LYNCHBURG, Va. — Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence on Wednesday framed the decision between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as an epochal choice, and implied that Christians who sit out the election lack courage.
“When the annals of this time in American history are written, the question will be, ‘Where were you?’ Where were we in the great battle for life and liberty and freedom in America? What did you do?” Pence said in a speech at Liberty University, a Christian university of 15,000 on-campus students in southwest Virginia.
“There’s no place for believers on the sidelines at a time like this,” Pence said. “It’s a time for courage.”
Pence left no room for the possibility that conservative evangelicals might actually consider standing against Trump on moral grounds.
But on the very campus where he spoke, a group of Liberty students seized on Pence’s appearance to start publicly circulating a strongly worded petition repudiating Trump and distancing themselves from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. because of his outspoken support for Trump.
“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history. Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him,” the petition states.
“Because our president has led the world to believe that Liberty University supports Donald Trump, we students must take it upon ourselves to make clear that Donald Trump is absolutely opposed to what we believe, and does not have our support,” the petition says. “We want the world to know how many students oppose him. We don’t want to champion Donald Trump; we want only to be champions for Christ.”
The petition also takes Falwell to task for defending Trump’s comments on a 2005 videotape in which he talks graphically about forcing himself physically on women and sexually assaulting them.
“Any faculty or staff member at Liberty would be terminated for such comments, and yet when Donald Trump makes them, President Falwell rushes eagerly to his defense — taking the name ‘Liberty University’ with him. ‘We’re all sinners,’ Falwell told the media, as if sexual assault is a shoulder-shrugging issue rather than an atrocity which plagues college campuses across America, including our own,” the petition states.
The petition is just one sign that while a majority of evangelical Christians still support Trump — many of them reluctantly — there are substantial numbers for whom it is a bridge too far. The Public Religion Research Institute’s latest poll shows 65 percent of white evangelicals supporting Trump. In 2012, 79 percent of white evangelicals voted for Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
The Barna Group’s latest survey shows an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction with the presidential choices among evangelicals. “More than four out of ten evangelicals currently refuse to vote for either of those two candidates,” George Barna wrote.
Christianity Today magazine released a scathing denunciation of Trump this week, calling him “the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.” World Magazine, another major Christian publication, printed its own editorial on Tuesday calling for Trump to step aside and let someone else run for president as the GOP nominee. World editor Marvin Olasky quoted Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler in agreement: “We should not ‘allow a national disgrace to become the Great Evangelical Embarrassment.’” And several prominent female leaders in the evangelical world have said they can no longer support Trump since the release of the 2005 tape.
At Liberty, Trump was rejected by most students in the Virginia primary last spring, despite having spoken there and promising to “protect Christianity.” He received only 8 percent of the vote from students. Sen. Marco Rubio was their first choice, with 44 percent, and Sen. Ted Cruz received 33 percent.
“A majority of Liberty students, faculty and staff feel as we do,” the Liberty student petition asserts. In an interview, the petition’s endorsers said they have encountered many students who are afraid to publicly speak out against Falwell’s support for Trump because they have jobs on campus and don’t want to lose them, or because the culture at Liberty places a high priority on respecting people in positions of authority, especially Christian leaders.
Dustin Wahl, one of the creators of the petition, told Yahoo News that he and the other students circulating the petition “all respect President Falwell, but feel free to challenge a Christian leader because challenging a Christian leader is a good way of showing them respect, holding them accountable.”
“But to a lot of students here, they see it as speaking out against someone who has been placed in their life to be their leader, and they feel like that’s something that will not allow them to keep their job or their good standing with other people, so they stay quiet,” Wahl said.
Liberty has in the past enforced a strict set of rules governing student speech on campus that prohibited circulation of petitions not approved in advance by school officials, though some of those restrictions have been eased in the past year, the petition organizers said.
And when a Yahoo News reporter tried to solicit student opinions about Trump and Falwell on the anonymous social media forum Yik Yak, the question disappeared after a few minutes. Students in the chat speculated that Liberty officials sometimes monitor the app and downvote submissions in order to make them go away, although there is no evidence of that. The app is blocked on the school’s wireless network.
Wahl said that he thinks a majority of students on Liberty’s campus will vote for Trump, but only out of opposition to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, interviews with students before Pence’s speech revealed little enthusiasm for Trump. Clay Goupil sat with three male friends, wearing an American flag bow tie and a suit jacket. Goupil said the Liberty campus, while politically conservative for the most part, is not pro-Trump. All four friends were regular listeners to the podcast of Ben Shapiro, an outspoken conservative critic of Trump who also used to work at the pro-Trump website Breitbart News with Steve Bannon, now one of Trump’s senior advisers.
The four said they sense hostility toward their faith perspective from many corners of the culture, and they like Trump’s business credentials. But only one said he would be voting for Trump. Goupil, who is voting by absentee ballot in his home state of Florida, said he was undecided and might vote for Trump. His friend Josh Wilson, also voting absentee in another swing state, Pennsylvania, said he might leave the presidential choice blank or write in another name.
During Pence’s speech, the audience was unenthusiastic when Pence talked about electing Trump president at the top of his speech. They warmed up and gave several standing ovations to Pence when he criticized Clinton, or talked about being pro-life or pro-Israel.
Pence, who was rumored to have been considering dropping off the ticket with Trump when the 2005 tape first broke into the news cycle, argued that Christians should forgive Trump for his indiscretions.
“As Christians, we are called to forgive even as we are forgiven,” Pence said. “My running mate showed humility … and then he fought back and turned the focus to the choice we face.”
Pence also sought to stir up evangelicals against Clinton by expressing outrage over emails in a Wikileaks document dump in which a Clinton adviser, Jennifer Palmieri, says many elite conservatives convert to Catholicism because “their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”
Pence called the emails “bigoted anti-Catholic, anti-evangelical remarks” and called on Clinton to denounce them and apologize.
Palmieri, however, told reporters that she did not “recognize that email” and implied that it was forged. She said the Russian government has been responsible for cyberattacks on American government and political entities and is “also behind the timing and manner of the leaks.”
“By dribbling these out every day, WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump,” Palmieri said. “The FBI is now investigating this crime, the unanswered questions are why Donald Trump strangely won’t condemn it and whether any of his associates are involved.”
A super-PAC devoted to defeating Donald Trump is targeting young evangelical Christians in North Carolina with a new campaign ad launching Wednesday, in hopes of peeling off support for the Republican presidential nominee in that key battleground state.
Not Who We Are PAC is launching an ad campaign featuring Christian musician William Matthews, who has been associated with Bethel Music, a group of musicians with roots in North Carolina.
A 60-second video will go out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, with a modest $8,000 social media buy. But given the specificity of the target audience — millennial evangelical Christians in North Carolina who have shown an interest in Matthews or Bethel Music — NWWA PAC hopes it can have an outsized effect, a spokesman said.
The video shows Matthews praying in church and standing in front of an altar with a cross on the wall. “We have power to stop one of the most dangerous candidates we have ever experienced in our lifetime,” he says. “Donald Trump is dangerous.”
NWWA is also releasing a six-minute extended cut video in which Matthews and the husband and wife musical duo Gungor perform the song “Free.”
Matthews, in a testimonial on a website created by NWWA with stories of several people — Muslim members of the U.S. military, children of undocumented immigrants, a single mom who says she was scammed by Trump University — who believe Trump should not be president, bases his opposition to Trump on the Republican candidate’s rhetoric on race.
“Racism strikes at the heart of the gospel, and racial justice is at the core of Jesus’ message. Donald J. Trump has inspired a movement that perpetuates and condones racism in this country — both explicitly and implicitly,” Matthews says. “We cannot ignore this bigotry.”
NWWA does not advocate support for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and neither does Matthews. In fact, he gives a nod to the fact that many evangelicals may feel uncomfortable supporting a Democratic candidate, but argues that stopping Trump is his highest priority.
“No matter what other issues we also care about, Mr. Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric and policies are morally unacceptable,” Matthews writes. “I’m proud to be both a Christian and an American, but Donald Trump is Not Who We Are.”
Younger evangelicals have less reflexive political allegiance to the Republican Party than older evangelicals, and Trump is accelerating that trend.
But Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said he is not overly concerned that younger white evangelicals will turn in droves to voting for Democratic politicians.
Moore, who has been the most outspoken evangelical critic of Trump over the past year, said liberal groups will not “have much success with younger evangelicals.”
“Younger evangelicals are too theologically defined,” Moore said. “The greater danger is [political] disengagement altogether.”
Hillary Clinton campaign volunteers coordinate their phone banking and canvassing efforts from Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Austin, Texas, in March 2016. (Photo: Tamir Kalifa/AP)
Armies of nerds and their algorithms saved President Obama’s reelection in 2012, but Donald Trump has shown you can also run for president just by using your celebrity and a Twitter account.
