Connie Razza, vice president of policy and research at progressive think tank Demos, argues that Democrats need to use policy ideas to directly counter the president’s identity-based appeal.
“If progressives are silent on race, then the other side gets to try and reframe it so that they can take what is clearly not in the interest of working and middle-class white folks and make it palatable because they’re vilifying people of color,” Razza said.
Chiraag Bains, who served for about seven years in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told the NewsHour that there are many ways these radical ideologies can be normalized.
One of the ways is when violence occurs and the government and high-ranking officials don’t do enough to condemn those acts, said Bains, who served under former President Barack Obama.
Last week, ballot initiatives to improve the functioning of democracy fared very well. In Florida — a state divided nearly equally between right and left — more than 64 percent of voters approved restoring the franchise to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. In Colorado, Michigan and Missouri, measures to reduce gerrymandering passed. In Maryland, Michigan and Nevada, measures to simplify voter registration passed.
Meanwhile, the overall cost of net tuition, fees, room and board rose 69 percent at public universities between 1997-98 and last year, even after being adjusted for inflation, according to the College Board. That’s a period during which the Census Bureau reports that median household earnings fell.
We just filed this emergency lawsuit to protect the rights of eligible Ohio voters who were recently arrested and are being held in jail, unable to get to the polls.
“For some 40 years now, the Supreme Court has been issuing decisions that make it difficult to regulate [money in politics],” Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies at Demos, told WhoWhatWhy. “Citizens United is the crowning achievement of that effort.”
Similar interim rules were in place for the 2016 elections and more than 7,500 residents used them to vote, said lawyers for Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, two groups that sued the state.
“There’s plenty of risk embedded in taking on a student loan,” says Mark Huelsman, an associate director at the think-tank Demos. “Student debt can impact the ability to buy a house, impact the ability to save for retirement, or save for a rainy day or a crisis.”
Sure there are reasons not to borrow, but Huelsman says, on an individual level — if the difference between a small loan is finishing college or not finishing — that’s a different story.
Instead of putting money towards changing these systems — by funding efforts to make college free across the country or by making it easier for low-income students to get access to decent public K-12 education, for example — wealthy donors tend to funnel their money into causes that keep the system they benefited from in place, Giridharadas said.
Home ownership is a major contributing factor to the racial wealth gap, as Demos, a left-of-center think tank, previously argued in a 2015 report. Seventy-three percent of white households own their home, Demos found; in sharp contrast, home ownership drops to 45 percent among black households.
Chiraag Bains, a former prosecutor and civil rights attorney at the U.S. Justice Department, said that because criminal codes are so complicated, prosecutors have an incredible amount of flexibility in deciding whether and how to bring a case. Prosecutors normally consider the culpability of the individual, the severity of the offense and what kind of penalty is necessary to deter future misconduct.
Souls to the Polls is a time-honored tradition, often led by clergy, to activate and engage congregants to exercise their right to vote that starts long before Election Day. It is a mobilization strategy to make the process of voting easier for their congregants. But sadly, voter suppression efforts targeting minorities in subtle and overt ways continue to make Souls to the Polls a critical service — placing the burden of voter education and empowerment on the backs of churches and other civil society organizations, not the government.
The Trump administration’s latest attack on immigrants, a proposed rule that would punish families for accessing public benefits, has rightfully come under fire for its potential to threaten children’s health and impose financial hardship on households and communities.
We’re sort of in this really bizarre window where, for a number of reasons, many of the leading … candidates are sort of tripping over themselves to claim a progressive mantle,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, president of the left-leaning think tank Demos. “And we have to make sure that that progressive mantle means something really progressive. And that means we should set the table, and we should set that table now.”
Though the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio was allowed to continue their purging practices, the Supreme Court also noted that Ohio voters removed from the rolls based on a perceived change of address needed to be given “proper notice that they would be purged if they didn’t take certain steps.” So, on October 31, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals
New York City’s system has enabled candidates ― especially those from less affluent neighborhoods ― to more consistently rely on small donors in their districts.
The poll results indicate that politics may soon catch up to the reality borrowers are facing, said Mark Huelsman, the associate director of policy and research at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
“It’s a sign of the increasing anxiety that voters and families are feeling about their own debt or their children going into to debt or them going into debt for their children,” he said.
Experian Boost comes with downsides for consumers, according to Amy Traub, associate director of research at the public policy group, Demos. She said lenders will be able to use the data they glean from consumer bank accounts in ways the public may not understand.
"It also allows them to make marketing decisions: who to promote which products to, how to get us hooked on the products that are most profitable and lucrative for the lender, " said Traub.
As Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos, an advocacy group tweeted: "the average family inheritance to a white college grad can pay off the average undergrad debt balance and have enough left over for a 20 percent down [payment] on a $575,000 home." That’s assuming the inheritor has student debt to begin with.
