Where are the Herschel Walker Campaign Signs? The 2020 General Reionization Race in Wrightsville, Ga.: Polling Strategies and Results

WRIGHTSVILLE, Ga. — The race for a critical Senate seat was in full motion by midsummer, but there were just a few Herschel Walker campaign signs sprinkled around his hometown.

They were planted in front of big homes with big yards, in a downtown storefront window, near the sidewalk by the Dairy Queen. There were two buildings on the corner by the Johnson County Courthouse.

The support appeared not to be the same. A dot-to-dot drawing of the racial divide that has shaped Wrightsville for generations is now shaping a critical political race with national implications.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Walker was a high school football genius and taught and coached by a Black man. The only other home with a Herschel Walker poster is his family.

The electorate is not evenly divided in key races across the country, limiting each side’s ability to score unexpected breakthrough or amass sweeping gains in November.

When direct election of senators began just before World War I, the Senate was divided almost evenly between the parties, but some analysts think next month will be different. If Democrats win the majority in the House, they will almost surely have a smaller margin than they had earlier this year.

The persistence and severity of the gender gap has led to Lake formulating a rule: Democrats win when they can get a large margin of victory over the GOP among women in most states.

The largest lobby for seniors has hired two firms to conduct polls in 2020 for Trump and Biden, and the results have been made publicly available. In the seven major competitive Senate races the two firms have polled, Republicans led among men in every state, and Democrats led among women in every state except Wisconsin. (The Democratic lead with women was also very narrow in Florida.)

Recent statewide polls by the non-partisan Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College likewise showed Democrats holding at least an eleven-point lead, and often much more than that, among women in the Senate races in Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Georgia. Republicans led in every contest except Arizona and Pennsylvania, where the Democrats had a lieutenant governor with a hardcore blue-collar style. The latest CNN polls in Arizona and Nevada showed Kelly and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, respectively, holding double digit leads among women, but trailing among men – Kelly narrowly and Masto by a crushing twenty-point margin. In the CNN polls, the two genders sharply divided in the Arizona and Nevada gubernatorial races as well.

Powerful forces this year are driving apart the preferences of men and women. The decision by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority to revoked the right to abortion was more important to women than men, according to most surveys. There is a recent national NPR/Marist poll that shows inflation is the paramount concern for men.

The generation gap is a thread through the polls. Democrats have run better with younger voters than they have older voters. Voters in their early 40’s, the oldest of the generation, now have that advantage, but it is greatest among the youngest voters. In the later stages of their working careers, Democrats have been weakest among voter from 45 to 65 years old, and then they recover to be competitive with seniors in certain states who are sensitive to Democratic appeals on Social Security, Medicare and reducing prescription drug costs.

Education is a potentially important issue this year. “When you combine across nine different polls in battleground states, the education gap is almost 3 times the size of the age gap and ten points bigger than the gender gap, so I absolutely think it’s going to be a significant predictor in these races,” says Matt Hogan, a partner at Impact Research, the Democratic half of the bipartisan AARP polling team.

College-educated White women have become a core Democratic group: most sources show Democrats winning most of them in the two years before and after the election, and a CNN poll shows the party slightly exceeding that level. In most major Senate races you can find Democratic candidates around or above that level, except in Georgia where more White voters of every variety tend to lean right.

“Younger women are very engaged and very fearful and angry about the court’s decision: they are the most Democratic- voting group bar none,” says Katherine Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a liberal group that on Monday released an extensive study about the gender gap.

The equation is more complicated among older White women, particularly the large number of them without a college education, says Lake, who conducted the polling for the foundation’s study. She says that they are more in favor of abortion rights than younger women but less likely to vote for it over inflation in their vote. If you do not have a conversation with the older end of the women, you are not going to get them to attend college.

Black Voters Are More Motivated by the Progress of Democratic Candidates than by Black Men and Black Candidates: An All Things Considered Analysis of a Republican-Democrat Correspondence

With inflation this high that seems entirely possible. But large-sample surveys of Latino voters by The Washington Post/Ipsos and the Pew Research Center have not yet found evidence of big Republican inroads: each survey found Democrats holding more than three-fifths of the two party vote among Latino voters, less than earlier in this century but almost exactly their level in 2020. Nor did the Post/Ipsos poll find evidence of GOP improvement with male or non-college Latinos. Latino shifts are still a threat to Democrats in some states. The state where Latino residents have been squeezed first by the COVID-related shutdowns in the gambling industry and then by inflation is Nevada, where economic discontent among those voters most threatens Democratic prospects.

With one day left before voting ends in this year’s midterm elections, the latest NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll shows some warning signs for Democrats — specifically regarding who is more likely to vote in this year’s races.

Terrance Woodbury, CEO of HIT Strategies, a polling firm specializing in understanding young and minority voters, tells NPR’s All Things Considered that while there is a gender gap in voting when it comes to Black men and women, it’s not particularly unique to Black voters — but to voters across all races.

In addition to voting for a Democratic candidate in the race for governor, Heartley told NPR he’s going to vote for a Democratic Senator in the race.

Black men have a voice and have a perspective. You have to see where I am as a person of color. To me, that’s what Warnock and Abrams really do.”