No.
Geeks and their campaign technology are not saviors. Trump’s disregard for data and digital expertise has reminded us that candidates shape elections more than anything. But if a race gets to the end and it’s still close, that’s when candidates need their nerds.
The data and digital teams, in other words, are the field-goal team. They don’t move the ball up and down the field, but they can win the game for you if it comes down to the final seconds.
In the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has an all-pro data and digital team. Trump, meanwhile, is relying almost entirely on the Republican National Committee for his tools and their execution.
At the moment, with the Trump campaign in full meltdown with just under a month to go, it doesn’t appear that either campaign’s data technology operation will play a decisive role in electing the next president.
But if the Clinton vs. Trump showdown were to come down to the wire, it’s almost certain Clinton would have an edge. And regardless of whether it’s close, she’ll be better able to know which voters in which states she needs to get to the polls to make a difference, and she will have more capacity to get them there. The size of her advantage is hard to know without seeing inside each campaign’s data and analytics.
But here’s how each campaign is seeking to use technology, and what we know so far about how they stack up.
It all begins with a voter file. There are many variations of voter files, with varying degrees of quality and breadth. There is no one single voter file. Each state has one, and it’s up to the political parties or private companies that compile a national list from all the state data to continue refreshing, improving and expanding their lists year in and year out. It’s one of the most important roles that state parties and the national party committees can serve.
But a campaign will start with a file built over the course of many years by its political party, which has the names of all 190 or so million registered voters in the country. It will build a separate list of unregistered voters, which in the U.S. is about 58 million people.
These lists include voting history, party affiliation and as much publicly available information as can possibly be assembled about a person, culled from consumer databases, donation histories, past contacts by phone, email or door-knocking, and some social media activity. Companies like Cambridge Analytica — which was hired by Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and is now doing work for Trump — have made big claims about their ability to gather intelligence about individual voters from social media platforms. But many remain skeptical that social media can actually be mined as effectively as Cambridge claims to be doing.
Regardless, campaigns use voter files to build a unique voter universe for their contest. They do this by making thousands of phone calls to people to gauge sentiment about their interest in the coming election and their candidate. Then they combine that with past behavior to award voters a score between 1 and 100 in two categories: how likely they are to vote and how likely they are to support the campaign’s candidate.
This data set allows campaigns to predict how many people will vote in each state, and how many of those people they think will vote for their candidate. At that point, campaigns know what their task is state by state.
In one state, their models will tell them they can win as long as they turn out voters who usually vote for their party. They will put the most effort into making sure reliable supporters who are unreliable voters show up at the polls. And their messaging — on TV, through targeted digital advertising, through radio and through the scripts that volunteers follow when making calls and knocking on doors — will be aimed at motivating people already in their camp, which is often a different kind of message than one intended to persuade a more moderate, middle-of-the-road voter.
In another state, a campaign’s models will tell it that the undecided voters who are open to persuasion hold the key to victory. That will require a very different kind of messaging campaign to those voters. Different ads will play on the TV stations in that state. Different types of mail pieces will be sent, emphasizing different issues. And the scripts for voter contact will follow suit.
And in a third state, a campaign will know that unless it finds a certain number of unregistered voters who are likely to support it, get them registered and turn them out to vote, it will lose that state.
These state-by-state models will also dictate what positions a candidate takes on issues specific to each state — such as ethanol subsidies in Iowa or the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada — and where the candidate and his or her surrogates travel in the state. Trump was asked about Yucca recently and did not have an answer. That does not necessarily mean his campaign had not studied the impact of that issue on its voter universe, though it’s possible. Trump’s well-established lack of interest in policy details could also have been to blame.
Every action that campaigns take flows from those universes and voter scores. But they will also continue to update their universes and their models week by week and even day by day, often doing nightly rounds of calls to voters in states that are the closest contests. The information they get from the hundreds or thousands of responses they get every night is extrapolated to draw conclusions about larger groups of voters.
In 2012, the Obama campaign was doing 10,000 of these ID calls a night, which worked out to 1,000 responses in each of the 10 battleground states. These calls don’t go out to random voters. The IDs must get responses from a certain number of voters who are representative of a few different categories or voter score ranges, so that their responses can be used to update the larger categories.
It’s unclear how much of a challenge the Trump campaign’s shotgun marriage with the Republican National Committee has affected its ability to synchronize and tailor messaging state by state. Trump has had a data operation, but it has seen turnover, with one data director, Matt Braynard, leaving early last summer. He was replaced by Witold Chrabaszcz, a former RNC staffer.
If the RNC is trying to use data from Trump businesses or volunteers not using the national party’s data, that could make it harder for the joint RNC/Trump effort to make sure the campaign’s TV ads, digital content, voter scripts and surrogate messaging are all on the same page. The Clinton campaign tested this kind of coordination during the primary and is fine-tuning that experience now. This kind of precision messaging also helps ensure that the Clinton campaign is not sending messages to voters that might have a negative impact on other elections in key states, like close battleground races for the U.S. Senate.
At one point over the summer, Trump’s travel to nonbattleground states flummoxed many observers and supporters, and was clear evidence that his campaign was not using any kind of data-backed analytics to guide internal decision making about where to send him. But RNC officials say that has changed, and there is now a weekly meeting to review fresh data and use it to shape upcoming travel.
Even with that, however, the Trump campaign does not have the kind of manpower directing resources that Mitt Romney’s campaign did in 2012. With any traditional candidate, “you’d have a 50- or 60-person operation at the campaigns directing strategy and guiding where resources need to be spent,” said Mark Stephenson, a Republican operative who oversaw the data and analytics operation for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign.
Early voting is another area where data and analytics play a crucial role. The voter universes built by the Clinton campaign and the RNC will help them understand who is voting early and who is not. They’ll know, then, whether they are losing or winning a state well in advance of Election Day, and that will dictate how much money they spend on TV there, how often their candidate travels there, and who they try to contact to get them out to vote down the stretch.
One of Clinton’s big advantages appears to be in her precision in placing TV ads. Politico reported last month on an algorithm written by Clinton data analytics director Elan Kriegel to target TV ads in the primary, and Stephenson said his analysis of Kantar Media data shows that Clinton is getting far more bang for her buck on TV than Trump.
“Hillary is buying 50 or 60 channels, while Trump is only buying eight or nine. It points to a data-driven optimization,” Stephenson said. In other words, Clinton’s campaign knows its voter universe well enough that it can place a certain type of ad on a rerun show like “Wheel of Fortune” because it knows it’s going to hit a certain target audience and it will pay a bargain rate. Clinton’s campaign has also maximized, as Obama did, advance purchasing of airtime to lock in lower rates.
Clinton has already outspent Trump exponentially on the airwaves and through online advertising, and is projected to outpace him by a huge margin between now and Nov. 8.
The only caveat to Clinton’s advantage here is the effectiveness of TV ads in the modern media environment. Yet Clinton campaign officials said in private conversations that the election will be won over a “relatively small number of votes,” and they are maximizing every means of influencing those voters.
Digital content distribution and digital advertising are another huge category, as is building an email list, which is key to raising small-dollar donations.
Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has a team of RNC digital staffers headed by Gary Coby embedded in his San Antonio, Texas, offices doing the bulk of the campaign’s digital advertising. The RNC also took over managing the entire 9 million person combined RNC and Trump campaign email list after Parscale hit a spam rate so high that there was risk of the campaign getting kicked off its email provider.
Kriegel, Clinton’s data director, said 2016 has been “interesting from a pure data perspective” because of Trump’s unpredictability and the ways in which certain categories of voters have been tossed in the air and rearranged.
For all the talk of Trump bringing new voters into politics to vote Republican, Kriegel said, he has seen statistical evidence that there are registered Democrats who have not been regular voters over the past few elections who have been roused in opposition to Trump and are more likely to vote now.
But despite the volatility of the 2016 election, Kriegel expressed the kind of confidence about the shape of the electorate that’s customary for the operatives who endlessly sift large data sets.
“I have a pretty good idea who is still deciding, who his core is, who our core is and who our new supporters are,” Kriegel said.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall with House Speaker Paul Ryan when he watched Donald Trump threaten to jail his political opponent if he wins.
Ryan, of course, made Trump’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution and its limits on the presidency one of his core reasons for not endorsing the Republican presidential nominee right away in May.
But Sunday night, Trump not only crossed a line that has never in American history been transgressed — “You’d be in jail,” he said to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when she raised the prospect of his presidency — but his campaign doubled down on it after the debate. It posted a picture of Trump on Facebook with the words “She would be in jail.” Top Trump aides tweeted out the same photo, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani encouraged the idea in a televised conversation with Trump supporter and Fox anchor Sean Hannity after the debate.
