleground states in this year’s election, so the restrictions on voter registrations are unlikely to affect the presidential election.

Kansas civic groups have curtailed their voter registration work for three years since the State Legislature there made “false representation” of an election official a crime.

“In 2020, even with the pandemic, we had registered nearly 10,000 Kansans to vote,” said Davis Hammet, the president of Loud Light, created in 2015 to mobilize the state’s young voters. “Now, we haven’t been able to register anyone.”

This year, Tennessee and Alabama banned the use of registration forms that are pre-filled with voters’ names and other details to make registering easier. Alabama also banned giving anyone cash or a gift for registering voters, as did Missouri in 2022. (In Missouri, a state court will hear arguments next month on whether to lift an injunction that has kept the law from taking effect there.)

“If the League of Women Voters pays people for parking or travel to get to a voter registration site, or gives them a free T-shirt or free lunch, are they being paid?” asked Denise Lieberman, the general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, who is representing the league and the N.A.A.C.P. in a suit against the law. “It’s unclear.”

State Senator Sandy Crawford, the Missouri Republican who sponsored the legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.

House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to reporters in May about a Republican proposal to require voters in federal elections to show proof of citizenship. Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Suspicion from the right of voter registration groups has a long history. When an advocacy group for the poor known as ACORN submitted fraudulent registration forms to officials in some states in 2008, Republicans built it into a major campaign issue. ACORN shut down in 2010.

In 2014, Brian Kemp, a Republican who was then the Georgia secretary of state, opened an inquiry into voter registration by the New Georgia Project, a creation of the liberal state legislator Stacey Abrams, and claims that there was evidence of “substantial illegal activities” by the group. The inquiry found a few erroneous applications among the many thousands the group had collected.

In Florida, officials say the rules there are narrowly tailored to address abuses by voter registration canvassers and groups that hire them. And abuses do happen: In an April statement to a federal district court, the Florida secretary of state, Cord Byrd, cited more than 300 instances of misconduct by voter-registration groups, some of which led to prosecutions.

The rules are needed, state officials argue, because groups that collect registration applications can abuse the sign-up process by creating applications with false names or addresses, submitting applications for processing after legal deadlines, or even by selling applicants’ personal information.

That sort of behavior is largely limited to companies that make money by canvassing new voters for political campaigns or advocacy groups. 

Cynthia Slater, president of the Daytona Beach, Fla., branch of the N.A.A.C.P., speaks to attendees during the Voters Education 2024 Community Forum, addressing the Florida Legislature’s new rules on voter registration in May.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

The state says voter-registration organizations still have many ways to help sign up voters, from handing out postage-paid registration applications with instructions on filling them out to letting people sign up on an iPad linked to the state voter registration website.

Leaders of civic groups say those methods are far less effective than when volunteers personally help people fill out registration forms and deliver them to an election office.

“When you’re trying to encourage people to register to vote, the process needs to be as simple as possible,” Ms. Bracy of Faith in Florida said. “And that’s just not the case in the state of Florida.”

Many conservatives remain deeply skeptical of voter-registration efforts.

“Liberal activists would have you believe every sensible safeguard to securing elections amounts to a restriction on the fundamental right to vote,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, one of several advocacy groups created by the conservative activist Leonard Leo.

Mr. Snead said: “Limits on third-party voter registration aren’t voting restrictions, they’re regulations to ensure groups that insert themselves between voters and elections meet minimum standards.”

Another conservative advocate on voting issues and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, J. Christian Adams, argued that some groups actually disenfranchise voters by turning in applications that are error-ridden or are submitted too late for election officials to add the applicants to the rolls. 

Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state, said laws restricting voter registration efforts fit a “pernicious and discouraging” pattern in Republican-controlled legislatures of seeking to curb access to the ballot box by potential Democratic voters.

Even so, he said he was skeptical that the laws would have a great impact in an age when most people can sign up to vote online, or even at the polling place on Election Day. In particular, he said, the looming presidential election should motivate partisans on both sides to find a way around obstacles to registering. It is not certain what effect the Florida law is having, because it is hard to know whether people who did not register through a group like the League of Women Voters might have found a different avenue. 

According to the Florida Department of State, third-party voter registration groups signed up between 16,600 and 63,200 new voters each year from 2018 to 2022. In 2023, after the Florida law’s enactment, the total dropped below 5,900. At the end of May, halfway through the 2024 presidential election season, third-party groups had enrolled 5,583 new registrants.

