After changing cities, the R.N.C. finds itself back where it began: the middle of a coronavirus hot spot. It’s Tuesday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- The coronavirus outbreak has grown so dire in Florida that on Sunday the state tallied more new daily cases than any country in the world except for the United States, Brazil and India. This is not the situation that President Trump had in mind when he decided last month to move his speech for the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, Fla. And it has some high-level Republicans planning to skip the convention altogether.
- Darin LaHood, a congressman from Illinois, put it bluntly: “Everybody just assumes no one is going,” he said. He is one of eight members of the House who told The Times that they would skip the convention — along with party heavyweights like Senators Charles Grassley, Lamar Alexander and Susan Collins, who have already indicated they won’t attend.
- The convention was initially planned for Charlotte, N.C., but Trump decided to move it after North Carolina’s governor, a Democrat, refused to guarantee that he would not enforce mask-wearing and social-distancing requirements at the event.
- The point is all but moot now: Jacksonville officials announced late last month that they would require all convention attendees to wear masks. They haven’t yet said whether they will restrict the number of people allowed in the arena.
- Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, refused to commit to a plan for the convention. “We will have to wait and see how things look in late August to determine whether we can safely convene that many people,” he said.
- In Texas, the State Supreme Court ruled against the Republican Party’s appeals to hold an in-person state party convention. The event was set to begin later this week at a convention center in Houston — one of Texas’s virus hot spots. But after the court handed down its ruling yesterday, the state Republican Party’s executive committee voted to move the convention online.
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- In California, where the rate of daily confirmed coronavirus cases has doubled in the past month, Gov. Gavin Newsom yesterday announced a sweeping rollback of the state’s reopening plans.
- Bars are being forced to close completely, and indoor operations are suspended at all restaurants, wineries, movie theaters, zoos and card rooms. In 30 of the most severely hit counties — together accounting for about 80 percent of California’s population — malls, fitness centers, places of worship, nonessential offices, hair salons and barbershops will have to close for indoor business.
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- Shortly before Newsom, a Democrat, made the announcement, the Los Angeles and San Diego public school districts said they would start the fall semester by holding classes remotely. That means the cities’ combined 825,000 students will be learning by computer.
- It also means the White House’s bluff has been called: Will Trump and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, follow through on threats to rescind funding from districts that move to remote learning? For that matter, do they have the authority?
- Seventeen states and the District of Columbia sued the administration yesterday over a recently announced rule that would force international students to return to their home countries if their schools did not offer in-person classes in the fall.
- In other news from the Golden State, election officials released data yesterday showing that over 100,000 mail-in ballots in the state’s March 3 primary had been rejected, most of them after arriving too late to be counted. The other leading cause of rejection was signature problems: Either ballots were unsigned, or a voter’s signature did not match the name on election rolls.
- It’s a sign of possible troubles to come in California and beyond: The state had gone to great lengths to ensure access to voting by mail, and before the November election it will be sending absentee ballots to all of its nearly 21 million registered voters.
- The billionaire investor George Soros’s charity, the Open Society Foundations, announced yesterday that it was pouring $220 million into efforts toward racial equality in America. The initiative will support a range of Black-led racial justice groups, including a $150 million investment in five-year grants for selected groups.
- The beneficiaries will include some well-established organizations, like the Equal Justice Initiative, which was founded by the renowned civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, as well as upstart groups like Black Voters Matter Fund and Repairers of the Breach, founded by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign.
- The other $70 million will go toward local organizations pushing for changes to policing and criminal justice, as well as to programs that help train and empower young people seeking to become engaged in politics.
- Soros is one of the most powerful donors to Democratic Party candidates and causes, but this effort — like others undertaken by the Open Society Foundations — reaches beyond the scope of partisan politics. Many of the initiative’s beneficiary organizations are dedicated to pushing for systemic changes that go further than what most Democratic politicians have called for.
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 | | September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times |
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What role will the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins, play in November? |
Bernie Sanders may not have won the Democratic presidential nomination, but there will still be at least one democratic socialist on the ballot in November. His name is Howie Hawkins, the longtime activist and frequent (though never successful — yet) candidate for political office in his native New York. |
Hawkins, who is this year’s Green Party nominee for president, actually campaigned for Sanders in 1972, when Sanders was running for governor of Vermont on the Liberty Union Party ticket. Sanders won 1.1 percent of the vote in that election — the exact share that Jill Stein won in 2016 as the Green Party’s candidate for president. |
Some Democratic observers that year complained that Stein’s presence in the race contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Other factors, such as the more popular Libertarian candidacy of Gary Johnson and the seven-percentage-point decrease in turnout among Black voters from 2012, may have played an even bigger role. |
Then there was Clinton’s unpopularity among Sanders supporters. Just 74 percent of voters who supported him in the 2016 primary then cast a ballot for her in the general election, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. By comparison, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of six battleground states found that Joe Biden, this year’s presumptive Democratic nominee, was commanding much greater support among Sanders’s 2020 primary voters. |
In an interview with our reporter Reid J. Epstein this week, Hawkins dismissed the argument that Stein had played spoiler, and instead credited her for bringing the Green New Deal into the public conversation. And he turned a sharp attack on Biden. |
“Where the hell is Joe Biden?” Hawkins said. “He lives within commuter distance of the White House press corps. He can command their attention. He should be holding news conferences and pounding away at what we need now — a test, trace and isolate program to suppress the virus, like most other organized countries around the world.” |
The Green Party this year is cleared to be on the ballot in 22 states. That’s half the number on which Stein’s name appeared in 2016 — but Hawkins’s campaign says it is petitioning for ballot access in over a dozen others. |
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