The question Republican leaders like Ryan faced after Sunday night was, “Do we do what we think is right and denounce Trump once and for all, and risk losing our majorities in hopes we can save the party long term? Or do we hang on for dear life and hope we can clean up the damage after the election?”
Ryan answered that question to some extent Monday morning when he told his fellow House Republicans that he would no longer defend Trump and was, as spokeswoman Ashlee Strong put it, “focused entirely on protecting our congressional majorities.”
Trump fired back on Twitter midday:
Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican nominee
Ryan and Trump are now in open war with each other, although Ryan has explicitly not unendorsed Trump. Ryan’s official position is that he supports him for president over Clinton, but that Trump is going to lose because of his own mistakes. And so the goal, Ryan is arguing, is to keep a majority to keep a check and balance against a Democratic president.
The question is whether that’s a politically effective line. One Republican operative working on a handful of House races said that Trump’s poll numbers are plummeting so fast away from the GOP that this might not be enough. And, the operative said, it’s hard to argue that a party whose brand has become so “toxic” should be entrusted with anything.
I had heard from multiple sources close to House Republican leadership and to Ryan himself that there had been fairly serious talk Saturday and Sunday of taking some action to distance the party from Trump, after the disclosure Friday night of his lewd comments in 2005 about groping and trying to have sex with women.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
And if Trump and his campaign continued to talk about jailing Clinton, it was hard to see how Ryan could support a candidate whose actions are so dangerous to the stability of America’s democracy.
But not many independent Republican operatives who I spoke with Sunday night — and I focused only on experienced, battle-hardened vote counters — said Ryan should distance himself from Trump. This was near the start of the debate, when it still wasn’t clear that Trump would deliver a debate performance that, while authoritarian in flavor, sprinkled with references to Clinton as “the devil,” and shot through with his usual falsehoods and exaggerations, was still viewed by many as “strong.”
On Monday morning, Ryan was harangued by angry members of the House Republican conference who were upset he was distancing himself from Trump, according to one congressional aide on the call. They are intimidated by the anger of Trump’s supporters.
Many of these same operatives also said they did not think Trump’s horrible, no good past few days had put the GOP’s House majority — a 60-seat edge — in danger. “We aren’t in that zone yet,” said Mike Shields, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super-PAC aligned with Ryan that is spending $20 million to help the GOP keep its House majority. But a few minutes after midnight, a House leadership aide texted me: “House in play.” I asked if this was based on any actual data. Yes, the aide said, but more will need to come in over the next few days to be certain.
These two things — the likelihood of losing the House and of leaders like Ryan ditching Trump — are linked. If it becomes clear that Trump’s scorched-earth campaign is going to lose both the Senate and the House for Republicans, then there is no reason for Ryan and other Republicans to stand by him. But if it’s close, and the outcome is in question, many Republicans think a decision to follow principle and “do the right thing” would actually be the wrong thing because it would give total control of the government to Democrats.
The immediate reaction to the debate was that Trump might have applied a tourniquet to his wound to stop some of the bleeding, and would be able to stave off a wholesale party revolt.
But Trump has put the GOP in a nearly untenable position over the past few days and on Sunday night. He’s done two simultaneous things: alienated groups of voters like suburban women who have been crucial to winning in swing states over the past few presidential cycles, and excited his base voters, who are also key for Senate races in states that will decide the majority. Now any move to repudiate Trump would infuriate some of the most committed Republican voters who are with him.
“I’m just giving you the political reality, and this is the political reality,” Joe Scarborough said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday. “Donald Trump delivered the attack against the Clinton machine that the Republican base in Middle America have been waiting for years now. So good luck in Pensacola, Fla., saying, ‘I’m off of Donald Trump.’”
Donald Trump speaks as Hillary Clinton listens during their debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Sunday. (Saul Loeb/Pool/Reuters)
Trump has now created a nightmare scenario that is highly possible. Republicans could fail to win back moderate Republicans and women if they reject Trump, because doing it now looks utterly calculated. And they would also turn off Trump’s most loyal supporters, egged on by Trump himself, who has already made clear he will attack Republicans who abandon him. The carnage at the ballot box would be immense.
But for all the hypothetical scenarios, one Republican operative who had a senior role on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign said he wanted Ryan “for one time [to] do what’s in your heart, not your brain.”
“Do what’s right,” he said.
And Terry Sullivan, a senior adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — and now working for a super-PAC in Rubio’s Senate reelection campaign — said he would, in fact, advise Ryan to unendorse Trump.
“First, you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror and be on the right side of history,” Sullivan said. “Second, we have to save the Republican brand.”
Sullivan declined to discuss Rubio’s position, which has been to denounce Trump at times while still endorsing him. Sullivan cannot communicate with Rubio’s campaign under federal election law.
Trump, Sullivan said, “is gonna lose. So we have to think beyond the election. We can’t be the party that is painted with the broad brush of Trump’s rhetoric. We have to begin to distance so we don’t pay the price after the election.”
Donald Trump may “love the evangelicals,” but the feeling is certainly not mutual among a good portion of them.
More than half of the most committed evangelical Christians didn’t support Donald Trump for president in the Republican primary. And although a majority of them have resigned themselves to backing him rather than supporting the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, evangelicalism is changing in ways that may not be apparent to the casual observer.
Trump’s candidacy, in fact, is helping to accelerate the trend pushing some evangelicals away from an automatic affiliation with the Republican Party. Evangelicals oppose Trump for a few reasons: They view his character as repugnant and his temperament as dangerous. And while many of them do not like Clinton, they are not as alarmed by their policy disagreements with her as they are by the idea that the church would align itself with someone like Trump.
Two individuals I’ve encountered over the past few months most vividly demonstrate the changing face of evangelicalism, which is increasingly looking past national solutions and focusing on local activism and community building.
Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, oversees an old-guard institution that for decades was part of the religious right and that was known for its reactionary positions and its hostility toward those it disagreed with. Under Daly, that’s changing.
Daly is still conservative on abortion and gay marriage, but he doesn’t emphasize these social issues, and when he discusses them, it’s in far less combative terms than James Dobson, its founder, ever did. He represents a trend that has been developing for nearly two decades of conservative Christians under a certain age realizing that because their views are no longer the cultural norm, they need to adopt a different approach in dealing with those they disagree with.
Michelle Higgins, 35, is a church minister and local activist in St. Louis. Higgins is trying to bridge the very wide gap between theologically conservative Christianity and the Black Lives Matter movement. She identifies both as an evangelical and as a Black Lives Matter activist. She is a part of both groups, but in the minority in each. Conservative evangelicalism is largely white, and the Black Lives Matter movement is mostly secular in orientation.
Daly and Higgins are following a similar path. They share the same fundamental beliefs and want to live them out in the public square very differently from evangelicals of the past. They reject the idea that Christians are at war with mainstream culture, and instead seek to work for the common good.
It’s unclear how this will play out politically, but a growing and active subset of Christians are determined to reclaim the evangelical label, and to reject the idea that they are a monolithic voting bloc that marches in lockstep with the GOP.
*****
In April, Daly sat in Denver on a couch in front of several hundred people next to Ted Trimpa, an attorney who’s been active in fighting for gay rights on behalf of the Gill Foundation, one of the biggest funders of LGBT causes.
Daly and Trimpa have worked together for the last few years to fight human trafficking in Colorado. That’s something that would never have happened at Focus on the Family under James Dobson, the man who founded it in 1977. Dobson turned it into a cornerstone of the Christian right for the next 30 years, but retired in 2009.
“For many years, Focus on the Family was the big evil, and we were in pitched battle over issue after issue,” Trimpa told the audience at Q, an annual conference focused on how Christians can have a positive impact on American culture.
Daly, however, told me that his attitude toward culture is markedly different from Dobson’s, due in large part to their age difference. Dobson, who did not respond to requests for an interview, is 80. Daly is 54.
“All of the culture warriors — Jerry Falwell, Dr. Dobson, Pat Robertson, Chuck Colson — to my knowledge, they were all born in the late ’20s and the ’30s. And I would say, generationally, they were people that were coming out of a social structure that their belief was rather normative,” Daly said. “And when they were losing power, when they were losing that social cohesion, they panicked.”
“I don’t blame them. I think that’s a completely normal reaction,” Daly added. “So they begin to try to call out the poor direction we were headed. … If I were born in the ’30s, I may have been doing the same thing. But I was born in the ’60s.”
Daly’s approach, he said, is more focused on the question of “How do we engage a world that really doesn’t know us and express the heart of God to them? … For me, it’s how do we engage people?”