While he supports John Fetterman in the Senate race, he does not feel politicians understand what it takes to win support from more Black men.

It is now enough to make a difference in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and North Carolina, where they have diverse candidates at the top of the ticket.

Recent data from pollsters suggest that candidates from either party should focus on key issues in order to close the enthusiasm gap — especially with Black men.

Black men are more motivated by the progress of the democrats than by the other side’s threats to democracy, as discussed in the recent article by Woodbury.

However, when given a list of policies to those being polled — such as the Child Tax Credit, the police reform executive order and the bipartisan infrastructure bill — Woodbury says that 90% of Black men said that the progress indeed improved their lives.

The Rise of Raphael Warnock. The First African American Senator to Vote In Georgia During the 2021 Florida Red Wave

Editor’s Note: Fredrick Hicks is a political strategist and campaign expert. He was a partner in Raphael’s debate preparation. Hicks did not work for the campaign in 2022. He owns a consulting firm called HEG. His views are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

After a lengthy and expensive campaign season, Sen. Raphael Warnock was elected one of the two Democratic US Senators in Georgia. He made history in 2021, when he was elected as the first African American US Senator from the Peach State, but it was only to complete the term for the recently deceased Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson.

In so doing, Warnock is now the leader of a new generation of Democratic leaders, including the likes of House Minority Leader-elect Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who are younger and more diverse than their predecessors.

Context is everything, including in politics. Nationally, Democrats fared better than anticipated. However, in the southeast, the red wave swept over every state, washing away many powerful Democrats in the region – from Virginia down to Florida.

The most prominent statewide Democrat to win throughout the region was Warnock. His name was on the ballot five times in the past year and he was the leading vote- getter every single time, including the two election wins against wealthy White women and the most famous football player in state history.

Further, as of two weeks before the runoff, Warnock had raised more than $284 million since first becoming a candidate, a figure which will likely approach $300 million after the counting is finished, making him one of the most prolific non-presidential fundraisers in recent memory. In a game where votes and money are the barometers of success and viability, Warnock has more of both than anyone – something his ancestors never could have imagined.

The Story of Walker and the Campaign for Multiracial Justice: Peniel E. Joseph discusses the experience and triumph of Walker in the United States

This is a generational moment and potential opportunity to move a center-left agenda forward for the country. It will be virtually impossible for a Republican to win the presidency in the foreseeable future, if the nominee can win in large states like California, Illinois and New York.

Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Walker possessed absolutely no credentials to become the Republican Party’s Senate nominee, other than being a famous former athlete friendly with Trump.

White support for Walker sends the exact wrong message for America at this moment in our history, not simply about political parties or ideology but also about the direction of our country. Still, I found hope in Warnock’s victory. Nearly 100,000 Georgians voted in support of a campaign whose belief in multiracial democracy represents ancestral dream in action, even though all the votes have not been counted.

Because of that, we can fully acknowledge the pain caused by Walker and at the same time celebrate the win as a triumph for the Democratic Party. It is a step that is necessary to realize the dream of multiracial democracy.

The Campaign against Sexist Powers of Ms. Haley: “We Are not Vicious” or “Worst of a Woman’s Righteous Action”

The campaign declined to comment on some of the attacks she has faced, including from Mr. Trump, but she has made clear she is wary of anything that could be seen as claiming victimhood.

In a free country like ours, we are not victims unless we choose to be according to Ms. Haley. “We should not fall into a trap of thinking that a woman’s road to empowerment lies with someone else righting a wrong.”

Republican voters will see a woman in a presidential race for the first time in 7 years when Ms. Haley enters the race. In 2016, Mr. Trump used sexist language to attack Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard — “Look at that face!” he mocked. “Would anyone vote for that?” — before winning a general election despite bragging about groping women without their consent.

Ms. Haley has overcome bias before. The daughter of immigrants, she was the first female governor of South Carolina, though she received vicious and sometimes racist attacks along the way.

(Asked about criticisms that Mr. Trump had made sexist remarks about Ms. Haley and others, Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the former president had “advocated for the advancement of women throughout his life.”)

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/us/politics/haley-campaign-gop-women.html

The Burden of Black Women Running in 2020 Campaigns: How Black Candidates Turn Their Social Media Faces to a Criminal Justice Error

In the 2020 campaign, amid a rise of female political activism in response to the Trump administration, six female candidates sought the Democratic nomination — the most ever in a presidential primary — but struggled with questions about their general election viability from voters who feared that the country was too sexist to elect a woman.

But for Black women, the hurdles to higher office begin even before they decide to run. According to research by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, women are more required to provide more evidence of their qualifications than men in races for governor because most voters still picture men in the job.

According to the foundation’s executive director, men can release their résumé and it is taken at face value. “Women have to show what they have accomplished in each position.”

The burden of entering a political campaign has only been made more difficult by the fact that Black female candidates are often turned into targets on social media. A prime example is Ms. Harris, who faced an onslaught of racist and sexist online attacks on her gender, identity and appearance during and after the 2020 campaign.

Black women often come up against another question: “Can she win enough white voters?” said Kelly Dittmar, the research director and a scholar at the Rutgers center.