Media

Washington, DC – Today, Adam Lioz, Demos Counsel and Senior Advisor of Policy & Outreach, released the following statement in support of “By The People Project.”

f the Trump Commission uses the data it says it wants to use, it will target this group of citizens with false allegations of illegal voting. We must fight against the purges of these voters, because in America, it is assumed that there are no two classes of citizenship, regardless of what the current President believes.

NEW YORK, NY – In response to the first Pence-Kobach Commission meeting tomorrow, Brenda Wright, Vice President, Policy & Legal Strategies at Demos, released the following statement:

“The Pence-Kobach Commission is the Trump Administration’s latest attempt to shrink the electorate. It has no legitimacy and no agenda other than to bolster the President’s lies about illegal voting in the 2016 election.  The Commission is a blatant political ploy to suppress voter turnout and kick eligible voters off the rolls.

Many states have rightly refused to provide private data from their voting rolls to the commission. However, the commission will still have access to highly inappropriate federal immigration data to “study” Trump’s theory that millions of noncitizens have voted.

Black students are far more likely to take on debt for a degree than white students, and young black households have more student debt despite fewer educational opportunities and a more uncertain payoff in the job market.

Demos (pronounced with long "e") — a public-policy group trying to shape a Democratic agenda on working-class issues like household indebtedness, college affordability and economic challenges facing young people — tested economic messages with an online survey of 1,536 registered voters in June.

Data show pocketbook issues including minimum wage, debt-free college and infrastructure are top priorities for likely voters

Today, Demos, a leading progressive think tank released new polling data that identifies the economic priorities of progressives, working-class people of color, and working-class white Obama to Trump voters. The polling sheds light on the shared top priorities for these voters including revitalizing infrastructure, raising the minimum wage and debt-free college.

“We think of education funding, particularly at the state level, as a spending issue, but it’s myopic,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “There are all kinds of second order effects to investing in education — homeownership or wealth building is certainly one of them. If you don’t spend the money on students now and that means that they’re less likely to go to college or they’re more likely to take on debt, that is going to impact their future economic activity.” [...]

Recently, Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, and Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist for the Washington Post, had a little debate about debt in the Washington Post. Singletary’s view is that all debt is bad debt. Bernstein’s view is that debt can be great, good, or bad.