But Daly has had to fend off plenty of criticism in the process from more conservative Christians, whose views still dominate much of the American church.
“I had some donors who called and said, ‘Look, if you’re going to work with people like him, I’m not going to support you anymore.’ For me, that’s not acceptable. And it was more like, ‘Keep your cash,’” Daly said, on stage next to Trimpa. Daly’s blunt repudiation of what he called a “Pharisee” attitude drew enthusiastic applause from the mostly Christian audience.
“Ted is not my enemy. He’s somebody that Christ died for, just like me,” Daly said.
Gabe Lyons, the 41-year-old founder of Q, who was moderating the discussion, noted that one donor pulled $1 million in funding from Focus on the Family.
Both Daly and Trimpa described ways in which developing a relationship and finding common cause with someone whom they’d viewed with suspicion in the past had changed their perception of the other.
“One of the first things that I learned in getting to know Ted is he has a deep respect for religious liberty. He’s concerned about it. We wouldn’t agree on some aspects of that, on public accommodations and some other things, but I was surprised to hear Ted show deference to religious liberty, because my monolithic view was that everyone in the gay community wants to trump religious liberty. And now I understand that that’s not totally accurate,” Daly said.
Trimpa added: “We spent far too much time in the gay community, and in the left progressive community, vilifying Christianity and looking more skeptically at evangelicals.”
*****
Michelle Higgins is a 35-year-old mother of two young children who lives in St. Louis. Her father, a black man, pastors South City Church, a mostly white Presbyterian congregation. Higgins herself is director of worship and outreach at the church.
For the last few years, Higgins has grown increasingly active in the social justice movement. In 2014, she helped start a group called Faith for Justice, “to create on ramps,” as she described it to me, for evangelicals of all colors to take part in social justice work.
Late last year, Higgins’ worlds of faith and activism collided. She was invited to speak at Urbana, a conference for evangelical college students organized by the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a 75-year-old organization that helps students organize Christian groups on their campuses.
Higgins, in the course of a passionate 30-minute talk largely about racial injustice, criticized what she described as a myopic focus on abortion among many Christians.
“We could end the adoption crisis tomorrow. But we’re too busy arguing to have abortion banned. We’re too busy arguing to defund Planned Parenthood,” she said. “We are too busy withholding mercy from the living so that we might display a big spectacle of how much we want mercy to be shown to the unborn. Where is your mercy? What is your goal in only doing activism that is comfortable?”
Higgins later explained to the New York Times that her personal views on abortion are that “babies are fully human from conception” and that “it would be good to see adoptions increase and abortions decrease.” She told the Times she opposes abortion, but also said she is “against the ‘pro-life’ demands that abortion should be fully banned and carry criminal charges.”
Higgins’ comments at Urbana prompted criticism from anti-abortion groups and several others. “I fail to see how a half-hour harangue by a left-wing church lady who tells white evangelicals in the audience that they ought to be ashamed of their pro-life activism, and of their ancestors for evangelizing Native Americans, is going to build bridges,” Rod Dreher wrote in the American Conservative. He also published several responses to his column, a few of them critical.
Tobin Grant wrote in a piece for the Religion News Service that Higgins was pointing out that “Christians have been willing to be political and activist on issues such as abortion, but not on issues such as racism and inequality, that are more uncomfortable to address.”
“Higgins did more than promote a message that racism is sinful. She placed support of #BlackLivesMatter squarely in the mission of God,” Tobin explained.
“Black Lives Matter is not a mission of hate. It is not a mission to bring about incredible anti-Christian values and reforms to the world,” Higgins said. “Black Lives Matter is a movement on mission in the truth of God.”
While she may be more liberal politically on issues like abortion and gay marriage, Higgins shares with white evangelicals like Daly a commitment to revering the Bible as the written word of God, and a devotion to a precise set of theological beliefs.
“Evangelical, according to, really, a theological persuasion … means, ‘I truly believe in the historical existence of Jesus, that he was born, that he walked this Earth, that he died, that he rose again, and that my life is centered around him. And therefore, my actions should mimic his, and more than that, should be bound up in — hidden in everything that he did. Since I’m risen with him, my life is hidden in him,’” Higgins told me. “And that, to me, means that I go forth and I tell the world that this Jesus can change everything that is wrong with the world.”
Higgins shares something else with Daly that distinguishes them from older generations of evangelicals who identified with the Moral Majority. They are both open to finding common ground with people they may strongly disagree with on certain issues, and ready to work with them for the common good.
Higgins said she does not share the political position of many in the Black Lives Matter movement. “Black Lives Matter as a political ideology is connected to the rebuilding of a liberation movement, and that is so off-putting [for] a number of people, especially Christians, and specifically people who really, really like capitalism,” Higgins told Religion News Service earlier this year.
But Higgins said she formed Faith for Justice because she “wanted evangelicals to know that there is a group of people where you can come and talk about your love for Jesus and your love for justice with no shame,” and because she wanted to help other Christians be “fearless in our associations with people who do not believe everything we think.”
*****
And so there is a new crop of evangelicals who are not defined by fearfulness about their rapidly diminishing status in mainstream culture. They do not “panic,” to use Daly’s term, when majority opinion is in favor of a sexual ethic at odds with their belief system, because they have been grappling with this reality for years or even decades.
What no one seems to know, however, is how the new evangelicals will behave politically in the coming years. Many reject reflexive loyalty to any political party, but the Democratic Party has not been welcoming. It has become overtly hostile over the past decade to those who oppose abortion and are marriage traditionalists. Only 17 percent of “white evangelical Protestants” support Clinton, according to the Pew Research Center.
Daly said “there was a rational reason” for this.
“You know, when they looked at a pro-life perspective or a pro-marriage perspective, those things seem to resonate within the Republican Party,” he said. “I tell my Democrat friends — I say, ‘If the Democrats were supportive of those two positions, I think there would be many, many Christians there too — many more.’”
The 2016 presidential election is crystallizing many of the dilemmas facing modern evangelicals. This new generation doesn’t like either Trump or Clinton.
But evangelicals also have significant concerns that a Clinton administration would be hostile to conservative churches and organizations on the issues of religious liberty.
And so many are figuring out in real time this year how to proceed when there are no good options for president. Will they choose the lesser of two evils? Or will they throw up their hands and give up on politics all together? When I visited an evangelical congregation in Atlanta called Renovation Church, I interviewed several congregants, and all were deeply conflicted about their choice this election.
“I think there are certainly some ethical concerns with Hillary Clinton. There are a lot of differences from what I believe how the federal government should be run,” said Sam Rauschenberg, a 31-year-old policy aide in the state government. “At the same time, it’s probably more of a continuation of the last eight years, which is not near as potentially harmful having someone who denigrates whole groups of people and won’t listen to the counsel of those around him either.”
Rauschenberg, who comes from a conservative political background, said he was “at a place right now where I’m either choosing whether I’m going to vote for [Clinton] or leave that part of the ticket blank.”
He said this election is causing him to rethink his attitude toward the Republican Party.
“I think that it’s really calling into question — probably in a good way — whether these party allegiances that have been so sacrosanct in our country for so long, that if you’re a certain faith, you vote this certain way (or certain racial group),” he said. “And these lines are blurrier now.”
Rauschenberg represents an evolving evangelical perspective on politics that is a rejection of older evangelicals’ Manichean view of the world. The new evangelical worldview is more comfortable with nuance and ambiguity in public life. These Christians will participate in national elections, and some will run for office at the national level or work for governors, members of Congress and presidents. But the average evangelical will put more effort and time into local solutions and community building, through politics but also through the most anonymous, low-profile activities: teaching arts classes, joining neighborhood gardens, volunteering in homeless shelters and the like.
“When we get past this particular election, no matter who’s president — Democrat or Republican — it’ll force some good soul-searching about how should Christians think about politics,” said Gabe Lyons, the founder of Q.
“Why do we put so much faith in, like, a president to be able to really lead cultural change? I think we should’ve learned this lesson by now, over the last 30 years,” said Lyons. “A new generation does see that, man, our faith’s been hijacked in many cases by political causes, and we want to be true to our faith.”
Lyons put his finger on a common theme that emerged in conversations with the new generation of evangelicals: Think local.
People “are looking for leadership,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s going to come from the presidency. I think, in fact, it’s going to come in our local communities, from civic leaders, from business leaders, from church leaders, who decide we’re going to work on this together and have a common respect of one another — even as we learn to live alongside people we completely might disagree with.”