The impact of those reduced registrations did not fall evenly, according to a report by Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist, filed in the suit challenging the Florida law. State-supplied data showed that third-party groups enrolled about 1.5 percent of all white registered voters between 2012 and 2023, he said. But they registered roughly 10 percent of Black voters, 9 percent of Hispanic voters, and some 8 percent of voters who were members of other minority groups.

Registrations also have slowed markedly at Florida colleges and universities, where more than a million students are enrolled.

“You have to tell every volunteer that if they screw up, there may be a $50,000 fine,” said Connor Efrian, the president of the University of Florida College Democrats. “The consequences are that there are a lot fewer people going around the campus registering people. People are a lot more intimidated.”

Kitty Bennett and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Michael Wines is a national correspondent, writing about voting and election issues. He is based in Washington, D.C." 

More about Michael Wines

Some States Target Voter Registration Drives With Restrictions - The New York Times

Speculation Swirls About What Hit Trump. An Analysis Suggests It was a Bullet - The New York Times

Speculation Swirls About What Hit Trump. An Analysis Suggests It was a Bullet

"An absence of medical records or official accounts has stirred confusion, but a Times video and trajectory analysis indicates a bullet, not debris, wounded the former president.

July 26, 2024Updated 5:24 a.m. ET

Donald J. Trump grasps his ear during an assassination attempt at an election rally in Butler, Pa.

Nearly two weeks after the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump, there’s still no official report from the Trump campaign or from state or federal governments about what caused the wound on his right ear.

This lack of clarity has left the issue unsettled and fueled speculation online about whether he was hit by a bullet or shrapnel — or perhaps something else.

But a detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman, Thomas Crooks. Subsequent bullets wounded two rally goers and killed a third.

What has helped stoke confusion is that Mr. Trump himself has said he was hit by a bullet, but his campaign has not released any official medical reports, nor has Mr. Trump’s current physician weighed in.

Instead, the campaign has posted a memo from Mr. Trump’s former White House physician, Ronny L. Jackson, now a Texas congressman and outspoken ally of the former president, that says he was struck by a bullet on his right ear.

The Secret Service, which was responsible for the security at the event, has declined to comment.

The F.B.I. said it was examining numerous metal fragments found near the stage to determine whether a bullet — or pieces of it — had grazed Mr. Trump’s head, bloodying his ear.

A key piece of evidence in The Times’s analysis is a live video feed that captures Mr. Trump’s reaction as the first three gunshots are fired. The crack of the bullets are heard as they pass the microphone that Mr. Trump speaks into. Almost a second elapses between the first and second shots.

During this brief interim, Mr. Trump starts reaching toward his ear, according to footage and audio of the event analyzed by The Times and Rob Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University.

“He flinches, and his right hand already starts reaching for his right ear during that time between the first audible shot and the second audible shot,” Mr. Maher said.

Mr. Trump’s fingers are bloodied as soon as he touches his ear, as seen in a picture taken by Doug Mills, a veteran Times photographer.

Blood is visible on Donald Trump’s hand as he withdraws it from his right ear during an assassination attempt. Doug Mills/The New York Times

After clipping Mr. Trump, that first bullet appears to pass him and strike bleachers off to his left, where scores of his supporters are standing, the analysis suggests.

A puff of debris captured in a video snippet appeared to show the impact point of that shot — right beside a rally attendee, David Dutch.

“The puff visible at the back of the bleachers appears at the time of the first shot,” Mr. Maher said.

Mr. Dutch appears to have been injured by the second shot, which was fired along a similar trajectory. He winces as it rings out, and then crouches down as the third shot passes.

Another video indicates that the third bullet hit a crane near Mr. Dutch.

A 3-D model of the rally grounds produced by The Times shows the positions of the shooter and Mr. Trump, and the point where the first bullet hit the bleachers.

The model and the trajectory analysis show that the bullet traveled in a straight line from the gunman to the bleachers, clipping Mr. Trump on its path. This suggests the bullet was not deflected by first striking an object that would have then sprayed Mr. Trump with debris.

One Bullet’s Path Toward Trump

Gunman fires first shot

Bullet appeared to graze Trump

Mr. Crooks appears to have fired eight gunshots in total — a burst of three followed by a burst of five — before he was killed by Secret Service snipers. Investigators found eight shell casings around Mr. Crooks’s body on the warehouse roof, Col. Christopher Paris of the Pennsylvania State Police said in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

One bullet injured James Copenhaver, 74, in the abdomen. Mr. Copenhaver was standing just a few feet from Mr. Dutch.