After brief opening statements in which both men introduced themselves, Kaine, a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, was asked why 60 percent of Americans are not willing to trust the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
He told debate moderator Elaine Quijano that Clinton has shown a commitment since she was a young woman to “serving others,” and quickly moved on to attacking Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Trump “always puts himself first,” Kaine said, accusing Trump of building his business career “on the backs of the little guy.” He mentioned Trump’s accusation that many of the immigrants to the United States from Mexico are “rapists and murders,” and criticized Trump’s long campaign questioning whether President Obama was really born in the United States.
“I can’t imagine how Gov. Pence can defend the insult-driven, selfish, me-first style of Donald Trump,” Kaine said.
Pence sat to Kaine’s left, shaking his head in disagreement. The Indiana governor turned to Kaine and said, “Senator, you and Hillary Clinton would know a lot about an insult-driven campaign. It really is remarkable.”
Pence gave no examples, however, and moved on quickly. He was focused on painting a picture of the world as “spinning out of control.” When he mentioned Russia, Kaine jumped in to interrupt, the first of many times he would do so.
“You guys love Russia,” Kaine told Pence. “These guys have praised Vladimir Putin as a great leader.”
As Quijano struggled to regain control of the conversation, Pence said, in response to Kaine’s interjections, “I must have hit a nerve here.”
Pence again said that Clinton and Kaine’s campaign has been characterized by “an avalanche of insults,” but again did not offer examples.
Pence moved on to talk about how Trump had built his business “through hard times and good times,” and Kaine again jumped in. “And paid few taxes and lost a billion dollars a year,” Kaine said.
Pence moved in again to discuss the Clinton Foundation’s taking donations from foreign governments. Kaine threw out what sounded like a prefabricated line.
“You are Donald Trump’s apprentice,” he said.
As he continued to talk over Pence, and Quijano tried to keep control, Kaine noted that the rules of engagement allowed for back-and-forth debate. “Isn’t this a discussion?” Kaine asked. Quijano acknowledged that it was. But Pence then said he would “interrupt” Kaine to finish his answer.
Pence added that Clinton’s private email server was intended “to keep the pay-to-play prices out of the reach of the public.”
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton shake hands at the presidential debate in Hempstead, N.Y., on Monday night. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)
In the four-dimensional chessboard on which the politics of gun control plays out, anything can happen — and for a brief moment in Monday night’s presidential debate, it did, as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton found themselves in agreement on at least one small aspect of it.
At issue was a ban on gun sales to people on the government’s terror watch lists, a move that has taken on huge symbolic importance since Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., began pushing for it earlier this year in the wake of the deadly attack at an Orlando nightclub. Murphy made the hyperbolic but politically effective charge that Republicans who oppose the measure “want to sell weapons to ISIS.”
Murphy and his allies in the gun-control movement see this as a wedge issue that can break the National Rifle Association’s stranglehold on gun-control legislation; the NRA, accordingly, has fought the proposal, at least while it was being pushed by Democrats. At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union, generally allied with the left, has opposed most efforts to attach new gun restrictions to the watch lists, which it regards as inherently problematic for civil liberties.
On Monday, though, Trump threw the whole debate into confusion by saying he agreed with Clinton, who also supports the idea.
“I think we have to look very strongly at no-fly lists and watch lists,” Trump said. “And when people are on there, even if they shouldn’t be on there, we’ll help them, we’ll help them legally, we’ll help them get off.”
It wasn’t his first time stating a position in favor of the ban, but he’d never acknowledged a need to improve the process of getting off the list before.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., center, calls for gun control legislation just days after the mass shooting in June at an Orlando nightclub. Seen here on Capitol Hill, Murphy is joined by fellow senators and the Rev. Sharon Risher, front left, who lost three family members in a church shooting in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
On the face of it, this defies both the NRA — one of Trump’s biggest backers — and the ACLU, which argues that Americans are being placed on the lists without being informed, without an explanation and with limited recourse for getting their names removed.
To Trump’s critics on the right, his stance speaks to a lack of principles and an eagerness to sacrifice conservative beliefs for political gain. All of Trump’s promises to conservatives — regarding the Supreme Court, religious liberty and economic policy — are subject to revocation if the political cost is too high, this behavior suggests.
Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard wrote on Twitter after Trump’s comments on the no-fly list: “Look how he threw the NRA under the bus tonight. Think he won’t do that with taxes and regulations? Of course, he will!”
Trump allies see something different: a political savvy that avoids falling into Democratic traps while leaving their candidate wiggle room to do what he wants later. And while the NRA has vehemently criticized Democrats for backing the terrorist-list gun ban, NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker told Yahoo News that it might be worth considering if the idea comes from Trump.
“Last night, Donald Trump echoed the NRA’s concerns about denying innocent Americans wrongly on these lists their constitutional rights,” Baker said.
Baker said that “we all agree that terrorist and dangerous people should not have access to firearms or any weapon” but that Clinton “would use the Supreme Court to pave the way for extreme gun control at all levels of government, including the banning of entire classes of firearms.”
Coupling support for the ban with a proposal to make the list fairer and more transparent was a shrewd move by Trump. The watch list has come under scrutiny since Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, wounding 53 others, with a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle and a Glock pistol. Mateen, who pledged himself to Islamic radical group ISIS in a call to a 911 operator, was on a watch list at one point before being removed after two separate FBI investigations in 2013 and 2014 found no reason to arrest him.
Omar Mateen, who shot and killed 49 people in the Orlando nightclub attack, was on a watch list at one point before being removed after two separate FBI investigations in 2013 and 2014 found no reason to arrest him. (Photo: Omar Mateen via Myspace/Handout via Reuters)
But helping people get off the Terrorist Screening Database, which has 1 million names on it, and the no-fly list, which has 80,000 names on it, is easier said than done. The system for being removed, called the Department of Homeland Security Travelers Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP), “is basically a black box,” the ACLU’s Hugh Handeyside told Yahoo News.
If an individual is repeatedly being given extra screening while traveling, or is routinely detained, they would “submit a petition” to DHS.
“The government considers it. They don’t tell you if you’re on or ever were on a watch list. They say any necessary changes have been made. So you know nothing,” he said.
As the DHS website itself states, “Security procedures and legal concerns mandate that we can neither confirm nor deny any information about you that may be within federal watch lists.”
Further, there is no process by which to find out if one is on the list, and for what reasons, and no venue in which to contest those reasons to a neutral arbiter.
The NRA said in August that a gun ban for people on the no-fly list is a “guilty-until-proven-innocent standard” that “is completely incompatible with our American system of justice and will do nothing to keep us safe.”
“Due process protections must be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watch list to be removed from it,” the NRA said. The organization supported an amendment offered by Texas Sen. John Cornyn that was intended to correct some of the problems with due process presented by the government’s watch lists.
The ACLU officially opposed the Cornyn amendment because they view the government watch lists as flawed in principle. But Handeyside said that the Cornyn amendment would have done the most of any legislation offered last summer to offer some recourse for people placed on government watch lists.
“The Cornyn proposal included a provision that would have allowed people to use what’s called the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) to try to gain some limited access to those reasons” for being placed on a watch list, Handeyside said. “It provides some greater access to the reasons, and because of that, people are better able to respond.”
So there is an already established path for a president to do what Trump said, to make it easier for people on the list to get removed. But Democrats opposed the Cornyn measure while backing other measures that Handeyside said did nothing to resolve due process concerns. Democrats felt the Cornyn amendment did not give federal officials enough time — a mere three days — to persuade a judge to bar a person on the list from buying a gun.
Trump and Clinton remain worlds apart in most ways on guns. She favors much wider controls on gun purchases than does Trump, and their choices of Supreme Court nominees would have great import for future rulings on the issue. But Trump’s position on the terrorist watch list is an example of how he sometimes defies party orthodoxy on a hot-button issue that might cost him politically.
Ted Cruz swallowed his pride and accepted political reality Friday, announcing on Facebook that he will vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Nov. 8.
Cruz stopped short of offering a full-throated endorsement. By releasing a written statement Friday afternoon he was able to parse the issue more than if he had made his announcement at a Saturday speaking engagement scheduled in his home state of Texas.
But Cruz’s 733-word Facebook post is primarily relevant to the Republican senator’s reelection campaign in 2018 and to his second run for the presidency that many expect him to launch in 2020.
The crucial context, of course, is Cruz’s controversial speech at the Republican convention in July, when he pointedly avoided endorsing Trump and was roundly booed by many of the delegates on the floor.
Cruz and his political operation were caught off guard by the intensity of the backlash, and in August, a poll showed Cruz would lose his Senate seat to former Texas Gov. Rick Perry if the election were held at that time.
Ted Cruz, right, speaks as Donald Trump looks on during a CNN primary debate. (Photo: John Locher/AP)
“The pressure Cruz faced was real. It was severe. People smelled blood in the water and they piled on,” said one Texas Republican operative who is not in the Cruz camp. “Anybody who’s looking at challenging him or wants to maybe run for president, they want to make sure Ted is not seen as a standard bearer of the party. They want to be on top of the Republican Party in Texas and nationally.”
Trump issued a statement saying he was “greatly honored” by the endorsement. “We have fought the battle and he was a tough and brilliant opponent. I look forward to working with him for many years to come in order to make America great again,” the mogul continued.
Cruz will continue to come under assault from his many adversaries — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — for the foreseeable future, the Texas operative said.
“The Mitch McConnells of the world are probably chomping at the bit now. Now is the time to put the knife in his back and finish the job,” the operative said.
Sen. Ted Cruz addresses the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Cruz went out of his way in his statement Friday to repair some of the damage.
His use of the word “conscience” was what set off a revolt against him on the convention floor in Cleveland. It was interpreted then as a clear signal by Cruz that Republicans should vote against Trump.
Cruz quoted from that part of his speech at the very beginning of his Facebook post, and then made the argument that his conscience now compels him to vote for Trump.
“After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,” Cruz wrote.
He went on to list six reasons why he would oppose Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton: Supreme Court nominations, Trump’s promise to sign legislation repealing Obamacare, energy policy, immigration policy, national security and Internet policy.
Cruz returned, after this, to his theme of conscience. “If Clinton wins, we know — with 100% certainty — that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country. My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that,” he wrote.
He also stressed to voters that he was upholding his promise to support the Republican nominee.
“A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment,” Cruz said.
Cruz speaking at a rally at the Indiana State Fairgrounds during the GOP primary. (Photo: Michael Conroy/AP)
Of course, Cruz said the day after his speech at the convention — while fielding questions from angry members of the Texas delegation — that his pledge had been “abrogated” by Trump’s slander of his father, giving credence to a ridiculous conspiracy theory about his father’s supposed connections with Lee Harvey Oswald, and by Trump’s personal insults of his wife Heidi’s physical appearance.
“That pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go slander and attack Heidi, then I’m not going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father,” Cruz told the Texas delegation.
Cruz was forced by the political reality of his fallen standing among Republican voters to get over his personal anger at Trump’s treatment of him and his family, and to offer support for Trump, no matter how tepid.
Cruz did hold out the possibility that a Trump presidency would require opposition from Republicans and Democrats.
“If the next administration fails to honor the Constitution and Bill of Rights, then I hope that Republicans and Democrats will stand united in protecting our fundamental liberties,” Cruz wrote.
As a top Republican National Committee official told me in Cleveland, “If Trump wins, you better bet your ass Cruz is going to primary him.”
But even if he does, he will need the support of the many Republican voters who have concluded that Cruz’s speech in Cleveland was a black spot on his record and his character. That was the goal of his move Friday.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., in his Hart Building office. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Tim Scott was doodling in my notebook.
The Republican U.S. senator and I were having dinner before he and a few staffers were to make the three-hour drive to Charleston, so he could sleep in his own bed that night.
But first, I’d asked him to explain how his idea to defer capital gains taxes would help struggling communities like the one we’d just visited in this city of roughly 40,000 people.
He scribbled some numbers and words, while talking about the bill that he and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., introduced in April. If passed into law, it would let anyone defer the capital gains tax on the sale of any asset — a business, a piece of land or property — if they reinvest the money in an economically distressed area.
The idea is to give wealthy individuals and corporations an incentive — in the form of reduced tax burdens on investment profits — to put money into developing low-income areas.
Scott’s approach is savvy both in terms of business and in terms of politics. He understands business, having owned an insurance company and been a partner in a real estate company. And having worked with Booker, a Democrat who happens to be the only other African-American member of the U.S. Senate, Scott has inoculated himself against the charge that he’s just another Republican cloaking efforts to reduce government in the language of helping people out of poverty.
Scott also knows that partnering with Booker on the legislation gives it a better chance to pass. When I mention Sen. Rand Paul’s proposal from three years ago for what he called “Economic Freedom Zones,” Scott dismissed it.
“I want something that will actually have a shot at passing some day,” he said.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. (Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
The Scott and Booker legislation would allow investors to defer capital gains tax for as long as their money was invested in what they would call “Opportunity Zones,” which would be designated by the states. Investors could pool their contributions. They would owe tax on the original capital gains whenever they took their money out of the “Opportunity Zone,” but would get a reduction if they kept their money in the zone for at least five years, another reduction if they kept it in for seven years, and wouldn’t have to pay tax on additional capital gains if their money stayed put for at least 10 years.
The most likely ways for investors to come into these zones would be to purchase and rehabilitate vacant property and finance new development.
Scott said he is still working on the details of the bill, to get it ready for scoring by the Congressional Budget Office.
But having started to build a policy foundation that has bipartisan credibility, Scott is now expanding his anti-poverty efforts.
On Wednesday, he’ll help announce a new group of five senators who will call themselves the Senate Opportunity Coalition: Scott, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. They are all Republicans, and that’s intentional.
“We believe strong conservative solutions can help every single American family,” the group says in its announcement.
“This is not something that will be solved with one bill,” they say. “From taxes to education, infrastructure to agriculture, we are each bringing stories from our own states to help show how wide-reaching our solutions must be.”
Scott at the 2016 Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity in Columbia, S.C. (Photo: Randall Hill/Reuters)
There is some tension between the idea that the group will introduce “conservative solutions” to poverty while working with Democratic lawmakers, which Scott told me is one of its goals.
But its intent is in part aspirational. Republicans don’t often talk about poverty, and they strategize even less about how to address it. This group, which is Scott’s brainchild, aims to change that.
Scott says that despite the exclusivity of the group, including only Republicans, this isn’t a branding effort. “I’m not here to make the Republican Party stronger,” he says. “I’m here to make the country stronger.”
Other members of the Republican group intersect at different places on the continuum of poverty awareness and action. Ernst, a freshman senator — like every other member of the group — from rural Iowa, speaks of recent “realizations” about the solutions for “food insecurity” in her own state. Lankford is promoting community nonprofits.
Sullivan’s anti-poverty efforts are centered on helping a remote Alaskan village get federal approval for a road that will lower their fuel and supply costs. Rubio is seeking to improve the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspection process for low-income subsidized housing. He passed three amendments in May toward that goal.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Scott is the only member of the group, so far, with a piece of standalone legislation aimed at reducing poverty. He’s also the only member of the group who grew up in a single-parent home, in a low-income neighborhood.
When Scott visited a group here that is working to revitalize a neighborhood on the north side of downtown Spartanburg, he spoke from firsthand experience about the challenge of living in poverty and having a “pit that’s in your stomach that just never goes away.”
“Anybody know that feeling, that you just look out toward tomorrow and there’s really no reason to be hopeful?” Scott asked the group. “And you meet someone who helps to change that reality, where tomorrow is not really filled with hope, but it’s not as dark as it used to be. And then the next day is not completely dark. It’s got shades of gray. And then one day you wake up and — it wasn’t overnight — it was as if, through prodding and plodding and moving, one day you just have a different sense of what’s possible, not for the community, but what’s possible for you.”
Scott is running for election to the Senate for the second time in two years, unlike most senators. He was appointed to the seat in 2012 to replace Jim DeMint, who retired to run the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Scott won the special election in 2014 to serve the last two years of DeMint’s term, and is running this fall for his first full six-year term, with only token opposition.
Politically, the Senate Opportunity Coalition being announced Wednesday seems similar to the effort of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to talk about something other than Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and to present a different face of the Republican Party, even while tepidly supporting Trump.
But Scott said his work on fighting poverty “predates Donald Trump.” “I’ve been talking about this for three decades,” he said.
Left to right: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C.; Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., at a rally earlier this year. (Photo: John Bazemore/AP)
Scott, who supported Rubio’s presidential candidacy in the Republican primary, has endorsed Trump, even though he does not agree with everything Trump says and stands for.
“We don’t have the same approach to life,” Scott told me. “I place a greater emphasis on civility and looking for ways to build a bigger, better success story. I don’t shy away from the fact that I think some of the things he’s said should not have been said.”
But at a recent conservative gathering, the Value Voters Summit, Scott went so far in endorsing Trump as to suggest that a vote for the Republican nominee was a vote for “hope.” He contended that President Obama’s policies have produced “12 million more people living in poverty, a 40 percent increase in those eligible for food stamps, a 1 percent economic growth in our nation, more division, disaster and challenges.”
He even told the audience that they could “vote … to make America great again.”
Over dinner, he told me that phrase wasn’t in his prepared remarks.
“I said it, and before I was actually thinking about Donald Trump specifically. I’ve heard it so many times, it just popped out of my head,” Scott said. “It made me laugh.”