A further video analysis shows that Corey Comperatore, 50, a father of two and volunteer firefighter, was shot in the head and killed most likely in the second volley of bullets fired by Mr. Crooks, a theory first posited on X by the journalists Moshe Schwartz and Oliver Alexander.

A video shows Mr. Comperatore standing upright and apparently filming or taking photographs with his cellphone as the first three bullets are fired. When the second volley is fired, a baseball hat resembling that worn by Mr. Comperatore is seen flying through the air.

What appears to have put Mr. Comperatore in the line of fire is that the gunman may have been adjusting his aim lower as Secret Service agents protectively took Mr. Trump to the ground.

The security lapses that permitted Mr. Crooks to fire eight rounds unimpeded, at least three of which came close to seriously wounding Mr. Trump, have become the subject of an active congressional investigation. On Tuesday, the director of the Secret Service tendered her resignation.

Kate Kelly, Riley Mellen, Helmuth Rosales and Adam Goldman contributed reporting."

Speculation Swirls About What Hit Trump. An Analysis Suggests It was a Bullet - The New York Times

Here’s How Deep Biden’s Busing Problem Runs

(I will never forget how Joe Biden sided with the racists who spat on me and call me the “N” word in 1961 and 1962 in Brooklyn New York when I attended P.S. 198.  I will not forget how he sided with teachers like Mrs. Cooper who refused to let me nominate a White girl for class Vice President.   Biden lied for decades claiming busing was na rural vs urban issue.  Brooklyn is as urban as you can get.  People are pouring praise on Biden while ignoring the great evil of racism he perpetrated in the 1970s.   I have despised him since.  I remember the first day I was bussed in September of 1961 asking my father if I was a “nigger”.    I had never heard the word before.   The screamed this as the three other students and I got off the school bus.  A boy asked me if I was a nigger as I went into the playground during the lunchtime break.   I told him I didn’t know because I had never heard the word before.   Biden sides with southern segregationists and northern racists throughout the 1970s.  He never apologized for this and therefore this stain should remain as part of his legacy during the 1970s.   Biden was hated along with other segregationists when I attended Hunter College in the 1970s.   It disgusts me how Americans are forgetting his evil past.)

And why the Democrats can’t use it against him.

Carly Sitrin05/08/20 09:44 PM EDT

Charles Harrity/AP Photo

“Brett Gadsden is a professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism.

In the summer of 1974, the freshman Senator Joe Biden found himself under siege from white suburbanites at a meeting just south of Wilmington, Del. The possibility that their children would be bused into “black schools" in the city and that black children would be bused to their schools had sent a wave of consternation through the white community.

Civil rights activists had recently won a lawsuit in which a federal District Court recognized that state-sponsored discriminatory education and housing policies had led to segregated metropolitan-area schools. The court was then poised to demand a two-way busing program that would transfer students between the city and suburban districts to advance racial balance.

For two hours, Biden paced the auditorium stage and absorbed the ire of the 250-member audience. Unable to offer them any assurance on the court ruling, he made a promise to oppose busing when he returned to Washington for the next legislative session. And he did: Biden spent the next four years pushing legislation to thwart the implementation of busing schemes like the one demanded by the courts in Wilmington around the country.

Now that he has declared his candidacy for president, a number of commentators have suggested his record on busing would hurt him in the Democratic primary.

But don’t count on it. School desegregation, as part of a broader suite of civil rights reforms, was once as a vital component of the Democratic Party platform. Yet since the 1970s, Democrats, in the face of concerted white backlash, have largely accommodated themselves to increasing segregation in public schools across the nation. Party leaders, even the most progressive among them, rarely propose serious solutions to this vexing problem. A sincere critique of Biden’s busing record would require a broader reckoning of the Democratic Party’s—and by extension the nation’s—abandonment of this central goal of the civil rights movement. And it’s hard to see that happening anytime soon.

***

In that meeting in the summer of 1974, Biden had begun his negotiation of a dilemma that faced many Democrats in the 1970s: How to support a central goal of the civil rights movement—school desegregation—and attend to a rising tide of white opposition to the remedies that promised to actually desegregate schools outside the Jim Crow South. Biden’s constituents, like those in white communities in Boston and the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C., and Detroit, claimed innocence of the charge of maintaining Jim Crow schools like white Southerners had in the preceding decades. The troubling demographics of their schools, they claimed, was a function of choice and “natural” housing patterns — or what many alleged to be de facto segregation, not discriminatory laws. They complained that court mandates demanding busing remedies interfered with their rights to manage their schools without interference from impersonal and unsympathetic courts and federal bureaucrats. The influx of educationally disadvantaged and purportedly ill-disciplined black students, busing opponents argued, promised violence, chaos and the deterioration of educational standards in their schools—and threatened to undermine the property values of cherished suburban homes. 