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., talks with constituents at Champs Sports Grill in State College, Pa., on August 16, 2016, during his statewide bus tour. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
Down Ticket is Yahoo News’ complete guide to the most fascinating House, Senate and governors’ races of 2016. Coming to you every Tuesday and Thursday until Nov. 8. What you need to know today.
_____
PHILADELPHIA — With control of the Senate at stake in this year’s election, it’s not surprising to see Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic star, stumping for Katie McGinty, the challenger to Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, a tea party favorite for most of his career.
It is noteworthy, however, that some gun control groups are backing Toomey. It was news to the people I talked to in the crowd at Harrison Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus on Friday. Many of them were there mainly to see Warren. While they didn’t seem to know much about McGinty — who’s worked on environmental protection at the White House and in state government — they are firm in their dislike of Toomey.
“I’m more anti-Toomey than pro-McGinty,” says Delia Turner, a 65-year-old retired middle school English teacher.
And Warren didn’t disappoint an audience who had come to see her serve up partisan red meat. She bashed Toomey for failing to repudiate Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Pat Toomey won’t break with Donald Trump because they share the same ugly agenda. Toomey just wishes that Donald wouldn’t be quite so impolite about it,” Warren said.
But on the issue of guns, at least, Toomey and Trump are quite different. Trump has cozied up to the National Rifle Association, while Toomey is being backed by the two most well known gun control advocates in the country: former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head and nearly killed in 2011.
Bloomberg’s group, Independence USA PAC, has already spent a jaw-dropping $7 million on Toomey’s behalf, airing three different TV ads, including one in which Erica Smegielski, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook Elementary school principal Dawn Hochsprung, praises Toomey.
“When it came time to vote on background checks, Pat Toomey crossed party lines to do the right thing. That’s who he is, and I’m grateful,” Smegielski says in the ad.
Before Warren’s speech, when I’d mentioned Toomey’s unlikely gun control supporters to Jordan Adams, a 19-year-old freshman at UPenn, she looked at me as if I had two heads. We had a brief conversation about why groups that lean left would come into a hotly contested U.S. Senate race, with control of the entire Senate possibly riding on the outcome, to help a Republican.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., had explained the answer just a day earlier. “I don’t think we are going to make progress on this issue if all we do is try to elect Democrats,” Murphy had said during a question-and-answer session after a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
Murphy has emerged this year as a leading voice for gun control, and at the Press Club, Murphy offered remarkable praise for Toomey’s 2013 sponsorship of a bill that would have expanded background checks for gun purchases.
“If you are working on the issue of protecting Americans from gun violence, you have a lot of reason to thank Pat Toomey,” Murphy said in full view of TV cameras. “Pat Toomey, you know, did something that was exceptional in reaching out and working with Democrats on this issue.”
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, left, and Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania announce that they have reached a bipartisan deal on expanding background checks to more gun buyers, at the Capitol in Washington in April 2013. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Murphy acknowledged that his comments wouldn’t be welcomed by other Democrats more focused on winning back the Senate. “Some of my friends get upset when I acknowledge that Pat Toomey did something that was mildly heroic,” he said.
But Murphy is most focused on getting gun control legislation passed. In that respect, he’s like former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who’s chosen to play a major role in helping Toomey get reelected, despite the fact it’s going to anger a lot of Democrats.
Toomey, for his part, is trying not to anger anyone in the state too much. He needs to retain Trump supporters while limiting his losses in the overwhelmingly Democratic parts of the state in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where Trump is an albatross. Thus, he has half-embraced Trump, and is emphasizing his bipartisan work on guns.
*****
But why do gun groups that lean Democratic think rewarding Republicans who worked with them is more important than regaining control of the Senate? To grasp Bloomberg’s and Giffords’ strategic thinking, it’s vital to understand the way the Senate works.
It takes 60 votes to pass most contentious legislation through the Senate, because of the way the Senate has functioned in the modern era. Technically, you only need a majority of 51 votes. But it’s become standard procedure for the minority party to block things with a filibuster, and it takes 60 votes to move past it.
Democrats were the last party to hold a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, which they lost in 2009 when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died and a Republican won the election to replace him. So even if they won back control of the Senate by a few seats, that wouldn’t give them a clear path to passing a bill to expand background checks.
As Murphy noted, even if all the Democrats in the Senate voted for a bill, they’d still need Republicans. Let’s say Democrats have 51 seats after this election, up from the 46 they have now. They’d still need nine Republicans to vote with them. But not even all Democrats have voted for bills to limit gun purchases. Toomey’s 2013 bill, which he co-sponsored with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., after the Newtown shooting, got only 54 votes, even though Democrats controlled the Senate then. Of the 46 votes against, five came from Democrats. There were four Republicans who voted for the bill, Toomey included.
Toomey-Manchin would have expanded background checks beyond purchases from federally licensed gun dealers to gun show and Internet purchases, while carving out exceptions for sales between friends and family members, and explicitly prohibiting any kind of national gun registry. Toomey took plenty of heat from the right and the National Rifle Association for backing this.
“It was a rough time,” Toomey told me. His office was overwhelmed with “angry calls” from people in his state who he said were misinformed about the substance of his bill. “It was extremely intense,” he said. “I’m still amazed that my staff manning the phones didn’t just walk off the job.”
Historically, the NRA has been the biggest political force in the gun debate. The group spent $34 million in the 2014 elections. The whole point of backing a Republican in such a high-stakes race as the one in Pennsylvania, then, is to encourage Republicans and Democrats in conservative states to vote in favor of future gun control bills.
Donald Carder wears his handgun in a holster as he pushes his son, Waylon, in a stroller at the National Rifle Association convention on Saturday, May 21, 2016, in Louisville, Ky. (Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP)
“There has been this imbalance for so long,” said Mark Prentice, a spokesman for Giffords’ group, Americans for Responsible Solutions. “There was the gun lobby on one side, and basically nothing on the other.”
Toomey, for example, got $1.4 million in ad support from the NRA in 2010 — the most of any candidate that year — when he first won election to the Senate. The NRA in 2016 has not endorsed Toomey, remaining silent so far on the race.
Lanae Erickson Hatalsky is a D.C.-based analyst on social issues and politics for the group Third Way. She has worked behind the scenes on efforts to expand background checks under the law. In 2013, Erickson Hatalsky said, Giffords’ group gave Toomey a promise that if he took the political risk of supporting background check legislation, the organization would stand by him when he ran for reelection.
“They said, ‘We will help protect you when the backlash comes,’” Erickson Hatalsky said. “The question was whether they would stand by their word. I don’t see how you can make progress without standing by your word. If members of Congress don’t believe you, they won’t step out with you.” (Toomey himself said he did not “recall any discussion at all with any of those folks about campaigns and elections.”)
Bloomberg is an independent who views political parties with near disdain. “For Mike Bloomberg, party affiliation is just not important. He’s not a partisan person, and he believes that if there are Republicans who stand with us on this issue, they deserve to be supported,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Bloomberg and a past adviser to Hillary Clinton.
Wolfson noted that while Bloomberg’s PAC is spending millions for Toomey, it is also putting money into the New Hampshire Senate race on behalf of the Democrat there, Gov. Maggie Hassan. Hassan’s bid to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte — who voted against the Toomey-Manchin bill — is another key part of the Democrats’ effort to retake the Senate majority. But so far, Independence USA PAC has spent only $788,927, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Wolfson said the PAC will spend over $10 million on Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, which gives the Bloomberg group some space to draw closer to parity in its spending in the two states. And by playing in races that cut both ways, Bloomberg can argue he is not putting his finger on the scale for either party in the fight to control the Senate.
“We thought it was important to demonstrate that we stand by our friends regardless of party when they do the right thing, and that regardless of party, we oppose people who do the wrong thing,” Wolfson said.
*****
The idea that a gun-controlling, pro-choice former New York Mayor like Mike Bloomberg would consider Pat Toomey a “friend” would have seemed almost unthinkable a decade ago. Toomey was an anti-establishment insurgent congressman during the presidency of George W. Bush. He was tea party before it existed.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 27, 2016. (Photo: Paul Sancya/AP)
His first race for the Senate was in a primary against a member of his own party, Sen. Arlen Specter. That was in 2004, not long after the 1999 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law diminished the moderating influence of political parties relative to outside groups that could spend unlimited amounts to pursue specific agendas. Toomey won the backing of one of the first big conservative organizations to attack Republicans for not being ideologically pure enough: the Club for Growth.
The founder of the club, Stephen Moore, was calling Republicans who didn’t meet his standards “Rinos” — “Republicans in Name Only” — even back then. (Moore is now an adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump). And although Specter’s voting record on economic issues was just as conservative as Toomey’s was during his six years in Congress, Moore threw the club’s support behind Toomey to give him a “major scalp on the wall” and heighten his group’s influence.
The Club for Growth spent more than $2 million to help Toomey, but he still narrowly lost to Specter. Toomey voluntarily retired from the House the next year and took over the Club for Growth from Moore, until 2009.
In 2010, Toomey again challenged Specter, and this time, he caught the anti-establishment tea party wave. Specter, the definition of establishment after 30 years in the Senate, didn’t even try to contest the primary. Instead, Specter switched parties and ran as a Democrat. He lost the nomination to Joe Sestak, who was beaten by Toomey, again with the help of Club for Growth spending.
The Club for Growth pioneered the rise of outside groups in politics, a trend that exploded after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that further weakened the political parties. And over the last several years, outside groups have wreaked havoc on the Republican Party establishment. Groups like Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund have helped ambitious politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz fight against the Republican leadership in the Congress, leading to the 2013 government shutdown.
Anti-establishment rhetoric has ramped up each year, and in 2016, Trump took Cruz’s playbook, put it on steroids, and injected a heavy dose of celebrity, running as the ultimate outsider, beholden to no one.
But Trump’s candidacy has put Toomey in a difficult position. He has made his distaste for Trump clear, declined to endorse him, and stayed away from the GOP convention in July. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Toomey “hopes to support the GOP presidential nominee, but is ‘waiting to be persuaded.’”
Donald Trump speaks at a National Rifle Association convention, May 20, 2016, in Louisville, Ky. (Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP)
“I am inclined to support the nominee of my party,” Toomey wrote in May. “There could come a point at which the differences are so great as to be irreconcilable.”
“Toomey is a movement conservative, and you know how they generally feel about Trump,” said Chris Nicholas, a Republican consultant who worked for Specter in multiple elections. Trump “has, in general, no ideological moorings, so that gives [conservatives like Toomey] great pause.”
Still, Trump appeals to many voters outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the two urban centers in the southern corners of the state. And while many Pennsylvanians hate the description of their state coined by Democratic strategist James Carville — “Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in the middle” — the 2016 election is only heightening the contrast between the red and blue parts of the state.
In fact, said Nicholas, local polling around the state is showing off-the-charts support for Trump in rural parts of the state. Longtime state Sen. John Wozniak, a Democrat from Johnstown, retired after 20 years this year because he saw no chance of winning his seat back, Nicholas said.
But districts around Philadelphia where 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney got support in the mid-40s are now polling in the mid-30s for Trump, Nicholas said.
So Toomey can’t ditch Trump entirely, but he has to counter the Trump effect in and around the two big cities.
There are almost one million more Democrats in the state than there are Republicans. Of the 8 million or so registered voters in Pennsylvania, nearly 3 million live in or around Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. And Democrats make up around 2 million of those voters.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and his son Duncan, 6, meet constituents at Bridgewater Church in Montrose, Pa., during his statewide bus tour, August 14, 2016. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
The gun issue gives Toomey a way to reduce his margin of loss in the two cities, while giving himself a fighting chance in some of the suburban counties around Philadelphia. And the Republican senator was quick to pick up on the issue, running a TV ad in the spring that showed him talking to two women at a playground. Toomey, the ad claimed, “led the fight to keep guns away from criminals.”
“It’s very clear from the ad he ran on this that he’s thinking of this as his insulation with suburban moms,” Erickson Hatalsky told me. “Trump could not be doing more poorly with white women in the suburbs, and that’s a group Republicans have to do well with to win.”
Toomey noted to me that he’d voted in favor of background checks all the way back in 1999, after the Columbine school shooting earlier that year. It was a bill proposed by Florida Republican Bill McCollum, who was himself running for a Senate seat that year. It was criticized by gun control advocates as inadequate, but it did draw support from 137 Republicans.
“I haven’t changed,” Toomey said. “The environment changed, there’s no question.”
_____
Baby face or heel? ‘Rhyno’ Gerin runs for Michigan statehouse
Terrance Guido Gerin and Gerin as wrestler ‘Rhino’ at the Stars of TNA Impact Wrestling in 2014. (Photos: terranceguidogerin.com, Jackie Brown/Splash News)
By Christopher Wilson
It’s not unusual for pro wrestling and politics to mix. Jesse Ventura had a long career in the squared circle before becoming Minnesota’s governor. Former WWE CEO Linda McMahon twice won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, losing in the general election both times. Even Donald Trump, Republican nominee for president of the United States, is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame for his work as a promoter and for WrestleMania appearances. But even so, it’s a little unusual for an active wrestler to also be competing for office.
But that’s the case with Terrance Guido Gerin, who’s running to be a state representative in Michigan. Gerin won the 15th district’s three-way Republican primary in August by just 54 votes, but that wasn’t his only accomplishment of the evening: He also appeared on “SmackDown Live” on the same night. Gerin is a veteran pro wrestler who competes under the name Rhyno (also known as Rhino), and he’s had a pretty productive summer in and out of the ring. In addition to his primary, he also won the WWE Smackdown Tag Team Championships on Sunday.
The crux of Gerin’s platform — in fact, the only issue currently listed on his website — is to keep the public pools of Dearborn, Mich., open. His plan is to work with local businesses to get sponsors for the public pools, which he considers an important part of the community and a place he and his brothers visited frequently while growing up.
Gerin is not running away from his pro wrestling career. Both his website and Facebook page are under the title “Vote for Rhino,” and the only current endorsements on his website are from pro wrestlers Kurt Angle and Shane Douglas. A pro-Gerin campaign ad featuring Angle, an Olympic gold medalist, putting an “undecided voter” in a submission hold has over 70,000 views on YouTube:
It’ll be a tough race for Gerin to win, as Democrat George Darany won 67 percent of the vote in 2014. (Darany is term-limited out of office, leading to the open seat.) The Democratic candidate, Abdullah Hammoud, says Gerin’s day job hasn’t been an issue in the race.
“Since the start of our campaign, we’ve been focused on the residents of the Dearborn community and the issues impacting them,” Hammoud said in an interview with Yahoo News. “Running against Mr. Gerin has added an element of interest in the election from media and wrestling fans, but overall, it has not affected the way we run our campaign.”
This is Hammoud’s first race, but he got some early battle testing after prevailing in a six-way battle royal of a Democratic primary. The 25-year-old, who grew up in Dearborn and is a product of its public schools, is on good terms with his opponent.
“We actually work out at the same gym, so I do see him from time to time,” said Hammoud. “He’s a great guy, and I respect him and his team. Running for public office is no easy feat.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot we agree on, but it’s a matter of how we get there. I hope to work with Mr. Gerin on some of those issues post-election, as we ensure all Dearborn voices are heard and accounted for.”
_____
Out of sight, W fights for a GOP Senate
George W. and Laura Bush at the game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants at AT&T Stadium on Sept. 11, 2016 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo: Erich Schlegel-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters)
Yahoo News Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox reported on former president George W. Bush’s efforts to keep a Republican majority in the Senate, while staying away from Trump. The senators he’s planning on helping.
The former president headlined an event for Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire in May in his hometown of Dallas, the first of eight fundraisers he has done to date, according to a source familiar with his efforts. He appeared at others for Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri in St. Louis in June; Sen. John McCain of Arizona in Dallas in June; and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio in Cincinnati and Columbus in August. That same month, Bush attended a fundraiser organized by Texas Sen. John Cornyn to help Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as Joe Heck and Todd Young, who are Senate candidates in Nevada and Indiana, respectively. On Sept. 12, Bush held fundraisers for Young in Elkhart and Indianapolis.
Bush has at least six more events coming up. He’ll raise money with Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund at an upcoming event in Dallas, and for the National Republican Senate Committee in Washington, D.C. In October, Bush will headline fundraisers for Heck in Nevada, Rubio in Florida, Sen. Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Sen. Richard Burr in North Carolina.
It all begins with a voter file. There are many variations of voter files, with varying degrees of quality and breadth. There is no one single voter file. Each state has one, and it’s up to the political parties or private companies that compile a national list from all the state data to continue refreshing, improving and expanding their lists year in and year out. It’s one of the most important roles that state parties and the national party committees can serve.
It’s unclear how much of a challenge the Trump campaign’s shotgun marriage with the Republican National Committee has affected its ability to synchronize and tailor messaging state by state. Trump has had a data operation, but it has seen turnover, with one data director, Matt Braynard, leaving early last summer. He was replaced by Witold Chrabaszcz, a former RNC staffer.
Clinton has already outspent Trump exponentially on the airwaves and through online advertising, and is projected to outpace him by a huge margin between now and Nov. 8.