What Biden and many like him refused to acknowledge were the discriminatory education and housing policies that undergirded their segregated communities. In the Wilmington area in the 1970s, for example, local school boards’ optional attendance policies enabled white students to transfer from schools with rising percentages of black students. The state Legislature passed a school zoning scheme, called the Educational Advancement Act, that effectively delineated the Wilmington School District as predominately black school district. Restrictive covenants, long tolerated by lawmakers, prevented African Americans from buying and renting suburban homes. Meanwhile, the housing authority, under pressure from suburban neighborhood groups, focused construction of public housing in the city of Wilmington, in effect concentrating poor and minority families there.

Buckling to political pressure from his white constituents who wanted to keep things the way they were, Biden established himself as a leading Democratic opponent of busing in the Senate. Concluding that busing was a “bankrupt concept,” he found himself principally aligned with consummate civil rights opponent and GOP Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who was unabashed in his commitment “to put an end to the current blight on American education that is generally referred to as ‘forced bussing.’” Biden joined conservatives and increasing numbers of liberals who were determined to limit the scope of Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its prohibition on school segregation and to hamstring the federal government’s power to compel localities—under the threat of withholding federal funds—to desegregate their schools.

Biden supported a measure sponsored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), a former Klansman who had held the floor for more than 14 hours in a filibuster against the 1964 civil rights bill, that prohibited the use of federal funds to transport students beyond the school closest to their homes and that passed into law in 1976. And in 1977, Biden co-sponsored a measure that further restricted the federal government from desegregating city and suburban schools with redistricting measures like school clustering and pairing. This measure won the approval of a majority of his Senate colleagues, and President Jimmy Carter later signed the provision into law, significantly narrowing legislative avenues for reform. Meanwhile, the Warren Burger-led Supreme Court, with its four recently appointed conservative members, proved less and less sympathetic to civil rights activists’ claims about constitutional violations and was unwilling to demand busing remedies.

In assessing the effect of his efforts to thwart the advance of race reforms, Biden made an astute observation about his role in cultivating a bipartisan coalition against busing: “I think what I’ve done inadvertently ... is, I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions [about busing] I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the floor.” This from a man who subsequently supported a wide array of civil rights measures for people of color, women and the LGBTQ community; won praise from the likes of the NAACP and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; and developed close working relationships with black leaders in Delaware and across the nation.

***

In the end, Biden and his fellow busing opponents failed to stymie court-ordered busing plans, which proved instrumental in sustaining school desegregation across the nation for the next two decades. The anti-busing movement was not vanquished, however. After the Supreme Court authorized school districts to dismantle their school desegregation programs in 1991, busing opponents compelled local districts, through lawsuits and political pressure, to abandon the transportation and pupil-assignment polices that had sustained certain levels of mixed classrooms. The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles has produced an extensive body of literature documenting the resegregation of African American and Latinx students across in the nation, most dramatically in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, since the court’s action. According to the project, the number of intensely segregated schools—schools with 0 to 10 percent white enrollment—has more than tripled since 1991. In the South, charter schools, extolled by private foundations as the means of narrowing achievement gaps, are even more segregated than public schools. And students in these segregated schools suffer: Schools in racially concentrated nonwhite districts often receive less funding, pay their teachers less, have larger class sizes and rank lower on academic achievement than schools in whiter areas.

Meanwhile, politicians on both sides have largely stayed quiet on the issue. Republicans have long established themselves as the party determined to dismantle the legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most recently, President Donald Trump has distinguished himself as the embodiment of white nationalism, xenophobia, racial insensitivity and historical ignorance. But it’s also true that few national Democratic leaders have sponsored concerted action or expressed concerns about our increasingly segregated schools beyond largely symbolic gestures toward Brown v. Board of Education.

And none of Biden’s chief 2020 primary rivals—from states with highly segregated school systems like California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Texas—lists the institutionalized isolation of students by race, income and language and its attendant inequities at the forefront of his or her agenda.

Indeed, civil rights activists and education reformers themselves have for the most part shifted their focus from pushing for desegregated schools to improving those that are already segregated. They advocate for community control of schools, culturally relevant curriculum and instruction, and measures to remedy discipline disparities. These interventions are essential, but they ignore a fundamental fact: Nonwhite schools in America have never produced similar education outcomes as white ones, and it’s hard to imagine they will in future. History has shown that desegregation is an essential component of a more comprehensive approach to improving schools for all students. Biden’s record might grate against the spirit of progressives’ demands for justice and equality. The truth is that most of them, too, have diverted their eyes from a prize—desegregated schools—that was central to the modern civil rights movement.

In his moving campaign announcement, Biden criticized Trump’s acknowledgment of the “fine people” among the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as an acute threat to the core values of the nation. Still, the Democratic front-runner’s reluctance to reflect on his past position on busing is emblematic of many white Americans’ continued resistance to acknowledge and fix a wider range of existential threats—including school segregation—to the political, economic and social standing of people of color. “We cannot have perfection as a litmus test,” Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “The responsibility of leaders is to not be perfect but to be accountable, to say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I understand it and here’s what I’m going to do to reform as I move forward.’” Biden has yet to modify his previous position or seek atonement for any perceived misdeed, however. And, as the Democratic Party heads into 2020 and explores ways to appeal to swing voters, many of whom are perceived as susceptible to Trump’s bromides about the declining fortunes of white middle America, the party will have to confront a hard truth: That this approach will likely push the party further from the ideals of the civil rights movement.”

More from POLITICO Magazine

Election Live Updates: Obama Endorses Harris, as Trump Prepares to Meet With Netanyahu

“Former President Barack Obama was the most prominent Democrat to have held out on endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Former President Donald J. Trump is set to meet with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Florida on Friday.

Updated 

July 26, 2024, 5:10 a.m. ET43 minutes ago

Former President Barack Obama with Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House in 2022.Kenny Holston for The New York Times

Pinned

Former President Barack Obama endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic presidential nominee, saying in a statement with Michelle Obama, the former first lady, that they would “do everything we can to elect Kamala Harris the next president of the United States.” Mr. Obama was the most prominent Democrat to have held out on endorsing Ms. Harris’s candidacy.

Ms. Harris accepted Mr. Obama’s endorsement in a phone call, a video of which her campaign released on Friday morning.

Former President Barack Obama’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris comes as Democratic leaders have united in their support for her candidacy.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Former President Barack Obama endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Friday, delivering Ms. Harris perhaps the most important missing piece in what has been a cascade of support from her party’s most influential leaders.

Mr. Obama, who has positioned himself as an impartial party elder and has remained neutral during Democratic primaries since he left office, had held back as endorsements poured in for Ms. Harris from all corners of the party after President Biden’s withdrawal from the race on Sunday.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is now officially on TikTok.

Ever since President Biden announced on Sunday that he would no longer be running for re-election and instead endorsed his vice president for the job, the social media platform has been inundated with memes about coconut trees, Brat summer and other fawning content related to Ms. Harris.

Former President Donald J. Trump had agreed to a debate on Sept. 10, but his campaign now says he cannot commit until “Democrats formally decide on their nominee.”Doug Mills/The New York Times

Advisers to former President Donald J. Trump said they would not commit to another debate, one they had already agreed to participate in, now that the Democrats have changed candidates from President Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had agreed to two general election debates, the first of which took place on June 27. Mr. Biden’s performance was so calamitous that it began a four-week drumbeat toward his departure from the race.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, left, in Philadelphia this month. Mr. Shapiro is a leading contender to be Ms. Harris’s running mate.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Vice President Kamala Harris is making plans to announce a running mate by Aug. 7 and her aides are conducting the first round of interviews with people in consideration by video calls given the tight timeline, according to four people briefed on the plans.

If she meets the Aug. 7 deadline, Ms. Harris will have squeezed a process of vetting, choosing and introducing a running mate, which typically takes months, into just over three weeks.

The American Federation of Teachers national convention in Houston, where Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Thursday.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Future Forward, which was the main super PAC backing President Biden’s re-election campaign, announced on Thursday that it would spend $50 million over the next three weeks on ads supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in six battleground states.

The super PAC’s first 30-second ad tells Ms. Harris’s political biography, tracing her career from the San Francisco district attorney’s office to the vice presidency.

The New York Times/Siena College Poll

July 22 to 24

If the 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?

Shaded areas represent margins of error.

Vice President Kamala Harris begins a 103-day sprint for the presidency in a virtual tie with former President Donald J. Trump, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, as her fresh candidacy was quickly reuniting a Democratic Party that had been deeply fractured over President Biden.

Just days after the president abandoned his campaign under pressure from party leaders, the poll showed Democrats rallying behind Ms. Harris as the presumptive nominee, with only 14 percent saying they would prefer another option. An overwhelming 70 percent of Democratic voters said they wanted the party to speedily consolidate behind her rather than engage in a more competitive and drawn-out process“

Vast majority of Black voters trust Harris and distrust Trump, survey finds | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Vast majority of Black voters trust Harris and distrust Trump, survey finds

Melissa Hellmann

Kamala Harris at the American Federation of Teachers’ convention in Houston on Thursday. Photograph: Montinique Monroe/Getty Images

"A vast majority of Black Americans trust Kamala Harris and distrust Donald Trump – 71% compared to 5% – according to the largest-known survey of Black Americans since the Reconstruction era. The survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states showed that the presumptive Democratic nominee may have a higher chance of winning over Black voters than the Republican candidate.

At a virtual press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Black-led innovation thinktank Black Futures Lab, revealed findings from its 2023 Black Census, which was conducted with the help of 50 Black-led grassroots organizations and national partners across the country from February 2022 to October 2023. The latest survey garnered seven times the respondents from the first census in 2018, which received 30,000 responses. Two-thirds of the respondents were women, a majority were from the south, and nearly half were from 45 to 64 years old. Black Futures Lab believes that the census results will help inform voter mobilization efforts ahead of presidential and local elections.

“For us to be powerful in politics, we must control the agenda,” said Black Futures Lab’s field director Natishia June at the press conference. “This is why the Black Census is crucial.”

The top three issues that Black Americans are concerned about were low wages at 38%, gun violence at 33% and failing schools at 31%, according to the survey. Economic concerns were top of mind for survey respondents, with 97% reporting that they want college to be made more affordable, 95% want minimum wage increased to $15 an hour and 94% desire an expansion of government aid for those who need it. Government aid, according to survey respondents, could range from helping small businesses to increasing access to affordable housing.

“There’s this narrative in the media, and amongst folks that attack Black people, that Black folks just want handouts – and that’s further from the truth,” said the group’s principal, Kristin Powell. “What Black people want is the support that they’re investing in. If we’re giving tax dollars to this country, we want to get paid back.”

Black Americans trust small businesses more than any institutions, while they trust corporations, elected officials and police the least. “Small businesses being the most trusted makes a lot of sense,” said Powell, “as Black folks are investing more in building their own businesses and want that support to do that.”

When looking at party affiliation, the survey also revealed that 70% of respondents identified as Democratic, while 2% identified as Republican. Of the 23% of people who identify as independent, they still lean Democratic.

“There’s so much rhetoric about the independent voters, even Black independent voters, and that they’re up for grabs by either party. But the data doesn’t support that,” Powell added. “What the data says is that Black voters lean Democrat, and when they don’t feel like they’re delivered for, they then don’t vote at all.”

The data did reveal a voter turnout gap when it came to local elections: although respondents spoke at length about issues in their communities, they voted less in local elections compared to federal ones. “It’s really important that although there’s a presidential race happening right now, that we educate and activate voters around mayor’s races, city council, school boards, state legislature races,” Powell said, “in order to really make the bigger impact on their daily lives.”

Netanyahu and Harris meet in vice-president's ceremonial office – video

The New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that engages Black and brown voters in Georgia, said that it will use the data to support policy positions that offer solutions to the local community’s concerns. The nonprofit was one of the local partner organizations that surveyed people face-to-face by tabling at large community events and at other hotspots.

Organizers plan to return to the areas where they collected the data to share the results with respondents “so that they can see themselves in this type of insight,” said the New Georgia Project’s research director, Ranada Robinson. The New Georgia Project also plans to use the research to show voters the power that they hold in local elections. The secretary of state decides who stays on the voter rolls, for instance, while the agricultural commissioner determines whether neighborhoods have fresh food.

“Research related to undercounted and underrepresented populations has to be designed to account for the skepticism and the lack of trust in systems that are usually not inclusive, but also to acknowledge the joy and hope that sustain our communities,” said Robinson. “Black voters need consistent interest and conversation and seeing the results of their civic engagement to build long-term power systems.”

Vast majority of Black voters trust Harris and distrust Trump, survey finds | US elections 2024 | The Guardian